In the last days of March 1922, a farmer walked to his neighbours near the Bavarian village of Kaifeck and told them something odd. He had found footprints in the fresh snow, leading from the edge of the forest toward his farm. There were no prints going back.
His name was Andreas Gruber. He was sixty-three. The farm was called Hinterkaifeck, an isolated stead about seventy kilometres north of Munich, between Ingolstadt and Schrobenhausen. Gruber did not report the tracks to the police. He mentioned them to Lorenz Schlittenbauer, to Kasper Stegmeier, to August Ritzl, and then he went home.
He had also been hearing footsteps in the attic. So had the household. The previous maid had quit over it, convinced the place was haunted. A key had gone missing. Someone had been tampering with a lock. The family had found an unfamiliar newspaper, which they asked the postman about, and nobody ever admitted to buying it.
On the night of 31 March 1922, someone killed all six people living at Hinterkaifeck.
The dead were Andreas Gruber; his wife Cazilia, seventy-two; their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, thirty-five; Viktoria's two children, Cazilia, aged seven, and Josef, aged two; and the maid Maria Baumgartner, forty-four. Baumgartner had arrived at the farm that same day, only hours before she died. The weapon was a mattock, a pickaxe-like farm tool, and it was never found.
The first four were lured into the barn one at a time and killed there, then hidden under hay. The two-year-old and the maid were killed inside the house. Then, it appears, the killer stayed.
For four days nobody knew. The cattle were alive and had been fed. Meat had been cut from the pantry and eaten. Food had been cooked. Smoke was seen rising from the chimney. The bodies lay in the barn and the house while someone moved through the rooms.
The discovery came on 4 April 1922, when young Cazilia failed to appear at school. Neighbours went to look.
The autopsies were performed on site by the court physician, Dr Johann Baptist Aumuller, on 6 and 7 April, three victims each day. No official written autopsy report has ever surfaced. What survives is a telephone note from 7 April, witness statements, and a report by the prosecutor Renner dated 10 April. From these comes the detail that has kept the case alive for a century: the seven-year-old girl survived the blow to her skull by roughly two to three hours. The doctor, according to a witness, said she could have been saved had the crime been found in time. Her jaw had been shattered, her neck cut, and tufts of her own hair were found torn out, one clump still in her cramped right hand.
There was an obvious suspect line, and it was ugly. Viktoria and her father Andreas had been convicted of incest by the district court in Neuburg an der Donau on 28 May 1915. Viktoria served a month; Andreas a year in a penitentiary. A second accusation was made in 1919 by Lorenz Schlittenbauer, and both were acquitted in 1920. In 1922 a maid claimed she had seen the two of them together in the hay the previous summer. Rumour held that the two-year-old Josef was Andreas's child. Karl Gabriel, Viktoria's husband, had been reported killed in the First World War, though his body was never recovered, and he was long considered a suspect.
Robbery was ruled out early. A large sum of money was found badly hidden in the house, untouched.
The investigation was a study in what not to do. Fingerprints had been a mature technique since 1909, and the police did not take any. The separated heads of the victims were sent away for laboratory examination; they were lost during the Second World War, probably in air raids. No one was ever charged. The case files were closed in 1955 by one account, though a Spiegel piece on the killings describes prosecutors arguing for dismissal on statute-of-limitations grounds, so even the ending is contested.
The genuine modern re-examination came in 2007, when students at the Police Academy in Furstenfeldbruck went through the case with current methods. Their conclusion was that too much time had passed and too much evidence was gone to name anyone with confidence. But they did produce a profile: one killer, not several, and a crime triggered by a personal emotional conflict. Journalists who later obtained the file reported that the prime suspect in it was Lorenz Schlittenbauer, the neighbour who helped discover the bodies and who had reportedly been involved with Viktoria.
You will sometimes read that the bodies were exhumed in 2018 for DNA testing. No such event can be verified in either German or English sources. What the record does contain is two experts saying exhumation would be pointless. The retired chief inspector Konrad Muller said taking samples from the dead at the cemetery in Waidhofen would achieve nothing. The journalist Peter Leuschner was blunter: the evidence will not be found anymore.
One theory holds that the killer hid in the rafters for weeks, watching the family, before striking. It is a police theory, not a fact. It is also the detail people remember, because it makes the footprints in the snow mean something. A man walks toward a farm. He does not walk away.
German law changed in 1979 so that murder is no longer subject to a statute of limitations. The file stays open. There is no one left who remembers the Gruber family, and the farm itself was demolished in 1923. What remains is a set of tracks in snow that somebody saw and did not report, and six people who did not know that a stranger had already come inside.
There is a distinction in that worth pulling apart. The case has been remembered for over a hundred years. It has books, articles, an encyclopedia entry, a small industry of retellings. People who were not born when it happened can describe the layout of the farm and the names of the dead.
The six people have not been remembered in the same way. The farm was demolished in 1923. There is no one left who knew them. What survives of the Grubers is not the Grubers. It is the question of who killed them.
An unsolved case is a story with a hole in it, and a hole is what people keep returning to. The people themselves were the part with no hole, so nothing pulled anyone back.
Which is the uncomfortable thing about being remembered for a long time. It is not the same as being known. A mystery about a family can outlive that family by a century and still leave nobody who could say what any of them were like. If what you want is for someone a very long way off to be able to tell who you were, being the subject of an unanswered question is not enough. The question lasts. You do not.
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