This is a full chapter about The Hinterkaifeck Murders from my book True Crime Stories Vol.4.

In the early 1920s, the people of Germany faced numerous hardships. The government was forced to pay reparations for World War I to France and Great Britain and it lost 13% of its territory as part of the Treaty of Versailles. The reparations, combined with war time debts, placed the new government based in Weimar at a serious disadvantage.

The Weimar government’s answer to the problems was to print more money, which led to the process of hyperinflation that coursed through Germany from 1921 through 1923.

Hyperinflation is not simply an increase in prices, but is an increase in the prices of commodities by at least 1,000%! Obviously, one does not need to be an economist to understand that hyperinflation can destroy an economy and the social and political stability of a nation along with it.

The situation caused Germans to burn their money to heat their homes because the money became virtually worthless, and worse yet, it created havoc on the streets and throughout the countryside.

Political crime increased dramatically, as once obscure political factions from the far right and left of the political spectrum fought each other for supremacy on the streets.

Street crimes, such as muggings and burglaries, also saw a significant increase in early 1920s Germany. The Weimar government seemed unable to stop the violence and desperation that had gripped Germany. Things were bad and only seemed destined to get worse.

This era of violence and hopelessness was the backdrop for one of the most brutal and mysterious multiple homicides in modern German history known as the Hinterkaifeck murders.

Hinterkaifeck

The strange sounding name for this case, at least strange sounding to non-German speakers, is derived from the name of the village of Kaifeck, which was the nearest town to the site of the murders. The murders took place on a farm that the owners had named “Hinterkaifeck,” meaning “behind Kaifeck.” If you were to travel to Kaifeck today, you would not think that it could be the location of one of Germany’s most notorious crimes.

In 1922, the farmstead of Hinterkaifeck was located in the idyllic hill country of Bavaria, about forty miles from Munich. At the time, most of the people in the area worked in agriculture and it was a place where neighbors knew one another. The farmers around Kaifeck often gladly helped their neighbors at harvest time and were charitable during the lean winter months. The warm, communal spirit of the rural area around Kaifeck was known throughout Germany.

But in early 1922, the peaceful, idyllic surroundings of rural Bavaria were shattered when the bodies of five members of the Gruber family and their maid were discovered at the Hinterkaifeck farm.

The Discovery

On April 4, 1922, neighbors began to worry when they had not seen any of the members of the Gruber family for several days. The people living at Hinterkaifeck were the patriarch, sixty-three-year-old Andreas and his seventy-two-year-old wife Cazilia. Along with the elder Grubers, their thirty-five-year-old widowed daughter, Viktoria Gabriel, and her two children, seven-year-old Cazilia and two-year-old Josef, also made the farmstead their home. To round out the residents of Hinterkaifeck was the maid, forty-four-year-old Maria Baumgartner.

Since a number of people lived at the farm, including two children, it was normal for the neighbors to see the Grubers coming and going, or for someone to be seen doing chores. When no activity was seen around Hinterkaifeck for several days, the neighbors became suspicious and noticed that the mail had not been picked up.

The local authorities were called to investigate.

The police first checked the house where they were horrified to find little Josef and Maria Baumgartner both dead in their beds. The shock of the initial discovery was quickly compounded when investigators found the bodies of Andreas, Cazilia, Viktoria, and little Cazilia in the barn.

An autopsy revealed that they were beaten and hacked to death with a mattock.

Investigators assigned to the case immediately established a chronology by working backwards from the discovery of the bodies, along with eyewitness testimony of the last reported sightings of the family, to determine that the murders took place on March 31, 1922.

The investigators knew how and when the Gruber family was murdered, but they quickly found out that finding the perpetrator, or perpetrators, would be elusive.

The Investigation

In many ways, the investigation of the Hinterkaifeck murders was ahead of its time procedurally speaking. The police pursued numerous leads and kept an open mind to different theories and techniques. Over 100 men from the area were investigated and questioned, but no arrests were made.

The initial investigation did turn up some mysterious and bizarre details about some incidents that took place at Hinterkaifeck just prior to the murders.

According to the Grubers’ neighbors, in the days just before the murders, Andreas said he noticed some footprints leading to the house, but not away from it. This alone would not normally be enough to raise an alarm, but it turned out that the Hinterkaifeck farm experienced several other strange incidents in the weeks leading up to the murders.

