Mayerling incident

On the morning of 30 January 1889, the bodies of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, and his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, were discovered at the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling, in the Vienna Woods about 26.6 kilometres (16.5 mi) southwest of Vienna. Rudolf, 30, was the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth and heir apparent to the throne of Austria-Hungary; he was married to Princess Stephanie of Belgium. Vetsera, 17, was the daughter of Austrian court diplomat Albin von Vetsera, who had been created a Baron in 1870. By 1889, the affair between Rudolf and Vetsera was known within the Imperial Court, including to Rudolf's parents and to Stephanie.

Rudolf had arranged a day's shooting at Mayerling for the morning of 30 January. When his valet, Loschek, and his hunting companion, Joseph Hoyos, could not rouse him, Loschek broke down a locked door panel. He found Rudolf motionless by the bed, bleeding from the mouth, and Vetsera's body on the bed, already in rigor mortis. Hoyos rushed to Vienna to notify the Emperor's household; rigid court protocol delayed the news reaching Franz Joseph, who was eventually told by Empress Elisabeth in private, after the Minister for Police was summoned and the lodge was sealed off.

At noon that day, Minister-President Eduard von Taaffe announced, on the Emperor's behalf, that Rudolf had died of "a rupture of an aneurysm of the heart," and Vienna's official gazette repeated this account. An Imperial Court medical commission, led by Dr. Hermann Freiherr von Widerhofer, examined the scene that afternoon and reported a different finding to the Emperor early the next morning. After foreign correspondents established that Vetsera had also died at the lodge, the official account was revised: authorities announced that Rudolf had shot Vetsera in a suicide pact and sat beside her body for hours before shooting himself. The Vatican granted a dispensation citing Rudolf's "mental imbalance," permitting his burial in the Imperial Crypt at the Church of the Capuchins in Vienna. Vetsera was buried quickly among other suicides, and her mother was barred from visiting the grave for more than two months. Rudolf's death, as Franz Joseph's only son, also triggered a succession crisis, passing the line of succession to the Emperor's brother and then to his nephew, Franz Ferdinand.

The exact circumstances of both deaths have never been conclusively established. Vetsera's remains were disturbed twice in the twentieth century -- by Soviet occupying troops in 1946 and by a private individual, Helmut Flatzelsteiner, in 1991 -- and forensic examinations in 1959 and 1993 could not confirm a bullet wound to the skull, which was found incomplete. Historians and later commentators have proposed competing explanations, including a mutual suicide pact (the account most historians favor), an accidental death during an abortion attempt, an accidental shooting, and a killing by third-party agents, a claim made decades later by Empress Zita. Farewell letters Vetsera wrote to her family, unsealed by the Austrian National Library in 2015, state that she was preparing to die by suicide alongside Rudolf. No criminal trial was ever held; Austro-Hungarian authorities closed the matter administratively within days of the deaths.