The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  Within months, the case was transformed from a lone-assassin scenario to a possible conspiracy. The driving force for this new narrative was investigative journalism. In Turkey, journalist Ugur Mumcu was able to piece together an intriguing trail for Agca. It began with his well-planned escaped from a high-security Turkish prison in 1979, an escape in which he walked out disguised as a soldier, and it continued as he assumed various other aliases, assisted by false travel documents through a half-dozen countries, including Bulgaria, Germany, Syria, and Iran, to Italy. According to Mumcu’s research, the jailbreak was organized by a Turkish terrorist organization called “The Grey Wolves,” which also supplied him with money, weapons, and documents. Meanwhile, in America, two separate journalistic investigations—one for the Reader’s Digest by Paul Henze, the CIA station chief in Turkey from 1974 to 1977; the other by Claire Sterling, who had written The Terror Network—uncovered evidence suggesting that Agca had been working for the Bulgarian intelligence service at the time of the assassination attempt. They also named a number of Bulgarian officials in Rome who they said may have been involved in the plot. As the firestorm grew in the Italian media, Agca was re-interrogated in prison. After being shown pictures of the Bulgarian officials in Italy, Agca changed his story. He now said he had two Bulgarian accomplices in Rome. He said one of them was Sergei Antonov, the representative in Rome of Balkan Air, the Bulgarian national airline, who drove him to St. Peter’s Square to shoot the pope. Antonov denied knowing Agca and having any involvement in the plot. Nevertheless, he was arrested by Italian authorities and put on trial for complicity in the attempt to kill the pope. During the trial, which extended over two years, Agca again changed his story, exonerating Antonov in rambling and incoherent testimony. Antonov was acquitted in 1986, returned to Bulgaria, became the subject of a novel called The Executioner by Stefan Kisyov, and died in 2007. His lengthy trial produced no evidence to substantiate the media stories that Agca was paid by the Bulgarian intelligence. For his part, Agca had made so many contradictory claims in the trial that his testimony was of little value in resolving the question of conspiracy. After the pope recovered and asked that Agca be shown mercy, Agca was extradited to Turkey, and then, after twenty-eight years in prison, was released on January 18, 2010.

  As for why he attempted to assassinate the pope, there are three main theories. First, that he acted on his own, believing, as he wrote prior to the attempt, that the pope was an enemy of Islam. According to this view, Agca, no matter who helped him escape from prison, earned money through smuggling and other criminal activities in Bulgaria and Germany. He used this money to buy a false passport, train tickets, and the weapon he used to shoot the pope. His conspiratorial confessions were either delusional or attempts to win favor from the Italian authorities. A second theory is that he was working for a Muslim extremist group, such as the Grey Wolves, who recruited him in prison, because of the threats he had made against the pope, and arranged his escape. In this view, Agca’s trips to Syria, where Agca himself said he had received terrorist training, were sponsored by the Islamic group that recruited him. That his target was not beyond the scope of such Islamic extremist groups was demonstrated, according to this theory, by the failed attempt by Ramzi Yousef, who was the organizer of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, to assassinate Pope John Paul II in the Philippines on January 15, 1995. Finally, there is the theory, advanced in the books of Sterling and Henze, that the papal assassination had been organized by the Bulgarian intelligence service on behalf of the Soviet Union’s KGB. The motive, according to this theory, was that Pope John Paul II, the first Polish pope, had been secretly funding the anti-Soviet Solidarity involvement in Poland. This alleged KGB plot was the prosecution’s theory in the 1984–86 trial of Antonov.

  My own assessment is that Agca acted alone. His own contradictory statements demonstrate, if anything, that he was opportunistic in inventing stories. There is no doubt that he had assistance from the Grey Wolves in escaping prison, as Mumcu convincingly shows, but there is no evidence that this organization supported or even stayed in contact with him when he went to Europe. And there is no persuasive evidence that he had ever been connected to either Bulgarian or Russian intelligence. At Antonov’s trial, Agca appeared to be totally deranged. If that was not an act, he was clearly capable of undertaking delusional missions. So it is possible, though by no means certain, that he himself decided to eliminate a person he described as a “crusader.”

