Murder: True Crime Stories - UNSOLVED: The Hinterkaifeck Murders 2

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the century-long investigation into the Hinterkaifeck murders, one of the most baffling cold cases in European history. From the moment the six bodies were discovered, the case defied explanation. The killer had apparently stayed on the farm for days after the murders, feeding the animals and lighting the stove while the victims lay dead. Investigators chased down hundreds of suspects over the decades, from estranged family members to neighbors to passing strangers, but no theory ever held. More than a hundred years later, the case remains officially unsolved, its evidence long gone and its witnesses long dead. Carter Roy examines the strongest suspects, the unsettling theories that endure, and the reasons this quiet Bavarian farm still haunts the imagination a century after the killings.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. 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 thread 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 Crimehouse. The more shocking the crime, the more we yearn for answers. So when a truly infamous case goes unsolved, it eats at us. We pick over every detail, hunting for the misstep,

the thing the investigators should have caught. Sometimes it really is that simple. Somebody dropped the ball and a killer slipped through. But every now and then, you get a case where the trail was already destroyed before the police ever showed up, where the evidence was gone before anyone in charge even knew there was a crime.

The 1922 Hinter-Kifek murders are that kind of case. Six people, including, including two children were slaughtered on a remote Bavarian farm. And by the time detectives arrived, the one thing that might have led them to the killer had already been trampled into the mud. That single head start was all it took for someone to walk away from one of the most gruesome mass murders in German history

and never answer for a thing. 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, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios.

New episodes come on every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper level. look. Thank you for being part of the Crimehouse community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content to join, go tocrimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. This is the second of two episodes on 1922 Hinter-Khyfeck 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. Last time, I introduced you to a family of farmers on a lonely homestead in the Bavarian woods. From the outside, they look like they should have been thriving, but behind closed doors, there were years of abuse and a web of secrets the whole county gossiped about. That was the life they were living right up until the night of March 31st, 1922, when someone murdered all six of them. Today, I'll walk you through the investigation that followed and why it never had a real chance.

By the time the police reached Hintr Kifek, the crime scene had already been picked over and trampled, which left detectives with an impossible question, was the evidence ruined by accident by a town full of curious neighbors, or did the killer count on exactly that? All that and more coming up. On the night of March 31st, 1922, six people were murdered inside a remote Bavarian farmhouse called Hinter-Kifek,

35-year-old Victoria Gabriel and her 7-year-old daughter, Zetsilia, were killed in the stables. So were Victoria's parents, 63-year-old Andreas Gruber and his 72-year-old wife, also named Setsilia. Inside the house, the family's new maid, 45-year-old Maria Baumgartner, and Victoria's little boy, 2-year-old Yoseph, were also murdered. Over the next few days, the people in the nearby town of Kaifax started to sense that something was off. Andreas missed an appointment to pick up coffee. Salesmen and neighbors knocked and got no answer. Tetzelia stopped showing up to school. And on the night of April 1st, a passing carpenter was chased off by a stranger with a lantern in the woods just outside the farm.

If those red flags had gone up at any other house, Someone probably would have acted sooner, but this was Hinter-Kifek. For years, the town gossip and Andreas's ugly reputation had taught people to keep their distance. He'd been convicted of abusing his own daughter. There were rumors he'd fathered her two-year-old son. And lately, the family had even been telling people the farm was haunted. So nobody wanted to spend a... second there they didn't have to. And that instinct to look away to assume it wasn't their business

is exactly what let the warning signs pile up unanswered. It didn't help that from the road, the farm still looked alive. Smoke curled from the chimney, the livestock were let out to graze every morning even after the murders. The mailman even glimpsed fresh food on the breakfast table. So people told themselves a comforting little story. The place seemed empty, sure, but somebody was clearly still home. And that was exactly what a mechanic named Albert Hoffner assumed when he pulled up to Hinter-Khefecht around nine in the morning on April 4th. By then, the family had been dead for more than three days. Albert had come to fix a diesel engine in the equipment room, one of the last jobs Andreas ever booked.

