City of Secrets: The Startling Truth Behind the Vatican Murders

by John Follain

Overview

A true crime exposé of a 1998 murder-suicide within Vatican City and its subsequent investigation.

On the night of Monday, May 4, 1998, in Vatican territory, the bodies of the commander of the Swiss Guard, his wife, and a young lance corporal were found in the barracks of the picturesque force entrusted with protecting the pope. It was the worst bloodbath to take place in more than a century in the heart of the supreme authority of the world’s one billion Catholics. Four hours later, the Vatican announced that the lance corporal, twenty-three-year-old Cédric Tornay, had shot the couple, then committed suicide in “a fit of madness” brought on by frustration with the unit's discipline—a conclusion it reaffirmed after a nine-month internal inquiry.

But as John Follain’s hard-hitting exposé shows, the official report was a travesty, a tissue of suppositions, contradictions, and omissions. Based on an exhaustive three-year investigation, City of Secrets reveals how the Vatican, the oldest and most secretive autocracy in the world, staged an elaborate plot to obstruct justice—and hide the scandals it dared not confess.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061736889
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	675,888
File size:	523 KB

About the Author

John Follain is an investigative journalist and author. He was a correspondent for Reuters in Paris from 1993 to 1997, where he researched and wrote the Carlos story. He is now bureau chief of the Associated Press in Rome.
 

Read an Excerpt

City of Secrets
The Truth Behind the Murders at the Vatican

Chapter One

Shortly before noon on the day after the deaths at the Swiss Guard, I left my home in the historic center of Rome and set out down the Via dei Coronari, a narrow street of ancient palaces and ocher houses with flaking facades. The street owes its name to the coronari, or rosary makers, whose shops once lined its sides. From these well-placed vantage points, their owners could call out to the pilgrims who flowed into the city through its northern gateway, the Porta del Popolo, and made their way down the long cobbled street to the Vatican. Now smart antique stores have replaced the rosary makers, and the only mementos of the shops' former religious vocation are a few dilapidated shrines to the Virgin on street corners.

I had learned about the shootings from the radio that morning, and found out with a phone call to the Sala Stampa, the press office of the Holy See, that there would be a press conference that day. After crossing the river Tiber, I stopped to buy the newspapers and sat down on a tone bench on the monumental avenue called the Via della Conciliione. Flanked by imitation obelisks, the street was forged on orders from the Fascist dictator Mussolini to open up a grand perspective of St. Peter's, but at the cost of pulling down many ancient houses.

BLOOD IN THE VATICAN, headlined the newspaper La Repubblica, with the subheading Thriller in the Vatican. Even the usually staid Corriere della Sera announced: MASSACRE AT THE SWISS GUARD. A third, La Stampa, went for a more evocative title: THREE BODIES, AND A GUN, IN THE VATICAN.

The newspapers ascribed the deaths to an "act of madness" on the part of the young guard Cédric Tornay, or to jealousy and an illicit love affair between him and the commander's wife, Meza Romero. One writer referred vaguely to "peculiar aspects" of the relationships between the three; another saw the hand of a fanatical member of a sect intent on making its mark on the eve of the "Holy Year," which the pope had announced would take place in two years' time, and which would bring millions of pilgrims to Rome. In the four years I had lived and worked as a journalist in the city, no other event at the heart of the Catholic Church had prompted so many different interpretations in so short a time.

Outside the press office, television crews jostled for position to book the best view of St. Peter's Square, while in the austere lobby, journalists who were not accredited to the Vatican pleaded for admittance. Luckily, I had been through this some years earlier when I first arrived in Rome. As a correspondent for the Reuters news agency, I had been given a Vatican press card by the surly, bespectacled Sister Elisabetta, assistant to the pope's spokesman. Sitting under a framed cover of the Time magazine edition proclaiming John Paul "Man of the Year" for 1994, she had asked me to sign a promise to abide by "ethical standards." When I asked to see a list of these, she looked at me blankly through her heavy spectacles, saying there was no such thing. I should just sign; there was no alternative. Please bear in mind, she told me, that the way we operate is the fruit of two thousand years of history. So I signed. At least she didn't ask me for a recommendation from a clergyman, as the press office had required of journalists covering the Second Vatican Council, which overhauled the Church in the early 1960s.

There were still a few minutes to go before the start of the news conference, so from the front desk I picked up a copy of the Vatican's first pronouncement on the previous night. The statement was in slightly odd English, as if it had been hurriedly translated, and stamped with the papal tiara and the keys of St. Peter's:

The Captain Commander of the Pontifical Swiss Guard, Colonel Alois Estermann, was found dead in his home together with his wife Gladys Meza Romero and Vice corporal Cedric Tornay. The bodies were discovered shortly after 9pm by a neighbour from the apartment next-door who was attracted by loud noises. From a first investigation it is possible to affirm that all three were killed by a fire-arm. Under the body of the Vice corporal his regulation weapon was found. The information which has emerged up to this point allows for the theory of a 'fit of madness" by Vice corporal Tornay.

I checked the timing of the statement -- shortly after midnight on Tuesday, May 5, 1998. Only three hours after the deaths were discovered and before any autopsies were carried out, the Vatican had identified not only the culprit but also his state of mind at the time of the murders. And it was making no secret of its conclusions.

