Cup of Joe with Jo
Hello! My name is Jovana! Also known as Jo! We’ll be talking about different topics. We’re going to dive into the past and explore our history, as well as take a closer look at the strange and mythical legends, and my favorite, true crime. So get your favorite cup of Joe and coziest blanket as we learn about the good and bad about us.
Cup of Joe with Jo
EP 6 - The Hinterkaifeck Murders
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In 1922, six members of a Bavarian farm family were found murdered in their barn and farmhouse. But the real horror came after: evidence shows the killer stayed on the property for days, feeding the animals, eating the family's food, and sleeping in their beds while the bodies lay undiscovered. This week, we dig into the eerie warning signs the Gruber family ignored and the neighbor who's remained the case's prime suspect for a century.
Picture a farmhouse in the Bavarian countryside. Smoke curling from the chimney, animals fed and watered in the barn, fresh footprints in the mud, leading up to the front door. Everything about this farm looks lived in. Looks normal. Except six people are dead inside it and have been for days. Someone had been feeding the livestock, someone had been eating the family's food, sitting in their beds, keeping the fire burning. The killer had it run. They'd moved in. It's the detail that still makes true crime researchers' skin crawl over a hundred years later. Whoever this family didn't flee the scene. They stayed for days, living quietly beside the bodies of six people, two of them children. This is the story of the Hinterkaifik murders, one of Germany's oldest, coldest, and strangest unsolved cases. A mystery newspaper, footprints that appear from nowhere, a killer who may have lived among the victim's community for the rest of his life, and an answer that investigators may have had for years. One they've chosen to keep sealed. Let's start from the beginning. Today we dive into a case of the stumped investigators for over a century, the Hinter Kaifek murders on an isolated farmstead in Upper Bavaria, Germany. I hope you're ready for your cup of joe and your cozy's blanket as we discuss today's topic. Just a reminder to keep in mind that our full source list is available on our website, cup of joe with joe.com. Alright, let's get started. To understand this case, you have to understand the world it happened in. It's 1922, Germany is four years removed from the devastation of World War I, hyperinflation is eating away at savings, jobs are scarce, and rural communities are largely left to fend for themselves. Farms like this one weren't just homes, they were self-sufficient operations, isolated by design, often miles from the nearest neighbor.
SPEAKER_00So if something goes wrong out there, you're on your own?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, completely. Hinter Kaifek wasn't even really a village. It was a single remote farmstead a shortwalk from the small town of Weithoffen in Upper Bavaria. To reach it, you'd have to follow a lonely dirt path bordered by dense trees cut off from view of any other home.
SPEAKER_00That already sounds like the setup to a horror movie.
SPEAKER_01It kind of is. Living there, Andreas Gruber, 63, and his wife Cecilia, 72, Andreas had a reputation locally. Neighbors described him as difficult, stubborn, and by several accounts prone to violent outbursts.
SPEAKER_00Um, so not exactly a beloved figure in town?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no. And also in the house, their 35-year-old daughter, Victoria Gabriel, a widow, her husband Carl, was reported killed in World War I. She had two kids, seven-year-old Cecilia, named for her grandmother, and two-year-old Joseph.
SPEAKER_00So, grandparents, a widowed daughter, and two small kids. So sounds like a full house.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and running a farm that size with an aging couple, a widow, and two toddlers was a lot of work. Which is why they kept a living maid. Which brings us to the newest member of the household, a woman who had no idea what she was walking into.
SPEAKER_00I already have a bad feeling about this maid.
SPEAKER_01So, weird thing is that the maid position had been empty for months.
SPEAKER_00Farmhands don't exactly grow on trees out there, but for months.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's because the previous maid, uh Kreshnitz Reger, quit abruptly. She stated that the reason she had to leave was because the farm was haunted.
SPEAKER_00Okay, why did she think that?
SPEAKER_01For months before the murders, the Groubers reported strange things happening on the property. A lot of it centered on the attic. Footsteps late at night, directly overhead in a room that should have been empty. Groaning, shifting sounds like someone was pacing.
SPEAKER_00Um, so this is an old farmhouse, so there could be settling wood, um, mice in the walls. It doesn't sound that paranormal, it just sounds like an old building.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and Andrews would grab his lantern and check, and every time, nothing. No intruder, no disturbed dust, just an empty attic in silence, which, yeah, that doesn't sound very paranormal to me, but you never know.
SPEAKER_00Okay, that's a little weird, I guess. But um, still, I don't think that I would jump to conclusion and say that it's a ghost, but um repeatedly finding nothing on its own is still kind of unsettling.
SPEAKER_01It's what convinced Kreshnitz to leave rather than spend another night there. In hindsight, that decision may have saved her life. But the attic wasn't the only strange thing. In March of 1922, a newspaper showed up with a mail, one the family had never subscribed to and didn't recognize. And just figured it was a postal mix-up, but I mean, even nowadays, uh I mean we get mail from other people, but I don't know, it's usually the next door neighbor.
