Dark Mysteries of the Vatican

CHAPTER 11

A Fit of Madness

In a mystery with three people dead, a supposedly fake suicide note, conflicts over the crime scene and autopsies, disputed bullets, whispers about connections to Opus Dei, and charges of drug use in the Vatican that was worthy of a best-selling mystery novel or Hollywood thriller, the commander of Pope John Paul II’s personal security force, the Swiss Guards, and his wife were shot to death on May 4, 1998, by a dashingly handsome young officer, who then turned the gun on himself.

The Holy See insisted that the killer was bitter at having been passed over for a medal. Another explanation was that the commander and the officer had been gay lovers. A third theory posited that the commander was killed after Vatican officials discovered that he had been a spy for the East German Stasi secret police in the 1980s. Conspiracy theorists and believers that The Da Vinci Code rang true, invoked the specter of a sinister plot by Opus Dei. Never in the 500-year history of the Swiss Guards had their been a whiff of scandal.

Clad in “red-yellow-and-blue tunics, plumed conquistador-style helmets, and gleaming 7-foot medieval halberds-a combined spear and battle-ax-the Swiss Guards were founded by Pope Julius II in 1506.” To join the guards, a man must be a Swiss national, unmarried, a Catholic, of legitimate birth, under the age of thirty, have military training, at least five feet nine or taller, healthy, and with no bodily disfigurements. “Whoever is not eligible for military service in Switzerland is likewise refused admission into the Guards.” He must present “a certificate from his home,…baptismal certificate, and testimonial as to character, all signed by the authorities of his parish. After a year of good conduct, the cost of the journey to Rome is refunded… Those who wish to retire from the Guards may do so after giving three months’ notice. After eighteen years’ service each member of the Guards is entitled to a pension for life amounting to one half of his pay, after twenty years to a pension amounting to two thirds of his pay, after twenty-five years to five sixths of his pay, and after thirty years to his full pay.”

Inducted to serve two-year renewable enlistments, recruits swear to lay down their life, if necessary, in defense of the supreme pontiff. They declared, “I swear I will faithfully, loyally and honorably serve the supreme pontiff [name of Pope] and his legitimate successors and also dedicate myself to them with all my strength, sacrificing if necessary also my life to defend them. I assume this same commitment with regard to the Sacred College of Cardinals whenever the See is vacant. Furthermore, I promise to the commanding captain and my other superiors, respect, fidelity and obedience. This I swear! May God and our holy patrons assist me!”

The one hundred Swiss Guards have been the only armed corps at the Vatican since Pope Paul VI dissolved three other units: the Papal Gendarmes, the Pontifical Noble Guard, and the Palatine Guard of Honor in 1970. The Swiss Guard is the remnant of the military corps that popes had at their disposal from the Middle Ages until the mid-nineteenth century, when they controlled a large part of central Italy. Swiss Guards officially assumed papal defense duties “when Pope Julius II, known as the warrior pope, recognized that he needed special protection. [H]e turned to well-known and tactically well-trained forces from Switzerland ” and asked for a contingent of Swiss soldiers who would protect him and his palace. In December of that year, 150 Swiss soldiers began their march to Rome. They entered the eternal city on January 21, 1506, and set up quarters in the pope’s stables. The next day, they were blessed by Julius. He bestowed on them the title “Defenders of the Church’s Freedom.”

Twenty-one years later, on May 6, 1527, 147 out of 189 guardsmen were killed in a defensive stance that allowed Pope Clement VII to escape attacking Spanish forces. The only blemish on the guards’ record occurred in 1798. When Napoleon occupied Rome, he captured and deported Pope Pius VI, then disbanded the papal guard. Other nonpapal Swiss Guard units noted for their combat prowess were kept and integrated within the ranks of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. After Hitler’s troops entered Rome in World War II, Swiss Guardsmen donned gray uniforms and took up positions behind machine guns and mortars. Vastly outnumbered, they were prepared to sacrifice their lives for Pius XII, but by Hitler’s order, the Germans did not move against the Vatican.