Other members of the Gruber family also told neighbors that they heard some sounds in the attic that sounded too big to be a small animal. Andreas crawled into the attic to check the source of the sounds, but found nothing.

The Grubers also said that they noticed some items missing, namely a set of house keys, and that they found some things that were out of place, like a newspaper that no one in the family claimed.

Then there were the maids.

The maid who worked at Hinterkaifeck farm prior to Baumgartner left after only six months because she thought the farm was haunted.

Baumgartner was murdered on her first day on the job!

Was Hinterkaifeck haunted and cursed by malevolent spirits? As strange as that may sound, many people at the time believed so and a quick search on the internet reveals that some people still hold this belief.

After investigators collected the statements of the neighbors and interviewed men from the area, it seemed as though there were no suspects in the macabre case. At their wits’ end, the local police decided to remove the skulls from the victims in order to have a clairvoyant in Munich offer any suggestions or leads.

None were found.

The lack of arrests in the Hinterkaifeck murders troubled the citizens of rural Bavaria, but the police did have some theories—although one of them reached into the realm of the bizarre.

One of the early suspects was actually a dead man, Karl Gabriel. Gabriel was the husband of Viktoria and father to little Cazilia, but he supposedly died on the Western Front during World War I. Since his body was never recovered from the battlefield, some people speculated that he actually survived and then deserted to keep from being sent back to the front.

There are some obvious problems with this theory.

Although Gabriel’s body was never recovered, his comrades all claimed to have seen him die. It was not an uncommon occurrence for bodies of soldiers killed on the battlefield, especially the Western Front, to never be recovered during World War I. Thousands of men routinely died at a time fighting for land the size of a football field and in the confusion identity tags and papers were often lost, destroyed, and misplaced. The use of chemical weapons also made entire regions uninhabitable and so bodies were often left to rot.

Then there is the question of motive.

The initial investigation of Gabriel did not turn up a clear motive he would have to murder six people in cold blood. It seems unlikely that Karl Gabriel would stage his own battlefield death, desert the army, and then wander around Germany for a few years before killing his family.

With that said, some circumstantial evidence points toward Karl’s wife being the primary intended target of the murderous rampage.

Viktoria’s body received more damage than any of the others—she and her mother were the only two strangled and beaten, but Viktoria was beaten worse.

Then there was the question of little Josef’s paternity.

Since Karl was allegedly killed during the war, he could not have been Josef’s father. Neighbors suspected the father to be a local man named Lorenz Schlittenbauer. Schlittenbauer was in fact Viktoria’s suitor at the time, but the police were never able to link him to the crimes, primarily because he had no motive, even if he was Josef’s father.

The more investigators searched the backgrounds of the Gruber family the more they learned that they were not such a normal family.

Many believed that Andreas was actually the father of Josef and pointed out that the Gruber patriarch was actually prosecuted for incest with his daughter, although he was acquitted.

Again, even if it were true that Andreas and Viktoria had an incestuous relationship that produced Josef, it does not seem like a motive to murder the entire family.

And how would Andreas have beaten and hacked himself to death with a mattock?

The dead ends concerning familial suspects led investigators to believe that the motive was robbery and the perpetrator, or perpetrators, were actually motivated by financial reasons. But the police quickly dropped this theory when they discovered that a sizable sum of money, which would have been easily found by burglars, was still in the house. In another strange twist to an already bizarre case, it was also learned that the killer, or killers, had fed the cattle, used the fireplace, and ate the family’s food.

All of this led the investigators to conclude that the killer, or killers, who were familiar with a mattock, were probably farmers.

Due to a lack of leads, the Hinterkaifeck murders quickly turned cold and unfortunately, due to the German economy’s collapse because of hyperinflation, the case eventually fell out of the headlines and receded to the back of the minds of most Germans.

But not everyone has forgotten about the victims of Hinterkaifeck.

The Aftermath and New Revelations

In order to prevent the farm from becoming a ghastly pilgrimage site, Hinterkaifeck was demolished in 1923, which actually turned up the mattock that was used to murder the Grubers and their maid. The victims, without their heads, were given a proper burial and most of the surrounding community moved on from the horrid events of March 31, 1922.

In the years after 1923, the Hinterkaifeck murders had to take a back seat to major geo-political events that involved Germany. First World War II, then the partition of Germany into West and East Germany, followed by the Cold War, all meant that the nation’s resources were spent on things other than trying to solve the Hinterkaifeck cold case murders.

