Swing That Axe

Hey true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. The sound is meaty, and wet, and sharp, all at once. Steel is harder than bone, but a human being is a moving target. So careful now, or the blade will get stuck, and you'll have to wrench it free before swinging again.

Again, and again, and again. And that's it. Yeah, that's how you do it. Shh. Shh. Now it's over. It's over. The wooden handle, slick with blood, slides from your hand. The tool hitting the floor with a dull thud. Now the only sound in the room is the roaring in your ears. It takes a special kind of rage, a real special kind of crazy, to kill another human being with an axe.

And then they got a small beam of light against the mirror. And it's real bright, real bright. I know, I know. Yeah. Truly weird stuff. Axe murder. It's not just for Lizzie Borden. On Thursday, September 21st, 2023, a former soldier in Hamburg, Germany, was sentenced to seven years in prison for the murder of his 100-year-old wheelchair-bound grandmother.

Coroners found that the elderly victim was struck 16 times with an axe and died by decapitation when the final blow severed her spinal cord. She had tried in vain to defend herself with a cordless vacuum cleaner. But her grandson, 37 years old, was so much stronger, so much faster. Identified only as Artur B., the man was said to be the black sheep of the family, unable to keep a job, always asking for money.

Neighbors of the victim, identified as Amelie G., said that they often heard the pair arguing loudly, usually over money. Investigators reported that the first blow from the axe came from behind. It's remarkable that Amelie, at 100 years old, in a wheelchair, and reportedly suffering from dementia, managed any attempt at self-defense.

Can you picture her trying to fend off the blows with only a cordless vacuum cleaner? What must it have been like for her those last moments on Earth? A blur of motion, the light catching the steel blade of the axe, hearing her grandson grunt as he drew back for another swing, the crunch of her bones shattering from the force.

Bones brittle with age, flesh thin and fragile, and no match for the bite of that blade. It was Artur himself who called the police. He admitted to having beheaded his grandmother. Officers arriving on the scene described it as brutal, terrible. And sure enough, they found the axe. Artur, who had no prior history of violence, was arrested.

He later told a psychiatrist that caring for his grandmother had been a struggle. In court, the prosecutor agreed, declaring that the motive for this horrific killing was simple. Artur could not cope with being a caregiver for the elderly woman. Seven years incarceration doesn't sound like much for so savage a crime, does it?

Looks like Artur's mental state was a mitigating factor, and who knows? Maybe the German courts are inclined to go a bit easier on perpetrators who kill 100-year-olds? And listen, any of us could snap, right? But an axe? That's barbaric, up-close, wet, physical work. And it's an ancient human tradition. People and axes go way back.

So far back, as in, like, as far as 1.6 million years ago. Primitive axes have been found in eastern and southern Africa, right alongside the fossilized remains of the early humans we call Homo ergaster. These early axes were hewn from stone. It wasn't until roughly 2000 BCE, the beginning of what we call the Bronze Age, that metal replaced stone.

And I kind of love how the first metalsmiths created molds that allowed them to just copy the stone axe, but in iron. They had this new technology, but their brains were still married to the old ways. It's very similar to how some people today will happily use computers, but keep all of their passwords written down in a notebook or on a post-it note.

So then, about 3,000 or so years later, the Vikings upped the ante by inventing the battle axe, with its long wooden handle and its blade wrought of iron. Now, we associate Vikings with those horned hats, long boats, their fiery floating fumaroles. But, above all else, the Vikings were huge fans of the axe, for both its utility and its affordability.

Swords were for the wealthy. Your everyday Viking carried an axe, a useful tool for everyday life, and a lethal tool in combat. Fun fact time! The Vikings loved to name their weapons, and axes were traditionally named after Scandinavian she-trolls of legend, like Hildra, who had the face and body of a beautiful young woman, but sported a tail like a cow.

I guess today they'd probably name their axe as Cairn. Now, you've got to feel sorry for all the nice Cairns out there. It's such an unfair and tragic hijacking of your good name. The modern world is a dumpster fire. We know that, but be glad that the Vikings today are a football team and not a pack of enraged warriors barreling toward you from the other side of the food court, battle axes raised aloft, bellowing, Cairn!

Axe murder. Just like the axe itself. Nothing new. 2,000 years ago in Egypt, a young woman named Takabuti was murdered, then mummified. Talk about a cold case. The cause of her death wasn't even known until 2021. Thanks to modern science and tools like the CT scanner, researchers were finally able to unlock her secrets.

