The Boogeyman: Hinterkaifek, The German Family Slaughtered By A Stranger // MONSTERS SERIES

Imagine you hear a strange sound coming from your attic one evening. What is scarier? That it’s paranormal? Maybe a ghost haunting your space? Or that it’s a person, an unknown intruder watching you from inside your own home? That is a question that a family in the German countryside had to ask themselves a hundred years ago. But we would never know their answer, because after hearing strange sounds coming from their attic, the entire family and their chambermaid were found brutally slain inside of their barn. What was tormenting the Gruber family?

TW: Child Death, Incest

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SOURCES

Hinterkaifeck murders – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinterkaifeck_murders

Hinterkaifeck – Wikipedia (Germany)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinterkaifeck

Der Mythos Hinterkaifeck • Hinterkaifeck

https://www.hinterkaifeck.net/

Hinterkaifeck – Das Hinterkaifeck-Wiki

https://wiki.hinterkaifeck.net/wiki/Hinterkaifeck

The mysterious massacre at Hinterkaifeck - J.H. Moncrieff

https://www.jhmoncrieff.com/the-mysterious-massacre-at-hinterkaifeck/

Horror at Hinterkaifeck — Part I | by Kimberly Parr | Medium

https://kimparr.medium.com/horror-at-hinterkaifeck-20389315b83a

Horror at Hinterkaifeck — Part II | by Kimberly Parr | Medium

https://kimparr.medium.com/horror-at-hinterkaifeck-part-ii-b5ce984e9523

Casefile True Crime - Case 124: Hinterkaifeck Transcript and Discussion

https://podscripts.co/podcasts/casefile-true-crime/case-124-hinterkaifeck

The Hinterkaifeck Murders of 1922, Germany — Facts-Chology

https://factschology.com/mmm-podcast-articles/hinterkaifeck-murders-germany-1922

Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic

TRANSCRIPT

Imagine you hear a strange sound coming from your attic one evening. What is scarier? That it’s paranormal? Maybe a ghost haunting your space? Or that it’s a person, an unknown intruder watching you from inside your own home?

That is a question that a family in the German countryside had to ask themselves a hundred years ago. But we would never know their answer, because after hearing strange sounds coming from their attic, the entire family and their chambermaid were found brutally slain inside of their barn. 

What was tormenting the Gruber family?

If you're interested in true crime that reads like gothic horror, real monsters that mirror mythological ones, and cases that will genuinely keep you up at night, you're in the right place. You're just like me. We upload once a week, so make sure to subscribe. And check out our special Monsters playlist with new episodes all October, our collection of stories of some of the most depraved human beings to ever walk the earth

In 1922, on a chilly spring afternoon in the Bavarian countryside, two coffee traders trudged through a dense stretch of woods until they arrived at a secluded farmstead on the forest’s edge. 

The two men approached the main residence with their burlap bags of coffee beans and knocked on the front door, ready to fill an order placed by the farm’s owners. But as they waited for someone to answer, they began to register this eerie emptiness all around them, an emptiness that felt like it was closing in on them. The farm was usually alive with the buzz of the family that lived there, but today, The only signs of life they could hear were the bellowing of hungry cattle in the barn and a dog barking somewhere in the vicinity. 

The coffee traders knocked on the front door once more, but again, no one answered, so they started walking the perimeter of the house, rapping on windows as they went, trying all the doors only to find each of them locked. 

Three days later, another visitor journeyed out to the farm: this time, it was an engine mechanic with a work order who also arrived to find the farm completely desolate. Void of any sign of the family that lived there. He even tried making his presence known with a loud whistle, but the only reply he got was the same barking dog and a mooing cow. 

After about an hour of this, he just went ahead and broke the lock of the engine room so he could get started on his work order. The mechanic didn’t know the family that lived there, but he’d heard around town that the patriarch, the old farmer Andreas Gruber, was an eccentric workhorse who spent all day every day out in the fields and wouldn’t come home till late. But even still, he was at the Gruber farm for 5 hours, and never saw a single sign of another person. 

The mechanic finished his work, closed up the engine room, and continued onto his next appointment. And on his way there, he encountered some young women at the neighboring Schlittenbauer farm. He briefly stopped to chat with them, and told them how strange it was that no one had been at the Gruber’s home while he worked. 

