145. The Boogeyman: Hinterkaifek, The German Family Slaughtered By A Stranger // MONSTERS SERIES

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By now, you should all know that I'm obviously a very curious person, and I'm also a big tea drinker. So I've always heard about this tea called Bigelow Constant Comment. It's been around forever, and people absolutely love it. I realized I had no idea what it actually tasted like. Obviously, I had to investigate, and now I'm obsessed. Constant Comment is this incredible black tea with real orange rind, cold-pressed orange oil, and sweet spices. The best way to know if it's good or bad is to check out our website, It's like Christmas in a cup, except you get to drink it all year long. Then I learned the story behind it, which made me love it even more. Constant Comment was created by Ruth Campbell Bigelow and her New York City kitchen in 1945. She shared it with her friends, and everyone kept talking about it. And all of those Constant Comments actually gave it its name. The recipe is still a Bigelow family secret over 80 years later. So this one is a mystery worth investigating for yourself. Bigelow Constant Comment. Curiously different. Impossible to forget. In 1922, on a chilly spring afternoon in the Bavarian countryside, two coffee traders trudged through a dense stretch of woods until they arrived at a secluded farmstead on the forest's edge. The two men approached the main residence with their burlap bags of coffee beans and knocked on the front door, ready to fill an order placed by the farm's owners. But as they waited for someone to answer, they began to register this eerie emptiness all around them. An emptiness that felt like it was closing in on them. The farm was usually alive with the buzz of the family that lived there. But today, the only signs of life they could hear were the bellowing sounds of hungry cattle in the barn and a dog barking somewhere in the vicinity. The coffee traders knocked on the door once more, but again, no one answered. So they started walking the perimeter of the house, rapping on windows as they went, trying all of the doors, only to find each of them locked. Now, three days later, another visitor journeyed out to the farm. And this time, it was an engine mechanic with a work order who also arrived to find the farm completely desolate, void of any sign of the family that lived there. He even tried making his presence known with a loud whistle, but the only reply he got was the same barking dog and the same mooing cow. After about an hour of this, he just went ahead and broke the lock of the engine room so he could get started on his work order. The mechanic didn't know the family that lived there personally, but he had heard around town that the patriarch, the old farmer named Andreas Gruber, was an eccentric workhorse who spent all day out in the fields and wouldn't come home until pretty late. But even still, the mechanic was at the Gruber farm for over five hours and he never saw a sign of a single other person. The mechanic finished his work, he closed up the engine room, and he continued on to his next appointment. And on his way there, he encountered a man named Andreas Gruber, and he encountered some young women from the neighboring Schlittenbauer farm. He briefly stopped to chat with them, and he told them how strange it was that no one had been at the Gruber's home while he worked. And these two young women then ran home to their own farm and relayed that message to their father, Lorenz Schlittenbauer, who remembered that only a few days earlier, some coffee traders had come his way and remarked that they too had not been able to make contact with anyone at the farm. Little did they know, there had been some other, pretty strange sightings around the Gruber farm the last few days. A local butcher who was passing by the farm in the wee hours of the night on April 1st saw two figures standing near the edge of the forest. Figures who, when they noticed the butcher walking through the area, turned their heads to hide their faces. And then there was the local carpenter who around the same time the following night was cutting through the farm on his way home when suddenly an unidentified person leapt out of a field and saw a man. It was a man who was standing in a field near the property and blinded him with a lantern. Lorenz rounded up two of his other neighbors and went to the Gruber's farm himself to investigate the Gruber family's unexplained absence. And when they got there, they found that all of the gates and doors on the property were locked. Except for one, which was a door that led into the family's barn. The three men made their way into this barn and once they were about halfway inside, they saw a man who was sitting in the barn. They saw something that made all of them freeze in terror. Near the far wall on the floor was a pile of hay and an old stable door that was placed on top of it. And sticking out from underneath the hay was a human foot. Lorenz, not knowing what else to do, grabbed the foot and began pulling at it. And that's when he discovered that it belonged to the body of the old farmer, Andreas Gruber. The three men then combined their strength to lift that stable door. And when Lorenz raked back all of the hay, all of them had to turn away in horror. Because concealed beneath the hay was not just one, but four members of the Gruber family, all stacked on top of each other. Lying on top of Andreas was his wife, Cecilia. Their adult daughter, Victoria, was there. And Victoria's seven-year-old daughter, Celie. Lorenz pulled the family members out one by one, but they were not alone. It was very clearly too late to do anything. All of them were dead with these massive visible head wounds. Now there was vigorous barking coming from the next door stable. So Lorenz went to go investigate what was going on. And that's where he found the family dog in a really agitated state with an injury to his eye. Nearby, there was the cow that