Adeptus Ridiculous - THE HINTERKAIFECK MURDERS: There's Something in The Attic | Detective Ridiculous

Episode Date: September 25, 2022

https://www.patreon.com/AdeptusRidiculoushttps://www.adeptusridiculous.com/https://twitter.com/AdRidiculoushttps://orchideight.com/The Hinterkaifeck murders occurred on the evening of 31 March 1922, when six inhabitants of a small Bavarian farmstead, located approximately 70 kilometres (43 mi) north of Munich, Germany, were murdered by an unknown assailant. The six victims were Andreas Gruber (aged 63) and Cäzilia Gruber (aged 72); their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel (aged 35); Viktoria's children, Cäzilia (aged 7) and Josef (aged 2); and the maid, Maria Baumgartner (aged 44). They were all found struck dead. The perpetrator (or perpetrators) lived with the six corpses of their victims for three days.Four of the dead bodies were stacked up in the barn, the victims having been lured into there one by one. Prior to the incident, the family and their previous maid reported hearing strange sounds coming from the attic, which led that maid to quit. The case remains unsolved to this day.Support the show

Everybody to another episode of Detective Ridiculous. I am your host, Bricky, and my co-host is D.K., and he's going to be talking to me about the worst thing in the world living. Before we start, check out patreon.com slash adeptist ridiculous for all of our wonderful benefits, including access to the discord, posters. We're not talking about the new one, bloopers if they have them, and other great, great stuff. But just a side note, if you are a member on YouTube, you do get access to our prior stream vods that we attempt to stream roughly once a week, but we do have issues sometimes. But roughly.

You also get Discord access if you're a YouTube member and emotes for the stream and comments and the like. If you like to check out some merch, go to Orkinet.com where you can buy the poster we don't talk about. And also various other kinds of merchandise. It's all that good stuff. That's the poster that we don't talk about. It's fanboy thousand sons. Thank you, thank you, D.K. Thank you.

No problem. I mean, you hadn't mentioned it yet, so I kind of figured, you know, if anyone was curious. That's true, you know, I just, I wasn't sure. I was very, I just forgot, you know. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's fan boy thousand sons for anybody that, uh, yeah. It's a nice poster. Most definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, okay. All right, all right, tell me about the people who die horribly. Oh, boy. So today is, um, yeah, there's, there's some stuff going on. Today we're dealing with a pretty brutal event from Germany. And we should probably start off a bit of a warning that we're going to be dealing with some real loss of life.

This stuff did happen. There are some pretty grisly descriptions of what happened. I'll try to remember to give another small warning before we go too in-depth into them. so if you're kind of sensitive to really graphic descriptions of just not fun stuff, which I can't blame you if you are, you'll kind of know where to tread lightly or maybe skip if you don't want to hear like the gory details, you know.

So today, we are rolling all the way back to 1922 in Germany to a little farmhouse called Hinter-Kifeck. For reference, the Hinter-Kyfeck farm was near Munich, maybe about an hour or so drive, and it was located behind a small town called Kifek, which is where this farmhouse gets its name, because Hinter-Kifek means behind Kifek. At the time, Hinter-Kifek was home to the Gruber family, which consisted of an elderly couple, Andreas, who was 63, and his wife, Cecilia, who was a... age 72. They also lived with their widow daughter, Victoria, who was 35 years old, and she had two

children, Cecilia, who was age seven, who I'm assuming is named after the mother, because they have the same name, and her son, Yosef, who was age two. They also had a live-in maid named Maria Baumgartner, who was 44 years old. Okay, backed up a couple things. One, All right, back it up. The picture shy posted the first one. Looks like the house is flooded. Does that not look like water to you? It looks like water, doesn't it?

I think it's just, I think it's a bad photo. Yeah, or something. But it looks like it's flooding, you know? It looks like water. That does kind of look like just really deep water, doesn't it? And the second image, I genuinely didn't notice the old lady next to the guy. I thought she was missing a head. It looked like the head was just.

Oh, my God, you're right. Oh, God, that's... It was just gone, because it's like her hair or her hat matches the white of the house perfectly. Oh, my God, you're right. Oh, that's creepy. That's creepy. That's astute observations on those pictures.

I hate them both a lot more now. Thank you. Thank you. Excellent. No problem. No problem. Continue. But let's do a little background on the Gruber family and Hinter-Kifek. So this family was a little more...

on the isolated side, tending to keep to themselves and really only go out when they needed to stock up on supplies in town, and they'd only interact with, like, maybe a few of their neighbors and their close friends. And from what I could gather, most people thought that Andreas was a miserable old bastard, and there were a lot of unsettling rumors about the grubers that would kind to justify everybody thinking that he was a miserable old bastard When you state miserable old bastard, you're not referring

to old and sad, you're referring to just grumpy, unlikable that kind of thing? Yeah, just in general, Andres Gruber, not a very likable man. Gotcha, okay. And one of the rumors being that

before Victoria was born, Andreas and Cecilia had two other children, But both of them passed away from what people think or are rumoring is either neglect or just ill treatment in general. It was also rumored that Andreas quite frequently beat his wife, Sezealia. Their daughter, Victoria, was married to a man named Carl Gabriel for a little while. And according to the Case File podcast, he really, really didn't get along with Andreel. And would often speak to his parents about the abuse that Andreas would give him.

And the fact that sometimes Andreas just refused to give him meals. Oh, Wait. Go ahead. The Andreas, the miserable old man would just be like, you don't get to eat. Yeah, you don't get to eat. I don't like you. I don't like that you're married to my daughter.

