The Hinterkaifeck Massacre

I hate the term “murder porn,” but what do call it when you find yourself up at 2 am, googling obscure murders to get to sleep?  Most nights, I’ll settle on an episode of Deadly Women or a JSC video on how serial killers fake insanity; but the Hinterkaifeck Massacre is one I try to avoid too close to bedtime, due to the sheer spooky nature of the killings. If this is you too, go ahead and check out that weird noise in the hall, pull those covers extra close, and settle in.

On April 4th, 1922 in Bavaria, Germany, neighbors of the sleepy Hinterkaifeck Homestead stumbled upon a grisly scene: elderly couple Andreas and Cazilia Gruber, their adult daughter Viktoria and her 7-year-old daughter Cazilia, lay bludgeoned to death in the family barn. Inside a bedroom of the main house, they found the bodies of maid, Maria Baumgartner and Viktoria's baby son, Josef, dead of similar ax wounds to the skull. In a bizarrely pitiful gesture, the murderer had covered Josef’s face with a blanket after he'd hacked him to death in his cot.

Pools of congealed blood indicated that some time had passed. Yet neighbors would testify that they saw smoke coming from the Gruber’s chimney that very day, and could tell that their livestock had been fed. The family dog was wandering the house unharmed. Dishes of half-eaten food were deposited in the kitchen, as though the killers had simply wanted the house to themselves. Who would stick around with a house full of bodies? If only the dog could talk..

Valuables in the home were untouched; this killer was unmotivated by money. The Grubers were not well-liked, but they had no known enemies to provoke such a deeply personal attack. Those who knew them said they kept to themselves, but did attend church, and Viktoria sang in the choir. Their absence from Sunday service and young Cazilia's absences from school had prompted the small party to enter the Gruber's barn and discover the first four victims stacked on top of each other, haphazardly concealed with hay. Little Cazilia's fists were filled with clumps of her own hair, meaning she lingered in absolute distress before finally succumbing--and may have lived to see her mother and grandparents slaughtered before her.

The brutal slaying sent shockwaves through the small community and kicked off a very long investigation. Over a hundred suspects were questioned, some as recently as 1986. Most had little connection to the reclusive Grubers, and dubious motive. Leads fizzled out; but the most promising suspect was Lorenz Schlittenbauer, who was among the searchers. Lorenz was the rumored father of Viktoria’s son, Josef, and had long resisted paying child support. Could this murder be the result of a lover’s quarrel? Viktoria was the only one dressed in day clothes, leading some to speculate that she’d gone out to the barn first—perhaps to meet with Lorenz while the family slept. Her parents and daughter may have heard her agonized cries and come running, only to meet their own gruesome ends.

Lorenz had an unsettling familiarity with the layout of the house. He knew that the door to the maid’s room jammed, and could only be opened by turning the handle upwards. He also volunteered to tend to the family’s livestock while the initial investigation took place. Perhaps his automatic instinct to care for the animals linked him to the killer.

Lorenz was not tried for murder due to lack of compelling evidence. One by one, the other suspects, which included a serial rapist, were also eliminated. At the end of their tethers, police detectives enlisted psychics to "divine" the fates of the dead by meditating over each of their skulls. Early 20th century investigators did not leave supernatural explanations off the menu. Theories were floated, some more plausible than others. A few suggested that the vengeful spirit of Karl Gabriel, Viktoria's late husband, had returned from the trenches of war to murder his family.

A thorough search of the attic revealed food, human feces, newspaper, and the murder weapon. The killer had used a mattock fashioned by Andreas himself. A mattock is a pick-like tool with an adze on one end and a chisel on the other. It was believed, due to the strength it would take to wield and inflict such extensive bodily trauma with a mattock, that the killer was likely male.

What makes this tale not only horrifying, but tragic is that it was preventable. The Gruber family had seen multiple warnings in the preceding weeks that might have led them to flee. Days prior, Andreas had spotted unfamiliar footsteps in the snow leading to the front door, with no return trail. It disturbed him enough to tell a neighbor, but not enough to report it to police. There was the spare house key that went missing, and the foreign newspaper left just outside the home (the Grubers did not subscribe to any paper). The toolshed in which Andreas kept his mattock was also raided. Lastly, there was the maid who had left the Gruber’s employ six months prior, raving about voices and footsteps in the attic. Assuming these voices belonged to mortals, that means the Grubers may have been living alongside their murderer for up to half a year--with the exception of Maria, who had been living with the Grubers for less than a day before meeting her demise.

Almost a hundred years later, the case has gone cold. The Hinterkaifeck farmstead was demolished--and with it, any evidence that may have survived until criminal forensics became advanced enough to identify a perpetrator. In 2007, the case was dredged up once more when the Fürstenfeldbruck Police Academy conducted their own study. Unsurprisingly, they could not come to any solid conclusion; but they did devise a theory, which has been withheld out of respect for the Gruber's living family. The world will likely never know what transpired that night on March 31st, 1922 on the Hinterkaifeck farm. What we can be certain of is that whoever it was got away with murder.

What most find chilling about these murders is that the killer lived in the family's home undetected for so long. It takes a cold person to sneak into your house, eat your food, poop in your attic, and kill your whole family, then have the gall to live there until the neighbors catch wise.

I like to think I'd know if someone were living in my attic, which is why I give the house a once-over, make sure the doors are locked, and maybe sleep with the hallway light on. None of this helps if an intruder has already made it in, of course. Most importantly for a good night's rest, never google Hinterkaifeck after dark. But if you're looking for some late night reading material, might I suggest the Lizzy Borden Wiki instead?