1974. 24-year old Jack Unterweger stands in court and receives a life sentence
for the brutal murder of an 18-year old girl. 15 years later, he’s celebrated by politicians
and intellectuals for the stories, poems, and plays he has written behind prison walls.
“We will never find a prisoner so well prepared for freedom,” states the prison warden.
Oh, he was wrong, so very, very wrong. Jack Unterweger, born Johann Unterweger, didn’t
just kill again. He went on a murder spree that took him across countries and continents, ending
with a face-off with U.S. Marshals on Miami Beach. But let’s go back to the start of this incredible,
almost unbelievable story. Unterweger was born on August 16,
1950, in a beautiful part of the world, a small town in Austria called Judenburg.
After Nazi Germany annexed Austria during the war, the town was home to a subcamp of the
Mauthausen concentration camp. The war ended, but it wasn’t easily forgotten in that town.
Judenburg was still dealing with the fallout from war when Jack came to life.
He was the product of a one-off encounter of the night. That was when his mother, Theresia,
met an American soldier. This GI wasn’t interested in fatherhood, and no sooner than he was told
what had happened, he turned his back. Theresia, who worked as a prostitute,
wasn’t really up for taking care of a child, either. She sent Jack to live with his violent,
alcoholic grandfather when he was just two. Sometime later, his mother was murdered, and Jack
knew there was no escape from the daily beatings he took at the hands of his merciless grandpa.
Before he was ten, he was an avid imbiber of schnapps and still barely able to read
or write. He soon started stealing, and then he moved on to pimping,
spending much of his youth behind bars. The angry young man couldn’t keep his hands to himself.
As he got older, he took to assaulting women. The crescendo of that violence came in 1974 when
he was 24. One night in West Germany, he lost the plot and strangled a girl with her own bra.
She was 18-year old Margaret Schäfer. He later said that when he pulled on the straps,
he could see his mother’s face in the dying girl. Over the years he read, and he read voraciously,
taking a particular liking to people you might call literary rascals, intellectual writers who’d
chronicled a life of crime such as Jean Genet. Unterweger read about the American prisoner,
Jack Abbott, who had written wonderfully about his life of crime from solitary confinement.
Unterweger read about how Abbott’s book, “In the Belly of the Beast,” was hailed
by America’s literary critics. He wrote short stories, poems, and plays himself, culminating
in 1983 with his autobiography “Purgatory or The Trip to Prison – Report of a Guilty Man.”
Now Europe had a celebrated intellectual behind bars, and like what happened over the US,
the European literati extolled the works of the downtrodden Unterweger. Artists and writers and
even politicians went to visit him. They wrote pieces in the newspaper about how this man had
reformed and become an asset to society. In his writing, Unterweger freely admitted
he’d once been a beast, stating in one chapter: “I wielded my steel rod among the prostitutes
and pimps of Hamburg, Munich, and Marseilles. I had enemies and conquered
them through my inner hatred.” But now he’d changed. He was
rehabilitated. Art had saved him. Austrian intellectuals often talked
about how rare it is for a violent criminal, a killer no less, to have accessed the antipodes
of his mind and discovered the root of his anger. Others joined in the chorus of celebration,
signing petitions for the release of Unterweger. One of his vocal supporters was Elfriede Jelinek,
a future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He later said about the imprisoned Unterweger,
“He was so tender, and at that moment we decided we had to get him pardoned.”
It was a travesty of justice to keep him locked up, people said. It was like clipping a wounded
bird’s wings, like hiding from the world one of its wonders. One intellectual that signed
the petitions later remarked about this metamorphosis from ugly killer to wondrous
artist, “We wanted to believe him very badly.” Then in 1990, the prison warden said these words:
“We will never find a prisoner so well prepared for freedom.”
An intellectual wrote that his release was “a triumph of the individual over all the social and
political pathologies into which he’d been born.” The thing was, all those supporters only had to
look at what had happened to Jack Abbott. People had also gotten behind him after his
book garnered praise from the public and media alike. People screamed for his release, too,
but some prison officials didn’t think Abbott was ready for the outside world.
