Free The Annals of Unsolved Crime by Edward Jay Epstein

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 fora 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