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Today's story starts on Friday, March 31st, 1922, in wooded, rural Bavaria. Maria Baumgartner and her sister trudged down the long, dirt road that led them away from their family home in Kaifek, a small settlement near the town of Weidhofen. The sisters were headed into the woods, where Maria's new employers, the Grubers, lived on an isolated farmstead called Hinterkaifek.
The small holding was a lonesome place and quite a few miles north of its namesake, far enough that any blood-curdling screams would be lost in the thick canopies of English oaks that separated them. Maria tried not to think about it. The sisters were bathed in darkness as they entered the woods. Every so often, dappled sunlight would penetrate the foliage above, making the shadows of the woodlands dance ominously. Maria's mind began to wander.
Doubt crept in. When Andreas Gruber offered her a job, the 44-year-old chambermaid was elated to have finally found work. That is, until she caught wind of the macabre rumors surrounding the farmstead. Hinterkaifeck had earned a sinister reputation after the Gruber's last chambermaid fled the property in terror. Apparently, it was haunted. Maria snapped back to reality when her sister nudged her.
she pointed to an opening in the trees ahead with light streaming through. There, hidden behind the thicket of oaks, was a sprawling meadow that tapered off into a vast field. In the middle of the field was a large farmhouse. There were two other equally large buildings on either side of it. To its right stood an adjoining building that housed the machinery room and barn, and to its left, a worn wooden storage shelter.
Together, the structures created a horseshoe that protected the courtyard nestled between them. They had reached Maria's final destination. As the sisters approached Hinterkaifeck, they noticed two people standing in the courtyard. The figures faced the women, clearly watching them approach, but didn't move or make a sound. Maria felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Her corset suddenly felt as if it had been tied far too tight.
Maria shook her head, hoping to fling these unwanted thoughts from her mind. She refused to believe the townsfolk's superstitious gossip. She was no longer a child, nor was she afraid of the dark. Perhaps she should have been. What Maria didn't know was that she had mere hours left to live.
Each step she took towards Hinterkaifeck brought her closer to becoming a victim of one of Germany's most brutal unsolved massacres. The blood-spattered atrocity occurred in a tiny community where secrets didn't last long. Yet, the killer managed to elude police for decades after those close to the case had died. Even today, over 100 years later, internet sleuths and cold case investigators are drawn to the mystery of the Hinterkaifeck massacre.
It has the makings of a Hollywood horror movie, you see. An old, remote farm hidden in the woods. A solemn family rife with secrets. Sounds coming from the attic and a bloodthirsty killer lurking in plain sight. Part 1: Welcome to Hinterkaifeck. Maria said her goodbyes to her sister. It would be a very long time before they saw one another again. Far longer than either of them knew.
She walked towards the two figures waiting for her in the courtyard. Maria recognized the old man. It was Andreas Gruber, the patriarch of the family. He gestured to the woman next to him, introducing her as his daughter, Victoria Gabriel. She had taken over ownership of Hinterkaifeck after her husband died in World War I. Maria greeted her employers politely before they abruptly turned and disappeared into the farmhouse.
She followed silently and obediently, as a chambermaid should. Maria was simply not prepared for the state of their home. She let a sharp gasp escape her lips before stifling it in. She didn't want to offend the Grubers. After the previous chambermaid abandoned her position, she spread ghastly rumors throughout Kaifek. Her stories were rife with spirits, bumps in the night, and the occult. The position remained vacant throughout the previous summer,
allowing months worth of filth, rotting food scraps, and rat droppings to pile up. No matter how much pay the family offered, no one was willing to work at Hinterkaifeck. No one except Maria Baumgartner. She smiled politely at Victoria, who motioned for her to follow. The widow introduced Maria to the rest of the family,
her elderly mother, Cecilia Gruber, and her two young children, Cecilia and Joseph Gabriel. Victoria then led Maria through the farmhouse, past the kitchen, and into the adjoining bedchamber. The room was damp and uncomfortably small, as servants' quarters always were. Maria knelt in front of the bench near her bed and began unpacking her belongings. She would never leave that spot.
In a few hours, Maria Baumgartner would be dead. On Monday, April 1st, four days after Maria arrived, Hans and Edward Scharovsky dropped by the secluded farmstead. The brothers were coffee merchants who had been taking orders from Hinterkaifeck for several years. Everything seemed to be in order. Aside from one thing, the farmstead was eerily quiet.
