Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grim and Mild from Eronminkie. Listener discretion is advised.
At six ten in the morning on January thirtieth, eighteen
eighty nine, Crown Prince Rudolph of the Austro Hungarian Empire
came out of his bedroom, closed the door behind him,
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and told his valet to prepare for the day of
hunting a head. The lodge where they were staying at
Marylyn in the Vienna Woods was still dark in the
early morning, though Rudolph was already dressed in his hunting clothes.
He said that he wanted to get a bit more sleep,
have breakfast ready at eight thirty, and wake me at
seven thirty, he said. The valet, named Loshek, noticed that
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Rudolph was whistling as he went back to his room.
As Loshak was setting the table, he heard two gunshots
in rapid succession, but thought nothing of it. At seven
thirty he came to the Crown Prince's bed chamber to
find it locked. Looshak knocked loudly and then again, strange,
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but not too strange. Rudolf frequently used morphine and drank
enough Kognak and Champagne to pass out cold, but Looshak
had just seen him an hour ago. Lushak tried running
upstairs and down a back staircase to a second entrance
to the Crown princess chamber, but he found that that door,
too was also locked from the inside. His heart pounding
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in his chest, Looshek went to find Count Hoyas, Rudolf's
hunting body, who was also staying at the lodge. He's
probably just tired, Ayas called, let him sleep, but Looshak
insisted that Hayas come to the lock door and help.
The Count rattled the door knob. Is there a coal
stove in there? He asked? Could the Crown Prince have
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passed out from the fumes? Looshak shook his head. The
rooms were heated by wood. And there's one more thing
I should probably tell you, the valet said, looking at
the floor. Rudolf wasn't alone in his chamber. He had
snuck his seventeen year old mistress Mary but Sarah to
the lodge with him. Oh Countoya said, okay, well, let's
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think about this then. The Crown Prince's brother in law, Coburg,
was set to arrive at the lodge that morning round
eight thirty to join the hunting. What if they just
waited for him? And so they waited. When Koburg finally arrived,
the trio decided that the best course of action would
be to break down the door with an axe. Looshek
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first tried axing the lock, but he couldn't break it,
so he decided just to break through a wooden panel,
which allowed him to reach a hand through the door
and undo the lock from the inside. The three men
stood outside the closed door. They decided that Loshek would
go in alone to zam in the seat, just in
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case the prince and his lover were in a compromising position,
while the other two men hung back the valet. Gingerly
pressed the wooden door open. The bile froze in his
throat and stammering, Loshek turned back to Coburg and hoyos,
the Crown Prince is dead. He managed to say. The
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story of the Maryling instant as it's come to be
known as, fascinated historians and lovers of the macabre for
a century, but the event itself has become twisted to
fit pat narratives of love or revenge. It wasn't a
Romeo and juliet story, or at least it wasn't entirely
a Romeo and Juliette's story. The Mistress Mary that Sarah
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was madly and wildly in love, and in her desperation,
Prince Rudolph saw an opportunity. He would bring her down
with him if it meant he'd didn't have to go alone.
I'm Danis Schwartz, and this is noble blood. Rudolph, the
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crown Prince of the Austro Hungarian Empire, was born in
eighteen fifty eight to a father who almost immediately despised
him and a mother who had no time or energy
for him. The Emperor friends Joseph was an old school
Habsburg Conservative, a militaristic leader who valued discipline and formality
above most other things. The Empress Elizabeth, commonly known as Cissy,
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was known for being beautiful, but her fixation on maintaining
her youth and beauty and figure could accurately be described
as obsession. Neither the Emperor nor the Empress had the
time nor inclination for parenthood. Austria Hungary wasn't like England,
where Queen Victoria level. Than creating a picture of warm
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and happy domesticity, no things were formal and rigid. Rudolph's
contact with his parents was akin to a modern day
relationship with a polite coworker. When Rudolph was five, he
came down with a case of typhoid. His mother refused
to cut short her vacation to Bavaria to return home
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to him. She was the type of mother who did
eventually respond to his letters, but usually after waiting a
few days. At age six, Rudolph's education began under a
major General who was informed that his job was to
toughen up the nervous young prince. To that end, the
major General forced the Crown Prince to do military drills
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outside at six in the morning every morning, rain or snow.
