Meanwhile, analysts at the University of Berne found that fibres from the red scarf taken from Unterweger’s apartment were consistent with those found on the body of Heidemarie Hammerer. While they could not definitely identify the scarf as the source, it was enough for Geiger to get an arrest warrant.
When the police arrived at Unterweger’s apartment, he was not there. Unterweger had gone 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. She was flattered by the attention of this famous man and she moved in with him.
Friends told Unterweger of the police interest, while the newspapers announced his imminent arrest. He fled to the United States with Bianca and contacted the Austrian papers. Then he offered the police a deal. He would return to Austria and face questioning if the arrest warrants were withdrawn.
“My flight was and is no confession,” he said in his open letter to the authorities in Vienna. He went on to say that there was no way they could prove anything against him. Fate was punishing him for his past.
One magazine,
Erfolg
, made him an offer for the exclusive story of his flight. Another journalist called and asked Unterweger whether he had forced Bianca to go with him. He put her on the line and she said that she was travelling with Unterweger of her own free will and they were having a wonderful time.
Unterweger then claimed that he had an alibi for each of the murders. He was at a book reading event on the night one woman had disappeared. In another case, he was not even in the city at the time. The police were manufacturing evidence against him because they were angry that he had been given parole. He would remain a fugitive until he could be guaranteed a fair hearing. On one point, he was adamant – he was not going back to prison.
Bianca needed some money and asked her mother to wire some cash to her in Miami. Her mother promptly informed the police. They alerted the US authorities via Interpol. Three deputy US marshals and an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms staked out the branch of Western Union in South Beach.
They had a photograph of Unterweger, but he had lost weight. When he and Bianca approached the Western Union office, they almost did not recognize him, but the prison tattoos on his arms gave him away. When the marshals moved in to arrest him, Unterweger took flight. He ran into a restaurant and out the back. But the officers cornered him in a car park, handcuffed him and took him downtown.
Unterweger had been arrested in Miami on a technicality – he had not declared that he was a convicted murderer to immigration officials. When he learnt this, he became quite cheerful, joking with the officers and saying that he would put them in his next book. However, when one of the officers mentioned the murders in Austria, Unterweger began to sob.
Bianca took the police to the rented rooms where she and Unterweger were staying. A search turned up Unterweger’s travel journal. It was clear from the pages that he was contemplating murdering Bianca.
It was not immediately certain whether he should be extradited to Austria or transferred to California. In Austria he could be tried for all eleven murders, while in California he could only be tried for the three in Los Angeles. So Unterweger plumped for California. Blood, hair and saliva were taken for DNA testing. His DNA matched semen taken from one of the victims in California, but she also had semen from six other men in her vagina. The only other evidence against him were the hotel receipts that Geiger had provided, putting him in the vicinity of the murders. It was not much of a case. But when the Los Angeles cops who had flown to Miami to question Unterweger pointed out that he faced the death penalty in California, Unterweger quickly changed his mind and agreed to be deported to Austria. He believed that he still had Austrian public opinion on his side. The physical evidence the police had was flimsy. He believed he could beat the rap and on 28 May 1992 he was on a plane to Vienna.
From jail he continued writing to the press, protesting his innocence and giving interviews. He told
Profil
magazine: “Would I be so stupid and so mad that during the luckiest phase of my life, in which I’ve done theatre 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 wrote poetry about the time he’d been free. In his letters to the press he said he could prove he was innocent, but he gave nothing away.
Then, parts of a skeleton were found that were identified as the remains of Regina Prem, a year after her disappearance. Like the other victims, she had been left in the woods, but no clothing or jewellery were found. After being left exposed to the elements for so long, the cause of death could no longer be determined.
Geiger got in touch with the FBI and enlisted the help of Gregg McCrary at the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia. Working with details of the crime and the crime scene, he studied the sequence of murders, looking for deviation from the pattern. If Unterweger was responsible for all eleven murders, he was a rarity. Serial killers usually go about their business in a confined geographical area. They rarely travel internationally to commit their murders and a defence attorney could easily find an expert to say that. Nevertheless, McCrary spotted a consistent pattern in the crime scene details and the modus operandi.
