Serial Killer Investigations (50 page)

The second victim, a prostitute named Marcia Horveth, had been strangled with her stockings and dumped in a lake. Unterweger was not charged with this murder, because he had already confessed to the first and had been sentenced to life. He pleaded guilty, claiming that as he was having sex, he had seen the face of his mother before him. A psychologist had diagnosed him a sexually sadistic psychopath with narcissistic tendencies.

When he went to jail, Unterweger had been illiterate. He had already been in prison 15 times. But condemned to life, he set about learning to read and write. He then edited the prison newspaper, started a literary review, and wrote his autobiography, a book called
Purgatory (Fegefeur),
in which he professed to be completely rehabilitated, and explained that he had killed the prostitute because he hated his mother.

Purgatory
was a literary sensation, and intellectuals began to lobby for his release. He was paroled on 23 May 1990, after 16 years behind bars. And he quickly became prosperous as his book climbed to the top of the best-seller charts, and then was filmed. He wrote plays, gave readings of his poetry, and appeared as a guest on talk shows. A small, handsome man who wore white suits and drove expensive cars, his face was soon familiar to everyone in Austria.

Then women began to disappear. The first, a shop assistant, Blanka Bockova, was found on the banks of the Vltava River, near Prague, on 14 September, 1990. She had been beaten and strangled with a stocking.

On New Years Eve 1991, in a forest near Graz, Austria, nearly three hundred miles south of Prague, another woman was found strangled with her pantyhose. She was Heidemarie Hammerer, a prostitute who had vanished from Graz on 26 October 1990. Five days later, the badly decomposed body of a woman was found in a forest north of Graz. She had been stabbed, and probably strangled with her pantyhose. She was identified as Brunhilde Masser, another prostitute. The decomposed body of a prostitute named Elfriende Schrempf was found eight months later, on 5 October, in a forest near Graz. When four more prostitutes, Silvia Zagler, Sabine Moitzi, Regina Prem, and Karin Eroglu disappeared in Vienna during the next month, it looked as if the killer had changed his location.

And at that point, the police were given their vital lead. Ex-policeman August Schenner, retired for five years from the Vienna force, was reminded of the modus operandi of the prostitute-killer Jack Unterweger 16 years earlier. Police who checked upon his tip were at first sceptical—Unterweger was rich, famous, and had plenty of girlfriends. Would such a man murder prostitutes? Moreover, as a magazine writer, Unterweger had interviewed prostitutes about the killer the press had labelled the ‘Vienna Courier’, and been critical of their failure to catch him. If they treated him as a suspect, would it not look as if they were pursuing a vendetta?

Yet as they reviewed the evidence, the Vienna police—and especially Detective Ernst Geiger—decided that the case against Unterweger looked highly convincing. A check on his credit card receipts revealed that his travels had invariably taken him to the same areas as where the women were killed. He had even been on a magazine assignment in Los Angeles, interviewing prostitutes, when three of them were strangled there in a manner that recalled the Vienna murders. He had even persuaded the Los Angeles Police Department to drive him around red-light districts in their patrol cars.

As his investigation continued, Ernst Geiger learned from prostitutes who had been picked up by Unterweger that he liked to handcuff them during sex—which was consistent with some of the marks on the wrists of victims. Police tracked down the BMW that Unterweger had bought on his release from prison, and found in it a dark hair with skin on the root. It was tiny, but using the PCR technique to make multiple copies of DNA, they were able to identify it as belonging to victim Blanca Bockover. When a search of his apartment revealed a red scarf whose fibres matched those found on her body, they decided to arrest their suspect.

They interviewed Unterweger on 2 October 1991. Naturally, he denied everything. Moreover, he renewed criticism of the police for their failure to catch the Vienna Courier. And support for him among Viennese intellectuals and his society friends remained strong. How could they admit that their enthusiasm for his writing had unleashed a killer on Vienna? Was it not more likely, as Unterweger told them, that the authorities were persecuting this ex-criminal who had now become their scourge?

