Rudolf’s interment did nothing to stop the onrush of escalating rumors about events at Mayerling. Within twenty-four hours of his funeral, newspapers had managed to ferret out the basic circumstances, describing the movements and actions of Loschek and Hoyos at the lodge.1 But few were convinced by the official version. “The story that someone killed Rudolf is as of much value as the carefully elaborated account of his suicide,” The New York Times reported on February 3. “Berlin, Brussels, and Paris are full of rumors, all discrediting the theory that the Prince took his own life.”2
It didn’t take long for the foreign press to learn of Mary Vetsera and spin out a tale of tragic romance. On February 2 Munich’s Neuesten Nachrichten reported that the young baroness had committed suicide with Rudolf at Mayerling.3 The following day Le Figaro noted “much talk about of a single disappearance: the Baroness Mary W[sic], who has not been seen since Tuesday. The family claims she is at Schloss Pardubitz [Pardubice, the Larisch estate in Bohemia] but no one has seen her and the public does not believe it.”4 By February 5 Le Temps was reporting that “the death of a beautiful young girl, whose father was a baron, has produced a great sensation in Vienna.”5 But the rival French paper Le Matin scooped its competitors with “the fantastic tale of the mysterious disappearance of Baroness Vetsera related to the tragic drama of Mayerling.” Mary, it declared, was “among the most beautiful women in Vienna, with velvety eyes, a queenly attitude, and a romantic character; her appearance was very admired in worldly circles, which always welcomed her with murmurs of admiration.” Hours after the public learned of Rudolf’s death, “word got around that the young lady had committed suicide and been mysteriously buried at night.”6
Vienna was still reeling. “It is all too sad and dreadful,” recorded Walburga Paget. “They are most anxious to believe it was Mary Vetsera who inveigled the Crown Prince into all this. But how so silly a girl could have persuaded so clever a man as the Crown Prince of Austria to end his life in such a stupid, dirty, undignified and melodramatic way I cannot conceive. I cannot see the logic—it was not baffled on love. The fact is he was a maniac and she a vain, unprincipled girl who wanted the world to speak of her.”7
Those privy to the intimate details unanimously echoed Franz Josef’s insistence that “anything” was “better than the truth.” “It is horrible, horrible,” Prince Philipp of Coburg cried to his wife. “But I cannot, I must not, say anything except that they are both dead.”8 Rudolf’s death, Coburg wrote to Queen Victoria, was “a terrible, frightful, unspeakable misfortune. It is a mystery to me how such a talented, clever man, who was so revered in Austria-Hungary, who so clung to Emperor and country, could commit such a deed! I, who was at Mayerling, who saw everything, can assure you that only the assumption of a disturbed state of mind can make this terrible thing comprehensible.”9
To his brother Philippe, count of Flanders, King Leopold II of the Belgians confided: “It is absolutely imperative to maintain the suicide version. It may seem difficult, in the eyes of our Catholic people, to see the House of Habsburg insisting on the suicide story. But suicide while of disturbed mind is the only way to avoid an unheard of scandal.”10 Franz Josef’s brother Ludwig Viktor insisted that “the whole truth is so frightful that one can never confess it!” Hoyos used the same word—“frightful”—to describe what he had seen, adding, “I have given the Emperor my word that I shall not say a word.”11
No one knew what to believe. The British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, assured Queen Victoria that he was positive Rudolf and Mary had been murdered. The Prince of Wales, though, was equally adamant: “It seems poor Rudolf has had suicide on the brain for some time,” he reported to his mother; sources in Vienna assured him that Rudolf’s action had nothing to do with Mary Vetsera. The entire episode, the Prince of Wales wrote, “is like a bad dream.”12
Authorities moved quickly to tie up loose ends. Several courtiers were ordered back to the lodge to destroy any remaining trace of Mary’s presence there.13 Coburg, Hoyos, Widerhofer, Rudolf’s servants, and members of the court commission had originally been asked to answer questions during a meeting on the evening of January 31.14 Loschek was discussing the tragedy with Prince Constantine Hohenlohe shortly before five that afternoon when Prime Minister Taaffe strolled into the room. He was “in exceptionally high spirits” as he announced that the session was cancelled. Two days later the emperor ordered Taaffe to preside over a secret meeting; Widerhofer was present, but Loschek was surprised that Coburg, Hoyos, the court commissioners, and Rudolf’s other servants were excluded. Taaffe read out a short summary of events—so quickly, Loschek recalled, that he could scarcely follow what was being said. At the end Taaffe confiscated all official files and papers concerning Rudolf’s death and warned everyone to keep silent about events at Mayerling.15