“Today a pope’s temporal authority extends over just the 108-acre enclave of Vatican City… The Swiss Guards now perform ceremonial functions but also stand guard duty outside the papal apartments and at the Vatican ’s four main entrances. Guards in plain clothes accompany the pope on his travels…and cooperate with other church security forces and police…to ensure the pope’s protection. These days, the guards carry tear gas for crowd control and train weekly with machine pistols and handguns at an Italian army firing range.” The force usually consists of four officers, twenty-three noncommissioned officers, seventy halberdiers (lance carriers), two drummers, and a chaplain, all with an equivalent Italian army rank. Although they are fully trained and equipped in modern weaponry and tactics, they also receive instructions in using the sword and halberd.

“Their official dress uniform was altered in 1915. It is a jumpsuit which has a distinctly Renaissance appearance. A popular misconception is that these dress uniforms were designed by Michelangelo. The working uniform is more functional, consisting of blue coveralls and black beret. Both dress and working uniforms are worn by the Guardsmen when on duty in Vatican City.”

“All the officers carry out guard duties every day as well as on occasions such as Masses, audiences, and receptions… The officers and the Sergeant Major generally wear civilian clothes when on duty… The chaplain has the equivalent title of an army lieutenant colonel.” “The Guard quarters consist of two narrow parallel buildings which with the Sistine Palace and the Torrione di Niccolò V form two courts. The inner court is adjacent to the palace, in the other is a gate leading directly to the city.” “The corps has its own chapel, SS Martino e Sebastiano, built by Pius V in 1568.”

A member of the Swiss Guard on May 4, 1989, Jacques-Antoine Fierz, wrote in Newsweek magazine, “It takes a special sort of man to leave behind the tranquil life of the Swiss cantons for a barracks in a foreign land. After all, it’s not a job full of material rewards. The hours are long-sixty or seventy a week when there are no extraordinary duties. The pay is merely 1.8 million lire ($1,000) a month-far less than an Italian soldier would earn. It’s not easy to stand like a statue for many hours holding a heavy pike. And we’re all normal guys who carry on like all other young men our age. We go out with friends in the neighborhood, have a few drinks at a pub with our comrades and swap work stories. Some of us even have girlfriends. To be a soldier of the pope does not imply a vow of celibacy, and it’s not rare for a Guardsman to come home with a wife he met in Rome. But there is very little free time, and bed check is at midnight every day.”

At age forty-three, Colonel Alois Estermann was “an 18-year veteran of the Swiss Guard Corps, who distinguished himself by shielding the pope’s body with his own during the assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981.”

Only inches away from John Paul II when Mehmet Ali Agca attempted to assassinate him, Estermann had become close to the pontiff and accompanied him on more than thirty foreign trips and on John Paul’s annual mountain-climbing retreats. “Described by his men as a straight-arrow professional soldier, Estermann had just achieved his life’s ambition at noon” on May 4, 1998, when John Paul II consecrated him in the post of commander of the Swiss Guard detachment. His forty-nine-year-old wife, Gladys Meza Romero, “was a striking ex-model from Venezuela who worked in the library of Venezuela ’s embassy. Married since 1983, they had no children.” Everyone in the Swiss Guard and the Vatican hierarchy considered them to be a model couple.

Since the retirement of his predecessor, Roland Buchs, “Estermann had waited six months for the appointment as commander of the Guard… The post traditionally goes to a Swiss nobleman, and Estermann was a commoner. But the tradition had become difficult to maintain, especially for a job that paid about $30,000 a year.” Estermann was only the fourth nonaristocrat chosen to lead the guards in their nearly five centuries of existence.”

“Finishing his second two-year enlistment in the Guard,” twenty-three-year-old Vice Corporal Cedric Tornay, “who was on his second Italian fiancée, had been cited five times for failing to make bed check at midnight and was criticized for drinking too much and swearing… Estermann had given Tornay a written reprimand. He passed him over for awards that were to be distributed…in an annual ceremony at which [Alois Estermann] was to be publicly installed as commander.

Sometime on May 4, 1989, Tornay wrote a letter to his mother that read, “Mama, I hope you will forgive me, for it is they who made me to do what I have done. This year I should have received the decoration (la “Benemerenti”) but the Lieutenant-Colonel refused to give it to me. After 3 years, 6 months and 6 days spent here putting up with all kinds of injustices, he refused to give me the only thing I wanted. I owe this duty to all the guards as well as to the Catholic Church. I took an oath to give my life for the Pope and that is what I am doing. Forgive me for leaving you all alone but my duty calls me. Tell Sarah, Melissa and Papa that I love you. Cedrich.”