And right away, he felt what everyone else had felt. The place was like a ghost town. Normally, he would have seen Andreas out doing the morning chores or Victoria at the stove. He expected somebody to greet him when he pounded on the back door. Nobody did. With nothing else to do, Albert sat down to wait, figuring the family was out in the fields and would come collect him soon. After a long, cold hour, he decided they'd simply forgotten he was coming. But before he left, he thought he'd try to start the

repair on his own. About a week earlier, the thief had broken the outdoor lock and Andreas had replaced it with a simple hook, which meant Albert could let himself into the equipment room, so he did and got to work. The job took close to four hours. It was noisy, too. He ran the engine in long bursts and whistled between them, and in all that time, not one person from Hinter-Kyfeck came to check on the racket. The whole thing left Albert uneasy, and it only got worse as he packed up. On his way out, he glanced into the barn and didn't see anything wrong, but the family dog was now tied up outside the front door, and it hadn't been there when he arrived. Someone must have moved it during those four hours without ever stopping to say hello.

Albert told himself he was being paranoid and left. Later that day, he mentioned the strange empty farm to a neighbor who, had an easy answer, the gruber's often spent long days out cutting firewood. It was a reasonable explanation. It just didn't sit right. The more Albert turned it over, the more it nagged at him, until he decided to go talk to the neighbor who lived closest to Hinter-Kifek, 48-year-old Lawrence Schlittenbauer. When Albert described the empty farmhouse, Lawrence reacted the same way everyone did with a harmless explanation. The family must be off working in the fields. Still, since the mechanic seemed so rattled,

Lawrence sent his own two boys to go look, his 16-year-old son, Johann, and his nine-year-old stepson. The boys came back an hour later with the same report as everyone else. No one at the farm. They'd even stood in the woods and shouted for Andreas and Victoria and got nothing back. The only thing that had changed was the dog, which had been moved again, this time back to the stable. Now, Lawrence was getting worried too, but he kept putting off going himself. Years earlier, he'd accused Andreas of fathering Yosef and still abusing Victoria. The bad blood between the two men had never gone away. So instead, Lawrence went to a friend, a man named Jakob Ziegle, and Jakub had a story of his own.

His son had gone down to Hinter-Kyfeck a couple days back to buy some lard and found the place deserted. He'd also heard that little Cicilia hadn't been at school. school. That was enough for the men. Lawrence and Jacob agreed to search the farm together and settle it once and for all. They brought along a third neighbor, a man named Michael. The three of them reached Hintr Kifeck around five o'clock on the evening of April 4th, almost four full days after the murders. Lawrence led them around to a door on the back of the house that opened into the feed room where the family kept hay for the cattle. It's not clear why he chose that spot, but since he knew they'd have to break in,

he probably figured it was better to damage a feedroom door than the front of the house. It didn't take long to get inside, and the second they did, they knew something was wrong. A big wooden board had been shoved up against the door to the stable, and the cure Curious cow had wandered over to see what the fuss was about. Lawrence went to lead the animal back to its pen. As he did, he tripped over something on the ground beside the board. He couldn't see what it was in the dark and he was busy with the cow, but Jacob was right behind him with a lantern.

And in that dim light, he saw something poking out from under the hay in the plank of wood. He bent down for a closer look. Then he screamed. It was a bare, human foot. Jakob stumbled back, trying not to throw up while Michael started praying under his breath. Neither of them wanted to go near it

and neither said it out loud, but they both saw that the pile of wood and hay was way too big, too tall, to be hiding just one person. Lawrence acted differently. Maybe it was nerves, maybe it was something else, but he didn't want to wait for the police. Even as the other two told him to stop,

he grabbed the old board and hauled it away. They were right about the pile. Under the hay were three bodies, stacked one on top of another. Andreas, his white Cecilia, and Victoria. In the flickering lamplight, it was hard to tell who was who? Frozen blood covered what was left of their faces.

