About five weeks later, in Graz, Austria, over 200 miles (320 km) to the south, a prostitute named Brunhilde Masser vanished. She was last seen on 26 October 1990. Prostitution is legal in Austria and sexually motivated murders were rare. At the time, an average of around one prostitute a year was killed. However, that was about to change. On 5 December, another prostitute, Heidemarie Hammerer, disappeared from Bregenz, near the border of Switzerland and Germany. Then, on New Year’s Eve, hikers came across her body in the woods outside the town. She was fully clothed and lying on her back with her stomach covered with dead leaves.
When the police arrived at the crime scene, they found that the victim appeared to have been naked when she was killed. Afterwards, she had been redressed, then dragged through the woods. Fortunately, the cold winter weather had preserved the body. Heidemarie’s legs were bare and the pathologist determined that she had been strangled with her own pantyhose. The cause of death was recorded as asphyxiation.
A piece had been cut from her slip with a sharp instrument, such as a knife. The missing piece was found in her mouth. It had been used as a gag. There were bruises on her wrists, indicating that she had been restrained with handcuffs or a tight ligature. The bruises on other areas of her body showed she had been beaten. No semen was found in, on or around the body. However, she had been killed elsewhere and any sexual discharge outside the body could have been washed away by the elements. She still wore her jewellery, so robbery did not seem to be a motive. The only clue to the killer was the presence of several red fibres on her clothing that did not match anything that she wore. These were collected and sent to a lab for analysis.
On 4 January 1991, five days after Heidemarie Hammerer’s body was found, other hikers stumbled across a badly decomposed corpse in a forest north of Graz. The naked body of a woman had been left in the bed of a stream and, again, covered with leaves. Her buttocks had been partially eaten by animals. The pathologist was able to determine that she had been stabbed and possibly strangled with her pantyhose. But the advanced state of decomposition made it difficult to determine the cause of death with certainty. Her clothing, handbag and other personal property were missing. Yet she still had her jewellery. Eventually, police identified the victim as Brunhilde Masser, who had gone missing in Graz ten weeks before. Her murder was linked to that of Heidemarie Hammerer and the Federal Police took over the investigation. They tried to track down Brunhilde’s and Heidemarie’s last customers and discovered that, on the night she disappeared, Heidemarie had been seen with man wearing a leather jacket and a red scarf but the clue led nowhere.
Two months later, another prostitute disappeared in Graz. Elfriede Schrempf was last seen on her usual corner on 7 March 1991. Two days later, a man phoned the Schrempf family home and mentioned her by name. He railed against prostitutes and made threats, then hung up. A little later, he called again and repeated the exercise. He was not heard from again.
The Schrempf family’s phone number was unlisted, but Elfriede always carried it with her. Unless a close friend or relative was playing a dreadful prank, Elfriede had either run off with the man who had made the call, or he was her kidnapper or murderer.
While the Austrian police did not know about the murder of Blanka Bockova in Prague, they did tie the disappearance of Elfriede Schrempf to the murders of Brunhilde Masser and Heidemarie Hammerer. But still they had no real leads. Then on 5 October 1991, hikers found the skeletonized remains of a woman in the forest outside Graz. All that was left of her clothing was a pair of socks. Again she was covered by leaves, although it was autumn in any case. The remains were soon identified as those of Elfriede Schrempf. But the crime scene rendered no clues as to her killer.
Then four prostitutes – Regina Prem, Silvia Zagler, Karin Eroglu and Sabine Moitzi – disappeared from the streets of Vienna in under a month. While the police laid on extra patrols, they had no new crime scenes to investigate. But on 20 May 1992, Sabine Moitzi’s remains were found. Three days later, someone came across Karin Ergolu’s body. Both had been dumped in forested areas outside of Vienna; both had been strangled with articles of their own clothing. Moitzi was only wearing a jersey, pulled up to expose her breasts. Her clothing was found nearby, along with her handbag, though her money was missing. Ergolu was naked and had been subjected to blunt-force trauma to the face. Her handbag was missing, along with her clothing, except for her shoes and a body stocking. This had been forced down her throat.