The fact that she was mummified at all tells us that she came from wealth and privilege. Her teeth were strong and healthy and intact. Her hair had been carefully curled and gelled. Yes, the ancient Egyptians used hair products because, of course, they did. Now, the fact that she had hair at all is important. The custom at the time for most Egyptians was a shaved head, and her injuries, thought for nearly two centuries to have been caused by a knife, were actually caused by an axe.

An axe with at least a three-inch long curved blade attached to at least a four-inch long handle. Takabuti's killer came upon her from behind, driving the axe blade into her ribcage, killing her instantly. It's amazing that we now know the how of this ancient murder, just not the who or the why. Was she slain by an invader or betrayed by her own people?

Either way, it was up close and intimate. The killer throwing one arm around her slender neck, jerking her backward by the throat, the other hand plunging the axe into her back. Savage. Not that you have to go back that far in time to stumble across an axe murder. Let's take a look at 2023. March 2023, an 81-year-old man in Englewood, Colorado, hacked his wife and adult daughter to death with an axe.

April 2023 was a super busy month. A 37-year-old woman in Brattleboro, Vermont, was killed by an axe. Ever-Roy L. Morrison of Roselle, New Jersey, attacked and killed his own sister-in-law and his nine-year-old niece with an axe. In Brazil, a man murdered four children at a daycare center with an axe. Two four-year-olds, one five-year-old, and one seven-year-old.

May 2023 gave us a 24-year-old man in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, slaughtering his 50-year-old landlord. And in June in Ottawa, Canada, 36-year-old Jennifer Stewart was attacked and killed by a deeply disturbed individual with an axe who claimed that the murder was meant to inspire his musical career. All of this before 2023 was even half over.

And trust me, there were other deaths by axe. This half dozen is just a bloody drop in an already overflowing bucket. It seems like no matter how much time passes, how much more sophisticated and dazzling our technology becomes, in a moment of white-hot fury, too many of us revert to the oldest ways of solving a problem, and we reach for an axe.

Since we began this story in Germany, with poor 100-year-old Amelie desperately fending off a hatchet with only a cordless vacuum cleaner, let's have a look at another deadly crime involving an axe and a bloodthirsty German. March 1922 in the Bavarian countryside. Winter had not yet loosened its grip to make way for spring.

There was still snow on the ground and in the forecast. A farmer named Andreas Gruber was troubled by a series of odd and puzzling incidents taking place on his property. Little things, maybe, but strange enough that Gruber confided in his neighbors that he was uneasy. It's just too bad that Gruber never went to the police.

The Gruber farm, called Hinterkaifeck, was located just 50 miles north of Munich. The word Hinterkaifeck isn't the official name of any town or village in Bavaria. The Gruber land was remote, a little more than half a mile outside the tiny hamlet of Kaifeck, and it was tucked away in the woods. Hinter means behind in German, so Hinterkaifeck is sort of like a German cousin to our slang term, the boonies.

And if not for the events of March 31st, 1922, the word Hinterkaifeck might never have become shorthand for one of the most famous or infamous unsolved crimes in German history. Andreas Gruber, age 63, shared the home with his wife, Cäzilia, age 72, their widowed daughter, Viktoria Gabriel, 35, Viktoria's two children, a seven-year-old girl, also called Cäzilia after her grandmother, and a two-year-old boy named Joseph.

Also in the home was 44-year-old Maria Baumgartner, who had just begun working for the family as a maid. In a tragic twist of fate, Maria arrived at the farmstead to begin her new job on the afternoon of March 31st, 1922. Those odd events that baffled Andreas Gruber seemed benign enough. For example, Gruber shared with a neighbor that a key had gone missing.

That sounds like no big deal to us, because we live in an age where drowning in possessions is the norm. Our lives are far more mobile and chaotic than anything the Grubers knew. We lose keys and phones and wallets and credit cards. We lose so much stuff that there's an entire category of products on the market just designed to help us keep track of that stuff.

Hello, tile, and thank you for finding 1.45 million sets of keys last year alone. A key to Andreas Gruber, though, that was a significant investment and not something easily replaced. Still, a key is small, it's an easy thing to lose, and troubled though he was, it didn't occur to Andreas Gruber that the missing key meant anything sinister.