all of the other neighbors had heard nervously wandering through the stable, free from its tether, as if someone had untied it. They all walked towards the main residence, the Gruber home, where Lorenz removed a key from inside of his pocket and let himself inside of the house as the other two neighbors entered behind him. And he went straight to the bedroom of Victoria's other child, a little two-year-old boy named Joseph. And that's where they found the little boy, still in his stroller, cold and stiff, with his head also split open. And just off of the kitchen and the maid's quarters, they found the family's newly hired chambermaid bludgeoned to death on the floor and covered with a duvet. The two neighbors left the farm to call for help while Lorenz stayed behind in the house. And within the hour, the whole farm was crawling with onlookers from the surrounding villages, tainting the crime scene well in advance of any police's arrival. And the investigation that began soon after would eventually span more than half a century, drawing on resources from multiple agencies, even some clairvoyance. By the end of the 20th century, the murders at the Gruber farm called Hinterkaifeck would become one of Germany's and the world's eeriest and most baffling unsolved mysteries. Welcome back to "Heart Starts Pounding," a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kayla Moore. And if you're new here, welcome to our little community of the darkly curious. We gather here every Wednesday in the headquarters of the Rogue Detecting Society. And this spooky season, we are going through some old, very strange, very morbid case files, cases where monsters became men and women. We're exploring real-life monsters of legend. And today, I wanna tell you about the time that a boogeyman infiltrated the Gruber family farm. Now, in German folklore, where our story takes place, the boogeyman is a shadowy figure that sneaks into your home and kidnaps naughty children. No one really knows, where boogeyman legends originated from. Some people have suggested he appeared around the time of the Black Plague, because he's sometimes referred to as der Schwarze Mann, or the Black Man. And perhaps he originally symbolized the plague snatching children. Now, depending on the exact legend that you study, the boogeyman's appearance might look different. Most of the time, he's faceless, this unknowable creature, but sometimes he's demonic and looks like a goat. But he's always hidden in a dark corner of your room or under your bed while you sleep. You might not see him, but you can feel his presence, and you'll know he's there. He's waiting with his sack to throw it over your head and kidnap you when you least expect it. Now, today, the boogeyman is folklore that's told to naughty German children, usually to scare them into behaving. Children in Germany even grow up playing a game called "Who's Afraid of the Boogeyman?" And in the game, a child that's been assigned the boogeyman role shouts, who's afraid of the boogeyman? And the other children respond, nobody. Then the boogeyman shouts, and what if he comes? And the other children respond, then we run. And then all the kids run to the opposite side of the field while the boogeyman has to try to tag as many people as possible. But running won't save you from the boogeyman. Today, the boogeyman is kind of this catch-all term that's used to describe an evil, usually unknowable presence that lurks in your house or your community. And just like how there's a few different versions of the boogeyman in German folklore, there's a few different boogeymen in this story that I'm going to tell you today. But this story is not folklore. It's not legend. It actually happened. And now, when the people in the Bavarian countryside hear a weird creak in their attic or a sound coming from under their bed, they can't help but wonder if the boogeyman has finally come for them. Two quick notes before we jump back in. First, we're running a very special Apple Podcasts extended free trial for this month only. You'll get a full 30 days to explore our back catalog of monthly bonus episodes, archived episodes, the new October bonus episode, and our first ever book club discussion episode. We've been reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, and I'm very excited to talk to you all about it. Check out the link in the description for more information. And second, episode three of The Timekeeper is dropping on Friday. This is our special four-part horror audio drama series. So please, if you haven't checked it out, do so. You're going to love it. I promise you. It's one of my favorite things that I've ever made in my entire life. Okay, let's get back into our story. The Gruber family's story at Hinterkaifeck began decades before their murders. The year was 1877, and 27-year-old Cecilia Sanhuter had just married her first daughter, Cecilia Sanhuter. She was a young woman who was married to her first husband, Joseph, who lived at and owned the Hinterkaifeck farmstead. Cecilia and Joseph enjoyed a quiet, peaceful life at Hinterkaifeck, but that all suddenly ended the week after their eighth wedding anniversary. Joseph, who had been battling this nasty bout of pneumonia, succumbed to his illness, leaving Cecilia a widow at just the age of 35. But Cecilia didn't stay a she married one of the farmhands who worked at Hinterkaifeck. His name was Andreas Gruber, who became co-owner of the farm after marrying Cecilia, who was around 10 years older than he was. In 1887, Cecilia and Andreas welcomed their first child, a girl who they named Victoria. And over the next four years, the Grubers would have two more daughters. But tragically, both of those girls died before their lives even really began. One at the age of 21 months, and the other one during childbirth. Andreas and Cecilia raised Victoria on Hinterkaifeck in virtual isolation. Cecilia wanted to protect her baby at all costs. The property was surrounded on three sides by forests that went