SEVEN
JACK UNTERWEGER:
Linkage Analysis and the Detective’s Database
Three deputy U.S. marshals and an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms kept surveillance on a Western Union office on Collins Avenue in Florida’s South Beach. It might have seemed like a cushy assignment, sitting there watching scantily clad people enjoying the sun, but the team was waiting for a desperate fugitive and suspected serial killer named Jack Unterweger. He had fled from Austria and established himself in Florida, but telegrams sent by Austrian officials pinpointed his whereabouts and allowed police to set a trap.
Armed with a photograph of Unterweger, the agents watched for his approach. Since he had lied to customs about his criminal record, they had cause for arrest, although it was only a reason to detain him until they had the paperwork for more serious charges.
Eventually Unterweger approached, in the company of his girlfriend, Bianca Mrak. “He looked like a normal tourist,” Shawn Conboy later told a reporter, although his distinctly European clothing, pale skin, and the prison tattoos covering his arms gave him away. The agents could hardly believe that this short, scrawny guy was responsible for a dozen murders, but it wasn’t their job to make that call. They just had to keep an eye on him.
Bianca entered the money-exchange area of the office while Unterweger waited outside. When she returned, they started to walk away and the marshals fell in behind them. But Unterweger, alert, noticed them and took off running. One agent stayed with Bianca while the others chased Unterweger.
He ran down an alley off Collins Avenue and into a restaurant, moving through it as fast as he could, and then ducked out the back. But the agents were faster and they managed to corner him in a parking structure as squad cars pulled up. The little Austrian had no choice but to surrender and they slipped handcuffs on his wrists, put him into a car, and took him to downtown Miami. Unterweger, a former convict freed under unusual circumstances, had vowed that he would never spend another night in prison. He acted confident that he would not be found guilty of any of the crimes of which he was accused. He did not realize that in addition to the Austrian officials who were interested in questioning him, there were detectives from Los Angeles as well. He was a suspect in a case that involved an international crime spree, and since authorities had no witnesses or direct physical evidence, it would take an impressive database and sophisticated behavioral assessment to nail him.
Alert Detective
It was a retired Austrian detective, August Schenner, who made the first connection. He watched the newspapers during the early 1990s as a string of murders was reported that bore an eerie likeness to two murders he had once investigated. What he did not know was that the murders in Austria were just more in a series that had begun near Prague.
On a chilly September morning in 1990, a woman’s body was found along the bank of the Vltava River in Czechoslovakia. She was lying on her back, naked, except for a pair of gray stockings. Left in a sexually suggestive position with her legs open, she was covered with leaves, grass, and twigs. On her finger was a gold ring. This victim had been recently strangled, as well as stabbed in the buttocks and beaten. There were bruises all over her, signaling quite a struggle, but no sign of sexual assault.
A search along the river turned up female clothing that appeared to be the right size for the body, along with a wallet containing identification. The victim’s name was Blanka Bockova. She was thirty years old, married, and had worked at a butcher shop in Prague. She had left the shop on September 14, the day before her body turned up, going to Wenceslas Square for a drink with friends. They left just before midnight, but she wanted to stay. They saw her talking with a well-dressed man around forty years of age. He was not a regular, and no one knew his name or where he was from, so he was never picked up for questioning and the case went unsolved.
Sometime after October 26, 1990, in Graz, Austria, a prostitute named Brunhilde Masser vanished. Prostitution was legal in Austria, where prostitute murders averaged about one per year. Thus there was reason for concern over this unusual crime, and that concern increased on December 5 when another prostitute, Heidemarie Hammerer, disappeared from Bregenz, an Austrian tourist city that borders Switzerland and Germany.
On New Year’s Eve, hikers came across Hammerer’s fully clothed body. Upon closer inspection, it appeared that she had been killed and then re-dressed, after which she had been dragged through the woods. She still wore her jewelry, so robbery did not seem to be a motive. Her legs were bare and a piece of fabric had been cut from her slip with a sharp instrument, like a knife. This piece was found in her mouth.
Cold weather had helped to preserve the remains, so the pathologist determined that Hammerer had been strangled with a pair of panty hose, presumably her own. In addition, there were bruises on her wrists that bore the marks of some kind of restraint, such as handcuffs or tight ligatures. She had bruises on other areas of her body as well, as if she had been beaten. No sexual discharge was present on or around the body. One potential piece of evidence was the presence of several foreign red fibers on her clothing. The regional office of the Austrian Federal Police began an immediate investigation.
