The Devil's Dozen (21 page)

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.

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.

It was rare for patrol officers to be in this position, but for two weeks Brian Lewis and Ed Bachert had been sitting up all night in separate houses in the hope of stopping a roving killer. At each place lived the victim of a brutal attack, and on Bachert’s watch in the middle of the night, someone had banged on the door but tried nothing more. Lewis wondered if the house where he was staying would be next.

The killer had already returned to the place at least once, before the surveillance, stealing a gun. He knew that someone who lived there could identify him, so Lewis had been watching throughout the night. If no one showed up soon, the surveillance would end, but with a few nights remaining, Lewis knew he still had a chance to stop the man who had already killed three women in the area.

Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the peaceful Lehigh Valley, seemed an unlikely place for a serial killer, but during the 1980s and 1990s, such crimes had increased across the country. There had been several serial killers in Philadelphia, an hour to the south. Then, in quick succession in 1993, a man abducted a girl and also entered four different homes, killing three people and assaulting two more, including a five-year-old child. The woman Lewis was now protecting would probably have died had not a neighbor fortuitously stepped in.

It was now the twelfth night on his watch. He had a few magazines to help keep himself alert, and lights burned as enticement at the two windows left open. Around 1:20 a.m., Lewis heard a noise and tensed to listen. Someone was testing the patio door.

Harvey Robinson, whose series
of rape/murders struck fear into
the small town of Allentown,
Pennsylvania, in 1992.
Allentown Police Department

This was it! The end of a terror spree that had started eighteen months before.

Mary Burghardt, twenty-nine, suffered from a mental illness and could not function without assistance. On August 7, 1992, she reported that someone had cut through a screen door and entered her apartment. Two days later, she was unaware that a young man was watching her through a window as she began to undress. She entered the living room with some milk and cookies, and suddenly the same man tore through the front window screen and came at her, smacking her so hard in the head that he knocked off her glasses and spattered the wall with her blood. Although trapped, she managed to run past this intruder and get to a room where she could pound on the wall and scream for help. No one came.

The intruder turned on the television, increasing the volume. With his prey trapped and helpless, he bludgeoned her with a blunt weapon until she fell to the floor; he kept hitting her in a rage until he had delivered thirty-seven blows to her head, some so strong that strands of her hair were driven into the skull fractures. Once he was certain she was dead, he looked for a pair of her panties in a drawer and then used them to masturbate over her prostrate body. Then he left through a back door. Despite being covered in blood, he walked through a field and returned to his home, about four blocks away.

Soon he was detained for a lesser crime and sent to juvenile detention. When he was released eight months later, on June 9, 1993, he drove back to his victim’s neighborhood and spotted a girl on a bike delivering papers. He grabbed her in broad daylight.

A woman on East Gordon Street, waiting for her
Morning Call,
looked out her window and saw the newspaper cart abandoned between two parked cars. It was uncharacteristic of carrier Charlotte Schmoyer to be negligent, so the woman phoned the police. They called Schmoyer’s supervisor, who said he had not heard from her and could not locate her. When officers searched the area, they located the girl’s bicycle and portable radio, but not her. She was also not home.

D.A. Robert Steinberg accompanied the police as they followed a tip to a wooded area at the East Side Reservoir. They discovered a trail of blood leading from the parking lot and Steinberg noted a discarded shoe. Then one searcher called out from the woods that he had found the fifteen-year-old’s body, covered with dead leaves and several heavy logs. No one had seen the incident, but a resident recalled a light blue car in the area, while someone else reported a similar vehicle at the reservoir.

An autopsy revealed that Schmoyer had been stabbed twenty-two times in the back and neck before her throat was slashed open. She had also been raped, and three superficial cuts indicated that a knife was held to her throat during her ordeal. A pubic hair was picked off her navy sweatshirt and a head hair from her knee.

Yet there were no real leads and no clues from the scene of the abduction or murder, so this shocking crime went unsolved. Residents wondered if the girl had known her abductor or if the incident had involved a stranger’s random attack. No one yet realized that Charlotte Schmoyer was actually the second victim of the killer.

Denise Sam-Cali, thirty-seven, lived on the East Side of Allentown, not far from where Charlotte had been abducted, and she usually walked a mile each morning to the limousine and bus service she owned with her husband, John. She learned only later that a young man had spotted and followed her.

