Episode 192 - Austria’s Most Notorious Serial Killer - The Case Of Jack Unterweger
01:08:03 Share

The opinions expressed in the following episode do not necessarily reflect those of the Minds of Madness podcast. Listener discretion is advised. We've all heard the classic story about the scorpion and the frog.

The scorpion needs to cross a river, but can't swim. All the animals in the forest know the scorpion is dangerous. Still, the scorpion manages to convince a frog along the riverbank to give him a ride across on its back. But halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog, and just before they both drown, the frog asks, "Why?" The scorpion replies, "I couldn't help myself. It's my nature."

The question of whether or not a person can change their nature has been debated for centuries. And when it comes to criminal behavior, the issue is central to conversations about rehabilitation and reform within our modern justice system. Can a person truly be rehabilitated behind bars? More and more, the evidence suggests that yes, some people can be rehabilitated.

But then again, it also suggests that some can't. Join me now as we take a look at the shocking case of Austria's most notorious serial killer.

The unbelievable story of a violent, sadistic murderer whose twisted crimes span two decades across four different countries. You'll learn about a devious, crafty and ruthless killer who wasn't just hiding in plain sight, but in front of the cameras as well.

The 1994 classic film, The Shawshank Redemption, tells the story of Andy Dufresne, an innocent man sent to prison for 19 long years before successfully escaping to freedom.

It's hands down one of the most satisfying and well-deserved happy endings to any movie. But the final climactic moment isn't really complete until Andy is joined on the beaches of Mexico by Morgan Freeman's character, Red Redding. Red had been imprisoned serving a life sentence. Throughout the film, we watch as Red tries his best to convince a parole board to set him free.

Time and time again, the board denies him parole.

Finally, after 38 years, Red is finally granted parole and set free. The audience cheers because we all know that he's a good guy now who'd never do harm to anyone. In fact, the movie does such a good job of making Red likable that you've probably completely forgotten what crime he'd committed to put him in prison in the first place. Think about it. Can you remember?

Don't worry if you can't, it's a trick question. The movie never actually tells us why Red's in prison, because the director knew the audience wouldn't sympathize with Red if they'd known what he'd really done. According to the book by Stephen King, Red was in prison for murdering his wife, his neighbor, and an infant child.

If the audience knew that, maybe they'd think twice before cheering for Red's parole. Has it even crossed any of our minds that perhaps Red hadn't actually been rehabilitated? The truth is, there really isn't anything an inmate can do inside of a prison to definitively prove they've been rehabilitated. Sure, they can behave well, educate themselves, and dedicate themselves to helping others.

They can give all the indications of rehabilitation, but how can anyone really know for sure?

Today, we're going to discuss a man who became Austria's most famous parolee upon his release from prison in 1990, Jack Unterweger. And the way he earned his parole was through writing. To help us tell the story, we reached out to author and journalist John Leake, who wrote the definitive book about this strange case called Entering Hades, The Double Life of a Serial Killer.

My name is John Leak. I am an American true crime author, and I lived for many years in Vienna, Austria. I went there on a graduate school scholarship. I was reading a newspaper in a Vienna coffee house, and there was a reference to this case about a Jack Unterweger. It

It was just a passing reference, but it got my attention. I call and discover that the lead homicide investigator in Vienna, a man named Ernst Geiger, had in the interim become the Vienna chief of police. To my surprise, he immediately took my call and

And on that very day, I walked down to the Vienna police headquarters and I met with Ernst Geiger and we hit it off. And I knew quite quickly that I wanted to write a book about this case. So I began researching the book in early 2003 and the book was finally published in 2007.

Throughout Austria in the late 70s and early 80s, children from all over the country turned on their radios around bedtime. Each night, the Austrian National Broadcasting Corporation played five-minute stories specifically for children, hoping to send them off to sleep with peaceful, happy dreams.

But what most Austrians didn't know at the time was that many of these children's stories were written from the confines of Stein Prison by a man named Jack Unterweger, an inmate serving a life sentence since 1976. Over time, the radio show's producer took a liking to Jack and began encouraging him to write even more.

That kind of struck me as just one of many things in this story that's rather strange. He actually started his career as a children's story author.

And I think it was the producer of that show who said, you know, try and tell the story of your own childhood, of your own youth. Like, how did you come to be where you are today in prison? So he starts working on what would become a book about his childhood and youth. And the title in German is Fegefeuer.

which means in English, purgatory. And it's a very strange book because it's actually on the title page explicitly stated it's an autobiographical novel. It was initially published in series in a very highly respected literary magazine in Graz, Austria called Manuskripta, Manuscripts.

And because this literary journal was quite carefully followed by Austrian literary people, it got a lot of notice. It was reviewed by a major German newspaper called Die Zeit. And it just started getting a bunch of attention amongst, I would call them, Austria's literary intelligentsia.

By definition, the autobiographical novel blends fact with fiction. But when Purgatory was published in 1983, most readers simply took Jack's account of his childhood and the circumstances that led him to becoming a criminal as the gospel truth. His mother was a girl named Teresa Unterweger.

during the time of the Four Powers occupation following the Second World War. And it was occupied by military forces of France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union for 10 years, between 45 and 55. So you've got all these soldiers all over the place. Jack strongly implies in his autobiographical novel, as it's called, insinuates that she was

something of a sex worker. And Jack states in Purgatory that his apparent biological father was an American soldier named Jack Becker. After getting Theresa Unterweger pregnant, he then left, perhaps went back to the United States.