Sometimes in the middle of the night, the major General
would creep into the little boy's bedroom and fire a
gun several times, you know, to toughen him up. Once,
the Crown Prince was brought to the zoo, where he
was locked in a cage. While the boy screamed and
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cried in terror, the major General shouted at him through
the bars that a wild boar was coming to eat him. Unsurprisingly,
the tax did not help toughen Rudolph up. He became
prone to bed wedding and night terrors that culminated in
a nervous breakdown at seven years old. The official story
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from the palace was that Rudolph had diphtheria. As his
education progressed, Rudolph was presented with a series of fifty
tutors for a seemingly infinite number of subjects a dozen languages,
military history, diplomacy, economics. From eight in the morning until
nine at night, the crown Prince was drilled in the
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things that his father decided a prince should know. Emperor
Franz Joseph wrote the prince quote us not become a
free thinker, but he should thoroughly become acquainted with the
conditions and requirements of modern times. Still, Rudolph's teenage rebellion
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led to private, furtive writings about atheism, and Rudolph further
rebelled against his father privately by writing about his liberal
ideas for the future of Europe. But his patchwork education
had real consequences. Though he knew a little about a
lot of subjects, Rudolph was never able to gain the
critical thinking abilities to digest contradicting information. He wanted a
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liberal Europe, but he never for a second questioned his
own divine right to be ruler. His education was shallow
and wrote, with no time for Rudolph to learn how
to think methodically or to tease out the contradictions in
his philosophies, and so by the time his formal education
ended a few a week shy of his nineteenth birthday,
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Rudolph was a deeply unpleasant man, moody and prideful, prone
to making rash judgments and dramatic proclamations, but without the
patients or humility to try to understand things deeply. Rudolph's
father made him a colonel, but Rudolph approached his military
duties with a complete lack of interest. His fellow officers
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would see him staring out into the distance, either looking
bored or tired, or both. One afternoon, during a regiment report,
Rudolph stared at the ground for ten minutes straight while
another officer was discussing important logistical matters. Finally, at one
point Rudolph interrupted him. Every other officer stared at the
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Crown Prince, eager with anticipation. He almost never spoken meetings
there's dirt on my shoe, he said. Finally, you there, groom,
come wipe it off. The nearby servant quickly came over
and knelt with a rag. When Rudolph's shoe was clean,
the meeting continued, and Rudolph returned to staring blankly into space.
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His political career as a young man was marred with
frequent social faux pa and a sarcastic attitude that bordered
on cruel, especially with his mother and younger sister. Here
he was the only son and crown prince of the
most powerful royal family in the world, but until his
father died, he had no purpose in life. His only
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sense of purpose or meaning came from his position as
a crown prince, and so Rudolph enforced rigid protocol around
his position, which only served to isolate him from his
family Further, Rudolph began spending his time getting drunk at
seedy taverns, having affairs with women, and becoming a regular
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customer at Vienna's best brothels. He kept a book of
his conquests, color coded by whether or not they had
been virgins. When Rudolph's reputation became something murmured and politely
coughed about. In the emperor's presence. Friends, Joseph insisted that
his son get married. Reluctantly, Rudolph agreed. He rejected two
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women right away for not being attractive enough, but finally
he agreed on marrying Princess Stephanie of Belgium. He went
on a trip to Brussels to dutifully propose to his
bride to be, but the entire arrangement was almost torn
up when his future mother in law walked in to
see Rudolph infal Grante with an actress in his bedroom.
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He had brought a girlfriend along to Brussels to keep
him company for the trip where he was supposed to propose,
but these diplomatic matches were more important than fidela, at
least on the part of the groom. Twenty three year
old Rudolph became engaged to fifteen year old Princess Stephanie,
although the wedding had to be postponed for a year
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when it was discovered that Stephanie hadn't yet begun to menstright.