on for many kilometers. And their nearest neighbor was about half a kilometer away. And the Grubers really kept to themselves and only interacted with outsiders when absolutely necessary. They also employed this revolving door of seasonal farmhands, and they cycled through a number of chambermaids. It was a position that never seemed to stay filled for very long. Friends and neighbors would later go on to say that they always felt like there was a reason that young girls didn't want to stay in that house for very long. In 1914, Victoria turned 27, and she married a man named Carl Gabriel. After this, her parents transferred ownership of the property to Victoria and her new husband. But the marriage was pretty troubled from the very outset. And no sooner had Victoria become pregnant with a couple's first child than Carl left Hinterkaifeck and went to go live with his parents again, which really infuriated Andreas and Cecilia. Then, in the middle of discussion of a possible divorce, the First World War began, and Carl got drafted to go fight. In December of that year, Victoria received news that Carl had been killed in a shell attack outside of Nouveau, France. And a month later, the newly widowed Victoria gave birth to a daughter that she named Celie after her mother. And Victoria continued to live at Hinterkaifeck after Carl's death, alongside her parents, who helped raise little Celie while she figured out exactly what she was going to do. But then, in 1919, without a husband, Victoria became pregnant again. This, at the time, as I'm sure you can imagine, was pretty sad. And the Grubers couldn't really afford for their community to hate them more than they already did. See, in the years that followed the First World War, it was a time of real darkness and anxiety for the citizens of Germany. By early 1922, the value of the German mark had plunged to one three hundred and twentieth of a U.S. dollar. And it was about to get exponentially worse as Germany was on the cusp of the hyperinflation. And so, in 1922, the value of the German mark was reduced by literally trillions and kind of laid the groundwork for the eventual rise of the Nazi Party. Think, food insecurity, malnutrition, unemployment were all ballooning by the day. And so was political instability and anger amongst the people. And while food insecurity was starting to grow across the entire country, with the cost of a loaf of bread doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and eventually increasing more and more, the value of the German mark was reduced by literally a hundredfold. The Grubers at Hinterkaifeck never went hungry. They continued to enjoy an abundance of meat and bread and crops and also money in various forms. The Grubers had their wealth split between a whole bunch of different things like cash savings, mortgage bonds, war bonds, jewelry, gold coins, silver coins, and over 40 acres of land with tons of livestock living on it. It's pretty impressive how well the German mark has improved over the years. the family managed their assets and everyone in the community knew that they were relatively wealthy. Rumors, in fact, had started circulating that they had cash stashed in various places around their property. And also people in the neighboring villages who were familiar with the Gruber family knew them to be very stingy and resource hoarding. They were not generous. They were not friendly with strangers who passed through their farm. They almost never let anyone inside of their house that wasn't just the core family or their hired hands. And people in the community also knew that the Grubers liked to illegally hire laborers, usually for only short periods of time. And that was so they could pay them well below standard wages. They did seem to be taking advantage of desperate people during desperate times. And now on top of all of that and everything the community had been saying about them, Victoria was pregnant out of wedlock. And everyone had another reason to side-eye the family even harder. But while from the outside, they looked like this well-fed, rich family, inside the walls of Hinterkaifeck, something was not right. The family itself had a few dark secrets, more than a few dark secrets, and the family was starting to feel like they were coming back to haunt them. This episode is brought to you by Trumi. Even though my little one is still way too young for a phone, I already think about what that decision is going to look like one day. Sometimes I feel truly haunted by it because giving a kid their first phone is about connection and independence, but you don't want to hand over unrestricted access to everything all at once. I mean, you and I have been on the internet for years at this point. 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In early 1922, the Grubers were looking for a new chambermaid. And that's because the previous chambermaid, this woman named Christens Rieger, had abruptly quit her position the previous summer and fled the farm. After she left Hinterkaifeck, she would go on to tell pretty much anyone who would listen that she was absolutely terrified of the place and couldn't have stayed there for a moment longer. Because, she said, the old farm seemed to be haunted. One night, Christens woke up around midnight and felt like there was someone standing right outside of her door. She laid there in bed, thinking she was just imagining things, when all of a sudden she heard the knob to her door turn and the door open by itself. She rose in bed to see if there was someone there, but there was just infinite darkness on the other side of the open door. And this happened multiple times, she said. Always around midnight, and she never saw who or what was doing this. It was like there was a ghost in the house. And before long, Christens was too spooked to sleep at night. And so she quit. But she wasn't the only person at Hinterkaifeck who sensed another presence at the farm. On the night of March 29th, 1922, just two nights before