Five days after Hammerer’s body was discovered in Bregenz, hikers came across some badly decomposed remains of a woman in an isolated forest north of Graz. The local pathologist determined that the killer had stabbed her and possibly strangled her with her own panty hose. Her clothing, handbag, and other personal property were missing, yet she still had her jewelry. The police soon identified her as Brunhilde Masser.
The Austrian Federal Police assigned to the Styrian region took over this investigation, but they found no one who knew about Hammerer’s or Masser’s last customers. Someone had seen a man in a leather jacket with Hammerer but could not identify him.
Three months later, on March 17, in Graz, Elfriede Schrempf vanished from her usual corner. Soon, a stranger called Schrempf’s family. He mentioned her by name, made threatening comments, and hung up. He called once more with the same message, but the family could not identify him. While the Austrian police did not yet know about the murder of Blanka Bockova in Prague, they did have two disturbing murders and one missing-person case that bore similar associations.
There were no real leads, although the police kept on the case for several months. Then, just as the investigation began to fade, on October 5, hikers called in a set of skeletonized remains that they’d found in a forested area outside Graz. These remains suggested a woman about the size of Schrempf, who was soon identified as the victim.
Then, over the course of a month, Silvia Zagler, Sabine Moitzi, Regina Prem, and Karin Eroglu, all prostitutes, vanished from the streets of Vienna. It appeared that the killer had selected a specific victim group, workers in the sex trade, but there was no evidence of sexual violation or ejaculation on or near the bodies. The victims’ bruises indicated anger, so this man might have been committing murder in frustration. A team of investigators from the various relevant jurisdictions came together to discuss the crimes, but concluded that they did not have a serial killer on their hands. There were similarities, yes, but there were also differences.
On May 20, Sabine Moitzi’s body turned up, and three days later, so did the remains of Karin Eroglu. Both had been dumped in forested areas outside of Vienna, lying prone, and both had been strangled with an article of their own clothing. Eroglu’s body was naked except for her jewelry and Moitzi wore only a jersey, pulled up. Moitzi’s money was missing, but her clothing and handbag were found a few yards away from her body. Eroglu had been subjected to blunt-force trauma to the face. Her handbag and clothing were missing, except for her shoes and a body stocking, which her killer had forced down her throat. The press began printing articles about a serial killer, dubbing him “the Vienna Courier” and “the Vienna Woods Killer.”
It was around this time that August Schenner, retired from the Criminal Investigation Department in Salzburg, made a call to his former colleagues. He asked about the status of a convicted killer named Johann “Jack” Unterweger. Something about the prostitute killer’s MO reminded Schenner of this man.
Back in 1974, he said, he had investigated two murders. Margaret Schaefer, eighteen, had been strangled and left in the woods. She was a friend of Barbara Scholz, a prostitute who had been involved in the killing. Scholz and Unterweger had robbed Schaefer’s house and then took her into the woods. With a belt from her coat, Unterweger tied her hands behind her back, beat her, removed her clothes, and demanded sex. She refused, so he hit her in the head with a steel pipe. Then he used her bra to strangle her to death, leaving her nude body faceup in the forest, covered with leaves.
When the police questioned Unterweger, he broke down and confessed. In court, he defended himself by claiming that as he had hit Fräulein Schaefer, he had envisioned his mother in front of him. His anger was such that he could not stop. (It seems likely that he borrowed this notion from a psychiatrist who had interviewed him.)
Dr. Klaus Jarosch pronounced him a sexually sadistic psychopath with narcissistic and histrionic tendencies. “He tends to sudden fits of rage and anger,” Jarosch wrote. “His physical activities are enormously aggressive with sexually sadistic perversion...He is an incorrigible perpetrator.”
The second murdered woman, Schenner said, was Marcia Horveth, a prostitute, who was strangled with her stockings and a necktie. Adhesive tape was applied to her mouth, and her body was thrown into Lake Salzachsee near Salzburg. The police did not investigate Unterweger for this murder, because he was already in prison for life. It had seemed a waste of resources. Yet Schenner, convinced that Unterweger was responsible, interviewed him, finding him quite vehement in his denials.
