Footprints Led Into the Farm. None Led Out. Then Someone Kept Feeding the Cows. The Hinterkaifeck Murders.

In the spring of 1922, on a small farm called Hinterkaifeck, about 70 kilometers north of Munich, the farmer noticed something in the snow.

A line of footprints led out of the forest, across the field, to his farm.

He looked for footprints leading back. There were none.

That night, the family heard footsteps above them, in the attic. The farmer searched with a lantern and found no one.

A few days later, everyone on the farm was dead.

The farm

Hinterkaifeck was a small farmstead, a house and barn joined together, surrounded on several sides by woods. The nearest neighbors were a few hundred meters away.

Six people lived there in March 1922.

Andreas Gruber, 63, ran the farm. His wife, Cäzilia Gruber, was 72. Their daughter, Viktoria Gabriel, 35, was a widow. Her husband had been reported killed in the First World War in 1914. His body was never recovered.

Viktoria had two children: a daughter, Cäzilia, who was 7, and a son, Josef, who was 2.

The sixth person had only just arrived. The family's previous maid had quit about six months earlier. According to later accounts, she said she heard noises in the attic and believed the house was haunted. The new maid, Maria Baumgartner, 44, came to work at Hinterkaifeck on the afternoon of March 31, 1922.

She would be there for only a few hours.

The warnings

In the days before the murders, Andreas Gruber told neighbors about several strange things.

He had found a Munich newspaper on the farm that nobody in the area subscribed to.

He had seen footprints in fresh snow leading from the forest to the farm, and none leading away. He found the lock on a door to the machine room broken.

The family heard footsteps in the attic at night. Gruber searched. He found nobody.

A key to the house had gone missing.

Neighbors offered help. Gruber turned it down. He did not report any of it to the police.

The night of March 31

Investigators later reconstructed what probably happened on the evening of Friday, March 31, 1922.

One by one, Andreas, Cäzilia, Viktoria and young Cäzilia were lured or went into the barn, where each was struck and killed with a mattock, a heavy farm tool similar to a pickaxe.

Then the killer went into the house and killed the new maid, Maria, in her room, and little Josef in his cot.

The autopsy later suggested that the seven-year-old girl may have survived for several hours after she was attacked. Some of her hair was found pulled out, as if she had torn it.

Investigators also found that sounds from the barn could not be heard inside the house.

Someone stayed

For the next four days, nobody outside the farm knew what had happened. But the farm did not look empty.

Smoke was seen coming from the chimney. The cattle were fed and watered. Bread was eaten, and meat was cut from the family's supply.

On April 1, two coffee sellers came to the farm, got no answer and left. That night, a neighbor walking past saw two figures near the edge of the forest. They turned away when they saw him.

On April 2, a man passing by saw smoke from the oven and was blinded by someone holding a lantern. He walked on.

On April 4, a mechanic arrived to repair a machine. Nobody answered. He waited for an hour, did the repair alone, and left.

Whoever killed the family, investigators came to believe, had stayed on the farm, perhaps for days.

The discovery

The children had missed school, and the family had not been seen at church or at the post office. On April 4, 1922, three neighbors went to the farm to look.

In the barn, under hay, they found the bodies of Andreas, Cäzilia, Viktoria and young Cäzilia. In the house, they found Maria and little Josef.

A large amount of money was found in the house, untouched. Robbery, it seemed, was not the main motive.

Before police could secure the scene, neighbors and curious onlookers walked through it. Some moved things. Some reportedly cooked in the kitchen. No fingerprints were taken.

The autopsies were done in the barn. The victims' skulls were sent to Munich for examination, and were reportedly later shown to clairvoyants in the hope that they could name the killer. The skulls were lost during the Second World War.

The weapon

The farmhouse was demolished in 1923.

During the demolition, workers found a mattock hidden in the attic, under the floor. It belonged to the farm. It was the murder weapon.

They also found a pocketknife in the hay of the barn. Nobody could say whose it was.

A small memorial now stands near the place where the farm once was.

The investigation

Over the decades, police questioned more than a hundred people. Several suspects were investigated, including neighbors, former workers, local men with criminal records, and, in some theories, Viktoria's husband, who had been declared dead in the war but whose body was never found.

No one was ever charged. Under our rules, people who were never charged are not named here.

The case was officially closed in 1955, though questioning continued for years after.

In 2007, students at a Bavarian police academy reviewed the entire file using modern methods. They concluded that the original investigators had been thorough, but that the evidence lost at the scene made it impossible to solve today. They said they had a main suspect in mind. Out of respect for living relatives, they did not name anyone.

What we still don't know

Who walked out of the forest and into Hinterkaifeck in the spring of 1922?

Was the person in the attic the same person who killed the family?

Why did the killer stay on the farm for days, feeding the animals, instead of running?

And why did a farmer who had found footprints, heard footsteps and lost a key refuse every offer of help?