No food. I can't think of my house. I can't think of a good German accent joke to go along. with this type of thing because to roll with some kind of the hard German humor is not a laughing matter kind of crap but

all right but Carl would eventually move away because he'd enlist to fight in World War I in France and at this time Victoria was pregnant so she would give birth to Sezilia

with Carl off fighting in World War I And things don't really get a whole lot better for Victoria after Carla leaves. In 1915, she and her father are anonymously accused of having an incestuous relationship. I believe I remember reading that Victoria had actually spoken to some neighbors and some of her friends about how her father was actually forcing himself. on her and she just she like couldn't bear to look at him she couldn't bear to be around

him and it was just horrible so this rumor had been kind of floating around for a while and they would actually be taken to court for it and Andreas would be sentenced to just a year in prison and Victoria would be sentenced

to a month in prison for their incestuous relationship and when both of their sentences were up, they went right back to Hintr Kifek and continued with life on the farm like nothing was wrong. Does that mean they continued, continued with life on the farm? Yes, they continued with life on the farm.

Sweet home, Berlin. I was going to say, it must have made life just a little awkward for everyone involved. I can't say. Well, you know, he was a miserable old man, so, you know, it's not like he could get much worse. Maybe they'd stop fucking if he stopped giving them food. Yeah. He was indeed a miserable old bastard. And as you can imagine, when Yosef was born in like the 1920s-ish, there were more than a few rumors rolling around that this child was actually the product of the incestuous relationship of Victoria and her.

father Andreas, which would make Andreas both the father and grandfather to Yosef. Okay, dude. Okay. All right. I don't like this Andrea guy. I'm not a fan of him. He's getting worse. Yeah. Though officially, on Yosef's birth certificate, the father is simply listed with the initials of L.S., which stand for Lawrence Schlittenbauer. one of the neighbors and few friends of the Gruber's on Hinter Kaifek. He was also romantically involved with Victoria and, again, was a pretty close friend of the Gruber family. And who the real father of Yosef was always seemed to be under speculation.

Because for a while, Lorenz said that Yosef wasn't his and that it was in fact Andreas's incestuous child with Victoria. According to Unsolvedcasebook.com, this would actually lead to Andreas and Victoria being accused of incest again because of Lorenz's accusations,

but they were acquitted when out of nowhere, just out of nowhere, Lorenz retracts his accusations, and he's like, yep, I'm the father. I'm the father, and like a good father, I'm going to help pay for his upbringing. Oh, what? Yep. Out of nowhere, he just kind of like retracts his accusation, and he's like, yep, I'm the father, and I am going to make sure that I help Victoria raise this child with, like, payments. It sounds like they've got dirt on him or something.

So the speculation is that Victoria either paid off Lorenz or actually offered to marry him at some point because apparently that's something Lorenz was looking for if he would just drop all the charges and claim that he was the father of Yosef. So sort of kind of yes, but not. They kind of paid him off to sort of like, okay, look, we don't want to be charged with incest again.

Again. Please, I'll marry you, I'll pay you off, whatever. Just please drop the charges, and Lorenz drops the charges. So, things are a little nuts around Hinter Kaifek and the Gruber family already. And we haven't even scratched the surface of what makes. makes Hinter-Kafeck so weird. So remember how I said there was also a maid that lived at Hinder Kiefeck, Maria Baumgartner. Yes.

She was not the first maid that Hinter-Kifek had. I've only seen a couple sources that actually lists the name of this maid and actually a little bit about her. It was the case file podcast being the most prominent one, which does an incredible, an incredible. episode on this topic. But this maid's name was Kresens Rieger. I don't know if I'm pronouncing her first name, right? It's spelled K-R-E-S-Z-E-N-Z. K-R-E-S-E-N-Z. So I'm just going to call her Rieger henceforth. But she was actually witness, or it was claimed that she was witnessed to a lot of the abuse that Andres would put Victoria through in terms of their, you know, unhealthy relationship.

These are words that are, those are words for it, yes. Yeah. She was actually privy to a lot of it. And you might think that witnessing such just unsettling and kind of gross events would prompt Rieger to immediately pack her things and get the hell out of Hinter-Kifeck.

But I guess in those days, as a maid, you don't question what your employers are doing no matter what you see, even if it's something as, like, gross and unsettling as that? Because that doesn't make her quit. Well, it's all, I mean, I hate to say it, 20s, different time. True, you know, let's not pretend, like, in America, the 50s wasn't full of abuse to, you know, like the spouse, you know, often. But, like, this is like, I feel like even by the 20s, this is maybe above an, beyond the call of duty, because this is still, this is still

Andrea's forcing himself on Victoria. There's still him abusing Sezilia, so it's just, it's a, it's a, it's a lot of bad stuff. It's a lot of bad stuff. Isn't it during World War I, so it's Warrior in Europe? That's true. Shai just brought that up. It's also wartime in Europe, probably hard to find work, you don't want to, that. That's fair. It's a small town anyway, so the chances of something else opening up kind of slim. I mean, you know, it's terrible. It's obviously terrible.

But I can like, I can, I can understand why they maybe had, what they felt, or not obligated, but they kept themselves quiet because they just needed a job during World War I. Yep. Different time, different circumstances, different, different necessities, sure. But what did cause her to finally leave was that she apparently thought that Hinter Kaifek was haunted. She had been hearing strange sounds in the attic, like footsteps, that she couldn't explain. And she also had this horrible feeling that somebody was like watching her. So, Creschen's Rieger would leave Hinter-Kifek sometime around September 1921. So all of all the crazy

stuff didn't get her, it was that she felt like Hinter-Kifek was haunted. This wouldn't be the only unsettling thing to happen to Hinter-Ky-Fect and these next events would happen around March 1922 for a quick time reference.

So several out-occurrences happen. First of all, Andreas and the family also start hearing these strange sounds that Rieger had mention sounds of people walking around in the attic and footsteps and after performing a pretty extensive search of the attic the farm and the house uh andreas couldn't find anything couldn't find anything couldn't find anyone so no no no decay in the walls story no no no deal well maybe

they were in the walls maybe they were hiding in the walls and that's why they couldn't find them Didn't take all the bricks out of the walls and see if there was anyone in there, you know? They weren't fast enough to find the person in the walls. They were too quick. Too quick. I'm too quick. I'm in your walls. Big attic.

That's shy just posted. That's a very large attic. Yo, is that a picture of their actual attic shy? Or is that just... Damn. Okay, cool. That's a room. That is a large attic.