The Grubers, who the men usually saw attending to the livestock and fields, were nowhere to be seen. Hans and Edward approached the main entrance of the farmhouse and knocked. Nothing stirred within the home. They knocked several more times. Still, silence. The brothers noticed that the doors to the farm's machinery room were open. When they peered inside, they saw nothing but hay and an overturned wooden door. Eventually, the men gave up and left.
A few days later, Albert Hoffner went to the Hinterkaifeck to repair the Gruber's broken food chopper. He too noticed that the farmstead was unusually still. The only sign of life was the watchdog barking from inside the barn where the livestock was kept. After an hour of hanging around, the Grubers had still not arrived home. Albert assumed that they had forgotten he was coming that day and gone into town. The doors to their machinery room were wide open, so he got to work.
Albert finished the job just over four hours later and left into Kaifek. The Grubers were known for keeping to themselves. However, the townsfolk of Kaifek soon began to worry about the family of five. Cecilia Gabriel, Victoria Gabriel's daughter, had been absent from school for days without any word from her mother or grandparents. Worse still, the family never showed up to Sunday worship.
the devout Roman Catholics never missed a service. Something was up. The townsfolk gossiped amongst each other, speculating about the Gruber's absence. It was impossible to guess the truth though. No one could have imagined that a simple family of farmers would have met such a nightmarish fate. On April 4th, a farmer who lived nearby Hinterkaifeck, Lorenz Schlittenbauer, took matters into his own hands. He was close with the family, too close perhaps.
and felt it was his duty to check up on them. Just after 3:00 PM that afternoon, Lorenz sent his 16-year-old son, Johann, and nine-year-old stepson, Josef, into the woods to find out why the Grubers had been gone for so long. The boys arrived at Hinterkaifeck and found that nothing seemed to be amiss. The farm looked as though it had been tended and there were no signs of any disturbances. The only thing missing was the Grubers themselves.
unwilling to stick their noses into matters best left to the adults. The boys ran home to report back to their father. Part two, a gruesome discovery. Lorenz was perplexed. Who was tending to the farm if the Grubers were missing? He decided to go to Hinterkaifeck and find out for himself. Suspecting that something nefarious may have taken place, Lorenz headed into the woods with his fellow neighbors, Jakob Siegel and Michael Pahl.
The farmstead looked just as his boys had described it. Upon further inspection, the men noticed that all the doors were locked, all except one. The doors to the machinery room were wide open. The lock had been broken. Led by Lawrence, the search party entered the building only to find that the adjoining barn doors were also locked. The men broke the doors down, hoping to get to the bottom of what happened to their neighbors. Nothing could have prepared them for what lay inside. The barn stank of rot.
Its stench had a metallic tang to it, one the men knew well. It was blood, a great deal of blood. They began searching for the source of the smell, fearing the worst. Unfortunately, their fears were confirmed. There, under an overturned wooden door and layers of hay, were the brutally battered bodies of 63-year-old Andreas Gruber.
72-year-old Tetzelia Gruber, their daughter, 35-year-old Victoria Gabriel, and their granddaughter, seven-year-old Tetzelia Gabriel. It was obvious that their deaths were no accident. They had been stacked on top of each other in neat, bloodied piles that were intentionally hidden from sight. They had been dead for some time now. Their bodies were stiff with rigor mortis, and insects had begun to swarm.
The humidity from the hay, livestock, and neglected piles of dung accelerated the decomposition process, resulting in the putrid odor that filled the barn. The men were horror struck. They knew that something terrible must have befallen the Gruber family, but not this. The search party quickly realized that someone was missing. They only counted four bodies. Where was little Josef, Victoria's two-year-old baby boy?
Lorenz calmly walked to the door connecting the barn to the farmhouse to look for the child. Although the men had to break the barn doors down, Lorenz managed to get inside his neighbor's home with no trouble at all. He had a key. Once inside, he headed straight for Victoria's room. Josef's carriage was standing in front of her bed with one of Victoria's skirts draped over it. No gurgles or cries were coming from it. The room was painfully silent. A faint smell like that of the barn lingered.