Something else, though, had happened six months earlier that was certainly out of the norm, if not downright strange. The woman who worked as the family maid prior to Maria Baumgartner abruptly quit her position in September 1921. Her reason for leaving? She claimed to hear noises in the attic, sounds that convinced her that the house was haunted.

Andreas Gruber was said to have dismissed the woman's fears as nothing more than superstition, which attracts, if you think about it. Andreas and Kazealia were no longer young. Their days were long and physically demanding, and the realities of scratching a living out of the land might have left them with little patience or energy for stories of ghosts or spirits or anything unseen and unseeable.

It's hard to imagine anyone more pragmatic than an elderly German farmer 100 years ago. Still, the maid's abrupt departure, the vanished key, and then the copy of a Munich newspaper found on the ground in March 1922. The farmer chalked that one up to the postman having dropped it by mistake. Gruber didn't pause to consider that there wasn't anyone nearby to even subscribe to that newspaper and no reason for the postman to be carrying it.

Most unsettling of all, just a few days before March 31st, Gruber told neighbors that he'd found footprints in the newly fallen snow. Footprints that came from the woods and led to the machine room on the farm. Footprints that led only in that one direction. Perhaps if the lock on the door to the machine room hadn't already long been broken, Gruber might have been more alarmed.

As it was, he was puzzled. He found it peculiar enough to mention, but not so worrisome that it required action. Now, I admit this strikes me as extra weird because footprints leading in one direction only into a building suggests to me that the owner of those feet is probably still inside that building. But I'm a city girl who chills out by watching Dateline.

And Andreas Gruber was a 62-year-old farmer who probably craved nothing more than the end of his daily labors and a seat by a warm fire. It's understandable that he took it in stride. What reason would he have to think that anyone meant him or his family harm? But the very same day that Gruber discovered the trail of footprints, he also heard what sounded like footsteps in the attic overhead.

The same attic the family's former maid had been convinced was haunted. Neighbors said that Gruber reportedly investigated the space and found nothing. At that moment, what was the old farmer thinking? Was it A. Maybe the maid was right and the old Hinterkaifeck farm was haunted. Things went missing, there were mysterious noises, mysterious footprints in the snow.

The work of a ghost? Completely plausible when you consider the times. Spiritualism is the belief that not only ghosts exist, but that it's possible for humans to communicate with the spirits of the dead. And the 1920s marked the beginning of a huge revival of spiritualism. Could it be that the spiritualism movement reached even the Gruber farmstead?

Were the Grubers believers? Or was it B? At 62 years old in 1922, Andreas Gruber was a very, very old man. Life expectancy for a German man at that time was just a tick over 58 years. It's not like today when 60 year old Demi Moore is out there giving us all a master class on how to slay a bikini. Or Al Pacino is welcoming his fourth child at age 83.

Gruber and his wife were defying the actuarial odds and still toiling on their farm every day. And who could blame them if they just didn't have the energy to get all worked up over a missing key, or a spooked maid, or even a mysterious trail of footprints in the snow. And of course, it's also possible that Andreas and Cäzilia were simply stoic folk, practical and hardworking, not given to wild flights of imagination or hysteria.

There's always something that needs doing on a farm. Who has time to daydream or worry about nothing? On the afternoon of March 31st, 1922, Maria Baumgartner arrived at Hinterkaifeck to take up her post as the family's new maid. Maria's sister accompanied her to the farm and helped her get settled in. It's likely that she was the last person to see her sister and the Gruber family alive.

At some point that evening, Andreas and Cäzilia, along with their daughter Victoria and seven-year-old Little Cäzilia, left the farmhouse and made their way to the barn. The theory is that they were lured somehow into what was ultimately a trap. The four were murdered, one by one, killed by repeated blows with a heavy mattock.

That's a type of axe with a broad blade on one end of the head and a pickaxe on the other. The killer or killers neatly stacked the bodies of the slaughtered family and made their way through the night to the farmhouse. Two-year-old Joseph was asleep in his small bassinet, using the same mattock that killed the child where he lay.

Then they moved to the room occupied by Maria Baumgartner. She had unpacked her few possessions and was sleeping for the first time under the Gruber's roof when the steel blade of the mattock bit into her skull. Though all six people residing at Hinterkaifeck were murdered that night, there was a notable difference in the way the bodies were treated.

