The Best-Selling Author Who Strangled Women With Their Underwear
The curious case of Austrian serial-killer Jack Unterweger
I have always been intrigued by murderers and criminals who have the charm and charisma to be able to convince people of their innocence and even treat them as a celebrity.
One such person is the infamous Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger.
Jack was born in 1950 to a prostitute mother and a father who abandoned him. After abandonment from his mother, he spent seven years of his childhood with an alcoholic grandfather and faced constant abuse. He turned to crime in his teens and his first known arrest came at 16 for assaulting a sex-worker.
His childhood of constant abuse and abandonment clearly left deep scars on his psychology which would lead him down the path of heinous crime with a very specific modus operandi.
First Murder Conviction and Arrest
In 1976, Jack was convicted of the murder of 18 yr old Margaret Schaefer and sentenced to life in prison. He had dragged her out into the woods, sexually assaulted her, and strangled her with her own bra.
It was in prison that his rise to celebrity status truly began. After learning to read and write, he grew to gain literary respect for his writing and somewhat of a fan following.
His autobiography, Purgatory or The Trip to Prison — Report of a Guilty Man was published in 1983 and became a best seller.
“No theme is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman,” Jack Unterweger wrote. “There is an age at which a woman must be beautiful in order to be loved, and there is an age in which a woman must be loved in order to be beautiful.”
It is indeed intriguing to read such words coming from a man who was a serial sexual offender and murderer. His poetry and writing convinced his supporters that he was a reformed man and rallied behind him for his release. His supporters included some powerful people including two Nobel laureates. He received parole in 1990 when the courts were convinced that he was a reformed man, not without external help from these influential supporters.
Life As a Mini-Celebrity Outside Prison
After his release, Jack made multiple appearances on talk shows and continued to promote his book. As his autobiography was converted into a movie, Jack also forayed into professional journalism.
Yet, it didn’t take very long for Jack to revert to his old ways. A series of murders surfaced shortly after his release that had an eery similarity to Jack’s modus operandi. Sex workers were found dead in the woods outside Vienna on multiple occasions. Each murder was clean and didn’t leave behind much evidence.
The Austrian media, who did suspect Jack as the obvious suspect, for fear of backlash from his fan following, termed the killer as the “Vienna Woods Killer”.
While he was constantly questioned by the police on account of these murders, there was never enough evidence to convict him of the murders. The magazine that had hired Jack as a journalist sent him on various reporting missions. Such work also brought him to the US on a task to report terrible conditions suffered by American prostitutes.
The Infamous Hotel Cecile & Jack’s Contribution
Los Angeles’ infamous Cecile Hotel, since its opening in 1927 has been the venue for multiple unfortunate incidents as well as mysterious murders. At least 16 different murders, suicides, and unexplained paranormal events have taken place at the hotel.
So it was probably a planned move for Jack to stay at the hotel to carry on his next set of murders.
While Jack was in the US, there were reports of murders of sex workers, that again followed the same modus operandi — sexually assaulted bodies of women found in remote woods, killed by strangling with their own underwear.
Jack would invite these sex workers to his hotel on the pretext of interviewing them for his journalism and murder them in his typical fashion.
The Final Arrest and Downfall
Jack’s weakness was the limelight and popularity that he got from his followers and the media and also led to his final arrest. He was arrested by the FBI on the bait that a famous magazine was ready to pay him a huge sum of money for him to tell them his true story.
In June, 1994, Jack was found guilty on 9 accounts of murder across the two continents of Europe and North America, and these are just the known murders, and there are quite possibly more.
Unterweger claimed to be innocent, but the night before his appearance in court for the final conviction, he hung himself with a rope made from his tracksuit and the laces in his shoes.
Posthumous Fame in Theater and Movies
In a 2008 performance, actor John Malkovich portrayed Unterweger’s life in performance for one actor, two sopranos, and period orchestra entitled Seduction and Despair, which premiered at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica, California.
In 2015, Jack’s life was made into a roughly inspired Austrian film, titled “Jack”. The intriguing life and sequence of events continue to remain an inspiration for many adaptations, and potentially more to come.
Understanding Jack’s Psychology
These unfortunate incidents are yet another testament to the fact that the making of a criminal often lies in their upbringing. Jack possibly grew to hate sex workers from his hatred for his mother, who abandoned him, and sought revenge in finding and killing sex workers throughout his life.
He was indeed a man of some brilliance, having learned to read and write in a short time while in prison, and having shown poetic ability to write pieces of art that appealed to a large, very intellectual set of masses.
Yet, possibly the intense suffering from his own life as well as the crimes he committed, potentially pushed him over the edge to take his own life and put an end to a life that was indeed eventful but for all the wrong reasons.
References:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/jack-unterweger https://allthatsinteresting.com/cecil-hotel-los-angeles https://www.suecoletta.com/crime-writer-turned-serial-killer/ https://peoplepill.com/people/jack-unterweger/ https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/jack-unterweger