Teresa was a single mom, and she was just really young. Times were tough, and she, in effect, deposited the young child, probably 18 months old, maybe two years old, with her father, a guy named Ferdinand Wieser. So that's where Jack grew up, in this isolated valley in the custody of his grandfather.

In Purgatory, Jack paints his grandfather as an abusive drunk who exposes young Jack to all sorts of vice, fraud, and violence. He longs for his mother to come back and rescue him, but she never does. The takeaway, for the reader of course, was how understandable it would be for a child raised in that environment to one day become a criminal. And Jack's writing had its desired effect.

Almost everyone who read Purgatory couldn't help but view Jack through the lens of sympathy. This idea begins to circulate that, wow, you know, what a great author. The process of writing down his childhood, he seems to have had this kind of moral discovery or discovery of himself, developing self-awareness, something along these lines.

Purgatory quickly went on to become a bestseller. The next year, Jack wrote a collection of poems and stories about prison that would go on to win an Austrian literary prize. In 1988, a film based on his book Purgatory would be produced. Even from behind bars, Jack Undewiger was quickly becoming the darling of the Austrian literary world.

And so we get this campaign, it starts as a letter-writing campaign advocating Jack Unterweger's early release from his life sentence. One of the persons that wrote a letter to the Austrian Justice Minister advocating Jack Unterweger's early release from prison was a famous Austrian writer named Elfida Jelinek who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I mean, she was just one amongst many of very well-known public figures in the arts and literature and science as well. I mean, there were psychiatrists that signed the petition, famous journalists, actors, playwrights, quite an impressive group that advocated Jack's early release from prison. I think it's no exaggeration to say it was a sort of who's who of

Despite the immense pressure, Austria's president refused to grant Jack a pardon before he'd served his mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years. But as soon as Jack was eligible for parole, the chorus in support of his release started right back up again.

The Washington Post would later write: "To the Viennese café intellectuals, who pulled him from prison and embraced him as one of their own, Jack Undewiger was proof positive that bad boys can become good men. He was their reclamation project, their social experiment, their civilized barbarian."

After serving just 15 years of a life sentence, Jack was released from prison on May 23, 1990. But what nobody seemed to realize was, much of what Jack's autobiographical novel had been completely made up, or at the very least, greatly exaggerated.

And remarkably, just like Red from Shawshank Redemption, none of his advocates seemed to know why Jack had even been sent to prison in the first place.

What I discovered is they did no research on Jack. It's no exaggeration to say that there was no getting informed at all. I mean, none. The people who advocated Jack Wontoveger's early release from his life sentence, I'd say they knew nothing about him, knew nothing about his crimes.

They read his book in which he whitewashed his crimes or omitted mention of them altogether. In Purgatory, Jack never revealed the real crime that had put him away for life and nobody seemed to notice.

The action of the book ends, I believe, in 1972. He's put in prison for stealing a car. That's how the novel concludes. Well, he did do a little time for stealing a car in 1972.

But that's not why he's in prison, you know, writing this book in 1982. I mean, he's in prison on a life sentence at the time he authored the book, not because he stole a car in 1972, but because he murdered a young girl in 1974. It would turn out that Jack's criminal history was much more violent than he wanted any of his audience to know.

Jack was in a home for juvenile delinquents in his early teens. And then I guess around the age of 16, he starts committing petty theft, maybe some burglary. Jack combines this activity as a sort of petty thief with a very interesting story.

I think he becomes a disc jockey and he starts spinning discs at ski resorts, mountain resorts. And so he's this part-time disc jockey, occasional acts of theft. And at this time he discovers he's very good looking boy. He discovers he has this kind of way with girls. He kind of,

makes them somewhat emotionally dependent on him. So I guess it's around the age of 17, 18. He starts dabbling in something akin to pimping, I guess you'd call it, where he would set up some kind of a liaison between a girlfriend and a paying customer. So he becomes a kind of a petty pimp, part-time disc jockey, part-time thief.

In 1970, when Jack was around 20 years old, his criminal career began to take a darker turn.

He discovers that he has this kind of kink for picking up girls, taking them out into an isolated wooded area, tying them up and abusing them in quite a frightening way. It's a kind of a power trip thing that he does with his victims. And a couple of girls report him for rape and sexual assault.

He actually flees the country and moves to Switzerland. And so what you have happening is a criminal record is piling up for these different kinds of offenses.

But he's never getting more than a slap on the wrist. And he's oftentimes just evading justice outright by moving into Switzerland or to Germany, which border Austria, and laying low in these other countries.

In 1974, Jack was arrested for sexually assaulting a victim in Salzburg, but once in custody, he swallowed a handful of pills in what appeared to be a suicide attempt. He was then placed in a psychiatric ward and released after only a short time. After his release, Jack returns to Switzerland, where he lives with a teenage runaway girlfriend named Barbara Schultz.

