Newly unearthed memo shows Vatican denying ransom payment in ‘Vatican Girl’ case

ROME – Confidential documents from forty years ago suggest that at the time of the 1983 disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the so-called “Vatican girl” whose fate has become the premier contemporary Vatican mystery story, Italian security officials believed the Vatican might already have paid a ransom to secure her release, while a senior Vatican official denied it.

The documents have been unearthed as part of a bipartisan probe in the Italian parliament into both the Orlandi case and that of Mirella Gregori...