In recording his actual death, Burchard is at once explicit and reticent to an extraordinary degree.

"Not dying," he writes, "from the wound he had taken, he was yesterday strangled in his bed at the nineteenth hour." Between the chronicling of his having been wounded on the steps of St.
Peter's and that of his death, thirty-three days later, there is no entry in Burchard's diary relating to the prince, nor anything that can in any way help the inquirer to a conclusion; whilst, on the subject of the strangling, not another word does the Master of Ceremonies add to what has above been quoted.

That he should so coldly--almost cynically--state that Alfonso was strangled, without so much as suggesting by whom, is singular in one who, however grimly laconic, is seldom reticent--notwithstanding that he may have been so accounted by those who despaired of finding in his diary the confirmation of such points of view as they happen to have chosen and of such matters as it pleased them to believe and propagate.
That same evening Alfonso's body was borne, without pomp, to St.
Peter's, and placed in the Chapel of Santa Maria delle Febbre.

It was accompanied by Francesco Borgia, Archbishop of Cosenza.
The doctor who had been in attendance upon the deceased and the hunchback were seized, taken to Sant' Angelo and examined, but shortly thereafter set at liberty.
So far we are upon what we may consider safe ground.

Beyond that we cannot go, save by treading the uncertain ways of speculation, and by following the accounts of the various rumours circulated at the time.
Formal and absolutely positive evidence of the author of Alfonso's murder there is none.
The Venetian ambassador, the ineffable, gossip-mongering Paolo Capello, whom we have seen possessed of the fullest details concerning the Duke of Gandia's death--although he did not come to Rome until two and a half years after the crime--is again as circumstantial in this instance.