Taaffe kept his promise to the emperor: The confiscated files seem to have been shuffled off to his Bohemian country estate, Schloss Ellischau, for safekeeping.16 After his death in 1895, his son, Heinrich, took control of the Mayerling papers. Heinrich claimed to have deposited them in a wooden chest handed over to his Viennese lawyer; in 1912, when he asked for the return of the box, the files had allegedly been removed.17 The Mayerling historian Fritz Judtmann thought it was likely that the box never held any of the contentious papers: The clumsy story of their disappearance was simply meant to throw future historians off their scent.18 That this was the correct interpretation was later shown by two facts: In 1919 Countess Zoë von Wassilko-Serecki was staying at Schloss Ellischau. Her grandfather, Baron Franz von Krauss, had been Vienna’s chief of police at the time of the Mayerling tragedy; she also happened to be a cousin of Heinrich Taaffe’s second wife. While at Ellischau, the countess recalled, Taaffe abruptly asked if she would like to read the missing Mayerling files before he destroyed them. She spent the entire night examining the documents before handing them back to Heinrich Taaffe, presumably to be burned.19
But Heinrich Taaffe did not burn the papers, as he told the countess: in 1922—three years after their supposed destruction—he allowed Professor Artur Skedl of Prague University access to a selection of the files for inclusion in a book on Prime Minister Taaffe—proof that they continued to exist after allegedly being destroyed.20 In 1926 fire swept through the library at Schloss Ellischau, and the press reported that the conflagration destroyed the missing Mayerling papers.21 But the documents had been kept, as Countess Wassilko-Serecki recalled, in the castle archives, which were not harmed in the blaze. Heinrich Taaffe died in 1928. Nine years later his widow told the Neues Wiener Tagblatt that she believed her husband had destroyed the Mayerling papers to ensure that “the confidence placed by the Emperor in his father was not betrayed.”22 This was more obfuscation. Possession of the papers passed to Heinrich’s son, Eduard, who in 1937 moved to Ireland—presumably with the documents. In correspondence with Fritz Judtmann in the 1960s, Eduard Taaffe did not deny that the Mayerling papers still existed, but he refused to allow access to them, explaining that he had given “a solemn promise” never to reveal their contents. “The circumstances of the Mayerling affair,” he added, “were far more frightful than was imagined.”23 When Eduard Taaffe died in 1967, the papers apparently passed to his cousin Rudolf Taaffe, who both confusingly denied any knowledge of their whereabouts and then later hinted obliquely about the possible contents.24 Whatever secrets Rudolf Taaffe possessed went with him to his grave in 1985. It seems likely that the enigmatic Taaffe papers do indeed still exist, frustratingly hidden away somewhere and apparently destined to remain so—the “holy grail” of Mayerling materials—suspected of containing momentous secrets surrounding events at the lodge.
Bribes in the form of pensions and monetary gifts also helped suppress the truth. Loschek received some of Rudolf’s clothing and his guns; although only forty-five years old, he was immediately pensioned off with the promise of 1,300 gulden a year ($8,307 in 2017).25 Josef Bratfisch, who knew all of Rudolf’s secrets, proved more troublesome. On behalf of the imperial court, Lord Chamberlain Prince Alfred Montenuovo discreetly approached the carriage driver and asked him to leave Vienna in exchange for a considerable amount of money.26 Bratfisch refused, insisting that he could be trusted. No one was convinced, and Chief of Police Krauss warned the prime minister that his agents had Bratfisch under constant surveillance. “I have also ordered them,” he wrote, “to see that no journalists should get in touch with him.” He worried that Bratfisch, “who occasionally goes in for excessive drinking,” might become inebriated and in that state begin to spill his secrets.27 Two months after Mayerling, Bratfisch suddenly bought a house and started his own cab company complete with horses from the imperial stables—developments suggesting that the court had bought his silence with a sizable amount of money.28
No one in Vienna, though, worried as much as Countess Marie Larisch. She’d accepted Helene Vetsera’s bribes of gowns and money to facilitate the affair; she’d blackmailed Mary in exchange for arranging meetings; and she’d extorted enormous sums from Rudolf to do his bidding and ensure her silence. She’d lied to the police, denied any involvement, and desperately tried to exculpate herself when the house of cards threatened to come tumbling down. Married to a minor aristocrat, the empress’s illegitimate niece lived on the fringes of society, accepted only because she was in favor at the Hofburg—and now that imperial favor threatened to evaporate.