The optimistic young princess learned very quickly that her relationship
with her new husband would be cordial at best. They
managed to produce a daughter, but Rudolph spent most of
his time out at those ced taverns, you know, the
type of place where men played cards and women danced
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on tables. He didn't even bother trying to keep his
affairs a secret. Everyone knew he was out at brothels
that he spent most of his time with his favorite prostitute,
a young woman named Mitzi Casper. Even so, the marriage
didn't entirely collapse until Crown Prince Rudolph infected both himself
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and his wife with gonorrhea. The disease ease was incredibly
painful and would flare up at random intervals, but it
was even worse for Princess Stephanie. It had shriveled her
fallopian tubes. Her husband had made her infertile, and rendered
her incapable of doing the single task required of her
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to make a male heir. From that point on, the
relationship between husband and wife was formal and distant, a
contract between countries. Rudolph was less a husband to her
and more of a jailer, someone who kept her in
a cruel and distant country and constantly humiliated her again
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and again with his infidelity. As for Rudolph, the gonorrhea
led to prescriptions of morphine and opium and cocaine, which
he added to his regular habits of kogniac and Champagne.
The depressive crown Prince, now all but ignored for political tasks,
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entirely retreated into a world of instant gratification and pleasure.
He surrounded himself with people who flattered him and made
him feel important. After all, he was the crown Prince
of the Austro Hungarian Empire. He was supposed to always
feel important. Mary vet Sarah had very little in the
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way of formal education. Her mother, Helene, sent her to
an institute for daughters of the nobility, where Mary would
learn the skills to become a good society wife one day,
the dancing and the table manners and the like. In truth,
Mary was just the daughter of a minor baron, and
her upward mobility in terms of social hierarchy was already
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limited by the less than spotless reputation of her mother.
Helene had been the type of woman that established matriarchs
of Viennese society refused to make eye contact with. Back
when Helene was thirty two, she seduced the twenty year
old Crown Prince Rudolph himself, and since Mary had begun
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appearing in the society scene at age fifteen, she had
started building a similar reputation for herself. There was no
denying that she was pretty, with dark hair and dark
flashing eyes. Women muttered that her large bosom made her
figure unbalanced, but men tended to stare at it. People
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rarely described Mary that Sarah as an intellectual. There are
other adjectives that crop up, vivacious, attention loving, captivating a flirt.
She seemed to have very little interest in art or music.
Her primary loves were gossiping about her exploits in a
way that even her friends found indecorous, and second the
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scandalous French romance novels that she had her maid sneaked to.
Her tragedy had come to the vet Sera family early.
When Mary was ten years old, her brother Ladislav died
in an explosion at the Viennese Ring Theater. Ladislav was sixteen,
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and he was one of five cadets at the military
academy who were given complimentary tickets to an opera for
outstanding performance that night. A malfunction with the stage lights
caused a gas explosion that engulfed the entire theater in flames.
Crowds trampled each other trying to reach the emergency exit doors,
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which only swung in, trapping the occupants inside. Ladislav's body
was only identified because his mother Helene, recognized the cuff
links that he had been wearing. But the event didn't
seem to affect young Mary too deeply, far from becoming morbid.
If anything, as she grew into a young woman, she
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became impatient for I am er for excitement, for scandal,
for love. If life was fleeting, why waste it waiting
through the insufferably restrictive formalities of Austrian high society when
it was so much more fun to make interesting things happen.
Preserving her virtue had very little appeal for Mary. When
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there were so many men that she saw staring at her,
Mary didn't concern herself with their age or whether or
not they were married. Her flirtations became games of conquest,
and Mary, intellectual or not, was very good at games.
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But fate came for Mary vet Serah when she saw
the Crown Prince Rudolph in the royal box at a
horse race. He was so close that she could watch him,
studying him in profile as the sun led him from behind.
His light mustache the curl, and his brown hair. The
black cape he wore embroidered with golden squares. He was magnificent,
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like the hero of one of her French romance novels.
