Hinterkaifeck murders

[4] Just days before the murders, Gruber told neighbours he had discovered tracks in the fresh snow that led from the forest to a broken door lock in the farm's machine room.[3] According to a school friend of the seven-year-old Cäzilia Gabriel, the young girl reported that her mother Viktoria had fled the farm the night before the act after a violent quarrel and only hours later had been found in the forest.Shortly afterwards, they found the chambermaid, Maria Baumgartner, and the youngest family member, Josef, murdered in the homestead.Initial investigations were hampered by the number of people who had interacted with the crime scene, moved bodies and items around, and even cooked and eaten meals in the kitchen.[8] First suspecting the motive to be robbery, the police interrogated travelling craftsmen, vagrants, and several inhabitants from the surrounding villages, but they abandoned this theory when a large amount of money was found in the house.[3] It was clear that the perpetrator(s) had remained at the farm for several days; someone had fed the cattle, consumed the entire supply of bread from the kitchen, and had recently cut meat from the pantry.[9] In the inspection record of the court commission, it was noted that the victims were probably drawn to the barn by restlessness in the stable resulting in noises from the animals.However, immediately after finding the four bodies in the barn, Schlittenbauer apparently unlocked the front door with a key and (suspiciously) entered the house alone.When asked by his companions why he had gone into the house alone when it was unclear if the murderer might still be there, Schlittenbauer allegedly stated that he went to look for his son Josef.[3][16][17] For many years after, local suspicion remained on Schlittenbauer because of his strange comments, which were seen as indicating knowledge of details that only the killer would recall.According to his information in the files for the case, local teacher Hans Yblagger discovered Schlittenbauer visiting the remains of the demolished Hinterkaifeck in 1925.Upon being asked why he was there, Schlittenbauer stated that the perpetrator's attempt to bury the family's remains in the barn had been hindered by the frozen ground.This was seen as evidence that Schlittenbauer had intimate knowledge of the conditions of the ground at the time of the murders, although being a neighbour and familiar with the local land, he may have been making an educated guess.[20] As a Freikorps member, Gump was said to have participated in the murder of nine farmers in Upper Silesia during the fight against the 1921 Polish uprising in the region.She thought that Anton and Karl Bichler could have committed the murder together with Georg Siegl, who had worked at Hinterkaifeck and knew of the family fortune.[28][29] He did state that he had carved the handle of the murder weapon when he was working at Hinterkaifeck and knew that the tool would have been kept in the barn passage.The Hinterkaifeck murders bear some similarities to Mueller's suspected crimes in the United States, including the slaughter of an entire family in their isolated home, use of the blunt edge of a farm tool as a weapon (a pickaxe), moving and stacking bodies of the victims, and the apparent absence of robbery as a motive.James suspects that Mueller, described as a German immigrant in contemporary media, might have departed the US for his homeland by 1912 after private investigators and journalists began to notice and publicize patterns in family murders across state lines.Also in 1991, radio station Funkhaus Ingolstadt aired a documentary, Hinterkaifeck – auf den Spuren eines Mörders, and the Abendzeitung (München) ran a series of articles called Die sechs Toten vom Einödhof – Bayerns rätselhaftestes Verbrechen.[33] In 2006, German author Andrea Maria Schenkel published the novel Tannöd, a fictionalized account of the murders although the setting and names of those involved were changed.The murders attributed to Mueller, including the Villisca axe murders, were apparently random nighttime home invasions in or near small railroad towns that left entire families bludgeoned to death with the blunt end of an axe, and were probably motivated by a sadistic and necrophilic attraction to prepubescent girls.