The Red Hood Predator (Case File #225)

In the Black Forest of medieval Europe, young women begin vanishing on the forest paths between village and cottage—always on errands of care, always near dusk. Their bodies are found days later in the underbrush. Their grandmothers are found strangled in their beds. And one detail repeats like a signature: missing baskets, missing red hoods, missing scarves—taken as trophies. Through pattern analysis, witness accounts, and a long-delayed medieval manhunt, the “wolf” becomes something far more frightening than a storybook monster: a methodical human predator using disguise, voice mimicry, and the landscape itself as a weapon. 

Content warning: violence against children and elderly women, predatory behavior, murder, and disturbing material. Listener discretion is advised.

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Transcript

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It's late afternoon in the autumn of 1284. The light is already fading between the dense oak and beech trees of the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest. A young woman, 16 years old, walks alone on a narrow path. Her name is Greta Mueller. She's carrying a wicker basket to her grandmother's cottage about two miles through forests that grows darker with each passing minute. Inside, fresh bread, cheese, honey, and medicinal herbs for grandmother's cough. She's made this walk dozens of times before. But today, something feels different. What Greta doesn't know is that she's being watched. Thirty feet to her left, hidden in the dense underbrush, a man crouches motionless. He's been following her since she left the village. He's wearing wolf pelts over his shoulders and back. In the failing light, he looks like part of the landscape itself. Something between man and beast. He watches Greta walk past. He notes the red scarf around her neck, a splash of color against the browns and greens of the forest. Easy to track, easy to follow. Then she hears it. A voice, a woman's voice, calling from deeper in the forest, off to her left. Greta, Greta child, is that you? The voice sounds like her grandmother, not just similar, exactly like her. The same quaver, the same breathless quality, the same way of saying her name. But it can't be grandmother, it can't be. Grandmother is sick. She's been bedridden for three days with fever and a terrible cough. That's why Greta is bringing her food and medicine. So why would grandmother be out in the forest? Unless the fever made her confused. Unless she wandered outside lost and calling for help. Again she hears, Greta, please, I've fallen. I can't get up. It hurts. Every instinct screams at Greta that something is wrong. The voice sounds right, but it's coming from the wrong direction. And Grandmother wouldn't be out here. She couldn't be. But what if she is? What if she's hurt and alone and Greta just walks past? Greta, please, I'm so cold. That decides it. Greta takes one step off the path toward the voice. Come here, child. Come quickly. I need you. She moves deeper into the forest. The underbrush catches at her skirt. She can barely see the path behind her now. The voice hasn't moved, and now that she's listening, really listening, there's something off about it. Something underneath that doesn't belong. That's when she sees him. Not her grandmother, not an old woman who's fallen, a figure rising from the shadows 20 feet ahead. Tall, broad-shouldered, covered in dark pelts. His eyes catch the last of the light like an animal's, reflective, predatory, fixed on her with absolute focus. For one frozen moment, Greta doesn't understand what she's seeing. It looks like a wolf standing on two legs. Then the figure takes a step toward her, a human step, and understanding crashes over her like ice water. The voice? It came from him. He mimicked her grandmother's voice. He lured her off the path. This was the moment Greta understood she was going to die. She tries to scream, she tries to run, but he's impossibly fast. His hand clamps over her mouth, his other arm around her waist, lifting her off her feet. He drags her deeper into the forest. Her red scarf touches on a branch and tears free a splash of crimson left behind like a marker. Greta Mueller's body will be found three days later, partially concealed under a pile of leaves and branches less than a quarter mile from her grandmother's cottage. Her red scarf will be missing. Her grandmother, Hilda Mueller, aged 68, will be found inside the cottage, strangled in her own bed with a leather cord. The basket Greta was carrying will never be recovered. But if investigators had known to look, they would have found it in a cave five miles away, stacked with 11 others just like it. Greta Mueller was not the first victim. And she would not be the last. I'm your host, Danielle Christmas, and today we're wandering into the dark and deadly woods with case file number 225, The Forest Path Predator, also known as the Red Hood Murders. You're undoubtedly familiar with its sanitized form, the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. But before it was a story about a girl in a red cape and a talking wolf, it was a series of brutal murders that terrorized communities across medieval Germanic and French territories for nearly two decades. And the predator at the center of these crimes was very, very real. Now let's begin our walk through one of the most disturbing serial predator cases in medieval European history. To understand this case, we need to understand the world these crimes occurred in. We're talking about medieval Europe, specifically the Germanic territories in northeastern France, during the late 13th and early 14th centuries, roughly 1280 to 1298. This is a world without modern law enforcement, without forensic science, without any kind of centralized criminal investigation system. Justice, when it existed at all, was local, arbitrary, and often brutal. But it was also slow, disorganized, and easily corrupted. The landscape itself is important here. We're talking about vast stretches of dense forest, the Schwarzwald in what's now Germany, the Vosges Mountains along the French German border, the Ardennes forest further west. These weren't the managed accessible forests we know today. These were dark, dangerous places. Wolves, bears, and wild boar were real threats. Bandits and outlaws hid in the deep woods. People disappeared in these forests all the time. Villagers were small, isolated, and often separated by miles of woodland. If you needed to visit a neighboring village or a relative who lived outside your own settlement, you walked, and you walked alone because everyone else was working. Survival in medieval rural Europe required constant labor. Every able-bodied person had tasks that couldn't be postponed. So when someone needed to bring food or medicine to an elderly relative living on the outskirts of a village or in an isolated cottage, the job usually fell to young women and girls, daughters, granddaughters, nieces. They were considered less essential to the heavy agricultural labor, and they were seen as less likely to be targeted by bandits who were primarily interested in money or goods worth stealing. This is the context in which our predator operated. A world where young women routinely walked alone through dangerous forests. A world where elderly people, especially elderly women, often lived in isolated