Inside the farmhouse, the two bodies had been carefully covered after the killings, Joseph with a blanket and Maria with a dress. Their deaths were the result of swift, repeated blows to the head with the heavy bladed tool. But out in the barn? That was a different story. A different kind of crime scene. Something that made the way Joseph and Maria died look almost merciful.

The body of Cäzilia, wife and grandmother in her seventh decade, showed signs of strangulation. Multiple blows to her head left her skull cracked and split open. Her husband Andreas fared no better. His face was a mass of ragged, torn flesh, the white of his cheekbones peeking through the blood that soaked his remains.

His daughter Victoria had been battered in the face with a blunt object and her skull shattered. And Little Cäzilia, just seven, had deep slash wounds on her neck and face, her tiny jaw pulverized from the force of the blows. I don't even know how to tell you this next part. And I wish I didn't have to. I wish it wasn't part of this already unbearable tragedy.

But the Grubers had no way to hide from that terrible blade. Who are we all these years later to hide from this terrible truth? Child Cäzilia was the only member of the family who did not die instantly from her wounds. An autopsy later revealed that Cäzilia had lived for hours after the attack. Her small hands were full of fistfuls of her own hair.

Investigators believe she had torn it out in desperation and panic and pain. The Grubers animals, the livestock, the family dog, all were unharmed. The next day, April 1st, 1922, a pair of salesmen came to the farm. They're knocking on the farmhouse door when unanswered. They tried tapping on the windows. Nothing. They circled the yard calling out.

Hello. Guten Tag. Is your mom so hausa? Silence. The men later said they did see that the gate to the farm's machine house was open. But they departed. On April 3rd, the postman made his usual stop at Hinterkaifeck and noticed that the mail he'd left just two days ago, Saturday, April 1st, had not been touched. That was odd.

And one day later, on April 4th, a man named Albert Hofner arrived at Hinterkaifeck to make repairs on an engine. It was strangely quiet, the only sounds puncturing the stillness coming from the barn. Hofner said that the barn doors were locked, but that the dog was barking and he could hear other animals stirring inside the building as well.

He sat down to wait for the farmer Andreas Gruber to return. He waited for an hour and then decided to go ahead and commence with the repair that he'd been hired to make. Hofner worked on the engine for four and a half hours, completely unaware that the bodies of the Grubers and their maid were mere yards away. The cold weather helped slow decomposition and perhaps spared Hofner from noticing the unmistakable stench of death.

Upon completing his work, Hofner packed up to depart and then he saw. The barn doors locked when he arrived. Now stood open. The dog was tied up outside. Hofner let his gaze travel from barn to farmhouse to woods. How had he not seen or heard any member of the family? Why had no one greeted him? Why had no one spoken to him?

Now, deeply uneasy, Hofner headed into the little hamlet of Kaifeck and shared his concerns with a man named Lorenz Schlittenbauer. Schlittenbauer had his own worries about the Gruber family. Little Cäzilia had now missed two days of school with no explanation and the family had not attended worship services on Sunday, April 2nd.

Schlittenbauer sent his two sons to the farm to check on the Grubers. When the boys returned and reported that there was no one at the farmstead, Schlittenbauer collected two other townsmen and headed out to see for themselves. It was that search party, Schlittenbauer, Michael Pöll, and Jakob Sigl, that found the bodies.

And the next day, autopsies were performed in the barn where the bodies lay by a physician named Dr. Johann Baptiste Ommela. He declared that the weapon used by the killer or killers was most likely a mattock. Police did not find the weapon on the scene and they struggled to determine a motive. Who would want to annihilate the Gruber family and why?

Their investigation was complicated by the fact that the crime scene had been trampled and the bodies had been moved by the same search party that found them. And here's where the story takes the next of many weird and bizarre turns. Gruber's widow daughter, Victoria, mother of Little Cäzilia and toddler Joseph, had been the subject of scandalous, heartbreaking rumor.

There were many who believed that the little boy was the product of an incestuous relationship between Victoria and her father, Andreas. And it wasn't all just ugly gossip. In 1915, both Andreas and Victoria were found guilty in court of the crime of incest occurring over the three-year period from 1907 to 1910. For this crime, Andreas was sentenced to one year in prison.

Viktoria's sentence was one month. Though there was evidence presented to suggest that the sexual relationship between father and daughter was not consensual, clearly victims of sexual assault had no easier time being believed a hundred years ago than they do today. But, plot twist. The very man who found the bodies, Lorenz Schlittenbauer, had also had a relationship with Victoria Gruber.