Those two young women ran home to their farm and relayed that message to their dad, Lorenz Schlittenbauer, who remembered that only a few days earlier, some coffee traders had come his way and remarked that they, too, had not been able to make contact with anyone.

Little did they know, there had been other strange sightings around the farm.

A local butcher who was passing by Hinterkaifeck in the wee hours of the night, on April 1st, saw two figures standing near the edge of the forest—figures who, when they noticed the butcher walking through the area, turned their heads to hide their faces.

Then there was the local carpenter who, around the same time the following night, was cutting through Hinterkaifeck on his way home when suddenly, an unidentified person leapt out of a field near the property and blinded him with a lantern…

Lorenz rounded up two of his neighbors and went to Hinterkaifeck himself to investigate the Gruber-Gabriel family’s unexplained absence.

When they got there, they found all the gates and doors on the property locked, except for one, which was a door leading into the barn.

The three men made their way into the barn, and once they were midway inside, they saw something that made them all freeze in shock.

Near the far wall, on the threshing floor, was a pile of hay with an old stable door placed on top of it. And sticking out from underneath the hay… was a human foot.

Lorenz, not knowing what else to do, grabbed the foot and began pulling, and that’s when he discovered it belonged to the body of the old farmer, Andreas Gruber.

The three men combined their strength to lift the stable door from the pile, and when Lorenz raked back the hay—they had to turn away in horror. Concealed beneathwere not just one, but four members of the Gruber-Gabriel family, stacked one on top of the other.

Lying on top of Andreas were his wife Cäzilia their adult daughter Viktoria, and Viktoria’s seven year old daughter, Cilli.

Lorenz pulled the family members out, one by one, but it was very clearly too late. All of them were dead—with massive visible head wounds.

The three men could hear vigorous barking coming from the next-door stable, so Lorenz went to investigate and found the family dog in an agitated state, with an injury to its eye. Nearby, a cow nervously wandered the stable, free from its tether, as if someone had untied it.

They then walked toward the main residence, where Lorenz removed a key from his pocket and let himself inside the house, as his two neighbors entered behind him. He went straight to the bedroom of Viktoria’s other child, a little two-year-old boy namedJosef. And there, they found little Josef, still in his stroller—cold and stiff, with his head split open.

And just off the kitchen, in the maid’s quarters, they found the family’s newly hired chambermaid, bludgeoned to death on the floor and covered with a duvet.

The two neighbors left the farm to call for help while Lorenz stayed behind in the house.

And within an hour, the whole farm was crawling with onlookers from the surrounding villages, tainting the crime scene well in advance of the police’s arrival.

The investigation that began soon after would eventually span more than half a century, drawing on resources from multiple agencies—and even clairvoyants. By the end of the 20th century, the murders at Hinterkaifeck would become one of Germany’s—and the world’s—eeriest and most baffling unsolved mysteries.

Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore. If you are new here, welcome to our little community of the darkly curious. We gather here every Wednesday in the headquarters of the Rogue Detecting Society and this spooky season, we’re going through some old, strange case files. Cases where monsters became men, and women. We are exploring real life monsters of legend, and today, I want to tell you about the time  a Boogeyman infiltrated the Gruber family. 

In German folklore, the Boogeyman is a shadowy figure that sneaks into your home and kidnaps naughty children. No one really knows where boogeyman legends originated from, some have suggested he appeared around the time of the Black Plague because he’s sometimes referred to as  “der schwarzer mann” or “the black man”. And perhaps he symbolized the plague snatching children 

Depending on the exact legend you study, the boogeyman’s appearance might look different. Sometimes, he’s faceless, sometimes, he’s demonic, or looks like a goat, but  he always hides in a dark corner of your room or under your bed while you sleep. You might not see him, but you can feel his presence. You’ll know he’s there.

He’s waiting with his sack to throw it over your head and kidnap you when you least expect it. 