cottages far from help. A world where disappearances were common enough that they didn't always trigger immediate investigation. It was, in many ways, a predator's paradise. So how did these cases come to be connected? How did communities across different regions, speaking different dialects, separated by mountains and forests, come to realize they were dealing with the same predator? The answer is they didn't, not for years. Let me walk you through how this pattern was eventually recognized. In the medieval period, information traveled slowly. News spread through travelers, merchants, and clergy moving between villages and towns. There was no centralized record keeping for crimes, no database to cross-reference. Each village dealt with its own tragedies in isolation. But there was one group of people who moved regularly between communities and who paid attention to patterns. The Franciscan friars. The Franciscan Order, founded in the early 13th century, emphasized poverty, service, and traveling ministry. Franciscan friars walked from village to village, offering religious services, hearing confessions, and providing what little medical knowledge they possessed. They were, in many ways, the closest thing medieval rural Europe had to an information network. And in the early 1290s, a Franciscan friar named Brother Matthias began to notice something disturbing. Brother Matthias kept a journal, we have fragments of it preserved in a monastery archive in Strasbourg. In his entries from 1291 to 1293, he documents his growing realization that the murders he kept hearing about in different villages followed an identical pattern. Let me read you a translated excerpt from his journal dated March 1293. In the village of Wolfok, I learned of the death of young Margareta, age 15, and her grandmother, both found dead. The girl had been sent to bring food to the old woman. In Shiltak, the same, young Anna and her grandmother, and Haslock, young Elsa and her aunt. In each case, the young woman was found in the forest. In each case, the elderly woman was found dead in her home. In each case, the girl had been carrying provisions in a basket. I fear we are not dealing with separate tragedies but with a single evil that moves between our communities like a plague. Brother Matthias began actively asking questions in every village he visited. He compiled a list. By his count, between 1284 and 1293, there were at least fourteen cases that fit the pattern. Fourteen young women dead, fourteen elderly women dead, all in a roughly similar geographic area, all following the same method. He brought his findings to the Bishop of Strasbourg, who brought them to the local secular authorities. And finally, nearly a decade after the first murder, there was an official acknowledgement that these crimes were connected. But by then the predator had refined his methods. He had become very, very good at what he did. Now I want to tell you about the victims, not as statistics, not as plot points in a fairy tale, but as real people whose lives mattered, people with hopes and fears and daily routines who were loved. I'm going to focus on four cases that are particularly well documented, thanks to Brother Matthias's journal and to testimony given during the eventual trial. The first victim we know by name is Greta Mueller, the young woman from our cold open. Greta was 16 years old in the autumn of 1284. She lived in a small village called Wolfok in the Black Forest region. Her father, Friedrich, was a woodcutter. His hands were permanently stained with tree sap and scarred from decades of axe work. Her mother, Margareta, kept a small garden behind their cottage where she grew cabbages, turnips, and herbs. She raised chickens that Greta helped tend every morning before dawn. Greta had three younger siblings, two brothers aged 12 and 9, and a sister who was only six. As the eldest, Greta carried responsibilities that would seem crushing to a modern 16-year-old. She helped her mother with all the household work, hauling water from the well, grinding grain, breaking bed in the outdoor oven, mending clothes by candlelight after the younger children were asleep. But according to testimony from her mother and from neighbors, Greta never complained. She had a quiet, steady temperament. She sang while she worked, fault songs her grandmother had taught her. She was patient with her younger siblings, especially her little sister who followed her everywhere. She braided her sister's hair every morning, the same way her grandmother had once braided hers. Greta was particularly devoted to her grandmother Hilda. Hilda had helped raise Greta when Margareta was pregnant with the younger children and too sick to care for a toddler. Hilda had taught Greta to identify medicinal herbs in the forest, to spin wool, to make the honey cakes that were Greta's favorite treat. When Greta was small, she had spent entire summers at her grandmother's cottage, learning the old songs, the old stories, the old ways. So when Hilda fell ill in early October of 1284, a deep rattling cough that wouldn't go away, a fever that made her confused and weak, Greta insisted on being the one to care for her. She walked to her grandmother's cottage every other day, bringing food, fresh water, clean linens. She would stay for hours, spooning broth into Hilda's mouth, changing the cloths on her forehead, sitting beside her bed and singing the old songs. Her mother worried. The walk to Hilda's cottage took 45 minutes through dense forest. The path was isolated. Anything could happen. But Greta was stubborn about this. Grandmother needed her. Grandmother had always been there for her. How could she not go? On the morning of October twelfth, twelve eighty four, Margareta packed a basket for Greta to take to Hilda. Fresh bread still warm from the oven, Greta had helped knead the dough before dawn, a wheel of cheese they'd made the week before, a clay pot of honey from their own hives, herbs for tea that might ease Hilda's cough. Margareta pressed the basket into Greta's hands and made her promise. Straight there and straight back, don't dawdle, don't talk to anyone on the path, be home before dark. Greta promised. She kissed her mother's cheek, she hugged her little sister who was crying because she wanted to come too. She waved to her father who was sharpening his axe in the yard, preparing for a day's work in the forest. She left around three in the afternoon when the autumn sun was already starting to sink toward the horizon. She was wearing her everyday dress, brown wool patched at the elbows, and a red scarf her grandmother had knit for her last winter. The scarf was Greta's favorite thing. She wore it constantly, even when it wasn't cold, because it smelled like her grandmother's cottage, wood smoke and dried herbs and honey. She never arrived at her grandmother's cottage. When she didn't return home by nightfall, her father and several other men from the village went searching for her. They carried torches and called her name through the dark forest. They found Hilda first dead in her bed, strangled with what appeared to be a leather cord. The cottage had been ransacked, blankets pulled from the bed, pots and jars knocked from shelves, Hilda's small collection of herbs scattered across the floor. But nothing of significant value was missing. Whoever had done this wasn't looking for money or goods. They found Greta's body