Max Gufler sold washing machines and vacuum cleaners out of St. Pölten, the main town of Lower Austria, in the 1950s. To the women he courted he was a polite, well-spoken suitor. To the jury that tried him in Vienna in 1961 he was a murderer: it found him guilty of four murders and two attempted murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The Austrian press called him Blaubart, Bluebeard, after the fairy-tale knight who killed his wives, and in St. Pölten he is still remembered by that name.
The case began with a missing woman in Carinthia and a forged letter. Within days of his arrest in November 1958, Gufler was being described in parliament as a mass murderer, and the conduct of his custody had become a political question. His trial, which began in April 1961, drew large crowds. He denied the killings to the end. He died in Stein prison in 1966.
The reports differ on where and when Gufler was born. The Argentine newspaper La Capital, in a 2023 account by the crime reporter Fernando del Rio, said he was born in October 1910 in Tyrol, the son of an unmarried mother, and that his family later moved to Merano, in South Tyrol. The St. Pölten magazine MFG, in a 2025 article by Johannes Reichl, gave his age as 48 in the autumn of 1958 and his full first name as Maximilian. A date of birth in May 1918 also circulates widely.
According to La Capital, he was hit by a stone as a child, and after that he was given to violent outbursts and began to steal. The paper wrote that in 1933, at 22, he returned to Austria to escape Italian military service and legal trouble, and that he drifted through jobs as a gardener, a guard, a barber and a factory worker. It said he spent two months in jail in Merano in 1946 for theft and settled in the St. Pölten area in 1947.
ORF, the Austrian public broadcaster, reported in 2024 that after the Second World War Gufler worked as a bookseller in St. Pölten. In 1951 he met the daughter of a tobacconist, and in her father's tobacco shop he began selling pornographic pictures. He was jailed for it. La Capital wrote that the woman, a widow, became his partner and that the two later lived together in St. Pölten.
He then became a traveling salesman for washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and he drove a green DKW. Alfred Anzeletti, later president of the regional court, remembered him for MFG as an unremarkable man, not unpleasant, polite and articulate.
ORF reported that shortly after his release from prison Gufler killed a woman in Vienna, and that more killings followed. He met mostly older women, ORF said, and won them over with promises of marriage. MFG described him as a man who presented himself to wealthy widows as a respectable suitor offering a shared future. Most of the women drowned, and the deaths were made to look like suicide, according to ORF.
A forensic psychiatrist told the court, as MFG recounted, that Gufler was not driven by sexual motives: he killed as a way of making money.
The reports name the women whose deaths came before the jury. A parliamentary question filed on November 20, 1958, by the deputies Hetzenauer, Kranzlmayr, Glaser and Hofeneder named four of them: Kammleitner, Robas, Nass and Meystrzik. La Capital gave their full names and said these were the four murders for which he was convicted.
Emilie Meystrzik was killed in Vienna in 1952.
Josefine Kammleitner, a widow of 45 who also used the name Weilguny, had savings of 10,000 schillings, according to La Capital, which wrote that Gufler drew her in with plans to open a shop with her in Bad Vöslau. The paper spells her surname Kamleiter; the 1958 parliamentary record spells it Kammleitner.
Juliana Nass was 50. La Capital reported that her body was found on October 15, 1958.
Maria Robas disappeared in September 1958, and her death led to his arrest. Before she vanished she had cashed in her savings and cleared out her apartment, and she had been seen traveling with a man, MFG reported. La Capital put the money she had withdrawn at 24,000 schillings and the date her body was found at September 22, 1958. The killing took place within the district of the Leoben regional court in Styria, according to the Justice Ministry's answer to parliament in November 1958.
There was also a woman from Fohnsdorf, in Styria. Johann Haiden, one of the officers who questioned Gufler, told MFG that Gufler had called her death the saddest of his killings, because she had had nothing worth taking and he regretted what he had spent on gasoline to reach her. Whether her death was one of the counts at trial was not reported.
The inquiry that ended the series started in Carinthia. In October 1958 Maria Robas's former husband received a letter that appeared to come from a "Dr. Eberharter" in Munich. It told him she had died in a car accident. The police could find no record of any such accident, and they began an investigation, MFG reported. La Capital dated the letter to October 25, 1958.