Today, The boogeyman is folklore that’s told to naughty German children usually to scare them into behaving. Children in Germany even grow up playing a game called Who’s Afraid Of The Boogeyman? In the game, the child that’s been assigned the boogeyman shouts "Whoos afraid of the boogeyman?" All of the other children respond "Nobody!". Then, the Boogeyman shouts "And what if he comes?" and the others respond "Then we run!" and everyone runs to the opposite side of the field while the boogeyman has to try and hit as many people as possible.

But running wont save you from the boogeyman. Today, the term boogeyman is a catchall term used to describe an evil, usually unknowable presence lurking in your house or your community. And just like how There are a few different versions of the boogeyman in German folklore, there are a few different boogeymen in this story. But this story is not folklore, it’s not legend, it actually happened. And now, when the people in the Bavarian country side hear a weird creak in their attic, or a sound from under their bed, they can’t help but wonder if the monster has finally come for them. 

Two notes before we jump back in. First, we’re running a very special Apple Podcasts extended FREE trial, this month only. So you’ll get a full 30 days to explore our back catalogue of monthly bonus episodes, archived episodes, the new October bonus episode and our first book club discussion episode. We’ve been reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and I’m super excited to talk about it. Check out the link in the description for more info. And second, episode 3 of The Timekeeper is dropping on Friday. This is our special four part horror audio drama, so if you haven’t checked it out, please do. Ok…

Let’s get back into it

The Gruber family’s story at Hinterkaifeck began decades before their murders. The year was 1877, and 27-year-old Cäzilia Sanhüter had just married her first husband, Josef, who lived at and owned the Hinterkaifeck farmstead.

Cäzilia and Josef enjoyed a quiet, peaceful life at Hinterkaifeck, but that all suddenly ended the week after their eighth wedding anniversary. Josef, who had been battling a nasty bout of pneumonia, succumbed to his illness, leaving Cäzilia a widow at the age of just 35.

But Cäzilia didn’t stay a widow for long. Less than a year after her first husband’s death, she married one of the farmhands who worked at Hinterkaifeck. His name was Andreas Gruber, who became co-owner of the farm after marrying Cäzilia, who was around 10 years older than him.

In 1887, Cäzilia and Andreas welcomed their first child: a girl, whom they named Viktoria.

And over the next four years, the Grubers would have two more daughters—but tragically, both of those girls died before their lives had even begun: one at the age of 21 months, and the other during birth.

Andreas and Cäzilia raised Viktoria on Hinterkaifeck in virtual isolation, Cäzilia wanted to protect her baby at all costs. Their property was surrounded on three sides by forest that went on for many kilometers, and their nearest neighbor was about half a kilometer away. The Grubers pretty much kept to themselves and only interacted with outsiders when necessary. They also employed a revolving door of seasonal farmhands, and they cycled through a number of chambermaids—a position that never seemed to stay filled for long. Friends and neighbors would later go on to say that, there was maybe a reason young girls didn’t want to stay in that house very long….

In 1914, Viktoria turned 27, and she married a man named Karl Gabriel. After this, her parents transferred ownership of the property to Viktoria and her new husband.

But the marriage was troubled from the very outset. And no sooner had Viktoria become pregnant with the couple’s first child than Karl left Hinterkaifeck and returned to live with his parents, which made Andreas and Cäzilia red with rage. Then, in the middle of discussions of a possible divorce, the First World War began, and Karl was drafted to fight.

In December of that year, Viktoria received the news that Karl had been killed in a shell attack outside of Neuville, France. A month later, the newly widowed Viktoria gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Cäzilia, after her mother—although everyone would call the little girl Cilli.

Viktoria continued living at Hinterkaifeck with her parents, who helped her raise little Cilli while she figured out what she was going to do, but then, in 1919, without a husband, Viktoria became pregnant again. And this, as you can imagine at the time, was pretty scandalous.

And the Grubers couldn’t afford for their community to hate them more than they already did. 

See, The years that followed the First World War were a time of darkness and anxiety for the citizens of Germany.

By early 1922, the value of the German mark had plunged to one 320th of a U.S. dollar—and it was about to get exponentially worse, as Germany was on the cusp of hyperinflation that would reduce the value of the German mark by literally trillions, laying the groundwork for the eventual rise of the Nazi party.

Food insecurity, malnutrition, and unemployment were ballooning by the day, and so were political instability and anger.