the next morning as the sun was rising. She was partially hidden under a pile of leaves and branches about a quarter mile from her grandmother's cottage. She had been strangled as well. Her clothing was torn. There were defensive wounds on her hands and arms, deep scratches, broken fingernails. She had fought hard. She had fought to live. The basket she'd been carrying was gone. So was her red scarf. These details will become significant later. Greta's family was devastated. Her father blamed himself for allowing her to walk alone. He stopped eating, stopped sleeping. He would go into the forest and stand at the spot where they'd found her body, just stand there for hours as if keeping vigil. Her mother stopped speaking for nearly a month. When she finally spoke again, her voice was different, flat, empty. Her little sister had nightmares every night, waking up screaming for Greta. The village held a funeral. The priests said prayers. They buried Greta in the churchyard next to the plot that had been prepared for her grandmother. And then they tried to move on because what else could they do? They assumed it was a random attack by a bandit or a madman passing through the area. Terrible, tragic, but isolated. They had no idea it was just the beginning. The second victim I want to tell you about is Liesel Hoffman. Lizel was 14 years old from a village called Schiltak, about 15 miles from Wolf. This was in the spring of 1286, roughly 18 months after Greta's murder. Lizel was the oldest of six children. Her mother, Anna, had died in childbirth two years earlier, delivering Lizel's youngest brother. The baby had survived. Anna had not. And in that moment, Lizel's childhood had ended. At 12 years old, Lizel became the woman of the house. She cooked every meal, porridge in the mornings, bread and cheese for midday, stew or soup in the evenings. She cleaned the cottage, swept the floors, washed the clothes in the river, and hung them to dry. She helped her younger siblings dress in the mornings, wiped their faces, combed their hair. She sang them to sleep at night with the lullabies her mother had once sung to her. By all accounts, Liesel was mature beyond her years, serious and hardworking. She rarely smiled anymore. There wasn't time for smiling, wasn't energy for joy. Her father, a carpenter named Friedrich, watched his eldest daughter turn into a ghost of the child she'd been. She moved through the house like a shadow, efficient and silent, taking care of everything and everyone except herself. The only time Lizel seemed to come alive is when she visited her grandmother Gertrude. Gertrude was a midwife and an herbalist, a woman with valuable knowledge and an important role in the community. She had delivered half the babies in Shiltock, including Lizel herself. She knew which herbs would bring down a fever, which would ease pain, which would help a woman through a difficult labor. Gertrude's cottage was filled with bundles of dried plants hanging from the rafters, lavender and chamomile and yarrow and dozens of others. The air smelled like earth and green things. When Lizel visited, Gertrude would teach her about the herbs, let her help prepare remedies, tell her stories about the births she'd attended, the lives she'd helped bring into the world. For a few hours in her grandmother's cottage, Lizel could be a child again. She could ask questions and laugh and not be responsible for anyone but herself. In late March of 1286, Gertrude injured her leg in a fall. She couldn't walk without terrible pain. She couldn't go out to gather herbs or attend to the women who needed her. So Lizel volunteered to bring her food and fresh water every day. She would walk to her grandmother's cottage in the late afternoon after she'd finished her work at home, after she'd fed her siblings and put the youngest ones down for naps. It was the only part of her day that was hers, the only time she had something to look forward to. On April 3rd, 1286, Lizel left home in the late afternoon with a basket of bread, dried fish, and a jug of milk. She was wearing a red woolen cape, a garment her mother had made for her before she died. It was the last thing Anna had sewn, working on it even when she was heavily pregnant and exhausted. She'd finished it just days before going into labor. Lizel wore the cape constantly. It was her most prized possession. When she wrapped it around her shoulders, she could almost feel her mother's arms around her. She could almost hear her mother's voice. It was the only thing she had left of the woman who had loved her, who had sung to her, who had promised everything would be alright. Lizel never came home. Her father found Gertrude the next morning when he went to check on his mother after Lizel failed to return. Gertrude was dead in her cottage, strangled with With a leather cord. The cottage showed signs of struggle. A chair was overturned, herbs and dried plants were scattered across the floor, jars were broken. Gertrude had fought, and she had tried to defend herself. Liesel's body was found two days later by a hunter about half a mile from her grandmother's cottage. She had been strangled, her red cape was missing. So is the basket. Friedrich Hoffmann buried his mother and his daughter in the same week. His five remaining children, the oldest now only eleven, stood at the graveside and watched their father weep. The youngest, the baby whose birth had killed their mother, was too young to understand. He reached up and patted his father's face trying to comfort him. The village was horrified, but again, they treated it as an isolated incident. There was no communication between Schiltock and Wolfok about the similarities between the cases. No one connected them. No one realized that the same predator was moving between villages hunting. The third victim was Anna Richter, aged 17 from the village of Huslock. This was in the autumn of 1288. Anna was engaged to be married. Her wedding was planned for the following spring as soon as the weather turned warm. She was described by those who knew her as cheerful, kind, and excited about her future. She smiled easily. She laughed often. She was in love. Her fiance was a young man named Hans Weber, the son of a farmer. Hans and Anna had known each other since childhood. They'd played together as children, worked side by side during harvests as teenagers. Everyone in the village had known they would marry someday. It was inevitable, like the seasons changing, like the sun rising. Anna was learning to weave from her Aunt Katrine, who lived in a small cottage about a mile outside the village. Katrine was 56 years old and had never married. She lived alone and supported herself by weaving cloth that she sold at market. Beautiful, intricate patterns that took weeks to complete. She had taught Anna the trade, and Anna visited her several times a week, sitting at the loom for hours, learning the rhythm of the shuttle, the pattern of the threads. Anna was making cloth for her wedding dress. She'd been working on it for months, fine linen, woven so tightly it was almost translucent. She would hold it up to the light and imagine herself wearing it. Imagine Hans seeing her in it. Imagine the life they would build together. They would have children, she told her aunt, at least four, maybe more. She would teach her daughters to weave the way Katrine was teaching her. Hans would teach their sons to farm. They