By the winter of 74, the couple worked down and out, struggling to make ends meet. So on the night of December 11th, Jack comes up with a plan. He's like, well, you know, we've run out of money. Winter is coming on. Why don't we just go rob your parents' house?

And so Barbara agrees to this scheme. So they go to her house and her parents' house. Jack parks on the street. She goes up. The house is completely locked up. There's no way she can get into it. She actually realizes she doesn't want to alert her parents to her presence.

So Barbara and Jack decide to abort their burglary attempt. But as they're driving off in Jack's car, Barbara sees a friend walking down the street, an old schoolmate named Margaret Schaefer. So Barbara says, well, hey, there's my friend Margaret. So Jack pulls over. She rolls down the window. She says, hey, hey, Margaret. Hi, it's Barbara. You know, how's it going? And the girls kind of catch up. And she says, well, my boyfriend and I are going to have a drink. You want to join us? You know.

So Margaret says, yeah, sure. So she gets in the back seat of Jack's car and he drives a couple of hundred yards and then he pulls over to the side of the road, pulls over, puts the car in park, turns around and punches Margaret in the face. The unexpected punch from Jack took both women by surprise.

Margaret doesn't understand. Of course, she's completely shocked. She's wearing like a Burberry raincoat with one of those belts that's kind of built into the coat. He rips this belt off of her coat, ties her hands behind her back, and then he just starts driving a long distance away from this little town.

He finds a road through the woods and pulls over to the side of this road in the middle of the woods and commands this girl to strip naked. And she hesitates to do that. But then he hits her again. And then it just turns into what I would describe as a ritualized stripping the girl naked, tying her hands behind her back again, marching her into the woods again.

and then beating her to death and strangling her, and then returning to the vehicle and getting in the car and driving away. The body of Margaret Schaefer was discovered three weeks later by a group of hunters, unclothed, except for the jewelry she'd been wearing. Her bra tightly knotted around her neck. There was no denying Jack's culpability for this, because even though Barbara Schultz was in love with him,

She did offer a full witness testimony, which was kind of strange at trial because she offered full witness testimony while maintaining her affection for Jack. She actually kissed him in court in front of the jury, which was quite shocking to people.

In 1976, Jack was found guilty of murdering Margaret and sentenced to life in prison. But when Jack began writing about his childhood, youth, and the circumstances that led to his imprisonment, he was careful to leave out the grisly details of what he'd really done.

So he knows, he understood, the reality of it has to remain concealed. If people read Barbara Schultz's witness testimony of what exactly I did to this girl, it's unlikely, unless they're crazy, they would sign the petition for my early release from prison.

Nevertheless, Jack was released from prison, and once he was released, he became an instant celebrity in Austria, appearing on talk shows and getting lots of press coverage in the newspapers. Using his newfound fame as a springboard, Jack decides to make a go of it as a freelance author, journalist, and playwright.

He recognized his significance to the Austrian intelligentsia. Prison reform or criminal justice reform was a very...

trendy, popular subjects. And he recognized, I'm kind of fascinating for these people. He was still a young man. He was only 39 years old. He was good looking. He had this kind of charismatic way about him. He was always dressed in a cool suit. And so I think he recognized, it's not just that I'm no longer popular.

dangerous. But perhaps even more important than that, I'm this kind of charismatic artist, a writer. He understood the sort of romance that his advocates were looking for, and he really did a good job of playing that up. He presented himself as an outsider from the lower class, and his mom, he claimed, was a sex worker. So

He emphasized that he had great sympathy for the underprivileged of society, the kind of the down and outers, the poor guys, the street sex workers. This was his milieu, and he had great sympathy for this underclass.

The reason Jack claimed to have such sympathy for the plight of sex workers, which was legal in Austria, was twofold. One, it was how he portrayed his mother, though his mother would later deny this. And two, in purgatory, he claimed his aunt, a woman named Anna Unterweger, was a sex worker who'd been murdered in 1967 by, quote,

her last customer. Jack spent the remainder of 1990 and the spring of 1991 trying to make a bigger name for himself as a playwright. This led to some modest success, but never panned out quite the way he'd hoped.

During this same time period, however, other events throughout Austria would position Jack to become the go-to celebrity commentator in another area of his expertise and sympathy. Crime among sex workers, and that year, it had been worse, much worse than it had ever been before. Well, it began in Graz. So Graz is a small, extremely charming city.

kind of an idyllic little city, and very, very low crime rate. And two street sex workers disappeared, one in October of 1990, and then the next one in March of 1991. Their bodies were found in the woods outside of town, strangled in a very similar way. And so the local press in Graz said,

The victims in Graz were 39-year-old Brunhilde Maaser and 35-year-old Elfriede Schrempf. When the remains were discovered, both women were found unclothed, except for the jewelry.

Then you have this murder in Bregenz in the far western part of Austria near the Swiss border in December of 1990. And I mean, that's a long way from Graz. And it's being viewed as an isolated case in Bregenz.

31-year-old Heidemarie Hammerer disappeared about six weeks after Brunhilde and 12 weeks before Alfreda in Graz. It was determined she'd been strangled to death with a pair of her own pantyhose. And notably, like the other victims, none of her jewelry had been taken or removed. Then, beginning in April 1991, the shocking crime wave affecting Austrian sex workers came to Vienna.