As food insecurity began to grow—with the cost of a loaf of bread doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and eventually increasing more than a hundredfold—the family at Hinterkaifeck never went hungry. They continued to enjoy an abundance of meat, of bread, of crops, and also money—in various forms.

The Grubers had their wealth split between cash savings, mortgage bonds and war bonds, jewelry, gold coins, silver coins and over forty acres of land with plenty of livestock thriving on it.

The family had managed their assets well, and that they were relatively wealthy was no secret around the village. Rumors in fact had circulated that they had cash stashed in various places around their property. 

And not only that, but People in the neighboring villages who were familiar with the Grubers knew them to be stingy and resource-hoarding. They weren’t generous or friendly with strangers who passed their way, and they almost never let anyone inside their house. People in the community also knew that the Grubers liked to illegally hire itinerant laborers, usually for only short periods of time, so they could pay them well-below standard wages, taking advantage of their desperation during desperate times.

And now, Viktoria was pregnant out of wedlock, and everyone had another reason to side eye the family even harder. 

But while from the outside, they looked like a well fed, rich family, inside the walls of Hinterkaifeck, something was not right. The family itself had a few dark secrets, and they were starting to feel like they were coming back to haunt them. 

In early 1922, the Grubers were looking for a new chambermaid

And That’s because their previous one, a woman named Kreszenz Rieger, had abruptly quit her position the previous summer and fled the farm. after she left Hinterkaifeck, she would tell pretty much anyone who would listen that she was absolutely terrified of the place and couldn’t have stayed there a moment longer, because the old farm seemed to be haunted.

One night, Kreszenz woke up around midnight, and felt like there was someone standing outside of her door. She laid in bed, thinking she was imagining things, when she heard the knob turn, and the door open by itself. She rose in bed to see if someone was there, but there was just infinite darkness on the other side of the open door. 

This happened multiple times, she said, always around midnight, and she never saw who or what was doing this. It was like there were ghosts in the house, and before long, Kreszenz was too spooked to sleep at night—and so, she quit. 

But Kreszenz wasn’t the only person at Hinterkaifeck who sensed another presence at the farm.

On the night of March 29th, 1922, just two nights before the murder, Viktoria and her father Andreas barely caught a wink of sleep because of noises they kept hearing from up in the attic. Like someone was walking back and forth, or moving something heavy. The noises actually prompted Andreas to bolt out of his bed, light his lantern, and climb up to the attic to investigate. But he searched thoroughly and found no one.

Nevertheless, Andreas kept his rifle and his pitchfork at his bedside, ready in case the source of the attic noises made an appearance in the night.

The next morning, he stepped out into the courtyard only to make a chilling discovery.

There, clear as day, were two sets of footprints in the snow, leading from the edge of the forest directly to his house. And what was more disturbing to Andreas was, there were no footprints leading back away from the house. It looked as though whoever had come out of the forest to visit… was still there..

He did a walkthrough of his property and inspected everything for any additional disturbances, and that’s when he discovered pry marks on the feed room door outside the barn—and then a broken lock on the door to the shed.

There was no evidence of a burglary, however, nothing in either location was missing—though he did find fresh snow inside the shed, which indicated someone had recently been inside of it.

And In the stable, Andreas found that one of his cows had been untied during the night and was roaming free. That was strange, he thought. He would have never instructed anyone at the farm to do that…

when he returned to the main residence, Andreas discovered that one of his house keys was missing.

He was so uneasy with these findings that he made a point of mentioning them to everyone he encountered that day, including a hardware merchant whose shop he visited that afternoon, and the farmer who lived nearby: Lorenz Schlittenbauer. The man who who would find their bodies. 

And this wasn’t even the first time in recent days that Andreas had found evidence that a stranger had trespassed on his land.

A few weeks earlier, Andreas was out in the courtyard when he had found a copy of the Münchner Zeitung, which is a newspaper from Munich that neither Andreas nor anyone else at Hinterkaifeck subscribed to. He assumed the mailman had dropped it there accidentally, but the mailman firmly stated that no one in the area subscribed to this particular newspaper, so it wouldn’t have come from him... how exactly it landed on Andreas’s property remained a mystery—

And now, Andreas and the rest of his family were now just as spooked as their previous chambermaid had been….