It was whispered that he was the father of Joseph, something that Schlittenbauer claimed sometimes and denied at other times. The circumstances suited him. And it was Schlittenbauer who disturbed the crime scene, moving the bodies in the barn, he said, in a desperate search for little Joseph. Not finding the child there, the trio raced for the farmhouse.

Poole and Sigel were surprised. When Schlittenbauer unlocked the front door with a key. Why did Schlittenbauer have a key to the Gruber farmhouse? What reason for that could there possibly be? Police considered robbery as a motive and suggested that a vagrant had committed the mass murder at Hinterkaifeck. But, given the amount of money found in the farmhouse, it was a theory they had to abandon pretty quickly.

And there was something else, something chilling and profoundly disturbing. Whoever had killed the Gruber family and their new maid, Maria Baumgartner, had clearly remained in the home for days afterward. The cattle had been fed. The dog had been cared for. There was evidence in the pantry of meat having been very recently sliced.

Every crumb of bread in the house had been consumed. And there were reports of smoke curling from the chimney long after the bodies in the barn and the bedchambers had cooled. Now that's some cold-blooded murdery behavior. Killing six people with an axe, then enjoying a sandwich in front of a roaring fire with the body of a murdered toddler concealed under a blanket just a few steps away.

Remote as the farmstead was, a fair number of people came forward to describe having witnessed some very odd goings-on. Just hours after the murder, a farmer and butcher named Simon Rylander, on his way home in the wee hours of April 1st, said that he came upon two strangers lingering at the edge of the forest. The men turned their faces away from him.

He thought little of the encounter until he learned of the deaths at Hinterkaifeck. The night after the killings, a man named Michael Pleschl, who was passing by the Gruber place, said that the smoke coming from the fireplace had a foul smell. There doesn't seem to have been any follow-up on that detail. Pleschl also reported encountering a man who hoisted a lantern in his face, blinding him.

With every instinct screaming to get the heck out of there, he did. He was later unable to offer any description of that man's face. And of course, police looked hard at Lorenz Schlittenbauer. His relationship with Victoria Gruber was an open secret. It was whispered that perhaps he had killed the family in a fury over Victoria, demanding that he provide financial support for baby Joseph.

And then, there was his very curious behavior the day the bodies were discovered. His two companions said that they had to bust open a gate to get into the locked barn to where the bodies of Andreas, Cäzilia, Victoria, and Little Cäzilia were stacked. But then, Schlittenbauer produced that key to a farmhouse door and initially entered the house alone.

And there was the whole problem of Schlittenbauer moving the bodies. Did he intentionally compromise the crime scene? So desperate was law enforcement and the community for answers that even Karl Gabriel came under suspicion. Wait, who? Karl Gabriel, the dead husband of Victoria Gruber. Oh, sure, sure, he'd been reported dead in the line of duty during World War I, a victim of a mortar shell attack in France.

But his body was never recovered. Since Victoria had managed to conceive and give birth to Joseph entirely in Carl's absence, the gossip was that the man faked his own death and then bided his time before seeking vengeance on his faithless wife and her entire family. Very dramatic theory. Also, very improbable. But in a case like this, so violent and off the charts in terms of brutality, police were as willing to grasp at wild straws as anyone.

Lots of other suspects came under scrutiny. A pair of brothers named Adolf and Anton Gump, and another pair of brothers, the Tollers, and yet another pair of brothers, Anton and Carl Bieschler. That last brotherly foursome looked like a promising lead, if for no other reason than the fact it was the family's former maid, the one who fled Hinterkaifeck because she believed the place to be haunted.

She was the one who tipped the police to the possible involvement of both the Toller and Bieschler brothers. All six of those suspects proved to be the dead end. In fact, over 100 suspects were investigated by police. And with no arrests and little else to go on, the case went cold. The victims were eventually buried.

Brace for the weird. Without their heads. All six heads had been shipped off to a clairvoyant. That's how desperate police were for a lead. The heads did not travel in vain, though. The clairvoyant reported that the family had died at the hands of two killers, and that the murder weapon was still hidden somewhere on the farm.

That psychic prediction proved true when a year after the murders, the Gruber farmstead was torn down. Built in 1863, the house had weathered 60 years. But mass murder has a way of forever staining a place, of marking it as unclean. The one potentially useful thing that came out of the demolition was the discovery of a blood-stained hoe under the floorboards in the attic.

