Of all the unforeseen consequences of the internet, sleuthing has been one of the most fortuitous. It’s one of the best parts of my job that I get to see people working together on a century-old case, with no expected reward other than the possibility that they might get an answer. And while we all love a good conclusion to a story, life is not always so kind. Sometimes the truth is lost to history with the people left asking.
Today’s is one such story, the sad, twisted tale of a family whose own story got cut short and left only questions in its wake.
Hinterkaifeck
Our story begins at the end of March 1922, in a small farmstead in southern Germany, roughly 70 kilometers north of Munich and 3 kilometers from the nearby town of Waidhofen. There would be little to discern this farmstead from any of the hundreds of others that dot the landscape of this picturesque part of the world. It has a barn, a house, a machine shed, animal sheds, and all are centered around your typical cobblestone yard.
The inhabitants of this farm are six in total: the Gruber family and their maid. Andreas Gruber, aged 63, and his wife Cecilia, aged 71, are the eldest and owners of this family farmstead. Their daughter, Viktoria Gabriel, aged 35, is the war widow of a man called Karl Gabriel, who had died fighting during the First World War, seven years prior in Arras, France. Viktoria’s eldest child, Cecilia Gabriel, named after her grandmother, is aged 7, and the youngest is Josef, aged only 2.
The family maid was Maria Baumgartner, aged 44.
Just a quick side note on names: there were two Cecilias in the family. To save confusion, I will refer to the younger Cecilia by her nickname Cece, and older Cecilia will just remain Cecilia. With that out of the way, we can get into it.
The morning of the 31st of March dawned bright and brisk on our small Bavarian farmstead. As with most mornings, Andreas Gruber was the first to rise and begin milking their small herd of cows. A bite from the winter just past still hangs in the air, and the remnants of the last snowfall still cling to the shaded corners of the yard. Soon it’ll be warm enough to move their small herd of cows out of the barn and into the field.
All is quiet in the barn, aside from the dulcet intonations of the cows, a fact that is reassuring to Andreas, what with all the strange goings-on of late.
Once the cows were milked, Andreas returns inside and is greeted by his family who are eating breakfast around the table. The family is expecting the arrival of their new maid at any moment. This was going to be her first day, the last maid having quit under suspicious circumstances several months ago. The clocks strike 11 AM and there is a knock at the door.
The maid, Maria Baumgartner and her sister are welcomed into their home and introduced to the family. She is shown her room and is left to unpack while the family goes out to tend the fields. Once she has settled, Maria’s sister says farewell and returns to the local town. Though they thought this wasn’t farewell for long, Maria’s sister would be the last person to see the family alive.
It wasn’t until five days later that the bodies would be discovered. On the following day after our scene, two coffee salesmen, Hans and Eduard Schirovsky, arrived on the farm to take the family’s regular order of coffee. After knocking for several minutes and receiving no reply, they looked around, noting that the machine room door had been left open. They continued their route to their nearest neighboring farm, who was also a customer of theirs.
They knocked on Lorenz Schlittenbauer’s door to take his order and asked if the Grubers had gone away. He said they hadn’t, and the brothers moved on.
Then, on the 4th of April, a local mechanic arrived at the farm to repair a food processing machine. After looking around and finding nobody, except the family dog, who had been running around the yard when he arrived, he decided to just wait and see if the family came back. But after an hour of waiting, still nobody had returned. He noticed that the machine room had been left unlocked and also that it was a brand new lock attached to the door.
Assuming they were out and had left the door open for him, he decided to just start working and hoped that they would arrive before he finished. Four hours later, though, he was done and heard nobody arriving or leaving. What was more, the family’s dog was nowhere to be found when he exited the machine shed.
Then on the fifth day, after hearing from his sons that Cece had not turned up to school and that the whole family had missed church on Sunday, the neighbor Lorenz decided to send his sons over to the farm to investigate. They looked around and reported that there was nobody anywhere on the farm, but when they had knocked, they could hear the dog barking from inside the main house.
Now concerned, Lorenz gathered two friends and went to investigate for himself. Upon their arrival, they searched the fields surrounding the property and the main farm buildings but found nobody. What was more, every door was locked, though they could hear some strange noises coming from the barn. With few other options, they broke down the door.
Just a quick note here: a lot of this is based on digitized police documents that are themselves over a century old, which makes the translations a bit rough. With that in mind, I’ll give you Lorenz’s description of the events that followed: “I led the way towards the stable door, but in front of it was a pile of hay. I tried to step through, but something caught my foot and I stumbled into the door frame.