While Lawrence pulled the bodies apart and laid them out, Jacob and Michael turned to leave, and that's when they spotted another mound of hay by the back door, one just big enough to hide the body of a child. It was seven-year-old, said Celia. There was a deep wound across her neck, and her small hands were clenched around tufts of her own blonde hair. For a moment, none of the three men could speak.

Then it hit them all at once. Two people were still missing. The new maid, Maria Baumgartner, and little Yosef, the men looked at each other in the lantern light. They already knew what was coming next. Despite his history with Andreas, Lawrence had once been close to Victoria. He'd even come to believe he might have been Yosef's actual biological father, so the moment he realized the little boy was still missing and might somehow be alive,

he insisted on going deeper into the house. His two companions, Jakob and Michael, wanted no part of it. As far as they were concerned, the smart move was to leave everything untouched until the police arrived. At first, it seemed like Lawrence agreed. He sent his teenage son off on a bicycle to alert the police. But by the time the boy was gone, Lawrence had changed his mind. He couldn't shake the thought of the two-year-old. He had no idea the family had already been dead for days.

And the image of Yosef trapped somewhere inside that house, starving and alone was more than he could bear. Jakob and Michael realized there was no talking him out of it. So they stood outside while Lawrence went back through the feedroom and forced his way into the main house. A few minutes later, he reached the front of it. front door, which was bolted from the inside. Lawrence said he found the key sitting right beside it, and he unlocked the door to let the other two in. From there, the three of them searched the house together. They started with Victoria's bedroom, the one she shared with her two kids, and they saw it almost immediately. Little Yosef's cradle in the corner, its cover smashed to.

in. When they lifted it, they found the two-year-old's body inside. The men were already shaken from the barn, but this broke something in them. In a trembling voice, Lawrence asked the other two for a moment alone. He had never known for sure whether Yosef was his son. Now he wanted to find a candle and lighted for the boy. Jacob and Michael moved on to the kitchen. From there, they could see into an open bedroom where a pair of feet stuck out from under a quilt on the floor. They belonged to the last person on the farm, the new maid, Maria.

All six of them were dead. And the three neighbors were alone with the bodies, with no police on the scene yet. Lawrence had already pulled the stacked bodies apart and forced his way into the locked house, and he wasn't done. The choices he made that day would haunt this investigation

for the next hundred years. Eight years, hundreds of episodes, and we've barely scratched the surface of true crime. I'm Mark. And I'm Bethan, and this is scene red. Every Wednesday we bring you another extraordinary case. And our huge back catalogue has everything from notorious murders and baffling disappearances. To scams, scandals, survival stories and crimes you won't believe actually happened.

If you're new to Seeing Red, you've got a lot to catch up on. Search Seeing Red, a true crime podcast wherever you listen. By the evening of April 4th, 1922, three neighbours had searched hinter Kaifek and found all six members of the household murdered, the last of them two-year-old Joseph and the new maid, Maria, inside the house. Now they were standing among the bodies trying to steady themselves, and that's when Lawrence did something even stranger. He suggested they feed the animals,

assuming the poor creatures had been starving for days. This was the last straw for the others. They told Lawrence flat out he had to stop touching things. He had to leave the scene alone and wait for the cops. Lawrence didn't listen. Maybe just to keep his hands busy, he walked through the barn, grabbing hay for the cattle and milk for the piglets. And that was it for Jacob and Michael.

They weren't about to wrestle a grown man to the ground to make him sit still, so they gave up and left. promising to come back the next day and give their statements to the police. We don't know exactly how long all of that took, but it couldn't have been more than an hour because by around 6 o'clock, people started arriving at Hinter-Kifek, and Lawrence wasn't the only one there to meet them. They weren't police, though.