Lorenz approached the carriage and lifted the skirt. Baby Yosef lay swaddled, still, and lifeless. His face was unrecognizable. The two-year-old's head had been crushed by an unimaginable force. His mangled remains were caked with congealed blood and desiccated gray matter. After taking a moment to compose himself, Lorenz moved on to search the rest of the house. He eventually got to the servants' quarters where he found another body, Maria Baumgartner.
The chambermaid lay on her side, just in front of the bench near her bed. She was partially covered by her quilt and surrounded by a pool of coagulated blood. Her belongings were piled in neat stacks on the bench, ready to be packed away into her tiny cupboard. It looked as though Maria had been unpacking her trunk when she was surprised from behind. She hadn't even changed into her nightgown for the evening. Part 3: Blindsided and Bludgeoned Life in Kaifek was painfully uneventful.
The moment something vaguely interesting occurred, news of it would spread through the tight-knit community like wildfire. That's exactly what happened when the Gruber's bodies were discovered. The townsfolk were consumed by morbid curiosity at the news of the seemingly unprovoked annihilation of an entire family. Crimes of that caliber were almost unheard of in those days.
The locals swarmed Hinterkaifeck desperate to get a glimpse of the massacre. They gallivanted through the crime scene without heed, poking at the bodies and moving things around as they went. Eventually, word was sent to the nearest police station in Munich. Lead investigator, George Rheingruber, mobilized his entire department and made quick work of the 43-mile journey to Hinterkaifeck, arriving the same day the bodies were discovered. As violent crimes were common in the city,
Rheingruber was no stranger to tackling murders. However, this case was unprecedented, even by his standards. The lawmen arrived to find the scene buzzing with nosy townsfolk. They did their best to cordon off the crime scene and preserve any remaining evidence, but the damage had been done. Although forensics was a faraway concept back then, the locals prying greatly hindered Inspector Rheingruber's investigation.
regardless of how rudimentary it was. The next day, on April 5th, court physician Dr. Johann Baptiste Amhuller was called to the farmstead to perform autopsies on the Gruber's corpses. His work painted a gruesome picture of the brutality the family suffered. Each victim had sustained massive head trauma. Their skulls were shattered and their faces mangled from the sheer force of it.
Andreas, the family's patriarch, was blindsided by the attacker. The right side of his face was pulverized, leaving his cheekbone barely covered by shredded flesh. His wife, Cecilia, had been strangled and bludgeoned seven times, splintering her skull into tiny fragments. Like her father, Victoria had sustained a violent blow from the right that destroyed her skull and, like her mother, her body showed signs of strangulation. However,
Dr. Ahmuller also found nine strange star-shaped wounds on her head. The last corpse to be examined in the barn was that of little Tetsilia, Victoria's seven-year-old daughter. She too had sustained several blows to the head, shattering her jaw and peppering her face and neck with gaping wounds. Tragically, the evidence showed that she had suffered a fate far worse than the others.
Dr. Ahmuller concluded that the girl's mother and grandparents died almost instantly from precision blows to the head. Cecilia, on the other hand, clung to life for several hours after the attack. As she lay in agony amidst blood-soaked hay and her family's dead bodies, she ripped clumps of hair from her own head.
Tzitzilia was found with blonde tufts still gripped between her cold little fingers. The physician moved on to the Grouper's farmhouse where the bodies of Maria Baumgartner and Joseph Gabriel were discovered. Maria had suffered crosswise strikes to the head, which penetrated her skull and obliterated her brain. The chambermaid, like her employers, seemed to have been taken by surprise and likely died instantaneously.
With no one left to protect him, little Josef was the last to perish. The attacker delivered a final, devastating blow to the defenseless toddler's face, crushing his head like a ripe melon. Dr. Amuler determined that the murder weapon had likely been a matic from the farm, like a pickaxe. It has a pick or axe on one side of its head,
However, instead of a chisel on the other side, a mattock has a broad, horizontal blade, ideal for bludgeoning. Once the autopsies were complete, the physician handed his findings over to Inspector Rheingruber and proceeded to remove the victims' heads. These grotesque pieces of evidence were sent to Munich for further examination. Part 4: Making Sense of the Massacre The autopsy results were invaluable to the police.