Around 7:20 P.M. the letter was entrusted to a colleague.

An hour later, Tornay called a Swiss priest he had known since childhood. He got the priest’s voice mail. “Padre Ivano, please call me back,” Tornay said with an urgent tone. “It’s an emergency.”

Wearing jeans and black leather jacket, he walked in the rain across a courtyard, passed under the lighted apartment of Pope John Paul II, and reached the barracks of the Swiss Guard next to the Palace.

A nun heard him going hurriedly up the stairs, looked, but saw nothing.

Tornay entered Estermann’s apartment building at about nine o’clock. “Estermann was speaking to a priest friend by telephone when shots rang out.

“By 9:05 P.M., all three people [in the apartment] were dead.”

Within minutes of being urgently summoned to the scene by a neighbor, the papal spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, sealed the Estermanns’ apartment. No one was allowed to enter it, including the Italian police. Within three hours, Navarro-Valls issued this statement on behalf of the Vatican: “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 9 p.m. by a neighbor 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 firearm. 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.”

Noting that Holy See officials said it was the first murder in the Vatican in 150 years, Newsweek magazine reported the Vatican ’s explanation, but cited doubts. For a case that was supposed to be open and shut, it said, “the Vatican could not convince everyone that it had told the whole tragic story.

“The Vatican will not give us the full truth about my brother’s death,” said Tornay’s sister, Melinda.

The soldier’s mother, Mugette Baudet, said she spoke to her son by telephone the afternoon before the killings. “He was not angry or bitter,” she said. “If he had been upset, it was not enough to kill anyone.”

A Berlin tabloid quoted anonymous sources who claimed that Estermann once supplemented his meager salary by selling Vatican secrets to the Stasi, the notorious East German secret police. Italian columnists speculated about a love triangle gone sour. “The relationship could not be other than one of a homosexual nature,” Ida Magli, a prominent anthropologist, told the Roman daily Il Messaggero.

Frank Grillini, head of Arcigay, Italy ’s leading gay organization, claimed, “The Holy See wanted to close a case in a hurry, perhaps out of a need to hide a sad, worrisome truth. It’s been known for years that many of the Swiss Guards are homosexuals. These men are isolated and shut away, which is why we see these gay tendencies in the Swiss Guard and in all Vatican institutions.”

The Vatican dismissed the espionage charge as beneath contempt and took pains to deny rumors of a sexual motive for the killings.

“The barracks is a ghetto,” said Hugues de Wurstemberg, a former Guard who lived in Belgium. “It’s like a stew in a pressure cooker. Lots of alcohol, stories of theft, rumors of homosexuality, desertions, rancor.”

“It’s a hard life, and these are young guys,” said Mario Biasetti, an American filmmaker who spent two years with the Guards to produce a documentary called Soldiers of the Pope. “But they’re also very serious about their duties, and they’re all volunteers. If they don’t like it, they only have two years to go.”

“The triple homicide was the latest in a disturbing series of violent episodes connected to St. Peter’s,” Newsweek recorded. “[In] January, the body of Enrico Sini Luzi, a nobleman who served as a Gentleman of the Pope, was found in his elegant apartment near the Vatican. He was bludgeoned to death with an antique chandelier. Until his death, Luzi had served as a papal usher, even though he had been arrested years before for having sex in a public bathroom, allegedly with a priest. A male prostitute was charged with Luzi’s murder. Shortly afterward, a gay man from Sicily set himself on fire in St. Peter’s Square to protest the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality.

“In the [previous] year, three plots had been uncovered to put bombs in the pope’s path… When CIA Director George Tenet visited Rome late[in 1997], Western diplomatic sources said, it was to pay a call on the Vatican’s secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, to warn of terrorists who might be targeting the pontiff…

“Moving quickly to try to repair any damage to morale” in the Guards after the Estermann murders, “the Vatican brought back the popular Buchs as commander. But from outside the walls of the papal state, there were suggestions that the Swiss Guard should be disarmed again, or even replaced by a modern police force.” Countering this idea, Swiss Cardinal Amedee Grab said, ‘Without the Swiss Guard, or with a disarmed Swiss Guard, it would be impossible to ensure the security of the pope.’