While at the prison, Schenner had the impression that the charming convict was running the place. That was reason enough to suspect that, despite a life sentence, he had persuaded officials to give him a parole hearing, where he could then strut his best stuff. Schenner learned that fifteen years into his sentence—just a few months before Brunhilde Masser was murdered—Jack Unterweger had indeed been paroled. Not only was he free, he was a national celebrity.
A Voice from Prison
Unterweger had signed up for writing courses, and was soon editing a prison newspaper and literary review. Eventually he was writing poems, short stories, and plays that won him some attention in the outside world. In 1984, his prison autobiography, Fegefeuer (Purgatory), was a bestseller and his rage-filled tale “Endstation Zuchthaus” (Terminus Prison) won a prestigious literary prize. In his writings, he admitted that by the time he had committed the murder that sent him to prison for life, he had fifteen prior convictions for such crimes as rape and burglary. “I wielded my steel rod among prostitutes in Hamburg, Munich and Marseilles,” he wrote. “I had enemies and I conquered them through my inner hatred.”
His memoir begins with a tone of existential despair. “My sweaty hands were bound behind my back,” he wrote in Fegefeuer, “with steel chains snapped around my wrists. The hard pressure on my legs and back makes me realize that my only escape is to end it. I lay awake, removed from the liberating unconsciousness of the sheep. Bathed in shit, trembling. My miserable small dreams are a daily reminder. Anxiously I stare into the unknown darkness of the still night outside. There’s security in darkness. I try to divert my thoughts from wondering about the time. I ask only for the immediate moment, for in that lies my strength. It’s still night, already late into the night, getting closer to morning.”
Unterweger gave the impression that he was himself a victim, and he lied about his rough life. He falsely claimed his mother and her sister had been prostitutes, that an aunt (who didn’t even exist) had been murdered, and that he’d been forced to live with an abusive, alcoholic grandfather. (Unterweger’s stepsister insisted that this was inaccurate.) Critics and prison reformers embraced his supposed honesty and hailed him as an example of how art can redeem a criminal. Journalists contacted him for interviews and it wasn’t long before support swelled among café intellectuals—Literarniks—to set him free. It seemed clear from his ideas and ability to write that he could contribute to the betterment of society. In fact, a prominent sex researcher said that Unterweger was remorseful, understood his past actions, and could keep himself from relapsing.
On May 23, 1990, just before his fortieth birthday, he won parole. He was granted a generous government subsidy to assist him in making the transition from prison to the world. “That life is over now,” he told the press. “Let’s get on with the new.” What he meant was that he was ready to kill again.
In his new life, Unterweger became the darling of Viennese intellectuals. He was much in demand, attending book launches, literary soirees, and opening nights. Fegefeuer was made into a movie, and the former convict was a frequent guest on talk shows. A traveling theater troupe presented his plays, inviting him to the openings, where he presented himself as a suave and stylish figure in white suits, silk shirts, and gold chains. He purchased several flashy cars, and whenever he showed up in Vienna’s trendy champagne bars, he charmed the women.
Unterweger was good at sniffing out stories that the public craved to read. It wasn’t long before someone thought he ought to be writing about murder, since he knew that subject firsthand, so he avidly pursued such cases, wrote about them, and talked about them on television. Regarding the recent string of prostitute murders, he hounded investigators in print about their failure to arrest someone. He interviewed prostitutes in the streets, wrote forcefully about “the Courier,” and alerted the public that, contrary to what the police said, their worst fears were true: Austria had a serial killer.
Clandestine Investigation
Eventually, investigators began to view him as a suspect, given his background. He had started early, stealing cars and breaking into businesses. He seemed to despise prostitutes and had once forced a young woman into acts of prostitution and taken her money—a way to degrade her. But their first task was to ensure that it was physically possible for Unterweger to commit any of the crimes.
They instituted a discreet surveillance of him, but he did not act in a suspicious manner. He went about his business, meeting literary colleagues and dining with various women. Then on June 11, 1991, three days into the surveillance, he flew to Los Angeles to write a series of freelance articles about crime in that city for an Austrian magazine.