Well, they had a, I mean, Hintr-Kyphick is a pretty decently sized farm and, like, house. So, you know, it tracks. God damn. All right. Yeah. Um, Andreas would also find a newspaper from Munich in his home. And this is a newspaper that he wasn't subscribed to. Uh, at first, Andres thought that the mailman maybe just delivered it to the wrong house. Simple mistake, since Andreas didn't buy it and he wasn't subscribed to it. Uh, however, uh, he would discover that literally no one in the area of Hintr Kiefeck was subscribed to this Munich newspaper. Andreas would also discover what looked to be footprints in the snow outside of his house. Prince that led from the nearby forest into the family's machine room, which had, I think it was either a broken lock,

or it looked like somebody tried to break the lock off of this machine. room door. But the really creepy thing is there was no second track of footprints coming out of the machine room and returning to the woods. Whatever went in that way,

either didn't come out that way or was still hiding somewhere in Hinter-Kifek. Also, they discovered... Wow, that farm is in the middle of jack-all-now-where. Yep, that's that's Hinter-Kyfeck.

It is kind of isolated. It's kind of on its own. But yeah, so there's the footsteps going in but not coming out. And they also discovered the set of their house keys had gone missing, which I think in the 20s is a really big deal. Because you don't just have a ton of house keys. You have like maybe two or three sets. So one of them going missing, kind of a big deal. Is this before or after the maid left?

This is after the maid left, I believe. Uh-oh, Spaghetti-O. Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs. Now, you might be thinking, holy shit. These are, like, proper signs that someone is scoping the place out or some really shady shit is about to go down. And I thought the same thing. And, I mean, if I were in Andres' shoes,

I probably pack the family up and get the hell out of there as fast as I could. but this is like kind of where they make their livelihood, this is where they make their money, this is where they raise their animals, so it's kind of hard to just up and leave everything. But Andreas, he had actually talked to several people in the nearby town about these odd circumstances.

I think he even told his neighbor Lorenz, the one that is maybe possibly, but probably not, Yose's father, and Lorenz offered to help, offered to contact the police. He even offered to let Andreas borrow his revolver if he wanted to. But Andreas refused to accept any help on the matter. He didn't report it to the police and claim that he wasn't afraid that he could defend his home and that he had his own rifle ready for any intruders that might try to come in and steal from him

that were squatting or hiding on his property. So Andres is trying to be a real man's man here, you know, I got this, it's my property, I can defend my family, I don't need your stinking help. I don't like this, this never ends well. This doesn't end well in the normal days, and this is the song that's going to end well in the olden days. Probably not going to end that well in the 1920s. By this time, the groubers would also hire their new maid, Maria Baumgartner, through her older sister Francesca, and I believe their mother had also spent their whole life working as a maid, too. So this is like a family of maids.

But back in Hinder-Kifec, there were still noises that could be heard by the family, footsteps in the attic and such. But no matter how much Andres investigated, he could never find anyone or any source of the noise. And one night in late March, Victoria actually ran away from home after a particularly violent incident with Andreas. Oh, who would have fucking guessed?

I know, right? What do you know? Wow, Victoria is distressed. He's a piece of shit. You telling me that, huh? I know. And the family spent most of the night looking for her. And when the family finally found her,

they found her sitting against a tree stump at dawn. because the family was kind of worried that with all this stuff going on, maybe, you know, she was thinking about doing something drastic, we'll say. Ah, like hanging herself on the tree? I believe I read they were worried that maybe... Oh, you said tree stump. Never mind, my head. I think I remember reading that they were worried that maybe she had drowned in a nearby ravine or something.

Oh. They found her. Cool. I would also imagine at this time the family is just rife with paranoia. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of mental state Victoria was in. Not only just being with Andreas, who is an absolute awful, awful human being, but she also has to imagine that there is someone or something trying to break into their house and harm them.

And again, they'd been telling numerous, like, shopkeepers and townsfolk that they were worried that someone was trying to break in and harm them and get them. But again, Andreas just wouldn't accept anyone's help. And her youngest daughter, Cecilia, was actually noticeably exhausted and falling asleep in school as well, because all this stuff, she just can't sleep. You know, they're out looking for Victoria. there's strange noises coming from the attic. So even the youngest one is just absolutely like exhausted.

I mean, she's only like seven or eight at the time. On March 31st, 1922, Maria Baumgartner arrives at Hinter-Kifeck for her first day as the new maid. She would arrive with her... Yeah, I know, right? This is the... This is where you want to be, right? You're coming into such a wholesome family setting, right?

But she would arrive with her older sister who would help her settle into her new home, and her sister wanted to leave shortly before it got dark, because I guess she had some errands or something to attend to in town. Now, over the next few days, however, Hinter-Kifex seemed oddly quiet. there were a couple of coffee vendors that had stopped by Hintr Kiefeck. Their names were Hans and Edward Shorovsky. No, it means.

Very German. But no one answered the door when they tried knocking on doors and windows and just nobody answered. So quiet you mean just not a lot of traffic going around, not a lot of people work in there? Well, there's just not a lot of, it's just very quiet on Hinterkhyphic. There's not a lot of, I mean, you can hear the animals, you can hear the dog, but there's just not a lot of activity in Hinterkifek. What's, are the people, or is the maid already working there, or was it before she made her route over? Oh, oh, the maid, the maid has been there. Her first night was like the day before the coffee vendor showed up.

Gotcha. So the maid's still there. The coffee vendors had also seen the broken lock on the machine room door, but, you know, they're not going to intrude and just go in and whatever. You know, okay, they're not home, whatever. The family's just, maybe they're out shopping, or they just were really busy and couldn't be bothered. Maybe they're all just sleeping. Who knows? Let's just go.

