Hinterkaifeck

Footprints led out of the forest to the house, and none led back

Hinterkaifeck means, roughly, "behind Kaifeck": a lonely farmstead built around 1863 about a kilometre north of the hamlet of that name, against dense woods some 70 km north of Munich. In the spring of 1922 six people lived there. Andreas Gruber was 63, his wife Cäzilia 72; their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, 35, had a daughter, Cäzilia, 7, and a son, Josef, 2. Viktoria's husband Karl had been reported killed in France in December 1914. The household carried ugly secrets. In 1915 Andreas and Viktoria had been convicted of incest, and the father of little Josef was disputed between Andreas and a neighbour, Lorenz Schlittenbauer.

The warnings came first. The family's maid quit about six months before, reportedly because she kept hearing sounds in the attic. In March 1922 Andreas found a Munich newspaper on the farm that nobody nearby took. A key went missing. Days before the end, he told neighbours he had found tracks in fresh snow running out of the forest to a door with a broken lock, and none going back; that night the family heard footsteps overhead, and he searched the attic and found no one.

On the afternoon of Friday 31 March a new maid, Maria Baumgartner, 44, arrived. That evening Viktoria, her daughter and her parents were lured one by one into the barn and killed with the family's own mattock; then Josef in his cot and Maria in her room. Whoever did it stayed. For days someone fed the cattle, ate the bread, cut meat from the pantry and lit the fire; a passer-by saw smoke rising from the chimney, and two figures were seen at the edge of the forest. Coffee sellers knocked on 1 April, the girl missed school, a mechanic worked there alone for hours on 4 April. That evening Schlittenbauer and two neighbours broke in and found the bodies.

Robbery was ruled out at once, because a large sum of money was still in the house. Suspects came and went for decades: Schlittenbauer, who won several slander suits before his death in 1941; Karl Gabriel, rumoured to have survived the war; the far-right Gump brothers, named by their own sister on her deathbed. The case was formally closed in 1955, and the last interrogations took place in 1986. The skulls, sent to Munich for study, were lost in the Second World War, and the victims lie buried without them at Waidhofen.

The farm was torn down within a year, and a small memorial stands near the site. In 2007 the Fürstenfeldbruck police academy reworked the case and agreed on a theory, which they kept to themselves out of respect for living relatives.