  A lesson here is that a lone assassin may find reason to falsely implicate others in a putative conspiracy. For example, James Earl Ray, who confessed to the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1969, asserted in an unsuccessful attempt to win a new trial eight years later that he had a co-conspirator named “Raoul” (even though a polygraph test financed by Playboy magazine showed that he had acted alone). In the attack on the pope, the Cold War interest in implicating Soviet intelligence in a papal assassination attempt provided Agca with an incentive, if only to break the boredom of prison, to implicate Antonov and other Bulgarian and Russian officials in the putative plot. Not all loners have help—even if they say they do.

  PART TWO

  SUICIDE, ACCIDENT, OR

  DISGUISED MURDER?

  CHAPTER 7

  THE MAYERLING INCIDENT

  On January 30, 1889, two young lovers were found shot dead at a hunting lodge in Mayerling, Austria. One was Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, the only son of Emperor Franz Josef I and the heir to the throne of the then-powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire; the other was Baroness Marie Vetseva, a beautiful seventeen-year-old aristocrat. Their deaths stirred the imagination of the world and over the next century and grew into a legend of a Romeo-and-Juliet-style suicide pact carried out because of the couple’s unwillingness to be apart. It became the subject of the British ballet Mayerling, with music by Franz Liszt; the German opera Mayerling: Requiem For Love; the American operetta Marinka, with the hit song “One Touch of Venus”; the Hungarian musical Rudolf; the Japanese manga Angel’s Coffin; the American television production Mayerling with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer as the star-crossed lovers; two Hollywood movies called Mayerling; and six other European movies. These romantic productions, however, lack any basis in fact.

  The problem here is that little is known about the crime scene. All that is established is a sequence of events. In January 1889, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its imperial family were in a state of crisis over the childless relationship of Crown Prince Rudolf and his wife, Princess Stephanie, the daughter of an important royal ally, King Leopold of Belgium. On January 29, 1889, Prince Rudolf departed from Vienna for a remote lodge in upper Austria with his teenage mistress Marie Vetseva, and a servant. On January 30, the imperial family was notified by local police that the prince and his mistress were dead. Their bodies had been discovered by a servant. The imperial family ordered the police to seal the crime scene and remove Vetseva’s body from the scene. It was secretly buried on the grounds of a nearby monastery, where it would remain unexamined for more than half a century. All police reports of the crime were ordered expunged. On February 1, the Imperial Court issued an official statement saying that Prince Rudolf died from heart failure. No mention was made of the Baroness Marie Vetseva. Later that week, Prince Rudolf was buried in the imperial crypt after the pope gave dispensation for burial on holy ground. However, because of persistent rumors of murder, suicide, and a cover-up, the Vatican in 1889 appointed a special papal nuncio, or representative of the pope, to determine the basic facts to support the pope’s dispensation, since suicide victims were not under normal circumstances permitted to be buried on holy ground. The results were filed away in the Vatican archives and kept secret for nearly ninety years.

  What is now known about the double death emerged largely as a result of access to the Vatican’s investigation, which was first made available to outside scholars in 1979. This investigation had revealed that both corpses were in the prince’s bedroom
, that the advanced state of rigor mortis of Marie Vetseva’s body indicated that she had died many hours earlier than Prince Rudolf, that only a single shot was fired that night at Mayerling lodge, and that Prince Rudolf died instantly from a bullet wound. The several hours between their deaths ruled out a near-simultaneous suicide. Before any sort of thorough medical examination could be performed on Marie Vetseva’s body, it was spirited away. In 1955, during the final days of the Russian occupation of Austria, her grave was accidently reopened by Russian troops. Given the opportunity to re-inter it, family members agreed to allow a doctor to examine Vetseva’s skeleton. An Austrian physician, Dr. Gerd Holler, examined her bones and skull and found no penetration holes or other damage consistent with a bullet wound. This belated examination was consistent with the police report, which said that only one shot had been fired in the lodge. If accurate, the examination means that Vetseva had died by means other than a gunshot several hours before the prince’s death. Dr. Holler, who became a relentless investigator of the incident, succeeded three decades later in getting the Vatican to open its archives.