What appeared to be human hair was still stuck to the dried blood. But in the absence of any other evidence, and remember, this is decades before DNA was even discovered, that possible clue proved to be yet one more dead end. And if you're wondering about fingerprints, the technology definitely existed at the time and was widely used, except in this case, no fingerprint evidence was collected.

A 2007 study of the case by students at a German police academy were highly critical of this failure, and every single one of those students found themselves in agreement over who they believed the perpetrator to be. But that name has never been released, out of respect for the individual's descendants. And so the case was officially closed in 1955.

Not solved, just closed. Despite the high number of suspects, there just wasn't the kind of evidence needed to get a conviction. There were plenty of loose threads though. Like the possibility that the maid who fled what she thought was a haunted house hadn't heard a ghost at all. One extra creepy theory is that the killer or killers was actually hiding on the Gruber farm for six months or more before the murders.

That's one to keep you up at night. Can you imagine that? Another loose thread. Whatever became of the heads of the six murder victims? Well, like everything else in this story, it wasn't a happy ending. After the clairvoyant did his or her thing, the heads eventually wound up in an office in a building in the city of Augsburg.

It's a fascinating place. It's one of the oldest cities in Germany. It was founded at around like 15 BCE by the ancient Romans. But unfortunately, the building where the six heads were stored was destroyed by bombs during World War II. Oops, what are you going to do? The last weird twist in this tale sounds incredibly far-fetched.

And yet... So, in the years between 1898 and 1912, a serial killer terrorized America. It's speculated that this individual killed somewhere between 40 and 100 people. The MO? The killer targeted isolated rural homes, used common farm implements as weapons, and never stole a thing from any victim. Which sounds very much like what happened at Hinterkaifeck.

Is it possible that this serial killer made his way to Germany after 1912 and clocked at least one more bloodbath on the Gruber farm? It's plausible. It for sure wasn't as easy or fast to travel from the U.S. to Germany in those days as it is now, but it wasn't impossible. We just have to accept that it's unlikely we will ever learn the truth of what happened to those six human beings on the night of March 31st, 1922.

All we have left is a horror tale. Strange noises in the attic. A trail of footprints in the snow. And six lives obliterated. All by the swing of an axe. Next time on True Weird Stuff. Don't think too much about the hotel you're staying in. Don't think about how many other bodies have been on this mattress. Don't think about it.

And definitely don't think about what sort of horrific and monstrous tragedy may have unfolded in room 1046 on the next True Weird Stuff. This is a tough story, isn't it, Max? It's really crazy because there are so many suspects. And the other thing is there is no other motivation than killing. Do you know what I mean?

For a lot of people that commit murders like this sort of thing, there's other kinds of components to it. There's stealing something. Sometimes there's a sexual component to it. But it doesn't seem like there's any of that connected with this. Not directly, anyhow. Which would lead me to believe that these were murders that were committed by somebody who knew them.

It feels very targeted and very, very intentional. It doesn't feel like a spree killing. Where this family just happened to be on the wrong stretch of isolated country road. I agree with you. I feel like whoever did this crime had a real grievance with one or more members of the family. So let's work our way through some of these suspects.

To me, the least plausible suspect is Karl Gabriel, Viktoria's husband who was presumed killed in action in December 1914 in France. But you want to hear like a weird kind of little detail? Yeah. So he was killed in World War I, 1914. So apparently at the end of World War II, there were captives who were held by the Soviets.

And some of these POWs were released and sent home by what they said was a German speaking Soviet officer who bragged about having committed the murders at Hinterkaifeck. And the theory was is that Karl Gabriel had instead of being killed on the battlefield in France, had defected and gone to Russia and turned traitor.

But this is increasingly like the plot of a James Bond movie. And I'm just not how about you? I'm just not feeling that. No, no. I mean, I guess you could say he would be somebody who probably would be comfortable knowing his way around the house to be able to live it on the sly. But no, this doesn't sound terribly plausible.

There's just an awful lot of you know, there's so many moving parts in the Karl Gabriel thing. Schlittenbauer. Man, there's something. Talk to me about Lawrence Schlittenbauer, please. So he had so so they're saying he had this relationship with Victoria and that he fathered Joseph. And, you know, he had a key. Right. So they said the key was missing.