And in fact, the family had recently put out the word that they were in need of a new maid. this word eventually reached a woman named Franziska, whose sister Maria had been looking for a new job and a new place to stay. Franziska thought the opportunity at Hinterkaifeck would be perfect for Maria, who had been struggling for some time to find and maintain employment, she had some intellectual and physical impairments, which made it difficult for her to find work. 

So, with the help of an employment agent, Franziska met with Viktoria Gabriel, the owner of Hinterkaifeck, and after working out the necessary arrangements, Franziska agreed to bring Maria to the farmstead the following day, to formally begin work on April 1st.

But she wouldn’t survive the night. 

Early on the day of the murders, March 31st, Maria arrived at Franziska’s with a borrowed backpack and a bundle of her personal belongings, and the two women set out on foot to Hinterkaifeck, a journey that would take them through several kilometers of thick forest.

Along the way, the two women realized they had gotten lost in the creepy woods. Franziska became certain they had gone in the same circle at least three times. It felt almost like the forest was trying to turn them around, and reroute them away from the haunted farmstead.

But Franziska was determined to get Maria to her destination, because she knew how badly her sister needed the job. And around 5pm, the two women finally arrived at their destination, which was just about the loneliest and saddest little farm Franziska had ever seen. There was a dead energy about the place.

Even still, Franziska dropped Maria off and left Hinterkaifeck. And as she left, she wondered if the forrest was actually trying to guide them away from the place, trying to make sure they never reached the Gruber farm. 

a few days later, she got the call that her sister, along with the entire Gruber Family, had been murdered

Around 6pm on April 4th—roughly three hours after the bodies were discovered—police from the nearby towns of Hohenwart and Schrobenhausen arrived at Hinterkaifeck to find the property swarming with onlookers, some of which were actually inside the house where two of the bodies were waiting to be carted out.

Police immediately blew their whistles and ushered everyone off the property, and once the location was cleared of interlopers, authorities began cordoning off what they realized was already a tainted crime scene.

In the barn, police photographed the badly bludgeoned bodies of Andreas, Viktoria, and the two Cäzilias —the elderly matriarch, and the seven-year-old girl. One thing that struck them as strange, was that the bodies were not in their original positions because Lorenz Schlittenbauer had pulled them out from under the haystack. It was going to be harder for them to properly assess the scene. 

inside the house, they photographed the respective rooms where 2-year-old Josef and Maria Baumgartner, the new chambermaid, lay dead with wounds that looked identical to the ones on the heads of the victims in the barn.

It was surmised that the murder weapon may have been something like a pickaxe, but the only pickaxe they could find on the farm didn’t match the shape of the victims’ wounds.

Early the next morning, detectives from Munich arrived with search dogs in tow, to formally begin a full-scale investigation.

The investigators and their dogs scoured the property, inside and out, looking for every bit of evidence they could find—with a particular interest in finding the murder weapon. They knew it would be something similar to a pickaxe, and they looked in every possible hiding spot for anything resembling such an instrument. But, even after an exhaustive search, the murder weapon was nowhere to be found.

Detectives meanwhile meticulously inventoried every item inside the home and around the property. Large sums of paper money the family was known to have kept around the property appeared to be missing. So it looked like robbery may have been the motive. But then one officer found around two thousand gold marks in plain sight, inside a cupboard that had been ransacked. If robbery was the motive for the crime, why did the perpetrator, or perpetrators, leave so much behind?

It didn’t make sense. And the motive for the murders was, at least at this early point in the investigation, not quite clear.

But even with all of that, the most chilling discovery at least in my opinion, hadn’t been made yet. Police examined the crime scene in the barn, and noticed the narrow width of the door leading into the threshing room, where the bodies were found. They tried reenacting the possible movements of the victims, almost like actors blocking a scene, and they reached the conclusion that each member of the family must have been lured in one by one, and killed in the same room they were found.

It was thought that the killer had perhaps intentionally disturbed the cattle to make them restless, knowing this  would draw the family members into the barn.. 

