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.’”