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.