would grow old together, surrounded by grandchildren. She had her whole life planned out. She could see it so clearly. On September 28th, 1288, Anna went to visit her aunt, bringing a basket of food, bread, apples from her family's tree, a jar of preserves her mother had made. Katrina had been feeling unwell, and Anna wanted to check on her to make sure she was eating properly. Anna was wearing a red hood that Hans had given her as a gift. He'd bought it from a traveling merchant, spent money he'd been saving for their future, but he wanted her to have something special, beautiful. The hood was made of fine wool, dyed in deep crimson. Anna had cried when he gave it to her. She wore it everywhere, even though it was too fine for everyday use. She wanted everyone to see it, to know that Hans loved her enough to give her something so precious. She never returned. Hans went looking for her when she didn't come home by dark. He ran the entire mile to Katrine's cottage, his heart pounding, telling himself she'd just lost track of time, she was fine, everything was fine. He found Katrine dead in her cottage strangled with a leather cord. The cottage had been disturbed, the loom was knocked over, threads tangled and broken, Katrine's body lying beside it. But again, nothing of real value was taken. Hans found Anna's body himself just off the forest path as the moon was rising. She was lying on her side, her hands still clenched into fists. She had fought, she had tried so hard to get away, and then she'd been strangled. Her red hood was gone, the basket was gone. Hans carried Anna's baddie back to the village himself. He wouldn't let anyone else touch her. He laid her on her parents' table, and then he walked out of the cottage and into the forest, and he screamed. He screamed until his voice gave out, until he couldn't make any sound at all. He attended Anna's funeral three days later. He stood at her grave and he didn't cry. He didn't speak. He just stood there staring at the ground where they'd buried the woman he loved, the woman who was supposed to be his wife, the mother of his children. According to Brother Matthias's journal, Hans left the village shortly after Anna's funeral. He told no one where he was going. He just walked away one morning and never came back. Some said he went to join a monastery. Some said he went to fight in the wars in the east. Some said he walked into the forest and let it take him the way it had taken Anna. No one ever heard from him again. The fourth victim I want to tell you about is Elsa Weber, aged 15 from a village called Gangenbach. This was in the winter of 1290. Elsa was the daughter of a blacksmith named Klaus. She was described as strong, practical, and unafraid. She had to be growing up in a household that centered around hard physical labor and the constant danger of fire and molten metal. Elsa helped her father in the forge sometimes, which was unusual for a girl. She would work the bellows, pumping air into the fire until the coals glowed white hot. She would hold tools steady while her father hammered. She could lift an anvil that grown men struggled with. Her arms were muscled, her hands calloused. She wasn't delicate or decorative. She was useful, capable, strong. Some of the village women clucked their tongues and said Klaus was raising his daughter like a son, that it wasn't proper, that Elsa would never find a husband if she kept working like a man. But Klaus didn't care. His wife had died when Elsa was young, and he'd raised his daughter the only way he knew how, to be tough and competent and able to take care of herself. Ulsa loved the forge. She loved the heat of it, the smell of hot metal and coal smoke, the rhythm of her father's hammer, the way raw iron could be shaped into something useful and beautiful. She loved working beside her father, the two of them moving in sync, not needing to speak because they understood each other perfectly. She wasn't afraid of much, not of fire, not of hard work, not of the dark. Her father had taught her to be brave. Elsa's grandmother, Brigita, was 70 years old and nearly blind. Cataracts had clouded her eyes until she could barely see shapes and shadows. She lived in a cottage at the edge of the forest, and she refused to move into the village, refused to live with Klaus and Elsa, refused to admit that she needed help. But she did need help. She couldn't fetch water from the well without stumbling, she couldn't chop wood for her fire, she couldn't prepare food without cutting herself or burning herself. So Elsa visited her every few days to do the tasks Brigitte could no longer do herself. Brigitta was proud and stubborn and difficult. She snapped at Elsa, criticized the way she did things, complained constantly. But Elsa was patient with her. She understood that Brigitte's sharpness came from fear, fear of being helpless, fear of being a burden, fear of losing the last shreds of her independence. On January 15th, 1290, Elsa went to visit her grandmother carrying a basket of supplies, bread, salted pork, turnips, a jug of beer. She was wearing a red scarf wrapped around her head and shoulders, a gift from her mother, one of the few things she had left from the woman she barely remembered. It was bitterly cold that day. Snow had fallen the night before, and the forest was silent and white. Elsa's breath made clouds in the air. Her boots crunched through the snow on the path. She didn't come home. Klaus went looking for her the next morning when she still hadn't returned. He found his mother first, dead in her cottage, strangled with a leather cord. The cottage was in disarray, furniture overturned, Brigita's few possessions scattered. She had fought despite her age and blindness. She had tried to defend herself. Klaus found Elsa in the forest about a quarter mile from Brigitte's cottage. She was lying in the snow, her body already cold. She had been strangled, her red scarf was missing, and the basket was gone. But there was something else. Elsa's hands were bloody. There was skin under her fingernails. She had fought back hard, harder than any of the other victims. She had hurt her attacker, she had marked him. Klaus carried his daughter's body back to the village. He laid her on the table in the forge, in the place where she had worked beside him, where she had been strong and capable and unafraid. And then he went to the village authorities and he demanded that they do something. He demanded that they find whoever had done this. He demanded justice. But this time there was something different. This time there was a witness. A woodcutter named Johan had been working in the forest that day, about a quarter mile from where Elsa's body was found. He told the village authorities that he had heard a woman's voice calling out in the late afternoon a voice that sounded like an old woman crying for help. He had thought about investigating, but it was getting dark and he needed to get home. He assumed it was someone from the village and that they would be fine. He assumed someone else would help. He would regret that assumption for the rest of his life. That voice, calling for help in the forest, would become a crucial piece of evidence. Because it meant the predator was using a specific tactic, mimicking the voices of elderly women to lure his victims off the path. So let's talk about the predator's methods. Because once Brother Matthias compiled his list and