When the two were introduced at a ball, she practically
spun home informing her maid that she had finally seen
the Crown Prince and that he was beautiful. The teenage
infatuation came easily for Mary. Like almost every girl her age,
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she had souvenir post cards that featured the young Crown Prince,
much in the same way a young Cape Middleton had
a poster of Prince William. For Mary's mother, Helene, she
was content to indulge in the infatuation, After all, she
had had her own brief affair with the Prince. Helene
was perfectly happy to wink and close the door on
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Mary in one of her many suitors, and so she
found very little to condemn when Mary began taking her
carriage out to the prater every day, hoping to accidentally
see Rudolph. But those meetings soon became less accidental. Rudolph
had a cousin named Countess Marie Larrish, the type of
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woman who delighted to indulge in any shred of gossip
if it made things more entertaining for her. She was
also the type of woman who knew exactly how to
exploit an opportunity for profit. Rudolph had been seeing women
mistress's prostitutes prostitute who became mistresses since the beginning of
his unhappy marriage to Princess Stephanie, and his cousin, the
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Countess was usually good at procuring those women for him
for a price. As the affair between the very married
thirty year old Rudolph and the sixteen year old Mary
that Sarah began, Countess Larish began taking little fees both
from Mary and Rudolph to act as a go between
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for their meetings, and by little fees the equivalent today
of a few hundred thousand dollars, the Countess would tell
Mary that she needed to pay up if she ever
wanted to see the Crown Prince again. To Rudolph, the
Countess would not so indiscreetly let him know that he
would pay if he wanted certain matters to remain private,
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and so for a good part of the year, young
Mary would be swept away from her home by the Countess,
who delivered her to Rudolph whenever he requested, before she
was spent safely deposited back to her mother. Helene and
the Countess were close. The married countess herself had had
two illegitimate children by one of Helene's brothers. But what
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was just meant to be a trifling little fling soon
became so much more for young Mary. One afternoon, as
the Countess escorted Mary up the back stairs and through
the kitchens to Rudolph's chambers at Hofburg Palace, Mary gingerly
stepped ahead. Oh don't worry, I know the way, she smiled.
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Mary had been sidestepping her escort and had already visited
the palace without the Countess realizing Mary's affair had taken
on a life of its own. Once, without telling anyone
except her maid, Mary snuck to the Hofburg Palace in
the middle of the night wearing only a lingerie nightgown
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and a fur coat. He's going to annul his marriage
to that awful princess Stephanie, and Mary me Mary would
tell her sister, Hannah. Hanna just rolled her eyes and
called her sister a stupid child. I can't believe she's
so in love with the Crown Prince. You can't imagine
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anything so silly, and she has no idea how ridiculous
it is, Hannah said. Their mother, Helene found it better
just to dismiss it altogether. Your sister isn't very well,
she said simply. Mary didn't look well. Her eyes had
begun to take on an evil glint, especially when she
spoke of Princess Stephanie, and she began to revel in
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her new found power to torment Princess Stephanie and to
captivate the scornful attention of society. One afternoon, when Rudolph
and the Princess were at the theater to see a
Sarah Bernhardt performance, Mary caused a scandal when she arrived
wearing an extremely low cut dress and then spent the
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entire performance openly staring at the Royal Box instead of
the stage. Her visits to Rudolph were always on his terms,
but that just made them so much more electric charged
in their urgency. I cannot live without having seen or
spoken to him, Mary, said once to her piano tutor,
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I know this love is a happy dream from which
I shall have to wake. But Mary didn't want to wake.
She had caught the object of her affection, the ultimate prize,
and she refused to let him go, or rather to
let go of her fantasies of how they might be.
He seemed to really like her when they were together,
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and from that she was able to convince herself that
he loved her too. He even gave her a ring,
what she secretly called her wedding ring. It was a
silly thing, made of cheap iron, but it was engraved.
