Hinterkaifeck

[Anon E. Mouse]

I searched around the forums for the Hinterkaifeck mystery, but I didn't see anything about it. If there is another thread then I apologise for it. But for the people that don't know, Hinterkaifeck was the site of a disturbing and perplexing set of murders in 1922.

Hinterkaifeck, a small farmstead situated between the Bavarian towns of Ingolstadt and Schrobenhausen (approximately 70 km north of Munich), was the scene of one of the most puzzling crimes in German history. On the evening of March 31, 1922, the six inhabitants of the farm were killed with a mattock. The murder is still unsolved.

The six victims were the farmer Andreas Gruber (63) and his wife Cäzilia (72); their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel (35) and her two children, Cäzilia (7) and Josef (2); and the maid Maria Baumgartner (44). The two-year-old Josef was rumoured to be the son of Viktoria and her father Andreas, who had an incestuous relationship.

A few days prior to the crime, farmer Andreas Gruber told neighbours about discovering footprints in the snow leading from the edge of the forest to the farm, but none leading back. He also spoke about hearing footsteps in the attic and finding an unfamiliar newspaper on the farm. Furthermore, the house keys went missing several days before the murders, but none of this was reported to the police.

Six months earlier, the previous maid had left the farm, claiming that it was haunted; the new maid, Maria Baumgartner, arrived on the farm on 31 March, only a few hours before her death.

Exactly what happened on that Friday evening cannot be said for certain. It is believed that the older couple, as well as their daughter Viktoria and her daughter Cäzilia, were somehow all lured into the barn one by one, where they were killed. The perpetrator(s) then went into the house where they killed two-year-old Josef who was sleeping in his cot in his mother's bedroom, as well as the maid, Maria Baumgartner, in her bed-chamber.

On the following Tuesday, the 4th of April, some neighbours went to the farmstead because none of the inhabitants had been seen for several days, which was rather unusual. The postman had noticed that the post from the previous Saturday was still where he had left it. Furthermore, young Cäzilia had not turned up for school on Monday, nor had she been there on Saturday.

I got all of this from Wikipedia, but I'll post a link to another site with some additional information. The whole thing is strangely fascinating to me. I realise that 1922 Germany isn't exactly the most technologically advanced time period and that a lot of things probably got destroyed in that big war about to happen, but I thought it might interest some people around here.

http://armchairdetective.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/hinterkaifeck/

There's a link to more of the story.

Edited March 8, 2014 by Skittel