On March 31, 1922, in Bavaria, Germany, six residents of the Hinterkaifeck Farm were murdered with a pickaxe: husband and wife Andreas and Cazilia Gruber, widowed daughter Viktoria, Viktoria’s two children Cazilia and Josef, and the Grubers’ maid, Maria Baumgartner, who had been hired the same day.
Gruber family has a troubled past
The Gruber family was a troubled one: Viktoria’s son Josef was suspected to be the product of incest―Josef was the son of Andreas, making Andreas both grandfather and father. Six months earlier, the Grubers’ previous maid quit because she believed the house was haunted, hearing voices and footsteps in the attic.
However, later, the family began hearing voices as well, and discovered that a set of housekeys was missing. Moreover, Andreas Gruber found an unfamiliar newspaper in the house and that the door to the family toolshed had been scratched up. He had also seen footprints in the snow leading to the back of the house coming from the woods with no sign of returning prints.
While two-year-old Josef was murdered in his crib and Maria in her bed, the rest of the family had been slaughtered in the family barn, stacked on top of each other. However, they were not found until a few days later due to the fact that the killer lived in the house for several days after the family’s murders. It is reported that in the week following March 31, cattle were fed, meals were eaten in the kitchen, neighbors reported seeing smoke rising from the chimney, and the post man testified seeing the family dog tied up outside.
Hinterkaifeck murders not robbery related
Moreover, the police ruled out robbery as a motive, finding that large sums of cash were found on the farm, and decided it would be a crime of passion. While the family’s heads were being removed to be studied in the autopsy, they were unfortunately lost permanently in the chaos of World War II.
One year later, the house was demolished, and a monument to the Gruber family was put in place. The Gruber Family was buried headless in Waidhofen Cemetery, in Bavaria, Germany. Schlittenbauer died in 1941.
THEORIES
- The Gruber family neighbor, Lorenz Schlittenbauer, murdered the family.
- A possible motive may have been that Schlittenbauer had been intimate with Viktoria and suspected that the two-year-old Josef was his son. However, there had no evidence linking him to the crime.
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