SPEAKER_00It's kinda it's pretty easy to get a mixed up over here, but imagine 1922 when I don't know, I think you had a a bit of you're a bit more reliant on it because that's don't one of the few methods of communication of the time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I and they had a bit more time to review the mail. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. They had more time on their hands.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So when people looked into this later, no household on that entire postal route subscribed to that Munich paper. Not one. It came from nowhere, meant for no one, and there it was.
SPEAKER_00Now we're in somebody's watching this family territory. Um, so that doesn't sound like mere that doesn't sound like male error. It sounds like it's a message.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's really strange. Starting off with steps in the attic, and all of a sudden now we have something from eunuch. Super strange. Then came the footprints. One morning after a fresh snowfall, Andreas found tracks leading straight to the farm's machine room. Here's the unsettling part. They only went in one direction. Toward the building, none leading back out.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so how does someone walk in and not walk back out?
SPEAKER_01That's the question. And the machine room's lock had been broken. So somebody did go in there, or somebody at least did something to the door.
SPEAKER_00So there's someone actually there?
SPEAKER_01I I believe so at this point. And he thought so too. He searched the whole room, braced for anything, and found nobody. Just a broken lock and an empty room.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that sounds much worse than finding someone. They broke in and then just vanished.
SPEAKER_01Yep, and that same night the family heard deliberate footsteps in the attic again. Andrea searched it and again. Nothing.
SPEAKER_00I would have called the police or the neighbors or everyone.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he told his neighbors and several offered to come stay at the farm, help him keep watch.
SPEAKER_00And what happened?
SPEAKER_01He turned every one of them down. He believed he could protect his family all by himself.
SPEAKER_00That's the decision I'd flag as the biggest what-if in this whole case. One extra set of eyes on that property, and this might have been a completely different story.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I had the same thought. Meanwhile, the tension inside the house was climbing too. According to a classmate of young Cecilia's, the family had a violent argument shortly before the murders. Bad enough that Victoria fled into the surrounding forest and stayed there for hours before being found and brought back.
SPEAKER_00So it's not just something outside the house, something's happening inside it too.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Intruder, stalker, or something closer to home, the household was under enormous strain. And on March 31st, 1922, a new person stepped right into the middle of it. Her name was Maria Baumgartner, 44 years old, and after months of the position sitting empty, finally, someone to help run the household.
SPEAKER_00So please tell me somebody warned her about the addict, right?
SPEAKER_01Not that I read, no. Maria arrived with her sister, who stayed just long enough to help her settle in, then said goodbye and went home.
SPEAKER_00Let me guess they never saw her again.
SPEAKER_01Never saw her again. That evening, Maria's very first night on the job, something started out in the barn. We don't know exactly how it started. What we do know, family members ended up out there one by one. Forensic testing later showed screaming from inside the barn couldn't actually be heard from the house. So it's more likely each person simply noticed someone hadn't come back and went to check.
SPEAKER_00Which means the killer didn't need to lure anyone. The family walked into it themselves, one at a time, just being normal and concerned.
SPEAKER_01That's a theory. Whoever was sitting struck each victim with a tool similar to a pickaxe, a mattock. I had to Google this. It actually looks like a pickaxe, except just one of them is standing up, the other one is tied to tide. We'll have to take a picture of it. Later found missing from the property and almost certainly the murder weapon. Andreas, Cecilia, Victoria, and seven-year-old Cecilia. Here's a detail that gets people. The youngest, Cecilia, didn't die immediately. Investigators found clumps of her own hair scattered in the hay beside her body.
SPEAKER_00Oh, so this means she pulled it out herself?
SPEAKER_01Yep, that's what it sounds like. She survived the initial blow and lay there, injured and alone next to her family, before eventually succumbing. By the time she died, the killer had already moved into the farmhouse, which tells you they knew the home's layout. They went straight for the back room where Maria was already asleep, worn out from her travels.
SPEAKER_00Oh wow, so she never even woke up?
SPEAKER_01No, she came, set up herself with her sister, her sister left, fell asleep, and then she didn't wake up. And that leaves two-year-old Joseph. He's asleep in his bassinet. And that's exactly where he was found. One blow, he never left his crib.
SPEAKER_00Hmm, so six people, two kids, probably under an hour.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, probably less. And the killer didn't leave.
SPEAKER_00Right. They stayed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they stayed for days. The murders happened the night of March 31st. Instead of fleeing, whoever did this slept on the farm, tended the animals, ate the family's food, kept the fire lit.
SPEAKER_00I really can't wrap my head around that. So somebody kills six people, two of them children, and then does chores.
