at the edge of the forest. When the strangers saw him, they turned around so that their faces could not be seen. Later, when he heard of the murders in Hinterkaifeck, he thought it possible that the strangers might be involved. In the middle of May 1927, a stranger was said to have stopped a resident of Waidhofen at midnight. He asked him questions about the murder and then shouted that he was the murderer before he ran into the woods. The stranger was never identified. Suspects Karl Gabriel The husband of Viktoria Gabriel, Karl Gabriel, had reportedly been killed in Arras, France, by a shell attack in December 1914, during the First World War. However, his body had never been recovered. After the murders, people began to speculate on whether he had indeed died in the war. Viktoria Gabriel had given birth to Josef in her husband's absence. Two-year-old Josef was rumoured to be the son of Viktoria and her father Andreas, who had an incestuous "relationship" that was documented in court and known in the village. He was raping his daughter and the town convicted them both of incest. After the end of the Second World War, war captives from the Schrobenhausen region who were released prematurely from Soviet captivity claimed that they had been sent home by a German-speaking Soviet officer who claimed to be the murderer of Hinterkaifeck. Some of these men later revised their statements, however, which diminishes their credibility. Many theorized that this Soviet officer might be Karl Gabriel, because those who claimed to have seen the man after his reported death testified that Gabriel had wanted to go to Russia. Lorenz Schlittenbauer Shortly after the death of his first wife in 1918, Lorenz Schlittenbauer was believed to have had a relationship with Viktoria Gabriel and fathered Josef. Schlittenbauer came under suspicion by locals early in the investigation because of his several suspicious actions immediately after the discovery of the bodies. When Schlittenbauer and his friends arrived to investigate, they had to break a gate to enter the barn because all of the doors were locked. However, immediately after finding the four bodies in the barn, Schlittenbauer apparently unlocked the front door with a key and (suspiciously) entered the house alone. A key to the house had gone missing several days before the murders, though it is also possible that Schlittenbauer, as a neighbor