One of them said, “I thought that Mr. Abbott was a dangerous individual. I didn't see a changed man.
His attitude, his demeanor indicated psychosis.” About six weeks after Abbott was released from
prison, he went to eat in a Manhattan restaurant. He needed to pee but was told the bathroom was
for employees only. The kind waiter showed him a place out back where he could urinate,
whereupon Abbott stabbed him to death. This was nine years prior to Unterweger
being released, but oh God did it serve as a warning. Unterweger wouldn’t just kill again,
he’d become an international serial killer. No sooner than he was out, he became a celebrity.
His plays hit the streets. He gave readings from his book and other stories all over
Austria and beyond. Wherever he went, artists and writers wanted to meet him. He even had
a regular spot working as a reporter for Austria’s national news service.
The more TV shows he ended up on, the more money he got. He’d drive around town in a flashy Ford
Mustang, only eating at the best restaurants. When he pulled up outside, everyone knew it was
him. His license plate read “W-Jack 1” Just a few months after his release,
he was in Czechoslovakia to research the Red Light district in the capital, Prague. Maybe he was,
but he was also planning to murder again. In fact, if you read his poetry,
you might have guessed that. Here’s one such poem infused with the stench of murder:
“You still seem strange and distant/ And lively, Death/ But one day you
will be close/ And full of flames/ Come, lover, I am there./ Take me, I am yours!”
Maybe that’s what he was thinking when he murdered a Czech prostitute named Blanka Bockova. She was
found strangled by her own underwear. That was the same MO as Unterweger’s first murder.
Still, police didn’t even look into him, after all, he was now a star.
He went back to Austria, where he killed at least another six prostitutes, all of them garroted with
their own bras and dumped, usually in the woods. He became a suspect at this point, but with no
forensic evidence or other evidence tying him to the murders, police didn’t go after him.
That would be left up to the American cops, veritable experts on serial killing after seeing
two decades of blood-spattered bedroom walls. Unterweger was still barely out of prison,
and he likely would have kept on killing in Europe, but then he was handed a key to
make a dream come true. That was to visit the USA, the place where his father had come from.
He’d been given an assignment from a magazine to write about crime in the US,
which in 1991 was making headlines around the world. But he wasn’t going to cover gang violence;
instead, he was going to talk about his favorite thing: the Red Light districts.
Unterweger chose Los Angeles as his place to put pen to paper and in the meantime,
secretly murder women. The LAPD was told about his arrival, and so on occasions, he was given
rides around the city by cops so he could get a first-hand view of the poorest parts where women
plied what’s called the oldest trade in the world. When he wasn’t out patrolling the streets he was
actually doing a bit of writing from his hotel room. That hotel was none
other than the Cecil Hotel, a place not far from Skid Row...a place which has
gained quite the reputation over the years. An American writer later said that Unterweger
“really immersed himself in the lifestyle” around the mean streets of LA, but unfortunately,
he also murdered three women when on that working vacation. All three were sex workers.
The first victim was 35-year-old Shannon Exley, whose body was found beaten and strangled in
the Boyle Heights neighborhood. The murder weapon was her bra. Just ten days later,
in the same neighborhood, 33-year-old Irene Rodriguez was found dead. Her injuries were
not too different from the previous woman’s. The third victim was 26-year Peggy Booth,
discovered in Malibu Canyon. She’d also been beaten and strangled with her own bra.
This is part of an article Unterweger wrote while he was in LA:
“Real life in L.A. is dominated by a tough struggle for survival,
by the broken dreams of thousands who come to the city and an equal number who leave,
sometimes dead.” No kidding, Jack.
He returned home to Austria to finish his writing on the crime-infested USA where no man or woman is
safe, and it was when he was there, Interpol heard about the LA murders. The European cops talked
at length to the LA cops, and it soon became apparent that wherever Unterweger laid his hat,
women were killed in a very similar way. It didn’t take a Columbo to figure out a
connection, and after some more investigating, Austrian police secured a warrant for his
arrest. The problem was, he’d left the country. That could only mean one thing: more murders.