  The mystery surrounding Vetseva’s death has led to a surfeit of speculative theories, the most romantic of which is the double suicide. According to this theory, the prince and baroness, unable to pursue their love affair because of intrigues of the court, killed themselves in a suicide pact. Presumably, she first killed herself, and then, after several hours, he followed suit. A second theory proposed in a number of books on the subject is that Prince Rudolf and Marie Vetseva were murdered together. The murder theory received support from Empress Zita, the widow of the last emperor. Shortly before her death, the empress claimed in an 1988 interview that the prince and his lover were killed as part of a political plot and that their murders were disguised as a double suicide. Finally, there is the theory that Prince Rudolf killed Marie Vetseva in a heated dispute and, several hours later, killed himself because he was unable to cope with the consequences of his crime.

  To borrow from Lord Acton, if political power corrupts a crime investigation, absolute power, such at that held by the Austro-Hungarian emperor, corrupts the evidence absolutely. The best evidence we have is the secret report of the Vatican discovered by Dr. Holler. It contains no suspicion of police perjuring themselves or forging reports. If true, this would rule out the double-murder theory since police, servants, and other witnesses told the papal nuncio that no one else broke into the house. The medical report would also rule out a double suicide because of the long gap between Marie Vetseva’s and Prince Rudolf’s deaths. Nor does it seem plausible that seventeen-year-old Marie, who came from a religious family, intended to commit suicide, which was a serious sin. As there was no suicide note, I believe that the simplest scenario that fits the evidence is that Prince Rudolf first killed his lover and then himself.

  Importantly, the Mayerling case shows that the possibility of solving a murder mystery does not perish with the death of the witnesses and destruction of evidence. So long as a body can be exhumed, forensic tools can be employed to cast a new light on a crime.

  CHAPTER 8

  WHO KILLED GOD’S BANKER?

  I.

  On June 11, 1982, Roberto Calvi, the chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano, left Italy. He had with him a black briefcase that an assistant had seen him stuff with documents from his safe. The disappearance of “God’s banker,” as he was known in the Italian media because of the massive investments he made for the Vatican, set in motion an international manhunt. One week later, his body was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London with an orange noose around his neck and his feet submerged in the swirling waters of the Thames. The black bag was gone. Also missing was $1.2 billion from Banco Ambrosiano’s subsidiaries in the Bahamas, Nicaragua, Peru, and Luxembourg. The Vatican bank was missing a half-billion dollars in the form of loans to anonymous corporations owned by unknown parties.

  Blackfriars Bridge, which had been built across the River Thames in 1769, had been undergoing extensive repairs, and scaffolding had been erected alongside it. To get up and down the scaffolding, iron ladders had been installed; Calvi’s body was found hanging from this abutting scaffolding. When the London river police cut down the body on the morning of June 19, 1982, they did not know immediately that it was the missing Italian banker. The Italian passport on the corpse identified him as “Gian Roberto Calvino.” It was a bogus passport, it turned out, that he had used to get into Britain. The police ruled out robbery, as “Calvino” still wore a very expensive Patek Philippe watch on his wrist and had about $14,000 in Swiss francs, British pounds, and Italian lire in his wallet. They also found seven large pieces of masonry stuffed in his pants. Even after he was identified, Scotland Yard, the Italian financial police, and Interpol were all perplexed as to how this banker from Milan came to be dangling at the end of a rope over the Thames in London. Did he commit suicide, or was he murdered? The coroner’s jury rendered a verdict of probable suicide on July 23, 1982, but that verdict was overturned on March 29, 1983, and a second coroner’s jury in London, unable to decide whether it was murder or suicide, rendered an open verdict.

