Serial
killer who murdered prostitutes in several countries Johann "Jack"
Unterweger (born 1950 in Steiermark, died 29 June 1994 in Graz). He was born in
1950 in the Austrian state of Steiermark to a Viennese prostitute and an
unknown American soldier. He grew up in poverty with his abusive, alcoholic
grandfather in a one-room cabin. He was in and out of prison several times
during his youth for assaulting local prostitutes. He murdered 18-year-old
German Margaret Schäfer in 1974 by strangling her with her own bra.
The
Crimes
On
September the 15th, 1990, some passers by walking along the river Vitava River
in Czechoslovakia, near Prague came across the grisly sight of the body of a
young woman. Blanka Bockova was the first victim of Jack Unterweger. She was
left in a degrading state, lying on her back, nude, with a pair of grey
stockings knotted around her neck. Her legs were open and she had been covered
with leaves.
The
night before she had gone out with friends for a drink in the upmarket
Wenceslas Square and had remained in a bar while the others left around
11.45pm. She was last seen talking to a man, aged around 40, but no-one could
offer any other details.
Several
weeks later Brunhilde Masser, a well known prostitute from Graz, was reported
missing. As Austria had very few problems with prostitutes the authorities
became concerned. Two months later in early December another prostitute,
Heidemarie Hammerer, also went missing. On New Year’s Eve, almost a month after
her disappearance, her body was found by hikers in a wood outside of the town.
Like
the first murder she was also found on her back and covered with dead leaves
and bramble. It appeared that the body had been redressed and then dragged
through the woods. Although not naked, her legs were bare and a missing piece
of material from her slip was found inside her mouth. Hammerer, like Blanka
Bockova, had been strangled with a pair of tights and also displayed bruises
and ligament marks on her wrists, suggesting that she had been tied up. Several
red fibres on her clothing that didn’t match anything she was wearing appeared
to be possible evidence left by the killer.
A
few days later the body of missing prostitute Brunhilde Masser was discovered.
Her badly decomposed body was also found in a quiet wood in Bregenz. Again,
there were no signs of robbery and her manner of death matched the previous two
murders.
The
Austrian Federal Police investigating the cases found it difficult to unearth
details about the prostitutes’ clients. There had been no witnesses to the
murders and the police found themselves without any leads to go on. At this
particular stage the Austrian police, unaware of Blanka Bokova’s murder in
Prague, had no indication that they were dealing with a serial killer.
This
view would soon begin to change when another prostitute, Elfriede Schrempf,
disappeared from Graz on March 7th, 1991. Schrempf’s parents contacted the
police to notify them that a man had called the family home several times and
taunted them about their daughter’s occupation. What concerned them and the
police was the fact the girl’s telephone number was unlisted and suggested that
the person who may be responsible for her disappearance made the calls.
On
the 5th October 1991, Schrempf’s body was found like the others in a woodland
area just outside Graz. Her remains were skeletal and again she was covered in
leaves. The police, if they hadn’t realised then that they were in the midst of
a serial killer soon did when four more prostitutes vanished, this time from
Vienna. Silvia Zagler, Sabine Moitzi, Regina Prem and Karin Eroglu had all
vanished within a month time period.
Moitzi’s
body was discovered on the 20th May, 1992 followed by Karin Ergolu. Both women
had been strangled and dumped in woodland outside the city of Vienna. Again the
MO of the killer was the same; the victims had been asphyxiated with an article
of their own clothing.
A
breakthrough suddenly came to the fore when retired seventy-year old investigator
August Schenner, recalled a series of murders and attacks he had dealt with in
the 70’s. The crime scene and cause of deaths was remarkably similar to the
murders now being committed in Austria. The culprit, Johann ‘Jack’ Unterweger
had been caught and imprisoned.
The
former murders of two women had led Schenner to a prostitute, Barbara Scholz
who had admitted that she and Unterweger had abducted one of the victims,
eighteen-year-old Margaret Schaefer and taken her to a wood where she was tied
up and assaulted. Unterweger had demanded sex and when the girl refused he
bludgeoned her to death with a steel pipe. He then strangled and left her nude
body face up in the wood covered with leaves.
At
the trial Unterweger had confessed to the crime but revealed that as he hit the
victim he had seen a vision of his mother, which had fuelled his anger and
hatred resulting in him continuing to strike the victim until she was dead. Unterweger
was declared insane by a psychologist who described him as being a ‘sexually
sadistic psychopath with narcissistic and histrionic tendencies, prone to fits
of rage and anger. He is an incorrigible perpetrator’
He
was sentenced to life in prison and used that time to study. He became an
author of short stories, poems, plays, and an autobiography, "Fegefeuer –
eine Reise ins Zuchthaus" which was a success with critics and the public.
He was released after only 16 years of his life term, thought to be a
successful "resocialized" prisoner. In the first year after his release,
however, police found later that he killed six prostitutes in Austria.
In
1991, he was hired by an Austrian magazine to write about crime in Los Angeles,
California, writing articles about prostitution and riding around town with the
local police. During his time in Los Angeles, the three prostitutes Shannon
Exley, Irene Rodriguez, and Sherri Ann Long were beaten, sexually assaulted
with tree branches, and finally strangled with their own brassieres. Back in
Austria, police had enough evidence for his arrest, but he was gone by the time
they entered his home. After police chased him through Europe, Canada and the
USA, he was finally arrested by the FBI in Miami, Florida on February 27, 1992.
