Welcome back to another edition of Monique Snyman’s Hall of Horror! This week, we’re covering the Hinterkaifeck Murders from 1922, and I have a theory about what may have happened …
The Hinterkaifeck Murders
Deep in the Bavarian countryside, in late March of 1922, something terrible happened. It was something so brutal, so inexplicable, it still haunts true crime circles today. On a lonely farmstead known as Hinterkaifeck, six people were murdered with a mattock, a type of pickaxe used for farming. But this wasn’t just another rural crime. It was a massacre … a deliberate, quiet, and deeply unsettling massacre that will go down in history.
Andreas and Cäzilia Gruber, their widowed daughter Viktoria, her two children, and the family’s newly hired maid, Maria Baumgartner, were all slaughtered, most of them being lured into the barn and killed one by one. From the look of things, whoever did it knew the place well. And here’s where the story gets even more bizarre: the killer stayed after the murders. Eating their food. Sleeping in their beds. Feeding the livestock. Lighting fires. Leaving the bodies hidden in hay.
There were footprints in the snow leading to the house, but there was no sign of footsteps leaving (Hadleigh). The murder weapon came from the property. The dog was alive. The cows were fed. This wasn’t random. It was personal. But a century later, we still don’t know who did it or why.
An Unnerving Puzzle, Even by Today’s Standards
When neighbors noticed the family hadn’t been seen for days, they went to check in. What they found, however, shook the village of Gröbern to its core. Four bodies — Andreas, Cäzilia, Viktoria, and young Cäzilia — were discovered stacked in the barn. The maid and the toddler were murdered inside the home (Serena, 2023).
This wasn’t just a killing spree, though. It was methodical. The younger Cäzilia, who was just seven years old, appeared to have survived her initial injuries and pulled out chunks of her own hair in agony before dying (Crime and Conspiracy). And yet, despite the brutality, the house itself showed little sign of struggle or looting. Money and valuables were left untouched.
Was this the first recorded instance of phrogging — the unsettling phenomenon where someone secretly lives inside another person’s home without their knowledge? In the weeks leading up to the murders, the Grubers heard footsteps in the attic, found a set of keys missing, and noticed unfamiliar tracks in the snow. After the killings, someone lingered on the property, tending livestock and even eating meals. Though the term phrogging is modern, the eerie hallmarks were all present in Hinterkaifeck, raising the disturbing possibility that the killer had been living among them all along.
And then there’s the Gruber family history. Andreas and Viktoria had been convicted of incest years earlier, a fact that branded them in the eyes of the villagers (James and James, 2017). Viktoria had reportedly been involved with several men, including Lorenz Schlittenbauer, a neighbor who once claimed paternity of her son Josef. When he helped discover the bodies, Schlittenbauer had a key, acted oddly calm, and even moved bodies around, allegedly to find his “son.” Suspicious? Absolutely. But it would not be enough to arrest him.
Some theorists point fingers at Schlittenbauer, suggesting jealousy, rage, or shame as motives (Eastern Herald, 2023). Others look beyond Germany.
Could It Have Been a Serial Killer?
In The Man from the Train, Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James argue that Hinterkaifeck fits a larger pattern. They suggest an American serial killer named Paul Mueller, who was responsible for axe murders in the U.S., may have made his way to Europe (James and James, 2017). The killer’s M.O. — slaughtering entire families, using tools from their property, often during moonless nights — is nearly identical.
While that theory is fascinating, it’s still speculative. And truth be told, everything about this case is speculation. No fingerprints. No definitive witnesses. No confession. Even the crime scene was compromised: neighbors, priests, and police trampled through it long before a formal investigation began (Schlosser, 2012).
In 2007, German police academy students attempted to re-examine the case using modern profiling. Their conclusion? The killer likely came from within the local community and was familiar with the farm — possibly even a family member or close acquaintance (Mental Floss). But without surviving suspects or clean evidence, there’s been no resolution.
One Hundred Years Later, Still No Answers
Locals refused to go near the Hinterkaifeck farmhouse, branding it as being cursed, and in 1923, it was demolished. A small shrine now marks the land where it once stood, but the case has never really faded. It’s kept alive through books, podcasts, YouTube documentaries, and conspiracy blogs that revisit the same theories, again and again, hoping for a new clue, a missing link.
My theory is: What if the Grubers were already dead before the supposed “killer” ever arrived? What if the murders weren’t a violent act, but the result of something far more insidious — a psychological breakdown within the family? Andreas Gruber’s abusive behavior and his alleged incest with his daughter Viktoria suggest that the household was already on the edge of collapse. So, what if Viktoria, in a desperate act of self-preservation or madness, killed her parents and children before she took her own life? The person who arrived later, tending to the animals and feeding themselves, might not have been the killer at all. It could have just been an innocent farmhand who discovered the aftermath and tried to cover it up, perhaps out of guilt or fear. In this dark analysis I’ve posited, the true horror of Hinterkaifeck wasn’t the bloodshed per se (although, I do think it would have been a frightening sight to see), but rather the silence of a family unraveling from within.
In an age of endless true crime content, this one still chills. What was the motive? Why are there no footprints moving away from the house? Was the killer truly local? The truth is, we’ll probably never know who killed the Grubers. It’s the kind of story that gnaws at the imagination because it defies all logic. Someone waited, watched, and struck with precision. And then … that someone vanished into silence.
Bibliography
Crime and Conspiracy. The Hinterkaifeck Murders: Unraveling Germany’s Chilling Mystery. [online] Available at: https://crimeandconspiracy.com/the-hinterkaifeck-murders/ [Accessed 5 May 2025].
Eastern Herald, 2023. Hinterkaifeck Murders: The Unsolved Mystery That Haunts Germany. [online] 14 Jun. Available at: https://easternherald.com/2023/06/14/hinterkaifeck-murders-mystery-rural-tragedy/ [Accessed 8 May 2025].
Hadleigh, G. The Hinterkaifeck Mystery. [online] Available at: https://www.guyhadleigh.com/blog/the-hinterkaifeck-mystery [Accessed 4 May 2025].
Hinterkaifeck.ch. Books – Hinterkaifeck – Mordfall gelöst. [online] Available at: https://www.hinterkaifeck.ch/en/books/ [Accessed 8 May 2025].
James, B. and James, R., 2017. The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery. New York: Scribner.
Mental Floss. The Chilling Story of the Hinterkaifeck Killings, Germany’s Most Famous Unsolved Crime. [online] Available at: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/502044/chilling-story-hinterkaifeck-killings-germanys-most-famous-unsolved-crime [Accessed 6 May 2025].
Serena, K., 2023. Hinterkaifeck Murders: The Unsolved German Massacre. [online] All That’s Interesting, 3 Aug. Available at: https://allthatsinteresting.com/hinterkaifeck-murders [Accessed 4 May 2025].
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