Six people were killed at an isolated Bavarian farmstead. In the days before, the farmer had spoken of footprints in the snow leading toward the house, noises in the attic and missing keys. No one was ever convicted.
Read it like a field journal. Each chapter logs evidence onto the board, and the plot twists stay redacted until you declassify them.
Hinterkaifeck lay outside the village of Gröbern, between Ingolstadt and Schrobenhausen. It was home to Andreas and Cäzilia Gruber, their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, and Viktoria's two children, Cäzilia and Josef.
A new maid, Maria Baumgartner, had arrived to start work on 31 March.
The six were killed between the evening of 31 March and the early hours of 1 April. According to the archive, all died of severe head injuries. Four were found in the barn, two inside the house.
For several days nobody raised the alarm. On 4 April neighbours went to the farm, found the bodies and called the police. The surviving police photographs and a plan of the farm are now among the most reliable records of the scene.
Later statements described strange signs in the days before the killings: footprints in the snow leading towards the farm, noises in the attic and a missing house key. Some accounts suggest someone stayed at the farm after the murders.
These details come from witness accounts and inference. They are not an observed sequence of events, and the archive treats them with caution.
When the farmhouse was demolished in 1923, a Reuthaue, a pick-mattock, was found. The state archive identifies it as the suspected murder implement. It did not reveal who had used it.
Over the following decades many people were questioned. Suspicion repeatedly fell on Lorenz Schlittenbauer, a neighbour who was among those who entered the farm, and the archive's catalogue reproduces contradictory allegations about him. That suspicion never became a proven identification.
In 2026 the Bavarian state archives held an exhibition on the case, cataloguing the police material that survives.
The archive explains that judicial records and original physical evidence were lost or destroyed over time. Modern investigators can only work from the fragments that survived.
Witnesses later describe footprints, attic noises and a missing key.
The new maid arrives. The six are killed that night.
Neighbours find the bodies and call the police.
A pick-mattock is found when the farmhouse is demolished.
The Bavarian state archives exhibit the surviving police material.
Drag the photos around. Tap one to examine it. Then pick a theory: the threads show which evidence it rests on.
Scene photographs and planDocumentedExamined
The pick-mattockDocumentedExamined
Footprints and signsWitness accountExamined
Suspect statementsUnverifiedExamined
Which explanation do you believe? Each is labelled by how well it's supported.
The record shows six people were killed at Hinterkaifeck on the night of 31 March 1922, and a suspected weapon was found a year later. It does not name the killer, and most of the material that might have done so is gone.
No. No one was convicted, and the Bavarian state archive describes the murders as unresolved.
A Reuthaue, a kind of pick-mattock, was found during the farmhouse demolition in 1923 and is identified by the archive as the suspected murder implement.
