Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - UNSOLVED: The Hinterkaifeck Murders 1

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

In 1922, six members of the same family were found murdered on their isolated farmstead in the Bavarian countryside, killed one by one with a pickaxe. In the days before their deaths, the family had noticed strange and frightening signs: footprints in the snow, footsteps in the attic, and the unshakable feeling that someone was watching them. But they never made it out alive, and their killer was never caught. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy introduces the family at the center of one of Europe's most haunting unsolved mysteries, the eerie warnings that preceded the massacre, and the quiet farm that became the scene of an unthinkable crime.Follow Murder: True Crime Stories for Part 2 of this episode: https://pod.link/1745145932If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m. that starts with, You have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis. are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe

at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. There's an old saying. It takes a lifetime to build a reputation and only seconds to destroy it. These days, one bad moment can follow you around forever, screen shot it and shared and impossible to shake. But long before the internet, your name mattered just as much. It decided who you could marry, where you could work, even which neighbors would open the door when you knocked. And in one small Bavarian town in 1922,

a bad reputation turned out to be a matter of life and death. For years, the ugliest rumor swirled around the family who lived on a lonely little farm called Hinterkifec. It got so bad that people avoided them whenever they could. So when the whole family suddenly went quiet one spring, the neighbors noticed. They just didn't care enough to walk up the road and check. By the time anyone finally did, it was too late. And that's part of the reason why more than a hundred years later,

one of the most gruesome mass murders in German history is still is still unsolved. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end, but you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories,

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To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. This is the first of two episodes on the 1922 Hinter-Kifek murders, one of Germany's most famous unsolved crimes. Before we get started, please note, this episode includes descriptions of murder and violence, including against children. Please listen with care. Today, I'll introduce you to a family of farmers

who lived on a homestead in the Bavarian woods. On paper, they had everything they needed for a good life, fertile fields, a barn full of healthy livestock, and a roof over their heads. But behind closed doors, they were hiding secrets that had already torn them apart from the inside. And on the night of March 31st, 1922, someone finished the job and left all six people on the farm dead. Next time, I'll walk you through the investigation and how it fell apart before it even started. By the time the police reached Hinter-Kifek, most of the evidence was already ruined. Because of that, we'll probably never know for sure who killed them, but there's no shortage of theories.

All that and more coming up. Hintr Kifek was haunted, or at least that's what seven-year-olds at Celia Gabriel believed. Built in 1863, the L-shaped farmhouse was tucked into the thick pine forests of Bavariari. area in southeast Germany. The nearest town, Kaifek, was about a mile down the road, and it's where the farm got its name. Hinter means behind in German, so Hinter-Kifek translates more less to behind Kaifak, which is exactly where it was. Behind the town, behind the trees. At the end of the road, most people had no reason to travel. To a little girl, a place like that could feel like the edge of the world. Cecilia heard strange noises drifting out of the woods at night. She heard footsteps in the

attic at odd hours. But the thing that really kept her walking on eggshells wasn't the forest or the dark. It was the man at the head of the table. Her grandfather, Andreas Gruber. Andreas had lived a small, hard life. Born on November 9th, 1858, not far from Kaifax, he never once left his home state. For the first 28 years of his life, he mostly worked his family's land. Then in 1886, he married a 36-year-old widow named Tseilia,

who would one day lend her name to the granddaughter who feared him. The elder Tetsilia had inherited Hinter Kaifekh from her late husband. From the outside, it wasn't much to look at. The main single-story building was made of stone with a kitchen, a dining area, and a couple of bedrooms. A stable and an equipment room filled out the shorter arm of the L. But the house was almost beside the point. The land was the prize. Hinter-Kifect had more than never.

a fertile ground to feed a family, plus open space for grazing livestock. That put Andreas, one rung up the ladder from the very bottom, above the day laborers who owned nothing at all. He was no aristocrat. He probably never had much money to spare, but owning the farm gave him something he'd never had before, the promise of a modest, respectable life. And respectable is the key. word. In a rural Bavarian community like this one, your standing was everything. The church sat at the center of daily life and so did your neighbor's opinion of you. Whether people trusted you shaped who would trade with you, work for you, marry into your family, or lend a hand when the harvest ran long. There was no anonymity out here, nowhere to start over. A name. A name,

game, good or bad, was something you carried for life and passed down to your children. And it's the thread that runs through everything that happened at Kinterkifak. Of course, a farm like that ran on constant work, and Andreas married into more than just land. His new wife came with two young children from her first marriage. Being a widow had put the elder Tseilla in a strange spot. In those days, divorce was rare and hard to get, mostly for religious reasons, so a woman who had already been married and lost her husband was an unusual figure in a small town. At worst, people treated widows like a threat, trading in old stereotypes about lonely women on the prowl. At best, they were simply overlooked, especially once they were past the age of having children.