During the five weeks that Unterweger was in Los Angeles, the murders in Austria stopped. Dr. Ernst Geiger, the number two man in the Austrian Federal Police and the most experienced detective on the force, took charge of the investigation. He knew he had to build a clear case against Unterweger or eliminate him and move on, because the public would turn on the police if they falsely accused such a popular figure. Through credit-card receipts at hotels, restaurants, and rental-car agencies, investigators pieced together Unterweger’s movements. They placed him in Graz in October when Brunhilde Masser was murdered and again in March when Elfriede Schrempf disappeared. He was in Bregenz in December when Heidemarie Hammerer was taken, and a witness said that Unterweger resembled the man with whom Hammerer was last seen. On that night, this witness said, the man had worn a brown leather jacket and red knit scarf. The police listed these items on a warrant.
They also determined that Unterweger had been in Prague the previous September. Contacting authorities there, they learned that his visit had coincided with the unsolved murder of Blanka Bockova, and during the times when the four victims were abducted in Vienna, Unterweger was there as well. They had enough evidence to warrant an interview with the famous writer.
On October 22, 1991, officers of the Criminal Investigation Bureau in Vienna questioned Unterweger about the Austrian murders. The lead interviewer already knew his suspect, because as a journalist, Unterweger had questioned him about the series of murders for an article. There was the chance that the bureau’s interest in him might pressure him to confess, but while he admitted seeing hookers, he denied knowing any of the victims. Although Unterweger had no alibis, investigators had no evidence, so they had to give up.
In retaliation, Unterweger wrote more articles about the mishandling of the investigation. Many of his new cronies supported him, taking up the cause that he was being targeted and persecuted.
Around this time, the missing Regina Prem’s husband and son, who had unlisted numbers, received telephone calls from a man who claimed to be her killer. He accurately described what she was wearing the night she disappeared. He was her executioner, he said, and God had ordered him to do it. She had been left in “a place of sacrifice” with her face “turned toward hell.” He also said, “I gave eleven of them the punishment they deserved.” Three months later, in January 1992, Prem’s husband found five empty cigarette packs of the brand that she preferred rolled up in his mailbox. Among these packs was a passport photo that Regina had carried of her son.
Geiger questioned Austrian prostitutes, who described Unterweger’s desire that they wear handcuffs during sex. That was consistent enough with the killer, so the police continued their surveillance. Geiger also tracked down the BMW that Unterweger had purchased upon his release from prison. He’d replaced it with a VW Passat, but its new owner allowed the police to go through it. They found a hair fragment, which might or might not help, but which they sent for analysis.
In February 1992, the Interior Ministry created a special commission for further investigation, which involved investigators from Vienna, Graz, and lower Austria, with Geiger leading it. He was determined to rearrest Unterweger and hoped for useful results from the lab analysis.
Manfred Hochmeister, at the Institut für Rechtsmedizin in Berne, Switzerland, found sufficient skin on the root of the hair shaft from the car to perform a DNA analysis using the PCR technique. They compared it to the DNA of each of the victims and found that it matched the first victim, Blanka Bockova, from Prague. That placed the strangled woman with Jack Unterweger, since he had driven the car at the time, and made it possible for police to get a warrant to search Unterweger’s apartment in Vienna.
When investigators arrived, he was not at home, but their hunch about him inspired a comprehensive search. They discovered a menu and receipts from a seafood restaurant in Malibu, California, as well as photographs of Unterweger posing with female members of the Los Angeles Police Department. Opening a closet, they received a nice surprise: a brown leather jacket and red knit scarf, which they seized.
Geiger contacted the LAPD to ask about unsolved murders in the city and discovered that they were investigating three seemingly linked murders of prostitutes. Geiger pressed for details: all had been left out in the open, strangled with their bras, and killed during the time when Unterweger had been in the city. Shannon Exley, thirty-five, was found on June 20, 1991, on a hill near the Pomona Freeway in the Boyle Heights area; on June 30, Irene Rodriguez was dumped on pavement on First and Myers streets in Boyle Heights; and then twenty-six-year-old Peggi Jean Booth (aka Sherri Ann Long) was strangled and left in brushland on Corral Canyon Road in the Malibu Hills. Her body was discovered on July 10.