They were able to decipher what happened at Hinterkaifeck that fateful night, and the grisly details offered precious insights into the mind of the perpetrator. Everything pointed to a surprise attack committed by a calculated killer. Dr. Ambuehler noted that the corpses lacked any defensive wounds, and there were no signs of struggle at the crime scene. Investigators deduced that the killer strategically lured the Grubers to the barn one by one before executing them systematically.
With this in mind, it was odd that they strangled the already dead or dying Victoria and her mother, Tetzelia. It couldn't have been some sick fetish with women. Maria and little Tetzelia bore no bruising on their necks, and there was no mention of the women being sexually assaulted. It clearly wasn't out of necessity. The killer was armed with a matic, which would have been far more effective. Furthermore,
The well-thought-out way the murders took place didn't fit a spur-of-the-moment crime of passion. So, why were the elder Gruber women strangled? Strangulation is often personal. Those who strangle by choice and not necessity are usually doing so out of an urge to squeeze the life out of their victims in a close and personal manner. Moreover, it suggests that said stranglers not only knew their victims, but harbored some kind of animosity towards them.
Perhaps the Hinterkaifeck killer had a vendetta against Victoria and her elderly mother, one that warranted murder. Let's not forget that the Gruber's bodies were also covered. Andreas, Tizia, Victoria, and little Tizia were concealed under layers of hay and a wooden door. While this was certainly done to delay the discovery of their bodies, there may have been a more subconscious motive for it.
one that is better understood when considering how Maria Baumgartner and Josef were found. Maria's body was partially covered by her quilt, while baby Josef's disfigured remains were obscured by one of his mother's skirts. In modern times, this phenomenon is known as undoing or symbolic reversal. Killers who do this are motivated by guilt and remorse and, more often than not, know their victims well. In the case of the Hinterkaifeck murders,
This supports the idea that the killer had a personal connection to some or all of the Grubers. Covering their bodies after the fact indicates that the killer became consumed by shame and couldn't handle the sight of their handiwork. Today's plethora of studies of examining violent crimes have given us insights that Inspector Rheingruber and his team wouldn't have had back in the 1920s. Instead,
They used deduction and dogged detective work to try and piece the puzzle together. Figuring out when the murders occurred was the easy part. Maria arrived at Hinterkaifeck on Friday, March 31st. Her sister accompanied her to the farmstead and left that afternoon. After conducting several interviews, investigators found that the postman delivered mail for the Grubers the following day, which lay untouched. Therefore, the family must have been slaughtered that Friday night.
The question was, and by the police considered the possibility that the motive might have been money. Perhaps the killer was a vagrant or thief who realized that the Grubers were easy targets. They could do little to protect themselves. Their family was only made up of an elderly couple, a young mother, two young children, and one chambermaid after all.
This theory was quickly ruled out when investigators found a barely concealed cache of money and valuables hidden in the house. They did, however, discover something truly disturbing during their search. The Gruber's killer had been living with their dead bodies for days. In the days before the family's corpses were found, their murderer had eaten their food, tended their farm, fed their animals, slept in their beds, and lit fires in their hearth.
This was substantiated by the Gruber's neighbors, who had seen smoke billowing from the farmhouse chimney, clearly. The intruder not only knew their way around the land, but also knew how to look after a farm. The police turned to the Gruber's previous maid, hoping she could shed some light on the inexplicable crimes. Instead, she spoke of sinister occurrences that suggested the killer had been hiding within the family's home for far longer than investigators thought.
Part 5: The Witch's Wood Six months prior, Hinterkaifeck was just like any other farmstead in the Bavarian countryside, until it was suddenly plagued by a series of strange phenomena. The chambermaid was first to notice the eerie happenings. It started with footsteps in the attic. The woman claimed that, once her employers had gone to bed, she would hear the floorboards above her creak as if someone was creeping around.
After venturing upstairs to investigate, the room would be quiet and empty. The chambermaid was unnerved by this, but not overly concerned yet. Soon, the woman began complaining to her employers about feeling as though she was being watched by someone or something. With no clear signs of any intruder, the chambermaid became adamant that the Hinterkaifeck farmstead was cursed by malevolent spirits.
The Grubers, who were yet to notice anything themselves, didn't believe her. Eventually, the woman abandoned her position as the family's chambermaid and fled Hinterkaifeck for good. That's when the mystery took a terrifying turn. After speaking with a few neighbors, police found out that Andreas Gruber had confided in them about several unsettling discoveries. First, it was the footprints.
