Royal Mistress. Born Marie Alexandrine Freiin von Vetsera in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of Helene Baltizzi, a Greek banking heiress, and Baron Albin Vetsera, a diplomat in the foreign service of the Austrian court. Most accounts agree that in 1888, she was introduced to the 30 year old, married crown prince Rudolf by Countess Marie Larisch. The pair apparently fell immediately into a passionate affair. Her family objected, in that she was being groomed to marry well, and scandal would taint the marriage chances of her siblings as well. She apparently considered herself a creditable threat to Rudolf's wife, however, despite the fact that he was notorious for conducting simultaneous affairs with several mistresses. Apparently, at some point, he proposed a suicide pact with her, having been turned down by several other friends and mistresses. In early 1889, she and Rudolf were staying at his hunting lodge Mayerling with a very few chosen guests. Their bodies were discovered in this rooms on the morning of 30 January 1889, by the prince's valet and a hunting companion. There was no official inquiry into the deaths. Her presence was covered up; her uncles summoned to remove her body from Mayerling as quietly as possible and to bury her immediately. Her mother was forbidden to attend. She was, however, allowed Catholic burial and was secretly interred in an unmarked grave at Holy Cross Abbey in Heiligenkreuz. The following May, her body was moved a short distance to a permanent grave commissioned by her mother, and a monument was erected. Theories at the time suggested the pair were murdered, or that she had killed the prince with poison. In 1945, her grave was opened and examination suggested blunt force trauma rather than shooting as a cause of death. Further exhumations in 1959 seemed to confirm this, and in 1991, which also failed to find a bullet wound, but the remains were so fragmented by then as to be almost useless in determining a cause of death. In 2015, apparent letters of farewell addressed to her mother, brother, and sister, written in her hand and still in the original envelopes bearing the seal of Crown Prince Rudolf, were discovered in a Vienna bank vault.