Hinterkaifeck: Germany's Most Famous Cold Case Quiz

Answer: the farmhand

The farm in question was called "Hinterkaifeck" because it was situated "behind" (German: "hinter") the hamlet of Kaifeck; the place name has never been official and no longer exists. The location of the farm was roughly 70 kilometers north of Munich.
Everyone who lived on the farm was killed that night. They were: the farmer Andreas Gruber and his wife, Cäzilia, their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, her two children Cäzilia and Josef, and the farmhand Maria Baumgartner.
It appeared that Viktoria, Cäzilia, Andreas, and the young Cäzilia were one after the other lured to the barn and killed there. Then little Josef was killed in his cot, and Maria Baumgartner in her bedchamber.

Answer: 4 days

The killings occurred on the evening of Friday, March 31, 1922. The bodies weren't discovered until Tuesday, April 4, when three neighbors went to check on the family. The young Cäzilia had missed two days of school, the family had not turned up at church on Sunday, and the postman had noticed that nobody had taken in the newspaper he had left at the door. Also, several people had stopped by the farm over the weekend and not seen anyone.

When all these bits of news converged, the neighbors started to worry and went to investigate.

Answer: all of these options are correct

Eerily enough, the killer(s) must have remained on (or returned to) the farm for quite some time after the killings: the cattle was fed and milked, neighbors had seen smoke rising from the chimney and a fire in the outdoor oven on Sunday, and while the mechanic Albert Hofner was fixing a machine on Tuesday morning, the barn door was opened and the dog (who had previously been indoors) was chained to the wall next to the front door. Albert Hofner was a little spooked because he had assumed that nobody was there.

He had even picked the lock to the shed where the machine was kept because no one would open the door, but he wanted to get the fixing done that day.

Answer: False

The murder weapon was a pickaxe which was not left with the victims, and it was assumed that the perpetrator had removed it from the scene. In 1923 the farm was razed to the ground, and the pickaxe was discovered hidden in the attic, with blood still on it.

Answer: She had started her job on the farm only hours before the murders

Maria Baumgartner arrived on the farm in the afternoon of March 31, only a few hours before the crime. That aroused suspicion, of course, but it was concluded that that was probably a very unfortunate coincidence. Maria Baumgartner was the last person to be killed, and would probably have slept through it all.

It is assumed that the killer simply could not stop and had killed the farmhand more or less for the sake of completeness. As for the other options: It was the previous maid, not Maria, who claimed that the farm was haunted, and she had left six months previously.

It was Andreas Gruber who mentioned hearing footsteps in the attic some days before the crime. Viktoria also talked about inexplicable noises in the house.

Answer: Lorenz Schlittenbauer, Viktoria's former suitor

Karl Gabriel, Viktoria's husband, went away to war in 1914 and fell in France even before his daughter Cäzilia was born. (Some people doubt that he really died and name him as a possible murder suspect.) Josef was not born until 1919. Lorenz Schlittenbauer, the Ortsführer ("town leader"; something like the highest-ranking individual in a village that had no mayor), had reportedly asked to marry Viktoria in 1918 but was flatly refused by her father Andreas.

He also claimed that he was intimate with her for five times during their courtship.

However, he changed his mind several times about the paternity of Josef: at first he denied being the boy's father and accused Andreas Gruber and his daughter of incest. Later he accepted paternity, only to contest (and subsequently accept) it again later. It was common knowledge, though, that there was indeed an incestuous relationship between Viktoria and her father, and they had both been sent to jail for it in 1915.

Answer: He seemed snug and satisfied after the murders were discovered

Witnesses reported that Lorenz Schlittenbauer was very active after finding the bodies in the barn, and that he was the only one of the three people who discovered the crime who entered the house. He then used the keys to unlock the kitchen door from the inside, claiming they had been in the lock, even though Andreas Gruber had missed those keys some days previously.
When the murder weapon was found in 1923, Schlittenbauer claimed it belonged to him even though a former farmhand at Hinterkaifeck testified that the pickaxe belonged to Andreas Gruber.
Since Lorenz Schlittenbauer would have had a personal motive, it would also explain why a large amount of money was left untouched in the house, effectively ruling out burglary as a motive. The fact that the killer must have stayed at/returned to the scene for days after the crime also indicates someone from the neighborhood rather than a passing opportunist.
There is no proof, however, and all those inconsistencies can easily be explained away.

Answer: The farmhand claimed the house was haunted

While the former farmhand indeed claimed the house was haunted, that happened six months before the crime and is generally assumed not to have anything to do with it.
Both Andreas and Viktoria talked about noise in the attic that sounded like footsteps. On March 30, Andreas also discovered that someone had tried to pick the locks of two of the sheds, and there were footprints in the snow leading to the house, but none leading back away.
According to a former classmate of the young Cäzilia, Cäzilia fell asleep in class some days before the crime and, when asked why, she told the teacher that she had been up all night looking for her mother, who had ran away and was found crying in the woods. (When that classmate was interviewed again years later, she said it was Cäzilia's grandmother, not her mother.) During the search for the missing woman, Andreas Gruber also found a Munich newspaper which he asked the postman about the next day. No one in the village had subscribed to that paper.

Answer: True

During the autopsy, the victims' heads were removed and sent to Munich for psychics to examine, but there was no result. The Hinterkaifeck murders kept the police busy for years but the investigation never really yielded anything. More than 100 people were interviewed until as late as 1986.

In 2007, a special task force of a Bavarian police department took a fresh look at the case, trying to solve it with today's forensic means. The final report of that project is kept secret, though, since there is no real evidence to support the theories.

Therefore, naming a suspect, no matter how credible, would not be fair towards that suspect's descendants.

Answer: 5

Only five pictures were taken at the scene: one of the farm, two of the bodies in the barn, one in the farmhand's bedchamber, and one of Josef's cot. The pictures can be viewed on the official Hinterkaifeck website, but I must warn you: I find them very eerie and disquieting.

After all, they are real. It is not clear why the police did not take more pictures than just those five. Perhaps because the use of crime scene photography on a large scale was only just emerging as a standard, routine procedure, and it might have required more effort and budget than was initially allocated to the case.

It may also not have figured prominently in police thinking at the time.