SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Hinterkaifeck Axe Murders

26:37Sure. Victoria showed signs of strangulation, but they determined that was not the cause of death. And by all accounts, everyone else died pretty much immediately upon receiving that pickaxe to the head. Right. most of the victims were in bedclothes, except for Victoria and Tertsilia. They were in their regular clothes, which seemed to indicate that it probably happened in the evening. Some people were already getting ready for bed. Some people had not yet. Right. And they also think that the groupers were lured one by one out to the barn, kind of Scooby-Doo fashion. Yeah, because clearly it wasn't all of them killed at once because there was no signs of struggle.

27:18like yeah maybe one person went out and died and then the other person was like they hadn't been back for a while. And then they died and then again and again. Horrific. So there was some other there was weirdness beyond that beyond just the horrificness of the crime and the fact that the bodies were covered up. This was April 4th right? They figured out that the bodies had been killed or the people had been killed on March 31st. That was the last time anybody had seen them alive. But the neighbors said, well, wait a minute, that's really weird because we saw signs of life coming from the farm all weekend.

27:59There was smoke coming out of the chimney the whole weekend. The livestock has been fed. The dog's clearly eaten. If they hadn't been fed or cared for in four or five days, they'd be showing signs of it by now. but you can tell that they were tended to this whole time. So what is that? Yeah, even the house itself, it showed evidence that someone had eaten a meal there recently, or more recently than four or five days ago. The bed looked like it had been slept in since that time. And like we mentioned earlier, that Pomeranian was tied up. I saw differing accounts on whether the dog was somewhat injured or not.

28:39I did too. So let's just say the dog might have been hurt some, but ultimately was fine. and wasn't killed or anything. Yeah, yeah. It was not injured, I think. Right. So all signs point to the fact that someone killed this family and then hung out there for a few days. But even more stirring is the idea that the person who killed them may have been the one who left the footprints and stayed in their house waiting to kill them. Perhaps. Killed them and then stayed in the house for a few days after. Taking care of everything. Yeah, just living the life. Very strange. Yeah. So the police started looking around pretty quickly for suspects and realizing, well, first we got to go with motive, I think is what they said to themselves.

29:30Sure, like occasionally it happens that there's a vagrant that comes through and kills for money and robs. And the thing they found out was that there was a little bit of folding money taken from the bodies, but there was a lot of valuable jewelry and gold coins and other money in the house that was not taken. So things weren't quite adding up on the robbery front. Yeah. And especially if somebody, the person who killed them, if they were planning on robbing them, they had four days to look around and amuse themselves by robbing the whole house blind. They certainly wouldn't leave this stuff behind.

30:08No. They also found out in the investigation that Victoria had emptied her bank account and had left a donation to the church, but there was also a substantial amount that just wasn't accounted for. Yeah. Who knows what that was? Never turned up. Lost the time. So robbery was kind of discarded as a motive, but another one would come to light soon. We'll talk about that after a break.

30:51Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one person billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen.

31:25I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

32:01When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits.

32:40He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Starting January 20th.

33:08All right, so to me, it's this guy for sure. Is it? Yeah, I think so. We'll go ahead and talk about this too. There was a neighboring man, a neighbor, as you might call it. Or a neighboring man. If you're a normal human. Hello, neighboring man. How are you today? By all means, if you're a professional broadcaster, you should say neighboring man. Right. So his name is Lorenz Schlittenbauer, and he was a, like I said, lived nearby. He was a suitor for Victoria, and she had always said, this guy's who knocked me up. This is Joseph's father. Right. And like you said earlier, he was like, for a little while, I think he claimed paternity, but then when he found out what that meant, he had to pay for that.

33:56He's like, that's an English word I didn't understand. Yeah, exactly. What is this paternity? So he backed off of that claim, and later it emerged that she was about to sue him for paternity before this murder took place. Right. So some people say, oh, well, that probably set him off. Yeah, because he was remarried and had a kid that had died, sadly, by that point. Right. So he didn't want this kind of scandal on his household. Sure. And he didn't want to make the payments, right? Yeah. Especially if he wasn't 100 % sure it was his kid. So if you look at this Schlittenbauer guy, some really weird stuff starts to emerge.