owning Hinter-Kifek changed that math for her. Unlike women in a lot of the world back then, German widows could hold and manage property. A farm made her worth marrying again, and it kept her footing in the community steadier than it would have been otherwise. So the arrangement worked for both of them. Cicilia got a husband and a farmer. Andreas went from a poor bachelor with few prospects,

to a land-owning stepfather almost overnight. That couldn't have been an easy adjustment for him. By all accounts, he was not a patient man, and not an especially bright one either. He ran the farm the way he ran the family with a tight fist and a short fuse. And he wasn't the type to soften with age. If anything, the older he got,

the more the household seemed to orbit around his moods. Still, he kept the family going and growing. And in 1887, Sitsili gave birth to a daughter named Victoria. Sadly, it didn't take long for Andreas to earn a reputation as a brutal father. In the late 1800s, plenty of people thought hitting their kids was just part of raising them. but what happened at Hinterkifect went far past that. In 1903, when Victoria was 16, she ran. She fled across the fields to the nearest neighbors,

the Schlittenbowers, about a half a kilometer away. Breathless and crying, she told them her father had raped her. We don't know exactly how the neighbors reacted. but they didn't go to the authorities, at least not for a long time. It's possible the community tried to handle something this delicate quietly. Victoria was young, and if work got out, it could ruin her chances of ever marrying and getting away. Whatever the reasoning, keeping it quiet meant the abuse

almost certainly continued behind those closed doors, and it kept Victoria trapped at Hinter-Kifaxe for another decade. The town gossip clung to her, and it took her far longer than most women in the area to find a husband. It's worth pausing on Victoria here because it's easy to lose her and all the ugliness swirling around the farm. By every account, she worked as hard as anyone at Hinter-Kifek, and she found what little space she could to have a life of her own.

She sang in the church choir, which in a town that size, was one of the few places a young woman could simply be part of something, but belonging to something small was about as far as her world stretched. The bigger kind of escape, kind that meant actually getting out, kept passing her by, even as it found others in her own family, Her older half-sister eventually married and left the farm. Victoria didn't get that door.

She stayed under her father's roof and his thumb, doing the work and raising what family she had. She did finally marry on April 3rd, 1914, when she was about 27. His name was Carl Gabriel, and he moved on to the farm and did his best to fit in. Within weeks, Victoria was pregnant. but there was tension almost from the start. When Carl married Victoria, he received Hinterkifax as part of her dowry,

which on paper made him co-owner of the farm. And yet Andreas refused to hand over any of the financial details. Not the yearly profits, not the losses, not the expenses. He kept his son-in-law completely. in the dark. Carl was so insulted that he packed up and moved back in with his own parents. Maybe it really was just about the money. Or maybe there was something darker going on with Andreas that Carl couldn't stomach.

Either way, Carl's parents wouldn't let him quit the marriage. They sent him back. So Carl returned to Hinter-Kifag to try to make it work. He barely got the chance. That summer, World War I broke out, and by the fall of 1914, Carl had been drafted. He was killed in France that December, just a few months after putting on the uniform. His body was never recovered, which was heartbreakingly common on the Western Front. That left Victoria a widow before she'd even really been a wife.

A month later on January 9th, 1915, Victoria gave birth to her daughter, Ticelia. The baby was healthy. The house was not because right around then, the abuse finally reached the courts. And in May 1915, Andreas was convicted after 12 years. The investigation and trial dragged on for months. Incest was a serious charge. and the courts weren't going to take one family's word for it, but eventually they must have found real evidence

because that May, Andreas was sentenced to a year in prison. And here's the part that's harder to sit with. The court also locked up Victoria for 30 days. Under the law at the time, everyone tied to a case of incest could be punished, and even though Victoria was clearly the, victim, the judge penalized her anyway, maybe for keeping the secret so long. Her daughter wasn't even six months old when she was sent away. So on top of everything her

father had done to her, Victoria was separated from her newborn and stamped in the eyes of the law as part of the crime committed against her. It's almost impossible now to untangle how a small community absorb something like that, but it's safe to say the damage to Victoria's name was permanent. In a place where your reputation was your whole future, she was now the girl at the center of the county's worst scandal through no fault of her own. Whatever hope she still had of escaping Hinter-Kifek was slipping away. For three years, nothing changed. Andreas served his sentence and came home to run the farm again, like nothing had happened.