Denise and John went away for a few days and returned on June 17. To their annoyance, they found the back door to their home slightly open. John went inside to look around, but saw no immediate evidence of a burglary. Nevertheless, someone had clearly been there, as a whiskey bottle had been moved and they found a dirty footprint on the couch. Then John checked his gun collection, which he kept in a special bag in the closet, and was stunned to discover the bag gone. He phoned the police, who were unable to locate the stolen collection.

For protection, John quickly purchased two more guns, including one for Denise. He felt frightened knowing that someone not only had those guns but had also entered his home, and violated it. Denise did her best to learn how to shoot, although she hoped she’d never need to defend herself in this manner. The couple had reason to grow even more worried when another incident occurred in their neighborhood.

On June 20, an intruder entered the home of a woman who was in bed on the second floor with her boyfriend. Her five-year-old daughter slept in a bedroom nearby, and the intruder entered and choked her into unconsciousness, carrying her by her neck downstairs. She revived and tried to scream, but he dumped her headfirst into a laundry basket full of towels and dirty clothes. While she was unable to move or scream, he raped her. Then he choked her again and she passed out. At this point, he left the residence and went home, just two blocks away.

Early the following morning, the girl woke her mother to tell her what had happened, so the woman’s boyfriend checked downstairs and found that a window screen had been removed. The victim’s mother saw small hemorrhages in the child’s eyes, a sign of asphyxia. She took her to a doctor who found that she had been choked till some blood vessels had burst and had been sexually attacked. The intruder had probably intended to kill her.

With one victim grabbed outside and two accosted inside their homes, Allentown residents were alarmed. More people began locking their doors and windows, despite the summer heat, but this did not stop the marauder. After a month, he struck again.

Denise Sam-Cali was home alone on June 28, because John was on a business trip. She had come in late after visiting her aunt down the street, and gone to bed. Although she had practiced with the new gun and was able to hold it steady, she still did not feel safe. Opening the bedroom window for some fresh air, she undressed and crawled under the sheets.

But she was restless and unable to sleep. She lay in bed listening to the night noises outside and hoping that John would come home. Suddenly she caught her breath. She was sure she’d heard something inside the house that sounded like crackling paper. She sat up and shouted, “Who’s there?” She hoped whoever it was believed he had entered an empty house, like before, and that he would be startled to realize someone was home and decide to just leave. But the place was silent.

Deciding she’d be safer with a neighbor, Denise jumped out of bed, grabbed a comforter to cover herself, and ran down the hall. To her horror, a man emerged from a walk-in closet with a knife in his hand. Racing away, she went for the door, but he got there, too, and grabbed her arm. He tried to stab her in the face, cutting her lip, but she knocked the knife away and struggled to get out. Although he still had a firm grip on her arm, she managed to break free, get outside, and run. On the lawn, the man caught her by the hair and threw her to the ground. She tried to scream but nothing more than a gurgle came out. This intruder was adept at pinning a woman down while he prepared to rape her. He began to strangle her, and she later recalled being punched four times in the face. Denise bit her attacker hard and cried out, but he choked her until she blacked out.

But she was lucky. A neighbor turned on a floodlight, which frightened off the attacker. Denise regained consciousness and managed to crawl back into her home and call 911. The police arrived and took her to a hospital. It was clear from her injuries that she would need hospitalization and possibly plastic surgery. She let a nurse process her with a rape kit for evidence, although she was not certain she’d been raped. As doctors attended to her bruised face and the strangulation marks on her neck, she was aware how lucky she was to be alive. Her assailant had certainly intended to kill her. The police soon found the knife he had grabbed in the house, wrapped in a napkin and left behind on the floor.

John was horrified when he learned what had happened. He made immediate plans to secure their home but insisted that Denise stay with one of her relatives. When she was able, she gave the police a description of her attacker: he’d been white, about five-foot-seven, muscular, young, and clean-shaven. His eyes, she recalled, were filled with rage. It would take a session with a hypnotist to help her bring forth enough details from that night to realize that she had indeed been raped.

When the newspaper reported that Denise had survived the attack, she knew she would never be safe in her home as long as this killer was free. He would certainly be afraid that she would recognize him, and given the fact that most of his assaults were in her neighborhood, it was likely he lived there.