Maybe first Andreas to see what was causing the commotion--he'd already seen the tracks in the snow and knew someone had been lurking. He would also have been the greatest threat to the killer. Once Andreas doesn't return you can imagine the others coming out to look for him, maybe his wife first and then the two girls, leaving behind the chambermaid with young Josef

It was just a theory. But what they were able to determine with certainty was that the victims had all been murdered sometime in the evening on March 31st, 1922—likely within hours of Maria’s arrival at Hinterkaifeck. They were able to pinpoint the timeframe based on witness statements, and also on mail that had been piling up at the property since April 1st.

But if that was the case, how had the family’s cattle been looked after, fed, and milked in the days between the murders and the discovery of the bodies? That’s when they learned from neighbors that passersby had, on at least one occasion during that period, observed smoke coming from the chimney of the main house.

This caused the police to do one more sweep, because they got the sinking feeling that whoever did this, might have been living in the residence for days afterwards. One officer who was inspecting the attic found half-eaten bacon rinds and smoked meat. 

All signs pointed to the killer, or killers, having lingered comfortably around the house for two or three days after murdering six people there. 

On the second day of the investigation, the court physician, basically a medical examiner, rounded up the six bodies and set up a makeshift dissection in Hinterkaifeck’s courtyard to perform the autopsy.

He ruled that each had indeed died of blunt force trauma, from blows most likely delivered by a mattock, which is a planting tool similar to a pickaxe. 

He also noted that Viktoria had strangulation marks on her neck, and her elderly mother may have had these marks as well—though I’ll make a note here that most of the original records of the autopsies are long lost, and among the surviving documents, there’s some contradictory information about which one of the two women had these marks. We know that at least one of them did.

what we do know for sure is that, during the autopsies, the physician was disturbed to discover that it was 7-year-old Cilli who suffered the worst death of them all. She wasn’t just bludgeoned, but her throat had also been slit open. The examining physician wasn’t sure if the gash was caused by the primary murder weapon, the mattock, or something else, like a knife.

But the little girl was the only one of the six victims who didn’t die right away. She had clumps of her own hair clenched tightly in her fist, and scratch marks on her neck near the wound. The physician believed that Cilli survived for several hours after the attack, and if help had reached her within the first two or three hours, the little girl may have survived.

After the autopsies were finished, the physician then took the unusual step of lopping off each of the six victims’ heads, and then laying the bodies to rest without them. 

The heads were then stripped of flesh and tissue. And once they had clean bone-colored skulls, investigators put them into a suitcase and brought them to a pair of spiritualists in the city of Nuremberg. They were so lost in this investigation, they thought someone who could see beyond the veil had a better chance of solving this than the police. 

The mediums ultimately reached the conclusion that the killers were two men in their twenties who spoke a foreign language and had beards. But then… there was also a third person involved—a woman. And then, they said,… maybe other people too.

The police were not happy with this answer, so they brought the skulls to yet another medium a few days later. All that psychic was able to add was that one of the killers had tuberculosis and a bad heart from years of heavy smoking. Predictably, this information did nothing to advance the investigation.

And that’s where the trail ends for the victims’ six skulls. Whatever ended up happening to them is lost to time, and no one on earth has any idea where the skulls are now.

Throughout the rest of 1922, the investigation wasn’t really going anywhere and a lot was changing at the farm. All of the buildings at Hinterkaifeck were going to be torn down. Karl Gabriels family, he was Viktoria’s husband who died in the war, ended up buying out the surviving members of the Gruber family for the farm, and they were more interested in the land than in the buildings of Hinterkaifeck. Plus, the buildings held on to so much sadness. 

In March of 1923, Karl Gabriel Sr. was in the process of going through all the rooms one last time before demolition. He decided, hesitantly, to return to the attic. See, he knew about the noises that were heard  up there, the food scraps that were found from whoever had done this to his daughter in laws family. But still, he figured he’d do one final sweep, when suddenly, he stumbled upon something that was obscured in the back, he almost missed it. 

It was a mattock. Stained with blood.

Neighbors and family members would soon identify this mattock as one that had belonged to the family and had gone missing after they were killed.

Karl Sr. also found a rusty pocket knife hidden among the hay in the barn, and he passed that knife—and the bloody mattock—along to investigators. And you would think with the murder weapon now found, there would be some more movement on the case. 