Then in October of 1918, something finally shifted, and it came from the house half a kilometer away. That month, the neighbor's wife died. She had been one of the only people Victoria ever confided in about the abuse. Her death left her widower, 44-year-old Lawrence Schlittenbauer, grieving just as Victoria had grieved for Carl. Two weeks after the funeral, Victoria walked over to comfort Lawrence. One thing led to another, and the two of them ended up together. The relationship continued quietly for the next several months. It seems like Lawrence wanted to make it official and marry 31-year-old Victoria, but her father wouldn't hear of it. By many accounts, he wanted to maintain

control over his daughter. Marrying Lorenz would threaten that. Victoria could have defied her father and married Lawrence anyway. He was a successful farmer in his own right. He lived just up the road, and by all accounts, he'd always been kind to her. But that closeness may have been exactly the problem. Marrying him would have kept her a stone's throw from the family she was trying to escape, and she had her three-year-old daughter to think about whatever her reasons, she said no. And then a few months later, things got more complicated. Victoria was pregnant again. Based on the timing, the baby could easily have been Lawrence's, but Lawrence didn't claim it.

Instead, he went public with an accusation that Andreas was the father, and that he was still abusing his daughter. Once Andreas was actually arrested, though, Lawrence got cold feet and took it all back. Some people think Victoria herself asked him to withdraw the statement. But it was too late. The police had already opened an investigation. The case wound through the courts for months,

and at some point Lawrence changed his mind yet again, this time accusing Andreas on the record. In the end, the judge ruled there wasn't enough evidence to say who had fathered the child, and back then there was simply no way to prove it either way. At the same time, the court clearly didn't think Andreas was innocent. Normally, when a German court of that era acquitted someone, it paid them back for the time they'd already spent locked up before trial. Andreas got nothing.

apparently because of the testimony he gave on the stand. We don't know exactly what he admitted to up there, but it was enough to convince the court he didn't deserve a cent. For Andreas, that was the end of it. For the rest of the family, the worst was yet to come. I'm Claire Buckley, and if your idea of relaxing is listening to seriously unsettling story, before bed, then you are going to love my podcast Pretty Scary. From terrifying true crime, haunting ghost tales, creepy alien encounters and anything weird,

it's the stories that leave you staring at the ceiling afterwards, questioning absolutely everything. Lock your doors, get comfy and prepare to dive into the darkness. Just search for Pretty Scary with Claire Buckley. For years, the groubers were the family everyone whispered about. In 1915, 56-year-old Andreas had been convicted of sexually abusing his daughter Victoria, and even after a year behind bars, the rumors never really went away. Then in 1919, the whole county was talking about whether Victoria's newborn son, Yosef, had also been fathered by Andreas.

It is hard to overstate how heavy that must have been for Victoria. she had survived years of abuse and now her private hell was public knowledge not just in Kaifax but for miles in every direction the one small mercy came that same September after Yosef was born Lawrence acknowledged that he was his father he wouldn't be raising the boy but his name on the paperwork gave Yosef a better standing in the world. Back then, children born outside a marriage were openly shamed, sometimes even fined by the state. It's a kind but grim thing to have to arrange for a newborn, a little legal shield against a lifetime of judgment. But that was the world these kids were

born into, and thanks to Lawrence, at least little Yosef wouldn't have to answer for his grandfather's crimes. With that settled, the noise finally started to die down. As 1920 arrived, the gossip of the last few years faded into the background, and for a while, Inter-Kifec was almost quiet. It was also full. Six people shared that farmhouse, 61-year-old Andreas, his 70-year-old wife, Cecilia, their 33-year-old daughter, Victoria, Victoria's two children, and a live-in-made to help with the little ones and the endless work. A day out there was relentless. There was no running water to speak of, no electricity, just fields and animals and the same chores turning over with the seasons.