I ignored my stumbling, but Pöll, who was walking behind me, called: ‘There’s a foot!’ I replied, ‘That would be even nicer.’ I turned around and grabbed the foot, pulled it to the corner and realized that this was Andreas Gruber.
I took a closer look and realized that there were more people lying on the ground around us.” What they had found was the bodies of the eldest members of the Gruber family: Cecilia and Andreas Gruber, Viktoria, and Cece. Each one had the same star-shaped injury to the temple of their head.
After finding the family, Lorenz made his way into the family’s home. Inside he found the body of the maid, Maria Baumgartner, in her living quarters, and most tragic of all, the body of the two-year-old Josef still in his crib. Maria had the same star-shaped wound to the head, but young Josef, possibly due to the fragility of his skull, had his head crushed. From here Lorenz returned to the yard and told the others what he had found.
After several minutes of discussion, the group decided to leave the house and inform the relevant authorities.
Now, I’m not sure how things were done back in the day, but to my modern mind, I would assume your first port of call was to tell the police. However, Lorenz told his companions to inform the mayor of the nearest town, which they did. After that, Lorenz then told his sons to go to the nearest telephone and inform the other members of the Gruber family what they had found. Meanwhile, word had spread and interested locals arrived at the farm to see.
Lorenz did his best to prevent anyone from entering either the stable or the house until the police arrived.
The Investigation
From the police’s arrival, there were multiple mistakes made by the investigators in the first few days. Evidence was mishandled and the general public had been able to access the scene for about 12 hours prior to their arrival. The coroner arrived the day following the discovery of the bodies and established that the murders had occurred between late on the night of the 31st of March and early on the morning of the 1st of April.
The evidence showed that the murder weapon was a piece of farm equipment called a mattock, which is kind of like a combination tool between a pickaxe and an adze. It was confirmed that the family did own a mattock but that it was nowhere to be found on the property, meaning the killer had taken the tool after they left.
But those aren’t the details that have made this case famous. Indeed, those are probably the only bits of this case that have some semblance of normality. From here, it starts to get a little bit weird.
The first thing that became clear was that the four victims had been lured out of their home and into the barn, one by one. The killer or killers then killed them with the mattock as they entered and moved the body out of sight before luring the next victim into the barn. Though it’s not known how the killer or killers did this, for one thing testing showed that a human scream wasn’t loud enough to carry from the barn to the house.
Then there was the fact that nobody could think of a reasonable cause for each individual family member to enter the barn, one by one, without one of them being suspicious enough to ask the other family members to go with them. The bodies showed no signs of a fight, which meant that each one had been surprised by the attacks.
In a horrible twist, Cece was likely the last one to die. There were tufts of her hair laying in the hay and in her hands, meaning that she hadn’t been killed instantly by the impact but lay there dying for several hours. And as the investigation continued, things only got weirder. Looking around the loft of the barn and the attic of the house, there were furrows in the hay that was being used as insulation, meaning that someone had been using both locations as a place to sleep.
Andreas’s body was found in his underwear and a shirt. Viktoria and Cecilia were wearing their working day clothes, and Cece was wearing only a shirt. There wasn’t any evidence of sexual assault by or onto anyone. Maria Baumgartner was fully dressed and was found in the kitchen.
Josef was found in his stroller and had sustained the same injuries as all the others but to a greater extent thanks to his small size. All the beds in the house were disturbed and unmade, which may have been caused by the perpetrators or the family members. The fact that Cece and Andreas were half-dressed would suggest that they had been in bed at the time.
After several days of investigating, it also became clear that the perpetrators had been living in the house for several days after the murders. Food was missing from the pantry, the fire had been lit as recently as the day before the discovery of the bodies, many of the family’s chores had been done, and the animals and the dog had been fed.
And interviews with those living in the surrounding area only created more questions. First were those who had visited the farm in between the time of the murders and their discovery. It became clear that the killer had been inside the house when the mechanic had worked on the food processing machine, explaining why the dog had disappeared once he had finished working.
Then it came out that in the days and weeks leading up to the 31st of March, there had been many strange goings-on around the farm. In early November of the previous year, a newspaper had been found on the property that hadn’t been ordered by anyone in the family. What was strange about this was that the paper in question was sold only in Munich, 70 kilometers away, and was not ordered by anyone in the local or surrounding towns and villages.
