On a cold, stormy night in late March 1922, six people lived on a remote Bavarian farmstead known as Hinterkaifeck, about 70 kilometers north of Munich. Andreas Gruber, 63, and his wife Cäzilia, 72, ran the place with their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, 35, her two young children—seven-year-old Cäzilia and two-year-old Josef—and a newly hired maid named Maria Baumgartner.
Strange things had been happening for weeks. Footprints in the snow led from the nearby woods to the farm but never back out. Keys went missing. The previous maid had quit after hearing footsteps in the attic and feeling certain someone was living up there. Andreas himself reported hearing noises in the loft and finding a newspaper that didn’t belong to them. Still, life went on.
Sometime on the evening of March 31, the killings began. Investigators later concluded the killer likely lured the victims one by one into the barn. Andreas, his wife, Viktoria, and young Cäzilia were struck repeatedly in the head with a mattock—a heavy farming tool used for breaking ground. Their bodies were stacked in the barn. Inside the house, the new maid and little Josef were killed in their beds.
The murders weren’t discovered until April 4. Neighbors noticed the family had missed church and the mail hadn’t been collected. When they finally entered, they found the livestock had been fed in the days after the killings. Bread had been eaten. Someone had stayed in the house with the bodies.
The investigation was massive for its time. More than a hundred suspects were questioned. Theories ranged from a rejected suitor of Viktoria to traveling laborers to even the possibility that Viktoria’s husband, listed as missing in World War I, had returned. Money was found untouched, ruling out simple robbery. The farm was later demolished. The victims’ skulls, removed for examination, were lost during World War II.
In 2007 a police academy team reviewed the entire case with modern methods. They reached a private conclusion about the most likely perpetrator but chose not to name the person, citing living relatives. Officially, the case remains unsolved. A century later, Hinterkaifeck still stands as one of Germany’s most haunting unsolved crimes—not because there were no clues, but because the clues never quite added up to a face.