According to the Austrian press, this was a clear sign that a serial killer was on the loose. They dubbed him the “Vienna Courier”. However, the police resisted the idea, emphasizing the different modus operandi of the killer in each case. However, sixty-nine-year-old former detective August Schenner had been following the murders in Vienna, Graz and Bregenz in the press. Until he retired nearly five years earlier, he had been with the Criminal Investigation Department in Salzburg. He called his former colleagues to tell them that the killer’s MO reminded him of a murderer he had once arrested.
Back in 1974, he had investigated two murders. One of the victims had been eighteen-year-old Margaret Schäfer. Her friend and fellow prostitute Barbara Scholz told the police that she and a man named Johann “Jack” Unterweger had robbed Schäfer’s house. Then they had lured her into a car and taken her into the woods. Unterweger had tied Schäfer’s hands behind her back with a belt from her coat. He had beaten her, stripped her and demanded certain sexual acts. When she refused, he hit her on the head with a steel pipe. Then he strangled her with her bra, leaving her naked body face up in the forest, covered with leaves – a crime scene strikingly similar to those of Blanka Bockova, Brunhilde Masser, Heidemarie Hammerer, Elfriede Schrempf, Sabine Moitzi and Karin Ergolu.
Schenner had arrested Unterweger. Under questioning, he had broken down and confessed to the murder of Schäfer. Dr Klaus Jarosch, a forensic psychologist who examined him, had proclaimed him a sexually sadistic psychopath with narcissistic and histrionic tendencies.
“He tends to sudden fits of rage and anger,” said Jarosch. “His physical activities are enormously aggressive with sexually sadistic perversion . . . He is an incorrigible perpetrator.”
In court, Unterweger said that when he hit Margaret Schäfer, he had seen his mother before him and had been consumed by a murderous rage. His mother Theresia had been a prostitute; his father an American soldier he had never met. From the age of two, he lived in a one-room shack with his grandfather, an alcoholic who beat him. From the age of five, he was drinking schnapps. His aunt, another prostitute, was murdered by a client. When he was sixteen, he had been arrested for assaulting a prostitute. This was significant as attacks on prostitutes were rare in Austria. He also had a rap sheet that included stealing cars, burglary, pimping and receiving stolen goods. He had also forced a young woman into acts of prostitution, and then took back the money. His fifteen prior convictions also included rape. By then he had taken the sobriquet “Jack” because of his fascination with Jack the Ripper.
In the second case that Schenner had been investigating, another prostitute, Marcia Horveth, was strangled with her stockings and a necktie. Her mouth had been covered with adhesive tape and her body was thrown into Lake Salzachsee near Salzburg, where Schenner had found her. As Unterweger had already been sentenced to life in prison, he was not charged with murder. But Schenner, who interviewed him, was certain that Unterweger was responsible, despite his denials.
Although Unterweger had been illiterate before he went to prison, he taught himself to read and spent every minute poring over books. Before long, he was editing the prison newspaper and a literary review. His poems, short stories and plays began to circulate in the outside world. In 1984, his short story “
Endstation Zuchthaus
” – “Terminus Prison” – won a prestigious literary prize and his prison memoir,
Fegefeuer – eine Reise ins Zuchthaus
(
Purgatory
–
a Journey to Prison
) was a bestseller.
“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.”
Fegefeur
begins with a sense of existential despair. “My sweaty hands were bound behind my back 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.”
As a result, Unterweger was hailed as a literary talent and a campaign was launched to have him freed. He was paroled, just a few months before Brunhilde Masser was murdered. However, it would need crime scene evidence to pin any crime on Unterweger, who was now a celebrity. His plays were being produced.
Fegefeur
was made into a movie. Unterweger was much in demand at parties and opening nights. He had his pick of women and drove around Vienna in a Ford Mustang with the number plate “W-JACK 1”.