Then there was the maid who had worked on the farm prior to Maria Baumgartner. During her interview, she explained that her reason for quitting was that she believed the house to be haunted. When asked why, she explained that for several months, she and the family had been hearing strange noises coming from the attic of the house and said that they sounded like footsteps.
This has been corroborated by other seasonal workers who had been on the farm during this period and people that members of the family had spoken to about the problem. On several occasions, Andreas is reported to have searched the attic but found nothing.
Interviewing the neighbors, the investigators found out that only days before the attacks happened, Andreas Gruber had told them that he had found two sets of footprints walking side-by-side in the freshly fallen snow. They started at the forest behind their house and went straight to the farm’s machine shed. What was strange was that these footprints did not return to the forest but ended at the machine shed door. The lock had been broken but nothing was missing from inside.
The final and most recent bit of information that they got from their interviews was that on the day of the 31st, Cece had attended school. She had told her friends that the previous night, her mother, Viktoria, had fled the house following a violent quarrel, though it wasn’t clear who she had been arguing with, and she was found hours later in the woods behind the house.
At first the police thought that the murders may have been financially motivated, a robbery gone wrong if you will. After all, the family were known in the area to be quite wealthy, and it was rumored that a large stash of gold and cash were somewhere in the house. This was corroborated by the fact that they found a large stash of gold and cash in the house.
The problem was that, with all the other evidence of strange happenings going on around the farm, and the fact that they actually found the gold and cash still in the house, it’s unlikely that this was a robbery. The robbers had days to find that gold. If they had been looking for it, there is no chance they wouldn’t have found it. The investigators suspected that there was something else going on here.
Based on the evidence and information gathered during interviews, the investigators knew that whomever had done this must have had some reason other than financial gain. Which opened the door to a much wider pool of possibilities: the spurned lover, someone with a grudge, a personal vendetta, a drifter who had taken up residence in the attic, or just somebody who traveled the countryside killing. Whatever the case, it was important that the police find anyone who may have had cause to kill them.
The Family
So, we’ve met the family. Why don’t we spend a bit of time getting to know them? First we have Andreas, who was the head of the family. Reports on his character have been varied, but the majority of them agree on a few things: he was unpleasant, a devout Christian, rude, a bit of an oddball, and miserly—or as we Brits like to put it, a bit of a tight-arse. There was also that other part of his personality, the incestualist part… because this case is apparently every kind of weird.
I’d like to offer my congratulations to all the viewers and listeners who picked up on the discrepancy between the date that Karl Gabriel died and the fact that Viktoria had a two-year-old son and no new husband. If you didn’t spot the difference or need a reminder, Karl Gabriel was Viktoria’s husband and the father of Cece. He died in France, seven years before the events at the farm, leaving a five-year gap between his death and the birth of the youngest member of the family, baby Josef. And Viktoria’s father was the one who filled that gap.
This incestuous relationship, or rather abuse, had been officially documented when both Viktoria and Andreas were convicted of it by a court when Josef was born. So the whole town knew. Going forward, just bear all that in mind, as it will become relevant later.
There isn’t much to be said about the older Cecilia—she had been the owner of the farm when she married Andreas Gruber, making him the property owner. After getting married, the Grubers ultimately had three children, of which Viktoria Gruber would be the only surviving child. Though this isn’t necessarily purely down to the high child mortality rate at the time. Later interviews with neighbors talked about how these children suffered at the hands of their parents.
One of the neighbors is quoted as saying, “Quite frankly, they weren’t good people. The small children had to stay in the cellar for days, and when you passed by, you could hear the children crying in the cellar.” So they were winning no awards for parenting.
It’s safe to say that Viktoria was not happy. In fact, it was the neighbor that discovered the bodies of the family that gave us the deepest insight into the mind of Viktoria. Lorenz Schlittenbauer was also a farmer, though for some reason I have also seen him referred to as the sled builder, and I really don’t know why—possibly a poor translation. Anyway, about a year after her husband’s death, Viktoria began hanging around Lorenz’s farm to “chat” with him.
I have personally read the statements given by him, and it must be said that, for a woman living in this time, I am rather impressed by how brazen Viktoria was in her advances towards Lorenz. Suffice to say that Viktoria’s methods were about six decades ahead of Playboy.