Geiger mentioned Unterweger being there and learned that the L.A. cops were familiar with him. He had introduced himself as a European journalist and said he was working on an article about prostitution in L.A., so he needed to know where these women might be found. Using the receipts recovered at Unterweger’s apartment, Geiger realized that the places where each victim was last seen alive were near one of the seedy, twenty-five-dollar-a-night hotels in which Unterweger had stayed. Now, for the first time, the LAPD had a viable suspect for their serial killings and Geiger had even more supporting information for his own case. He also found the two articles that Unterweger had published upon his return from California. “Real life in L.A.,” Unterweger had written, “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.”
In Switzerland, analysts at the University of Berne had finished their examination of the leather jacket and red scarf from Unterweger’s apartment. Fibers from these items were consistent with those found on the body of Heidemarie Hammerer. No one could definitely identify the scarf as the source of the evidence, but it could not be eliminated either, and it allowed Geiger to obtain an arrest warrant. Once again, when the police arrived at Unterweger’s apartment, he was gone—off on a holiday with his girlfriend, Bianca Mrak, a pretty eighteen-year-old who had met him in a wine bar where she worked as a waitress.
Meanwhile, Unterweger’s friends told him that the police were seeking information about him, so he fled the country, with Bianca in tow. The couple ended up in South Beach. From there, Unterweger called Austrian papers to insist that he was being framed and asked his friends for support. The authorities learned that Bianca’s mother was sending money via wire transfers, so they contacted her to tell her their suspicions about the man who was with her daughter. She agreed to help.
Unterweger offered a deal: he promised to return and answer questions if the arrest warrants were withdrawn. He wrote a letter in his defense to Austrian officials, which he wanted published in newspapers so the public would read his claim and decide for themselves about his innocence. “My flight was and is no confession,” he insisted. “It is a different type of despair.” He went on to point out that there was no way to prove anything against him. “I was doing well,” he wrote, “perhaps too good—and fate decided to punish me once more for my debt from the past. But in the moment, I still have something to say. If a fair, neutral official of justice is invited to determine that the warrant against me is unjust, I am ready to place myself at this person’s disposal.”
One magazine, Erfolg, offered him a substantial fee for the exclusive story of his escape. He agreed to do it, happy for both the money and the publicity, and gave its editors an address. They passed this along to Geiger.
To everyone, Unterweger made the same claim: he had an alibi for every one of the murders. The police were giving out a “controlled history.” They had singled him out as a scapegoat because they were upset over his parole and his published criticism of them, and were intent on sending him back to prison. Until he could get a fair hearing, he said, he would remain on the run.
Bianca wired her mother to send cash, providing a Miami address, and Mrs. Mrak informed the police. (By some accounts, the editor of Erfolg only pretended to hire him so that he would go to the money-exchange office and into the hands of police.) The information was conveyed to Interpol, which alerted U.S. officials. The U.S. marshals took it from there. They arrested Unterweger, while an agent accompanied Bianca to the place where she and Unterweger were staying. A search of their rooms turned up Unterweger’s travel journal, which indicated that he was contemplating murdering Bianca.
Unterweger was detained in order to await extradition, but it was unclear whether he was going to California or to Austria. Although LAPD detectives Fred Miller and Jim Harper arrived to question him, it was deemed best to turn him over to his native country. To strengthen their own case, Miller and Harper obtained a search warrant for tissue samples, so they drew Unterweger’s blood and took hair samples and swabs of saliva for DNA testing. His DNA matched that found in semen from one of their victims, but she also had semen from six other men, so this case was weak. Unfortunately, there had been no discharge in or on the other two prostitutes.
The detectives told Unterweger that in California he faced the possibility of the gas chamber, so he quickly agreed to be deported. He had Austrian public opinion on his side, and the actual physical evidence the police had there was flimsy. He believed he could beat the rap. In a fairly good mood, he was sent back to Austria on May 28, 1992.
While being detained in his home country, Unterweger gave interviews freely. He claimed that he had been fully rehabilitated and asked, in Profil in October, “Would I be so stupid and so mad that during the luckiest phase of my life, in which I’ve done theater productions, played a role onstage, organized a tour, and made many wonderful female friends, I would go kill someone each week in between?” He also kept a prison journal of his thoughts and his poetry about the time he’d been free, and wrote letters to the press insisting on his innocence. He could prove it, he said, although he offered nothing to support this claim.
Then, a year after her disappearance in 1991, parts of a skeleton were found that were identified as the remains of Regina Prem, the woman whose husband had received the disturbing phone calls. She had been left in the woods, which was consistent with the pattern of killings, but no clothing or jewelry was found, and after such a long period of exposure to the elements, her manner of death could not be determined.