the murder of the family, Victoria and her father Andreas barely caught a wink, because of the noises that they kept hearing from up in the attic. It was like someone was walking back and forth, or moving something really heavy. The noise actually prompted Andreas to bolt out of his bed, light a lantern, and then climb up into the attic to investigate. But he searched the attic pretty thoroughly and didn't find any trace of a person being up there. Nevertheless, Andreas kept his rifle and his pitchfork at his bedside, just ready in case the source of the attic noises made an appearance, sometime in the night. And the next morning, he stepped out of the front door of his farm, only to make a terrifying discovery. There, clear as day, were two sets of footprints in the snow, leading from the edge of the forest directly to his house. And what was even more disturbing to Andreas was there were no footprints leading back away from the house. It looked as though whoever had come out of the forest to visit was still there at the property. So he did a big walk-through of the whole farm and inspected everything for additional disturbances. And that's when he discovered that there were pry marks on the feed room door outside of the barn, and then a broken lock on the door to the shed. There was no evidence of a burglary, however. Nothing in the location was missing, though he did find that there was some fresh snow inside of the shed, which to him indicated that someone had recently been inside of it. And then, in the summer, he found that there was some fresh snow inside of the shed, Andreas found that one of his cows had been untied during the night and was roaming free. That was pretty strange, he thought, because he would have never instructed anyone at the farm to do that. And then, when Andreas returned to the main residence, he discovered that one of his house keys was missing. He was so uneasy with these findings that he made a point of mentioning them to everyone he encountered that day, including the hardware merchant whose shop he had visited, and the farmer who lived nearby, Lorenz Schlittenbauer, the man who would eventually find their bodies. He also mentioned to them that this wasn't even the first time in recent days that Andreas had found evidence that a stranger had trespassed onto his land. See, a few weeks earlier, Andreas was out in the courtyard when he found a copy of the Mönchner Zeitung, which was this newspaper from Munich that neither Andreas nor anyone else at Hinterkaifeck subscribed to. He assumed that it was a copy of the Mönchner Zeitung, and he assumed that the mailman had dropped it there by accident. The mailman stated that no one in the area subscribed to this particular newspaper, so it definitely wouldn't have come from him. How exactly it landed on the Gruber farm remained a mystery. And because of this series of events, Andreas and the rest of his family were just as spooked as their previous chambermaid had been, the one who quit. And actually, because of that, the family had recently put out word that they were in need, of a new chambermaid. This word eventually reached a woman named Franziska, whose sister Maria had been looking for a new job and a new place to stay. Franziska thought that the opportunity at Hinterkaifeck would be perfect for her sister, Maria, who had really been struggling for some time to find and maintain a job. She had some intellectual and physical impairments that made it really difficult for her to find work at the time. So with the help of an employment agent, Franziska met with Victoria, who was at this point the owner of Hinterkaifeck. And after working out the necessary arrangements, Franziska agreed to bring Maria onto the farmstead the following day to formally begin the job on April 1st. However, Maria wouldn't survive the night. Early on the day of the murders, March 31st, Maria arrived at Franziska's with a borrowed backpack and a bundle of her personal belongings. And the two women set out on foot to Hinterkaifeck, a journey that would take them through several kilometers. of thick, thick forest. Along the way, the two women realized that they had gotten lost in the really creepy woods. Franziska became certain that they had gone in the same circle at least three separate times. It felt to her almost like the forest was trying to turn them around and reroute them away from the haunted farmstead. But Franziska was determined to get Maria to her destination because she knew how badly her sister needed this job. And at around 5 p.m., the two women finally arrived at that destination, which was just about the loneliest and saddest little farm Franziska had ever seen. There was a kind of dead energy about the place. Even still, Franziska dropped Maria off and she left Hinterkaifeck. And as she was leaving, she wondered if the forest was actually trying to guide them away from the place, trying to make sure that they never reached the Gruber farm. And a few days later, she got the call that her sister, along with the entire Gruber family, had been murdered. At around 6 p.m. on April 4th, that's roughly three hours after the bodies were discovered, police from the nearby towns of Hohenwart and Schrobenhausen arrived at Hinterkaifeck to find the property swarming with onlookers, some of which were actually inside of the house where two of the bodies were waiting to be carted out. Police immediately, blew their whistles and ushered everyone off of the property. And once they cleared the area of all the interlopers, authorities began cordoning off what they realized was already a very tainted crime scene. In the barn, police photographed the very badly bludgeoned bodies of Andreas Victoria and the two Cecilias, the elderly matriarch and the seven-year-old Celie. And one thing that really struck out to them as strange was that the bodies were not in their original positions because, Lorenz Schlittenbauer had pulled them out from underneath the haystack. So, it was going to be a lot