Investigators learned that Robas had been traveling with a man and that, at a butcher's shop, the man had left the registration papers for his green DKW as security for a loan. The papers led to Maximilian Gufler of St. Pölten. By then a body had been found and identified as hers.
On October 31, 1958, the Carinthian gendarmerie command asked the police in St. Pölten to question Gufler about where Robas was. According to La Capital, an officer brought him in that day; he first denied everything and then made admissions when he was shown the evidence. On November 2, 1958, he was arrested on a warrant issued by the regional court in Klagenfurt and handed over to the district court in St. Pölten, the Justice Ministry told parliament.
The police searched the rooms Gufler used and a garage he rented, and they seized more than 3,500 objects, MFG reported: washing machines, coats, jewelry and other belongings of the women, so many that they had to be laid out in a police gymnasium to be sorted. ORF also reported that a gymnasium was needed. Haiden told MFG that the officers concluded Gufler was "either a collector or he had more on his conscience."
The St. Pöltner Zeitung asked on its front page on November 6, 1958, whether Max Gufler was a mass murderer. Haiden told MFG that it was the first murder case in Austrian criminal history to cross the boundaries of the federal states.
About ten officers questioned Gufler, and he told each of them a different story, Haiden recalled to MFG. Another former officer, Hubert Gnad, said Gufler admitted only what was already on the table in front of him. He confessed to crimes and then withdrew his confessions, again and again. The prosecution later called this a tactic.
His custody in St. Pölten turned into a public dispute within weeks. On November 18, 1958, the Vienna daily Neues Österreich reported that Gufler had been allowed to read about his own case. The officials had said that a detective shared his cell to watch him. In fact, the deputies wrote in their November 20 question to the justice minister, his cellmate was a prisoner held for a minor offense who had permission to read newspapers, and Gufler had read a long report on the investigation that told him which murders could not yet be proved and which interrogation methods were planned. After that, according to the deputies, Gufler partly withdrew his confessions to the murders of Kammleitner, Robas, Nass and Meystrzik, put the blame on two unknown men, and refused to talk about the killings that had not been proved. The deputies wrote that the failures had set the investigation back by weeks, perhaps months, and asked what action had been taken against those responsible.
The Justice Ministry rejected the charge. In an answer to a separate question from the deputy Marehner and others, published with the parliamentary press service on November 21, 1958, Justice Minister Tschadek wrote that soon after his arrest Gufler had made a will, which pointed to thoughts of suicide, and that for this reason he had been placed in a cell with a second prisoner, with the approval of the investigating judge and in agreement with the police. The minister said it was untrue that Gufler had been able to follow the investigation in the press: of the two publications he had seen, one had nothing on his case and the other only a short report of his arrest. The investigation, the minister wrote, had not been harmed by any fault of court staff or prison guards, and there was no "justice scandal."
The minister also set out where the case stood. The killing of Maria Robas lay in the Leoben court district, while suspicion of further serious crimes had grown, among them crimes in Tulln, within the St. Pölten court district, and in Vienna. The conflict over which court should handle the case went to the Supreme Court, which on November 14, 1958, gave it to the Landesgericht für Strafsachen Wien, the Vienna regional criminal court. Gufler was moved to Vienna on November 17, 1958. He was held there in solitary confinement under tightened security. An investigating judge, Dr. Pullez, was released from other work to handle the case, and the police were given rooms in the Vienna criminal court building, known as the Graues Haus.
Forensic findings tied the deaths together. The forensic expert Gottfried Machata examined seven of the dead women, MFG reported, and found the same substance in every one of them. Machata said later, in an ORF interview quoted by MFG, that it could be taken as certain that more crimes had been committed than were charged.
Gufler was charged with the murders of seven women. The trial began before a jury at the Vienna regional criminal court in April 1961, and public interest was high, ORF reported. La Capital wrote that the trial ran from April into May. By the time it began, the St. Pöltner Zeitung was writing that Gufler himself expected a life sentence.
