Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (31 page)

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The third murder

On 5 December 1990, he propositioned prostitute Heidemarie Hammerer and took her to an unknown location. There he cuffed her hands, stripped her naked and gagged her with a strip cut from her own underskirt. He beat her buttocks and she struggled so hard that the handcuffs cut into her wrists, leaving them badly bruised.

Finally he strangled her with her own stockings, re-dressed the body and drove it to a remote part of the woods where it was discovered on New Year’s Eve by young hikers enjoying a winter walk.

The fourth murder

On 7 March 1991, he approached street prostitute Elfriede Schrempf and persuaded her to accompany him. We’ll never know what he did to her pre-mortem as her body was skeletonised by the time it was recovered seven months later.

She was naked apart from a pair of socks.

On 9 March, Unterweger phoned one of the unlisted numbers in her notebook and threatened the person who answered the phone, making obscene comments about the profession of prostitution, his mother’s profession. He made a series of such calls, mentioning Elfriede’s name. It’s not unusual for sadists to contact their victims’ families with such taunts and they often use such phone calls as a masturbatory aid.

The fth murder

Sylvia Zagler also died in March after Unterweger approached her in Vienna. The prostitute had large eyes and a soulful look, but the sadist was indifferent to her appealing expression. He stripped, cuffed and tortured her and eventually strangled her with her own lingerie, leaving her body in the woods.

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The sixth murder

That same month he approached Sabine Moitzi in Vienna and took her to a forested area outside the city. He stripped her of all her clothes except for her jersey, restrained her wrists and arms and strangled her with her own clothing. Again, the body was obscenely displayed in this, his third murder of the month.

The seventh murder

Regina Prem was the next woman to die, murdered in Vienna by the sadist in April 1991. Months later, whilst under stress after being interviewed by the police, Unterweger would phone her husband and tell her that he’d murdered Regina, that God had ordered him to punish and execute her. He made several such phone calls, aware that at the time Regina was still only listed as a missing person, that her family desperately hoped she’d be found alive.

The eighth murder

In the same time period he lured Karin Ergolo into his vehicle and hit her about the face with a blunt instrument.

He cuffed her, stripped her of all her clothing except for her shoes and stuffed her underwear down her throat as a gag.

Finally sated, he strangled her with her own clothing and took her to the forest in Vienna where he left her corpse in a naked and splayed state. Previously he had covered his dead victims with leaves, but now he was displaying the cadaver for others to find – causing shock like this is yet another form of sadism. It’s in direct contrast to most killers who want the body to remain hidden as long as possible so that their crime remains unknown and forensic clues can be washed away.

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The Los Angeles murders

The Austrian police now began to suspect Jack Unterweger because the crimes were so similar to his 1974 murders. They ascertained that he’d been in the vicinity of the homicides and that a man answering his description had been seen talking to several of the prostitutes. But Unterweger had said in interviews that he liked such call girls so police considered that he might simply have been paying for their services.

Aware that they’d put him under local surveillance, Jack outsmarted them by flying to Los Angeles in June 1991. He told the LA police that he was a journalist and asked them to show him the red-light district to help with his crime research.

They obligingly drove him around and pointed out the best places to find prostitutes. He also posed with several female police officers and kept one of the photos as a souvenir.

The ninth murder

Unterweger could now start torturing and murdering women in America, where no one suspected that he was a sadistic serial killer. On 20 June he picked up prostitute Shannon Exley.

Unusually, he had intercourse with her – his semen was later found in her vagina, alongside that of her six previous clients.

Shannon was wearing a bra, and the sadist particularly got off on the idea of strangling women with their own bras.

Unfortunately for him the Czechoslovakian and Austrian prostitutes hadn’t worn any and he’d had to strangle them with their slips and stockings. Now he removed Shannon’s bra and began to fashion it into an elaborate noose. The attractive young prostitute probably had to watch this bizarre ritual as she lay handcuffed on the ground, concealed from others by a row of garages. Eventually he strangled her with the customised bra and left her lying naked on her back.

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The tenth murder

Another attractive young prostitute, Irene Rodriguez, met the same fate. She was soliciting near Jack’s hotel when he persuaded her to accompany him to a quiet location. She too was strangled with her bra which had part of the elastic removed.

The eleventh murder

That summer, Sherri Long was the third Los Angeles prostitute to die at Unterweger’s hands. She was handcuffed, stripped, beaten and strangled with her specially refashioned bra.

On 17 July 1991, the sadist returned to Austria, convinced that no one would link him with these brutal murders. He had killed at least three women in six weeks.

The new girlfriend

Like many sadists, Jack found it easier to attract and manipulate much younger women so, now approaching 40, he started a relationship with an 18-year-old waitress called Bianca.

Meanwhile the police were closing in, and Unterweger knew he had to leave Austria before he ended up behind bars.

Bianca was happy to go with him and they travelled to Miami together and rented a house, but Jack found it difficult to be satisfied by one woman alone and he found it equally difficult to stay out of the limelight. As a result, he phoned various Austrian journalists and told them that he was innocent, that he was being picked on by fate and by those who were jealous of his success.

Short of cash, he persuaded his girlfriend to start dancing topless and hand over all her money to him. In other words, he was reverting to his early role as a pimp rather than as a loving boyfriend. Bianca told everyone that they were having 262

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a wonderful time – but his diary would later show that he was plotting her death.

Eventually the happy couple decided to relocate to Florida and asked Bianca’s mother to wire money. She promised to do so but in reality tipped off Interpol who were waiting for them at the Western Union office on 27 February.