In the spring of 1991, you get just one after the other. I mean, I think on average of every 10 days, a sex worker from the Vienna Red Light District disappears and is later found in the Vienna woods. And so just really one right after the other with very little cooling off period in between.

Between April 8th and May 7th, four Viennese sex workers disappeared without a trace. 23-year-old Silvia Zagler, 25-year-old Sabina Moitse, 33-year-old Regina Prem, and 25-year-old Karina Roglu. All four bodies would eventually be discovered in the Vienna woods, strangled to death with their own pantyhose. And again, none of the victims' jewelry had been taken.

So the Vienna police, they quickly realized this is definitely the same guy. I mean, first of all, like Graz, Vienna had a very, very low homicide rate.

and one of the lowest in the world. And so to suddenly have four young women being murdered and turning up in the Vienna woods, just one right after the other, the Vienna police realized they had a serial killer on their hands. But again, the Vienna police are looking at this as a case that is somewhat regional to Vienna.

Newspapers, magazines, and radio programs throughout the country began devoting considerable ink and airtime to stories about the mysterious murders, disappearances, and rumors of a potential serial killer.

Suddenly, Jack Unterweger was thrust back into the media spotlight as a journalist and commentator. On June 5th, 1991, the Austrian National Broadcasting Corporation produced a segment about the seven suspected victims called "The Fear in the Red Light District".

And in that radio story, which was done for a very popular radio show called Journal Panorama, which is kind of like NPR's All Things Considered in the United States, there is this recognition that there's four young women who've disappeared from Vienna, two have disappeared from Graz, and one has disappeared from Bregenz. And the lead reporter for

for this radio program is Jack Unterweger. He has pitched doing a radio show on this mysterious, unknown killer. He says, I feel like I'm really specially qualified to report on this because I grew up

in the milieu of sex workers. My own aunt, Anna Unterweger, was a sex worker who was murdered in the woods by her last client in Salzburg.

Not only did Jack claim a personal empathetic connection to these victims because of his murdered aunt, he'd also spent the past nine months or so researching Austrian sex workers as a journalist. In fact, just the month before the murders began in Graz, Jack had gone on ride-alongs with Graz police officers through the red light districts.

He was shown the streets and corners where the women worked, spent time in the area nightclubs, taking photos and speaking with sex workers. In the days before the radio program's release, Jack had personally interviewed Max Edelbacher, the Vienna chief of police.

On paper, Jack Undervegger was a uniquely qualified person to inform the public about the plight of Austrian sex workers, the dangers they faced, and he staunchly advocated for their safety. But you have to remember, Jack was often a much different person on paper than he was in real life.

It's only later it's discovered that his special qualification is based on a fiction. Anna Unterweger was not his aunt, nor was she a prostitute, and nor was she murdered by her last client.

Around the same time as the radio program, Jack also penned an article for a Vienna newspaper in which he blasted the media for over-sensationalizing the murders, arguing that the media hysteria was only making it harder and harder for police to catch the killer.

More and more, Jack was positioning himself as the go-to expert on the biggest story gripping the country at the time. But Jack's research into the milieu of sex work wasn't confined to just Austria.

Jack again shows up at police headquarters and he tells Max Edelbacher, hey, I'm about to fly to Los Angeles. I'm doing some reporting on crime in Los Angeles. And I'm wondering if you might have any contacts in Los

the Los Angeles Police Department. So Jack then the next day gets on a plane and flies to Los Angeles, rents a car with a fake driver's license, and drives to downtown Los Angeles where he checks into something of a notorious hotel called the Hotel Cecil.

Famously, the Cecil Hotel had been home of California's night stalker Richard Ramirez, a serial killer who murdered 13 victims between 1984 and 1985. In more recent times, the Cecil once again gained notoriety for being the scene of the mysterious death of Canadian student Elisa Lamb.

In 2013, her body was discovered inside a water tank on the building's rooftop. When Jack Hunteveger checked into the hotel in June 1991, the Cecil was about as downscale as you could get, surrounded by poverty, homelessness, and vice. But his choice to stay there wasn't a matter of money.

Instead, it was his way of positioning himself, right at the center of the topic he intended on researching.

His research is for a show also on the Austrian National Broadcasting radio station, and his working title is The Dark Side of Los Angeles. And so in accordance with his subject matter, he rides around with Los Angeles Police Department patrol officers, and he wants to paint a portrait of the dark side of L.A. that's

not the glamorous film and music industry, but the hard, mean street reality of Los Angeles.

In total, Jack spent five weeks in LA researching the seedy underbelly, returning back to Vienna by mid-July. The Dark Side of Los Angeles was broadcast nationally in September. But unfortunately for Jack's rekindled fame, the national news cycle was slowly moving on from his recent topic of expertise.

Because right around the same time he'd set off to LA, the string of serial murders among Austria's sex workers had come to a sudden and unexpected halt.

Meanwhile, the police investigation into the unknown serial killer was continuing rather unsuccessfully. Jack had been correct in his newspaper article. The massive amounts of media coverage had led to an overwhelming number of tips, suspects, and false leads from the public. One of the wilder tips pointed the finger at Jack Unterweger himself.

the writer, the empathetic artist, and a poster boy for rehabilitation. It was a far-fetched tip that police didn't place much confidence in. But they couldn't ignore it either, on account of the person who provided the tip, a retired police inspector from Salzburg named August Schenner.