Lorenz was married at the time, though, and so he rebuffed her advances. But when Lorenz’s wife died several years later, he and Viktoria began courting each other once again. Though this never progressed to marriage, there were several facts about this relationship that are notable. Even though they never married, Viktoria did care for Lorenz, and she confided in him that her father was having the incestuous relationship with her and that this had begun shortly after her husband had died.
When Viktoria got pregnant, and owing to the timeline, she and Lorenz both knew that Viktoria’s father was the father of the child. Viktoria didn’t want it known that her father was doing this, and so she begged Lorenz to do the necessary paperwork to make him the father. However, this cost a fairly large sum of money, a sum that Viktoria stole from the aforementioned stash of money that was in the house.
Without drawing out the entire sordid affair, Lorenz and Andreas had a falling out over this money, which ultimately led to Lorenz outing Andreas and Viktoria for the nature of their relationship.
The Concerned Neighbor
Now, once the investigators heard about this little transposition, they began taking a bit more interest in Lorenz himself. And the more they looked, the guiltier he became. Remember when Lorenz first went looking around the farm? He chose to break down the door of the barn, saying that he could hear noises.
The strange thing about this was that he already had a key to the main house on him. In fact, he was the only person in the entire area, other than the family members themselves, who had a key to the farmhouse. If we are to assume that he thought the family was still alive, why would he make the decision to commit property damage instead of using the key that he already had?
According to the two other people that had assisted Lorenz in the search of the farm, once they had found the bodies in the barn, Lorenz had left the pair of them to search the house. Apparently, his companions argued with him, saying that the killer may still be in the house, though he seemed to have no concern for this, saying, “I am going to find my son,” referring to the two-year-old Josef. Then, during the interviews with Lorenz’s sons, the police found out that Lorenz had not returned home on the night of the murders. Though, according to Lorenz, he had been working late and decided to sleep in his barn.
All of a sudden Lorenz was in some very hot water, and the police’s theory went as follows. The night before the murders, Lorenz had gone round to the farm to discuss something with Viktoria. This became a heated argument and caused her to flee from the house. Then, the next day, Lorenz finished his work and made his way over to the house once again.
Upon arrival, he asked if he could speak to Viktoria privately and took her to the barn. Whether premeditated or not, this ultimately resulted in Lorenz taking the mattock from the wall and killing Viktoria with it. He then returned to the house and individually asked the family members to accompany him to the barn, where he killed them.
There are already some gaping flaws in this theory, but we will get to those in a minute. So he lured the family members out of the house individually, and then once he was done, he decided to finish the maid and the infant who had begun the whole thing. Then the next day, realizing the implications of what he had done, he began visiting the house and attending to the family’s chores so as to buy himself time to think of his next move. Finally, after their absence began getting noticed, he decided to attend to discover the bodies for himself.
This theory explains why someone would live in the house after the murders and why he didn’t just check the door with his key when first visiting. It explains why he was unconcerned about the possibility of the killer still being in the house and also why he wanted to go in alone, if it meant that he could do one last sweep for evidence.
But in my opinion, this theory is iffy at best. Yes, it supplies the motive, but after that, it’s all downhill. Sure he had a feud with Andreas, but that particular feud had allegedly been resolved. They had buried the hatchet months before the killings and were on good terms again—a fact that is corroborated by both Lorenz himself and others who lived in the area and knew of the issue. Then there is the fact that it’s unrealistic to assume Lorenz, who had just committed a brutal murder, was compos mentis enough to think of an excuse for individually luring four people out of their home in the middle of the night without one of them being the least bit suspicious. I’ve been at this for days and I can’t think of one.
Then there were the coffee sellers, who went straight to Lorenz’s house after leaving the farm. There was no way that he could have beaten them there if he had been in the house. They say that there was almost certainly someone tending the stove inside the house when they knocked, so the killer must have still been inside.
Finally, and this is just based on my own opinion: I have read a lot about Lorenz and read his interviews. Though it is only from the written word and I have no way to confirm this, he just doesn’t seem the type to commit a murder. He was reasonable and cooperative with the police; he also volunteered the story about the disagreement with Andreas. If he had been the murderer, surely he would have avoided talking about his motive at all cost, or at least downplayed it.
Ultimately there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Lorenz, and he was let go. In spite of this, he never managed to live down the arrest, and for the rest of his life he was seen as the killer of Hinterkaifeck. Though this didn’t seem to hurt him too much, as he fought and won several lawsuits against his most outspoken defamers.