SPEAKER_01That's what the evidence suggests, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Let's not panic. That's that's a crime of passion gone wrong. And it sounds like that person felt complete ease just staying there after the murders.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, which is a which is a big part of why this case is so unsettling. And for four days, nobody outside the phone knows anything wrong. The evening after the murders, a local resident walked past and noticed the chimney smoke smelled off. Enough that he considered investigating.
SPEAKER_00Uh-oh.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, before he could, a man approached him from the property, holding a lantern. The light was so bright it blinded him, and by the time his vision cleared, the man was gone.
SPEAKER_00Somebody just casually walked up to a stranger on a property with six bodies currently lying in it, holding a lantern like everything's fine.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was described.
SPEAKER_00That's either the most brazen thing I've ever heard, or that guy had no idea what was going on inside that house.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, still one of the case's biggest open questions. The next day, coffee sellers came by for Cecilia Gruber's regular order, walked the property, found no one, and left. Young Cecilia didn't show up to school. No alarms were raised, of course. The whole family missed church that Sunday and nothing.
SPEAKER_00So this is a small town in 1922. I think that missing church is basically a five-alarm fire, and nobody checks.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Somehow it took four full days before anyone started asking questions. On April 4th, a repairman named Albert Hoffner came to fix an engine. Spent four or five hours on the property, saw no one, finished the job, and then went home. As usual.
SPEAKER_00So this guy comes to do a job, he spends like half a day there, and he didn't even think to maybe ask where everyone was. Like maybe a kid or an adult, he didn't see anyone, and he didn't think that was strange.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, apparently not. And you know, I'm kind of wondering, shouldn't he be getting paid for this? I mean, if I'm a repairman spending four or five hours, I would want to get paid immediately, or I don't know if he he paid beforehand, but still.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for that much work for sure.
SPEAKER_01I don't know, seems so weird.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And then later that day, a neighbor named Lawrence Schlittenbauer sent his son to check on the family. When the boy couldn't find anyone, Lawrence gathered two other neighbors and went himself. Finally!
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01The three men found Andress, Cecilia, Victoria, and young Cecilia stacked together in the hay in the barn.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. A short time later, inside the house, they found Maria and two-year-old Joseph.
SPEAKER_00Hmm. I can't imagine being one of those three guys just walking into that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And local police were completely unprepared for a clim for a crime scene like this. Rural Bavaria in the 1920s just didn't see mass homicides, let alone one that's deliberate. And by then the scene was already badly compromised. Not just from days of foot traffic from repairmen and coffee sell sellers, but from the killer who'd been living there, unknowingly disturbing whatever evidence might have pointed back to them.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, this seems kind of hopeless. Um, this is the 1920s, and forensics at the time was basically non-existent. And then the scene was also a mess before anyone with a badge even arrived.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. Which left investigators asking the question that still defines this case. Why kill six people, two of them children, and then just stay?
SPEAKER_00Um, first instinct, robbery gone wrong.
SPEAKER_01And that was the leading theory until they found a significant amount of money still on the property, untouched.
SPEAKER_00So it's not about the money, um, which makes it somewhat scarier.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that's when the rumor mount really got going. The first theory centers on Victoria's husband, Carl Gabriel, reported killed in World War One. What if he hadn't actually died? What if he came home years later and found his wife had a child in his absence?
SPEAKER_00That's a motive I can see. A traumatized war vet comes home to a kid that isn't his. That breaks people.
SPEAKER_01Some witnesses claim to have seen a man mark matching Carl's description, working in a prison camp in Russia after the war. Carl had reportedly wanted to visit Russia before the war, and allegedly that same man later told someone he was a Heinter Keif killer.
SPEAKER_00Allegedly told someone is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
SPEAKER_01And that's because he was never properly identified. No name, no paper trial, nothing beyond a resemblance and uh secondhand claims.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, great story. As evidence goes, it looks like there's nothing there.
SPEAKER_01Essentially, it's a dead end, yeah. And then there's theory two, the family tension. There was a long-running rumor in town tied to paternity tied to paternity questions within the household that eventually became a formal legal case. Victoria and her father Andrews were found guilty of incest in connection with it.
SPEAKER_00Ugh, that's a grim detail to drop in the middle of a murder investigation.
SPEAKER_01It is. One theory holds that whatever tension or shame that created in how that household could have factored into the violence. It's one thread amongst several, never definitively resolved.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, honestly, that one feels more like small town gossip than an investigation lead, but I get why it's part of the record. It's pretty serious.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And theory three, the neighbor. Okay. So most researchers actually point to Lawrence Schlittenbauer, the neighbor who found the bodies.
SPEAKER_00Called it.
SPEAKER_01Lawrence had been close with the family for years, particularly with Victoria. And after his own wife died, that closel that closeness reportedly grew. There were rumors, never confirmed, that he had fathered one of Victoria's children, possibly Joseph.