It was time to bring the suspect into custody. In February 1992 a judge signed the warrant. But when the police arrived at his apartment, Unterweger had already left. They learned from his friends that he had gone on holiday with his latest girlfriend, 18-year-old Bianca Mrak, whom he had picked up in a restaurant, and with whom he had been living since the previous December.

It seemed they had gone to Switzerland, and then, when friends tipped him off by telephone that there was a warrant out for him, to New York.

Before leaving Europe, Unterweger had telephoned Vienna newspapers to insist that the police were trying to frame him. He also made an offer: if the officer in charge of the case would drop the warrant for his arrest, he would return voluntarily to ‘clear his name’. He had alibis, he said, for all of the murders—on one occasion he had been giving a reading of his work.

Unterweger and Bianca moved to Miami, Florida, and rented a beach apartment. They were running short of cash, and Bianca took a job as a topless dancer. Her mother kept them supplied with money by telegraph.

When the police learned about this, they called on the mother, and prevailed on her to inform them the next time her daughter made contact. And when Bianca asked her mother to telegraph more cash to the Western Union office in Miami, two agents were waiting for them. The alert Unterweger spotted them and fled, urging Bianca to head in another direction. But he was caught after running through a restaurant, creating havoc. Out in the back, an armed agent arrested him. When told he was wanted for making a false customs declaration in New York—he had failed to admit his prison record—he looked relieved. But when they added that he was also wanted in Vienna for murder, he began to sob.

Learning that he was also wanted in California, he chose to resist extradition to Europe and opt for a Los Angeles trial. However, when told that California had the death penalty, he changed his mind.

The trial began in Vienna in April 1994, and in spite of overwhelming circumstantial evidence, the result was by no means a foregone conclusion. Unterweger had hundreds of admirers, who were convinced that the police had picked on him because they were blinded with prejudice by his past criminal record. And there was virtually no forensic evidence to link him to the crimes—merely a few red fibres that matched his scarf.

The part McCrary played in the prosecution proved to be central and vital. It was his task to explain to the court that the ‘signature’ evidence amounted to overwhelming proof of Unterweger’s guilt. It was almost impossible, he told them, for 11 unconnected murders to be committed with an almost identical pattern—strangulation by underwear tied in a unique knot, and disposal in woodland in the same manner.

McCrary had even fed the ‘signature analysis’ into the VICAP computer, which covered nearly twelve thousand murders from all over the US. He had expected dozens of matches; instead, it came up with only four, one of which had been solved. The other three were the murders attributed to Unterweger.

When the defence asked him whether he had ever come across another case of a man who had frequent consensual sex getting involved with prostitutes, he was able to cite the case of Arthur Shawcross who, like Unterweger, had been in prison for 15 years for murder, been released, and then murdered 11 prostitutes—in spite of having a wife and a girlfriend. The amazing parallel produced an obvious effect on the

^jur
y.

The trial dragged one for two and a half months, and McCrary watched Unterweger’s support eroding away as the public realised the strength of the evidence against him. In a speech in his own defence, Unterweger did not even attempt to counter it. He merely repeated his assertion that he had no reason to kill women, since he had every reason to stay out of jail. He conceded that he had once been ‘a primitive criminal who grunted rather than talked, and an inveterate liar’. But, he declared with passion, he was no longer that person.

But McCrary’s evidence left little doubt that he was exactly that person. And on 28 June 1999, the jury found Unterweger guilty on nine of the 11 counts of murder—in the remaining two cases the jury reasoned that the bodies were too decomposed for the cause of death to be established. Unterweger was obviously stunned; he had confidently expected an acquittal.

McCrary had one more contribution to make to the case. By now he knew enough about Unterweger to know that an ego like his would find it virtually impossible to accept the verdict. He had sworn that he would never return to prison. This time it would be for life; there would be no second chance of parole. Suicide would be his last defiant act, his last great ‘Fuck you!’

Unfortunately, this warning was not passed on to the prison guards. That night Jack Unterweger hanged himself in his cell with the cord of his jumpsuit.

For McCrary, the moral of the story is also the moral of this book: it is almost impossible for serial killers to change their spots.