Outside of Lorenz’s arrest and subsequent release, the police could come up with next to no other potential suspects, and only a few arrests were made in the years following the murders. However, this story stuck in the public’s mind, and there have been many subsequent investigations that resulted in one arrest and many, many more theories, a few of which we will cover now.
The Theories
First was the theory of the unwelcome guest. All of the strange happenings going on around the farm in the weeks and months leading up to the murders suggests that there was an unknown person or persons living somewhere on the farm without the family’s knowledge. This would explain why there was no sign of someone breaking into the house. The depressions in the hay insulation in both the barn and the house attic are indicative of someone sleeping there, and it would explain why they continued to eat the food and tend to the farm after the murders.
If this were the case, then something must have caused them to come out of hiding and commit the murders on that night. The theory states that the killer or killers were discovered by either Cecilia or Viktoria. They then killed them so as to avoid being detected. When they didn’t return, the family members individually went to the barn to go searching for them.
Though I haven’t seen anything mentioned about this online, I find it hard to believe that Cece and Andreas both individually made the decision to enter the barn when they realized that the other two were missing. Partly because they were both half-naked, meaning they were both getting ready for bed. If they had willingly chosen to go outside, why did they do it separately and not at least put trousers on before going? And if they were forced out of the house, why was Maria Baumgartner still there?
I’m not trying to lead you to some conclusion here; I’m genuinely asking. There aren’t any answers to this that I can find, and I can’t think of a way that a person could convince these two to leave the house without alerting Maria Baumgartner and the baby. Whichever way you spin it, it doesn’t make sense. If they had been forced out, it’s reasonable that at least one person would have fought back, especially if they thought their life or the life of the baby was at risk, but there was no evidence that any of the inhabitants did.
The next theory is that it was the work of a vagrant or traveling salesman. However, this was very quickly disproven because again, there was that big stash of money that would have been taken otherwise. Also, there was nobody spotted in the surrounding area during the weeks prior or following the murders that fit that description, and anybody that was found had an alibi.
After that, the theories become rather more outlandish. One is that the killer was none other than Karl Gabriel. If that name isn’t familiar, don’t worry, I was confused too. He was Viktoria’s dead husband, so… yeah, I’ll let you figure out the implications of that one. In a bizarre twist that I still can’t wrap my head around, this theory has gotten a lot more credence than I think it’s due, considering the facts available.
Pretty much, there are two pieces of evidence for this theory. First, his body was never recovered from no-man’s-land in France. Second was that at some point in his life he expressed a desire to move to the USSR. The theory says that when he ran into no-man’s-land, he somehow managed to not get shot for real but did manage to fake getting shot.
Then he somehow managed to crawl out of no-man’s-land without either side noticing or shooting him. Then he somehow managed to make it back to Hinterkaifeck without getting picked up for desertion. Then, for some reason, decided to move into the attic, again without getting noticed. And then proceeded to kill his whole family and then ran away to the USSR.
The only other piece of evidence for this was that at the end of WW2, some German prisoners of war spoke about a German-speaking Soviet who had released them. This Soviet claimed to be the killer of Hinterkaifeck. I haven’t the foggiest idea why this theory even made it onto the Wikipedia article, let alone the police reports and the online discussion forums.
After that, we have the theory that it was a group of people all acting in concert. When the investigation began to run out of suspects, the investigators called in Miss Ju—that’s J-U, listeners. In a move that’s simply baffling to me and more than likely because of the era that this investigation occurred in, the investigators decided they should call in a psychic to try and get a description or descriptions of those involved.
This is an absolutely ridiculous route to go down, and the transcripts read as such. When the spiritualist, known as Miss Ju, entered the Hinterkaifeck farm, she began to have premonitions that were actually very helpful in giving us a detailed and accurate description of two men who were then tracked down, arrested and convicted… Wait… Hold on… Yeah, sorry, my mistake, I must have misread the transcript. What she actually did was exactly fuck all.
I’ll give you a quick summary of her statement. She started by identifying a man with broad shoulders, then she saw a man with dark, slicked-back hair. Then she started wandering around the house, talking about the maid. Then she started talking to the maid. Then she started talking to Cece, then she started giving her description of the killer’s walk to the house, the sound of the chickens in the barn and such. Then she started talking about a group of three black men, all arguing about whether they should kill the infant. Then she got a headache and stopped.
