page_title: Mayerling incident
section_title: Exhumations and forensic evidence
hierarchical_section_title: Mayerling incident / Exhumations and forensic evidence
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Abschiedsbrief von Mary Vetsera an ihre Mutter Liebe Mutter – Verzeih mir was ich gethan. – Ich konnte der Liebe nicht wiederstehen. In Übereinstimmung mit Ihm will ich neben Ihm im Friedhof von Alland begraben sein. – Ich bin glücklicher im Tod als im Leben. Deine Mary
context_page_description: The Mayerling incident is the series of events surrounding the apparent murder–suicide of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, and his lover, Mary Freiin von Vetsera. Rudolf, who was married to Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, was the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, and was heir apparent to the Imperial throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
  Rudolf's mistress was the daughter of Albin Freiherr von Vetsera, a diplomat at the Austrian court. Albin had been created a Freiherr in 1870. The bodies of the 30-year-old Kronprinz and the 17-year-old Freiin were discovered in the Imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods, 26.6 kilometres southwest of the capital, on the morning of 30 January 1889.
  The death of the Crown Prince interrupted the security inherent in the direct line of Habsburg dynastic succession. As Rudolf had no son, the succession would pass to Franz Joseph's brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig, and his eldest son, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
  This destabilisation endangered the growing reconciliation between the Austrian and Hungarian factions of the empire.
context_section_description: Freiin von Vetsera's body was spirited out of Mayerling and interred in the graveyard at Heiligenkreuz. The official story of murder-suicide went unchallenged until just after the end of the Second World War. In 1946, occupying Soviet troops dislodged the granite plate covering the grave and broke into Vetsera's coffin in the graveyard, perhaps hoping to loot it of jewels. This break-in was not discovered until 1955 when the Red Army withdrew from Austria per the Austrian State Treaty.
  In 1959, a young physician named Gerd Holler, stationed in the area, accompanied by a member of the Vetsera family and specialists in funereal preservation, inspected her remains. Dr. Holler carefully examined the skull and other bones for traces of a bullet hole but stated that he found no such evidence. Intrigued, Holler claimed he petitioned the Vatican to inspect their 1889 archives of the affair, where the Papal Nuncio's investigation had concluded that only one bullet was fired. Lacking forensic evidence of a second bullet, Holler advanced the theory that Vetsera died accidentally, probably as the result of an abortion, and it was Rudolf who consequently shot himself. Holler witnessed the body's re-interment in a new coffin in 1959.
  In 1991, Vetsera's remains were disturbed again, this time by Helmut Flatzelsteiner, a Linz furniture dealer who was obsessed with the Mayerling affair. Initial reports were that her bones were strewn around the churchyard for the authorities to retrieve.   But Flatzelsteiner removed them at night for a private forensic examination at his expense, which finally took place on February 1993.
  Flatzelsteiner told the examiners that the remains were those of a relative killed some one hundred years ago, who had possibly been shot in the head or stabbed. One expert thought this might be possible, but since the skull was not only in a state of disintegration but was actually incomplete, this could not be confirmed. Flatzelsteiner then approached a journalist at the Kronen Zeitung to sell both the story and Vetsera's skeleton. That these were Vetsera's remains was confirmed through forensic examination. The body was re-interred in the original grave in October 1993, and after a court case, Flatzelsteiner paid the abbey €2000 for damages.
  In July 2015, the Austrian National Library issued copies of Vetsera's letters of farewell to her mother and other family members. These letters, previously believed to be lost or destroyed, were found in a safe deposit box in an Austrian bank, where they had been deposited in 1926. The letters—written in Mayerling shortly before the deaths—state clearly and unambiguously that Vetsera was preparing to commit suicide alongside Rudolf:
  Dear Mother
  
  Please forgive me for what I've done
  
  I could not resist love
  
  In accordance with Him, I want to be buried next to Him in the Cemetery of Alland
  
  I am happier in death than life.
caption: Vetsera's farewell letter
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