34:36In addition to that motive of not wanting to pay alimony for little Yosef, the way he behaved in the immediate wake of the discovery of these murders was very bizarre. He was part of the original search party that searched the house. Suspicious. First thing, yeah, because a lot of criminals like to do that. They like to go to the scene of the crime as part of the search party, right? At least on TV they do. Sure. Everything I learned from the Flintstones points to this guy being suspicious. He also immediately started disturbing the crime scene, right? Yeah. He unstacked the stacked bodies. And when he did it, apparently there were a couple of other guys there.

35:18And the other guys were real shaken up by just being in the presence of these horribly mangled bodies. Apparently Schlittenbauer was totally fine handling them. Yeah, he's like, I got the head, you get the legs. One of the men was quoted as saying, he disturbed everything there was to disturb. So he had no qualms about going in there and just having his way with that crime scene. Apparently he was super familiar with the house itself. Which isn't necessarily a, it doesn't necessarily, Yeah, especially if he was dating Victoria. Yeah, well, true. I would call this part of the body of evidence, though.

35:59Okay. So he apparently went into the house from the barn, which meant he knew they were connected. He unlocked the front door from the inside, which was like, did he have a key? Or did he know where the key was? Remember the missing keys. And then he also apparently knew the maid's room handle was unusual and he had to lift it up to enter and not press it down. And apparently he just went right to it and lifted it up. Again, maybe he spent some time over there with Victoria and knew these things. Like a lot of this can be explained away in some ways. They also said that the dog went nuts when he was around.

36:38Yeah, like, it's him. Right, exactly. There's the murderer. Would you take or leave that? That seems like local folklore to me. Yeah. The dog called out the murderer. Yeah. You know? And he said it was because he had blood all over his shoes from disrupting the crime scene, and the dog was, like, barking at that. Which, by the way, the two other searchers who were with him while he was disturbing the crime scene asked him what he was doing, and he said he's looking for his son. Yeah, Joseph. A couple of things weird about all this, right? So if he's disturbing the crime scene to cover his tracks, If he was the killer and the killer stayed behind for several days, he had all the time in the world to cover up his tracks.

37:21Why would he do it in the presence of a couple of fellow searchers? Weird. Yeah. And then secondly, if he was the killer and he was not trying to act unaware, Yeah. why would he be looking for his son in the stack of bodies when he knew full well his son was in his room in the house? Misdirection. I guess. This guy seemed like he was not very good at misdirection. He had no alibi for the night. Apparently his family said, and this is where it gets, I want to say obvious, maybe not obvious. It gets really suspicious to me. His family said, oh, no, the night they were murdered, he spent the night in the barn because he knew that there was weirdness going on over there, and he was looking out for burglars, so he spent the night in the barn that night.

38:08Okay, so he spent the night in the Gruber's barn, is what they're saying? No, no, no, their own barn. Oh, okay, I gotcha. Okay. He apparently, though, had asthma, so people were like, why would he spend the night in a barn if he had asthma, Smarty? Right. But that was his alibi, which is pretty weak. He only lived 350 meters away, which I think that's like 19 miles. I'm just kidding. What is it? It's like three football fields, right? Yeah, I looked up the conversions. Three and a half? It's not too far. Yeah. So he could have been the one coming back and forth. Like the fact that there were footprints leading one way doesn't to me signify that someone spent six months hiding there.

38:57It could have been, he could have come and gone as he pleased. Right. And not been like away from his house too long that anyone noticed. Sure. And maybe he walked in those same footprints. Maybe he did do the Danny. Maybe. You know? He was the one who originated the Danny. He was Danny before Danny was even born. That's true. Or maybe he was Danny. Oh, man. This case keeps getting weirder and weirder. Yeah. The more we make up about it. That's true. The other thing that he said that I thought was, I mean, this is just, I don't even know if I believe this. Apparently, many years later, when the murder was talked about in the bars and the beer gardens.

39:40He would talk about it in the first person when he speculated about the killings. I don't buy that necessarily either. I don't either. That sounds like something that people would make up in a pub. Yeah. He used to say, I killed them. Right. No one ever cared. Sure, I guess. Yeah. So he was the main living suspect. There was another suspect who was brought back from the dead to be paraded around as a suspect in this case. Yeah, not literally. In some ways. Yeah. But no, not literally. Right. This guy's name was Carl Gabriel, and he used to be married to Victoria. Yeah. But he died in World War I in the trenches.