The Gruber's had also scheduled some repairs to take place on a food shopper on April. 4th, which a man named Albert Hoffner showed up to complete. But much like with the coffee vendor, there really wasn't anyone around at Hintr Kivek. Again, no one answered the door or him banging on the windows. All he heard was the sound of the animals put away on the farm, the dog was put away. So, I mean, I guess they must have already paid him for the work and the repairs, or he figured he could get payment from like Andres the next time he saw him, because after waiting an hour, he decided, you know what, I'll just fix what I came to fix and leave. So he does. The repairs take him about four hours, and he just kind of dips after

that. The mailman had also noticed that ever since, I think, Saturday, the Gruber's mail had really started to pile up where he left it. Their neighbor. So nobody's around. Guys like, well, shit, I'll do my repairs, I guess. Yep, pretty much. No one's around picking up the mail. So it's just... I mean, what was he repairing again?

He was repairing the food chopper. Okay, so was he in the house? I think he was not in the house. I assume the food chopper must have been outside. Or, I mean, I guess maybe it could have been in that machine room since the lock was broken, but I'm pretty sure it was just outside.

Maybe in the fields or something. But yeah, he did not go in the house. Nobody is going in the house yet. So their neighbor, Lorenz Schlittenbauer, you know, this guy, was becoming increasingly worried about the Gruber's and Hinter-Kifeck. Not only was the farm just eerily, eerily quiet, but Sezealia had missed the last three days of school without an excuse. Furthermore, the gruber's had missed Sunday worship, which apparently they rarely missed.

So Lorenz decides to send two of his sons to check out Hinter-Kythek and see if he could find any sign of the grubers on the farm, in the fields, or anything like that. Just is there any sign of people being in Hinter-Kifek? But when his sons came back, it was pretty much the same story. Farm was all locked up, the animals were put away in the barn, and they couldn't find anyone in the fields. So Lorenz decides to take matters into his own hands.

He decides to form a sort of search party with a couple of their neighbors. Their neighbor's names were, oh man, I'm going to butcher these. Oh boy. Jacob S-I-G-L, S-I-L-S-I-L-S-S-E-L-Sigl, and Michael Pol. P-O-L-L, I'm just going to say Paul. Sure. But he got these two neighbors, and they were like, you know what, it's time to figure out what the hell's going on. Where the gruber is just, like, isolating themselves to the maximum in the house? Was there anyone even in the house?

or had they just abandoned the town in the dead of night without telling anyone? And much like the other visitors to Hinter-Kifek, Lorenz and his party found that the house was just all locked up, the animals and the family dog were put away, and everything was just too quiet, like that unsettling quiet where you just, you know something's gone wrong. So Lorenz and his search party start looking around, examining everything, and they come to the machine room, the one that had its lock broken with footprints leading up to in the snow. So Lorenz and his party would enter into the machine room, and through the machine room, they could actually get into the stables and kind of poke around.

and so here's here's your warning because things are... Oh boy! Yeah, here's your warning because things are going to get a little grimy and gruesome here when I tell you what they found. Specifically, there are victims... In the stables? Yeah, in the stables, there are victims that were children and thinking about this and reading up on it did make...

me a little unsettled, so take a second, maybe Shile put up a little skip to this time or whatever, just in case you're not feeling it, and you don't want the gory details of what they found. Or, you know, fair warning. Sometimes people like to listen to these

things, you know, like, I don't know, we have fans that have kids and stuff. Oh, sure, sure. Maybe you don't want your kids to hear the... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, just fair warning, because things are about to pick up. At first, they didn't really see anything.

But one of the neighbors, since it's kind of dark and they're kind of rifling around with like, I think they had like lanterns or like old-timey flashlights or something like that. But one of the neighbors noticed that under a pile of hay in the stables was a foot coming out from like a bunch of hay. And when they cleared out the pile of hay, they found. Real quick. Oh, go ahead. Did they go into the stables originally? Was it to check or was there like a stench?

So there wasn't really a stench or anything that I heard. From what I gathered, they were just like, they were trying to examine all of Hinterkai Effect. You know, they were like, okay, let's go in the machine room. From the machine room, we can probably make our way into the stables. I think there was like a small little like passageway into the stable. If I remember, right, they kind of stumbling. into the stables a little bit, and one of the neighbors was like, oh, my God, that's a foot under that hay.

Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. So when they cleared out that pile of hay that the foot was under, they found four bodies piled up on top of each other. They were the bodies of Andreas, his wife, Sezealia, Victoria, and her daughter, the younger Sezealia. They had all suffered these just massive blows to the head from a Maddoch. They had a bunch of these star-shaped patterns on their head. And if you don't know, Maddoch is like this big old pickax type thing, but it's a little different because it's got a broader end to it. And that Maddoch had pretty much crushed their skulls and faces.

I was debating whether I wanted to put this detail in because every time I read up on it, it made me a little queasy. But while it looked like most of the family had pretty much died instantly from their wounds to the head, the youngest girl, Sezealia, was not so lucky. Report said that she tragically survived the initial blow to her head with the Maddock, and she suffered for hours,

writhing on the ground next to her family's deceased bodies. And the investigators know this because she had bald spots on her head from where she was writhing and tearing her own hair out in shock and agony. Also, I found some conflicting information. Some sources said that Victoria showed signs of strangulation. I think the Case File podcast said that Victoria showed signs of strangulation. But then a lot of the other sources I looked up say that Andreas's wife, Cecilia, was actually the one that showed signs of strangulation.

So one of them was also strangled. So kind of, I'm not sure which one. one was, but I mean, that's a very personal thing to do to someone that you've already blown up with a Maddoch. What are, um, what were the ages of them again?

Uh, so, of the four of them that is. Uh, Andreas was in his 60s. Uh, I believe his wife was 72, 75-ish. Victoria should be around 35, uh, and Sezilia is around,

seven or eight. Oh, she's very young, okay. Very young, which is just like, oh. I was trying, I was trying to think about, like, how many people, was it one guy, put up a fight, how old would they have been,

60 years old, nah, but the rest, probably not. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. Even more tragic, they had found the new maid Maria Baumgartner and, and young Yosef in his crib, both dead and having been killed with similar head trauma inside the house.