The Crown Prince had engraved it with the letters I
lv B I DT. They stood for a German phrase,
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please pardon my pronunciation in liebe verand been indistant, we
are united by love until death. The year Crown Prince
Rudolph turned thirty, his inner circle began to notice a
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change in him. Though he had always been moody, his
moods began to get violent. On a hunt with his father,
Rudolf fired his weapon so off kilter that he almost
killed the Emperor. Franz Joseph and the rest of the
family privately believed that maybe Rudolph had been trying to
kill him on purpose, so that he could be the
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emperor himself. From that point on, Franz Joseph avoided being
alone with his son. The same was true for his wife,
Princess Stephanie. She noticed her husband's strange moods, the dark
circles beneath his eyes, the way he would casually toy
with a trigger of a pistol as he spoke to her.
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She was afraid of him. Princess Stephanie went to her
father in law and begged Emperor Franz Joseph to send
Rudolf on a trip to do something, anything to pull
him out of his strange malaise. Can't you please do something,
she said, your son isn't well. She was surprised by
the emotion in her voice. She so rarely ever spoke
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with her husband's family. Franz Joseph told her that she
was overreacting. You're giving way to fancies, my dear, he said,
There's nothing wrong with Rudolph. After Stephanie left the Emperor's chamber,
a page caught up to her to inform her that
from now on she should follow protocol and only speak
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to the Emperor after requesting a formal audience through his secretaries. Meanwhile,
Rudolph had become fascinated with stories about death and suicide. Suicide,
especially theatrical suicides, were practically entertainment in Vienna at the
turn of the nineteenth century. Newspaper readers delighted themselves with
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stories of chilling and romantic deaths. There was the young
couple who ate a formal lunch of chicken and champagne
and then went into a cemetery hand in hand to
shoot themselves. The woman who put on a wedding dress
and jumped off a train. The woman who was singing
in the national anthem as she leapt from her apartment window.
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Tightrope walker who hanged himself out of his own window,
visible to the street below, and left a note that said,
the rope was my life and the rope is my death.
Ridolf was particularly fascinated by the story of the famous
Hungarian sportsman Is van Kigel, who shot himself and used
a small hand held mirror to aim correctly. When Rudolf
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read that he couldn't talk about anything else for weeks,
would you kill yourself with me? If I asked Rudolph
asked his private secretary. The secretary responded that although he
would consider it a great honor, no, he wasn't willing
to kill himself. Rudolph asked another officer on his staff,
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who also politely declined. Both men quietly asked for reassignments.
Mitzi Caspar, the long time lover of the Crown Prince,
is used to his waxing poetical about suicide. He would
often show up, drink a bottle of champagne and talk
about killing himself. At this point, she was used to it,
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but one evening he showed up talking about suicide with
such a grim and haunted look in his eyes that
Mitzy couldn't get it out of her head. The next afternoon,
she went to the police station to report the conversation
to the Chief of Police. If you repeat anything that
the Crown Prince said to you to anyone else, the
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police chief threatened, you will be prosecuted. Chastised, Mitsy returned
to her apartments, waiting for the next time Rudolph would come.
His final interaction with Mitsy would happen a few weeks later.
Rudolph showed up drunk and spent two hours drinking more
and telling Mitsy that suicide was the only heroic answer,
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the only way to make the vague statement that he
needed to make. He was rambling, verging on scary, but
after the police chief's threats, Mitzy didn't tell anyone. Before
Rudolph left that night, he did something he had never
done before. Rudolph, a devout atheist, made the sign of
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the Cross on Mitzy's forehead. Rudolph spent Christmas with his family,
where his mother pulled him aside to beg him to
be a little kinder to his younger sister, who had
been the object of so much of his sarcasm and cruelty.
I do love you, you know, Rudolph said, the cold
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and beautiful in brist Elizabeth. To her surprise, Rudolph began
to sob, though he was a man of thirty. He
fell to his knees and hugged his mother's skirts, crying
like a child. You haven't said those words to me
in a long time, he gasped. The Emperor Empress just
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stood there, motionless and embarrassed by their son's humiliating display.