They were just curious locals who'd heard the news from Lawrence's son. On his ride to fetch help, The boy had been peddling through town, shouting to anyone who'd listen that there'd been a mass murder. Lawrence claimed he kept the crowd from going inside and making things worse. Whether that's true, we'll never know. Either way, the damage was done. Long before any investigator arrived, Hinter-Kifek was full of people. When the local police finally got there, one look.

told them they were in over their heads. These were small town officers who had probably never worked a murder, let alone a slaughter like this one. So they put in a call to the city to detectives in Munich about 40 miles south. In 1922, that was no quick thing. It meant finding a working telephone, explaining the horror to the other end of the line, and arranging the trip.

For the next day or so, all the local police could really do was stand guard and try to keep the scene intact. That proved almost impossible. When the Munich detectives arrived on April 5th, they walked into a disaster. They estimated that dozens of people, maybe as many as 70, had already tramped across nearly every inch of the grounds. To top it off, fresh snow had fallen that morning, burying whatever tracks might have survived in the woods. There was nothing to do but make the best of a ruined scene. While the detectives combed the house for clues, the court physician, Dr. Johann Almuller set up a makeshift lab in the courtyard to examine the bodies. The original autopsy records are long gone, but thanks to other sources,

we know roughly what they found. The first big finding was that the killer had used more than one weapon. But every victim showed wounds from the same primary tool. A mattock. It's similar to a pickaxe with two flat blades set at right angles to the handle, usually used for breaking up soil. And a tool like that swung again and again, told Dr. Almuller,

important. These weren't clean, efficient killings. The victims had been struck over and over, some long after they were already dead. To the doctor, that pointed to rage, to someone who knew these people and hated them. The first to die was probably Victoria. She had at least a dozen wounds to her head, nine of them in a distinct star shape that likely came from one end of the mattock. Her mother, 72-year-old Tsetilia, took multiple blows to the skull as well, but probably died from strangulation, and the body of 63-year-old Andreas was riddled with wounds. The children were the only ones the killer didn't brutalize the same way. Little Yosef was killed. killed with a single blow to the head, but seven-year-old Cicelia suffered the cruelest fate of

anyone in the family. She wasn't killed outright. She was left with a wound to her neck, and she may have lain there on the stable floor, unable to move, for as long as two hours before she died. Investigators also found a bundle of the little girl's hair beside her body, Dr. Almuller believed she had torn it out herself in her agony. When the autopsies were done, the doctor carefully removed the victim's heads to send to the University of Munich for a closer look. Moving the body's whole would have been too difficult. This was the best he could manage. While that was happening, the detectives worked their way through Hinter-Kifek room by room.

inside the house itself they didn't turn up much, traces of blood in Maria's room, in the hallway to the front door, and in Victoria's bedroom. But near Yosef's body, they made an important discovery. A hidden tin stuffed with cash and gold coins worth several thousand marks. In a place like rural Bavaria, that was real money. But the amount wasn't what stopped. the detective's cold. It was that the killer hadn't seemed to take a single coin. And that one fact quietly knocked out the most obvious motive of all. This wasn't a robbery. Combine that with

the sheer overkill and the picture sharpened into something more disturbing. The killer who wasn't after money, but after this family. Then the detectives went out to search the other buildings, and what they found there was stranger still. In a narrow attic above the equipment room, they discovered a thick layer of hay that looked, slept in. And in the barn's attic, several roof tiles had been deliberately pried loose to make a kind of peephole. From the marks in the wood, it looked like someone had crouched up there and watched the

courtyard below. Underneath that lookout, there were more impressions in the hay, as if one or two people had lain there for a while. And nearby, there was human waste. Piece it all together, and it was almost too unsettling to say out loud. It looked like someone with a grudge against this family had hidden on their property. Watched them, murdered all six of them in a frenzy, and then simply stayed. And this is the detail that has haunted the case for a century. Whoever did this didn't run. They lived at Hinterkifek for days afterward with six bodies in the barn and the house.