Which is just awful. I mean, obviously this whole thing is awful, but Yosef was a two-year-old that was just like innocently sleeping in his crib. And for someone to be able to do that is just like, what the fuck? With a two-year-old with the same injury? Yeah, with head trauma. Yep. Like that's, that's, that, like that's another level of sick. And they would also determine that when these murders happened, it was literally Maria's first night on the job.

This job that she was just so happy and thankful to get. It was her first night on the job when this happened. And that's just like, oh, God, why is everything so sad? Was Maria in the pile or was she in the bedroom? Maria was in the bedroom with Yosef. Gotcha. So the two of them were in the house. Yeah, got it, got it.

Yeah, yeah. Now, one of the biggest problems faced with, like, the investigation of this crime was it seems to me that the townsfolk knew about the murders long before it was actually, reported to the police. So, like, news of this grizzly murder had got out, and before somebody could even get to the police and report it, because I think they had to go all the way to Munich to get people to come down and investigate it,

since the town knew about it, people from the town actually came to Hintr Kifek and started poking around and moving stuff. And, like, I think people were actually prodding and poking at the bodies, people were moving the bodies I think I read somewhere that people actually had meals at the crime scene

um wait before before authorities arrived yeah before authorities could show up people were mulling around at the crime scene touching things moving things accidentally

destroying evidence so the whole scene was a circus before the police could even get there once the police the police finally did arrive and could perform a proper investigation, there were at least a few things that they could figure out. For starters, they could pretty confidently say that the murders happened on Friday. Like we said earlier, that was Maria's first night on the job as a maid of Hinter-Kafeck. They knew that because Maria's sister was with her that night,

so Maria was still alive and the grubers were obviously still alive and the mail from Saturday and onward had been piled up and untouched it also lines up perfectly with Sezile's absences from school police also naturally first sort of assumed that

this must have been a home invasion someone scoped out Hinner Kaifek they wanted to take all of the valuables, all of the money this family had and just get out and leave no witnesses. I gotta be honest, you talking about the people being like, check out this crime scene. Sounds like shit people would do in the modern day with their phones. Oh, that's, I mean, that's fair. But I would hope in the modern day.

Yeah, I would hope in the modern day, like people would just use their phone and not touch anything because that's bullshit. But yeah, these are people that were like moving. bodies and like poking around touching the bodies is just crazy um but the problem with the home invasion theory uh is that police found like a really large sum of andreas's money in the house and i don't think anything else had actually been stolen so this wasn't some hit and run done by like petty thieves or vagrants looking for a quick score this was like this seemed like it was an actual like personal thing. Um,

the other really unsettling discovery was that whoever killed the Gruber family actually stayed in the house for like another three or four days. Uh, they were tending to the animals. They were making

meals for themselves. Wait, days? Days. They stayed in that house. Days after they murdered the whole family. To what? Be like, oh, can't let the pigs go get started.

Can't let the pigs not be fed? I have no idea what kind of person. Like, it, I, I don't even know. But like, legit, they were upkeeping the farm. They were tending the animals. They were putting the animals away. They had eaten the whole stock of bread from the kitchen. And there had been, like, noticeable cuts of meat from the farm stock.

I don't know if it was, like, the dried meat. or they actually had like some meat hanging and it had been noticeably cut and there was a bunch of shit missing. So it's kind of crazy. And some of the neighbors even recalled that they had seen smoke coming from the chimney after the time the grubers had been slain. So knowing this, it was pretty clear that whoever murdered the grubers probably had to know them pretty well because they managed to upkeep the goddamn farm after killing them. It's also possible that if the killer was someone that the grubers knew well, that that's actually how the killer got them to,

that's how they were all led to their doom. Because police determined that the murderer somehow lured each of the grubers to the stable one by one to kill them with the Maddock. so if it was like a familiar face or a family friend and they were like oh hey yo can i can i talk to you in the stable i have something important to tell you in the stable something's going on in the stable it's believable that they would have all just kind of gone along with it since it was a family friend or someone they trusted um they also found out that uh since they were killed one by one you might be thinking well why why in any of the family here like the screaming or the the the boom

or any of the, you know, whatever that happened. Apparently, from where the murders happened in the stable, you could not hear the screams from the house. So there is absolutely no way that the family could have known or been alerted as to what was happening. There's also the theory that they all came out to the stable because maybe they heard the animals sort of rustling and being alerted and joshes.

and maybe they wanted to go, like, check it out. The investigation was altogether pretty lackluster aside from those findings. They mentioned that literally no fingerprints were taken. And by that time, using fingerprints, finding fingerprints was fairly common. But not taking fingerprints doesn't seem that surprising, to me at least, because the whole crime scene had been tainted by the townsfolk that were poking around anyway. So, like, even if you take fingerprints,

it would be goddamn impossible to figure out which prints to rule out and which prints to suspect. The thing I find really shocking about the investigation is apparently only five pictures of the crime scene were taken. Like, I get the fact. Wait, I'm sorry. Wait, five total.

Five total pictures of the crime scene were taken. Total. Like, the... What? Five. Is it any different back because it was in the 20s or... I mean, I guess it has to be, like, because I can't wrap my head around why you would only take five pictures. Because, again, like, okay, the scene is disrupting.

and there's not much, you know, that's in the same spot. But you still want to get an idea of what the scene looks like and any noticeable things on the body or anything that could potentially be at. Like, you still want to take comprehensive shots. Like, I can't wrap my head around why only five picks were taken. It makes no sense to me. I got nothing.

Yeah. Also, the autopsy on the Gruber's was actually performed in the barn. Some sources say there were literally townsfolk onlookers watching as the autopsy happened. I can't confirm that. It's just something I heard, something I read. It was also reported that after the autopsy was completed, the heads of the Gruber family were decapitated and sent for further study in Munich. I'm assuming it was because of all the damage that was done to their head with several blows

with the Maddock and all that stuff and they wanted to further analyze it. According to an article done by Rancor.com, the skulls were also at one point given to or allowed to be examined by a clairvoyant in a razor-thin attempt to learn any potential new information or get any new leads on who may have killed this family. They gave a bunch of these skulls to a clairvoyant.