But recently, thanks in part to advances in forensic technology and techniques, as well as Germany’s reunification and stabilization, efforts have been made to solve the Hinterkaifeck murders. In particular, a group of police academy students did a case study of the murders and came to some conclusions.

The academy students argued that the Hinterkaifeck murders went cold largely due to crude forensic techniques at the time. Their report stated that all the potential suspects are now dead and that they established a prime suspect, but could not name the person publicly due to German law.

The Hinterkaifeck murders have also seen a resurgence of popularity among the general public worldwide.

Dozens of websites, often conspiratorial in tone, litter the Internet and two German language films titled Hinterkaifeck have been produced. Several books and articles, both academic and popular, have also been published that deal with the Hinterkaifeck murders and the question of who, or what, killed the Grubers and their maid.

Since the name of the suspect will not be made public anytime soon, it only stands to reason that the number of theories concerning what happened at the Hinterkaifeck farm will continue to multiply.

Check out True Crime Stories Vol.4 and see more chilling cases like this.

This is a full chapter from one of the stories of my book True Crime Stories Vol.2.

In 1912, Villisca was a small Midwestern town in Iowa with a population of just 2,500. Despite its size, it was a busy little town with trains coming and going every day, businesses up and down the streets, and it was home to the first publicly funded armory in the whole state. For many, the name ‘Villisca’ meant ‘pleasant view’ or ‘pretty place’. But regardless of the business successes and the beauty of the town, its history would be forever marred by one single event—the brutal and horrifying murder of eight people in one house, on one night, with an axe.

The Moore’s

The Moore family was well liked in the community, and their affluence was well known. The members of the family were Josiah, who was 43 at the time, his wife Sarah, aged 39, and their children, Herman Montgomery, aged 11, Mary Katherine, 10, Arthur Boyd, 7, and Paul Vernon, 5. They were regular church attendees, and on the evening of  June 9, 1912, the children had been participating in the Presbyterian Church’s Children’s Day Program. This program lasted until 9:30 p.m., and the Moore family invited two young girls, Ina Mae Stillinger, aged 8, and her sister Lena Gertrude, who was 12 years old, to stay the night in their home. All walked back to the home of the Moores, arriving somewhere between 9:45 to 10 p.m. No one is sure what time the family and their guests retired to bed that evening, or what if anything was amiss in the house when they got home. What is known, however, is that what did occur during the night in that house would become legendary, for all the wrong reasons.

A Gruesome Scene

On the morning of June 10, the next door neighbor, Mary Peckham, found it strange that the family next door was not up and about at 7 a.m. as they usually were. She was used to hearing and seeing the family members as they started their morning chores, but they hadn’t appeared, and the curtains were all closed. Mary decided to check on the family and went and knocked on the door, but nobody responded. She tried to open the door, but it was still locked. Fearing something was very wrong, she called Josiah’s brother Ross to investigate. Oddly, she first let the Moore’s chickens out of their coop—goodness knows why.

Ross arrived at the house, and like Mary he knocked on the door, shouting out in the hopes that someone inside would hear him. On receiving no response, he proceeded to unlock the door with his copy of the key to the house. Mary waited anxiously on the porch as Ross entered the house and made his way into the guest bedroom. The scene that greeted him was horrific—the bodies of the Stillinger sisters dead in the bed. Moore instructed Mary to call the local officer, Hank Horton, who arrived within a short period of time. It was Horton who further investigated the rest of the house, finding body after body of the Moore family, all with horrific head wounds. In the guest room where the bodies of the Stillinger sisters lay was a bloodied axe, and that was immediately identified as the murder weapon.

Though the injuries to each of the victims were gruesome, it was Josiah who seemed to have been dealt the most vicious blows. Unlike the others who had been bludgeoned to death with the blunt end of the axe, it was the sharp end that had been used on Josiah. In fact, his wounds were so horrific that his eyes were missing in his cut-up face. Gouge marks in the ceilings of the bedrooms had been created by the swinging of the axe; in some cases, these gouges were in the center of the room, not near the beds, and it was surmised that the killer must have been in some sort of wild frenzy, swinging the axe triumphantly after each kill.