They ate the food in the kitchen. They kept the fire going. They fed the cattle and the pigs morning after morning, which is the very thing that made the farm look occupied to every neighbor who passed by. Someone who just wiped out an entire family went about the chores like it was any other week. And the most chilling clue was still to come. After Dr. Almiller finished the autopsies, a pair of porters carried a stretcher through the

barn. One of them looked up and froze. A rope was hanging from a rafter, and it hadn't been there a few minutes earlier. Startled, he dropped the stretcher. There were fresh handprints on top of the rafter. rope was tied to. It looked like someone had been hiding up in the barn ceiling and had used that rope to drop down and slip away only moments before. The detectives fanned out into the surrounding woods, hoping to catch the killer before they got away. They brought in a police dog to

pick up a scent, but the fresh snow had smothered any trail, and the dog came up with nothing. It was incredibly frustrating and more than a little humiliating. The murderer may have been right over their heads the entire time. Now they had a head start, and the detectives were back to square one. By sunset, on April 7th, they gave up the search and officially closed down the scene. And they made a choice that still gets second-guessed 100 years later. A crime this size, with six victims, would normally take a lot longer than a single day to work. By 1922, most big city departments had started fingerprinting the scenes they investigated.

The Munich police decided not to bother. They probably reasoned that the farm was already hopeless. Dozens of neighbors had touched everything in sight, even if the detectives lifted a purpose. perfect print and matched it to someone, well, that person could just say they'd been part of the crowd that showed up after the bodies were found. In a scene that contaminated, fingerprints might have been worse than useless. But choosing to skip them left the police badly exposed. With no forensic evidence to lean on, everything came down to what the bodies could tell them. And based on the wounds, Dr. Almuller had named the likely weapons, a mass of the likely weapons.

A mattock, a knife, and possibly an axe. The trouble was, during that first search, the police hadn't found any of them. One officer did turn up a pickaxe in the barn, but the doctor ruled it out. It couldn't have made the distinctive star-shaped wounds on Victoria's skull. So it came to this. A ruined crime scene, no usable fingerprints, and not one confirmed murder weapon. in hand. The detectives had almost nothing physical to build on. All they had left were people. The neighbors and witnesses and enemies this family had made over the years. And to get those people

talking, they were about to put a small fortune on the table. Nominated as one of the best British true crime podcasts, murder mile is hailed as a masterpiece of compelling storytelling. Researcher using the original police files. Over 300 episodes, Murder Mile has covered hundreds of crimes you won't hear anywhere else, as well as solving cold cases, unearthing new evidence, and even discovering a serial killer no one even knew existed. For a truly original podcast, subscribe to Murder Mile. By the time the Munich detectives gave up on the Hinterfect scene in April 1922, the physical evidence had led nowhere. All they had left were the people around this face.

family. So they worked at the hard way through interviews, witness statements, and whatever creative angles they could find. And on April 8th, they made a move designed to shake something loose. They announced a reward of 100,000 marks. It sounded like a fortune. In reality, the German mark was already sliding into the hyperinflation that would soon wipe out people's savings, so the true value was closer to a few hundred dollars. But to a poor rural community, the number alone was staggering. The reward did exactly what the police hoped, and then some. It brought people forward with leads.