Did you say that they sent the, the heads back, but like just the heads? Just the heads. So when did they remove the head at the scene? I believe it was either at the autopsy or after the autopsy, yeah. Okay, okay. Was the autopsy done at the scene or did they take the bodies back first? No, autopsy was done at the scene in the barn.

Okay, so basically they went to the barn. They're like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, cut it. Yeah, pretty much. And like I said, from one of the sources I had was like, yeah, just, yeah, let the town's folk watch, sure. Bro, I got to be honest, listen, man, I now have three reasons to be mad at the Germans. But that also means that when the groubers were buried,

they were buried without their heads. Yeah, because they gave the skulls to some fucking psychic. So I don't know, I don't know why, but that detail seemed kind of sad to me. Like, you know, just being buried with that ahead. And it's like, oh, man, that's... Well, I mean, they would have a closed casket anyway because they got bonked in the head. Yeah, yeah. But bonked is one way of putting it.

Well, I didn't want to say, I don't want to say, like, clobbered. Bludgeoned is a word. You could have been, they were bludgeoned, you know. Yes, but I'm not going to... Yes. But yeah, it would have been, oh, that tiny cat. casket makes me so sad. Looking at the picture

shy posted of the caskets, the tiny casket makes me so incredibly sad. That's so depressing. Oh, my God. That is a very tiny casket. Yeah. A year later, Hintr Kifek would be raised to the ground and

a memorial site for the Gruber's would be erected in its place. So, the mystery of who killed the Gruber family at Hinter Kaifek, to this day, remains unsolved. None of the leads or any potential evidence found at the site of Hinter-Kifek led to anything super definitive.

I imagine a big part of this is because, as we mentioned, the crime scene had basically been forensically destroyed when all of the townsfolk started poking around inside and making it impossible to find any real, like, concrete evidence. Now, from what I've heard, the police interrogated and questioned over a hundred people in regards to the murders at Hintr Kiefeck. The old maid of Hinter-Kifek, Krishenszre. She suspected a few people, but it seemed like most of the people she accused seemed to have, like, burglary or I'm going to get the family fortune on their mind. so I'm not going to focus on them since very clearly this wasn't a crime based on money since they left all the money. There was a theory that Andreas, being the fucking lunatic that he is,

was tired of all the drama, tired of the Yosef drama, tired of the incest drama, and decided to just kill his whole family before turning the Maddock on himself and bludgeoning himself to death. I don't know if I believe that. I don't think someone can so easily just whack himself with a Maddick. Mm-hmm. That was the theory, but from the wounds they found on the body,

literally none of them were consistent with a self-inflicted wound, and the theory that any of the Gruber family just sort of went nuts and did a murder-suicide was very quickly ruled out. You're right. I will admit, though, I'm not sure how much of it I trust to begin with, considering the fact that the autopsy report decided to capitate the heads of the family at the goddamn scene. Yeah, a little medieval. You know, a little medieval.

There are two popular suspects that we can talk a little bit about, though. The first one being Carl Gabriel, Victoria's husband who left to go fight in World War War. one. Now, this theory does get a little shaky because it was actually reported that Carl died after a shell bombing in France. But some believe that since his body was never recovered, maybe he didn't actually die in the war. Not only that... Oh, go ahead. Well, I was going to say, was it never recovered because it was a shell bombing and there's not anything left? Look, all I'm saying is the theory The theory goes

That would make a lot of space You're right I'm not saying you're wrong All I'm saying is the body was never recovered So maybe people like maybe he didn't actually die in the war And not only that Maybe he actually managed to come back home And he had seen his wife with another man

And a new woman Like a new she had seen his wife with another man, a new child. Maybe he had seen his wife having this just disgusting, incestuous relationship with her father, and it threw him into a fit of rage where he would just be like, fuck it. I never liked the groupers to begin with. They never treated me well. Victoria is cheating on me with her father.

And he just off the whole family. You know, that is the problem of them, like, of him. like luring them all into the barn though which like if he came back from war they'd be like oh my god you're alive what the hell I gotta tell everybody and he'd be like no quietly come to this barn with me that's true that's true um so who knows uh well the theory was also that uh they got lured out to the barn

because they kept hearing the animals rustling and that maybe they weren't lured out by a specific person but like they heard stuff rustling around and like hey what's that you know after you're saying go one by one. Yeah. Yeah, that's essentially the theory. Shai said, poke a cow in the night. It moves. One of the family go to check on it. Kill. Poke the cow again. It moves. Another family member checks on it, etc., etc., so on and so forth. So in that way, yeah, poor cow keeps getting poked. In that way, it could have been Carl.

And again, he had previously lived at Hinner Kifek with Victoria, so he'd know his way around the farm, He'd know how to tend the animals, and he'd know how to upkeep the farm too. And his reasoning obviously is not based on money because he's just like, oh my God, this goddamn Gruber family. But police had actually interviewed soldiers who were deployed with Carl, and they said they had not only seen him die, they saw his body. and they could specifically tell police which, I think it's a military cemetery that he was buried at. So the Carl Gabriel theory kind of fell by the wayside, but there are some people that still like to believe it

because they're like, oh, well, you know, maybe he survived and he just took the identity of someone else and let people believe that he was dead because it's more convenient that way. But that's kind of... Well, I was trying to make a good point that a lot of World War I soldiers did just up and bail because it was such an awful war.

True. But I think we're getting a little too... We're splitting hairs. A little bit. A little bit. I mean, it's possible. It's possible, I suppose. It sounds unlikely, but I suppose it's possible. Though this is also not taking into account

all the wacky, weird shit that was happening before. Broken Lock, all that kind of stuff. Mm-hmm. You know, it really just seems like there was disgruntled, like, person. Yeah, and I mean, Andreas was unpopular enough that it, maybe it was just somebody that wanted to off him and didn't want the money. And it was just a vagrant that thought he was a piece of shit. And I mean, yeah, like, Andreas was known as a bitter, awful old man who everyone hated. He goes to church every Sunday.