Schinner's suspicion of Jack actually stemmed from a long unsolved murder he'd investigated way back in 1973. A murder he was convinced Jack had committed prior to the murder of Margaret Schaefer in Germany, the one he'd been sent to prison for.

It was the night of March the 31st, 1973. A girl named Maritza Horvat was found dead, stripped completely naked with her hands tied behind her back in a little pond on the outskirt of Salzburg. She had been brutally beaten about the face, strangled, and then the culprit had tied her hands behind her back with a necktie

and then dragged her out into the pond, not into very deep water, but she couldn't swim because her hands were tied behind her back. So she actually drowned.

So it was a very brutal, sadistic, terrifying, horrible way to die. And again, no apparent motive. She was a Croatian immigrant and could just find absolutely no one in her social milieu with any kind of motives to hurt her. So it just looked like a complete stranger murder. So Schenner was really upset by this. It's not the kind of sadistic murder that he saw.

saw very often or if at all. And so he became very tenacious in trying to figure out who did this. And he ultimately threw, it's my favorite part of the story in terms of old-fashioned detective work. He ultimately realized that Jack Unterweger did it.

Ultimately, in 1983, a full 10 years after Marisa's murder, Schenner was able to gather enough convincing evidence to charge Jack with murder. But, unfortunately, the DA decided not to prosecute. He told Schenner he already has a life sentence, he can be only given one.

By the time Jack was paroled from prison in 1990, Schenner was probably the only person in the world who vividly remembered the Marisa Horvath case and knew who'd been responsible. Schenner is convinced that Jack murdered this girl in Salzburg, and he is convinced that

This story that Jack had told in purgatory is nonsense. It's all a bunch of lies and whitewashing. And that Jack is actually a singularly dangerous man to women and should have never been left out of prison. So when Shetter hears about all of these murders that are happening, especially these four murders in Vienna, he concludes, I know who did that.

I know who's murdering these girls. And it's a remarkable coincidence in the story because on the same day Schenner calls the Vienna police to provide this tip, Jack himself shows up at the Vienna police department to interview the chief of police. Eleven days after first receiving the tip from Schenner, Jack was already on his way to Los Angeles to research his radio segment.

Schenner gives the tip and they're like, who's this crazy old retired Salzburg detective? Like, you know, we don't really know what to make of this. They can't find any reference to what Schenner's talking about in Jack's criminal record. There's no reference to it whatsoever, not a single file entry about this. So they just don't know what to make of it.

Within the Vienna Police Department, Schenner's tip was mostly ignored at first. But through the grapevine, an Austrian journalist got wind of the tip and started doing some investigating of his own.

Peter Grolick was a very good crime reporter. So he starts poking around. He starts looking at these cases of the women that were murdered in Vienna. He starts talking around. And what he realizes is that this detective in Salzburg kind of looks like he might have point. Like this tip looks like it has legs.

So Grolig is September the 1st, 1991 edition of Career, writes a report titled Hot Tip and the Search for the Prostitute Killer.

On October 7th, 1991, Jack went down to police headquarters to speak with the chief about another story he was working on. At the meeting, the chief informs him that his name had come up during their investigation. Jack replies that he's not surprised, given his past. Nevertheless, the chief asks Jack if he can provide an alibi at the time of the four murders in Vienna.

After two weeks, Jack's unable to provide any, claiming he hadn't kept detailed records from that time period. Notably, at that time, Jack was only asked to provide alibis for the four murders in Vienna, because among the investigators in Graz, Bregenz, and Vienna, there was still considerable disagreement about whether or not all seven murders were even linked at all.

Perhaps hindsight is just 20/20, but the modus operandi of each victim in all three cities was remarkably similar.

What the police in each different city recognized was the way this guy is working is he picks up a young woman in the city center, somehow gains her trust sufficiently where she must feel comfortable enough to drive with him a pretty long distance from the town center and

into a wooded area. At which point, it looks like he probably does tie her hands behind her back or somehow restrain her.

It looks like he's somehow marching these girls from the road, from the parked vehicle, into the woods, where he then appears to be doing some kind of ritualized abuse and beating and perhaps some kind of sexual abuse, concluding with strangling her to death with pieces of her own clothing.

He would sort of dismantle the clothing and fashion it into a ligature, and then he would strangle them with the ligature. And I should say that, you know, in each city, the police, it's a notable thing, in each city, the police really didn't have any suspects. I mean, it's not like, you know, there are five different guys we think might have done this. It was just...

And although it may seem obvious today that all seven of these murders throughout Austria were connected, at the time, investigators in Graz actually had a pretty good reason to believe their murders might be separate from the others.

Early in 1990, two women had been strangled in their apartments. And so the Graz police are initially thinking, well, this is all part of the same series. Two women in early 1990s, then you have a woman in October of 90 found in the woods, and then you have a woman in March of 1991 found in the woods. So they're initially thinking they've got a series of four in Graz.