But somehow he ended up having a key. So it's possible that because if he's having this relationship with Victoria, that it's possible she gave him a key so that they could carry this out, you know, in some kind of way. I don't know when the rest of the family was out or something like that. So I suppose that's possible.

But more than likely, I don't know. I feel like he probably stole the key. How about how about like, here's an idea to follow your line of thinking. Victoria gave him the key and the two would meet and have rendezvous in the attic while the rest of the family, quote unquote, slept. But of course, the maid, the maid heard everything.

So there were a lot of there was a lot of suspicion about Lauren Schletenbauer. Like, for example, a teacher in the town of Kaifeck found Schletenbauer visiting what was left of the demolished Hinterkaifek farm in 1925. And the teacher said, Schletenbauer, what are you doing here? And he said the perpetrator's attempt to bury the family's remains was hindered by the frozen ground, which the teacher took to be proof that Schletenbauer knew exactly what was going on at the time of the murders.

But, of course, he lived in the village and was a neighbor. So, of course, he knew what the weather was. Right. Right. That's not compelling. And I will tell you that Lauren Schletenbauer died in 1941, but he took multiple people to court and won people that called him the murderer of Hinterkaifek. He sued people for slander and he won.

So I'm not saying he didn't do it, but he made a he he made it his mission to not be accused of that. Then, of course, there's the there's the cluster of brothers. Right. There's the Gump brothers and the Bischler brothers and the taller brothers, all of whom were fingered by the former maid. Apparently, the brothers, you know, they knew the farm, they knew the premises.

They were jealous of any wealth that they might have on the property. But police were unable, Max, to make any reasonable case against any one of those individuals stick. Now, the taller brothers, that was interesting because the former maid said that they were known burglars and that one of the brothers, Joseph, said, I know every room that every Gruber family member is sleeping in and there's money on that farm.

But, of course, police were unable to make any of those accusations stick. Well, and so the case went cold. But, of course, there wasn't money stolen. Right. But we I mean, I mean, that's what they said. So, no, I don't think so. Plus, there's something you you called it close up wet work or something like that. And when you think about something like this, that generally is somebody who knows somebody who does that.

Also, there's something else that you said that their bodies, two of the bodies were covered. So there's a you know, from looking at murdery, serial killer kinds of things that generally only happens that you cover the victim if you know them. Exactly. And this is why, like, I was leaning so hard into Lauren Schletenbauer, because that was his son, allegedly.

Right. And the maid was a stranger that he had no beef with. Right. You know, now the family, the family he had a grievance against. But the seven year old and this is the part where it's all the trains jump the tracks for me. The seven year old child, Little Cäzilia, was tortured. Tortured, which makes you go, well, the grievance here wasn't against Andreas or Victoria.

The grievance is against a seven year old girl. Make that make sense. It's very difficult to say because, you know. So see how it if kind of falls apart, it does fall apart with that. Yeah, that was there are two details in this story. The whole story is haunting. There are two details in the story that I have been lying awake at night thinking about.

The first, of course, is that child, Cäzilia, seven years old. It's it's unbearable, unimaginable. The other detail is Andreas Gruber was found to be guilty of repeatedly raping his daughter, Victoria. She went to jail, too, for the crime of incest. I was wondering about that. Mm hmm. Yep. And that shows you that shows you we've come some good distance from that kind of interpretation of behavior and the law.

But we haven't come maybe as far as we would like to. The idea that in some way that she was guilty of being seductive or alluring. And so she was as guilty of this incestuous assault as her father. Oh, did that one. Did that detail come at you? Yeah, it really did. Because, you know, you're a child. You can't make those decisions. You can't you can't.

And so that one is very troubling. But when I said there was at the beginning, I said there was no sexual component. There seems to be no sexual component connected to the crime itself. You know what I mean? Yeah, I do. I do. The weird thing here is and the last of course, the last suspect is, is that the serial killer known in the United States as Paul Mueller may have somehow gotten across the Atlantic Ocean to Germany for one last throw down on the Gruber farm.

It's a bit of a stretch, but there's a really interesting book called The Man from the Train. And the author of that book is a guy named Bill James. And he I mean, he this is the whole book is about this serial killer called Paul Mueller. And the theory is, is that Mueller had like so many victims, dozens and dozens of victims.