Just days before his grisly demise, Andreas found a set of footprints in the fresh layer of snow that blanketed their farmstead. The tracks led from a section of the surrounding forest called Hexenholtz, which ominously translates to "witch's wood." Andreas followed the tracks to their farm's machinery room. The lock on the doors had been broken. Disturbingly, the footprints stopped at the entrance to the building. There were no tracks leading away. Andreas was troubled by this.
However, with nothing stolen or moved out of place, he put the matter behind him. Next, it was the newspaper. One day, the patriarch came across an unfamiliar newspaper on their property. He hadn't bought the paper and neither had any of his family members. In fact, it had come from a publication in Munich. Andreas assumed it must have been dropped by the postman on his way into town.
The police would later discover that no one in the area or surrounding towns subscribed to that paper. Andreas spoke with his neighbors to see if they had noticed any unfamiliar faces prowling around the area or had similar occurrences happen on their properties. They hadn't. Lastly, it was the keys. In their final few days, the Grubers noticed that one of their two keys had disappeared. Their neighbors offered to help, but the family seemed content to deal with it themselves.
However, after police spoke with little Tetzilia's school friends, it was clear that her family was far from content. Apparently, the night before they were slaughtered, an explosive fight occurred that left Victoria hysterical. She ran into the witch's wood alone. Tetzilia snuck out and followed her mother into the trees, only to find her crying uncontrollably on the forest floor. Whatever pushed Victoria over the edge became a secret the Grubers took to their graves.
The investigators were unconvinced by the paranormal superstitions surrounding the case. As men of logic and reason, they relied on the information gleaned from their interrogations instead. Their efforts revealed that the killer had some sort of obsession with the Grubers and that the family had something to hide. Part 6: Secrets, Suspects, and Incest The Grubers were a private family who never made any enemies, at least, that's what the residents of Kaifek thought.
The family was, however, at the center of a sordid scandal that dated back to 1914. The more investigators probed into the Gruber's unseemly past, the more potential suspects surfaced. Victoria Gabriel was the widow of Carl Gabriel, the original custodian of Hinterkaifeck and father of her children, Cecilia and Josef. The talk around town seemed to contest the latter though. Many speculated about the parentage of the children,
With a special focus on little Josef, the Gruber's originally claimed that Karl was the boy's father. However, the math simply didn't add up. Karl died in battle during a shell attack in Arras, France. In December 1914, Victoria gave birth to Josef five years later. It was obvious that the boy had been fathered by someone else, but who? The townsfolk of Kaifek accused two men,
Lawrence Schlittenbauer and Andreas Gruber. Yes, Victoria's own father. Let's turn back the clocks to April 1914, when Victoria and Karl tied the knot. The couple seemed happy at first. However, for some unknown reason, that soon changed. Karl abruptly left Victoria shortly after their marriage and returned to his parents' farmstead. He headed off to war before anyone could find out why, but speculation was rife.
The neighboring town had long suspected Andreas Gruber of having a perverse sexual relationship with Victoria. In fact, the patriarch's penchant for incest and abuse had been the subject of gossip for decades. Victoria wasn't his only child. She was the only one who survived. Andreas had many children with his wife, Cecilia. Sadly, they eventually fell victim to his violent temper and sick urges. Victoria was the sole survivor.
neighbors suspected that her father's obsession with her was the reason she was spared. Andreas was known to be overly protective of Victoria, even jealous. He rarely allowed her to leave Hinterkaifeck and after Karl died, he forbade her from remarrying. This was highly unusual in those times as single mothers were frowned upon and this only fueled the belief that something sinful was going on. In January 1915,
The townsfolk's suspicions were apparently confirmed when Victoria gave birth to her first child, Cecilia Gabriel. The baby came nine months after her marriage to Carl, making it highly likely that he was the father. However, the locals had other theories. It was believed that Carl left Victoria in 1914 after discovering Andreas' incestuous acts with her. As a result of this belief,
Andreas was accused of impregnating Victoria and a complaint of incest was filed against them. The father and daughter proclaimed their innocence, but the court eventually found them guilty. They were sentenced to one year in prison for their unnatural acts. Although women were considered complicit in rape cases back then, the court took pity on Victoria and her sentence was reduced to one month. The incest scandal died down after Andreas was released from prison.
but it was revived in 1919 when Victoria gave birth to Josef Gabriel. The townsfolk dismissed the Gruber's claim that her late husband was the father, and fingers were once again pointed at the family's patriarch. However, another secret surfaced around this time that implicated a second potential father. Victoria was in a relationship with Lorenz Schlittenbauer, the neighbor who led the search party that discovered the Gruber's dead bodies years later.
