"I can't stand the distortion of the truth," said Croce, whose version of the Tornay-Estermann crime - involving Stasi spies, defrocked priests, stolen documents and alleged blackmail, for a start - might come across as extravagant to some. But the main interest, really, is that three people could die under the pope's window," he said.Ĭroce, who heads Edizioni Libreria Croce, a publishing house that specializes in gay-themed literature, said he wrote the play because he wanted to know what really went on that night. "There's the fact that the men were among those in charge of protecting the pope, and then all the quaint picture postcard of the Swiss Guards in the public perception. In the past 10 years the Tornay-Estermann murders have inspired several literary undertakings.Ĭrime and the Vatican make for good copy, said John Follain, a British reporter and the author in 2003 of "City of Secrets," which is about the case.
"The plot might be a little demanding of people who don't know the case," Croce admitted recently after a run-through of the play, which stars three actors who take on several roles. The two groups were supposedly clashing to gain primacy over the pope's security detail. For good measure Croce throws in a bitter rivalry between the clerical freemasonry and the Catholic organization Opus Dei. In the play, the three deaths are interwoven with the unresolved disappearance in 1983 of two young girls, one of whom lived in Vatican City with the sudden, and some say mysterious, death of Pope John Paul I with the bailout of the IOR, the Vatican bank, when it was in uneasy financial waters and with secret service agents of various ilk. The smoking gun never actually finds its way into the hands of a specific culprit, but in concocting his murder theory, Croce thickens the plot with enough twists to make the audience dizzy. Those are just a few of the questions that the playwright Fabio Croce poses in a fast-paced whodunit that happens to provide its own frank answer: Because the Vatican was trying to hide the truth, which is that all three were murdered. Why were the Swiss Guards without a leader for months, and why did Estermann get killed the same day he was appointed? Why were the Italian police excluded from the investigation? Then, if Tornay was killed in a fit of madness, why did he calmly write a suicide note? Ten years on, the play "04-05-'98: Massacre in the Vatican," which opened in Rome last week and runs through Saturday, revives the salacious rumors and murky conspiracy theories that have hung over thecase.
#John follain city of secrets professional#
Traces of cannabis in Tornay's urine and a cyst in his brain discovered during the autopsy were given as possible explanations of why a simmering professional grudge had exploded into a double murder and suicide.Įnd of story? Hardly.
It claimed that Tornay had killed the couple before turning the gun on himself in what appeared to have been a "fit of madness."Ī final report by Vatican investigators presented in February 1999 confirmed the original reconstruction. Rescuers found three victims: Lieutenant Colonel Alois Estermann, 43, who only hours before had been appointed commander of the Swiss Guard, the elite corps that guards the pope his Venezuelan-born wife, Gladys Meza Romero, 49 and one of Estermann's underlings, Vice Corporal Cédric Tornay, 23.īarely three hours later - in record time, many longtime Vatican observers noted - the Holy See put out a statement that opened, and quickly shut, the case. on May 4, 1998, shots rang out in an apartment in Vatican City.
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