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It was a scandal that shook an empire. At 7am on January 30th, 1889, the Archduke Rudolf, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was found dead by his valet in the Imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods, fifteen miles southwest of the capital. The thirty-one-year-old Crown Prince was lying on his bed in a pool of blood. The body of his seventeen-year-old mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, was lying close by on the floor. The local police called in the Minister for the Police and the national security services sealed off the hunting lodge and the surrounding area. The first official explanation was that Rudolf had died of a heart attack. But, as this failed to explain the dead body of his mistress, this version was quickly dropped. The Police Minister then announced that the Archduke had first shot Marie Vetsera and then killed himself in a suicide pact. Rudolf and his father, Emperor Franz Joseph, were known to have recently had a violent argument, with the Emperor demanding that his son, as a married man, must forthwith end his liaison with his teenage mistress. What had happened, the Minister indicated, was tragic but clear. The Mayerling deaths were the result of the desperate decision of thwarted lovers taken 'while the balance of the Archduke's mind was disturbed'. The police closed their investigations with surprising haste, in apparent response to the Emperor's wishes. The Catholic Church gave its implicit support to the handling of the matter. Officials involved in the case and members of the Imperial household were sworn to secrecy. The dossier on the investigations and the actions taken in relation to it were not deposited in the state archives, as they should normally have been. The nation was stunned, but it seemed that the cover-up was complete.

The death of the Crown Prince had momentous consequences for the history of the nineteenth century. It had a devastating effect on the marriage of the Emperor Franz Joseph and his Empress Elizabeth. It destabilized the issue of the succession to Franz Joseph and the growing reconciliation after the 1848-49 Hungarian Revolution between the Austrian and the Hungarian constituents of the Empire. It was thus a key event in the inexorable developments that led to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by a Serb nationalist at Sarajevo in June 1914 and the subsequent drift into the First World War. In the century and a quarter since Mayerling, there have been many books, 'romantic' investigations, ballets, a film and even a musical based on the story of the star-crossed lovers. But the fact is that the story of a playboy prince killing his lover and taking his own life in a moment of drunken despair was never a convincing one. Clearly a double murder occurred that night in 1889. There have been many conspiracy theories put forward as the explanation. But no 'smoking gun' has ever been found and, after this passage of time, it seems improbable that conclusive evidence will now ever emerge as to who planned or carried out the killings.

Despite the rapid, thorough and coordinated damage control exercise mounted by the state authorities, the Imperial court and the Church, wild rumours began to circulate almost at once. Vienna's pro-court circles stuck loyally to the double suicide version of events. The capital was agog, however, with stories that Rudolf's body showed all the signs of a violent struggle. His chin was fractured and his knuckles skinned, as it he had been vigorously defending himself before he was killed. Others claimed that Marie Vetsera had not been shot, as in the official account, but had been battered to death; and that the gun found in the Crown Prince's hand was not his own. It was said that, though Rudolf had been killed by a single shot, all five other bullets had been fired from the gun. Ir Rudolf had shot himself, who had fired the remaining five bullets? …