SPEAKER_00So there's a personal connection and a possible motive going on. What about his behavior at the scene?
SPEAKER_01This is where it gets interesting. After finding the four bodies in the barn, Lawrence didn't wait for the police or backup. He ran alone into the farmhouse with no idea whether the killer was still inside. And then there are the keys. Lawrence let himself into the house with his own set of keys. A set of house keys had gone missing from the property in the days before the murders.
SPEAKER_00Wait, so he had keys to their house?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and when asked why he'd walk into a possible murder scene unarmed and alone, his explanation was that he was checking on his son.
SPEAKER_00Meaning Joseph, the kid people think might actually be his?
SPEAKER_01Right. Though Lawrence's story on that was wildly inconsistent. He'd provide he'd previously fought paying child support for Joseph, with even claiming the boy wasn't his and was actually conceived through incis between Victoria and her father.
SPEAKER_00Wait, so he denied the kid was his to avoid paying child support, but then used checking on my son as his excuse for sweeping a bloody crime scene alone.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. That double center is one of the biggest reasons people didn't buy his story. It gets even more suspicious. In the years after the murders, Lawrence kept turning up, frequenting the farm, commenting on the condition of the remains, staying oddly engaged with the case. Some observers at the time felt he knew details only the killer should have known.
SPEAKER_00So there's a motive, opportunity, means, and behavior that raises every red flag in the book. Why wasn't he ever charged?
SPEAKER_01That's the frustrating part. Despite all of it, he never was. No one was.
SPEAKER_00Of the three theories, that's probably the one I like the most.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, me too. And so why did the case go cold if this theory is actually really convincing? With this much circumstantial evidence, there was never an arrest. Part of it is the era forensic science in 1920s rural rural Bavaria was decades behind. Fingerprinting existed, but wasn't vigorously applied at provincial scenes like this. DNA analysis was almost a century away.
SPEAKER_00And the scene was already trampled by four days of foot traffic before police even got there.
SPEAKER_01Right. Plus the killer contaminating further just by living there. Arguably one of the most compromised crime scenes in German criminal history.
SPEAKER_00So the case was practically unsolvable from the moment it happened?
SPEAKER_01By the standards of the time? Largely, yes. But investigators kept circling back for decades. The last official interrogations connected to this case happed happened in 1986, over 60 years later.
SPEAKER_00So 60 years. Who were they even interrogating at that point?
SPEAKER_01Presumably surviving witnesses or people connected to earlier suspects. Then in 2007, 15 students at a German police academy took the case on as a training exercise, re examining it with modern standards. And they criticized the original investigation for failing to use forensic tools that were already available in 1922. Fingerprinting, especially.
SPEAKER_00So, even by the standards of that time, they still dropped the ball.
SPEAKER_01Yep, that was their conclusion. But here's the detail that keeps this case alive more than any other. Those students said the original investigators had actually gathered enough circumstantial evidence to narrow the suspect list down to a single man.
SPEAKER_00A single name?
SPEAKER_01One name. Never made public, out of respect for the man's surviving family.
SPEAKER_00After everything we just went through, they're just not gonna tell us.
SPEAKER_01Nope. It's sealed away.
SPEAKER_00That's simultaneously the most satisfying, most frustrating way this could end.
SPEAKER_01Yep. They at least they know, but also, yeah, we won't know. The farmhouse itself didn't survive long past these murders. Demolished within the year. The land essentially wiped clean. It was during the demolition that workers found the murder weapon hidden in the attic. The same attic that had been haunted by unexplained footsteps for months before the killings.
SPEAKER_00Okay, that detail gives me chills. Real clue or just a coincidence? That's just a gut punch of an ending.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean that he was actually there. And after the family checked and checked, and others trying to see what was up there, nothing. No one was there, they couldn't see any foot uh footprints, whatever, and there it turns out he was there. But Heinter Kaifek has never really left the public consciousness in Germany. It's inspired by documentaries, books, and at least one notable film, 2009's Tanno released internationally as the murder farm.
SPEAKER_00I'm not surprised, it's got everything isolation, warning signs, and an impossible killer, so sounds like I need to watch that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And today, all that physically remains at the site is a small monument honoring the six victims, Andreas and Cecilia Gruber, Victoria Gabriel, her children Cecilia and Joseph, and Maria Baumgartner, a woman who had been on the job less than 24 hours when she was murdered in her sleep. So, what makes Heinter Kaifik so enduringly unsettling isn't just the brutality. It's everything around it. Months of warnings that went unheeded, the eerie normalcy investigators found in a home the killer had quietly been living in. The fact that somewhere in a sealed file, an answer may already exist, and we're simply not allowed to have it. Guessing and left with a monument in an empty field where a farmhouse used to stand.
SPEAKER_00Stay safe, Doctor.
SPEAKER_01See you next time.