2. People Questioned Her Assassin’s Sanity
After stabbing the empress, Lucheni fled but was caught by two cab drivers, a sailor, and a soldier in the gendarme. A concierge found the knife that he had used to stab her the next morning while doing his daily cleaning. Initially, people questioned his sanity because the people had so loved Elisabeth for her charitable works and populist leadership. Lucheni even requested that he be tried under the Canton of Lucerne as a dangerous anarchist because Geneva had recently abolished the death penalty. However, the court found him to be sane.
To Lucheni’s chagrin, he was tried as a murder, not a political criminal; this act denied him the notoriety in history that he had craved. He committed suicide ten years later by hanging himself with his belt inside his prison cell, supposedly because a prison guard had confiscated his yet-to-be-completed memoirs. He was denied an opportunity to turn his crime into a political statement. Meanwhile, Italians in Vienna feared reprisals from the Austrian people because an Italian had murdered their beloved Sisi. Her estate was endowed to various religious and charitable projects; what could not be invested was given to her granddaughter, Archduchess Elisabeth, the daughter of Prince Rudolf.