This week, Cassie covers Germany’s Hinterkaifeck Murders. In a seemingly idyllic village on a quiet farm, tragedy strikes. After an entire family is mysteriously slaughtered, will evidence be found to convict the person responsible for the gruesome crimes?
On the night of March 31, 1922 at a small Bavarian farmstead located 43 miles north of Munich, Germany, Andreas Gruber and his family, Cazilia Gruber, Viktoria Gabriel, Victoria’s children Cazilia and Josef and their maid, Maria, were found decapitated. The murderer used a mattock that belonged to the family. The murderer killed the family with blows to the head. After killing four of the family members in the barn, the murderer made their way inside the home, killed two year old Josef and then the families maid, Maria, At the time of their deaths the family members were Andreas 63, Cazilia 72, Viktoria (35) and her children Cazilia (7) and Josef (2) along with Maria (44).
Leading up to the murders, strange things started to occur at the family farm. Six months before the attack, the family maid quit her job. She said she had quit the job because she heard sounds in the attic and believed the house to be haunted. The same months as the murder, Andreas Gruber, found a strange newspaper from Munich, Germany on the property. He had no memory of buying the paper and figured the postman “lost the paper” at his property. Then, days before the murders occured, Andreas Gruber discovered tracks in the fresh snow on his property. The tracks led from the forest to a broken door lock in the farm’s machine room. That same night, the family heard footsteps in the attic; but when Andreas went to check out the attic, he found no one. He even searched the whole house just to be sure, still coming up empty.
On April 1, two salesmen, Hans Schirovsky and Eduard Schirovsky arrived in Hinterkaifeck. When no one answered the door, the men walked around the yard looking for signs of someone, they noticed that the gate to the machine house was open, but decided not to enter. On April 4, an assembler named Albert Hofner went to Hinterkaifeck to repair the engine of the food chopper at the farm. He stated that he did not see any of the family and only heard the sounds of the farm animals and the dog inside the barn. He waited around for the family for one hour before deciding to just begin his repairs. He worked for nearly 4.5 hours, never discovering their bodies.
That same day, at 3:30 in the afternoon, Lorenz Schlittenbauer sent his son Johann and stepson Josef to go to the farm and see if they could make contact with the family. When the boys returned and reported that they did not see anyone, Schlittenbauer decided to go himself. He arrived at the farm with Michael Poll and Jakob Sigl. When the three men entered the barn, they found the bodies of Andreas, Cazilla, Viktoria and granddaughter, Cazilia. They continued into the house finding the maid, Maria, first and then young Josef. The men contacted the police and an investigation ensued.
The day after the bodies were found, court appointed physician Johann Baptist Aumuller performed the autopsies on the bodies in the barn. He concluded that the mattock was the “most likely” murder weapon, but there was no weapon left behind at the scene, so he could not definitively claim it was a mattock. As he continued to examine the bodies, the evidence showed that the young girl, Cazilia, had been alive for several hours after the assault. The physician said she had “torn her hair out in tufts while laying in the straw.” When the physician completed his autopsies, he sent the skulls of each victim to Munich for further, in-depth examination.
After reviewing all of the evidence and examining the crime scene, detectives could not decide on a clear motive. Without a solid lead on suspects, motive or more concrete evidence, the files were closed in 1955.
While the case has remained unsolved for decades, some notable suspects have come up in the investigation.
Karl Gabriel was the husband of Viktoria Gabriel, the daughter of Andreas and Cazilia. Karl had been killed in Arras, France in December 1914 during WWI. But his body had never been recovered. After the entire family was murdered, people began to speculate that maybe Karl didn’t actually die in the war. Viktoria’s son Josef was born out of wedlock and people thought Viktoria could have had the child with her own father, Andreas, and that they did not report this to the village. To add to this theory, at the end of WWII, some war captives who were released prematurely from Soviet captivity claimed they were sent home by a man claiming to be the murderer of Hinterkaifeck. Some of the men claimed the Soviet officer was actually Karl Gabriel. However, some of them changed their stories, destroying their credibility, so Karl being a suspect was quickly diminished.
Lorenz Schlittenbauer was one of the men who found the bodies of the family. He was a widower after his first wife died in 1918. Some believe that Lorenz then began a relationship with Viktoria Gabriel and is actually the father of Josef. The initials “L.S.” appear on Josef’s birth certificate; though some also say these could be the initials of the doctor. Lorenz became a suspect to some shortly after the murders because his actions were deemed somewhat suspicious. Those that were with Lorenz when they discovered the bides said they had to break the gate to enter the barn, but when they continued to the house to search for the others, he used a key to unlock the front door and just walked right in. Allegedly, a key to the house had been missing for several days before the murders; however, some think that because Lorenz was a neighbor of the family and even potentially the lover of Viktoria, it would not have been strange for him to have a key to the house. When the men that went along with him to look for the family asked him why he had entered the home without knowing if a murderer was still lurking around, Lorenz allegedly told his friends he was “looking for his son Josef.” Though none of this could be proven, the investigation could prove that Lorenz was responsible for disturbing the bodies, which resulted in compromising the investigation to an extent.
The Hinterkaifeck home was demolished in 1925 and there were reports that Lorenz continually visited the location. For years and years after the murders, Lorenz remained suspicious of locals and he even went to court and won civil suits for defamation of his name for people claiming he was the murderer of the family.
Next we have the Gump Brothers. In 1951, Prosecutor Andreas Popp investigated Anton Gump for the murders at Hinterkaifeck. The reason Prosecutor Popp went in this direction is because of the Gump Brother’s sister. On her deathbed, Krezentia Mayer, claimed that both of her brothers, Anton and Adolf, had committed the murders. After her claim, Anton was taken into police custody but the other brother, Adolf, had died in 1944. After an initial investigation, the case against Anton was dismissed. In 1954, the case against Anton was officially discontinued because there was no evidence to “prove he participated in the crime.”
In 1971, a woman named Therese T. wrote a letter about an event that occurred during her youth. She said that at the age of twelve, she witnessed her mother receiving a visit from the mother of Karl and Andreas S. The woman allegedly claimed her sons were responsible for the murders of the family at Hinterkaifeck. This woman said “Andreas regretted that he lost his penknife.” When the farm was demolished, a pocket knife was found but not assigned to any family member as a belonging. This woman’s claims were tracked briefly in 1971, but followed with no conclusive results.
Before the family hired their Maria, they had another maid: Kreszenz Rieger, who worked for the family from November 1920 to September 1921. Rieger suspected that brothers Anton and Karl Bichler committed the murders. She said Anton “had helped with the potato harvest at Hinterkaifeck and knew the land well.” She also said that Anton talked to her often about the family. Allegedly, also saying the family “ought to be dead.” Rieger also reported speaking with a stranger through her bedroom window at night. She believed the person she spoke to was Anton’s brother, Karl. She suspected that Anton and Karl committed the murders alongside Georg Siegl, who worked at Hinterkaifeck and knew that the family had money. Supposedly, Siegl had broken into the home at Hinterkaifeck in November of 1920, shortly after Rieger began her position; he had stolen a number of items but he also denied the allegation. However, Georg also noted that he “Carved the handle of the murder weapon” when he worked at Hinterkaifeck and knew exactly where the tool was kept.
98 years have passed since the brutal murders of the family that resided at the Hinterkaifeck farm. Though multiple suspects have been questioned and many investigations have ensued, this case has remained cold and is still unsolved to this day.
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