harder for them to properly assess the scene. Now, inside of the house, they photographed the respective rooms where two-year-old Joseph and Maria, the new chambermaid, lay dead with wounds that looked identical to the ones on the heads of the victims in the barn. It was pretty immediately surmised that the murder weapon may have been something like a pickaxe, but the only pickaxe that they could find on the farm didn't really match the shape of the victims' wounds. Early the next morning, detectives from Munich arrived with search dogs in tows to formally begin a full-scale investigation. The investigators and their dogs scoured the property inside and out, looking for every little bit of evidence that they could with a particular interest in finding the murder weapon. They knew that it was going to be something similar to a pickaxe and they looked in every possible hiding spot on the farm for something that resembled a pickaxe. But even after an exhaustive search, the murder weapon was nowhere to be found. Detectives, meanwhile, were meticulously inventorying every single item at the home and around the property. Large sums of paper money that the family was known to have kept around the property appeared to be missing. So it looked like robbery might have been the motive, but then one officer found around 2,000 gold marks that were just sitting out in plain sight inside of a cupboard that had been used as a storage room for the victims. That had been ransacked. If robbery was the motive for the crime, then why did the perpetrator or perpetrators leave so much of it behind? It just didn't make any sense. And the motive for the murder was, at least at this early point in the investigation, not very clear. However, the most chilling discovery, at least in my opinion, hadn't even been made yet. Police later on examined the crime scene in the barn and they noticed that the murder weapon had been used by the victims. They noticed the narrow width of the door leading into the threshing room where the bodies were found. They tried to reenact what the possible movements of the victims would have looked like, almost like actors blocking a scene. And they reached the conclusion that each member of the family must have been lured in one by one and killed in the same room they were found in. It was thought that the killers had perhaps intentionally disturbed the cattle to make them restless, knowing the sound would draw the family members into the barn, maybe first under the sun, went to see what was causing the commotion. He had already seen the tracks in the snow and maybe caught on to the fact that someone was lurking. He would have also have been the greatest threat to the killer. Once Andreas didn't return, you can imagine how the others would have come out to look for him. Maybe his wife first and then the two girls, leaving behind the chambermaid with young Joseph. It was just a theory, but what they were able to determine with certainty was that the victims had all been murdered sometime in the evening of March 31st, 1922, likely within just a few hours of Maria's arrival to Hinterkaifeck. They were able to pinpoint the time frame based on the witness statements they'd gathered and also mail that had been piling up at the property since April 1st. But if that was the case, then why were none of the family farm animals starving? The cattle had been looked after since the murder had taken place. They had been fed, they'd been smoked in the days between the murder and the discovery of the bodies. And that's when the police learned from neighbors and passerbys that they had at least on one occasion during that period observed smoke coming from the chimney of the main house. Once they learned this, police did one more sweep of the entire property because they got the sinking feeling that whoever did this might have actually been living in the residence for days afterwards. And one officer who went back up to the attic to re-inspect it found half-eaten bacon rinds and smoked meat. And to him, that really pointed to the fact that the killer or killers had lingered comfortably around the house for two or three days after murdering six people there. On the second day of the investigation, the court physician, which is basically a medical examiner, rounded up the six bodies to do a makeshift autopsy in the Hinterkaifeck courtyard. And by doing that, he was able to rule that each family member, indeed, did die of blunt force trauma from blows most likely delivered by a matic, which is a planting tool similar to a pickaxe. He also noted that Victoria had strangulation marks on her neck and her elderly mother may have had these marks as well. Though I'll make a note here that most of the original records of these autopsies are long lost. And among the surviving documents, there's some contradictory information about which one of the two women had these strangulation marks on. We do know that at least one of them did, and it would be very important to know which one, but we just don't have that information definitively. What we do know for sure is that during the autopsies, the physician was disturbed to discover that it was actually seven-year-old Celie who suffered the worst death of everyone. She wasn't just bludgeoned, but her throat had also been split open. The examining physician wasn't sure if the gash was caused by the primary murder weapon, the matic, or some of the other things that were involved in the murder. So, according to the autopsy, Celie survived for at least several hours after the attack. And perhaps if help had been there within the first two or three hours, she may have survived. After the autopsies were finished, the physician was told that Celie had survived for at least several hours. You would think that the bodies would be sent off for burial, but the physician took the unusual step of lopping off each of the six victims' heads and then laying the bodies to rest without them. The heads were eventually stripped of flesh and