Is there anyone at the church who, like, how do they know about the murders beforehand? The guy who did it, like, tip someone off? You know, like, like, it's pretty, it is pretty, it is pretty, brutal, but at the same time, I mean, like, have you heard a German fairy tale? That's fair, actually. Original German fairy tales are gnarly, dude. I mean, and not to, I don't know, like, yeah, the guy could have been awful. It was pretty brutal, though, especially with the fucking babies and stuff.

They would just kill me. They probably just killed the dad. Yeah. And they stayed there for weeks. Or no, no, weeks. Days, days. Yeah, I think it was three days after. They were there for at least, well, let's say anywhere between two to four days.

They were there. So, the other very, very popular theory is that the murderer was actually their neighbor, Lorenz Schlittenbauer. Being so close to the Gruber's and having as much history with the Gruber family as he did, there was naturally a lot of suspicion placed on Loren. For starters, there were a couple of little things I left out when Lorenz and the other neighbors found, when they found the bodies in Hintr-Kifeck. For starters, Lorenz seemed very nonchalant when the grisly state of the bodies were discovered, almost like he wasn't too surprised at how mangled they were because he had something to do with it. though the theory that his nonchalantness is because he had a part in the murder or was the murderer has been, I don't want to say it's been debunked, but it's been explained

because a lot of people chalk it up to just being in a complete state of shock and not really knowing how to react to such an insane scene. So you kind of come across as a little nonchalant, a little uncaring, and just a little sort of unmotivated. Lorenz was also reported to have been one of the many people who were disturbing the crime scene and moving things around.

That doesn't give us anything. There was a million people in disturbing the crime scene. There were, but he was moving bodies around. He was talking to the police a lot, and he was just, if I'm not mistaken, it was reported that he was talking to the police a lot, trying to explain things a lot, talking a lot about their dirty laundry.

So he just, he seemed very suspicious. Also, according to the neighbors that joined Lorenz in searching Hintr Kaifek, they became a little suspicious of him when he unlocked the front door to the Grubber's house after finding the bodies in the stable. he had a key to the Gruber's house, and he unlocked the door, and he very brazenly went into the house all by himself to discover the bodies of Yosef and Maria, claiming that the reason he went in alone and so brazenly is that he wanted to find his son, despite the fact that there's no way he or the neighbors could have been. known if the murder was still in the house or not. Like, why would you go brazenly going

into this house when the murder could still be there? You just found four bodies that got manlocked in the head. They could still be in the house somewhere. But it was hard. Oh, go ahead. Well, it makes sense. If we're

trying to put a timeline guy, breaks the lock, steals a key that went missing. Yep. And he's a familiar face. Like, Lorenz Schlittenbauer, like, all of the family would know him. He was the neighbor. He was on fairly friendly terms with him.

I'm not sure he'd be on friendly terms with Andreas, but maybe the rest of the family. Yosef is his son, you know. It was also argued that it wouldn't be completely strange for him to have a key to to the front door because he was romantic with Victoria and he was helping pay for raising Yosef. So that is true. Maybe he didn't steal it.

That is true. Mm-hmm. What, he was the one that originally was going to press charges and then turned back, right? Yes, he was the one that, uh, accused them of incest a second time. Although people believe that he was the one that accused them the first time and anonymously too. And it was him all the time accusing them of incest. You think that maybe someone went back on their promise for chance?

Maybe. For him not to do the thing he was going to do? Maybe that that is another potential motive is that like he was tired of paying to raise Yosef. He was tired of Andreas. And he was just tired of the grubers in general for all of this shit. the incest and the drama and Victoria and Victoria not marrying him, and he was just done with it. But yeah, locals were pretty regularly suspect of Lorenz being the Hinder-Kafeck murderer

to the point where he actually had to have several legal battles for defamation and slander, all of which he won too, because there was no real hard evidence they could use to actually convict him. So he always won, and I believe I read that he put an ad out in the newspaper warning people that he was not the Hinter-Kyfeck murderer, that he had pretty much won all of his defamation cases, and that stop doing it, or I'm going to get you two, in a legal battle. On a completely unrelated note, if you've ever seen this one, like, it's like a hedge- shot. Do you have that headshot of Lorenz Schlittenbauer, Shai? This dude has the creepiest eyes

I've ever seen. I don't know if it's just because it's an old black and white picture, but his eyes, like, they stand out and they give me it a heby-jeebies, dude. Like, if you Google image search Loren Schlittenbauer and you get this, like, profile, dude looks creepy. I don't like him. He's... But yeah, he seems very, very suspicious to me. Yeah, Shire is going to get the picture. Give her a second. There is one final honorable mention.

Yeah, that one. Oh, my God. He's so creepy. Oh, wow. Yeah, he's got some. He's got some. It almost looks like someone drew in his eyes. Right? They looked drawn in. It looked like they were added in post. Yeah, it almost looks like they were like edited to be like highlighted. I hate it. He's so creepy.

I don't. I, um, he, mm, anyway. Um, one final honorable mention is a man named

Paul Mueller. Uh, originally from Germany, uh, he had moved to the U.S. where he became kind of known for being the only real suspect in an 1897 incident in

Massachusetts, that very eerily resembled what happened at Hinter-Kifek. It was a murder of a family that was fairly isolated. It was done with a pickaxe. And money seemed to have absolutely no motivation in the slaughter. When similar events happened in Colorado and Kansas, the theory is that Paul Mueller really felt the heat of investigators on his trail and moved back to his homeland of Germany,

where perhaps, in his psychotic serial killer fashion, murdered the Gruber's at Hinter-Kafeck. But that's just sort of a... A little, little... That's a little bit of a stretch, but it fits his modus operandi, at least. Oh, I suppose. Yeah, that's why it's just an honorable mention,

because it's like, it's eerily similar. He's from Germany, you know, maybe... Who couldn't say? And even though the case was officially closed in 1955, in 2005, in 2005, there was this German police academy that decided to re-examine the case using modern-day forensics to see if they could piece together, the mystery of Hinter-Kifek. And even though they came to the conclusion that it would be essentially not possible to actually identify who the murderer was,

they all agreed that there was really, really only one main suspect who they believed probably performed the murder. And do you want to know who it was? I'm assuming Mr. Schlitten, whatever. Too bad. They refused to reveal their findings and who they thought the main suspect was going to be

out of respect for the person's living descendants who would more than likely be hassled or harassed for being of the same lineage as someone so heavily suspected of such a heinous and infamous crime. Oh my God, lizard dancing gift cry about it. The world may never know. Oh, Shai wanted to add that a lot of people still believe that Andreas Gruber was the murder. He was brutal. He was a scumbag.

