A Servant With an Axe Broke Into a Locked Room and Found an Empire's Heir Dead
Crown Prince Rudolph had shot Mary Vetsera two hours before he asked his valet for breakfast, then shot himself.
The Rest Is History · The Habsburg Murder MysteryShortly after 6 in the morning at the Mayerling hunting lodge near Vienna, the valet Loschek was woken by footsteps. Looking up, he saw Crown Prince Rudolph, the emperor's 30-year-old son next in line for the throne, standing over him in a dressing gown and silk scarf, pale and whistling one of his coachman's tunes.
Rudolph told him, "I want you to call me for breakfast in an hour." He added, "Tell Bratfisch to have the horses ready." Bratfisch was his coachman. Rudolph then walked back to his bedroom and closed the door.
The order is the mystery at the center of this story, because it came after the killing had already happened. When the locked bedroom was finally forced open, Rudolph and his teenage mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, were found dead inside. The imperial doctor who examined the bodies later concluded that Rudolph had shot Mary two hours earlier, which meant she was already dead when he asked for breakfast.
At 7:30, as instructed, Loschek knocked on the crown prince's door. No one answered the knock, at the front door or at the back door of the apartment. Loschek, who knew Rudolph was a famously light sleeper, began to panic and called others at the lodge for help.
Count Hoyos and the Prince of Coburg, another hunting guest, joined him along with Bratfisch. Loschek then admitted that Mary Vetsera had been staying in the crown prince's room. After a brief conference, Hoyos and Coburg ordered him to force the door.
Loschek hacked through the panels with a wood-chopping axe and then put the axe down when he saw what was inside. Mary lay on the bed holding a rose, with blood near her head. Rudolph was slumped by a small table beneath a mirror, with blood coming from his mouth. Both were clearly dead.
Professor Herman Widhoffer, the imperial doctor who first inspected the room, concluded that Rudolph had shot Mary with the same gun he then turned on himself. Rudolph's note to his mother, Empress Elisabeth, the only one written at the lodge while his other farewell letters had been written beforehand, read, "I have no right to go on living. I have killed." In it he asked to be laid to rest alongside Mary at Heiligenkreuz, the abbey close to the lodge.
Questions people ask
Who was Crown Prince Rudolph and why did his death matter?
Rudolph was the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, known as Sisi, and therefore heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, the large Central European empire that united Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and others. His death left the empire without a direct male heir, which later helped set up the succession crisis that followed the assassination of his successor, Franz Ferdinand, in 1914.
Who was Mary Vetsera?
Mary Vetsera was the 17-year-old daughter of a recently ennobled Austrian family. She was a fashionable partygoer who had become infatuated with Rudolph, and the two carried on a secret affair arranged through Rudolph's cousin, Countess Marie Larisch, meeting in parks, carriages, and his rooms at the imperial palace.
Why would Rudolph order breakfast if Mary was already dead?
No one knows. The doctor's timing shows Mary was already dead when Rudolph woke Loschek, so the request could not have led to a normal morning. Historians have suggested he wanted to delay discovery, or briefly hesitated before shooting himself, but the source notes the reason is impossible to say.