The pillows on the beds were soaked in blood and spattered with brain matter. By the time the first doctor entered the house, the blood had congealed into a jelly, and clots were noticeable, and this indicated they had been killed somewhere shortly after midnight. Each of the victims had their faces covered with their bedclothes, and all lay in their beds as though they had been killed while sleeping, except for Lena Stillinger. Her body showed defensive wounds, suggesting she had tried to fight off the attacker. Her nightgown had been pushed up and her underwear removed, and her body had been posed in a sexual manner. Naturally consideration was given to the possibility she had been sexually assaulted or raped, but this was never determined without a doubt.

There were other strange things about the crime scene that made no sense at all. Although it is normal to pull the curtains closed on the windows, those which did not have curtains were covered with clothing that had belonged to the victims. Every mirror in the house had also been covered, which was truly bizarre. At the foot of Josiah and Sarah’s bed sat a kerosene lamp with the chimney missing and the wick turned to black. The chimney was eventually found beneath a dresser. Another lamp was found at the end of the guest bed, where the bodies of the Stillinger girls lay. It too had the chimney missing. The axe itself, although covered in blood, showed signs that the killer had tried to wipe away the blood to no avail. The axe was found to belong to Josiah. In the bedroom downstairs, a small piece of keychain was found that didn’t seem to belong to anyone in the house. On the table in the kitchen was a pan containing bloody water and a plate of food that hadn’t been touched.  Up in the attic, two cigarette butts were located, and it was assumed that the killer (perhaps killers) had waited up there for the family to return home. This was perhaps the most terrifying piece of evidence—to think that this innocent family returned home following a pleasant evening only to be ambushed by someone waiting inside.

Who Were the Suspects?

There were numerous suspects on the list, and one was even arrested and tried for the crime, though eventually he was acquitted. They ranged from transients to a reverend, and even a serial killer, but nobody was ever held accountable and brought to justice for this horrific massacre of the Moore family and the Stillinger girls.

Andrew Sawyer

Naturally, any transients or strangers were considered suspicious during the investigation into the murders. This is generally because people as a rule don’t trust strangers, and nobody wants to consider that maybe it was someone they knew. In small towns in particular, people are more wary of those they don’t know. One such man that fit this bill was Andrew Sawyer.

There was never any concrete evidence to suggest Sawyer had played a part in the killings. Instead, he was brought to light by a gentleman who worked for the railroad and had interacted with Sawyer on the morning of the murders in nearby Creston. Thomas Dyer alleged that Sawyer had appeared around 6 a.m. that morning looking for work. He was dressed in a brown suit, was shaven, his pants were wet almost up to his knees, and his shoes were covered in mud. Workers were highly sought after, so he was hired there and then. Later that evening, Sawyer apparently bought a newspaper with the murders broadcast across the front page, and he went off alone to read it.

Apparently, Sawyer was very interested in the murders, and he talked about them often with his fellow workers. Even more strange, he had a habit of sleeping with his axe next to him. He would later tell Dyer that he had been in Villisca the night of the murders but had left for fear of being considered a suspect. When considering all of the strange behaviors he had exhibited, Dyer handed Sawyer over to the sheriff on June 18, 1912.

Despite the statements Sawyer had made to his work colleagues and the intense interest he seemed to show in the murders, even placing himself in town on the night in question, it would later be proven that he was innocent. On investigation, it turned out that Sawyer had been arrested on that very night in a town called Osceola, also in Iowa, for vagrancy. Therefore, he had an alibi.

The Reverend George Kelly

Kelly was a man with a disturbing background who happened to be at the very same Children’s Day services the Moore family and the Stillinger sisters attended that day, June 9, 1912. Born in England, Kelly was a traveling minister who many regarded as being rather odd. It was claimed that he had suffered some type of mental breakdown when he was younger, and his adult behavior included lewd acts such as peeping and trying to get young girls to pose for him in the nude. Strangely, he left Villisca somewhere between 5 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., just hours after the murders had occurred and before the bodies were found.

Over the following weeks, he showed a strong fascination with the case. He began to write letters to the investigators, the police, and even the mourning family members. As expected, this behavior seemed suspicious to the investigators, and they in turn wrote back asking if Kelly happened to know anything about the killings. Kelly replied that he may have witnessed the crimes being committed and had heard sounds that evening. However, due to his history of mental illness, the police were unsure whether he was recalling facts because he was involved or whether he was just making it all up.

