Similarly: if Hauser’s story of childhood captivity was substantially true, there would have been an actual location — a room, a house, a farm, some structure — where he was kept. That location would have had an owner, a maintenance history, neighbors who might have noticed unusual things. Extensive efforts to identify such a location were made during and after Hauser’s life. None succeeded. The silence of the physical record — the absence of any identified location consistent with the story — is a gap in the evidence that supports the theory.
None of this proves anything. Conspiracies can be successful. Locations can be destroyed or simply never found. The absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. But the cumulative silence of a record that should, if certain things were true, contain more than it does is relevant to assessing the probability of different accounts.
The 2024 DNA study contributed a specific piece of evidence that speaks directly to the prince theory. The accumulated historical silences — of documentary traces of the alleged conspiracy, of any identified location consistent with the captivity story — are softer evidence but not irrelevant evidence. Taken together, they describe a case in which the specific theory that attracted the most attention and generated the most controversy for the most time has also attracted the most investigation and produced the least corroboration.
Kaspar Hauser appeared as a riddle. He remained a riddle. The DNA study resolved one of the riddle’s clauses. The rest of the question stands, as it has always stood, in the absence of the evidence that would be needed to answer it.