The Hinterkaifeck Murders

The case

When a mechanic named Albert Hofner arrived at the Hinterkaifeck farm on 4 April 1922 to repair the engine of a fodder cutter, nobody came to the door. He could hear the cattle and the dog. He waited an hour, did the job alone, and left about four and a half hours later. What he did not know was that the six people who lived there had been dead in the barn and the house since the night of 31 March, and that someone had been looking after the animals in the meantime.

Hinterkaifeck was not a village but the house name of a single farmstead, set apart from the hamlet of Gröbern in the Schrobenhausen district, about 70 kilometres north of Munich, and backed by woods. It belonged to Andreas Gruber, 63, his wife Cäzilia, 72, and their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, 35, whose husband Karl had been killed in France in December 1914. Viktoria's children Cäzilia, seven, and Josef, two, lived there too. The household was known in the district as reclusive and careful with money, and it carried a dark history: in 1915 a court had convicted Andreas Gruber of incest with Viktoria, a relationship that began when she was a teenager. Neighbour Lorenz Schlittenbauer, a widower who had been involved with Viktoria, was named as Josef's father, though he at times disputed it.

In the weeks before the killings Andreas Gruber told neighbours about things he could not explain: footprints in the snow leading from the woods to the farm but not away, a broken lock on the engine shed, a missing house key, a Munich newspaper that nobody in the area took, and footsteps in the attic at night. He searched and found nothing, and he declined offers of help. On the afternoon of Friday 31 March a new maid, Maria Baumgartner, arrived with her sister, who soon left. That evening Viktoria, her parents and her daughter were killed one after another in the barn with a mattock that belonged to the farm. In the house, the killer or killers then killed Maria Baumgartner in her room and the little boy in his cot.

Over the next days the farm seemed merely quiet. Two coffee salesmen called on 1 April and left. Young Cäzilia missed school, and the family missed Sunday mass. On the evening of 4 April Schlittenbauer, having sent his son to look, went to the farm with two other neighbours. They broke into the barn and found four bodies under straw; the other two were inside the house.

Detectives from Munich under Georg Reingruber arrived that night, but onlookers had already walked through the scene, and the evidence was handled in ways that later reviewers found inadequate: few photographs were taken and no fingerprints were secured. Robbery seemed unlikely, since a large amount of money lay untouched in the house. Yet someone had fed and milked the cattle, eaten the bread and cut meat from the larder, and the hay in the attic showed hollows where people might have lain. A passer-by later said he had seen smoke from the farm's oven on the night after the murders. The weapon was found only in 1923, hidden under the attic floorboards when the farm was demolished.

About a hundred people came under suspicion, but no one was ever charged. Schlittenbauer was suspected by many locals because of his entanglement with the family and his conduct on the day the bodies were found, and he won several lawsuits against people who called him the murderer before his death in 1941. Investigators also looked at Karl Gabriel, whose body had never been recovered; at members of a far-right paramilitary group; at local brothers named by a former maid; and at others. The case was formally closed in 1955, though interviews continued into the 1980s. Many of the original files were lost when bombing struck Augsburg in 1944.