“We had a similar victimology and manner of disposal,” he wrote in his book,
The Unknown Darkness
. “Most of these women had been prostitutes and were left outside, with branches or foliage placed over them. We had no semen left on or in [most of] those bodies. The cause of death for those on which we could tell was strangulation, but some bodies were too decomposed to make a determination. Most had restraint bruises on their arms and wrists. No one had seen them getting into a car, so this offender had been careful. There was an absence of any indication of sexual assault. The trace evidence was next to none as well, and he appeared to have a calculated MO. He was smart and he was organized.”
McCrary also fed details of the murders into the database for the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. At that time, it carried the details of 10,000 to 12,000 homicide cases. Using fifteen cross-referenced criteria for the search, he ended up matching the eleven killings for which Unterweger was thought to have been responsible with just one other murder. The killer in that case had already been convicted.
“It would be highly unusual to have more than one guy engaging in this specific type of behaviour during this same time period,” said McCrary. Whoever had done one of the eleven unsolved murders had probably done the rest.
Unterweger’s movements fitted the timeline of the murders. The modus operandi – the MO – in the murder of Margaret Schäfer, which he had admitted, matched the others. But one piece of crime scene evidence was the clincher. Lynn Herold, a forensic scientist at the Los Angeles Crime Lab, examined the knots that had been made to tie the ligatures used to strangle the three prostitutes in California. The knot was complicated and it matched the knots in the pantyhose used to kill several of the victims in Austria.
In Graz in June 1994, Unterweger went on trial for the seven murders in Austria, along with the one in Prague and three in Los Angeles. Despite the gravity of the accusations, he still managed to garner public support through interviews where he would brag that he would win.
Detective Jim Harper and Lynn Herold came from Los Angeles to testify. Gregg McCrary flew in to show that the behaviour shown in the eleven murders was consistent with the behaviour Unterweger had exhibited in the murder of Margaret Schäfer. The prosecution also had a psychiatric report about Unterweger’s sadistic criminal nature and character witnesses who would testify to his deviant nature. Then there was the crime scene evidence – Blanca Bockova’s hair recovered in Unterweger’s old car, numerous red fibres from Brunhilde Massar’s body that were consistent with fibres from Unterweger’s red scarf, the knots and scene where the bodies had been found.
In court, Unterweger was well dressed and charming. He asked the jury not to judge him on his past crimes. He admitted that he had been “a primitive criminal who grunted rather than talked and an inveterate liar”, who “consumed women, rather than loved them”. But he had been rehabilitated.
“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 and a half months. His charm swayed the jury, but he could not counter the crime scene evidence. He was found guilty of nine counts of murder – one in Prague, three in Los Angeles and five in Austria. In the other two cases in Austria, the victim’s bodies had been too decomposed to determine the precise cause of death. He was sentenced to life in prison. That night, he committed suicide at Graz-Karlau Prison. He hanged himself with a rope made from shoelaces and the elastic from his prison jumpsuit, using the same intricate knot he had used on the murdered prostitutes – thereby confirming his guilt. But as he died before an appeal could be heard, under Austrian law, he is officially considered innocent.
A
T
2.44
P.M. ON
25 July 2000, an Air France Concorde, Flight 4590 with the tail number F-BTSC, was taking off from Runway 26 Right at Charles de Gaulle International Airport outside Paris on a charter flight to New York’s Kennedy Airport with 100 passengers and nine crew members on board. But as it careened down the runway approaching take-off speed, fire burst out from under the port wing. As burning fuel plumed from the wing tank, engines one and two on the port side surged and lost power.