Although some of the eminent writers who had led the campaign to free Unterweger continued to stand by him, his most vocal early supporters issued public apologies. Jack was losing some of his appeal.
VICAP
The best hope for conviction was to demonstrate the repetitive patterns from case to case. There was no time for the Austrians to develop a database, and they knew that testimony from a mental health expert could easily be countered by defense experts. The FBI had a database and plenty of expertise in serial murder. Three of the murders were committed on U.S. soil, and since Austrian courts allowed evidence from crimes committed in other jurisdictions, Geiger knew what he had to do next.
He contacted an FBI office in Vienna, and through them, he explained what he needed to Supervisory Special Agent Gregg McCrary in the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) at Quantico, Virginia. McCrary described their meeting and his involvement in the case in The Unknown Darkness. Geiger enlisted Thomas Mueller, chief of the Criminal Psychology Service in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, to go with him to the States, and for two weeks, they learned how the BSU worked on such cases. Profiling was not involved, since these cases were well beyond that stage, but the area of Criminal Investigative Analysis that was relevant was case linkage—showing that the behaviors were consistent across the cases in such a way as to prove that the same perpetrator committed them all.
“Before the Austrian investigators arrived,” McCrary said, “I asked that they separate the victim files from suspect information, because we don’t want to know anything about this person. As objective as we try to be, we still might spin or interpret the cases to fit. We put that aside and don’t compare it until we’ve gone through the case and drawn our own opinion. On the other hand, I wanted a lot of information about the victims—the method and manner of their respective deaths, family history, occupation, the crime scene photos, and the full autopsy reports. I would start without any presupposition that these cases were linked and if I came to the conclusion that they were, I would tell the investigators the kind of person who was most likely to commit the crimes in question. Afterward, they could compare those characteristics to their suspect.
“The two most logical officials for me to meet made plans to come to the states: Ernst Geiger, who was in charge of the investigation, and Thomas Mueller. They told me when they expected to arrive and I blocked out my calendar for two weeks in August. They were bringing twelve boxes of reports, so I commandeered the downstairs conference room for the duration of their visit.”
Since criminal profiling had not yet been utilized in Austria, McCrary carefully explained to them the concept of a signature analysis that might link several crime scenes. He looked through the eleven files they brought: seven in Austria, one in Czechoslovakia, and three in the United States. This was unusual: “Killers who travel outside their realm of familiarity are rare. In particular, while they may cross into bordering countries, such as from Austria into neighboring Czechoslovakia, we almost never see them actually fly overseas to look for new victims.” Nevertheless, he knew that the human factor meant there was always room for a surprise.
McCrary examined the chronology and methods. “Examining one victim at a time, we looked at the way each had been killed, the manner of body disposal, the type of items left at the scene and the type removed. I took extensive notes to try to distill the significant factors that would help to create a timeline and a means for comparing one case to another. In particular, I was looking for an escalation of certain behaviors. I also examined the terrain and type of geography at the disposal sites and their relationship to the cities of Prague, Graz, and Vienna.”
He spotted a pattern:
• The victimology and manner of disposal were similar
• All victims were left outside, and most had branches or foliage placed over them
• No semen was left on or in the bodies (except a small amount on one of the L.A. prostitutes)
• The cause of death was strangulation, usually with an undergarment or stocking
• Many had restraint bruises on their arms and wrists
• No one had seen them going with someone or getting into a car
• There was an absence of any indication of sexual assault
• The trace evidence was next to none
• The MO appeared to be calculated rather than spontaneous
“I believed that this killer acted violently, probably out of impotence. He was insecure about his masculinity and when he could not perform after being stimulated, he blamed the women for shaming him, so he killed them and left their bodies in humiliating positions. The violence itself had become erotic to him.”
The next step was to put information into the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) database. This program was the result of the efforts of a Los Angeles-based detective named Pierce Brooks. As early as 1958, he had spearheaded the movement to develop a national database for unsolved crimes around the country. In one case he worked, he had spent his off-hours and many weekends in the library looking for similar incidents to link to the offender. He started in Los Angeles and then began to go through articles from other major cities. The task seemed hopeless, but then he found a murder in another city that was similar. He made a fingerprint match between the two cases, but the process had been time-consuming and arduous, and with the development of computers he knew it could be streamlined.