But, no. authorities could never determine if the knife was connected in any way to the crime.

The investigation really slowed down after this. At one point, a pair of brothers were turned into police by their own mother, but they provided an ironclad alibi that cleared them of involvement. They were soon released and police were back at square one.

While the police felt like they were lost in the investigation though, the townspeople began to talk. They would whisper of the boogeyman that had been living inside of the Hinterkaifeck farm, hidden in plain sight. 

But they weren’t talking about the murderer… No, they knew that a boogeyman had been living with the family LONG before the attacker or attackers made themselves at home  in the farm’s attic. 

See, when I told you that the family had dark secrets, there was one I didn’t tell you. A secret so dark, they had always planned to take it to their graves. They just didn’t know how soon that would be. 

In 1915, Andreas Gruber and his daughter Viktoria were tried and convicted of a crime that landed them short prison sentences. Incest.

Our understanding of the situation has changed a lot in the past 100 years. Now, we see incest as abuse. We see children as victims, not as willing participants. But back then, the Grubers were seen as an abomination for this crime. 

Going to jail did not stop Andreas, and In 1919, he went on trial once again for the crime of incest. And one of the people that testified against him—was his neighbor, the one who found the bodies, Lorenz Schlittenbauer.

Schlittenbauer, had known Viktoria his entire life, and he became especially close with her after his wife died in October of 1918. Lorenz and Viktoria connected on the level of both being widowed, and at one point they had a romantic fling that lasted for about two months. 

Schlittenbauer told police during the investigation that it was common knowledge around town that Viktoria and Andreas had a sexual relationship. In fact, when Viktoria was just sixteen, she had confided in Schlittenbauer’s wife that her father was sexually abusing her—so Schlittenbauer had known about this for years.

But eventually, Andreas gave Schlittenbauer his blessing for him and Viktoria to marry.  Schlittenbauer told Andreas he would honor his intentions only under one condition—which was, Andreas must stop abusing his daughter and repent for his sins.

Andreas’s thought about it for a moment and then responded, “...we’ll see.”

Not long after, Viktoria came to Schlittenbauer and announced that she was expecting another child. And this, in a way, horrified Schlittenbauer. There was no way to know who the father was.

And this set off an ongoing feud between the Grubers and Schlittenbauer. Schlittenbauer didn’t want to take custody of a son he couldn’t prove was his, and he wanted everyone to know what Andreas had been doing to Viktoria all of these years.

The Grubers, in turn, tried to take him to court, claiming that he was extorting them. 

This, of course, was all leading up to the murders, which put him on the authorities’ radar from the very outset of the investigation. But that wasn’t the only thing that concerned the police, It was also his behavior immediately following his discovery of the bodies.

For one, Schlittenbauer disturbed the crime scene by pulling the victims out from beneath the haystack and repositioning them.

And after discovering the bodies in the barn, he went immediately to the house and was observed by one of his neighbors unlocking the door with a key he had on his person.

Now, he was never able to provide a reasonable explanation for how he had the key.

He also stayed back on the property and was there all alone at the crime scene for at least an hour before others began showing up.

And then, a month or so after the property was demolished in 1923, a local teacher had strolled onto Hinterkaifeck and happened to bump into Schlittenbauer, who at that moment was hanging around one of the demolished buildings, leaning over a cellar staircase and peering into the remnants of the cellar.

The teacher said that he then turned to her and pointed out an area on the cellar floor where it looked as though someone had tried to dig a hole—presumably to bury the victims’ bodies, he theorized. How would he have known that, she wondered.

As word of his curious behavior and his history with the Grubers began to spread, Schlittenbauer would live the rest of his life under a cloud of suspicion.

Police interrogated him many times over the years, and he was frequently overheard in public making questionable statements. In particular, he wasn’t shy about sharing his view that the murders were divine retribution against the family for incest, and that each of them had been lured to the barn, and to their deaths, by what Schlittenbauer described as “higher power.”

Authorities, however, were never able to find any physical evidence tying Schlittenbauer to the crime, and their case against him—their strongest suspect—was overall pretty weak.