These findings initially led investigators to believe that the Hinterkaifeck murders might have been a murder-suicide. Perhaps Victoria's affair with Lorenz caused Andreas to murder his family in a jealous rage before turning the mattock on himself. Maybe Victoria had been the one to snap after the abuse she endured made her unstable. Both ideas were supported by the alleged quarrel that happened the night before their murders, but the truth of what caused the fight died with the Grubers.
In any event, the theory was quickly ruled out when Dr. Aumuller confirmed that none of the Gruber's injuries were self-inflicted. Investigators honed in on Lorenz as their new prime suspect. Part seven, a promising prime suspect. Lorenz Schlittenbauer started seeing Viktoria shortly after his first wife died in 1918. The couple had planned to marry, but their romance soured when Viktoria fell pregnant and gave birth to Josef one year later.
Although she was adamant the child was his, the incest accusations made Lorenz doubtful. The couple broke up soon after. Despite this, Lorenz acknowledged Josef as his own, and the pair publicly referred to the baby as their child. He even agreed to contribute financially to Josef's upbringing. Eventually, Lorenz moved on and married another woman. The newlyweds had a child together years later.
but the baby tragically died a few weeks after birth. There was no denying it, Lorenz had a clear motive for murdering the Gruber family. Investigators theorized that he had begun to resent paying child support for Josef, especially since many still thought that Andreas had fathered the boy incestuously. The recent death of Lorenz's newborn may have driven him to insanity and become the catalyst for the massacre.
Investigators believed that he lay in wait at the Gruber's farmstead and murdered them in cold blood. That's not all. It quickly dawned on them that Lawrence didn't only have a motive, he had the means. Lawrence's farm was only a short walk away from Hinterkaifeck. That, coupled with his past relationship with Victoria, meant that he had an intimate understanding of the Gruber's farmstead and home. As a farmer himself, he also knew how to look after it.
This explained the footsteps leading to the farm, the smoking chimney, and the well-fed livestock. A local teacher further implicated Lorenz after tipping off police about a strange remark he made. Allegedly, Lorenz suggested that the killer didn't bury the Gruber's bodies because the ground had been frozen. Although a simple observation, it made investigators wonder if he knew more than he was letting on. Their suspicions were bolstered by the eyewitnesses who accompanied Lorenz to Hinterkaifeck.
Allegedly, his behavior had been deeply unsettling. Michael Pohl and Jakob Siegel recalled that Lorenz was surprisingly indifferent when they found the Gruber's corpses. Instead of being repelled by the harrowing sight, he nonchalantly inspected their bodies and even moved them around. What the men found to be particularly odd was that after struggling to break down the locked barn doors, Lorenz suddenly produced a key for the doors leading into the farmhouse.
He then proceeded to enter the Gruber's home alone, despite not knowing if the killer was still inside. When Michael and Jakob questioned him about that decision, Lorenz calmly responded that it was his duty. Josef was his son, after all. At that stage, investigators were certain that Lorenz was responsible for the Hinterkaifeck massacre. He had the motives, the means, and apparently, he also had a key, potentially the same key the Grubers reported missing just days before they were slaughtered.
The police interrogated Lorenz thoroughly, but were unable to prove that he had committed the atrocities in question. Furthermore, he easily explained his strange behavior away by blaming it on shock. His key and familiarity with the farmstead was explained by his relationship with Victoria. After eliminating their most promising suspect, Inspector Rheingruber and his team hit a dead end.
Hinterkaifeck was demolished one year after the slaughters and any remaining clues were destroyed along with it, except for one piece of evidence. Astonishingly, the mattock used to murder the Grubers was found in their attic. It was an amateur oversight and not the last the police would make. Fingerprints were never taken from the mattock and nothing came from its discovery, forcing investigators to rely on hearsay and rumors. Part Eight: A Decades-Old Dead End.