The problem with this theory is that Unterweger got out of prison after the apartment murders. Shortly after Jack was told he was a potential suspect, another Austrian journalist named Hans Breidegger starts doing some digging as well.

So what Hans Weitegger did was, okay, I'm going to posit the theory that these four murders in Graz are not all part of the same series. I'm going to examine the two murders in the woods as probably a different culprit. And what he realizes is the murders in the woods in Graz actually began after Unterweger got out of jail.

And then what he realized, the two murders in the woods in Graz are actually more plausibly viewed as part of the series that then extends into Vienna in the woods. So the question is, could I put one and the same guy not only in Vienna, but also in Graz at the time on the night of the two murders that happened in the woods?

Focusing his attention on Jack, the journalists decided to see if he could place Jack in the various cities around the times the murders were committed. So Hans just says, well, I wonder if Jack, by any chance, happened to be in Graz on the night of October the 26th, 1990.

And then on the night of March the 7th, 1991, could it be that Jack was in Graz on these two nights? So Hans does some sniffing around and he notices that in fact, Lunterweger had given a reading from his latest book in a town about 20 miles outside of Graz on the night of October the 26th. And he's like, wow, I mean, is that just a coincidence?

For the second murder, on the night of March the 6th, he left Vienna in the evening around 10 o'clock to drive to the town of Sankt Wight.

So the really important revelation was that Jack had certainly passed within, you know, 100 yards of town. All he had to do is exit from the Autobahn to be in Graz around midnight when the second girl disappeared in March. So it's like, you know, what are the odds that

But then Hans took his curiosity a step farther, contacting another journalist friend of his from Bregenz.

He calls his friend and he says, Wilde's idea, could you look in your events notices on the afternoon or evening of December the 6th, 1990, and just tell me if by any chance the Austrian writer and poet and reformed prison inmate, might he have been in the

Bregenz area on that night. Well, turns out he was giving a radio voiceover broadcast of a play he'd recently written at the Austrian National Broadcasting Studio in Dornbirn, right outside of Bregenz on that night. Again, Jack was in town on that night. So now Hans Freitag is thinking, you know, there's just no way.

And, you know, you have to stop and consider this. It's not that Unterweger is hanging out in Bregenz all the time. He's not a regular of that town. It's 500 miles west of Vienna where he lives. No, he's in town on that particular night. So at that point, Hans just is like, for sure, Unterweger. I mean, what are the odds that it's not him?

Hans passed what he discovered on to authorities, and before long, he finally found an ally in Vienna's Homicide Division, who also became convinced that Jack was the serial killer they'd been looking for. So now you've got the Graz police,

and Hans Breitiger, the journalist, and now you've got Ernst Geiger in Vienna, and everybody's kind of becoming convinced that Jack did it, but, you know, now how do we prove it? It's one thing to have these gravely suspicious circumstances. It's another one to have sufficient proof to actually arrest the guy.

Honing in on Jack as their prime suspect, Jack was interviewed several times in the winter of '91 and '92, and he was asked to provide alibis for the dates in question. This time, the Gratz and Braganz murders were included as well.

For some dates, Jack was able to give alibis for around the times of the murders, but nothing definitively exonerated him. For others, Jack provided names of old girlfriends he claimed could corroborate he'd been with them at the time. Investigating Jack's alibis was an exhausting and time-consuming process. But in the end, after interviewing the girlfriends he'd offered his alibis, they were able to prove Jack had been lying.

Jack almost never made mistakes, but on two occasions he offered a phony alibi and it was quite remarkable. In both instances, the girl kept a diary from the time.

So the Vienna and the Graz police are working together to persuade an examining magistrate to issue an arrest warrant. And they realize this is going to be politically complicated because he is, after all, the poster boy of...

criminal rehabilitation and the Austrian justice ministry after all lets this guy out and journalists and prominent people of all walks of life in Austria have signed the petition so you know politically this thing is a hot potato and so they're kind of strategizing on you know what they're going to do once they arrest this guy and

On February 13th, 1992, a warrant was issued for Jack's arrest on the grounds he provided a false alibi. Jack is under surveillance by a surveillance outfit in Vienna. And right as they get the warrant ready to rock, Jack shakes surveillance in Vienna and disappears. Turns out...

He has driven to Switzerland to meet his girlfriend, who's actually a Viennese girl named Bianca Mrak. And so he's actually on his way to Switzerland to pick up his girlfriend when the warrant is issued for his arrest. And I never got 100% confirmation of this, but by this time, Jack has a cell phone in his car.

And it appears that someone called him on his cell phone and said, hey, Jackie, there's a warrant for your arrest. So he said, I'm fleeing. I'm getting out of here. And so his young girlfriend, she's only 18 years old. She agrees to flee with him. And of course, the Austrian police, you know, have no idea where on earth has he gone. I mean, he's just completely vanished.

For two weeks, police had no idea where in the world Jack could possibly be, but eventually received a tip and were able to find Jack's secret location, Miami Beach, Florida. U.S. Marshals were then informed about Jack's whereabouts, and he was arrested in Miami on February 27, 1992. But this wouldn't be the end of the strange story of Jack Undevager.

Not by a long shot. While the marshals were preparing to arrest Jack in Miami, investigators in Vienna had secured a search warrant to search his apartment. And although they didn't find anything particularly incriminating, they did find some cause for concern.