Abused his family. He used the tool that killed the family to slaughter pigs in the same way the family was killed. He threatened to kill his daughter if she was about to leave him, and there were indications that she was about to leave him, true, because she ran away. The messy overkill that seemed too personal for a random killer, the fact the killer stayed in the house and cared for animals after murder, nothing was stolen. Every person in the house died from several injuries.

Andreas died from just one. that is possible, and it possibly was caused by him falling on the murder weapon, not being hit by it. You know that, you know what that reminds me of, that reminds me of a goddamn Dangan Rompah case.

I don't believe that, honestly. That's fair. I mean, the other things fit, because he was, he was a brutal scumbag. He did abuse his family. Yep.

I didn't know that that's how you slaughter pigs, though. I didn't realize you, use like a Maddoch to just brain them. Well, maybe back in the day. Because now I don't use the like pressurized canister gun. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, like the little bolt

gun, yeah. I know that's how you do... Bolt gun. Cattle, right? Like, it's like this... Did you ever see it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where there's the...

I think about... Yeah, I think more about, um... What's it called? Um, no country for old men. Oh, fair. Yeah. Okay. I, for some reason, I completely blanked on that.

They do use that. Oh, boy, that's right. They do use that, don't they? Yeah, they very much do. I mean, like, that fits. But, I mean, him just randomly falling on the same murder weapon that he, like, and that would be days later that he would have to randomly fall on the murder weapon. Like, I buy, I buy the motive, but not.

Do the groubers have descendants? Because this family's gone, aren't they? Yeah, I guess they wouldn't. Which means that the people who said, like, we think we know who did it, but out of respect for their family. And if there's no family to speak of, then I'm assuming they don't think it was the Gruber father. Oh, true, true.

There's that too. There's that too. I mean, they never released their findings, so that's also true. But if it's out of respect for a family and there's no family left to speak of. True, true. Yeah, the rest of that theory, I guess, go with, but the him falling on the murder weapon is just a little... Yeah, like, Mr. Gruber was a piece of shit, but at the same time, I'm not sure, like,

I don't know, the falling on the murder weapon thing just seems, seems weird. It seems, weird. It just seems weird. It seems bizarre. Yeah, it seems a little bizarre. But that's, that's Hinder Kifeck. That's the mystery of Hinder Kifek that was never really solved, although there is a police academy in Germany that thinks they know who the main suspect should be and who they would sort of... I don't know if they would pin it on them, but they would put high speculation on this main suspect.

The closest I've got is the neighbor, but at the same time, like, normally you want to lay low when that stuff happens and him putting out an ad in the newspaper to say, hey, shut up. It's kind of... Is kind of baller? I'm not going to lie.

And I don't know how I think about that. And also, also these were like, yeah, these were like German rednecks. Like, I don't know if he's, you know, I bet it, if we are going that path, I don't expect it to be murder suicide. I expected to be murdered accident. Like, I can imagine him just like tripping and it falling and hitting his own goddamn face. Yeah, I, I tend to believe it was Lorenz. It was Mr. Schlittenbauer, the neighbor.

He was just tired of it all. He was tired of paying for the sort of child support for Victoria. He was just tired of Andreas. Just tired of that whole family. Although, I wonder, like, because he would have had to have killed Yosef, who he was claiming was his kid, unless he was very sure that Yosef was not his child. Like, if Lorenz is like, oh, shit. I know for a fact that Yosef isn't mine.

I know for a fact that it is an incestuous baby between Andres and Victoria. I don't know. I think it's neighbor boy. I do too. And Andreas Gruber is a bad man, but I don't know. I think maybe that's more of a reason for them, for the neighbor to want to take him out. though I'll be honest, Andreas is such a miserable piece of shit that I'm totally okay with him, think, oh, I got away with it, and then he brains himself on his own Maddock that he used to kill the family.

There's a certain type of poetic justice to that that does sound appealing, so I get why people like to believe that one. Yeah, it just, I don't know, it feels, it feels, it feels, it feels, it's stretch, it feels like, It's a hundred-year-old mystery. And it's another one of those mysteries that the reason it's a mystery is because it was in the 1920s where nobody knew how to properly do things. They didn't have the same technology we have today.

And yeah. Indar Kifek, there you go. 100-year-old mystery that will probably never be solved. And the murderer is long dead. The murderers, yeah, yeah, that's true. but might have a family. Yeah, yeah, probably has descendants. But yeah, watch that case file podcast episode.

They did fantastic. They had easily the most in-depth piece on Hintr Khyphic. Oh yeah, well, obviously watch us, because they're already watching us, you idiot. Yeah, they're at the end of the episode. They were already at the end of the episode. I want to give proper credit where credit is due. you know and it's very important

yeah yeah and the episode bricky oh are we going right now oh yeah man I sure you've got more stuff to say I sure do love full family murder that's two in a row now let's let's keep it let's keep it rolling hey hey hey hey hey next month let's uh let's go back to

to cringe crypto wrapping hey man the du pro family Terry Joe survived that wasn't a whole family murder at all yeah yeah it was most of that Family. But Territ, Territio is. You're gonna fall on, you're gonna fall on your star, F, X.

Yeah. See you next week, I guess.