Vatican murders
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 Holy See took five months to replace him, with the eventual selection of 43-year-old Swiss 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.
[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.
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.
[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.
He stated that "the information that has emerged so far suggest vice-corporal Cédric Tornay suffered a sudden fit of madness".
[7] The state of the Swiss Guard generally was criticized in the aftermath, with service portrayed as "stressful, difficult, and poorly paid".
[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.
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.
[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.
[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.
His mother Muguette Baudat believed her son was innocent, and subject to a plot, claiming various inconsistencies in the evidence and investigation.
[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.
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.