tissue, and once they had clean skulls, investigators put them into a suitcase and brought them to a pair of spiritualists in the city of Nuremberg. They were so lost in this investigation that they were able to find out that Celie had been involved in the murder of Celie. And then they thought that someone who could see beyond the veil had a better chance of solving who had done this than the police did. The mediums that they went to ultimately reached the conclusion that the killers were two men in their 20s who spoke a foreign language and had beards. But then there was also a third person involved, they said, a woman. And also they said that there were maybe other people involved as well. Obviously, the police were not thrilled with this answer. It was, essentially, useless. So they ended up bringing the skulls to another medium a few days later. And that medium was able to add on to the already useless information that one of the killers had tuberculosis and a bad heart from years of heavy smoking. And of course, this information did absolutely nothing to advance the investigation. And that's where our trail of where those six skulls ends. Whatever ended up happening to them is completely lost to time. And no one on earth has any idea where their skulls are now. This episode is brought to you by Primally Pure. I think a lot of people are becoming more conscious about what goes on their skin. I know I am. But overhauling my entire routine can feel really daunting, especially during the holidays when we're all already stretched so thin. But that's what I love about Primally Pure. They're a female-founded brand that makes clean, non-toxic products that actually work without making you feel like you need a 12-step process. I recently got their Primally Pure Clean Start Bundle. 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Their Airy Eucalyptus Sheets are made with 100% Tencel Lyocell, they're doctor-recommended, Ecotex certified for sensitive skin, and something that I didn't know until recently, but Sejo's products are made with 100% Tencel Lyocell, they're doctor-recommended, Ecotex are actually HSA and FSA eligible. So if you have end-of-year funds to use, this is a really smart way to spend them. I also enjoy their Flex Cool Pillow because it has this shredded memory foam that is adjustable, so you can add or remove filling so that it fits exactly how you sleep. Go to sejohome.com and use code HSP to get 20% off your first order. That's S-I-J-O-H-O-M-E.com and use code HSP for 20% off at checkout. Throughout the rest of 1922, the investigation wasn't really going anywhere, and a lot was changing at the farm. All of the buildings at Hinterkaifeck were going to be torn down. Carl Gabriel's family, he was Victoria's husband, remember, who died in the war, ended up buying out the surviving members of the Gruber family for the farm, and they were more interested in the land than the buildings of Hinterkaifeck. Plus, the buildings held so much sadness. So in March of 1923, the land of Hinterkaifeck was torn down, and the land of Karl Gabriel Sr. was in the process of going through all of the rooms one last time before he just demolished all of the buildings. He decided, hesitantly, that he was going to return to the attic. See, he knew about the noises that were heard up there, the food scraps that were found from whoever had done this to his daughter-in-law's family. But still, he figured he would do one final sweep, when suddenly, he stumbled upon something that was obscured. In the back of the attic. He almost missed it. It was a matic, stained with blood. Neighbors and family members would soon identify this as the one that belonged to the family that had gone missing after they were killed. Karl Sr. also found a rusty pocket knife hidden amongst the hay in the barn, and he passed that knife and the bloody murder weapon along to investigators. And you would think that now that we had the murder weapon, there would be some more movement on this case. But no, authorities were never able to determine if the knife was connected in any way to the crime. And after that, the investigation just really slowed down. At that point, a pair of brothers were turned into police by their own mother, but they had these ironclad alibis that cleared them of any involvement. They were soon released, and police were completely back to square one. And while police felt like they were lost in this people began to talk. They started whispering. of a boogeyman that had been living inside of the Hinterkaifeck farm, hidden in plain sight. But here's the thing. The townspeople weren't talking about the murderer or murderers. No. They knew that a boogeyman had been living with the Gruber family long before the attackers made themselves at home in the farm's attic. See, when I told you that the family had dark secrets, there was one that I didn't tell you about. A secret so dark they had always planned to take it to their graves. They just didn't know how soon that would be. In 1915, Andreas Gruber and his daughter Victoria were tried and convicted of a crime so horrible that it completely ruined their reputation within their community and landed them short prison sentences. Incest. Now, our understanding of the situation has changed so much in the past 100 years. Now we see incest as what it really is, abuse. We see children as victims, not as willing participants in this. But back then, 100 years ago, the Grubers were seen as an abomination for this crime. Going to jail did not stop Andreas from attacking his daughter, however, and in 1919, he went on trial once again for the crime of incest. And one of the people who testified against him was his neighbor, the one who found the bodies, Lorenz Schlittenbauer. Lorenz had known Victoria his entire life, and he became especially close with her after his wife died in October of 1918. Lorenz and Victoria had this connection on the account that they were both widowed, and at one point, the two had a romantic fling