Two people who had survived meetings with him were part of the case. MFG reported that a jewelry dealer survived an attempt on his life, and that a jeweler identified Gufler as the man who had attacked him in a robbery in 1951.
Gufler denied the murders. "I may well be a swindler, but I did not commit murder," he told the court, as MFG quoted him. He later claimed that he had confessed only to protect his partner, and because the police had promised him a Wiener schnitzel with cucumber salad in his cell at Christmas.
The jury found four murders and two attempted murders proved, and Gufler was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a day in a dark cell on each anniversary of the murders, MFG reported. The prosecutors described his manner as "stupid cunning," according to MFG.
Investigators believed that Gufler had killed more women than the jury convicted him of killing. La Capital reported that he was suspected of 18 killings. It named four women whose deaths the authorities also suspected him of, though he was not convicted of them: Auguste Lindebner, Theresa Wesely, Juliana Emsenhuber and Josephine Dangl. Lindebner, 47, died on April 16, 1952, in Schwaz, Tyrol, and the medical report at the time recorded a natural death, La Capital wrote. These deaths remain attributed to him by investigators and the press, not proved in court.
Gufler served his sentence in Stein prison, on the Danube near Krems. He died there of stomach cancer in 1966, MFG and La Capital reported.
The Austrian Criminal Museum at Scharnstein, in Upper Austria, displays two original liqueur bottles from the case, its director Harald Seyrl told ORF in 2024. Ernst Geiger, a former head of investigations at Austria's Federal Criminal Police Office, told ORF that serial offenders often move across large areas, and that in earlier decades police units that were poorly linked often missed each other's evidence.
Doris Plank covered the case for ORF's documentary series Tat-Sachen in 2004, according to MFG. Anzeletti recalled for MFG that there were jokes about Gufler in St. Pölten and that children played "Gufler" in their games. MFG called it one of the largest criminal cases of Austria's Second Republic.
Date and place of birth. La Capital gives October 1910 in Tyrol, and MFG's figure of 48 years in 1958 fits a birth around 1910. A date of May 1, 1918, circulates widely in other accounts. No official record settles either date.
The number of victims. The jury convicted him of four murders and two attempted murders out of seven murders charged. Machata found the same substance in seven of the dead. La Capital reported that he was suspected of 18 killings. Only the four convictions are proved.
Robas's death. MFG and La Capital give different places for where her body was found, and the Justice Ministry put the killing in the Leoben court district.
The confessions. He admitted and withdrew confessions repeatedly, and at trial he denied every murder. His claims that he confessed to protect his partner and for a Christmas meal are his own account.
The custody dispute. The deputies' account, based on the press, and the minister's answer contradict each other on whether Gufler could follow the investigation in prison.
1910 (October): birth in Tyrol, according to La Capital; a 1918 date also circulates.
1947: settles in the St. Pölten area, according to La Capital.
1951: meets a tobacconist's daughter; jailed for selling pornographic pictures in her father's shop (ORF).
1951: a jeweler is attacked in a robbery; he later identifies Gufler as the attacker (MFG).
1952: Emilie Meystrzik is killed in Vienna.
1952 (April 16): Auguste Lindebner dies in Schwaz; her death, recorded as natural, is later suspected (La Capital).
September 1958: Maria Robas disappears; a body found on September 22 is identified as hers (La Capital).
October 1958: Robas's former husband receives the forged "Dr. Eberharter" letter.
October 15, 1958: Juliana Nass is found dead (La Capital).
October 31, 1958: the Carinthian gendarmerie asks St. Pölten police to question Gufler.
November 2, 1958: arrested on a warrant from the Klagenfurt regional court.
November 6, 1958: the St. Pöltner Zeitung asks whether he is a mass murderer.
November 14, 1958: the Supreme Court assigns the case to the Vienna regional criminal court.
November 17, 1958: moved to Vienna.
November 18 to 21, 1958: press reports, a parliamentary question and the justice minister's answer on his custody in St. Pölten.
April 1961: trial begins before a jury in Vienna.
1961: convicted of four murders and two attempted murders; life imprisonment with a dark cell on each anniversary.
1966: dies of stomach cancer in Stein prison.