And when you look at some of the crimes that it is believed Paul Mueller committed in the United States, there's a lot of similarity to what happened at Hinterkaifeck. And there's one one of Mueller's suspected crimes, because, of course, we don't know, is an entire family was slaughtered in their isolated farmhouse. They were killed with a pickaxe. The bodies were moved and stacked and there was no robbery.

So it's a it's it's a very similar crime scene is what happened at Hinterkaifeck. And in The Man from the Train, the author believes that he has found the identity of Paul Mueller as a German immigrant who decided to take a break from his serial killing spree, which we know now, thanks to the FBI and the DOJ and all the research that we have, that serial killers do go dormant sometimes for long periods.

He believes that Mueller went dormant and returned to his native Germany. So, I mean, it could be possible. I mean, because the original thinking when they talked about serial killers was they will continue doing this until they're caught or perhaps incarcerated for another crime. And then, of course, we have found out in modern times, too, like B.T.K. took a period of time to stop the Golden State killer.

He just stopped. Yeah. And so is it possible? Is it possible that this man who committed serial murder across the American heartland in the late 1800s somehow boarded a ship, went home to Germany and for whatever reason took out the Gruber family at Hinterkaifeck? I mean, what do you think? It's possible. It seems a little bit of a stretch.

There's been connections they've tried to do with the Jack the Ripper that was in both countries, too. So this is not the first time that it's been floated that somebody could have done this in two countries. And why not? Except it just seems I don't know. It just seems like it's a little bit of a stretch. It's a great story and it's an interesting idea to think about.

But yeah. And then again, this is one of those cases where all of the theories are a stretch and we will never know. Now, the German police today, although the case remains open and unsolved, it is the most notorious unsolved criminal case in the country of Germany. Even though it's open and unsolved, it is the German police believe they know who did it and they have elected to remain silent and to keep that information sealed to protect that person's descendants, which seems awfully civilized and polite.

Do you agree? Yeah, it would be interesting to know with DNA the child, Joseph, to see who the father of that child was. That would be very interesting to know. And we know for certain that Joseph was not the son of Karl Gabriel because Joseph was conceived and born entirely while Carl was away at war. So, I mean, is it Andreas Gruber?

Is it Loren Schleenbauer? Is it someone else? And then for me, the final thing that just feels like it's unbearable. I can't imagine what it's like for law enforcement. I mean, sometimes I'll be watching like a dateline or 48 hours or whatever, and they'll have this detective who retired 10 years ago, but he's still chasing this one cold case or she's still chasing it because it gets inside you and you can't bear.

You can't bear for there to never be justice. This is just never. There's never going to be any answers here. So that's unbearable. But their heads, Max, on top of everything else, they sent their actual heads to a psychic in your life. Have you ever heard anything that crazy? No, no, I haven't. But did you ever see that coming?

Did you think, you know what? I bet at the end of this story, she's going to say that all six of their heads got shipped off to a psychic. Somebody had to make that decision who was really desperate. That's for sure. But the fact that they were never able to be recovered because of, I guess, World War Two, the building was bombed.

Yeah, it was destroyed. But the idea that these people who suffered and died in such unspeakably terrifying and grim and gruesome circumstances. They lost their heads to the clairvoyant. Could we have been able to do that with their heads still attached? Couldn't we have sent? I mean, look, I've seen the Long Island media or whatever.

Send a scarf. You know, here's the child's teddy bear. How did you need their heads? And how did you ship the heads? And what did the psychic do with the heads? And were the heads embalmed? Were they on ice? I couldn't. I looked. I could not find the answer to that. I'm so horrified. These are grim questions. These are grim questions.

Now, you can, if you happen to be in Germany and the town of Kaifeck, it has a new name now. And, of course, the farm at Hinterkaifek was demolished one year after the murders. So you can't visit the barn or the house or any of that gruesome, you know, macabre, looky-loo stuff. But you can visit the grave marker and the memorial for the family.

And so many people do. So many people go to pay their respects. Some out of morbid curiosity. Some because they've heard the weird and strange story. And some because it's so painful to imagine what those human beings went through. And then all of the terrible things that happened to their bodies afterward. There are people who go just to say a prayer at that memorial for some kind of peace.

For the Gruber family and Maria Baumgartner. And that, I'll remind you, Max, that was her first day on the job. Her first day on the job. So, I would prefer that none of y'all murder anyone by any means. But definitely, definitely, if you have axe murder on the mind and in your heart, I just have to tell you, that's some real hardcore, dark, sick, crazy.

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