that lasted for about two months. Lorenz told police, during the investigation, that it was common knowledge around town that Victoria and Andreas had an incestuous relationship. In fact, when Victoria was just 16, she had confided in Lorenz's wife that her father was abusing her. So Lorenz had known about this for years. But eventually, Andreas gave Lorenz his blessing for him and Victoria to marry. And Lorenz told Andreas that he would honor his intentions only under one condition, which was that Andreas must stop abusing his daughter and repent for his sins. Andreas thought about it for a second and then responded with, we'll see. And not long after that, Victoria came to Lorenz and announced that she was expecting another child. And this, in a way, really horrified Lorenz. There was no way for him to be sure who the father truly was. And this really set off, an ongoing feud between the Grubers and the Schlittenbauers. Because Lorenz didn't want to take custody of a son that he couldn't prove was his. And he wanted everyone to know what Andreas had been doing to Victoria all of these years. The Grubers, in turn, tried to take him to court, claiming that he was extorting them. This, of course, was all leading up to the murders, which put Lorenz on the authorities' radar from the very beginning of the investigation. But that wasn't the only thing that was going on. And that was the only thing that was going on. And that was the only thing that concerned the police about Lorenz. It was also his behavior immediately following his discovery of the bodies. For one, Lorenz disturbed the crime scene by pulling the victims out from beneath the haystack and repositioning them. And then, after discovering the bodies, he went immediately to the house and was observed by one of his neighbors, unlocking the front door with a key that he had on his person. And remember, Andreas noticed that one of his keys was missing shortly before the murder took place. And he was also observed by one of his neighbors, Now, he was never able to really provide a reasonable explanation for how he had this key. Police noticed that Lorenz had also stayed back on the property and was there all alone at the crime scene for at least an hour before other people began showing up. Was this enough time for him to clean up the scene and hide the murder weapon? And then, a month or so after the property was demolished in 1923, a local teacher had strolled onto Hinterkaifeck and happened to see a bump into Lorenz, who at that moment was hanging out around one of the demolished buildings, leaning over a cellar staircase and peering into the remnants of the cellar. And the teacher said that Lorenz then turned around to her and pointed out an area on the cellar floor where it looked as though someone had tried to dig a hole, presumably to bury the victim's bodies, he theorized. How would he have known that, she wondered. As word of his very curious behavior and his history with the Grubers began to spread, Lorenz would live the rest of his life under a cloud of suspicion. Police interrogated him many times over the years, and he was frequently overheard in public making questionable statements. In particular, he was not shy about sharing his view that the murders were divine retribution against the family for incest, and that each of them had been lured into the barn and to their deaths by what Lorenz described as, quote, Authorities, though, were never able to find any physical evidence tying Lorenz to the crime, and their case against him, who was really their strongest suspect, was overall pretty weak. But Lorenz was far from the only suspect that police looked at in this investigation. Police leaned really heavily into the angle that the murders had been committed during a burglary, and through this lens, they had a few suspects that they looked into. The Grubers' former maid, Christens Rieger, had implicated two different suspects, both of whom were former laborers at Hinterkaifeck. One of them was a former farmhand named Anton Bischler, who Christens claimed told her that the family deserved to die. And it was Christens' opinion that Bischler knew the layout of the property well enough that he could have easily carried out the crime with an accomplice. Christens said that Bischler was known to be violent, and she in fact had a specific fear of him returning to the farm to kill him. Christens said that Bischler was known to be violent, and she in fact had a everyone who lived there. This was another reason that she left her position on the farm, she claimed, on top of the bedroom door opening every night. She was afraid that he would actually kill her. Christens also named a second potential suspect, a former Hinterkaifeck employee named Georg Siegel, who had been caught by the Grubers burglarizing their house in November of 1920. Siegel had also made threatening comments towards the family, and he was intimately familiar with the matic that had been used to bludgeon the six victims, because he had personally carved the handle. In 1923, Christens was interviewed by the police again, and this time she named a totally different person, a farmer's son named Joseph Thaler, who was a known burglar. She claimed that he would come to her bedroom window at night and make advances towards her, and he would also ask her about where the family members at Hinterkaifeck slept and where they kept their money. Christens ended up accusing Christens of slander for making this comment, and as a result she was actually jailed for a week for the crime of making an insult. But that did not make her completely stop speaking of her suspicions towards Joseph Thaler. In her final police interview, 30 years after the murder took place, she continued to name Thaler as the person that she believed was responsible for this. Now, police did look at and interview Thaler. They also had a conversation with an anonymous letter implicating the Thaler family in 1925, but you know, who's to say that Christens didn't