It also sent the story racing across the region. By the time that family was buried, thousands of people had poured into the area for the funeral. Most of them had never met the victims. some had never even heard of them before the murders. They came anyway, pulled in by a grim fascination with the crime itself. In a way, it was the cruelest twist of all. A family that had been shunned and whispered about their whole lives

suddenly drew a crowd of thousands, but only in death and only as a spectacle. And that reward money may have worked a little too well. One local merchant in particular, a man named Georg Zedal wanted it badly. Over the next year, he fed the police the names of eight different murderers. At first, his tips sounded almost credible. He started by accusing a pair of convicted thieves of trying to rob Hintr Kifek, and even claimed he'd overheard them bragging about it while drinking at a local festival. But when the police checked, both men had been taken.

sitting in prison at the time of the murders. It was about as airtight in alibi as you can get. That didn't stop Gaiorke. He kept inventing suspects and the police kept clearing them one after another until he finally accused the wrong people. His last targets were the Fuchs Bruners, a pair of local brothers who were done being slandered. They hauled Geyork into court for making false accusations. The judge sided with them and sentenced him to three months in prison. After that, the police were left with only a handful of names they took seriously, and the most famous of them was a man who was supposed to be dead.

His name was Carl Gabriel, Victoria's husband and the father of little Tim. Cecilia. Like I mentioned last time, Carl had been killed in France in 1914, only months after he was drafted into the war. Except his body was never recovered. And in these strange, desperate years after the murders, that missing body gave rise to one of the most enduring theories in the whole case. What if Carl hadn't died at all? What if he'd faced? What if he'd faced? his death, come home, and found his wife mixed up with her own father or with the neighbor, Lawrence. The theory goes that a man who came back to that could have snapped and taken his

revenge on the entire household. It's a haunting idea. It also runs into some serious problems. Carl's fellow soldiers said they watched him die and on the western front bodies going unrecovered was tragically ordinary. Thousands of men were lost in the mud without a trace. Their remains and their papers gone for good. In other words, a missing body was heartbreakingly common and it was never real evidence that Carl Gabriel was alive. The next name was actually two, Anton and Adolf Gump, a pair of brothers. Both were war-reve, veterans and both belonged to a far-right paramilitary group called the Frye Corpse Oberland. On paper, the Frye Corpse existed to put down the small uprisings that flared across Germany

after World War I. In practice, the group carried out civilian massacres it blamed on communist revolts and even murdered nine farmers in Central Europe. Some locals said Adolf had been romantically involved with Victoria. Others whispered that Andreas had ties to the group and had crossed them, maybe by skimming money. The police looked into it, but they could never turn up any real proof behind the gossip, and they were drowning in exactly that. Gossip, plus the flood of fake tips from men like Georg Zedal, which made it almost

impossible to tell a genuine lead from a distraction. Eventually, the Gump brothers were set aside too. That left one name on nearly everyone's lips, and it was one you already know. Based on the statements Jakub and Michael gave, the man who had led the search that day, Lawrence Schlittenbauer started to look very suspicious. The neighbors had watched him do things that were hard to explain away. He was the one who spoiled the scene. moving the bodies, unlocking the house, and feeding the animals.

He had openly hated Andreas for years. He had nearly married Victoria, and as the closest neighbor, he knew the farm well enough to come and go without being noticed. He might have even been the one keeping the fire lit and the livestock fed in the days after the murders. The more the detectives dug, the more saw the more, circumstantial evidence they seemed to find. One resident told them Victoria had recently gone to Lawrence to push for more child support

for Yosef, which seemed to give him a cold, simple motive to make that problem disappear. And there was a gut-wrenching piece of timing. Just one day before the murders, Lawrence's own newborn daughter had died of whooping cough. Some people came to believe that losing his baby had shattered Lawrence and driven him to kill. As chilling as that sounds. The theory never quite held together. According to Jacob and Michael, Lawrence seemed genuinely stunned when he found Yosef's body. And while he'd clashed with Andreas for years, he didn't have any real issues with the rest of the family.

It was hard to see how grief over his own child could. could push him to slaughter two more, especially since one of them might have been his own son. So while the police interviewed Lawrence again and again over the following months, they never charged him with anything. Maybe they simply didn't have the evidence, maybe he had an alibi they couldn't break. From here, it's impossible to say. What we can say is this. Lawrence Schlittenbauer was suspected, investigated, and never charged. And it's worth being careful with a man in that position, especially one who spent the rest of his life under a cloud he could never fully escape.