Trapped in the web she had helped spin, Larisch could only sit helplessly in her suite at the Grand Hotel, hoping that the storm would pass. Then, on the morning of February 5—the day of Rudolf’s funeral—a group of officials arrived to question her about her role in the liaison. Larisch tried to deny everything, but it was futile. Several of her letters to Rudolf, offering to arrange meetings between her cousin and Mary Vetsera, had already been found in the crown prince’s desk; two days earlier Frau Wolf—Mitzi Caspar’s madam—described to police agent Florian Meissner how Larisch had been acting as a go-between for the crown prince and Mary Vetsera, information Rudolf had apparently confided to Mitzi.29
At first Larisch insisted that Loschek and Bratfisch had actually arranged everything; she had only been following her cousin’s orders. But then officials brought Mary’s maid, Agnes Jahoda, into the room and the accusations began to fly as each woman blamed the other for encouraging the young baroness. The empress had sent a courtier to ask her niece about Rudolf’s state of mind; sensing an opening, Larisch admitted that her cousin had been behaving strangely.30 This confrontation—and details of Larisch’s involvement in the affair—were reported back to the Hofburg; when Larisch went to see her aunt, she was stunned to find herself abruptly turned away. Empress Elisabeth refused ever to receive her niece again.31
Suspicion turned to anger after Rudolf’s funeral, when an accidental discovery sealed the countess’s fate. Tadeusz Ajdukiewicz, a Polish artist who had been painting an equestrian portrait of the crown prince, still had the dolman Rudolf had worn to his last sitting; a search of the pockets disclosed a highly compromising letter from Larisch to her cousin, detailing her complicity in the liaison and exposing her persistent blackmail. Ajdukiewicz turned the letter over to Franz Josef; from that moment, Larisch complained, “a vicious circle enveloped me.”32 Orders came from the Hofburg: Marie Larisch was forbidden ever to appear at the imperial court again. The empress, Larisch insisted, had “made use of me, and she threw me aside without a regret.”33
Now designated the “crown princess widow,” Stephanie, too, was a victim caught in the web of her husband’s misadventure. Her marriage had existed only in name, and she soon made her peace with Rudolf’s actions. Stephanie even developed a kind of sympathy for Mary Vetsera, viewing her as yet another of her husband’s victims. Rudolf, she complained, had “traded upon Mary Vetsera’s passion” in seeking death at her side. In turn Mary’s “profound and sincere love” for him, however immature, excused her “poor, misguided” actions.34
The emperor and empress continued to blame Stephanie for Rudolf’s suicide and slowly but surely excluded her from their circle. Although she had basked in perpetual mourning following Prince Albert’s death, even Queen Victoria worried that the young widow needed a reprieve from an oppressive, opprobrium-filled Vienna. Would Stephanie, she asked, care to come and stay with her at Windsor Castle for a few weeks? But, as if exacting whatever punitive retribution against their daughter-in-law they could find, Franz Josef and Elisabeth flatly vetoed the proposal. Humiliated and insulted, feeling trapped amid her dead husband’s embittered family, Stephanie soon took young Elisabeth and retreated to Schloss Miramar in distant Trieste.35
* * *
The Austrian government had moved heaven and earth to hide Mary Vetsera’s death at Mayerling. Despite her secret burial, the continued confiscation of newspapers, and the lies her family were forced to repeat, though, inevitably word leaked out, and soon curious crowds began haunting the cemetery at Heiligenkreuz, searching for Mary’s unmarked grave. Within a week of the tragedy Helene Vetsera leaked two of Mary’s farewell letters to Le Figaro in Paris.36 “The mother of the young girl is now in Venice,” Prince Reuss reported on February 9, “where she is parading her daughter’s disaster without making any secret of the romance. This throws a clear light on this person, who claims to have received a promise that, provided she disappear and keep quiet before the burial, everything could be published later. Blackmail cannot be excluded here.”37
By the end of March, as Countess Eleonore Hoyos wrote in her diary, “the snake, the viper, the horrific” Helene Vetsera was back in Vienna.38 Helene was still careful to conceal her role in the affair, even from her own family. To her sister Elizabeth in England, she wrote:
I am so much ashamed of myself not having written to you up to now.… You see, in the beginning, I really could not. This thunderbolt that fell on me felled me to the ground. You know how I worshipped Mary, perhaps too much, and that is why I have been cruelly punished. I can assure you that my grief is worse than ever; I cannot see how I am ever to forget all this dreadful past and as long as I do so my life and my thoughts can only be full of anguish.… She left us three such beautiful letters, childish, but also showing that faith that there must be a world the other side more beautiful than this one.… The last fortnight her nerves must have been very broken; we saw there was something the matter with her, but had no idea as I did not know they knew each other until they were both dead.… I spent six weeks in Venice to patch up my broken nerves and then I came back here to go and see her grave which I had not been able to do before leaving. The coming back into this house was dreadful. From morning to night she was about me (except for the few times she left the house with that bad woman Countess Larisch, who knew everything and who might have saved them through a word) that now I miss her every hour of the day.39
Larisch, for her part, was fighting her own battle against Helene and her Baltazzi brothers. It was, she complained, “a scandal” that they were attempting to “roll everything onto me” and blame her for the liaison. Heinrich had abruptly broken with her—“for him to rant against me,” Larisch raged to one of Helene’s relatives, “is a vile, shameful thing.” Now she was “bitterly set against him,” and she wanted her former lover to know that he “may tremble before my revenge” when she exposed “how the Messrs Baltazzi behave toward women.”40
Worried about the scenes at Heiligenkreuz, Prime Minister Taaffe tried to bribe Helene, offering her a considerable sum of money if she exhumed Mary’s body and took it away for secret burial elsewhere. Infuriated, she refused. Scheming social climber though Helene Vetsera may have been, she felt that she’d been treated appallingly. Brimming with resentment, she now decided to make a spectacle of her daughter’s grave as a permanent irritant to the imperial court. On May 16 she had Mary’s plain pine casket exhumed, placed within a large, ornate copper casket, and reburied in a more prominent grave at Heiligenkreuz, “the most beautiful spot in this world of God’s creation,” Helene wrote, “a heavenly spot, one can call it.”41 An elaborate wrought-iron grille surrounded the new grave’s monument:
MARY
FREIIN V. VETSERA
GEB. 19 MÄRZ 1871
GEST. 30 JÄNNER 1889
WIE EINE BLUME SPRIEST DER MENSCH AUF
UND WIRD GEBROCHEN (MAN COMETH UP LIKE A FLOWER AND IS CUT DOWN)
JOB 14:2.42
Not content to stop with the grave, Helene commissioned a Romanesque-style marble memorial chapel in the cemetery. A large stained-glass window above the altar depicted the Virgin Mary; Helene originally asked that her face be modeled after Mary’s, but officials vetoed this proposed bit of effrontery, nor would they allow any mention of the Vetsera name. Instead artisans worked Mary’s features, and those of her brother Ladislaus, who had perished in the 1881 Ringtheater fire, onto the faces of angels kneeling on either side of the Virgin. Denied use of the family name, the Latin inscription on the chapel’s memorial plaque read:
IN PIOUS MEMORY OF
LADISLAUS AND MARY,
HER SWEETEST CHILDREN SNATCHED AWAY PREMATURELY,
THE GRIEF-STRICKEN MOTHER,
REDEEMING A VOW,
BUILT THIS CHAPEL,
IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1889.43
Helene Vetsera’s provocative actions came amid her ongoing struggle against the imperial court. Since returning to Vienna, she’d deluged the emperor with plaintive letters. Everyone, she complained, knew the truth about Mayerling, and everyone unfairly blamed her daughter. Society had followed the court’s lead, punishing the Vetseras and Baltazzis for Rudolf’s actions. The baroness wanted Franz Josef to issue a statement absolving her of responsibility for the tragedy and warning that her remaining children should not be ostracized.44
Franz Josef pointedly ignored the baroness’s pleas. With no satisfaction forthcoming, Helene decided to take revenge by writing and publishing an account of Mary’s liaison with the crown prince and its tragic denouement, drawing on her daughter’s letters and personal papers. She secretly delivered the manuscript to the Viennese publisher Johann N. Vernay at the beginning of May, and by the end of the month 250 copies of Der Vetsera Denkschrift went out to bookstores and newsagents. Just as quickly, police raided the publisher and news stalls, seizing every copy they found.45
Despite their best efforts, however, a few dozen escaped destruction and were smuggled out of Austria. When the Austro-Hungarian ambassador in London heard that The Times was about to print a translation, he intervened and had the publication quashed. But Le Temps in Paris published extracts on August 26, while both L’Éclair and the Liverpool Daily Post printed the complete memoir on September 3.46 This booklet was, of course, meant to present Mary and her mother in the best possible light. Helene unconvincingly claimed complete ignorance of the affair until a few days before the tragedy; she blamed Larisch for having conspired with her daughter and the crown prince and facilitated the liaison behind her back. Later the baroness’s surviving daughter, Hanna, made a handwritten copy of her mother’s original manuscript, adding details about Larisch’s blackmail schemes that did not appear in the published version.47
