On October 31, 1958, the gendarmerie command in Carinthia asked the police in the Lower Austrian town of St. Pölten to question a local salesman about a missing woman. The salesman was Max Gufler, who lived on the Kupferbrunnberg, and the woman was Maria Robas, whom he had killed in September. Within a week the St. Pöltner Zeitung was asking in a headline whether Max Gufler was a mass murderer. He was arrested in the town on suspicion of having killed eighteen women since the end of the war. His rooms held so much that had belonged to women, down to their false teeth, that the police needed a school gymnasium to lay it all out and sort it.
Gufler was born on May 1, 1918. At nine he suffered a serious head injury, from a rock by one account and an accident by another, and afterward was given to sudden outbursts of violence. In the Second World War he drove an ambulance for the Wehrmacht at the front and was hit in the head again, this time by shell fragments. After the war he sold books in St. Pölten. In 1951 he took up with the daughter of a tobacconist and sold banned pornographic photographs out of her father's kiosk, which put both men in custody.
Soon after his release, in 1952, a prostitute named Emilie Meystrzik was found with her skull broken in an hourly hotel in the Vienna red-light district, a killing later laid to him. By then he was a traveling salesman of household machines, vacuum cleaners in one account and washing machines in another, and he was building a second trade as a marriage swindler. He met women who wanted a husband, promised to marry them and got hold of their money. Then he invited them on a honeymoon trip, gave them coffee spiked with barbiturates, undressed them while they were unconscious and drowned them in a lake, so that each death would pass as a suicide.
One of them was a woman who delivered newspapers in Fohnsdorf. He later told an investigator that hers was the saddest of his murders, because she had nothing worth taking and he was sorry about the money he had spent on gasoline to get there. Two liqueur bottles from the case are still on display at the crime museum in Scharnstein.
To prove the drugging, Vienna's forensic doctors devised a method, new anywhere at the time, for separating two sleeping drugs from each other and identifying each one. Gufler was charged with seven murders. When his trial began before a jury in the Vienna Criminal Court in April 1961, the papers were already calling him Bluebeard, after the fairy-tale nobleman who killed his wives, and predicting a life sentence.
He denied the killings to the end. "A swindler I may be," he said, "but I did not murder." He said he had confessed only to protect the woman he lived with, 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 in May 1961 he was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a day in a dark cell on each anniversary of the murders. The head injuries did not save him from the sentence.
He died of stomach cancer at Stein prison, outside Krems on the Danube, on August 9, 1966.