He approached his chief with the idea, but such an enterprise seemed financially extravagant. Nevertheless, Brooks knew that investigators around the country needed a centralized database and he never stopped pushing for it. It would be more than two decades before he finally realized his dream. In the early 1980s, at a Senate subcommittee meeting for the Department of Justice, he and others argued for funding for a networked computerized system that would catch serial killers earlier in their careers than had been the case up to then. Brooks said that his own method of looking up linked crimes had remained the same for twenty-five years, which was shameful in the light of advances in technology. Thus VICAP (or ViCAP) was born. The FBI was set to run it out of Quantico as part of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), and in 1985 Brooks became its first director.
Using standardized forms that contained a lot of questions, police departments from around the country provided detailed data about specific types of incidents: solved, unsolved, and attempted homicides (especially random or sexually oriented); unidentified bodies in which the manner of death is suspected to be homicide; sexual assault incidents; and missing-persons cases in which foul play appears to have played a part. In other words, by using the FBI-provided software and searching the database, a homicide in Los Angeles might be linked to one in Florida committed by the same person, or a murdered John Doe in Missouri could be identified as a missing-person runaway from Michigan. The database benefited large and small agencies equally, giving anyone who searched it the ability to link crimes from around the country.
In addition, VICAP also offered services in investigative support, such as off-line searches and the development of detailed time lines, case management consultation (especially multiagency), and training in crime analysis. The staff could also prepare a “VICAP alert” notice for the Law Enforcement Bulletin and other publications.
“At that time, we had 10,000 to 12,000 solved and unsolved homicide cases on file,” said McCrary, “so we entered key words from the case analysis in order to narrow down the search field. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, so I used a minimum number of variables from the cases: age group, the fact that they were prostitutes, the ligature strangulation, the outdoor disposal sites, how they were left mostly or partly nude, and that they had retained their jewelry.”
Using the VICAP system, he ordered a multidimensional ad hoc search with fifteen cross-referenced criteria. After two days, Geiger received a report that included the eight European cases and the three from California, as well as one more in California. However, the man responsible for this last crime turned out to already be in prison.
“That was a convincing statistic,” said McCrary. “Just using those variables, we excluded thousands of other cases in the database. The eleven believed to be in the series were all linked by the computer. In other words, it would be highly unusual to have more than one guy engaging in this specific type of behavior during this same time period. Even more significant, this offender had committed all these murders in less than a year.”
Then it was time to open the envelope containing the information about the suspect. Unterweger’s movements also formed a time line from September of 1991 through July of 1992. He proved to be a very good suspect: “We could put Unterweger at every murder location. He was either the unluckiest man in the world to have been in all those places at the wrong time or he was an excellent suspect.”
The Fugitive Pleads His Case
The trial began under Judge Kurt Haas in June 1994 in Graz, Austria. As an Austrian citizen, Unterweger could be tried for the three murders in Los Angeles and the one in Prague along with the seven in Austria. Despite his many indictments, public support for him had not diminished and he continued to seek interviews in which he claimed he was innocent and bragged about how he would win. (He’d even published another book by then—99 Hours—that detailed his life on the run.) The prosecutors, Martin Wenzl and Karl Gasser, intended to show that he was a liar, that he had no alibi, that as a psychopath he was still dangerous, and that the evidence nailed him and only him. Unterweger was represented by Hans Lehofer, as well as by the entertainment lawyer who had assisted in winning his parole, Georg Zanger.
Detective Jim Harper arrived from Los Angeles to lay out the evidence from those cases, and Lynn Herold from the crime lab to testify about the special knots used to bind or strangle each victim. The bras from the Los Angeles prostitutes had been cut in exactly the same places in order to create a braid using the straps. Herold showed how the Austrian killer had made a similar knot with the tights and stockings belonging to the victims there.
Gregg McCrary, the first FBI profiler to testify in an Austrian court, discussed the VICAP system, the unique behavioral patterns that linked all of the crimes, and how those behaviors were associated with Unterweger’s first murder. In addition, the prosecution had a psychiatric report about Unterweger’s sadistic criminal nature; Blanka Bockova’s hair recovered from Unterweger’s car; numerous red fibers from Brunhilde Masser’s body consistent with fibers from Unterweger’s red scarf; and character-witness testimony from former associates and girlfriends whom he had conned.