But Schlittenbauer was far from the only suspect police looked at.

Investigators leaned heavily into the angle that the murders had been committed during a burglary, and through this lens, they had no shortage of viable suspects.

The Grubers’ former maid, Kreszenz Rieger, had implicated two different suspects, both of whom were former laborers at Hinterkaifeck. One of them was a farmhand named Anton Bichler, whom Kreszenz claimed had told her that the family deserved to die, and it was Kreszenz’s opinion that Bichelr knew the layout of the property well enough that he could have easily carried out the crime with an accomplice.

Kreszenz said that the farmhand Bichler was known to be violent, and she in fact had a specific fear of him returning to the farm and killing everyone who lived there. This was another reason that Kreszenz left her position at the farm, she claimed—on top of her bedroom door opening every night. Maybe she just felt safer claiming she thought it was a ghost.

Kreszenz also named a second potential suspect: a former Hinterkaifeck employee named Georg Siegl, who had been caught by the Grubers burglarizing their house in November 1920. Siegl had also made threatening comments toward the family, and he was intimately familiar with the mattock that was used to bludgeon the six victims, because he had personally carved the handle.

In 1923, Kreszenz was interviewed by police again, and this time, she named a different person, a farmer’s son named Josef Thaler who was also a known burglar, whom she claimed would come to her bedroom window at night and make advances toward her, and would also ask her about where the family members at Hinterkaifeck slept, and where they kept their money.

Thaler’s family ended up accusing Kreszenz of slander for making this comment. And as a result, Kreszenz was jailed for a week for the crime of making an insult.

But Kreszenz didn’t completely stop speaking of her suspicions toward Josef Thaler. In her final police interview, thirty years after the murders, she continued to name Thaler as the person she believed was responsible.

Now, Police did look at and even interview Thaler—they had also received an anonymous letter implicating the Thaler family, in 1925, but who’s to say Kreszenz didn’t send it? You know? But where I’m going with this is, they were never able to build a case, and Kreszenz seemed to be Thaler’s loudest detractor.

Kreszenz also knew about the rampant abuse happening within the house. And I’ve seen it suggested that she was so afraid of Andreas, and so disgusted by what was happening, that she said the house was haunted as an excuse to leave the house without upsetting him. 

However, Kreszenz went ahead and spoke to people in town about the abuse she had witnessed at the farm. Was word spreading? Was Andreas scared enough to do something to his whole family, to ensure the secret didn’t get out?

I know what you’re thinking, how could Andreas have done this, he died too. Well, he would have been able to lure the family out to the barn one by one, unsuspectingly. And there’s a theory that Schlittenbauer came over that night, maybe to confront Andreas again, and saw what he had done. And in a blind rage, he stole the murder weapon from Andreas and killed him. Then, when he came back to the farm later, he moved the bodies, maybe cleaned up a bit when he was left alone in the house, all to keep the attention off of himself. 

I know it is, to some people, the most plausible scenario, but I don’t necessarily go for it. Schittenbauer always felt that the family’s aberrant sexual conduct may have led to someone targeting them. Like someone may have wanted to prune the rot from the community. 

Because that idea goes back hundreds, if not thousands of years in german folklore. Just like in childrens lullabies and bedtime stories, the Boogeyman arrives in the dark corners of your room, under your bed, or deep within your attic, waiting to step out of the shadows and punish children for their transgressions.

Was this boogeyman there to teach the Grubers a lesson?

Today,  all that remains where Hinterkaifeck once stood is a dirt road, some open fields, and a concrete monument that stands near the former site of the barn where an entire family and their chamber maid was killed. 

In 1955, after the investigation had been open for nearly thirty years, the Munich police felt they had exhausted every angle and avenue, and they finally closed the file on the Hinterkaifeck murders.

That department would reopen the case one last time, in 1986, but never were investigators any closer to identifying the killer, or killers, than they were when the investigation first began in 1922.

That’s all I have for you this week on heart starts pounding. Join me here next week as we explore the story of a real life werewolf. Someone who had two sides to him, a charming man, and a monster that would come out at unsuspecting times. HH HOLMES. 

Until then, stay curious, and check for monsters under your bed tonight. 

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