Hinterkaifeck Murders

Summary

On the evening of 31 March 1922, six people were killed with a mattock at an isolated Bavarian farmstead. Four were killed in the barn, one by one. Two were killed in the house. For the four days before the bodies were found, someone fed the animals, lit the stove, and ate the family's food. No one has ever been charged.

What is documented

The dead. Andreas Gruber, 63, who owned the farm. His wife Cäzilia, 72. Their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, 35. Viktoria's children, Cäzilia, 7, and Josef, 2. And the maid, Maria Baumgartner, 44, who had arrived that afternoon and had worked at Hinterkaifeck for a single day.

The killings. Late on the evening of Friday 31 March 1922, Andreas, the elder Cäzilia, Viktoria and the seven-year-old Cäzilia were drawn into the barn through the stable, one at a time, and struck on the head. The weapon was a mattock, a heavy soil-breaking tool that belonged to the farm. The killer then entered the living quarters and killed Josef in his cot and Maria in her bedroom.

The autopsies. On 5 April 1922 the court physician, Dr Johann Baptist Aumüller, performed post-mortems on all six, at the farm. He recorded blunt-force injuries consistent with the mattock, and noted marks of strangulation on the elder Cäzilia. The seven-year-old did not die at once. Clumps of her own hair were found in her hands.

The four days. The bodies were not found until Tuesday 4 April, when the neighbour Lorenz Schlittenbauer, having noticed the mail accumulating, came to the farm with Jakob Sigl and Michael Pöll. During the intervening four days, neighbours saw smoke from the chimney. The livestock had been fed and the cows milked. Food had been cooked and eaten. Whoever killed the family did not leave immediately.

What happened before. In the weeks before the killings, Andreas Gruber told neighbours several things. He had found footprints in fresh snow leading from the forest to the farm's machine room, whose lock was broken, and no tracks leading away. The family had heard footsteps in the attic; he searched and found no one. A Munich newspaper appeared on the property that nobody had bought and nobody in the area subscribed to. House keys went missing. The family's previous maid, Kreszenz Rieger, had left about six months earlier, and it is widely reported that she gave the reason that the house was haunted.

These are Gruber's reports to his neighbours, recorded after his death. He did not call the police, and none of it was independently examined at the time.

The crime scene. It was destroyed. Locals came to the farm on hearing the news, walked through it, moved evidence, and cooked and ate meals in the kitchen. The Munich detective, Georg Reingruber, arrived from some distance away, after the fact.

The weapon. Less than a year later the farm was demolished. During the demolition a blood-stained mattock was recovered, considered to be the murder weapon, together with a penknife in the hay. Sources differ on whether the mattock was found in the barn loft or in the house attic.

The skulls. The victims' heads were removed and sent to Munich, where they were examined by clairvoyants. The skulls were lost during the Second World War. The six were buried without them.

The investigation. More than a hundred people were questioned over the following decades. Robbery was excluded: money was found in the house. In 2007, students at the Bavarian police academy re-examined the case with modern methods and settled on a suspect, but withheld the name because relatives were living. No charge has ever been brought.

Leading explanations

Someone who knew the farm (widely held). The killer used a tool that was already on the premises, moved between the barn and the house without difficulty, and stayed afterwards. Investigators from 1922 onward have generally read this as local knowledge rather than a passing stranger.

Lorenz Schlittenbauer (long-standing suspicion, never charged). Schlittenbauer was a neighbour and was widely believed locally to be the father of the two-year-old Josef. He was among the men who found the bodies, and he moved them, which he explained by saying he was looking for his son. In 1925 he was found at the site of the demolished farm and, asked why, remarked that the killer had been prevented from burying the family because the ground was frozen. This has been read as knowledge he should not have had, and can equally be read as the guess of a farmer who knew the local ground. He sued successfully for slander against people who called him the murderer, and died in 1941 without being charged.

A family motive (context, not evidence). In 1915 Andreas Gruber and his daughter Viktoria were convicted of incest. Andreas served a year in prison; accounts of Viktoria's sentence differ. This is a documented fact about the household and it is not evidence of who killed them, and the registry declines to treat it as such.

Karl Gabriel (not supported). Viktoria's husband was reported killed in France in 1914, and his body was not recovered. The suggestion that he returned has circulated for a century. There is no evidence for it beyond the absence of a body in a war that failed to recover a great many bodies.

Current status

Unsolved. No one has been charged in more than a century. The physical evidence is gone, the skulls are gone, the farm is gone, and every person who was at the scene is dead. What remains is the case file, the autopsy record, and the fact that for four days someone kept the fire going.

Last reviewed: July 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.