Unterweger’s attorneys had never before dealt with the FBI’s criminal investigative analysis program, so they inadvertently asked questions that only strengthened the prosecution’s case. They attempted to prove that the prosecution’s case was irrational and illogical—Unterweger was a successful journalist and successful with women, so why would he undermine himself so badly, and why would he even need a prostitute? These questions were easily addressed by someone familiar, as McCrary was, with the compulsion and fetishes involved in serial murder. Rationality is not usually the issue, he pointed out, nor the availability of sex. Killing was a dark addiction, motivated by thrill or the need for control.
Unterweger, dressed like a dandy, argued his case before the jury. He seemed confident that his charm and good looks would deflect them from the evidence. He asked the jury not to judge him on past deeds, admitting what a “rat” he had once been, “a primitive criminal who grunted rather than talked and an inveterate liar.” He “consumed women, rather than loved them.” But he had changed, he insisted. He had been rehabilitated. He was no longer the bad person he once had been.
“I’m counting on your acquittal,” he said, “because I am not the culprit. Your decision will affect not only me but the real killer, who is laughing up his sleeve.”
The trial lasted two months, involving many witnesses, and the opinion of the press toward Unterweger began to shift, especially when they learned he had tried to persuade some people to provide a false alibi. Things looked bad for the defendant. So far he’d been unable to counter the evidence, as he’d promised to do. Perhaps the reformed criminal had not been reformed after all. Even Bianca Mrak had decided she’d had enough and abandoned him.
In the end, the evidence was convincing. The jury voted six to two to convict, which was sufficient in Austria. Jack Unterweger was found guilty of nine counts of murder—the Prague victim, all three Los Angeles victims, and five in Austria. (The remaining two Austrian victims had been too decomposed to establish a definite cause of death.) The court immediately sentenced the defendant to life in prison. His eyes filled with tears as he vowed to appeal.
This was quite a blow to a man who had assured everyone that he would never spend another day in that hellhole. Psychopathic serial killers often have issues with control, and Unterweger was no exception. Defiant to the end, he fulfilled his promise in the only manner that was left to him: when the guards were not looking, he used the string from his prison jumpsuit to hang himself. By some accounts, it was tied in the same knot he had used on the panty hose of his victims.
On a positive note, Unterweger’s legacy was that Austria set up a system for criminal investigation similar to the FBI’s VICAP program. As for Jack Unterweger, he was a rare and clever offender, but his case demonstrated what McCrary likes to say: “When you educate a psychopath, all you get is an educated psychopath.”
Catching a serial killer usually involves the coordination of a number of resources, but rarely do investigators bait a trap with a former victim. The following case was one such success story.
Sources
Articles from German newspapers and magazines on Jack Unterweger.
Blumenthal, Ralph. “Confined, in Prisons, Literature Breaks Out.” New York Times, August 26, 2000.
DeNevi, Don, and John H. Campbell. Into the Minds of Madmen: How the FBI Behavioral Science Unit Revolutionized Crime Investigation. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004.
“Forensic Psychiatric Aspects of the Case of Jack Unterweger.” Forensische Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Expenditure 4.
King, Brian, editor. Lustmord: The Writings and Artifacts of Murderers. Burbank, CA: Bloat, 1996.
Leake, John. Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Malnic, Eric. “Following a Killing Trail.” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1992.
_. “Police Fight Time in Effort to Link Austrian, Killings.” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1992.
_. “Austrian Slayer of L.A. Prostitutes Kills Self.” Los Angeles Times, June 30, 1994.
McCrary, Gregg, with Katherine Ramsland. The Unknown Darkness: Profiling the Predators Among Us. New York: William Morrow, 2003.
Unterweger, Jack. Fegefeuer, order die Reise ins Zuchthaus. Maro Vlg., Augsbg, 1983.
_. Endstation Zuchthaus/Kerkerzeit. Taschenbuch, 1984.
Wagner, Astrid. Kannibalenzeit: Die Unterweger-Verschwörung. Broschiert, 1996.
_. Im Zweifel Schuldig: Der Fall der Jack Unterweger: Wenn Medien Recht Sprechen. Broschiert, 1998.