Epilogue

A book like this is hardly the place for philosophical reflection, but in these final pages perhaps I might permit myself some latitude.

On a hot Monday in June 1955, an ex-con named Willie Cochran saw 15-year-old Patty Ann Cook sunbathing in a black swimsuit in her front yard in Dallas, Georgia, and offered her a lift to the swimming pool. When she accepted, he drove her to a spot beside the Etowah River, raped her, and then shot her through the head. Since Cochran was a sex offender who had taken that day off from work, he was questioned by the police and confessed to the crime. He was duly executed in Reidsville’s electric chair.

What stuck in my mind about the case was a comment made by the presiding judge, J. H. Paschall: ‘The male sexual urge has a strength out of all proportion to any useful purpose that it serves.’

I suspect that comment contains the solution to the rise of the serial killer. In the West we live in a society that has seen a steady rise in the level of sexual stimulation. By the 1930s advertisements already made use of attractive young women in swimsuits, and in the post-war years these images extended to women clad only in their underwear. Nowadays anyone can access pornographic pictures on the Web. If Patty Ann had been wearing a Victorian bathing costume with a woollen skirt down to the knees, Cochran would have driven past.

Which might seem to imply that unless we revert to a Victorian code of advertising, there is no end in sight to the rise of sex crime and serial murder. This conclusion, however, is not as inevitable as it looks. There is,

I would suggest, a way forward. And Christie’s remark about the ‘quiet, peaceful thrill’ he felt after killing Muriel Eady offers a starting point for trying to explain what it is. Christie’s remark had always reminded me of a phrase used by D. H. Lawrence in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
when the gamekeeper first makes love to Lady Chatterley: ‘He had come in to her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body.’

Roy Hazelwood’s comment that sex crime is about power is obviously true, but it is not the whole truth. Equally important is that sense of ‘peace on earth’.

Now Lawrence was a true descendant of those nineteenth-century writers and artists we call Romantics, a movement that began in Germany in the late eighteenth century, at the time of Goethe. And 50 years ago, they were the starting point of my first book
The Outsider.
As a teenager in the 1940s, I had been fascinated by the high rate of suicide among the Romantics, as well as deaths by tuberculosis that seemed to be part of the syndrome of misery and defeat.

The reason for the misery and defeat was their feeling of the painful contrast between ‘peace on earth’, and the madness of our materialistic world. This I saw as the basic ‘Outsider problem’, which was succinctly expressed in Villiers de LIsle Adam’s play
Axel
when the hero tells the heroine: ‘As for living, our servants can do that for us.’ He is embracing her as he speaks, and then goes on to propose that the solution would be suicide. This is the conclusion reached by so many of the Romantics. What I wanted to demonstrate was why this is illogical, and why, when we recognise this, we can also see a way forward for our chaotic civilization.

To me, it seemed obvious that the answer was for the ‘Outsider’ to stop feeling sorry for himself, and get on with the job of trying to change the world. If he didn’t do it, then nobody else would.

At about this time, 1960, I received a letter from an American professor of psychology called Abraham Maslow. He explained that he had got tired of studying sick people, because they talked about nothing but their sickness, and decided to study healthy people instead. And he quickly learned something that no one had discovered so far: healthy people had with great frequency what they called ‘peak experiences’, experiences of sudden tremendous happiness. Typical was his story of a young mother who was watching her husband and children eating breakfast when she suddenly thought, ‘My God, aren’t I lucky?’ and went into the peak experience.

He also made another interesting discovery: when he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began remembering and talking about their own peak experiences,
and they began having peak experiences all the time.
The capacity for peak experiences is obviously quite basic and normal in human beings. Until we recognise this, we are selling ourselves short.

But Maslow said something else that struck me as relevant to the problem of crime. He talked about what he called the ‘hierarchy of needs’. As they evolve, human beings pass through certain levels of need. If you are so poor that you have difficulty getting enough to eat, then you will find it hard to think about anything but food. But when people have enough to eat, then the next level emerges: for a roof over your head. Every tramp dreams of retiring to a cottage with roses round the door.