“Estermann and his wife were given a funeral in St. Peter’s Basilica that was concelebrated by 16 cardinals and 30 bishops. All available Guardsmen turned out, standing composed and impassive through the mass. Before the service, Pope John Paul II prayed at all three caskets, which were displayed, side by side, for viewing. Vatican officials gave Tornay a proper funeral, despite the Church’s condemnation of suicide. A crowd of his Roman friends gathered at the parish church of Santa Ana, within Vatican walls. The Swiss Guards also turned out, with many of them weeping openly, as they had not done for Estermann. The Guardsmen’s band played ‘I Had a Good Comrade.’”

In its May 18, 1998, issue, Newsweek presented an account of life in the Swiss Guards by Jacques-Antoine Fierz. A member from 1992 to 1995, he had returned “to Rome to join annual ceremonies known as the Swearing In, in which the Swiss Guards…renew their allegiances. Instead, he attended a funeral.”

“We are, it has been said, the pope’s calling cards, the Vatican ’s finest,” he said, “And here were three dead among us, all three absurd deaths-a loss that has profoundly wounded us all. It is only invidious bad-mouthers who speak ill of the Swiss Guard, and among those I count the ones who are floating these provocative theories that Cedric Tornay and Estermann were homosexuals. It is impossible, inconceivable. We live and work in such close quarters that we would surely have known if anything like that went on. It didn’t. Those who say otherwise are jealous of the prestige the Swiss Guard has gained throughout its history…

“The Swiss who become the pope’s soldiers are simply young men with high enough ideals to take on huge responsibilities, those who want to dedicate their lives to the service of one man and all that he represents.

“I don’t know a single Guard who really minded the hours or the duties,” he said. “The great majority of us feel a very strong affinity for the church, the pontiff and the military life, and the discipline and the adventure it represents. And it’s not bad to improve your language skills, or to live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Also, I can’t deny the fascination of being part of the oldest continually serving army in the world. And I admit that it’s something else to be able to dress up in those elegantly colored uniforms, however out of fashion they may now seem. If I sound enthusiastic, it’s because I remember my time at the Vatican very positively, especially the spirit of camaraderie. That’s what makes this tragedy so sadly incomprehensible. I talked to a lot of the Guards after the murders, and they all said the same thing-it was so senseless, so impossible to imagine. I agree. Estermann had been my lieutenant colonel. He had wonderful human qualities, was an exemplary believer and a very correct officer. His wife, Gladys, was pleasant and well educated. I remember Cedric Tornay as very kindly… This was an act of a madman, not of Tornay the Guard.”

“After a nine-month internal inquiry, the text of which remained secret, the Vatican repeated the claim that Tornay acted in a fit of madness, saying traces of cannabis were found in Tornay’s urine, and a cyst ‘the size of a pigeon’s egg’ in his head, helped explain the ‘madness.’”

A year after the killings, a group of disaffected priests within the Vatican claimed that Estermann was the victim of a Vatican power struggle. Calling themselves “the disciples of truth,” they claimed that evidence had been tampered with in order to fit the hypothesis that the killing was the result of a moment of madness on the part of Tornay. In a book titled Blood Lies in the Vatican, they said that the struggle was between the secretive, traditionalist Catholic movement Opus Dei and a Masonic power faction among the Curia for control of the Swiss Guard.

“‘In the Vatican, there are those who maintain that Vice Corporal Tornay was attacked after coming off duty and dragged into a cellar,’ the book said. Tornay was then ‘suicided’ with a silenced 7mm pistol, and his duty revolver used to kill the Estermanns in their Vatican apartment. His body was dumped in the Estermann’s flat so that the triple killing would appear to be a murder-suicide.”

The book alleged that “Estermann and his wife…were actively engaged in secret international financial deals for the benefit of Opus Dei.”

Those who discerned a conspiracy asserted that a Vatican inquiry had been rigged, as was the case in the assassination of John Paul I twenty years earlier, and in the murder of Roberto Calvi. It was alleged that a “veritable piece of stagecraft was orchestrated at midnight, [in which] an ambulance from the Vatican’s Health Assistance Fund…pretended to transport ‘three bodies’ to the Gemelli Polyclinic Hospital, when…the three victims were actually placed on stretchers which halberdiers transported to the Vatican morgue next to Saint Anne’s Church. It was imperative to prevent an autopsy taking place outside the Vatican or on the premises of the Health Assistance Fund. The three corpses were therefore taken away without any of the precautions routinely used in criminal investigations…and placed in the corridor of the morgue, then covered with sheets.”

