Johann 'Jack' Unterweger - International Serial Killer. (True Crimes Book 15)

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On May 28 1992, Unterweger arrived at Vienna airport. As he stepped off the plane, flanked by two US marshals, he seemed relaxed, as though he'd just returned from a holiday in Florida. What Leake misses is that Borneman, for years an English resident, was also author of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor, published in 1937 under the pseudonym Cameron McCabe and later hailed as a milestone in crime fiction. For Unterweger's purposes, this radical and experimental murder mystery, set in the film industry, had one crucial point: the author of the story was also the killer. Had he read it? Did he know that his sponsor had written such a vital work? As a voracious reader he may well have known the book, which had a cult following and was published in German under Borneman's name. As it is, we don't know whether Unterweger cultivated Borneman on his release or what Borneman's response was to his error of judgment. He committed suicide in 1995, the year after Unterweger. However, a possible clue is noted by Leake who reports a journalist remarking on a strange tie worn by Unterweger, "made out of a roll of 35mm film, [which] might have said something about his strange interior life". They hatched a plan. They would pose as journalists from the Culture section, trying to get a scoop on Unterweger's latest book (whatever that was).

But he got what he wanted – a free trip to California to kill some hookers and make himself a little more famous and known and thoughtful." Police in Graz eventually gathered enough evidence to arrest Unterweger, but he had fled by the time they entered his home. [14] After law enforcement agencies chased him and his girlfriend, Bianca Mrak, through Switzerland, France, and the US, he was finally arrested by US Marshals in Miami, Florida, on 27 February 1992. [14] While a fugitive, he had called the Austrian media to try to convince them of his innocence.Information researched and summarized by Chelsea Newton & Tiffany Waller | Department of Psychology | Radford University | Radford, VA 24142-6946" (PDF). Amid these murders, Unterweger was hired by another Austrian magazine and on June 2, 1991, he traveled to Los Angeles, California in the United States.His task was to write about crime in the United States. Specifically how attitudes towards prostitution vary between the two countries.Unterweger was able to arrange several ride alongs with police in L.A.He focused specifically on areas populated by prostitutes. In 1985, a campaign to pardon and release Unterweger from prison commenced. Austrian President Rudolf Kirchschläger ( SPÖ/ ÖVP) refused the petition when it was presented to him, citing the court-mandated minimum of fifteen years in prison. [10] Writers, artists, journalists and politicians agitated for a pardon, [11] including Jelinek and German novelist Günter Grass; [12] along with the editor of the magazine Manuskripte, Alfred Kolleritsch. [11]

But the newly-freed Unterweger seemed to have grown far beyond the violence that defined his early years. He’d become something of an Austrian literary sensation. He gave readings, staged his plays, and worked as a reporter. In fact, Unterweger established himself as a key journalist investigating the recent string of prostitute murders. Shamelessly, Unterweger interviewed Vienna’s chief of police and penned newspaper essays about the deaths.He grew up tough and illiterate, supporting himself through petty thievery and pimping. "I wielded my steel rod among the prostitutes of Hamburg, Munich and Marseilles," he later wrote. "I had enemies and conquered them through my inner hatred." At the time I didn't get it, I wondered why people believed in someone who was so obviously fake, so obviously lying," said Malkovich in an exclusive interview with the Guardian. "Only years later did the real story come out." He’d relished the attention of the press ever since his writing career took off while in prison. Once released, he posed for high-fashion photo shoots and went on TV to discuss his beloved works, all while continuing to court his fawning press. Unterweger was a suspect, but there was virtually no proof tying him to the crimes, no witnesses, no forensic evidence. The killings were very clean. Later it would be speculated that he was periodically impotent and would kill the prostitutes in rage at his own incapacity. A few have offered public mea culpas, such as Guenther Nenning, one of Unterweger's most vocal supporters. Perhaps, Nenning postulated, some blame should be affixed to Viennese intellectuals for "breaking into this life and then abandoning him."

He went to Miami with his girlfriend, even as the Austrian police collected evidence to prove that Unterweger was the killer. The pair went to collect wired money from a Western Union bank, where the police were waiting nearby to arrest him. Geiger imagined the uproar in Austria if Unterweger was sentenced to death in the US. He doubted it was going to happen. The DNA test result wouldn't be available before Austria's 90-day extradition period expired on May 27, and without the DNA result Geiger knew it was unlikely the Los Angeles DA could prosecute.

Unterweger devoted much of his literary energy to the construction of myths about himself, so the facts of his childhood are murky at best. He was born in August 1950, bastard son of an Austrian mother and an American father, a GI serving in the army of occupation that remained in Austria for a decade after World War II. The father vanished before the baby was born; the mother, who Unterweger often claimed was a prostitute, abandoned him when he was 2 to an alcoholic grandfather in rural Austria. As police began to close in on him, Unterweger was hired by an Austrian magazine to write an article on crime in LA that focused on the differences between the Austrian and American perceptions of prostitution. While on his trip to Los Angeles, Untweger went on ride-alongs with the LAPD and gave them insight on catching killers.