Hinterkaifeck Farm Victims

On April 4, 1922, neighbors discovered the bodies of six people at the isolated Hinterkaifeck farmstead, located between the Bavarian towns of Ingolstadt and Schrobenhausen. The victims were farmer Andreas Gruber (63), his wife Cäzilia (72), their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel (35), Viktoria's two children—Cäzilia (7) and Josef (2)—and the maid Maria Baumgartner (44), who had arrived at the farm that very day.

The victims appeared to have been lured one by one into the barn, where they were killed with a mattock, a type of pickaxe. The two-year-old Josef and the maid were killed inside the house. Investigators determined the murders had occurred on March 31, yet the most disturbing detail was that the killer had remained at the farm for several days afterward—feeding the livestock, eating food in the kitchen, and apparently living among the bodies.

In the days before the murders, Andreas Gruber had told neighbors he found mysterious footprints in the snow leading from the nearby forest to the farm but not returning. He also reported hearing footsteps in the attic and finding an unfamiliar newspaper. The previous maid had quit months earlier, claiming the farm was haunted. Over 100 suspects were interrogated over the following years, including neighbors, former prisoners of war who had worked at the farm, and various relatives.

Despite extensive investigations that continued intermittently into the 21st century—including a 2007 forensic re-examination by students at the Fürstenfeldbruck Police Academy—no killer was ever identified. The skulls of the victims, which had been removed during the original investigation, were lost during World War II, preventing modern forensic analysis. The case remains one of Germany's most famous unsolved crimes.