Andreas was aging and could do less and less, which meant more and more of the load fell on Victoria. The cooking, the children, the livestock, the harvest. Her daughter, Cecilia, was old enough to trail after her and help. Her son Yosef was still a baby, and on the edges of it all was the maid, a stranger living under the same roof, close enough to notice things the family had learned to stop noticing, and neither could the one other person under that roof. By the summer of 1921, Victoria's daughter, Cecilia, who was now six, had become convinced that the farm was haunted. Day and night, she told anyone who'd listen about the ghosts

she saw in the forest from her window and the sounds she heard coming from the attic after dark. At first, it was easy enough to write off as a child's imagination. But then the maid started hearing things too, things she couldn't explain. Zatelia wasn't the only one listening to footstead steps in the attic anymore. When the maid brought it up, though, nobody in the house took her seriously. Everybody had their own theory about what was really going on. Andrea seems to have suspected that 34-year-old Victoria was sneaking around with a man, which wasn't a wild guess, given her history with Lawrence. Victoria, for her part, couldn't explain the noises either, but she had two kids to raise and a farm to help run and less and less help from her aging father.

She didn't have time to chase ghosts. The maid held out for a few more months, trying to talk herself out of her own fear. It didn't work. The strange sounds kept coming, the paranoia kept a building, and by August of 1921 she'd had enough. She quit on the spot and left Hinter-Kyfeck for good, telling people she refused to work in a haunted house. The family was blindsided. They'd heard her complaints, sure, but they never thought she'd actually walk out over them. So they did what they always did.

They told the neighbor she was just a foolish woman spooked by a little girl's ghost stories. Then Victoria went looking for a replacement. which was easier said than done. You couldn't exactly post a job listing in rural Bavaria in 1921, and the family's reputation didn't help. Word traveled, and the haunted farm where the old man went to prison was not an easy sell. It took until March 21st, 1922, nearly seven months, to finally hire someone new. And in the meantime, the strange incidents,

kept piling up. Earlier that month, Andreas found a newspaper on the property from Munich, the Bavarian capital, about 40 miles south. There was no good reason for it to be there. He figured the mailman had simply mixed up the delivery until he realized

nobody in the whole town subscribed to that paper. It got stranger from there. Sometime before the end of March, Andreas noticed one of his house keys had gone missing. He grilled the whole family about it, sure that someone had lost it, but no one would own up to taking it. Then, either that same day or the next, he found a set of footprints in the snow. They led out of the forest and straight to the farm's equipment room, where the outdoor lock had been broken. When Andreas went to look, nothing seemed disturbed except a few.

scratch marks on an interior door. So he landed on the obvious explanation. A couple of burglars had tried their luck, come up empty, and moved on. It wasn't a crazy theory. Hinterkifek sat only about a mile from the nearest railroad, and a drifter riding the rails might abide the old farm as an easy score. There was just one problem. The footprints led toward the equipment room.

But there were no prince heading the other way. As far as Andreas could tell, whoever walked out of those woods never walked back. These incidents rattled Andreas enough that he did something almost unthinkable. He mentioned them to Lawrence Schlittenbauer, the man he despised. And in a rare moment of peace between them, Lawrence offered Andreas one of his guns for protection. Andreas turned him down.

He wasn't about to take a favor from Lawrence under any circumstances. Besides, he insisted the danger had passed. The burglars were gone. Nothing was missing. He probably regretted that within hours. Because that very night, as the family got ready for bed, several of them heard it again. footsteps in the attic right over their heads.

Terrified that someone was hiding up there, they sent Andreas to check. The old man climbed up into the rafters with an oil lamp and looked around for a few minutes. He didn't find a thing. And taken together, these incidents added up to something the family couldn't ignore. a newspaper that couldn't be explained, a key that walked off on its own, footprints that came out of the woods and never went back, a broken lock, and now footsteps overhead in a house where a little girl had been talking about noises in the attic for months. Any one of those things on its own was easy to shrug off.

Stucked on top of each other, a house already full of fear and bad blood, they must have felt like something was closing in. Whatever they told themselves, the house no longer felt like it was only theirs. It's safe to say nobody slept well that night, but the next one was worse. On March 30th, 1922, Andreas and Victoria got into a violent argument.

We don't know what set it off, whatever it was, it ended with Victoria storming out of the house and into the freezing dark, straight into the woods in the middle of a snowstorm. The family had to round up the neighbors and spend hours searching, and they even pulled seven-year-old Tzealia out into the cold to help look. Eventually, they found Victoria, soaked, half-frozen, and still so furious they had to beg her to come home. The next morning, little Cicelia fell asleep at her desk at school.

When her teacher asked why, the girl explained she'd been up all night helping search for her mother. She couldn't say what the fight had been about, but she did tell the school that her grandfather had hit Victoria during the argument. Clearly, this was no place to raise a child, let alone two, but on that same day, March 31st, help was finally on the way. At 5 o'clock that evening, the new maid arrived. Her name was Maria Baumgartner. She was 45 years old, and she came with her sister, who stuck around for about an hour to see where Maria would be living and working.

