Background
Hinterkaifeck was an isolated farmstead in Bavaria between Ingolstadt and Schrobenhausen, about 70 kilometres north of Munich. It was home to Andreas Gruber, his wife Cäzilia, their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel and her two children. In March 1922 a new maid, Maria Baumgartner, arrived.
Rural life in post-war Germany was hard and the farm lay far from its neighbours.
What happened
In the days before the killings the family had described strange occurrences: noises from the attic, footprints in the snow leading to the farm but not away from it, and a missing key. A previous maid had left her job for such reasons.
Six people were killed on the evening of 31 March 1922. Four were found in the barn, the maid in her room and the youngest child in his crib. The weapon was a mattock found on the farm. Neighbours noticed the bodies days later, and the scene was largely disturbed by curious onlookers. There were signs that the perpetrator remained at the farm for several days and fed the animals.
Investigation
The investigation went on for years. Neighbours, acquaintances and many other people were questioned. Theories centred on several suspects, including a neighbour, people close to the family and a soldier thought to have died in the war, but no evidence conclusively pointed to any of them. No one was ever convicted.
The limited forensic methods of the time and the contamination of the scene hampered the work. The farm was demolished in 1923. In later decades police and historians reviewed the file; in 2007 a police academy analysed the case with modern methods but reached no result.
Over time, investigators and researchers also tried to understand the relationships among the people who lived on the farm, but gaps in the records of the period limited this work.
Where it stands today
For more than a century Hinterkaifeck has been one of the best-known unsolved crimes in Germany, and it has inspired books, films and research. This page remembers the six people who lived there, including two young children, as people and not only as an unsolved mystery.
The case is often cited in discussions of forensic science and cold-case review in Germany. That it was never solved does not erase the memory of the family or the grief of those days.