#true-crime

Hinterkaifeck: The Farm Murders That Were Never Solved

On the evening of 31 March 1922, on a small, isolated farmstead called Hinterkaifeck in the Bavarian countryside of southern Germany, six people were murdered, one after another, with a heavy farming mattock. The dead were a single household: the elderly farmer Andreas Gruber and his wife Cäzilia; their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel; Viktoria's two young children, seven-year-old Cäzilia and two-year-old Josef; and the family's maid, Maria Baumgartner, who had arrived to begin work only hours before. In the days before the killings, the farmer had told neighbors of strange and frightening things: footprints in the snow leading from the forest to the farm but none leading away, footsteps heard in the attic, a set of house keys gone missing, a newspaper on the property that no one had bought. He did not go to the police. After the murders, in the most chilling detail of all, the killer appears not to have fled but to have remained at the farm for several days — feeding the cattle, tending the dog, and lighting the kitchen stove, while the six bodies lay where they had fallen and neighbors, seeing smoke from the chimney, suspected nothing. It was four days before anyone came close enough to discover the horror. The investigation that followed was one of the largest in Bavarian history, pursuing hundreds of suspects over the decades and reopening the case again and again. No one was ever charged. A century later, the Hinterkaifeck murders remain unsolved, one of the most haunting cold cases in the world. This is the story of the farm where six people died and the killer was never found.