Over the years, investigators questioned countless persons of interest to no avail. The case had become too publicized, resulting in unsubstantiated accusations and vindictive deathbed confessions, all of which sent police on wild goose chases that proved fruitless. Undeterred, they pushed on. They followed every breadcrumb dropped by witnesses who claimed to have seen suspicious individuals near Hinterkaifeck at the time of the murders.
No new leads turned up. Investigators became so desperate that they briefly considered Carl Gabriel a suspect, Victoria's late husband. As his body was never recovered from the battlefield, it was rumored that the soldier had deserted the war effort to exact revenge on the Grubers. His motive?
the contested parentage of Victoria's children and her alleged incestuous affair with Andreas. This theory was abandoned after police interviewed several of Karl's fellow soldiers who insisted they had seen his dead body. The detectives even turned to clairvoyance in a last ditch attempt to solve the mystery of the Hinterkaifeck murders. The victim's heads, which were being kept in Munich, were examined for metaphysical clues, unfortunately.
The skulls remained silent and were later lost during World War II. The decapitated bodies of the Grubers and Maria Baumgartner were buried headless and seemingly without closure, with all suspects cleared, no new leads, and insufficient evidence to make any arrests. The Hinterkaifeck case was eventually closed in 1955. This didn't stop the townsfolk of Kaifeck from coming to their own conclusions though.
Lorenz Schlittenbauer was labeled as guilty and could never rid himself of their suspicions. He continued filing and winning defamation cases against his accusers until his last breath in 1941. The case was reopened several times in the decades that passed, most notably in 2007. The Firstenfeldbruck Police Academy gave the infamous cold case to 15 students to scrutinize using modern investigation and forensic techniques.
They praised the original investigator's meticulous work. However, the students also criticized their failure to take fingerprints as the practice had already become commonplace at the time. Interestingly, despite the rudimentary initial investigation, missing evidence and lack of living suspects and witnesses, the students were able to formulate a promising theory. They couldn't conclusively prove it, but they had a good idea of who the killer might have been.
Out of respect for the individual's descendants, the students theory remains shrouded in secrecy. The decision was profoundly noble but frustrating. The true crime community was left dissatisfied and hungry for answers. Interest in the case was renewed and 10 years later, a surprisingly promising theory was put forth by an unlikely source.
Bill James, an American baseball writer, statistician, and historian, published a true crime book with his daughter in 2017 called The Man from the Train. The father-daughter duo made an astonishing claim in its pages. Supposedly, they discovered a previously unknown serial killer who they believe plagued several American states in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Paul Mueller. More so, they alleged that Mueller, who was described as a German immigrant and traveling carpenter, might have been responsible for the Hinterkaifeck murders. The James's suspicions stem from his connection to the 1897 murder of an entire family of farmers near West Brookfield, Massachusetts.
Mueller, who'd recently been hired as the family's farmhand, was the sole suspect and managed to evade police for one year before disappearing. After months of sifting through American newspaper archives, the authors found dozens of unsolved murder cases that bore striking similarities to the crimes Mueller was accused of. More so, they noticed that the chosen victims almost always lived near a railroad junction, which ensured an easy escape route for the transient killer.
The Jameses believe that, after the police and media started to notice the patterns between the murders, Mueller fled America for his homeland and went on to commit the Hinterkaifeck Massacre. Honestly, one can see why. The similarities between the Gruber family murders and those allegedly committed by Mueller in America are truly uncanny. Each case involved the annihilation of entire families in remote, under-policed areas.
evidence pointing to the killer hiding in their victims' homes to monitor their movements, the blunt edge of an ax being used to kill their victims, the murder weapon being hidden in plain sight, the victims being covered with sheets or blankets, the bodies being moved or stacked, and no evidence of anything being stolen. While this theory may be the most plausible we've heard so far, we're still left with more questions than answers. Does James's research really prove that Paul Mueller was a serial killer?
If so, how can we be sure he murdered the Grubers too? Did the students truly crack the case? Or was it Lorenz all along? Perhaps the Grubers' killer was someone else entirely, a mastermind who managed to avoid suspicion long after their death. Who knows? There's only one thing we know with absolute certainty. 100 years and 100 suspects later, the true identity of the Hinterkaifeck Killer remains a mystery to the world.