1900's Hinterkaifeck Farmhouse Murders in Grobern Germany
The life of a farmer isn’t easy. You have to get up early in the morning, tend to the livestock, or till fields, sow seeds, and reap the crop. It’s hard work, but at least you’re safe from many of the dangers of more urbanized areas, or so you’d think. On April 4, 1922, Lorenz Schlittenbauer and his friends entered the barn of the farmstead, to find four members of the Gruber family brutally bludgeoned, lying dead under the hay. They also found the family’s youngest child and the maid slaughtered in their beds.
What Exactly Happened?
The Hinterkaifeck farmstead was owned by Viktoria Gabriel, a widow of 35 years. She had two children: 7-year-old Cäzilia, and two-year-old Josef. Viktoria’s parents Andreas and Cäzilia (who shares a name with her granddaughter) Gruber lived with them and helped around the farm.
Strange things began happening at the house long before the massacre, however. Six months earlier, the family’s maid quit working at the farm. According to her, she heard footsteps in the attic and felt like she was being watched. There was no evidence to support the claims to the police and soon after, a new maid, Maria Baumgartner, prepared to begin her own employment on March 31 of that year. In addition to these strange occurrences, Andreas had mentioned to neighbors not long before his murder that he had seen two sets of footprints in the snow leading to the house from the nearby woods. There were no tracks headed away from the house. On top of that, he had found a newspaper in the house which didn’t belong to anyone in the family or to any of the neighbors, which meant the postman didn’t leave it there by mistake.
The Discovery:
Only a few days prior to the discovery of the murders, a number of people had gone to the homestead and noticed that none of the family members were working and their dog was nowhere to be found. They described it as eerily quiet and claimed the mail was piling up where the postman had left it. Catching wind of this, Lorenz Schlittenbauer, one of the neighbors, gathered two of the other neighbors, Jakob Sigl and Michael Pöll, and went to investigate. Arriving at the house, they found all the doors were locked, and so they walked to the barn and found the entrance to the machinery room open.
From there they entered the stable, in which under a board covered in hay, they found the bodies of Andreas, his wife Cäzilia, their daughter Viktoria, and her daughter Cäzilia. All of them had been killed by bludgeoning to the head, the older Cäzilia showed signs of strangulation, and the younger Cäzilia had torn her hair out while awaiting death in agony. The barn was connected to the house via a hallway, from where Schlittenbauer entered the living room and unlocked the house’s door for the other two neighbors. They found 44-year-old Maria Baumgartner in her bed, and Josef in his crib, both with similar bludgeoning injuries.
News of the gruesome murders spread fast, as they do in close-knit rural communities. Many of the locals came to the house and inadvertently corrupted the crime scene by poking and prodding and destroying evidence before eventually alerting Munich Police to the situation. Because of how many people inadvertently tampered with the crime scene, it was hard for police to find any forensic evidence, but they did conclude that the family members had been lured to the barn one by one before getting brutally murdered.
The Investigation:
Autopsies were performed by Dr. Johann Baptist Aumüller a day after the discovery. He determined that the victims were likely bludgeoned to death by a farming implement, likely a mattock or pickaxe. This notion would be lent credence by a pickaxe found in the building’s attic during its demolition a year later.
Unlike the murderer, the time of the murder was easy for Police to determine. Maria began working for the Grubers on Friday the 31, and her sister came to visit later that afternoon. The Mailman delivered the mail on Saturday, but it has since laid untouched. Therefore, police deduced that the murder happened on Friday night.
At first, police thought the robbery was the motive for the killing, but police soon found Gruber’s cash store in the house, ruling the robbery out. Evidence suggested that someone had been staying at the house sometime after the murder; someone had been preparing food and feeding the animals. On top of that, neighbors reported seeing smoke in the chimney days after the murders occurred.
During the investigation, police found a number of scandals involving the Grubers were uncovered. One major allegation was that Andreas and Viktoria had incestuous relations, in 1914-15, which has been placed around the time she was pregnant with or shortly after giving birth to Cäzilia. Viktoria claimed that Cäzilia’s father was Karl Gabriel, who was killed in battle in 1914. Not long after the two married, Karl returned to his parents’ homestead before going off to war. A witness speculated that this was a result of Viktoria and Andreas’s indiscretions, likely due to already present questions regarding the identity of Cäzilia's true father. The court found Viktoria and Andreas guilty and sentenced them both to a year in prison - though another report claimed Viktoria only served a month.
The Prime Suspects:
First, to be named a suspect in the murders was Schlittenbauer himself, who initiated the search for the Grubers. Police interviewed him in 1931 as part of the investigation. In the interview, he claimed that he had begun sleeping with Viktoria in 1918. She asked him to marry her, and he was willing to but suspected he was not the father when she told him she was pregnant. He had heard about her indiscretion with Andreas and thought the child might be his. He filed a complaint with the police about incestuous relations between the father and daughter but withdrew the complaint after Viktoria begged him to claim fathership of the child. He never knew who the boy’s father really was, but always referred to Josef as his son. Police were convinced of his innocence from his testimony.
Karl Gabrial was another suspect in the murder. Although he was reported missing in World War 1, his fellow soldiers never recovered his body, leaving to the police the task of confirming his death. Theories rose up about Karl taking revenge on the Grubers as he didn’t believe Josef was his son, but the search for Karl ceased when a few of his comrades confirmed seeing his dead body. Despite this, the story picked up traction again when German prisoners of war claimed to have seen Gabriel in a Soviet Uniform.