While a fugitive, he had time to call Austrian media to try to convince them of
his innocence. Back in Austria, he was charged with eleven homicides. The jury
found him guilty of nine murders because no cause of death could be determined
for two of them, as nothing was found of them but bones. On June 29, 1994 he
was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. That night, he
took his own life by hanging himself with his pants. Because he died before he
could appeal the verdict, it was never legally valid. Thus, according to
Austrian law, Unterweger is to be regarded as innocent.
History: A native of Styria, in southeastern Austria, Jack
(Johann) Unterweger was the illegitimate son of an American soldier and an
Austrian prostitute. Born in 1951, he was raised among hookers and pimps,
growing up wild with an unpredictable temper.
He was a chronic truant by age nine and logged his first arrest at 16
for assaulting a prost tute. Over the
next nine years, he accumulated 16 convictions-mostly for sexual attacks on
women-and spent all but 12 months of that time behind bars. Briefly freed in 1976, he was charged with
murder after he bludgeoned another streetwalker with an ¡ron bar, then
strangled her with her own brassiere. In
court, he admitted his crime, telling the judge, "l envisioned my mother
in front of me, and I killed her."
Sentenced
to life imprisonment, Unterweger followed the lead of certain American
convicts, reinventing himself as an author of "important"
literatura. Over the next 14 years, he
produced various poems, plays, short stories, and an autobiography that made
him the toast of Viennese café society.
Influential Austrians petitioned the government for his release, and the
rehabilitated killer was paroled on May 23, 1990. That life is over now let's get on with the
new, he told the press.
And
so he did. Overnight, Jack became a
fixture on television talk shows, posing as a model of prison rehabilitation,
enjoying most-favored-guest status at high-society cocktail parties. Money follows celebrity, and Unterweger
sported designer clothes, drove a Ford Mustang with the license tag reading
Jack 1, and acquired a blond girlfriend the same age as his last victim. Unfortunately, Jack's new life was a
charade. Austrian police report that
Unterweger killed at least six prostitutas within his first 12 months of
freedom.
In
June 1991, Jack got a chance to take hís show on the road. An Austrian magazine commissioned him to
write about crime in Los Angeles.
Winging off to L.A. with his lover, Unterweger wangled severas
ride-alongs with local police. He wrote
a couple of articles, focusing primarily on Hollywood prostitutes, but Jack
also had a more personal interest in his subject. The first victim, 35-year-old Shannon Exley,
was found in Boyle Heights on june 20.
Number two, 33-year-old Irene Rodriguez, was found in the same
neighborhood 10 days later. Peggy Booth,
age 26, was found dead in a Malibu canyon on July 10. All three women were hookers, all three had
been savagely beaten before they were strangled with their own bras, and all three
bodies were sexually violated with tree branches. (Some accounts refer vaguely
to a fourth, unnamed victim in San Diego, but no charges were ever filed in
that case.) Unterweger was safely back in Austria by the time Interpol
officials recognized descriptions of the L.A. killer's MODUS OPERANDI in
February 1992. An Austrian SWAT team
raided Unterwegers Vienna apartment, but their suspect was already gone,
embarked with his teenage lover on a jaunt that would take them through
Switzerland, France, and Canada and back once more to the United States. Along the way, he paused for telephone calls
to the Austrian media, alternately taunting police and proclaiming his
innocence. A trail of credit card
reccipts led manhunters to Miami, Florida, where Unterweger was captured
without resistance. (His girlfriend told police they had chosen Miami as their
refuge because she "liked Don Johnson," star of the Miami Vice TV
series.)
In
custody once more, Unterweger was accused of killing 11 prostitutas since his
release from prison-six in Austria, three in Los Angeles, and two more in
Czechoslovakia. The Czechs didn't want
him, but Austria and the United States squabbled over jurisdiction, Jack's
homeland winning out when Austrian officials agreed to try Unterweger for five
forcing murders as well as the six committed on their own soil. Extradition was thereby approved, and Los
Angeles authorities packed up their forensic evidence for shipment across the
Atlantic. Back home in Graz, Unterweger was indicted on 11 murder counts in
August 1992, but legal maneuvers delayed his trial for nearly two years. The proceedings finally began on April 20,
1994, and lasted for two months, including testimony by FBI experts imported
from Quantico, Virginia. Unterweger seemed confident throughout the trial,
never failing to smile for the cameras, but evidence was mounting üp against
him. A bomb blast at the courthouse
failed to disrupt jury deliberations on june 28, and Unterweger was convicted
that afternoon on nine murder counts and acquitted of two others.
Biography
Jack
Unterweger was Austria’s most prominent serial killer who, while serving prison
time for his first murder, wrote poetry, a novel and an autobiography. He
received success and celebrity from his writing and was eventually given parole
in 1990. After he was released he continued to attack and kill prostitutes both
in his home country and America. Unterweger was eventually arrested and
extradited back to Austria, where he was found guilty of nine murders. A twist
to the tale is that he cheated final justice in prison when he hung himself
less than 24 hours after being sentenced to life for a second time. At 3:40
A.M. on June 29, jailers found him hanging from a curtain rod in his cell, the
drawstring from his sweatpants looped around his neck. Several of his recorded audio cassettes tapes
were recovered from his cell, but their content has never been divulged.
Can
a serial killer be rehabilitated? You be
the Judge – Bird –