They find in his apartment several photographs documenting his time in Los Angeles from the summer before. And amongst these photographs are photographs that he's taken of...

street sex workers in L.A. Now, you ask Jack, he'll say, well, of course I'm hanging out in the red light district of L.A., photographing sex workers on the streets of L.A., because I'm a journalist writing a report on them. Nevertheless, the police think, aha, Los Angeles,

summer of 1991. I wonder if they, the LAPD, have any unsolved murders of Los Angeles street workers during the time that Jack was in town.

It always seemed a bit odd that the Austrian murders had suddenly stopped in May of 1991, right around the same time Jack had left the country and flown to LA. Was it possible that the killer hadn't actually stopped at all, but had simply moved on?

Acting on his hunch, investigator Ernst Geiger contacted the LAPD and asked if they had any unsolved murders of sex workers during a very specific time period from June to early July 1991.

And the LAPD says, well, as a matter of fact, we do. We have two girls that were last seen near downtown. That's where they worked. They were found a couple of miles away in the Hollenbeck neighborhood. And then we've got a woman who disappeared from Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, and her body was found a long way away from where she worked.

She was found in Malibu, and we are quite convinced the same culprit murdered all three women. All three women, the culprit had removed the victim's bra, her brassiere, made an incision in the side panel with probably a knife,

cut the shoulder strap off, run the shoulder strap through the incision in the side panel, and then use this as a noose. But it wasn't just a simple slipknot. It had a sort of elaborate quality with multiple bands of material that were greatly amplifying the mechanical advantage of the noose. This pretty darn clever piece of work.

Just like he'd done in Graz, while in Los Angeles, Jack cozied up to local police and gotten them to show him around the red light districts in their patrol cars.

He claimed it was for research for his radio story, but in actuality, what he'd actually been doing was performing reconnaissance, scouting out locations to find victims, looking for secluded areas where he could commit a series of gruesome murders. Police had unknowingly allowed the fox into the henhouse.

Over the course of just 14 days in 1991, Jack murdered three Los Angeles sex workers. 20-year-old Shannon Exley on July 20th. 33-year-old Irene Rodriguez on June 28th. 26-year-old Sherry Long on July 3rd.

At each crime scene, the M.O. was particularly identical, the signature of a serial killer that police in Austria were already now too familiar with.

At the time of Jack's arrest, he was wanted for seven murders, making him the most prolific serial killer in Austrian history. And with the news coming out of LA, three more names were added to the list, bringing the total to 10. But before Jack's trial, yet another name would be added to that list.

A 30-year-old woman from the Czech Republic named Blanka Baczkova. She disappeared from the streets of Prague on September 14th, 1990, with her body being discovered the next day. Blanka had been picked up in town, driven out into the woods, strangled with a ligature, and left unclothed, except for her jewelry and socks.

And guess who just happened to be in Prague on that exact date, according to his own diary? That meant Blanka had actually been Jack's first murder victim after his release from prison. He'd only made it a grand total of 16 weeks before the serial killings began.

The murder trial of Jack Undervaker began in Graz, Austria, on April 20, 1994. He was charged with 11 counts of murder in three different countries over the span of less than a year.

It really is the trial of the century. I mean, this is peacetime Austria, a civilian accused of serial murder. And there was really nothing like this in all of Austrian history. Remember, he's the poster boy of criminal rehabilitation. So the poster boy for criminal rehabilitation, turns out he's the worst serial murderer in Austrian history. So quite an irony there.

At trial, the prosecution did its best to offer physical evidence to the jury that Jack had in fact been the murderer. They presented some DNA evidence linking Jack to one of the murders in LA, as well as a single strand of hair linking him to the murder of Blanka Bochkova in Prague.

But there were serious concerns about chain of custody issues, and because DNA was still in its infancy in 1994, no one really knew how much the jury would be able to comprehend. In the end, the prosecution needed to present the jury with the same circumstantial evidence that had led them to Jack in the first place.

If you look at all of these circumstances combined, there's no way all of these circumstances, which all fit together, are just a coincidence. I mean, he doesn't have an alibi for any of the 11 murders.

He was always there in the area, whether it be Prague, downtown L.A., Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood. He was always there in the vicinity. And although the guy is a ladies' man who's always going out on dates and attending parties, it just so happens during the critical time frame in which these murders were committed, he just always happened to be alone during these times.

His signature is picking up girls in town, taking them outside of town, tying them up, and then strangling them with a very sophisticated ligature that he fashions out of their clothing. And they all had these striking similarities. That was really important. And on and on it goes.

One after the other, the jury was presented with 11 murders that were all clearly linked. And though the killer had been extremely careful to not leave any real evidence behind, at some point, the remarkable lack of evidence at each crime scene could be seen as evidence itself.

Criminalistic, the science of investigating serial killers, it's not really an area of knowledge and understanding that comports particularly well with criminal law. Because most of the time when human beings kill each other,

It's not very well planned. Mistakes are made. Oftentimes there's witnesses, obvious traces of the killer being left behind. When you get into a guy as clever as Jack Unterweger with this extremely careful planning, it's not realistic to think that he's going to make big mistakes, that there's going to be

big chunks of evidence that he leaves behind. I mean, he's really thought this through. He's planned it and executed it with great skill. So in a weird paradoxical way, one of the most remarkable similarities of all of these crimes is there were simply no other suspects for any of them.