Well, thanks very much, Miss Ju, that was really helpful. Everyone be on the lookout for a tall man with broad shoulders and dark slicked-back hair—shouldn’t be too difficult to find in 1920s Germany. As for the three black men she mentioned, they enquired about that, and it will surprise absolutely nobody to hear that not a single person had seen a group of three roaming black men in the area. Don’t worry, Miss Ju, everyone makes mistakes.
I mean, who among us hasn’t confused a racist worldview with visions from the spirit realm, hmm?
The Final Suspects
As the months and years came to pass, it started to become apparent just how poorly the investigation had been handled by the police and the coroner. Once the autopsies had been conducted on the bodies, the heads of each of the victims were removed—yes, removed—and sent to Munich to be studied.
The transit process and the process of prepping their heads for study destroyed a good deal of evidence that could have been pulled, though I haven’t been able to find out what precisely that might be. The result was that they couldn’t be certain of any results other than the knowledge that the victims were indeed dead. Then, a couple of decades later, the skulls were lost entirely during the heavy bombing sustained by most German cities during WW2. The bodies were buried as a group, excluding the maid who was buried by her family elsewhere, and all of them were still missing their heads, of course.
Several years after the killings, the farm was destroyed to make way for more land for growing. Which did give us one of the final clues of the investigation: the missing mattock, which had been used as the murder weapon. It seemed that it had been stowed in a hidden compartment in the floor of the hayloft in the barn.
As public attention began to switch to other things like the rise of the Nazi party and the Second World War, the investigation was shelved and became a cold case. Officially it was closed in 1955. However, there was one final chapter to this story. Allow me to introduce you to the Gump brothers, Adolf and Anton.
These two men were suspected as early as a week after the discovery of the bodies; however, they couldn’t be found, and then the case was suspended while Germany was doing that whole Nazi thing. When the investigation resumed in 1951, a new piece of evidence came to light that made them the number one suspects.
On October 20th, 1941, just shy of 20 years after the murders, an unknown woman lay dying on her deathbed, and as is the custom of Christianity, a pastor was called to her side. In her final moments, she confided to him that her brothers were the murderers of Hinterkaifeck. She explained why they had done it and who they were. Then she told the pastor that he could inform the police of her brother’s alleged crimes after her death.
The pastor wrote down everything she said on a random slip of paper, gave her a blessing, and then left. However, he chose not to go to the police with this information; instead he chose to invoke the seal of confession and gave no testimony, because reasons, I guess. The only reason we know about this event at all is because he told a group of 11 children during a Sunday school session. Apparently, it’s not just the Catholic pastors that ruin childhoods.
Then, a decade and a world war passes, and some of those kids seemed to remember a creepy guy in Sunday school telling them about a dead woman and her murderous brothers. It’s worth pointing out that the people who chose to write to the officers handling the investigation did so independently of each other and both referenced this event, giving the name of the pastor—which would not be the last time priests got reported by the kids from Sunday school. This priest was called Anton Hauber, who ran the church in a town called Augsburg.
They visited him, and he confirmed that this had indeed happened. However, he could remember nothing of the event, meaning that he had forgotten the name of the woman and therefore her brothers. What’s more, he had lost the slip that he had written the information down on.
He gave all the information he could, though, and the investigators used this to find a woman who matched the description. The name they came up with was Krezanz Maier, maiden name Gump. They also found out that prior to her death, she had told one other pastor of her suspicions of her brothers. This pastor’s name was August Ritzl.
With this information, they looked for a verification of their hunch. They managed to track him down in a hospital in Augsburg. He himself was very near his death, was very weak, and could barely speak. However, when asked the name “Gump,” he nodded.
This woman’s brothers were, of course, Anton and Adolf.
As I said, the brothers were already suspects in 1922 but couldn’t be tracked down. In the intervening decades, Adolf had died—also one of the Gump brothers died too. Anton was still alive. A judge issued a warrant for his arrest, and a manhunt ensued. After several months, he was tracked down in Ingolstadt, a city 30 kilometers north of Hinterkaifeck, and was taken in for questioning.
In 1922, Anton had gone to live with Adolf in his home, which was situated several miles from the Hinterkaifeck farmstead. His presence there was verified by work records from the time. Adolf, for his part, had been associated with a different ongoing murder investigation. Though his involvement was never proven, he was known to be a member of a group that had orchestrated a separate murder in the past.
The little information I could gather about this group says that they weren’t a political movement and seemed to just be a group of mates who made a habit of killing farmers. Anton hadn’t been directly involved in this group but is likely to have interacted with them, seeing as he was living with Adolf at the time of the murders.