Unterweger first headed to Switzerland with his girlfriend, Bianca Mrak, but soon after they took
off to Paris and from there, they headed to the US again, destination Miami – apparently because
his girlfriend loved the TV show Miami Vice. He knew the cops were after him back home and
on occasions he contacted them. One newspaper ran the headline, “Hello. It's Me, the Mass Murderer.”
Mrak got a job as a stripper and earned some extra cash from selling her story to the tabloids.
That story was headlined, “Bianca's Exclusive Love Story: The Girl and the Murder Suspect.”
Unterweger did what he did best, after killing that is, and settled down with an old typewriter
to tell some of his tales. His life as an Austrian Charles Bukowski didn’t last long.
The pleasures of the damned were stopped in their tracks when U.S. marshals arrested
Unterweger on Miami beach after he went to collect some cash from the USA Money Exchange.
Apparently, he cried all the way to the police station, but he didn’t remain locked up in the
US for long. He was extradited to Austria to face the music there.
His deportation, by the way, was only down to his not having told US authorities about
his felony conviction. Nonetheless, he was first asked about why he was in the US and
told he was being investigated for murder. To that, he gave the statement:
“I went to LA to write stories on prostitutes and homeless people. While I was in LA. I dated
the receptionist at the Hotel Cecil, a girl named Carolina. I also dated three prostitutes,
one white, the other two Latina. I killed no one in Los Angeles.”
He still had support back home, though, much of it coming from those intellectuals that had supported
him before his release. Remember from the time of his release to this point was only just over a
year and a half. Some people said the authorities didn’t want to believe in his transformation.
Maybe, they said, he was being set up. One intellectual who still believed in him told
The Guardian newspaper, “If he was the killer, he would be one of the cases of the century.
Statistically, the chance that I would know one of the cases of the century is so unlikely that,
therefore, I think he is not guilty.” Unterweger was charged with 11 murders in total,
three in the US and the rest in Europe. In court, he admitted that he was no angel,
but he said he wasn’t guilty of those murders. He said in one declaration:
“I was a rat, a primitive criminal who grunted rather than talked, an inveterate liar. The
prosecutor is right: I consumed women rather than loved them. But I'm counting on my acquittal
because I'm not the culprit. Your decision will affect not only me but the real murderer,
because he's laughing up his sleeve.” Police had managed to find one of the
cars he had used on his travels in Europe and in it, they found some human hairs. Unterweger’s
lawyer then told him, “If they can conduct the DNA test, then the Devil's going to catch you.”
Yet again, Unterweger claimed he was innocent. After hearing the evidence, the jury found him
guilty, and he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
For those of you that study the mind and what can go wrong, you won’t be surprised to hear
that a psychiatrist said Unterweger suffered from narcissistic personality disorder.
Still, you have to ask some questions about the evidence. Those hairs that were genetically
matched to one of the victims were found in a car that was then 11 years old and had had four
different owners after Unterweger. It was this evidence, too, that cemented his guilty verdict.
Much of the other evidence was circumstantial. Sure, people were murdered the same way wherever
Unterweger went, but could that have been just a really strange coincidence? He also didn’t
have an alibi for the murders, not one of them. But this is what Unterweger’s lawyer said about
that, “It's always a coincidence if one has an alibi. ... Such an intelligent man would
certainly have taken care to have one if he needed it.” It’s also worth noting that while he didn’t
have an alibi, not one person ever came forward and said they’d seen him with one of the victims.
That’s why two jurors wanted to acquit him, but the majority of them were against him,
and the sentence was passed. That was the last anyone saw
of Jack Unterweger. He was found dead in his cell on his first night in jail.
Now you need to watch “How Tylenol Became the Perfect Murder Weapon.”
Or, have a look at “The Coder Who Became A Criminal Mastermind - Paul Le Roux.”