40:21And the reason that he was brought back as a possible suspect is that people said, well, his body was never shipped back home. We don't actually know that he really did die. Maybe, maybe, follow me on this, is what they said. Maybe he came back to reclaim his wife, found out that she'd had an incestuous relationship with his father. He snaps, he kills everybody. Yeah, I don't buy this at all. Well, no. They started the police, I think, and the Munich Police Department really apparently went to town trying to get to the bottom of this murder over the years. Yeah, and one of the other things that pointed to him, supposedly, was that in World War II, another whole war later, supposedly some people came forward and said, you know what, we met this German-speaking Russian soldier that used to claim to be the Hinterkaifeck killer.

41:15And we think that that's Carl. Right, I guess, okay. Yeah. The thing is, the Munich police apparently spoke to some of the men who were there when he died, and they described him being died. People witnessed his death. Even though his body didn't make it back, it wasn't recovered, people saw him die. All right. So it was verified that he was died, I guess at least to the satisfaction of the police. And that was a pretty weak link anyway because supposedly the reason that he fled for the war was to fake his death. Not why he fled for the war, but that he faked his death to get out of the marriage.

41:53Right. So why would he fake his death, get out of the marriage, come back years later, and kill them all? Great question, Chuck. Yeah. I think the answer to that is he wouldn't. Or maybe it's the perfect crime. Yeah. It's so nonsensical. He's listening right now laughing. It's the perfect crime. What else? Of course, whenever they're going one way and not the other, and they're talking of ghosts, we're going to have some tinfoil hat-wearing people on the Internet talking about paranormal, you know, that it was ghosts, and these strange noises and this mysterious newspaper and all these footprints is because there was some supernatural force out to get the family.

42:34Well, that would account for the ghost. You could say that accounts for everything. Sure. That's why it's bunk. Yeah. No, that one's not a big one. Although the Munich police very early on decapitated, had the family decapitated and their skulls were sent for forensic analysis and were handled by a clairvoyant who apparently was not able to come to any conclusions about their fate or the killer. Yeah, and those bodies were buried headless because those heads eventually went missing. Yeah, apparently they kept them in the Nuremberg, I guess in one of their city government buildings and it was leveled in World War II.

43:18They think that's where the skulls were lost. They think. Well, mixed in with the other skulls. It was either that or the ghost that did it. So for the cops' part, they interviewed over 100 suspects over the years, including the clear killer to me, the neighboring man. Lawrence Schlittenbauer? I just think it all points to him. Apparently, years later, too, was like, God did the right thing with his family. They were awful people. and he didn't say, except for my possible son, the two-year-old, he just said all of them. They deserved it. So it just kind of seems obvious to me that it was him because someone stayed there, someone knew the house, someone took great care covering the bodies.

44:06It just doesn't seem like a random burglary. No, that is a very bizarre thing to do to stick around afterward unless you feel like you're within your own safe zone and if you lived 350 meters away, maybe you would feel safe there. safe enough that you could retreat very quickly. Yeah, or know that like, I know no one comes by here. Yeah. Whereas if it was a burglar, they probably wouldn't feel so comfy hanging out for days on end. Right. So, yeah. You're right. It probably was him. No one will ever be able to prove it one way or another. No, they didn't have any hard evidence. No, and the evidence they did take, a lot of it was lost.

44:45This is 1922, so a lot of forensic techniques hadn't been invented yet or were still being developed elsewhere in the world. So in 2007, a police academy in Munich got their hands on the case some students did. The Gutenberg Police Academy? The first in Feldbrook. They just threw in brook after, you know. Yeah, why not? Let's throw in another syllable. that students from that police academy investigated this crime and in Germany like it's pretty this is an enormously famous crime in Germany it's huge there it's their Jack the Ripper for sure it'll never be solved it's not possible being solved and this is the conclusion from the students at the Furstenfeld Brook Police Academy they said we think we know who it is we're not since this is unsolvable and it will never be able to be proven we're not going to name the person because they still have relatives alive, but you can guess it's the one living suspect that anyone's ever really raised.

45:53Yeah. It was probably him. Yeah. They didn't say that. That was my conclusion of their conclusions. And then they said, thank you, Police Academy, for your findings, and where's the guy that makes all the funny noises with his mouth? You know, Steve Guttenberg follows us on Twitter. No way. Yeah. Really? Yeah. At Steve Gutbuck. Really? Yeah. And he is in like a Sharknado-esque movie. I'm not sure what the name of it is, but he's in it with the guy who does the voices. Oh, really? I used to know his name, Michael something maybe? Yeah, Michael something. I will say that, and I think I mentioned this on the show, maybe that's why he follows this, Steve Guttenberg was in one of the very best episodes of one of my favorite TV shows, Party Down.

