Max Gufler was born in 1918 and lived in Upper Austria, working as an insurance clerk. He was married.
Between 1946 and 1958 he answered and placed matrimonial advertisements, of which the Austrian papers of the period were full, the war having left an enormous number of single women. He courted them by letter and in person, presented himself as a man of means, and took them on outings. He gave them barbiturates and drowned them, in the Danube and in lakes and ponds, and the deaths were recorded as suicides or accidents, which a woman found drowned after a broken engagement in 1950s Austria readily was.
He took their savings, their jewellery and in several cases their furniture.
He was arrested on November 1, 1958. He was tried in Vienna in 1961 and convicted of four murders, which was as far as the evidence could be taken given how the earlier deaths had been recorded, and sentenced to life. The Austrian press called him Bluebeard and put the figure at eighteen or more.
He died in prison in 1966.