send it? You know, where I'm going with this basically is they were never able to build a case against him, and Christens seemed to really be his loudest detractor. However, I think it's worth adding here, just as a little aside, that Christens also knew about the rampant abuse that was happening within the house. There was one time where she did say that she entered the barn and saw Andreas abusing Victoria, and I've seen it suggested that maybe she was so afraid of Andreas, and so disgusted by what was happening there, that she actually said the house was haunted as an excuse to leave without upsetting him. This was maybe an excuse that was common amongst chambermaids at the time, because they didn't want to publicly name the men who worked at the farms as being abusers, but they wanted to get out, so they would say that the farm they worked at were haunted, and they were too scared to stay there. It also seems like after she left the farm, Christens went ahead and spoke to some people in town about the abuse that she had witnessed at the farm. Was word finally starting to spread about what was happening? Was Andreas scared enough to do something to his whole family to ensure that this secret didn't get out again? He had already gone to prison twice. Was he afraid of going again? And I know what you're thinking with this theory is, how could Andreas have done this? He died too? Well, he would have been able to lure the family out to the barn one by one, unsuspectingly. And there is a theory that I've read that Lorenz came over that night, maybe to confront Andreas again, and actually saw what he had done to his family. And in a blind rage, Lorenz stole the murder weapon from Andreas and killed him. And then when he came back to the farm later, he moved the body, he maybe cleaned up a little bit when he was left alone in the house. And all of that was just in an effort to keep the attention off of himself. I know that, at least to some people, seems to be the most plausible scenario. I don't necessarily go for it. Lorenz has said that he always felt that the family's abhorrent sexual conduct may have led to someone in the community targeting them. Like, someone may have wanted to prune the rot from their community. Because that idea goes back hundreds, if not thousands of years in German folklore. Just like in children's lullabies and in their bedtime stories, the boogeyman arrives in the dark corners of your room, under your bed, or deep within your attic, waiting to step out of the shadows and punish children for their transgressions. And to me, that seems like the most likely scenario. That a boogeyman from the community, whether it was Lorenz or someone else, came into the Gruber's farm to teach them a lesson. Today. Today, all that remains of where Hinterkaifeck once stood is a dirt road, some open fields, and a concrete monument that stands near the former site of the barn where the entire family and their chambermaid was killed. In 1955, after the investigation had been open for nearly 30 years, the Munich police felt like they had exhausted every angle and avenue, and they finally closed the file on the Hinterkaifeck murders. That department would actually reopen the case one last time in 1986. But never were investigators, any closer to identifying the killer, or killers, than they were when the investigation began in 1922. And so, today, we're left wondering who it was at that farm that killed the Gruber family. Was it someone inside of the family? Was it someone who came from the community? Was it their neighbor? I mean, the possibilities really seem endless. And it's something that still horrifies the community to this very day. But like I said, there's multiple boogeymen in this story. There's the boogeyman, that came into the Gruber home who lived in the attic and walked around at night, waiting for the moment that they could teach them a lesson, if that's what it was. But there's also the boogeyman that was living inside of the home for years. And the more I look into this case, the more Andreas' crimes really stick out to me. And it makes me think of one of the victims of this story that usually gets talked about the least, Maria. Because I don't think it was his charitable spirit that led Andreas to okaying a chambermaid being hired, who was intellectually and physically disabled. I think there was a reason why he wanted another young woman in the house that maybe couldn't fight for herself. But, what do you guys think? I want to know your theories now. Who's the real boogeyman in the story? And why was the Gruber family killed? Let me know wherever you listen. And that is all I have for you this week on Heart Starts Pounding. You can join me here next week, as we explore the story. Yes, we're going into the real-life story of another monster. Next week, we're looking at werewolves. Someone who has two sides to them. A charming man, and then a monster that would come out at unsuspecting times. We're talking about the very real-life werewolf, H.H. Holmes, and his murder castle. Until then, stay curious, and make sure you check under your bed tonight. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Additional writing and research by Paul Haynes. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlop, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart-pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com. This episode is brought to you by our partner, Vistaprint. 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Right now, new customers get 20% off with code NEW20 at Vistaprint.com. That's 20% off at Vistaprint.com using code NEW20. Do you want more darkly curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content. Our weekly rogue-detecting society. Newsletter and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool Jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven-day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com backslash heartstartspounding. But whatever you do, stay curious.