Vatican murders
| Vatican murders | |
|---|---|
| Location | Vatican City |
| Date | 4 May 1998 9 p.m. (UTC+2) |
Attack type | Shooting, murder–suicide |
| Weapon | SIG Sauer P220 |
| Deaths | 3 (including the perpetrator) |
| Victims | Alois Estermann and Gladys Meza Romero |
| Perpetrator | Cédric Tornay |
| Motive | Personal grievance |
The Vatican murders occurred on 4 May 1998, when Swiss Guard lance corporal Cédric Tornay, using his service pistol, shot and killed the commander of the Swiss Guard, Alois Estermann, and his wife Gladys Meza Romero in Vatican City, before killing himself. The murder happened the same day that Estermann was confirmed in his position as commander, after a period of being acting commander.
Estermann had previously disciplined Tornay for infractions; as a result, he rejected Tornay for the benemerenti medal, which Swiss Guards usually receive. Tornay wrote a suicide note to his family complaining about Estermann and the supposed injustices he had inflicted against him. The case shocked the Vatican and became a media frenzy. The murders spawned various conspiracy theories that doubt the official narrative, though none have ever been substantiated.
Background
[edit]The Swiss Guard are the Pope's bodyguards, and the smallest army in the world, numbering about 100 men.[1] In early 1998, Roland Buchs, the commander of the Swiss Guard, retired. The Holy See took five months to replace him, with the eventual selection of 43-year-old lieutenant colonel Alois Estermann, initially only as acting commandant.[2][3][1] In 1981, Estermann had been one of the bodyguards guarding the popemobile when Pope John Paul II was shot in an assassination attempt.[4] Estermann was married to Gladys Meza Romero, a Venezuelan former model and former policewoman. After marrying Estermann, she worked for the Venezuelan Embassy in Rome; they were a popular pair in diplomatic circles there.[5] On 4 May 1998, Estermann was made the commander of the Guard.[6]
23-year-old lance corporal Cédric Tornay was from Saint-Maurice in Valais, Switzerland.[7][8] He was a non-commissioned officer of the guard.[9] Roland Buchs, who knew Tornay personally, described him as someone who was "sensitive to the way other people treated him" and who was greatly affected by the reactions of others.[7] The final report described him as dually "uninhibited and disrespectful" but also "polite and kind". He would regularly use marijuana and an autopsy found a cyst in his brain "the size of a pigeon egg".[1]
In February 1998, Estermann disciplined Tornay for a regulatory infraction after Tornay spent the night outside of Vatican City without permission. Citing this as his rationale, he rejected Tornay for the benemerenti medal, which is usually automatically given to Swiss Guards after three years of service.[1][9] This denial occurred two days before Tornay would have received the medal, and Tornay may have only stayed in the Guards as long as he did so he could receive it.[10][11]
Murders
[edit]
At 9 p.m. on 4 May 1998, only a few hours after Estermann was confirmed in his position as commander of the Guard, Tornay went to Estermann's apartment in the barracks in Vatican City.[5][6][1] The apartment was located close to the Porta Sant'Anna, the entrance to the Vatican, shortly behind it.[1]
Using his SIG Sauer P220 9mm service pistol, he shot and killed both Estermann and Romero, before killing himself with a shot to the roof of his mouth.[10][5][1] Noise and shouts were heard briefly from the apartment; Anna-Lina Meier, a nun who did some of her work in the Swiss barracks there, went to Estermann's apartment to find the source. Finding the door open, she saw Romero's body, and not wanting to go any further by herself found lance corporal Marcel Riedi, who entered the apartment and found all three bodies. Tornay was found with the pistol underneath him.[1][5]
Prior to the murders, Tornay wrote a suicide note to his mother. In this note, he complained of numerous grievances, which he called "injustices", perpetrated by Estermann, calling him unfair and harsh. Additionally, he complained of the tension between the German and French speaking Swiss guard members. It is unclear to what extent these complaints reflected reality.[10][12][1] In this note he wrote of the medal rejection, saying that: "After three years, six months and three days of enduring all the injustices here, they denied me the one thing I wanted."[1]
Aftermath
[edit]The case shocked the Vatican and became a media frenzy in the press worldwide;[10] author Robert Royal called it "one of the most shocking events in the entire history of the Swiss Guard".[5] Tornay's status as the perpetrator and his presumed motive were announced a few hours later, with Joaquín Navarro-Valls attributing the murders to Tornay's "peculiar" psychology and his resentment towards Estermann. He stated that "the information that has emerged so far suggest vice-corporal Cédric Tornay suffered a sudden fit of madness". Swiss President Flavio Cotti expressed "the sincere sympathy of the government and the entire Swiss population". A mass was held for the Estermanns in St. Peter's Basilica, the first time this had been done for someone who was not a member of the clergy. John Paul II prayed for them.[1][9] Tornay's funeral was held in his hometown of Saint-Maurice.[7]
The state of the Swiss Guard generally was criticized in the aftermath, with service portrayed as "stressful, difficult, and poorly paid". The murders took place only two days before the swearing-in of the new Swiss Guard officers on 6 May.[1] Due to Vatican City's low population, this singular instance of double homicide gave the country the highest annual murder rate in the world in 1998, at over 200 per 100,000 people, far above any other country. In 1999 the rate was 0 per 100,000 (there were no murders).[13] In the aftermath, Buchs came out of retirement for a temporary period while the Vatican looked for a replacement. Estermann was eventually replaced by Pius Segmüller.[14][11]