During his interrogation, the investigators came at him with all the evidence they could, and there was a lot more than just the stuff that I have mentioned. However, it was all circumstantial and easily explained away. As for the 31st of March—well, that’s where the speculation begins. We can’t know if either brother was there. His employer had no record of presence or absence on the days around the murders, which could have been enough to convict or exonerate him.
Some internet sleuths have proven that the company he worked for was in the midst of a workers’ strike at the time, and so we know with some certainty that he wasn’t working on those dates. The only other piece of evidence that could be brought against him was something he said to his cellmate while he was awaiting his interrogation: “And all because of the child.” When this accusation was leveled, he initially reacted indignantly but then kept quiet and refused to answer any questions for the next few minutes. The police had a hunch that his motives may perhaps be that he believed himself to be the father of Josef; however, this was a very loose theory.
What was missing was a piece of evidence that gave a certain motive and tied him to the family in some way. Without this, though, the police could no longer hold him and had to release him after three days. The investigation persisted for two more years after the release of Anton Gump, but it was eventually shut down in 1955. It has been picked up by various crime investigation agencies, but none have been successful, and no new clues have been uncovered.
That was until 2006, when one final clue came to the surface: a Hinterkaifeck death note. No, I’m not talking about that anime my friend keeps banging on about; I am talking about a note that is released when a person dies. Starting as early as the 17th century, people have been writing death notes to spread the news of a death or deaths—think of the postcard version of an obituary. They contain factual information about the deceased, a passage from the Bible, and perhaps a religious image.
The Hinterkaifeck murders had several printings of death notes. The death note found in 2006 was one of the printings of the Hinterkaifeck death notes. This one was conspicuous, however, for the fact that it had a variety of handwritten notes all over it. Most of these scrawlings are illegible and faded; however, some have been deciphered.
The words are not directly written in German; they are in something known as Gabelsberger Shorthand. This is a kind of German abbreviated writing script that uses derivatives of the normal Latin alphabet to allow for someone to write faster without missing information. At the time, it was only scholars and members of the clergy that knew how to use this system. As I said, not all of it is legible, but there have been a few short phrases translated: “God’s Punishment,” “1 Year,” and “incest.”
I seem to recall there being a missing piece of evidence in this case. I believe it was a slip of paper, written by a member of the clergy, who had been called to receive a deathbed confession from a woman stating that her brothers were the Hinterkaifeck murderers. As you may recall, Anton was quoted as saying, “and all because of the child.” This may be the missing piece of evidence that gives us the motive of the Gump brothers.
Then again, it could also be an overzealous member of the clergy that wanted to damn the family for what they were accused—we can’t really know.
Wrap Up
And those are the Hinterkaifeck murders, a sad and rather twisted question mark in the history of crime. The four theories being Lorenz, the unidentified resident, the drifter, or the Gump brothers. Personally, I think if I had to rank them in terms of likelihood, I would say it was the drifter, the Gump brothers, the resident, and then Lorenz.
If I had to give my own theory of what happened on that night, without having to name an actual perpetrator, here it is. We can discard the sounds of footsteps in the attic and the random newspaper; it seems too unlikely that there was anybody in the house for that long without anyone noticing. I think the first time we have any interaction with the Hinterkaifeck murderers was when we found those footsteps leading to the machine room door.
I believe that the murderers were hiding in the hidden compartment in the barn where the murders took place and only came out at night when the coast was clear. On the night of the murders, I believe that the murderers exited their hiding spot, only to be discovered by Viktoria and Cecilia. They were then disposed of in the barn, which will have occurred at some time in the mid to late evening. After perhaps an hour or two, it was time for bed.
Cece and Andreas were both in bed and wondering why the other two had not returned from the barn yet.
Andreas went first and was killed, though Cece may have heard him and came running when she was also killed. Finally, the killers thought that they had finished their job and made their way to the house, whereupon they found the maid and disposed of her. The following morning, they were awoken by the sound of the baby, and upon the approach of the coffee sellers, killed the child to make sure they weren’t found. After a few days and several people poking around the farm, they decided to leave.
It’s certainly not a perfect theory, and there are perhaps some flaws in it, not to mention the fact that it relies on a certain amount of chance and doesn’t actually answer who did it. But I think it’s the most likely given all the information. It’s unlikely that we will ever get an answer, though.