The Habsburg court took a dim view of these developments; Helene Vetsera won not imperial compliance but scorn. By July, Franz Josef had enough, and ordered his chief of protocol to reply to the baroness’s constant stream of pleading letters. At first the communiqué seemed conciliatory: “Even from the very first moment,” it assured Helene, “the thought that you might have been an accomplice in this terrible tragedy never entered His Majesty’s head.” But this was the only olive branch extended. The letter went on to chide the baroness for becoming “entangled in the accusations” surrounding Mayerling. She would “have been better advised to have refrained from attempting to excuse [herself] in public” by publishing her memorandum and “taking the law into your own hands.” By doing so she had “compromised [her] own child and flaunted the matter in public.” As such, societal retaliation against the Vetsera family was only to be expected. The emperor was sorry if her maternal feelings had been wounded by Mary’s hasty burial, but the tragedy had demanded secrecy. The baroness would do well to “bear with calm devotion the heavy sorrow that Fate has placed upon you.”48
There the matter rested. Helene Vetsera would be shunned, but she had the satisfaction of knowing that crowds regularly flocked to her daughter’s grave at Heiligenkreuz, tearing away pieces of ivy from the headstone as treasured souvenirs.49 It was a place evocative of tragic romance, at least until the spring of 1945, when Heiligenkreuz came under heavy fire by Soviet artillery as they advanced against the retreating Nazis. One shell landed atop Mary’s grave, smashing through the top of the coffin.50 Occupying Soviet troops spent the next year ransacking the cemetery and pilfering graves. Using a garden hoe, they hacked away at Mary’s casket, smashing in the top and sides, severing her skull from the body in the process, and searching the remains for jewelry and valuables. The grave was left open to the elements, Mary’s bones in disarray, her skull thrown to one side of the coffin, and the hoe haphazardly tossed in before the soldiers abandoned their quest.51
Authorities at Heiligenkreuz could do nothing until the Soviets left. In 1948 the grave was sealed with a new stone slab; then, in 1959, an Italian lady heard of the terrible state of Mary’s grave and volunteered to pay for a new coffin. The grave was exhumed on July 7, 1959. When the stone slab was lifted, it revealed the shattered bronze coffin beneath, its lid dented and awry.52 Water had filled the casket, and it was impossible to raise it; the gravedigger Alois Klein descended, opened the lid, and tried unsuccessfully to bail out the brackish water. Finally Klein simply ripped pieces of the skeleton from the muck and placed them in buckets. Hauled to the surface, the skull, vertebrae, femurs, pelvis, and other disarticulated bones—“all coated with a fine layer of black slime”—were laid out “randomly” in a new metal coffin, along with clumps of hair and the remnants of Mary’s clothing, hat, and shoes.53
In transferring the remains, Klein managed to examine the skull. It was shattered and fragmented, though it was impossible to determine if this dated from Mary’s death or if the Soviets had caused the damage during their clumsy exhumation. Despite its poor condition, Klein thought he “clearly” saw two small gunshot wounds, one on the left temple, the other above the right ear.54 Yet the local physician Gerd Holler later claimed to have seen only a small oval hole, measuring approximately 5 by 7 cm, at the top of the head.55
Holler developed a startling theory: Mary, he suggested, died as the result of a botched abortion, with Rudolf killing himself out of remorse. Larisch, Holler claimed, engaged the services of the midwife Theresia Miller to perform an abortion—at least this is what the midwife’s grandson, Emil Miller, told him. This procedure supposedly took place at the Hofburg on the morning of January 28, when a catheter was inserted into the uterus; this was to be left in place for twenty-four hours, and Rudolf and Mary went to Mayerling so that she could rest. The next night, according to Holler, an unknown woman arrived at the lodge, presumably to remove the catheter. But something went wrong, and Mary bled to death; in despair, Rudolf then shot himself.56 Aside from the fact that serious questions surround some of Emil Miller’s claims, Holler largely ignored troublesome evidence contradicting his theory, including Mary’s suicide letters and the accounts of those who saw the bullet wound to her head.
