Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, and his…

Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, and his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera commit a double suicide (or a murder-suicide) in the Mayerling hunting lodge on January 30, 1889.

The ensuing scandal makes international headlines.

In Vienna, on May 10, 1881, Rudolf had married Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, a daughter of King Leopold II of the Kingdom of Belgium, at the Augustinian Church in Vienna.

Although their marriage was initially a happy one, by the time their only child, the Archduchess Elisabeth, was born on September 2, 1883, the couple had drifted apart, and he found solace in drink and other female companionship.

Rudolf started having many affairs, and wanted to write to Pope Leo XIII about the possibility of annulling his marriage to Stéphanie, but the Emperor forbade it.

In 1886, the spouses were diagnosed with gonorrhea, which rendered Stéphanie sterile.

In the same year, Rudolf had bought Mayerling, a hunting lodge.

In late 1888, the thirty-year-old crown prince had met the seventeen-year-old Baroness Marie Vetsera, known by the more fashionable Anglophile name Mary, and had begun an affair with her.

As suicide would prevent him from being given a church burial, Rudolf is officially declared to have been in a state of "mental unbalance", and he is buried in the Imperial Crypt (Kapuzinergruft) of the Capuchin Church in Vienna.

Vetsera's body is smuggled out of Mayerling in the middle of the night and secretly buried in the village cemetery at Heiligenkreuz.

The Emperor will have Mayerling converted into a penitential convent of Carmelite nuns and endow a chantry so that daily prayers will eternally be said by the nuns for the repose of Rudolf's soul.

Vetsera's private letters will be discovered in a safe deposit box in an Austrian bank in 2015, and they will reveal that she was preparing to commit suicide alongside Rudolf, out of love.