Unterweger had sworn that he would never go back to prison so now he behaved like a trapped animal, dodging into an adjacent restaurant and racing through its kitchen sending food and crockery flying. He made it to a nearby car park before officers drew their guns. He began to sob when they said that he was wanted for murder in Austria and that they were going to extradite him.

Trial

In June 1994, his trial began in Graz, Austria. He was tried for all 11 known murders – the one in Prague, seven in Austria and three in Los Angeles. The defence said that a man as popular with women and with the literati had no need to resort to murder and that this alone suggested that he was innocent.

There would have been some truth in this statement if Jack had been a normal man with a normal ego – but he was a cold-blooded psychopath and extreme sexual sadist who hated prostitutes. Having vanilla sex with a ‘good’ woman was never going to satisfy him.

Unterweger himself said in court that he was being wrongly judged for cavorting with such call girls. He shrugged away his lack of alibi, suggested that he didn’t understand the DNA evidence against him and told the jury ‘I’m counting on your acquittal.’

But the prosecution built a strong case. They noted that part of one of Blanka Bockova’s hairs was found in Unterweger’s BMW

and fibres from his scarlet scarf were found on Heidemarie Hammerer’s corpse – he’d probably used it to bind her legs 263

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whilst he tortured her. Other prostitutes testified that Jack Unterweger always handcuffed them before sex, and several of the corpses had handcuff marks on their wrists caused as they struggled violently to escape his cruel ligature and knife. He’d been in Prague, Austria and Los Angeles when the respective murders took place and they bore marked similarities to his 1974 homicides. A psychiatric report judged him sadistic but sane.

On 28 June 1994, the jury found him guilty of nine out of the 11 murders – two of the Austrian victims had been too decomposed for them to still bear Unterweger’s trademark signature. He looked genuinely shocked as he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Suicide

But Unterweger had sworn that he’d never be caged again and he was true to his word. A mere six hours into his sentence, he took the cord from his prison uniform and tied one end around his neck and the other end to the bedstead then he leaned forward, strangling himself to death.

JANUSZ KOMAR

A known criminal in his native country of Czechoslovakia, Janusz Komar made his way into Germany on 2 September 1980 and asked for political asylum. Whilst awaiting a decision he joined the French Foreign Legion but he was so inept that they threw him out.

In early June 1981, he was charged with two violent assaults but Germany still chose to officially grant him asylum status.

As he was only 18, he was given a suspended sentence for the two attacks. Unfortunately nothing else has been reported about his formative years.

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The heavily-built and tall teenager continued to cause mayhem, breaking into cars and buildings rather than earning an honest living. He also crashed a stolen car whilst drunkenly driving it. This time he spent six months in a juvenile detention facility, after which he soon broke his parole.

The rst murder

Released on 10 November 1983, he set up home with another drifter. A week later he loitered beside a vineyard near Trier, desperate to hurt someone and hoping that a female victim would come along.

26-year-old Japanese student Matsuko Ayano was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and was attacked by the sadist. He dragged her into the vineyard and began to kick her, breaking her nose, jaw and cheekbones and fracturing her skull. He also jumped up and down on her body again and again, causing horrific internal injuries and leaving his size ten boot marks embedded in her flesh.

During the prolonged attack, he pulled down her jeans and panties. Afterwards he rifled through her handbag and stole her cash. The pretty young woman was found by a shocked winegrower and rushed to hospital where she died four days later without ever regaining consciousness.

Because there was no semen on the body, police believed that they were dealing with a simple mugging. But, like many sadists, Janusz Komar had doubtless orgasmed when his victim screamed in pain. He wanted the victim’s money but the violence he used was so excessive that it clearly gave him a thrill.

The second murder

Eighteen days later his bloodlust had built again and he entered a flower shop at the gates of a Regensburg cemetery. Finding 265

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the shop owner, 68-year-old Maria Weis, alone on the premises, he kicked her repeatedly, stamping on her face and body until she was unrecognisable. During the assault she died of shock or loss of blood.

A customer found the elderly victim, her blood dripping from the walls and counter, and was so shocked that she had an angina attack. The cash register was open and its contents gone.

Komar’s flatmate knew his propensity for violence so feared the worst when he came home covered in blood, but Komar paid off the drifter. Police only fathomed that he was the killer when they caught him robbing a house near the first murder scene and realised that he was also on record for committing crimes close to the second murder scene. Taken into custody, his boots matched the terrible stamp marks on both victims’

flesh. He immediately – albeit very casually – confessed.

On 15 November, he was found guilty of two counts of premeditated murder and was sentenced to ten years in prison, the maximum sentence for juveniles under German law at that time.

WAYNE CLIFFORD BODEN

Like Richard Cottingham, who is profiled in the American Sadists section, the Canadian Wayne Boden fantasised about biting female breasts and put his fantasies into action again and again…

Details are scarce about Boden’s 1948 birth and subsequent upbringing, but it’s known that – like Jack Unterweger, Robert Rhoades, Neville Heath and Christopher Wilder – he was superficially charming and attractive to women. Indeed, he’d worked as a male model in his teens, though his career was over by 20, the age when he started to sadistically kill.

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The rst murder

On 23 July 1968, he went with 21-year-old Norma Vaillancourt to her Montreal apartment. It’s likely that the sex play was at first consensual, as when Norma was found she had a faint passive smile on her face. But during the sex act, her lover got violently carried away and he strangled her then bit her breasts.