Unterweger promoted himself as an expert on murder, writing about it and talking about it on television. Naturally, he turned his attention to the Vienna Courier. After interviewing the investigators and prostitutes on the street, he announced that a serial killer was at work. But he himself was put under surveillance. The police had been following him for just three days when he flew to Los Angeles to write articles about crime there for an Austrian magazine. During his five weeks away, the murders in Austria stopped.
In charge of the investigation was Dr Ernst Geiger, one of the most experienced detectives in the Austrian Federal Police. He knew that he either had to eliminate Unterweger from the investigation or build a case against him. Geiger’s first job was to place Unterweger at the scene of the crime. He got hold of Unterweger’s credit card records and began to trace his movements. They placed Unterweger in Graz in October when Brunhilde Masser was murdered and in March when Elfriede Schrempf disappeared. He was in Bregenz in December when Heidemarie Hammerer vanished. And he resembled the man in the leather jacket with whom she was last seen.
He was also in Vienna when Regina Prem, Silvia Zagler, Karin Eroglu and Sabine Moitzi disappeared. Unterweger’s credit card records also put him in Prague the previous September. He said he had been researching an article on prostitution there. The Austrian police contacted the Czech authorities and learnt that his visit had coincided with the unsolved murder of Blanka Bockova. Found in the woods, covered in dirt and leaves, and strangled with her own undergarment, her murder bore the same signature as the Austrian victims.
Unterweger was questioned by the very investigators that he had interviewed in connection with the Vienna Courier. He admitted seeing prostitutes, but denied knowing any of the victims. He offered no alibis, but then the police only had the most tenuous of circumstantial evidence to connect him to the crime. And now that Unterweger knew he was a suspect, he was on his guard and he responded with a series of articles about the investigators’ mishandling of the case.
The husband and son of Regina Prem, whose body had not yet been found, received phone calls from an unidentified man on their unlisted numbers. He accurately described what Regina was wearing the night she went missing. He then said that he was her executioner and that God had told 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.”
This sent a chill through the police. It meant there were more victims than the eight they were currently investigating.
Three months later, in January 1992, Prem’s husband found five empty cigarette packets of the brand his wife smoked stuffed into his mailbox. With them was a photograph of Prem’s son that she had carried in her purse.
Geiger questioned the Austrian prostitutes that Unterweger visited. They told him that he liked them to wear handcuffs during sex. He tracked down the BMW that Unterweger had bought when he was released from prison, but had since sold. In it, crime scene investigators found a piece of hair fragment that they sent to the lab for analysis. At the Institut für Rechtsmedizin in Berne, Switzerland, forensic scientist Manfred Hochmeister found enough skin on the root to produce a DNA profile using the polyermerase chain reaction technique to magnify the sample. It matched that of Blanka Bockova.
The DNA match allowed Geiger to get a warrant to search Unterweger’s apartment in Vienna. There they found a brown leather jacket and red knitted scarf, which they seized. They also found a menu and receipts from a seafood restaurant in Malibu, California, along with photographs of Unterweger posing with female members of the Los Angeles Police Department. Geiger contacted the LAPD and asked about unsolved murders. At the time, they were investigating three seemingly linked killings in the city.
All of the victims – Shannon Exley, Irene Rodriguez and Sherri Ann Long – had been prostitutes. They had been beaten, sexually assaulted with tree branches, strangled with their own bras and had been left out in the open. And all of them had been killed during the time that Unterweger had been in Los Angeles. Of course, the LAPD knew all about Unterweger. He had introduced himself as a European journalist researching an article on prostitution and asked for a police escort to the red-light district. Were these three women the other murder victims that the man who had called Regina Prem’s husband and son had boasted about?
Receipts recovered from Unterweger’s apartment showed that Unterweger had stayed in seedy hotels near where the victims had last been seen alive. And in his article on prostitution in Los Angeles, Unterweger had written chillingly: “Real life in LA 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.”