An extremely skilled, highly planning, highly adept killer has killed all of these women. And it just so happens that this killer who's killed all of these women just happened to have done it when Jack was in town a mile away. So it's precisely the lack of any obvious mistakes with each one that is pointing to Jack as well.

On June 28th, 1994, Jack Undevaker was found guilty on nine of the 11 murder charges. In two of the cases, the bodies were so badly decomposed by the time they were found that the exact cause of death was undetermined, and it was impossible for the jury to say with certainty that their murders matched Jack's signature.

Over the course of his life, Jack Unterweger was convicted of murdering a total of 10 women. Convictions that represent the coordinated and dedicated efforts of law enforcement agencies spanning four different countries: Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the United States.

But if we consider the two acquittals at trial, as well as the technically unsolved case of Marisa Horvath in 1973, it's believed Jakun Deweger murdered at least 13 women. One of the most remarkable aspects of this case was the roles played by individuals who weren't in active law enforcement. Journalists like Hans Breidegger...

and Peter Grolik, who painstakingly investigated and helped build the circumstantial case against Jack Undewager. But none of it would have been possible without the instincts and dogged determination of one retired homicide investigator, August Schenner.

At a time when, seemingly, the whole of Austria was blinded by Jack's empathetic and artistic public persona, he saw through it, followed his gut, and provided the necessary spark to solve this case. Without his tip, how many more innocent women around the world would have suffered the same fate?

Instead, Jack Undevager, the poster boy for criminal rehabilitation, was headed back to prison with a life sentence again. And this time, there was no possible way anyone would sign a petition for his early release.

This scorpion had proven it could never change its nature. If he ever wanted to get out of prison again, he'd have to tunnel his way to freedom, like Andy did in Shawshank Redemption. But that's not what he did.

Toward the end of Shawshank Redemption, before Red's parole is granted, another inmate named Brooks, the prison librarian, is released after serving 50 years behind bars. He's indeed been rehabilitated, but after getting out, he struggles to adapt to the outside world. He's spent so much time in prison that the real world is now terrifying, lonely, and utterly depressing.

Eventually, Brooks hangs himself, unable to cope with his new surroundings. For Jak und de Weger, adjusting back to life in the real world after prison had never been a problem.

He was famous, a ladies' man, and adored by intellectual Austrian society. He'd slipped on his newfound freedom, like a comfortable old shoe, and without so much as skipping a beat, he'd gone right back to doing what he'd been doing before: murdering vulnerable women.

He appeared on TV, in newspapers, radio and magazines, offering commentary, writing stories, and personally producing segments on the very murders he was responsible for. The sheer brazenness is truly hard to comprehend.

But now that Jack is going back to prison, he must have started to feel the same terror, loneliness, and depression that Brooks had felt on the outside. Jack had been to prison before, but apparently he couldn't bear to do it again. Because just seven hours after the final guilty verdict was read, Jack Undervegger was found dead in his cell. He'd hung himself, just like Brooks.

We want to offer a special thank you to author John Leake for sitting down and speaking with us about this case. His book, Entering Hades, The Double Life of a Serial Killer, tells the full, unbelievable story of Jack Undervegger. What we told you today about this case is only a fraction of the entire story. So if you're a fan of reading true crime, we can't recommend this book enough.

Since publishing Entering Hades in 2007, John has written three more works of nonfiction, including his brand new true crime book, The Meaning of Malice, which was just released in October. We asked John to tell us a little bit about it. I have just finished writing a book that is

strikingly similar to the Jack Unterweger case, except in this case, I didn't have to live in Vienna, Austria to write it. It happened in my hometown of Dallas, Texas.

The title of the book is The Meaning of Malice, and it's the story of a very mysterious, attractive, seductive woman who lived down the street from me when I was a boy growing up in Dallas, Texas in the early 80s. I knew her. I was friends with her daughter. Her name is Sandra Bridewell.

fell under suspicion for committing three murders in Dallas. Now, for reasons that I examine in the book, she was never arrested for committing these crimes. After many years of researching them, I was able to obtain the crime scene photos

have them analyzed by experts, and was able to assemble a presentation of evidence that she did, in fact, kill these three people. So I believe that my book, I present my evidence, and I state that based on the totality of circumstances, I believe that the evidence compels me to believe that she, in fact, did murder these people.

So that's what I've done. I've done it with the help of forensic experts. And I present my evidence. And again, the book is The Meaning of Malice. I hope that those who have listened to this podcast will check out my new book. You can see my website, meaningofmalice.com, and my author website, authorjohnleek.com.

Follow the Minds of Madness on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. To support the show and get access to ad-free episodes, extra content, and Patreon-exclusive episodes, go to patreon.com slash madnesspod. To find us on Instagram and Facebook, search The Minds of Madness, and on Twitter using the handle

at MadnessPod. And also, by checking out our sponsors and using our promo codes, you're also helping support the show. We've got all the links in our episode notes. So until next week, thanks for listening.