Kelly was arrested on a different matter in 1914, after having sent obscene material to a woman who had applied to work for him. As a result he was sent to a mental health hospital in Washington, which left the police unsure if he was the killer or not. However, in 1917 they decided to interrogate Kelly again, and following several hours of questioning, Kelly confessed to the crimes. Later he would recant this confession, claiming to be innocent after all. Two trials followed, and the jury obviously agreed with him, as the first trial resulted in a hung jury and the second led to an acquittal.

State Senator Frank F. Jones

As a suspect, Senator Jones was perhaps the least likely to have been behind the murders. However, there was a rumor that he had hired William ‘Blackie’ Mansfield to commit the crimes following an issue that had arisen between the Senator and Josiah Moore. Josiah at one time had worked for the Senator at his implement shop for several years and then left his employment so he could open up his own store. This resulted in the Senator losing a lot of his customers to Josiah, including a very lucrative dealership with John Deere. There were also rumors around town that Josiah and the Senator’s daughter-in-law had an affair, though this was never substantiated. Would a man such as the State Senator have ordered the assassination of an entire family over something such as lost business and possible adultery? The investigators clearly didn’t think so, as this matter was not taken any further, at least where the Senator was concerned. Mansfield, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter.

William ‘Blackie’ Mansfield

Mansfield came to light as a potential suspect not only because of the rumor of his being hired by the Senator, but also because of murders he subsequently committed following the massacre in the Moore household. Two years after the murders in Villisca, Mansfield was suspected of murdering his wife, child, father-in-law and mother-in-law in very similar circumstances, which made the authorities take a much closer look at Mansfield. He was linked by circumstance to the axe murders in Colorado Springs just nine months before Villisca and another axe murder in Ellsworth, Kansas. He was also suspected of being the perpetrator of axe murders in Paola, Kansas, just four days before the tragedy at Villisca. Furthermore, he was a prime suspect in the axe murders in Illinois of Jennie Miller and Jennie Peterson. More axe murders occurring around the same time period were also considered to be the work of one man. The similarities between all of these murders were spine-tingling.

Each of these murders was committed in the same manner, which would indicate they were done by the same person. All victims were attacked with an axe, and the mirrors in each home had been covered. A kerosene lamp was left burning with the chimney removed at the foot of each bed. A basin containing bloody water was found at each scene, where the murdered had obviously tried to clean himself. Gloves were worn at each crime scene, leaving no trace of fingerprints. The coincidences were just too good to be true, and although we have more access to media information these days, back then the chances of there being a copycat killer or killers roaming the streets were less likely.

In 1916, the Grand Jury agreed to embark on an investigation and Mansfield was arrested. He was transported from Kansas City to Montgomery County to face questioning. Despite all of the evidence that seemed to indicate he was the murderer, Mansfield was found to have a legitimate alibi for the night of the murders in Villisca and so was set free without being charged. He would then bring a lawsuit against the detective who had pursued him as a suspect, Detective James Wilkerson. Mansfield won his case and was awarded the staggering amount of $2,225. This was a huge amount in those days. Some speculated that the Senator played a part in getting Mansfield released, but this was never proven.

Henry Lee Moore

Henry, who was no relation to Josiah Moore and his family, had been convicted of a double axe murder months after the murders in Villisca. Henry had killed his mother and his grandmother, and there was much suspicion that Henry was actually a serial killer. The crimes were very similar, especially as the same type of weapon was used, but there was never any evidence to link him to the Moore family murders. He was always considered a suspect, however, and he was never completely ruled out.

Fourteen Witnesses Called to Coroner’s Inquest

Remarkably, the coroner called the jury together and began the inquest on June 11, 1912, just two days after the murders had taken place. Nowadays it can take months or years for an inquest to take place, let alone in the same week! Anyway, the county coroner at the time was Dr. Linquist, and he and the members of the jury all visited the Moore house to view the scene and the bodies before they were removed. A temporary morgue was set up at the local fire station, and the bodies were finally moved there around 2 a.m. on the June 10.