the pattern became clear, investigators could see exactly how this predator operated. And it was sophisticated, disturbingly sophisticated. Let me walk you through his process. First, surveillance and target selection. The predator chose his victims carefully. He targeted young women who were known to regularly visit elderly female relatives living in isolated locations. This required knowledge of the community. He had to know who lived where, who visited whom, and when those visits typically occurred. This suggests one of two things. Either the predator was a member of these communities, or he spent significant time observing them before striking. Given that the murders occurred across multiple villages over a wide geographic area, the second option seems more likely. He was an outsider, a traveler, someone who could move between communities without attracting superstition. Second, the approach. In multiple cases, witnesses reported hearing a woman's voice calling from the forest, usually an old woman's voice calling for help or calling the victim by name. This is what the woodcutter Johan heard before Elsa Weber's murder. Similar accounts appear in Brother Matthias's journal from other cases. This tells us something important. The predator was skilled at voice mimicry. He could imitate an elderly woman's voice convincingly enough to lure young women off the forest path. They responded to a voice calling for help in distress. That's what compassion looks like in a medieval village. You hear someone you love crying out and you go to them. And it was exactly what he counted on. Third, the disguise. Multiple witnesses from different villages reported seeing a figure in the forest around the time of the murders, a figure described as wearing animal pelts, particularly wolf pelts. Some described it as a man in a wolf skin. Others, in the confusion and fear of the moment, described it as something between man and beast. This wasn't a supernatural creature. This was a predator using animal pelts as camouflage and psychological warfare. In the dense forest, at dusk, a figure covered in wolf fur would be terrifying and disorienting. It would make victims hesitate, freeze, question what they were seeing. And that moment of hesitation was all he needed. Fourth, the sequence of the crimes. In every case, the predator killed the elderly woman first. He went to the cottage, gained entry somehow, possibly by claiming to be a traveler in need of help, or by forcing his way in, and he strangled the victim. Then he waited. He waited for the young woman to arrive. When she approached the cottage, he would call out to her, using the voice mimicry, luring her off the path or into the cottage. Then he would attack. After killing the young woman, he would take her basket and any red garment she was wearing, a cape, a hood, a scarf. These items were never recovered. We can only speculate about why he took them. Trophies, most likely, souvenirs of his crimes. Fifth, the disposal of the bodies. The elderly women were always left in their cottages. The young women were always taken into the forest and partially concealed, but not buried. They were meant to be found, but not immediately. This gave the predator time to leave the area before the alarm was raised. This was a predator who planned carefully, who understood human psychology, who used the landscape and the social structures of medieval village life to his advantage. He was patient, he was methodical, and he was successful for nearly two decades because no one realized they were dealing with a serial predator until Brother Matias connected the cases. So how were the bodies discovered? What did the crime scenes look like? And what did witnesses report? Let me walk you through the typical discovery process using Greta Mueller's case as an example. When Greta didn't return home by nightfall on October 12th, 1284, her father Friedrich immediately knew something was wrong. Greta was responsible. She wouldn't stay out after dark without sending word. Klaus gathered several men from the village, neighbors, friends, anyone willing to help search. They took torches and walked the forest path to Hilda's cottage. This was dangerous. The forest at night was genuinely treacherous, but they went anyway. They reached Hilda's cottage around nine o'clock that night. The door was closed but not locked. Klaus called out, no answer. He pushed the door open. Hilda was in her bed, lying on her back, eyes open. There was a leather cord around her neck, pulled tight. The cottage was in disarray. A table was overturned, a clay pot was shattered on the floor, herbs and dried plants were scattered everywhere. Hilda had fought back or tried to, but Greta wasn't there. The men searched the area around the cottage that night, calling Greta's name, but the darkness made it nearly impossible to see anything. They returned at first light with more men from the village. They found Greta about a quarter mile from the cottage just off the main path. She was partially covered with leaves and branches, not buried but concealed. The leather cord was still around her neck. Her clothing was torn, her hands and arms showed defensive wounds, scratches, bruises. She had fought. The basket she'd been carrying was gone, so was a small red scarf she'd been wearing. The men carried both bodies the village. The bodies were prepared for burial, and the village tried to make sense of what had happened. This pattern repeated itself in case after case. The young woman would fail to return home. Family members would search, they would find the elderly woman dead in her cottage, signs of a struggle, strangulation, then they would find the young woman's body in the forest also strangled, also showing signs of a struggle with the basket and any red garment missing. As for witnesses, there weren't many. The crimes occurred in isolated areas, often at dusk or early evening when most people were indoors. But there were a few crucial witness accounts. The woodcutter Johan, who heard the old woman's voice calling in the forest before Elsa Weber's murder, a merchant traveling between villages who reported seeing a figure in wolf pelts near the forest path outside Shiltock around the time of Weasel Hoffman's murder. A young boy who was gathering firewood and saw a tall man wearing animal skins walking quickly through the forest, carrying what looked like a basket near Haslak around the time of Anna Richter's murder. These accounts were fragmentary, confusing, and often dismissed at the time. People saw what they expected to see: a wolf, a wild man, a demon. But when Brother Matias compiled these accounts years later, a clearer picture emerged. A man, tall, wearing wolf pelts as a disguise, moving between villages, hunting. So what was the investigation like? How did medieval law enforcement respond to these crimes? The short answer is poorly. Let me walk you through the reality of criminal investigation in late 13th century rural Europe. There was no police force, no detectives, no forensic investigators. Justice was administered locally by village councils, local lords, or ecclesiastical authorities, depending on the jurisdiction. And their primary concern was maintaining order and collecting taxes, not solving murders. When a murder occurred, the local authorities would conduct a basic inquiry. They would ask questions, gather testimony from anyone who might have