But the theory only played into larger accusations of conspiracy. Then, in 1991, the story took a truly bizarre turn. Helmut Flatzelsteiner, a middle-aged furniture salesman from Linz, first read Gerd Holler’s book, Mayerling: Die Lösung des Rätsels—Der Tod des Kronprinzen Rudolf und der Baroness Vetsera aus medizinischer Sicht, in 1988 and became obsessed with the case. Flatzelsteiner apparently believed he was in psychic communication with the dead couple.57 One July night in 1991 he crept into the cemetery at Heiligenkreuz and, aided by two confederates, secretly exhumed Mary’s remains. “I had anticipated something pretty,” Flatzelsteiner said of the remains, “but it was all wet, dirty, and smelled awful.”58
After cleaning the skeletal remains, Flatzelsteiner said he approached several forensic experts, claiming that the body belonged to a relative who had died a century earlier. He wanted to know if they could determine the cause of death. Professor Dr. Klaus Jarosch at the University of Linz concluded that the remains belonged to a woman approximately eighteen years of age. The skull was incomplete: Portions of the jaw were found in the coffin, but little remained of the cranium from the tops of the eye sockets down. Jarosch couldn’t determine with certainty if there had been a bullet wound—the skull was simply too fragmented. He did, though, believe that it had been subjected to multiple fractures, which might have led to death.59
Thinking that he had a blockbuster mystery, Flatzelsteiner began shopping his story around to journalists. After being approached, though, the writer and historian Georg Markus went to the police with the tale of grave robbing, and authorities quickly seized the remains.60 After examination, Professor Dr. Johann Szilvássy of the Institute of Forensic Science at the University of Vienna agreed that the remains likely belonged to an eighteen-year-old female; she had probably died a hundred years earlier. He agreed that the skull was too fragmented to accurately determine any possible injuries.61 Yet conflicting reports kept the press speculating. A small, semicircular groove in the left temple might have been caused by a bullet, but press reports insisted that it was impossible to make any definitive finding.62
Although the use of DNA as a forensic tool was then still in its infancy, genetic testing could have established that the remains belonged to Mary. Rumor hinted that Vetsera and Baltazzi descendants would donate blood to enable the necessary examinations, yet no genetic testing ever took place.63 This only led to more speculation, including stories that the genetic material was too deteriorated to obtain an uncorrupted sample. An order suddenly came from the family prohibiting further inquiries. “It’s incomprehensible to me,” complained Professor Georg Bauer, who had been examining the remains in Vienna, “why, more than a hundred years after the tragedy, the tools of modern forensic sciences and corresponding investigations are being prevented.”64 In the end the remains were placed in a new coffin and on the morning of October 28, 1993, reburied in Mary Vetsera’s grave at Heiligenkreuz.65
Unlike Mary, the Mayerling controversy refused to rest quietly. Stories that her skull bore no trace of a bullet wound in 1959 had stoked the flames of conspiracy theories: Modern examinations only added fuel to the fire. Was the severed skull found in the coffin really Mary’s, or had the Soviets simply tossed a random head into her grave? And if not, what was the explanation? Was there really no trace of a bullet wound to the skull, or was the small groove at the side of the head evidence that Mary had been shot in the head? Did the extensive fracturing mean that Mary had been killed in an argument with Rudolf? Or, as increasingly popular theories suggested, had Rudolf and Mary been murdered? For more than a century confusing claims have cloaked events at Mayerling; to solve the mysteries it is necessary to return to January 1889 and examine how the seemingly impenetrable layers of rumor first consumed the story.