A total of fourteen witnesses were called to testify at the inquest, and they were as follows:

• Mary Peckham—the neighbor who raised the alarm that something was wrong at the house
• Ed Selley—an employee of Josiah, Ed had arrived to take care of the animals
• J. Clark Cooper—the first doctor to enter the house following the discovery
• Jessie Moore—Ross Moore’s wife, who took the call from Mary
• F.S. Williams—the doctor who examined the bodies
• Edward Landers—was staying just up the road at his mother’s house and claimed he heard a noise around 11 p.m.
• Ross Moore—Josiah’s brother, the first person to gain entry to the house
• Fenwick Moore—also Josiah’s brother
• Marshall Hank Horton—the first officer to enter the house
• John Lee Van Gilder—Josiah’s nephew
• Harry Moore—Josiah’s brother
• Joseph Stillinger— the father of the murdered Stillinger girls
• Blanche Stillinger—sister of the murdered Stillinger girls
• Charles Moore—another of Josiah’s brothers

Most of the witnesses were called to testify regarding what they had seen when entering the house that day. The descriptions given by some were gruesome to say the least, but their testimony was all consistent. Josiah’s brothers were called largely to speak of any troubles Josiah may have had or been in, such as business problems. None could say that they were aware of any issues or of anyone who wished to cause the family such terrible harm. One brother, Charles, was asked to testify regarding whether the axe belonged to Josiah or not. Although he couldn’t say it was for sure, he did state that Josiah owned one similar. It must have been a terrible burden on both the Moore and Stillinger families to have to endure the inquest so quickly after the tragedy. They barely had time to digest what had happened before being thrust into a courtroom to discuss it, and the details must have been truly shocking. Particularly for the father of the two little Stillinger girls who had simply gone to a friend’s house for the night.

Deathbed and Jailhouse Confessions

On March 19, 1917, a reverend by the name of J.J. Burris, who was the pastor of the Church of Christ in Oklahoma, traveled to Red Oak because of a deathbed confession he had received. Burris was subpoenaed by the grand jury of Montgomery County to give evidence regarding this confession of the murders of the Moore family. Burris had claimed that a man whose name he could not remember had summoned him to his hotel room so that he could confess his sins before dying. This took place in July 1913, just over a year after the murders had been committed.

Burris stated that when he arrived at the man’s room, he could tell straight away that he was near death, and despite his physical state, the man began to talk the minute he entered the room. The man claimed that he had committed many sins, but the worst was the murders in Villisca. He had been living in the town at the time, working in the blacksmith industry, and his sister had been married to a physician in Villisca before moving to Radersburg. He was unable to speak for long due to his deteriorating condition, and as such was incapable of giving any details. Burris estimated the man to be around twenty-five years old, and it was believed he had part ownership in a blacksmith business in Radersburg.

Because the story was unclear, Detective Wilkerson decided that it would not stand up in court, as too little information was available. The man who had made the confession was dead and unable to stand trial anyway. The story was pushed aside as irrelevant.

George Meyers Confesses in Jail

In March 1931, a prisoner in a county jail in Detroit who was awaiting sentencing for burglary made a startling confession, stating he was the one who had committed the axe murders in Villisca. Meyers had been under interrogation for around five hours by detectives at the time of his confession, following an anonymous tip that he was the man they were looking for. It was believed that Meyers’ fingerprints had been found at the murder scene; however, this was unlikely as no fingerprints were found in the Moore house.

Meyers’ confession stated that he had been hired to kill the family by a businessman, though he could not recall his name. The price on offer was $5,000—a huge amount. He claimed his name had been given to these people through acquaintances in the Kansas City underworld. This acquaintance escorted him to Villisca to meet with the man who wished to hire him. He was shown the house where the family lived and told to kill them all. A deposit payment of $2,000 was given, and Meyers was told he would receive the rest after the job was done. Meyers then entered the house shortly after midnight and slaughtered the two adults and four children with an axe. When meeting with the businessman afterwards he was told he would have to wait for the rest of the money. Meyers decided it was best to flee town before the sun came up for fear of being caught.

Now, if you read that carefully, you would see what the problem was with Meyers’ confession. George Meyers only confessed to killing six people that night—two adults and four children. But there were eight killed in that house, not six. He flatly denied killing the Stillinger girls, only the Moore family. Although there had been a witness story that claimed three men had been overhead talking in the forest near the house the night of the murders about committing the crime, and this seems to fit with  Meyers, his acquaintance, and the businessman, there is no way Meyers would have gotten the number of victims wrong. Therefore, it was decided that this confession was nonsense, and no further action was taken against him for the crime. To date, nobody has ever been charged with these murders, so the case remains unsolved.

Check out True Crime Stories Vol.2 and see more chilling cases like this.