The conspiracy theorists said “the inquiry was entrusted to the only judge in the Vatican State, Gianluigi Marrone. He decided that the autopsy would be carried out the following day, within the Vatican, by forensic pathologists Pietro Fucci and Giovanni Arcudi, who could be trusted to do what was necessary.”

In 2003, Anglo-French writer John Follain drew several startling conclusions in his book, City of Secrets: The Startling Truth Behind the Vatican Murders. Author of books on the Mafia and Carlos the Jackal, Follain asserted that the official explanation for the deaths of Estermann, his wife, and Tornay was a “hastily cobbled cover-up” concerning a papal protective force in which “homosexuality was common, with as many as one quarter of the Swiss Guards gay, morale low, and fundamental reform desperately needed.” Follain agreed that “Tornay was the murderer, but he said he discovered a morass of abuse, discrimination and misery behind the young guard’s desperate act. ‘The decision not to award Tornay the medal was the trigger,’ he said. ‘But it was not an act of madness: it was premeditated.’

“Other grievances had been simmering in Swiss-French Tornay. He suffered prejudice and discrimination by the majority Swiss-Germans in the force. He believed the Swiss Guard was amateurish and not up to the duty of protecting the Pope, and had urged reform of the body. Nobody was listening. He had also had a homosexual affair with Estermann, who had hurt him by moving on to other lovers.”

Tornay’s mother stated that his letter to her was a forgery by someone who knew him well. She noted that it was addressed to the name “Chamorel,” but her son always used her maiden name, Baudat. Graphologists from Switzerland attested that Tornay had not written the letter. She also said “an independent autopsy in Lausanne established that a 7mm bullet killed her son-not a 9.4mm caliber bullet from a Stig 75 gun, as claimed in the Vatican ’s investigation. She claims the autopsy suggested her son was drugged, then shot and his body positioned in Estermann’s flat to make it seem that he killed the couple before shooting himself.”

In 2005, “high-profile French lawyer Jacques Vergès and his colleague, Luc Brossollet, acting for Tornay’s mother, said that they would file a murder claim” in Switzerland because Tornay was Swiss. They said they had “faced years of stubborn deafness from the Vatican.”

On May 7, 2006, “Benedict XVI thanked the Swiss Guards for 500 years of service and invited them to continue their mission with ‘courage and fidelity.’” The Pope said this during a Mass commemorating the 500th anniversary of the arrival in Rome “of the first 150 Swiss Guards, requested by Pope Julius II. Also remembered were the 147 Swiss Guards killed while defending Pope Clement VII during the sacking of Rome on May 6, 1527. In his homily delivered in Italian, French and German,…The Holy Father said that his purpose for the meeting was to render honor to the Swiss Guard corps.

“‘For all, to be a Swiss Guard means to adhere without reservations to Christ and his Church, to be ready to give his life,’ he said. ‘The effective service may finish, but within one is always a Swiss Guard.’”

He said the Swiss Guard had always been constant, even in 1970 when Paul VI dissolved all the other military corps of the Vatican but the Guard.

Two years after this accolade, Benedict stripped the Swiss Guard of its sole role in papal protection. Some of the duties were handed to the Holy See’s second, and larger, protection service, the Vatican Gendarmerie. When the commander of the Guard, Elmar Theodor Maeder, quit in protest, Benedict appointed Daniel Rudolf Anrig, a senior police officer from the Swiss canton of Glarus and a former lecturer in civil and church law at Freiburg University. The Rome newspaper, Il Messaggero, suggested that “despite the long-standing rivalry between the two forces, Anrig and [Domenico] Giani,” head of the 180 gendarmes and a former officer in the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian financial police, “would find cooperation because they were ‘of a similar age,’ thanks to Pope Benedict’s policy of promoting younger men and women.”

For the first time in five hundred years, the Swiss Guard that Cedric Tornay wished to reform was no longer the sole protector of a Pope’s physical safety.