After nearly a century and such poor management of the evidence to start with, there isn’t much cause for hope that we will get closure. The Hinterkaifeck death notes were a piece that could have solved the puzzle, but again, given so much time has passed, it’s unsurprising that they can’t confirm anything, and I think it’s likely that they will be the last thing to come out of this case. Thankfully the killer or killers, whoever they are, are long dead and buried, and we don’t need to answer these questions as a matter of safety but rather interest.
So to all the internet sleuths of the present and future who may just find us an answer, I thank you.
Key Takeaways
- Six people were murdered at the Hinterkaifeck farm in 1922 by unknown killers using a mattock, with evidence suggesting the perpetrators lived there afterward.
- The Gruber family had a documented history of incest between father Andreas and daughter Viktoria, producing son Josef after her husband’s death.
- Neighbor Lorenz Schlittenbauer was briefly arrested as a suspect due to his relationship with Viktoria and suspicious behavior, but was released for lack of evidence.
- The Gump brothers became prime suspects in 1951 after a deathbed confession, but Anton Gump was released after three days due to purely circumstantial evidence.
- A 2006 discovery of a death note with shorthand annotations mentioning ‘God’s Punishment’ and ‘incest’ offered potential motive but could not definitively solve the case.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where did the Hinterkaifeck murders take place?
The Hinterkaifeck murders took place at the end of March 1922, at a small farmstead in southern Germany, roughly 70 kilometers North of Munich and 3 kilometers from the nearby town of Waidhofen.
Who were the victims of the Hinterkaifeck murders?
The six victims were: Andreas Gruber (63), his wife Cäzillia/Cecilia (71), their daughter Viktoria Gabriel (35), Viktoria’s children Cäzillia/Cece (7) and Josef (2), and the family’s maid Maria Baumgartner (44).
How were the victims killed?
The victims were killed with a mattock, a farm equipment tool that is a combination between a pickaxe and an adze. Five victims had star-shaped injuries to the temple of their head, while 2-year-old Josef had his head crushed due to the fragility of his skull.
When were the bodies discovered, and by whom?
The bodies were discovered on April 5, 1922, five days after the murders. Neighbor Lorenz Schlittenbauer, after hearing from his sons that Cece had not attended school and the family missed church, gathered two friends and went to investigate the farm himself. They broke down the barn door and discovered the bodies.
What evidence suggested someone had been living on the farm before and after the murders?
Evidence included: furrows in the hay insulation in both the barn loft and house attic indicating someone had been sleeping there; a newspaper from Munich found on the property that no one had ordered; the maid and other workers reporting strange footsteps from the attic; and after the murders, missing food from the pantry, a recently lit fire, completed family chores, and fed animals suggesting the perpetrators lived in the house for several days after the killings.
What was unusual about the incestuous relationship in the Gruber family?
Andreas Gruber and his daughter Viktoria were convicted of incest by a court when Josef was born. This created a 5-year gap between Viktoria’s husband Karl Gabriel’s death in 1915 and Josef’s birth in 1921, making Andreas the father of his own grandson. The whole town knew about this officially documented relationship.
Why did Lorenz Schlittenbauer become a suspect?
Lorenz became a suspect because: he had a key to the farmhouse but chose to break down the barn door instead; he went into the house alone claiming to find ‘his son’ Josef despite warnings the killer might still be inside; he had not returned home on the night of the murders; and he had a prior feud with Andreas Gruber over money Viktoria stole to pay Lorenz to falsely claim paternity of Josef.
What was the deathbed confession related to the Gump brothers?
On October 20, 1941, a dying woman named Krezanz Maier (maiden name Gump) confessed to a pastor named Anton Hauber that her brothers, Adolf and Anton Gump, were the Hinterkaifeck murderers. The pastor wrote it down but invoked the seal of confession and didn’t go to police. The story only emerged when children from his Sunday school remembered it and reported it to investigators in 1951.
What was found in the 2006 discovery of a Hinterkaifeck death note?
A death note from the Hinterkaifeck murders was found with handwritten notes in Gabelsberger Shorthand, a writing system known mainly by scholars and clergy. Some deciphered phrases included ‘God’s Punishment,’ ‘1 Year,’ and ‘incest.‘
What happened to the murder weapon?
The mattock used as the murder weapon was missing from the property after the murders. It was later found decades afterward when the farm was demolished to make way for agricultural land—it had been hidden in a compartment in the floor of the hayloft in the barn.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: The Hinterkaifeck Murders
- Hero image source by Pir6mon / openverse, by-sa.