seen something. But if there was no obvious suspect, the case would simply go unsolved. There was no mechanism for pursuing a killer who had left the area, no way to coordinate between different jurisdictions, no way to track someone moving between villages. In the case of the Forest Path Predator, each village initially treated the murders as isolated incidents. They assumed it was a random attack or a local person who had committed the crime and then fled. They held funerals, said prayers, and moved on. There was no investigation in the modern sense. The communities did react. After each murder, villages warned their young women, don't walk alone, don't stray from the path, don't talk to strangers, be home before dark. But the warnings came without structural changes. Villages didn't organize escorts for young women visiting isolated relatives. They didn't relocate elderly people living alone to safer locations. They didn't post guards on the forest paths. The burden of safety fell entirely on the young women themselves. And when something did happen, when a young woman disappeared or was found dead, people asked, did she stray from the path? Did she talk to a stranger? Did she ignore the warnings? As for official investigation, there was essentially none until Brother Matthias brought his findings to the Bishop of Strasbourg in 1293. And even then the response was slow and inadequate. The bishop sent letters to various local authorities, informing them of the pattern and urging them to be vigilant. But there was no coordinated manhunt, no systematic search, just a general warning to be on the lookout for a suspicious traveler. It wasn't enough. The murders continued. So how was the predator finally caught? What was the breakthrough? It came down to a combination of luck, persistence, and one very brave young woman. Let me walk you through what happened. In the spring of 1295, a young woman named Margarita Schneider was walking through the forest to visit her grandmother, who lived outside the village of Oberkirk. Margarita was 18 years old, the daughter of a tanner, and by all accounts she was sharp, observant, and not easily frightened. She was carrying a basket of food and wearing a red cloak. As she walked, she heard a voice calling from the forest, an old woman's voice calling her name. Margareta stopped. She recognized the voice or thought she did. It sounded like her grandmother, but something felt wrong. Her grandmother should be at home, not out in the forest, and the voice was coming from deep in the trees far off the path. Margareta didn't move toward the voice. Instead she called out, Grandmother, is that you? What are you doing in the forest? The voice called again. More urgently. I've fallen, child. I've hurt my leg. Please come help me. Margarita stood there thinking, and then she did something that probably saved her life. She ran. She ran as fast as she could down the path toward her grandmother's cottage. She didn't look back, she didn't investigate, she just ran. She reached her grandmother's cottage and pounded on the door. Her grandmother, Elsa, opened it, confused and alarmed. Margareta, what's wrong? Margareta pushed inside and slammed the door behind her. Someone in the forest was calling my name, she said, using your voice. But it wasn't you. Elsa went pale. She had heard the stories. Everyone had heard the stories by then. Young women disappearing, elderly women found dead. The warnings had spread from village to village. Elsa barred the door. She and Margareta stayed inside, silent, waiting. About an hour later, they heard footsteps outside the cottage. Slow, deliberate footsteps circling the building. Then a knock at the door. A man's voice this time, rough and low. Open the door, old woman. I know you're in there. Elsa and Margareta said nothing. They barely breathed. The footsteps circled the cottage again, then stopped. Then after a long moment moved away back into the forest. Margareta and Elsa waited until morning. Then they went to the village and told the authorities everything. This time the authorities acted, because this time they had something they'd never had before, a potential witness who had survived an encounter with the predator and a location where he had been seen recently. The local bailiff, a man named Otto Keller, organized a search party. Twenty men armed with axes, hunting spears, and clubs, they searched the forest around Elsa's cottage looking for any sign of the predator. They didn't find him that day or the next day, but on the third day, a hunter named Friedrich reported seeing a man matching the description, tall, wearing wolf pelts, near a cave system about five miles from Oberkirk. Otto Keller and his men went to investigate. They found the cave, and inside they found evidence that someone had been living there. A bedroll, supplies, tools, and they found a collection of items that made their blood run cold. Wicker baskets, at least a dozen of them, stacked in a corner, red fabric, capes, hoods, scarves, folded and stored like treasures, and leather cords, the kind used for strangulation. They set a trap. They left men hidden near the cave, and they waited. Two days later, the predator returned. The man they arrested was named Alaric Wolf. Yes, his surname was actually Wolf with two F's. It was almost too perfect, too on the nose, but it's documented in the trial records. Alaric Wolf was approximately 40 years old, tall, lean, with dark hair and a beard. He was a drifter, a man with no permanent home, no family ties, no ties to any community. He survived by doing odd jobs, woodcutting, hunting, guiding travelers through the forest, and by theft. And by murder. Let me walk you through what we know about him based on testimony from his trial and from Brother Matthias's journal. Alaric Wolf was born in a small village in the Vosges Mountains, the son of a woodcutter. His mother died when he was young. His father was described as brutal and violent, a man who beat his son regularly. When Alaric was about 15, his father died in a logging accident. Alaric left the village and never returned. For the next 25 years, he wandered. He moved from village to village, forest to forest, never staying in one place for long. He learned the skills he needed to survive in the wilderness, tracking, hunting, navigating by the stars. He learned to move silently through the forest. He learned to read people, to understand their routines and vulnerabilities. And at some point, he started killing. During his trial, Alarg Wolf confessed to 17 murders, 17 young women and 17 elderly women, 34 victims in total. Brother Matias had documented 14 cases. There were three more that authorities knew about but hadn't connected to the pattern yet. That left 17 confirmed cases. But Alaric claimed there were more. Cases that were never discovered, bodies that were never found. He wouldn't say how many. He seemed to enjoy the uncertainty, the fear it created. So what was his motive? Why did he do this? The trial records give us some insight, though we have to be careful about taking them at face value. Medieval trials were not concerned with psychological analysis. They were concerned with guilt, punishment, and moral condemnation. But from Alark's own testimony, a picture emerges. He targeted young women because they were vulnerable and because he could. He targeted elderly women because they lived alone and because