A fire warning went off in the cockpit and the captain ordered the flight engineer to shut down engine two. However, engine one recovered. Concorde had already passed V
1
speed, that is the speed that the plane can still take off if an engine fails. The takeoff continued and Concorde managed to claw its way into the sky. But the landing gear would not retract and, with engine one surging and producing little power, the plane was unable to gain much height or speed. Unable to climb or accelerate, the aircraft maintained a speed of 200 knots (230 mph; 370 km/h) at an altitude of 200 ft (60 m). The heat of the fire began to melt the metal in the port wing, which began to disintegrate. Engine one surged again, but this time failed to recover. As all the thrust was coming from the starboard engines, the right wing lifted, causing the plane to bank. The power was reduced on engines three and four in an attempt to level the aircraft. The pilot tried to make for nearby Le Bourget airport, but with falling airspeed he lost control. The plane crashed into Les Relais Bleus Hotel in the small town of La Pattie d’Oie de Gonesse near the airport, killing all 109 people on board and four people on the ground.
The Bureau Enquêtes-Accidents (Accident Investigation Bureau) was informed of the accident minutes later and an investigation was launched. Investigators would minutely examine the wreckage and comb the runway as they would in any plane crash. What made this a crime scene investigation was that, in 2008, five people were charged with manslaughter in connection with the crash.
The plane had taken off from Runway 26 Right. Normally, Concorde used Runway 27, but work on it had been underway for the previous three weeks. An examination of the runway found various debris and marks under the aircraft’s flight path. These included parts of the water deflector from the left main landing gear and pieces of one of Concorde’s tyres showing a transverse cut approximately 12.5 inches (32 cm) long.
On the shoulder of the runway was a strip of metal about 17 in. (43 cm) long. Its width varied from 1
1
/
8
to 1
3
/
8
in. (29 to 34 mm) and it had holes drilled in it. Some contained rivets. On visual inspection, the piece appeared to be made of light alloy, coated on one side with a greenish epoxy and on the other side with what appeared to be red aircraft mastic used on hot sections. But it did not appear to have been exposed to high temperature. Investigators quickly realized that this was not part of the Concorde.
Further down the runway, investigators found a small piece of Concorde’s number five fuel tank measuring 12.5 × 12.5 in. (32 × 32 cm). It showed no signs of impact damage. An inboard alloy part, identified as the brake servo valve cover, from the left main landing gear, was also found. It was covered in soot and had clearly been overheated. There were also signs that it had been deformed on impact. Further on, a piece of concrete 4 in. (10 cm) wide and 10 to 14 in. (25 to 30 cm) long had been separated from the runway and there were signs of an explosion. A black scorch mark was found surrounding the detached chunk.
At 3,000 yards (2,800 m) from the runway threshold, the left runway edge light was broken. Small pieces of it were found nearby. The marks on the ground showed that it had been broken by Concorde’s left main landing gear. The mark of a deflated tyre with incomplete tread ran from 1,974 yards (1,805 m) to 3,000 yards (2,800 m) down the runway. This ran parallel to the direction of the runway at about 12.5 ft (3.8 m) from the centreline until around 2,400 yards (2,200 m) when it began to diverge. By the time it disappeared at about 2,560 yards (2,340 m), it was 26 ft (8 m) from the centreline. It corresponded to the right front tyre of the aircraft’s left landing gear. Further on, some irregular tyre tracks from the left landing gear were noted up to the broken edge light at 3,000 yards (2,800 m). After that point, the tracks became intermittent and then disappeared at about 3,100 yards (2,830 m).
There were marks on the runway at around 1,990 yards (1,820 m), probably made by kerosene. Soot, produced by the incomplete combustion of kerosene, was found from 2,035 yards (1,860 m) onward. These deposits were large and dense up to 2,515 yards (2,300 m), then became less dense and rich in carbon up to the taxiway at 3,030 yards (2,770 m). The traces were on average 23 ft (7 m) wide. They were initially centred on the damaged wheel ground mark and progressed towards the left as the plane veered from the centreline.