The Cardinal Secretary of State, Angelo Sodano, said that of the events that, "Dear officers of the Holy See, the pope renews his trust and his gratitude. The black cloud of one day cannot obscure more than five hundred years of service."[11] Nine months after the murders, the official investigation was closed 5 Februrary 1999.[1][15] That month, the examining magistrate of the Vatican Gianluigi Marron released a 10-page final report on the deaths. It said that drugs and mental illness were likely related to Tornay's actions, though said he was solely responsible. Traces of cannabis were found in Tornay's body during the autopsy, in addition to the cyst in his brain, which they said may have impaired his reasoning.[1][9] It found no indication of any other perpetrators.[1]
Motive and conspiracy theories
[edit]The media, along with several "Vatican watchers", promoted a variety of conspiracy theories and speculations about the events.[5][10] The Italian press was especially conspiratorial; a correspondant for the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung said of the Italian press response that it "has taken on forms that can almost be compared with the flood of information after the accidental death of Lady Di".[15][1] These narratives were popular in the tabloid press and other media, and several investigative journalists wrote books trying to substantiate them, but no proof of them has ever peen put forward.[7][11] Politics professor David Alvarez said of such theories that "such claims either remain unsubstantiated or have been thoroughly discredited".[10] One of these theories was that Tornay and Estermann were gay lovers and that the murder happened after their relationship went bad, with Romero being killed by chance.[5][10] Another was that Romero and Tornay had been the ones having the affair leading to the murders.[5]
Yet another propounded that, since Estermann had been present at the 1981 assassination attempt of John Paul II, and the perpetrator Mehmet Ali Ağca had some assistance from communists, Estermann was therefore an agent (codenamed Werder) of the East German Stasi and was killed due to intelligence services.[16][10] In the reverse, some writers argued that Estermann had some kind of affiliation with the Opus Dei; in these two theories, Tornay is said to have found out about Estermann's allegiance and felt he had to kill him for the church to prevent him from becoming the commandant.[7] Other theories involved espionage, exorcists, the Legionaries of Christ and the Bulgarian Secret Service.[15] The 2002 book Assassinati in Vaticano (transl. Murdered in the Vatican) by Vergès and Luc Brossollet argues that all were actually assassinated and the scene was staged to look like a murder–suicide.[14]
Tornay's relatives rejected the theory that he had been angry with Estermann. His mother Muguette Baudat believed her son was innocent, and subject to a plot, claiming various inconsistencies in the evidence and investigation.[1][9] She hired Jacques Vergès as their family lawyer; Vergès was a high-profile, notorious French lawyer, known for defending international terrorists, Nazi leaders, and Serbian president Slobodan Milošević.[1][9] This had the effect of obscuring whatever possible truth there was to Tornay's claims.[11][9] A 2009 attempt to reopen the case in Switzerland failed as the crime had not been committed in Switzerland, and the Vatican also rejected it saying there was no evidence.[1] The investigation and findings were criticized for their secrecy, with an attempt to access related records in 2019 being rejected.[9][1] In 2021, the Cardinal Secretary of State intervened in the case, and gave Baudat's lawyer Laura Sgro access to the court file. Sgro published the next year a book using the information from the court file, called Sangue in Vaticano (transl. Blood in the Vatican). In her book, she criticized the investigation for being superficial and sloppy, and for immediately settling on Tornay as a perpetrator, without properly analyzing the scene. Sgro sent this book to Pope Francis and complained to the United Nations Human Rights Council.[9]
Robert Royal said that the "much simpler and far less lurid" reality was that Tornay had simply "snapped". Roland Buchs said of him at his funeral that: "His act remains mysterious. Who can understand his last gesture? At this tragic time, many 'whys' and 'wherefores' remain in suspense. Only God knows the answers to our questions."[7] John Paul II said at his funeral that Tornay was to be judged by God, "to whose mercy I entrust him."[11]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Tribelhorn, Marc (5 May 2021). "Vatican murders: Swiss Guard case controversial after 23 years". Neue Zürcher Zeitung. ISSN 0376-6829. Retrieved 22 January 2025.
- ^ Alvarez 2011, p. 367.
- ^ Royal 2006, p. 186.
- ^ Royal 2006, pp. 186–187.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Royal 2006, p. 187.
- ^ a b Alvarez 2011, pp. 367–368.
- ^ a b c d e f Royal 2006, p. 188.
- ^ Lecomte 2016, pp. 238–239.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Winfield, Nicole (29 November 2022). "Vatican Swiss Guard slayings back in spotlight with new book". Associated Press. Rome. Retrieved 5 February 2025.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Alvarez 2011, p. 368.
- ^ a b c d e f Royal 2006, p. 189.
- ^ Royal 2006, pp. 188–189.
- ^ Olofsson 2014, p. 90.
- ^ a b Stephens, Thomas (4 May 2018). "The murder of the commander of the Swiss Guard". SWI swissinfo. Bern. Retrieved 5 February 2024.
- ^ a b c Lecomte 2016, p. 239.
- ^ Royal 2006, pp. 187–188.
Works cited
[edit]- Alvarez, David (2011). "Guardian Angels". The Pope's Soldiers: A Military History of the Modern Vatican. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. pp. 352–374. ISBN 978-0-7006-1770-8.
- Lecomte, Bernard (2016). "Garde suisse". Dictionnaire amoureux des Papes (in French). Paris: Plon. pp. 237–239. ISBN 978-2-259-24956-0.
- Olofsson, Peter (2014). "Tiny Probabilities: Why Are They So Hard to Escape?". Probabilities: The Little Numbers That Rule Our Lives (2nd ed.). Hoboken: Wiley. ISBN 978-1-118-89890-1.
- Royal, Robert (2006). "Modern Times". The Pope's Army: 500 Years of the Papal Swiss Guard. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-8245-2395-4.