killing them first gave him access to the cottages where he could wait for his primary victims. He used the voice mimicry in the wolf belts because they worked. They gave him a psychological advantage. They created fear and confusion. He took the baskets and the red garments as trophies. He kept them in his cave where he could look at them and remember. But there was something else, something darker. During the trial, Larrik made a statement that was recorded by the court scribe. Let me read it to you. Quote, they walked through my forest like they owned it, like they had no fear. I wanted them to be afraid. I wanted them to know that the forest was mine and they were my prey. This is the psychology of a predator who saw himself as an apex hunter. He viewed the forest as his territory and the young women who walked through it as his rightful prey. He dehumanized them completely. And the red garments? He specifically targeted young women wearing red because it made them easier to spot in the forest. Red stood out against the green and brown of the trees and marked them as targets. Alaric Wolf's trial took place in the summer of 1295 in the town of Strasbourg. It was presided over by a secular court, with ecclesiastical observers present, including Brother Matthias. Medieval trials were not like modern trials. There was no presumption of innocence, no defense attorney, no jury of peers. The accused was questioned, witnesses testified, and the judge rendered a verdict based on the evidence and his own judgment. Alark Wolf confessed to the murders. He showed no remorse. He described his crimes in detail almost boastfully. He seemed to enjoy the attention, the fear he inspired. The verdict was never in doubt. He was found guilty of multiple murders and sentenced to death. The execution took place in August 1295 in the public square in Strasbourg. The method was breaking on the wheel, a brutal form of execution, where the condemned person's limbs were broken with an iron bar, and then they were left on a large wheel to die slowly. It was meant to be a public spectacle, a demonstration of justice, a warning to others. Hundreds of people attended. Families of the victims were there. Brother Matthias was there. Alaric Wolf died slowly over the course of several hours. According to witnesses, he cursed the crowd until he could no longer speak. After his death, his body was left on the wheel for seven days, then taken down and buried in unconsecrated ground outside the town. His possessions, including the baskets and red garments, were burned. He was dead. Thirty-four people were dead. Families had lost daughters, sisters, mothers. Villages had lost members they had buried and grieved and tried to move past. The damage was permanent and it would not be repaired by a public execution. And the story of the forest path predator would live on, transformed and sanitized as a fairy tale. So why did it take so long to stop him? In October 1284, Greta Mueller was murdered in Wolfhock. The village held a funeral. They buried her next to her grandmother, and then they moved on because what else could they do? They had no way of knowing that 18 months later, in Chiltock, 15 miles away, Liesel Hoffman would be killed in exactly the same way. The villages never spoke to each other. There was no system for sharing information about crimes, no messengers riding between towns with warnings, no posted notices. Each community dealt with its tragedies in isolation. When Anna Richter was murdered in Hoslac in 1288, the local authorities investigated. They questioned people. They searched the forest, and then they stopped because the killer had moved on and they had no jurisdiction beyond their own village boundaries, no authority to pursue him, no resources to chase him. There was no police force, no investigative body that could follow a criminal across regions. Justice was local and reactive. If their perpetrator fled, the case simply ended. And the young women kept walking through the forest because someone had to. Grandmothers needed food and medicine. Aunts needed help with their work. These weren't optional tasks, they were survival. The work had to be done, and young women were the ones expected to do it. The warnings were always the same. Stay on the path, don't talk to strangers, be home before dark. When bodies were found, people said the forest is dangerous, everyone knows that. People disappeared in the forest all the time, to wild animals, to accidents, to bandits. It was easy to see each death as isolated, as just another tragedy in a landscape full of them. The pattern was there, but it was camouflaged by the ambient danger of medieval life. After Elsa Weber's murder in 1290, her father Klaus demanded action. He went to the village authorities, he went to the regional lord, he demanded they find whoever had done this. But it took four more murders, four more young women dead before the Franciscan monks began their investigation, before anyone with resources and authority took the pattern seriously. And when Margarita Schneider heard that voice calling from the forest, when every instinct told her something was wrong, she ran. She trusted herself. She survived. Margareta survived by listening to her own instinct. Others may have had the same instinct and suppressed it, or never developed it at all. The records don't tell us these things. We know only that 34 people died and one woman lived. For more than a decade, Alaric Wolf killed. There were no systems connecting villages, no coordinated investigation across regions, no way to see the pattern until a monk began writing things down. Each death was isolated, each village grieved alone. The forest remained a dangerous place where young women had to walk, and no one could say with certainty why so many of them never came home. Thirty-four people died in those gaps. So, how did this true crime case become the fairy tale we know as Little Red Riding Hood? The transformation happened gradually over centuries as the story was told and retold, passed down through oral tradition, adapted to different cultures and contexts. Let me walk you through the evolution. After Alark Wolf's execution in 1295, the story of the forest path predators spread throughout the region. It was told as a cautionary tale, a warning to young women about the dangers of the forest and the importance of vigilance. But as the story was retold, it began to change. The specific details, the names of the victims, the locations of the crimes, the identity of the killer began to fade. What remained was the essential structure, a young woman in a red garment walking through the forest to visit her grandmother, encountering a predator disguised as something else. The predator, Lark Wolf, became the wolf. This was partly because of his surname, partly because of the wolf pelts he wore, and partly because wolves were a genuine threat in medieval forests. The wolf became a symbol, a stand-in for all the dangers that lurked in the dark woods. The voice mimicry became the wolf's ability to talk, to deceive, to trick the young woman into revealing information about where she was going. The disguise, the wolf pelts, became the wolf literally disguising itself as the grandmother wearing her clothes, lying in her bed. The story became a fairy tale, a fable, a teaching tool. It was told to children to warn them about strangers, about straying from the path, about