By 1923, about a year after the murders, the case had gone cold. But it was too horrific and too famous to disappear completely, and the authorities kept circling back to it. In March of that year, there was a genuine break. After a long negotiation, the farm passed to the family of Victoria's late husband, the Gabriel's. And almost the moment the paperwork was signed, they had the whole place torn down. During the demolition, workers found three hidden tools that were almost certainly the murder weapons. First, a sharp iron strap that's used in blacksmithing tucked under the floorboards in the barn.

Doctors decided it was a close match for the neck wound that killed seven-year-old Cizelia. Nearby, they turned up a small knife, another possible match for the little girl's injuries, though it might have simply slipped from the killer's pocket as they fled. And finally, there was the mattock. It had taken a full year, but Dr. Almuler's hunch from the autopsy turned out to be right. The tool was hidden in the attic above Andres' bedroom, and it had more than human blood and hair on the blade. Its handle had a distinctive screw with a star-shaped cap, the same star-shaped stamp stamped into the wounds on Victoria's skull. That's all but confirmed.

it was the main murder weapon. The police ran fresh interviews and re-examined everything after the demolition, praying this was the break they'd been waiting for. It wasn't. The technology back then just couldn't squeeze much out of the weapons. The mattock and the iron strap had belonged to Andreas and no one could say for certain who owned the little knife.

What had looked like a turning point curdled into one more, dead end. Without a solid witness or confession, the detectives had nowhere left to go, and over the next several years, the investigation quietly ran out of road. In the century since, Hinter-Kyfeck has become one of Germany's most infamous unsolved cases. Amateurs and professionals alike have picked the evidence apart over and over, trying to build a theory that finally sticks. None of them managed to do it. And there's a strange footnote to just how far investigators reached in those early days. Desperate for anything, they had the victim's skulls sent to a clairvoyant in Munich, hoping the dead might somehow point to their killer. The skulls, of course,

said nothing. And any scientific improvements came too late. The skulls were lost for good in 1944 in the last days of World War II. In 2007, a group of 15 German police cadets took another run at the case using every modern forensic method they had. Even then, they couldn't say for sure who did it. By that point, too much was gone. In the end, the cadets agreed on the single most likely suspect, but because they had no hard proof,

they refused to release the name out of respect for the suspect's living descendants. That refusal says something about this case. Even now, more than 100 years on, there's just enough to point a finger, never quite enough to prove a thing. And so the question hangs there, exactly as it did in the spring. of 1922.

But I don't want the last word here to be about the killer. Because in the end, that's the trap Hinterkifax sets. It is so strange, so unsolvable, that it's easy to get lost in the puzzle and forget it happened to people. Not everyone on that farm was innocent. Andreas Gruber had spent years abusing his own daughter. But the others hadn't done anything to deserve what happened to them that night. Not Victoria, who'd already survived one nightmare under that roof.

Not her mother, Cicelia. Not the maid, Maria Baumgartner, who had been on the farm only a matter of hours. At least of all, the two children, little Yosef, who was two, and seven-year-old Cicilia, who was terrified of that house. long before the worst night of her life. The same isolation that defined their lives also let their killers slip away. Their neighbors had kept their distance for years, so when the farm went quiet, no one rushed to check.

By the time anyone did, the trail had already gone cold. More than a century later, we still can't give them justice. but we can refuse to let them dissolve into a ghost story. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support.

If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow. Murder, True Crime Stories, wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday, completely ad free, no waiting for part two, plus ad-free and early access to every show across Crimehouse

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 Friday. 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 Pertofsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fawkes, Tara Wells, Nicolette Tavallero, Mara Della Rosa, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi, it's Carter.

Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love Crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House Original with Sabrina DeAnneur. Aroga and Alexis link letter. 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 thread 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. Thank you.