DUKE'S SUICIDE.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 77, 31 March 1928, Page 9

DUKE'S SUICIDE.

JATAL LOVE AFFAIR. Authentic Account Of Mayerling Tragedy. jjjjjjl TO AUSTRIAN THRONE. p,y Cable.—Prei* Association.—Copyright.)

(Received 11.30 a.m.) PARIS, March 30. Thirty-nine years after the Mayerling tragedy when the Archduke Rudolf of Austria and the beautiful Maria Vetsera were found dead in the Imperial hunting lodge, the first authentic account appears in the memoirs of the late Empress Eugenie just published. These relate how Rudolf's mother, the Empress Elizabeth, widow of the Emperor Francis Joseph, revealed the full story.

It appears that Rudolf, after a violent nuorrel with the Emperor, consented to break the liaison but gained permission for a last farewell.

Maria was waiting him at dinner at the bunting lodge. He told her of the promise he had given his father under threat of renouncing his rights to the throne.

She replied coolly: "I am expecting to tiecome a mother." They talked the whole night through and agreed to die together. Rudolf shot Maria through the heart, laid her body on a bed and covered her with roses from vases. Then he wrote to his mother a long letter stating: "I have killed someone. I have no longer any right to live." At six in the morning Rudolf died from a bullet in the brain. —(Sydney "Sun.") Rudolf Franz Karl Joseph, born 1838, wis Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, being the only son of the Emperor. He committed suicide as the result of his love affair in 1880 at Mayerling, near Vienna.