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The Hinterkaifeck Murders
In late March 1922, six people — the Gruber family and their newly arrived maid — were killed with a farm mattock at the isolated Hinterkaifeck farmstead in Bavaria. Strange events preceded the murders, and someone evidently stayed at the farm for days afterward, feeding the livestock. Despite a decades-long investigation, no one was ever charged, and the case remains Germany's most famous unsolved murder.
UNEXPLAINED HISTORY
DISPUTED
48.59° N · 11.32° E
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Evidence — 14 claims
12 supported · 1 resolved · 1 contested
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Sources — 4
4 sources · reference + journalism + secondary
Hinterkaifeck farmstead, Bavaria. March 31, 1922. Six people were killed with a mattock — a farm tool, the kind kept in a barn. The victims were Andreas Gruber, his wife Cäzilia, their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, her two children, and the family's newly hired maid, Maria Baumgartner, who had arrived that very day. The bodies lay undiscovered for nearly a week. When neighbors finally came to check, they found the livestock fed, the stove warm, and food recently consumed. Someone had stayed.
What happened
The Hinterkaifeck farmstead sat about 70 kilometers north of Munich, isolated enough that its residents could disappear for days before anyone noticed. According to the record, the murders occurred on or around March 31. The adult victims — Andreas, Cäzilia, Viktoria, and one of the children — were lured or led to the barn, where they were killed. The maid and the youngest child were killed inside the house.
The weeks before the killings had been strange. Andreas Gruber had told neighbors about footprints in the snow leading from the forest to the farm — and no footprints leading back. He'd found an unfamiliar newspaper on the property. The previous maid had quit months earlier, reportedly because she felt the house was haunted. Gruber reported the footprints to people in the village but did not contact police. The case record suggests someone may have been living in the farm's outbuildings, undetected, for days before the attack.
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