The statement was signed by the pope's spokesman, the sixty-one year-old Joaquin Navarro-Valls. The press office's Spanish director is a lay worker, but the absence of a weighty religious tide is no indication of inferiority A former newspaperman who wears his pink porphyry ring bearing his family's coat of arms as if it were a cardinal's seal of office, he wields more power than most princes of the Church, and carries himself accordingly. Smooth of appearance and of manner, with the rugged good looks of a Castilian nobleman, he has attracted the interest of several of the women journalists accredited to the Vatican. But he has never married, explaining curtly when asked why: "I haven't got the time."

Navarro-Valls likes to boast that 90 percent of Vatican stories in the world's media are based on information released by him. The journalists who report them, known as the vaticanisti, who, unlike me, are permanently based at the press office, retort that he sheds so little light on what really goes on behind the Vatican's walls that they often feel as if they're covering the Kremlin in the iciest days of Soviet rule.

City of Secrets
The Truth Behind the Murders at the Vatican. Copyright © by John Follain. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

While Follain maintains that the Vatican's network of envoys is the envy of the CIA and MI6, he shows that church intelligence is spotty and ill-coordinated. People tell him they fear for their lives, but the most sinister figures in Follain's pantheon of villains would have trouble frightening an altar boy. — Michael Mewshaw

The Washington Post

On May 4, 1998, Col. Alois Estermann, commander of the Swiss Guards, the Vatican force that protects the pope, was found shot dead in his apartment inside Vatican City, along with his wife. Also shot dead in the room was a young Swiss guardsman, Cedric Tornay. Three hours after the bodies were discovered, the Vatican released a statement naming Tornay as the killer, his motive a "fit of madness." Not so fast, thought Follain, author (Jackal, etc.) and Rome-based correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, who also figured that investigating the story would allow him insight into Vatican ways. This book presents his findings, written as a first-person investigation. This technique generates moderate suspense, as Follain follows up leads, interviews tangential figures in the case (the man who succeeded Estermann as head of the Swiss Guards, assorted clerics, the accused killer's mother et al.), and it allows for vivid firsthand accounts of the Vatican and its officials, as well as of London, Paris and Switzerland, where Follain's digging also took him. As Follain turns up evidence-mostly circumstantial and anecdotal-that the murders were more complicated than the Vatican opined, including apparent ties between Estermann and the conservative group Opus Dei and a possible homosexual affair between Estermann and Tornay, and as his outrage grows, his writing turns more lurid: his portrait of Monsignor Alois Jehle, chaplain to the Swiss Guards, which closes this account, drips with personal distaste. While by no means an objective account, then, the book does provide unusual access to inner Vatican circles and demonstrates that even those busy in pursuit of the divine can be human, perhaps all too human. 16 page b&white photo insert. (Jan.) Forecast: The abuse scandal rocking the Church will bring additional interest to this title. One hopes, however, that the publisher's promo abandons the tabloid-style, sensationalistic copy featured on the galley sent to PW for review. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"Filled with explosive revelations!" screeches the publicity, so Follain, a Rome-based correspondent for London's Sunday Times, had better deliver. Follain insists that the Vatican engaged in a huge cover-up in 1998 after the commander of the Swiss Guard, his wife, and a vice corporal were found dead, evidently victims of a double murder/suicide.

Library Journal

A homosexual cabal. A drugged pope. Conspiratorial cardinals. Evil Swiss Germans. Murder.

Thus the ingredients of this innuendo-rich true-crime tale, set among the gilded halls of Saint Peter’s. On May 4, 1998, a Swiss Guard lance corporal named Cedric Tornay stormed into the Vatican City apartment of his commandant, Colonel Alois Estermann, shot Estermann and his wife dead, and then killed himself. In a note to his mother shortly beforehand, Tornay wrote, "I must do this service for all the guards remaining as well as to the Catholic church. I have sworn to give my life for the pope and this is what I am doing." Vatican officials quickly covered up the murder, saying little other than that Tornay had had a cyst on the brain and that traces of cannabis had been found in his bloodstream. The heavy in this cover-up--for so London Sunday Times correspondent Follain (Jackal, 1998, etc.) considers it to be--was wily Vatican press secretary Joaquin Navarro-Valls, by his lights a worthy descendant of Torquemada and Richelieu. But Novarro-Valls was not alone: after all, Follain suggests, Pope John Paul II knew of the murder-suicide but did nothing to determine why the young, decorated guard had killed the man who only that afternoon had been promoted to commander of the Swiss Guard. And no wonder: according to one of Follain’s informants, "The Holy Father is so ill he’s become a prisoner of the Curia," a religious Mafia if ever there were one--or so we’re to believe. Follain argues that Tornay and Estermann had had an affair, that Tornay had complained loudly and frequently of the laxness of security and the ridiculousness of rules that prevented the Swiss Guard from carrying guns whiledressed in their striped-pantaloon finery, and that in all events a heavy animosity between the French and German Swiss who make up the security unit keeps all involved from doing their jobs effectively. All understandable motives for murder, one supposes, but not necessarily strong evidence for malfeasance and conspiracy at the highest levels of the Church.

That scenario will be of interest to those convinced that the Illuminati run the world. Others may want to wait for the movie.

Kirkus Reviews

Intriguing.” — Dallas Morning News

From the Publisher

Intriguing.

Dallas Morning News