  I was also baffled by the circumstances of the hanging of God’s banker. I had come to London in 1983 on assignment from Vanity Fair to investigate his death, not realizing at the time that the twists and turns in my own investigation would span the next three decades.

  I went to see Professor Frederick Keith Simpson, one of England’s most experienced and brilliant pathologists, who had conduced the autopsy. It had established that there was no river water in Calvi’s lungs, so he had not drowned. The cause of death was asphyxia, or loss of oxygen. There was a V-shaped wound on his neck, consistent with suicide by hanging, and there were no marks on his arms to indicate that he had been restrained, no puncture marks on his body to indicate that he had been injected with a drug, and no traces of suspicious chemicals or drugs in his stomach (other than the residue of a sleeping pill he had taken the previous night). In short, there was no medical evidence of foul play.

  The time of the death was fixed by his Patek Philippe watch, which, though valued at over $100,000, was not waterproof. It stopped at 1:52 a.m. While the watch could have stopped for reasons other than water damage, the water marks on the face of it, when taken together with the dropping level of the tide that night at Blackfriars Bridge, established the latest time at which his body could have been suspended from the scaffolding. After 2:30 a.m., the level of the water in the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge would not have been high enough to have reached Calvi’s wrist, so he must have been hanging before then. But he could not have hanged himself before 1:00 a.m. because the river level then would have been above his mouth, and there was no river water in his body. So, if he committed suicide, it could only have been between 1:00 and 2:30 a.m. Making the problem more vexing, during these hours there was a low tide, and the distance to the water would most likely have broken his neck. Yet the pathologist had determined that Calvi’s neck had not suffered the kind of injury that would have occurred in such a free-fall. In fact, he could have not have dropped more than two feet before his fall was broken by the water. To get that near to the water, after tying the rope, he would have had to climb twelve feet down a nearly vertical iron ladder, and then, with seven pieces of masonry in his clothes, step across a two-and-one-half-foot gap onto the scaffolding’s rusty poles, which were arranged like monkey bars in a children’s playground. Next he would have to tie the rope and shimmy down to the next level of the scaffolding in the darkness. The medical examination had found none of the signs, including splinters, cuts, or abrasions on his hands, or rust and tears in his grey suit, that such a descent would be expected to have produced. Whereas climbing up and down ladders and scaffolding might present no problem for a young man in the peak of health, Calvi was sixty-two years old and overweight, and he suffered from vertigo. Even in the absence of any murder signatures on Calvi’s corpse, I found it difficult to accept that he killed himself wit
hout help.

  I next went to Rome to speak to Italian investigators. What was clear from their investigation was that Calvi had co-conspirators in getting to London. Italian authorities had established that he had used three false identities, eight separate private-plane flights around Europe, a speedboat, four different cars, and fourteen temporary residences in getting into Britain. He had gone from Rome to Venice by plane, then to Trieste by car, where someone smuggled him in a speedboat to Yugoslavia. From there, a car had driven him to a mountain retreat in Austria, and then, on June 15, disguised as a Fiat executive, he had flown from a small airport in Austria to London in a leased jet. The facilitator of this incredibly complex escape was Flavio Carboni, a well-connected Sardinian businessman. Calvi had previously used Carboni to fix problems, and when he learned he was about to be arrested for bank fraud, he asked Carboni to arrange his escape from Italy. To this end, he had given him access to about $19 million in numbered accounts. Carboni then employed Silvano Vittor, a cigarette smuggler, to be Calvi’s bodyguard and driver. He also had two strikingly beautiful Austrian sisters, Manuela and Michaela Klienszig, help arrange the logistics.