Maybe they didn't realize, or maybe they weren't capable of
realizing that he was begging for help one final time.
A few weeks later, Rudolph told the Countess Marie to
pick up Mary that Sarah and bring her to the
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palace immediately. She obliged. The Countess told Mary's mother that
they were going to go shopping, but instead they went
directly to the Hofburg Palace. Here Rudolf said, take this
money and bribe your driver to say that you've lost
Mary while you were out shopping. The Countess obliged, and
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when hours later she returned to Mary's house without Mary,
that was the story she told Helene in a dramatic
performance worthy of being on the stage. At that very moment,
Mary and the Crown Prince were riding to Maryland Hunting
Lodge in the Woods, a few hours carriage ride outside
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of the city, where Rudolph had quickly arranged a hunting
trip with a few of his friends. As soon as
the two arrived, they were treated to the Crown Prince's room,
where Mary remained hidden, taking her meals there even as
Rudolph left to eat dinner with his guests. The lovers
were embarking on what Mary believed to be her romantic
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destiny side by side, they wrote letters together, letters to
their friends and families to be read after their deaths.
That night, before they went to bed, Rudolph went to
his valet Lashek, and made a simple and clear declaration.
You are not to let anyone into these rooms, not
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even the Emperor. Loschek said he understood. Mary, seventeen years old,
was wearing the olive green ice skating outfit that she
had traveled in that she had been wearing when she
told her mother that two is going out shopping. She
smiled and gave Loshek a gold watch encrusted with diamonds.
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The valet watched as they closed the door behind them.
The next morning, Mary and Rudolph were found both covered
in blood. Mary was on the right side of the bed,
closer to the door, her body in full rigor mortis,
her eyes still open, her hair down, a handkerchief still
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clutched in her hand. The bullet had entered her left
temple and blew off the right of her skull. In
official reports, Count Hoyas and Loschek both scrambled when we
described what she was wearing. She was fully dressed, Loshek said,
in a black dress. Pas wrote, but Mary hadn't brought
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a black dress. She had only brought the olive green
clothes that were found folded neatly on a nearby chair.
The men, awkward and formal, were trying to cover up
the fact that she was found naked. Rudolph was seated
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on the other side of the bed, his head hanging
low and blood congealing at his nose and mouth. His
body was only in the beginning stages of rigor mortis.
Doctors estimated that Rudolph had shot Mary six hours before
he finally decided to shoot himself. After the shock of
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the gore, of the sight of blood splatter on the headboard,
and the visible brain, the details of the room began
to come into focus one by one. The crystal tumbler
on the bedside table still filled with brandy, two shattered
champagne glasses on the floor, a broken coffee cup, and
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next to Rudolph a small handheld mirror like e Doan
Kigel had used to perfect his deadly aim. The three
men who found the bodies, the Valet Looshak, Count Hoyas,
and Coburg, sent a telegraph immediately to the court physician.
Coburg was too distraught to move, so Hoyas was sent
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to rush back to Vienna to tell the Emperor that
his son was dead. Remember, Coburg said, not a word
of this can get out until the Emperor knows, so
tell no one. Of course, Hoyas responded, not a soul.
He rushed to the train station and demanded to board
the next train bound for Vienna that passed through the station.
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The station master said that the next train was an
express and it wasn't stopping there. For God's sake, Man
Hoya shouted, the Crown Princess shot himself. The train stopped,
and Hoyas made it to Vienna. Meanwhile, the station master
had telephoned his brother in law, who telephoned the German embassy,
who informed the British embassy. The only government that didn't
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seem to know that Prince Rudolph was lying in a
pile of his own blood was his own. Hayas was
so unnerved by the scene, so embarrassed by the Prince's actions,
by the violence, the blood, the nudity the mistress, that
he tried to soften the story. When he got to
the palace, I didn't even see the bodies, he lied
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the Valet told me they poisoned themselves. None of the
officers wanted to be the one to tell the Emperor.