Nothing about the family struck the sister as alarming. She said they seemed like an ordinary rural household. But she did notice one thing. For house so full of people, the place had a strangely, lonely feeling to it. When it was time to go, the sister said her goodbyes and started back toward town. Then Maria came running up from behind to give her one last hug. That was the last time the two sisters never saw each other. What happened next is still up for debate.

but at some point that night it seems like Victoria and her seven-year-old daughter stepped into the stable, maybe drawn there by an open door or a restless animal. Someone was waiting for them. Whoever they were, used a mattock, a heavy hand tool, a lot like a pickaxe and beat them both. Victoria died soon after. while Tseilia held on for another hour or two. The noise seems to have drawn Andreas and his wife out to the stable next, and they met the same fate.

From there, the killer went into the house. Maria, who had been at Hinterkifek for only a few hours was next, and little Yosef, just two years old, was the last killed in his cradle, In a single night, all six of them were gone In one of the most brutal mass murders Germany had ever seen. Two of them were children. It would be days before anyone else realized.

And by then, whoever did this would be long gone. Some mysteries have haunted us for centuries. Others are unfolding right now. How does a modern airliner with 239 people on board disappear from the sky without a trace? This is History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Adapted from the hit TV show, every episode dives into one of the world's greatest enigmas, the vanishings, the myths, the lost relics, and the unexplained. With contributions from top historians, authors, scientists,

and researchers, we separate fact from folklore and evidence from rumor, from unsolved crimes to buried treasure, to the deaths and disappearances of famous figures. These are the stories we think we know, but dig beneath the legend and the truth gets far stranger. Follow history's greatest mysteries, available now wherever you listen to podcasts. of Hintr Kifek were beaten to death. 35-year-old Victoria Gabriel and her 7-year-old daughter, Cicilia, were killed in the stables. So were Victoria's parents. 63-year-old Andreas Gruber and his 72-year-old wife also named Cizelia.

Inside the house, the family's brand-new maid, 45-year-old Maria Baumgartner, and Victoria's little boy, 2-year-old Yosef, were also murdered. murdered. The chilling part is what came next, or rather what didn't. Because for days, life around Hinter-Kifek went on as normal while the family lay dead just out of sight. Smoke rose from the chimney. The animals were fed and led out to graze. People passed the farm, and from the road, nothing looked out of place. And so for four days, no one. looked any closer but the truth kept brushing up against people who had no idea what they were looking at starting just hours after the murders around three o'clock that morning a local farmer was

riding his bicycle home a couple miles away after staying up all night with his girlfriend his route took him past the hinter kifek fence line as he peddled by he spotted two shadowy figures among the trees near the farm. He even heard them talking, though he couldn't make out the words. He was surprised to see anyone up at that hour, but he didn't dwell on it. After all, half the county had been out in those same woods just a day earlier, searching for Victoria. The farmer figured there was more Gruber family drama afoot, the kind he'd hear about soon enough, so he put his head down and rode on. A few hours later, the store. The store was a little bit of school bell rang. Even though it was Saturday, there were classes back then, and Cicilia's teacher

marked her absent. The girl was usually punctual, so it stood out, but the teacher's mind went to the same place as the farmers. Sotilia clearly had a rough home life. Maybe Victoria had run off again. Maybe the girl was just catching up on sleep. Either way, the teacher decided it wasn't her business and didn't send anyone to check. By then, everyone in town knew Andreas's reputation and steered clear of the farm on principle. So when a pair of traveling salesmen came by around noon, they had no idea what they were walking into. The salesman had made an appointment a couple weeks earlier to drop off some fresh coffee. Instead, they found Hinder Kifek completely still.

The only sound was the livestock in the barn. Every door was shut tight, except one, the equipment room with a broken lock from a few days before. They spent a while knocking, calling out, nobody answered. It was frustrating since they'd come all the way from a neighboring town to close the sale. Desperate, they started peering in windows and, even tried the back door. From what they could see there wasn't a soul on the property. Eventually, they gave up and moved on to the next stop. When they ran into the neighbor,

Lawrence, they grumbled about the wasted trip and the empty farm. All he could do is shrug, and didn't surprise him one bit that Andreas had left him standing at the door. The salesmen weren't the last visitors that day. Late that afternoon, A hunter was working his way through the pines nearby, tracking an animal he hadn't managed to catch. Getting hungry, he spotted the farmhouse in the distance and figured he'd stopped for a meal. Back then, it was normal enough for a traveler to knock on a stranger's door and offered to pay for hot food or a place to sleep. So the hunter tried.