the dangers of the world beyond the safety of home. Different versions emerged in different regions. In some versions, the young woman escapes. In others, she's rescued by a huntsman who cuts open the wolf's belly and saves both the girl and the grandmother. In the earliest versions, the ones closest to the original crimes, the girl dies. There is no rescue. There is only the warning, be careful or this will happen to you. The story was first written down in the 17th century by French author Charles Perrault, who published a version called Le Petit Chaperon Rouge in 1697. Perrault's version was dark and moralistic. The girl dies at the end, eaten by the wolf, and Perrault includes an explicit moral warning about the dangers of talking to strangers. Then in the early 19th century, the brothers Grimm collected and published their version, Rootkeptchen, in 1812. The Grimm version is the one most of us know today, the one with the huntsman who rescues the girl and the grandmother by cutting open the wolf's belly. The Grimm brothers were folklorists, scholars who traveled through German-speaking regions collecting traditional stories from oral tradition. They were interested in preserving what they saw as authentic Germanic folk culture. But they also edited the stories they collected. They made them more suitable for children, more morally instructive, more aligned with their own cultural and political goals. In the case of Little Red Riding Hood, they added the rescue scene. They gave this story a happy ending. They transformed it from a dark warning about inevitable danger into a story about salvation and the restoration of order. And in doing so, they completed the transformation of the Forest Path Predator case from true crime to fairy tale. The real victims, Greta Mueller, Liesel Hoffman, Anna Richter, Elsa Weber, and all the others, were forgotten. Their names, their lives, their stories were erased. What remained was a sanitized, symbolic version of their deaths, repackaged as a children's story. That's it for the Red Hood Murders, case file number 225, but the story doesn't end there. Keep listening for a brief case epilogue on the Brothers Grimm. When the Brothers Grimm were collecting stories for their fairy tale anthology in the early 1800s, they interviewed hundreds of people, mostly women, mostly from rural areas, mostly from the lower classes. These were the people who preserved oral traditions, who told stories to their children and grandchildren, who kept the old tales alive. One of their primary sources was a woman named Dorothea Vieman, a widow from a village near Cassell. Dorothea was in her 50s when the Grim Brothers met her, and she knew dozens of traditional stories, including the several versions of Little Red Riding Hood. According to the Grim Brothers' notes, Dorothea told them that the story of Little Red Riding Hood was based on old murders that had happened, quote, long ago in the Black Forest region. She said her grandmother had told her the story, and her grandmother had heard it from her grandmother, passed down through generations of women. Dorothea said the story was meant as a warning, but also as a memorial. It was a way of remembering the young women who had died, of keeping their memory alive even after their names were forgotten. Picture this: a small room in Cassell 1813, winter light filtering through a single window, two young men, scholars, educated, earnest, sitting across from a woman in a worn dress and a widow's cap. Dorothy Owen's hands are folded in her lap. She's been telling stories for hours. Her voice is steady, practiced. These are stories she's carried her whole life. When she gets to Little Red Riding Hood, something shifts. The brothers' grim notice it. They write it in their notes. Her voice drops lower. She leans forward slowly. My grandmother told me this one, she says, and her grandmother told her, it's not just a story. She tells them about the Black Forest, about young women who walked forest paths to visit their grandmothers, their aunts, their elderly relatives, about a man who wore wolf belts and called to them from the trees, about bodies found in the underbrush, red cloaks torn and bloodied. The women in my family, Dorothy says, we tell this story so the girls will remember, so they'll know it's not just wolves you have to watch for. The Grimm brothers wrote it all down, every word. They fill pages with her testimony about the murders, the investigation, the trial. They note that she believes the story is a memorial, that the women who told it were trying to preserve something true. And then they published the fairy tale. Just the fairy tale. The wolf and the huntsman and the happy ending. The murders stay in their notes, unpublished, gathering dust in an archive. I wonder what Dorothea thought when she saw the published version, if she recognized what had been taken out, if she understood that the scholars had heard her story about real violence, real deaths, and real grief, and decided it was too dark, disturbing, too real for a children's book. She died in 1815, two years after meeting the Grimm brothers. She's buried in a churchyard near Cassell. Her gravestone doesn't mention the stories she preserved, the memories she carried, or the truths she tried to tell. But the story survived, transformed, sanitized, stripped of its origins, but it survived. And sometimes, late at night, when I'm reading through old archives and trial records and fragments of medieval journals, I think about all the Dorotheas, all the women who carried these stories, who understood what they really meant, who tried to pass them down intact. I think about Greta Mueller walking through the forest with a basket of food, thinking about her grandmother's cough. I think about Liesel Hoffman in her red cape, the one her mother made her, carrying bread to her aunt. I think about Anna Richter, excited about her wedding, imagining the future she'd never have. I think about Elsa Weber, strong and capable, who fought back and almost escaped. Their names were forgotten. The details of their lives were lost. But the story remained, changed, yes, but still there, still being told, still carrying some echo of the truth. Maybe that's enough. Maybe that's all we can hope for. That the truth persists even in fragments, even in fairy tales, even when the scholars and the publishers try to smooth away the rough edges. Maybe Dorothea Weyman knew that. Maybe that's why she kept telling the story, even knowing it would be changed, even knowing the murders would be edited out. Because something is better than nothing. A fairy tale is better than silence. And now you know. Now the names are spoken again. Greta, Lizel, Anna, Elsa, and 30 others whose names we've lost, but whose deaths mattered, whose lives mattered, who deserve to be more than just a cautionary tale about staying on the path. Next week we'll reopen another case, examining legends and lore through the lens of true crime. I'm Danielle Christmas, and you've been listening to Folklore Forensics. Folklore Forensics is written and hosted by me and produced by Audio Ellis. Lean music is by The Soundlings and Josh Pan. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow Folklore Forensics on Instagram at Folklore Forensics. Please send future case suggestions to Folklore Forensics Pod at gmail.com. Until next time, stay curious and always follow the evidence.