46:43and did you ever see that Joe? No. Boy it was good. Yeah. It was really really funny. Had the great Adam Scott and Lizzie Kaplan and one of my heroes Ken Marino from the state and Martin Starr Megan Mullally it was great. Good episode huh? Well they were caterers like cater waiters all actors and writers and stuff in Hollywood and each episode was its own thing own catering event and they had one where they showed up to Steve Guttenberg's house for his birthday party and he pulled up and he was like, oh man, I forgot to cancel. I really had the party a couple of days ago with my friends. He's like, but since you're all here, why don't we just have a party?

47:25And so the waiters end up having a party with Guttenberg and he does some scene acting with them and gives them great wine and he has great art and he's just really, really funny in it. Yeah, I can imagine. He seems like an awesome dude. He seems so awesome after watching this episode. I was like, man, Goots is the best. Yeah. And I think they called him Goots in the show even. Sure. Yeah. Anyway. Or Gootbook. Shout out to Party Down. Great, great show. And Steve Gutenberg. Yeah. Do you have a listener mail? Or is this too spooky for one? He did great work on that Bible. Yeah, I got a listener mail.

48:00Okay. Well, if you want to know more about Hinterkaifeck, you can go listen to Stuff You Missed in History Class. I think they did an episode that covered it as well. You can search mysteriousuniverse.org and all sorts of other places for it. And since I said Hintra Kaifek, it's time for Listener Mail. Before we do Listener Mail, we want to give a very special thank you to Margaret and Mike in Jacksonville, Florida. Yeah, thanks, guys. Yeah, they stepped forward and helped Jerry out in a big way as the Stuff You Should Know Army often does. Sure. and it's all we're going to say other than big, big thanks to you guys for helping out.

48:41For real. How about that? Yeah. All right, I'm going to call this listener mail squirrel shooting. Hey guys, been listening for about a year. Love the show. I was listening to the Polar Bears episode and I stopped dead in my tracks when Chuck told a story about shooting a squirrel. When I was about 13, I too thought I was a tough guy and wanted to hunt animals. My grandparents lived on some land and agreed to let my cousin and I shoot a squirrel as long as we agreed to skin it and eat it. they're like, they'll never do it. Yeah, you gotta love those Depression-era grandparents. Like, sure, skin it and eat it, it's all yours.

49:13I envision them as hippies, like, passing a joint, like, joking about how stupid their grandkids were. Wow. Depression-era, sure, I see that one, too. All right, so we were very excited. We dressed up in camo, walked the property, because, you know, you gotta dress in camo if you're hunting squirrels. Sure. Eventually found a squirrel in a tree. I should note that we were using a pellet gun, not like a real bullet gun. I took the first shot and hit the squirrel. Fell from the tree and much to my chagrin, he did not die. He made a noise I hoped to never hear again. It was that awful. Oh, man. I had to hand the gun to my cousin.

49:47I just could not do it and take the other shot. We ended up skinning it and eating it, though. Alive? No. He said it tastes like chicken, so why bother? Like we promised that we would do, that was the last time I considered killing an animal for sport. I've always loved animals, so I'm not sure where this urge came from to begin with. I actually run a small online candle company now that sells dog-themed candles. Made from dogs. He donates. We skin them alive. No. They donate 10 % of all profits to animal shelters and rescues. So, Stephen, I am going to plug your company over my wife's candle company, even.

50:25Whoa. Which is Mama Bath & Body. and you can go to www.noxfavorite K-N-O-X-S www.noxfavorite.com and Knox was their dog they named the company after these are soy candles I looked it up they're good made from dogs no made from soy dogs thanks again for everything you do your daily listen for me I hope you continue for years to come that is Stephen Stephen way to go Stephen thank you for that we appreciate you letting us share your horrible story with everybody yeah if you have a horrible story you want to share oh man I'm going to regret saying that you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast you can join us on Facebook.com slash Stuff You Should Know you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks.com and as always join us at our home on the web StuffYouShouldKnow.com

51:28For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

51:39Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.

52:12Guaranteed human.