And he ran straight in the same wall as the salesman. No answer at the door, no sign of anyone around. hungry and out of luck, he moved on too. It was becoming a pattern. One person after another brushed up against the truth and one person after another found a reason to look away. The bicyclist assumed more family drama. The teacher assumed a rough home life.

The salesman assumed Andreas was just being difficult. Every one of them was working from the same quiet assumption. the one the whole town shared, that Hinter-Kifek was a place you left alone. By 11.30 that night, a full day had passed since the murders, and the last visitor of the day came walking up the road. A local carpenter named Michael had just finished a long shift and was heading home past the Hinter-Kifax Fence line. The same road the bicyclist had ridden that morning.

As he passed the farm's entrance, Michael noticed a glow in the kitchen window, even from a few hundred yards off. There were no street lamps out there, nothing else to light the dark, so that one bright window stood out. It struck him as odd that someone would be in the kitchen so late, though it wasn't unheard of to start the next day's bread in the middle of the night. He was about to keep walking when the wind shifted and a lung full of smoke from the chimney. blew right into his face. Michael crinkled his nose. He didn't recognize the smell, but it was bad, sharp and acrid.

He couldn't quite say why, but he hopped the fence and started walking toward the house just to make sure everything was all right. He'd only taken a few steps when a shadowy figure sprang out from behind a tree and shined a lantern straight into his eyes, blinded by the light, Michael called out. No one answered, but he could hear the stranger moving closer.

As his eyes adjusted, he could just make out the silhouette, one hand holding the lantern. When the figure lifted it overhead, Michael turned and ran. He didn't stop until he was through the fence and all the way home. You'd think an encounter like that would send someone straight to the police, but it didn't. By the next morning, Michael had half convinced himself he'd overreacted that it was some misunderstanding in the dark. He didn't want to look foolish for raising an alarm over nothing. So the bodies in the farmhouse stayed hidden.

And the next day was Sunday, which meant nearly everyone in town would be at church. Victoria mattered to that congregation more than most. She was a devoted member of the choir, one of the few bright threads in a hard life, and two of her fellow singers usually met her at the farm's gate so they could all walk to church together. On the morning of April 2nd, the two women went to their usual spot and waited.

Victoria never came. At any other house, they might have gone up and knocked but nobody wanted to set foot inside Hinter-Kifax if they could help it, and Andreas had scared off would-be visitors for years, so they figured she'd gone on ahead or that she'd turn up later with the rest of the family. Once the service started, they realized they were wrong. The gruber's usual seats in the back pews sat empty.

For a family this tied to the church, that was strange, but like every other odd thing that week, people noticed and people let it go. Around town, the small signals kept stacking up. Down at the post office, the family's mail had started to gather in a pile that no one came to collect, and that wasn't the only sign that something was wrong. That same afternoon, a neighbor boy walked over to buy some lard, and of course no one answered for the second day running, This time, the boy actually felt that something was off, an uneasiness he couldn't put into words.

But before he could look any closer, he saw that all the livestock had been fed and water. Someone had even let the animals out to graze, just like any other day. So there were signs of life, just no sign of Andreas or Victoria or anyone else. The boy couldn't make sense of it, but he was a kid sent on an errand, not someone looking for a tragedy. He talked himself out of his worry and headed home, telling himself he'd try again tomorrow. By Tuesday morning, April 4th, it had been four full days since anyone had laid eyes on the family. That's when a repairman showed up to fix a motor, found the place deserted, and told him. the neighbors. That was the moment they finally went to look. In the end, the job would fall to the

last man in the county who wanted to set foot on that property, Andreas's bitter enemy, his neighbor, Lawrence Schlittenbauer. And what waited for him inside would become the most gruesome chapter in that little town's history. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for part two on the Hinterkifek Murders and all the people that affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crimehouse original, powered by Pave Studios here at Crimehouse. We want to thank each and every one of you for your support.

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and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Thursday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team,

Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pertowski, Lori Marnelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Terrell Wells, Mara De LaRosa, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. I'm Sarah Turney. And I'm Courtney Nicole. We're the host of the Crime House Original podcast, The Final Hours. Crime has impacted both of our families, teaching us how the last conversations the missed red flags can change everything. On the final hours, we examine the moments before a disappearance, and the question

that never got answered, a podcast that puts the moments before it disappears under a microscope. Listen to and follow the final hours, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely, blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube.