On May 4, 1998, five shots rang out inside a private apartment tucked within the fortified walls of Vatican City in Rome.
Dead were Alois Estermann, the newly appointed commander of the elite Swiss Guard army that protects the pope; Estermann’s Venezuelan wife, Gladys Meza Romero, a former model; and Cedric Tornay, who was a corporal in the Swiss Guard.
No one heard the shots, according to neighbors who were interviewed after the murders, but the three bodies were enough proof to solve the crime, at least according to the Vatican.
The Holy See’s official line was that corporal Tornay had killed Estermann and his wife before putting his 7mm pistol into his mouth and blowing his brains out.
The motive was simple, they said.
Tornay had been passed up by Estermann for a promotion and could not contain his rage.
But the truth behind the Vatican’s Swiss Guard murders is far more complex, says Tornay’s mother, Muguette Baudat. Earlier this month she pleaded to Pope Benedict XVI to reopen the case and clear her son’s name.
In a brief interview with The Daily Beast, she says her son was the victim of a cover-up, not the perpetrator of a murder-suicide. “My son is not the man behind such a murder,” she said. “He was not crazy and vengeful. He was actually a victim in this crime.”
Baudat has written a letter to the current pope in the hope he will reopen the case. She believes that because Benedict was a key administrator in the Vatican hierarchy during her son’s murder investigation, he may be willing to reinvestigate the case for the sake of transparency.
“He might want clear his conscience,” she says. “It would be the right thing to do.”
When it happened, the Swiss Guard murder shook Rome to its core.
Because Vatican City is a sovereign nation, it has its own police and investigative units.
The pope is the head of state, and no one in the papal administration has to answer to anyone outside the Vatican walls—even though the tiny nation is tucked inside the city of Rome.
Secrecy shrouded the case from the moment the news broke. In the hours after a Vatican insider leaked the news of a murder, local Italian journalists speculated that then–pope John Paul II himself had been the victim of a gunman’s wrath.
It took nearly 24 hours for the Vatican to clarify that it had been the head of the pope’s protective arm who had been killed in a murder-suicide and not the pope himself.