It was decided that the only person who could tell
Franz Joseph was his wife, the Empress. A minister interrupted
her Greek lesson, hat in hand. He informed the Empress
that Mary that Sarah had poisoned Prince Rudolph, and then,
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in her guilt, she had taken her own life. Rudolph's
younger sister came in to see their mother weeping. He's
killed himself, hasn't he, Valerie said. Elizabeth gasped and physically
stepped away from her daughter. Why would you think that,
she said, No, it's probably no certain that the girl
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poisoned him. By the time they got around to telling
Rudolph's wife, Stephanie, the official story was determined. There would
be no sordid details of murder or suicide or an affair.
They would say that Rudolph had a heart attack. It
was just like when he was seven years old having
a nervous breakdown when they said it was diphtheria. Better
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to cover up to obstocate. The most important thing is
preserving royal decorum. Meanwhile, Mary's mother, Helene, had spent the
past two days desperately trying to get the Chief of
Police to take her missing daughter seriously. The moment he
found out that Mary had been having an affair with
the prince, the chief of police refused to get involved.
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The royal family's personal life is none of our business,
he said. When finally Helene made it to the palace
to ask if anyone knew the whereabouts of Rudolph or Mary,
the servants tried to usher her away. Elizabeth heard Helene
at the door. You're telling me the poor woman knows nothing,
the Empress muttered to her lady in waiting. Let her
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in without so much as a moment's introduction. The Empress
gathered her height and told Helene to collect her courage.
Your daughter is dead, she said, simply, so is my son.
Helene wept and was escorted out, while Elizabeth called after her.
Remember the Crown Prince died of heart failure. Back at Marylyn.
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The Crown Prince's head was bandaged and his body was
covered with a white sheet. When word finally reached the
palace that it had actually been a suicide, the Emperor
requested special dispensation from the Vatican to permit a royal
burial anyway, which he was granted because, as the Emperor said,
the prince didn't know what he was doing. He hadn't
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been in his right mind. Mary's body was brought to
a store room and covered haphazardly with her clothes. She
was given a quiet, secret burial near by. Her family
wasn't permitted to attend. The only connection they had left
to their daughter were the letters that she had written
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to them on Marling stationary. Dear mother, Mary wrote, forgive
me for what I have done. I could not resist love.
I am happier in death than in life. To her
sister Hannah, Mary wrote, think of me now and again,
and Mary, only for love. I could not do so.
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And as I could not resist love, I am going
with him. Do not cry for me. I am going
to the other side in peace. It is beautiful here.
Rudolph was tortured and lost. He felt useless, and he
was going mad from disease and the drugs and the alcohol,
and the emptiness of a life in which he had
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been given everything. But for Mary, her death was merely
a gift for her lover, a way to immortalize that
larger than life, obsessive love that can only happen when
you're seventeen years old. She would be forever part of
his story after all. Maybe in the back of her
mind she knew that he would never leave his wife
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for her, that he would never marry her. This was
the only version of their story where they would end
up together. Rudolph had wanted someone devoted enough that he
wouldn't have to die alone. He saw the love in
Mary that Sarah's eyes, and he knew what to do
with it. That's the tragic story of the Maryland incident.
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But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear
about how Rudolph's death reshaped europe. Crown Prince Rudolph's death
meant that his father, Franz Joseph no longer had an heir.
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The next male Habsburg in line was Franz Joseph's brother,
who died, which meant that the next in line was
his son, Rudolph's cousin, an archduke named Franz Ferdinand. Archduke
Franz Ferdinand didn't live long enough to take the throne
as Emperor of the Austro Hungarian Empire either, he and
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his wife were assassinated and Sarah Gavo by a Bosnian Serb,
which ignited all of Europe to fall into the First
World War. One last final and very important note, if
you were a loved one is having suicidal thoughts, please
know that help is available. Call the suicide hot line
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now at one eight hundred two seven three eight two five.
Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. The show is written
and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey,
Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is
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on social media at Noble Blood Tales and you can
learn more about the show over at Noble blood Tales
dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.