Emanuela Orlandi: the opening
of the tombs inside Vatican City
 |
| The Teutonic Cemetery (Vatican Media) |
An exclusive interview with the forensic anthropologist
commissioned by the Vatican judiciary to examine findings and take samples for
DNA testing, following the opening of two tombs in the Vatican on Thursday.
By Andrea Tornielli
Emanuela Orlandi was 15 years old when she disappeared. She
was on her way home from a music lesson and was last seen waiting for a bus in
the centre of Rome. The date was 22 June 1983. Emanuela’s father was a Vatican
employee, and speculation regarding her disappearance and hypothetical ties
with the Vatican have been rife for 36 years.
Two tombs to be opened
On Thursday, two tombs will be opened in the Teutonic
Cemetery inside the Vatican. According to an order of the Promoter of Justice
of Vatican City State, the aim is to ascertain whether or not the remains of
Emanuela Orlandi are contained there. The so-called "Tomb of the
Angel" is that of Princess Sophie von Hohenlohe, who died in the mid
1700’s. The adjacent one is that of Princess Carlotta Federica of Mecklenburg,
who died over a century and a half ago.
Forensic anthropology expert
Giovanni Arcudi is a leading expert in forensic anthropology
and professor of forensic medicine at Rome’s Tor Vergata University. His task
will be to analyse whatever is found inside the tombs and to take samples for
subsequent DNA examination. All this in the presence of members of the Orlandi
family, their own expert and lawyer.
Details of the procedure
Asked to describe the procedure in detail, Professor Arcudi
said he will “apply the international protocols that are used for the
identification of skeletal remains for their classification and dating and for
all the diagnoses that can be made in forensic anthropology, in order to
establish age, gender, stature and so on”. This involves separately
investigating the two skeletons, “starting with the extraction, cleaning, placing
on an anatomical table of the bone structures and making for each of these all
those reliefs that are made in forensic anthropologies”.
The time frame
Professor Arcudi cannot predict how long the procedure will
take: “It depends, precisely, on the state, quality and quantity of the remains
that we will find”, he says. Considering how long the remains have been buried,
and “depending on the state in which they have been preserved, they may have
suffered zero or significant deterioration. Much depends on the environmental
conditions, on the microclimate in which they are found, on the humidity, on
the presence of infiltrations, on possible actions of microfauna”.
Dating the remains
According to Professor Arcudi, experts can distinguish
whether the skeletal remains date back 10 or 150 years, and can also diagnose
the gender “if the bone structures are all well preserved”. After which they
can establish whether the skeletal remains “belong to different people, other
than the two who were buried there”.
DNA testing
Apart from the morphological examination of the bones,
Professor Arcudi adds that DNA testing will be carried out in order to
establish “in a definitive and categorical way” whether there is any evidence
attributable to Emanuela Orlandi in either of the two tombs. The time it takes
to extract DNA varies considerably, depending on the state of preservation of
the remains. According to Professor Arcudi, it can vary from 20 to 60 days,
“because sometimes you have to repeat the test”. Precise identification requires
the extraction of "nuclear" DNA, he explains, which undergoes
degeneration. “We can extract mitochondrial DNA more easily, but that does not
allow us to do comparative analysis or to make the genetic profile”.
Team work
Professor Giovanni Arcudi will be working alongside two of
his collaborators and employ the same “protocols and methods that are used in
all investigations of forensic anthropology, regardless of the importance and
connotation of the case… to achieve results that meet all the demands of the
judicial investigation”.
The full
interview, in Italian, can be read on our Vatican News Italian page.
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