The Devil's Dozen (18 page)

The trial dragged on into August. The defense summed up its case by saying that the evidence and psychiatric analyses were flawed and the confessions had been coerced. Chikatilo’s lawyer pleaded for a not-guilty verdict. The next day, Chikatilo broke into song from his cage and then muttered a string of nonsense, with accusations that he was being “radiated.” He was taken out of the courtroom before the prosecutor began his final argument, in which he asked for the death penalty. On October 14, Andrei Chikatilo was found guilty of five counts of molestation and fifty-two counts of murder. Chikatilo cried out incoherently, shouting, “Swindlers!” and throwing his bench while demanding to see the corpses. The judge sentenced him to be executed. He appealed, but it was denied, so on February 15, 1994, Andrei Chikatilo, the Lesopolosa Maniac, was taken to a soundproof room and shot behind the right ear, ending his life. For Burakov, it was the resolution of a long and difficult investigation, but like other good detectives, he had stayed the course, devised inventive methods, educated himself beyond what was expected, and finally saw results.

Criminal profiling played an important role in many serial-killer investigations during the 1990s, but it has often been disparaged as “mere” psychology. In fact, profiling from crime scenes is only one aspect of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Analysis, which offers other types of behavioral analysis. One of them was instrumental in our next story.

 

 

Cannibal: The Real Hannibal Lecters.
HBO, February 2003.

Conti, Richard P. “The Psychology of False Confessions.”
Journal of Credibility Assessment and Witness Psychology
2 : 1 (1999), 14 -36.

Cullen, Robert.
The Killer Department: Detective Viktor Burakov’s Eight-Year Hunt for the Most Savage Serial Killer in Russian History.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

Krivich, Mikhail, and Ol’gert Ol’gin.
Comrade Chikatilo: The Psychopathology of Russia’s Notorious Serial Killer.
Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 1993.

Lourie, Richard.
Hunting the Devil: The Pursuit, Capture and Confession of the Most Savage Serial Killer in History.
New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Matthews, Owen. “A Crime-Fighting MD and the Twisted Citizens of the Capital of Serial Crime: City of the Dead.”
Newsweek,
January 25, 1999.

Three deputy U.S. marshals and an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms kept surveillance on a Western Union office on Collins Avenue in Florida’s South Beach. It might have seemed like a cushy assignment, sitting there watching scantily clad people enjoying the sun, but the team was waiting for a desperate fugitive and suspected serial killer named Jack Unterweger. He had fled from Austria and established himself in Florida, but telegrams sent by Austrian officials pinpointed his whereabouts and allowed police to set a trap.

Armed with a photograph of Unterweger, the agents watched for his approach. Since he had lied to customs about his criminal record, they had cause for arrest, although it was only a reason to detain him until they had the paperwork for more serious charges.

Eventually Unterweger approached, in the company of his girlfriend, Bianca Mrak. “He looked like a normal tourist,” Shawn Conboy later told a reporter, although his distinctly European clothing, pale skin, and the prison tattoos covering his arms gave him away. The agents could hardly believe that this short, scrawny guy was responsible for a dozen murders, but it wasn’t their job to make that call. They just had to keep an eye on him.

Bianca entered the money-exchange area of the office while Unterweger waited outside. When she returned, they started to walk away and the marshals fell in behind them. But Unterweger, alert, noticed them and took off running. One agent stayed with Bianca while the others chased Unterweger.

Jack Unterweger, suspect in an
international murder spree, under
arrest in Florida.
AP/Worldwide Photos/Gepa

He ran down an alley off Collins Avenue and into a restaurant, moving through it as fast as he could, and then ducked out the back. But the agents were faster and they managed to corner him in a parking structure as squad cars pulled up. The little Austrian had no choice but to surrender and they slipped handcuffs on his wrists, put him into a car, and took him to downtown Miami. Unterweger, a former convict freed under unusual circumstances, had vowed that he would never spend another night in prison. He acted confident that he would not be found guilty of any of the crimes of which he was accused. He did not realize that in addition to the Austrian officials who were interested in questioning him, there were detectives from Los Angeles as well. He was a suspect in a case that involved an international crime spree, and since authorities had no witnesses or direct physical evidence, it would take an impressive database and sophisticated behavioral assessment to nail him.

It was a retired Austrian detective, August Schenner, who made the first connection. He watched the newspapers during the early 1990s as a string of murders was reported that bore an eerie likeness to two murders he had once investigated. What he did not know was that the murders in Austria were just more in a series that had begun near Prague.

On a chilly September morning in 1990, a woman’s body was found along the bank of the Vltava River in Czechoslovakia. She was lying on her back, naked, except for a pair of gray stockings. Left in a sexually suggestive position with her legs open, she was covered with leaves, grass, and twigs. On her finger was a gold ring. This victim had been recently strangled, as well as stabbed in the buttocks and beaten. There were bruises all over her, signaling quite a struggle, but no sign of sexual assault.

A search along the river turned up female clothing that appeared to be the right size for the body, along with a wallet containing identification. The victim’s name was Blanka Bockova. She was thirty years old, married, and had worked at a butcher shop in Prague. She had left the shop on September 14, the day before her body turned up, going to Wenceslas Square for a drink with friends. They left just before midnight, but she wanted to stay. They saw her talking with a well-dressed man around forty years of age. He was not a regular, and no one knew his name or where he was from, so he was never picked up for questioning and the case went unsolved.

Sometime after October 26, 1990, in Graz, Austria, a prostitute named Brunhilde Masser vanished. Prostitution was legal in Austria, where prostitute murders averaged about one per year. Thus there was reason for concern over this unusual crime, and that concern increased on December 5 when another prostitute, Heidemarie Hammerer, disappeared from Bregenz, an Austrian tourist city that borders Switzerland and Germany.

On New Year’s Eve, hikers came across Hammerer’s fully clothed body. Upon closer inspection, it appeared that she had been killed and then re-dressed, after which she had been dragged through the woods. She still wore her jewelry, so robbery did not seem to be a motive. Her legs were bare and a piece of fabric had been cut from her slip with a sharp instrument, like a knife. This piece was found in her mouth.

Cold weather had helped to preserve the remains, so the pathologist determined that Hammerer had been strangled with a pair of panty hose, presumably her own. In addition, there were bruises on her wrists that bore the marks of some kind of restraint, such as handcuffs or tight ligatures. She had bruises on other areas of her body as well, as if she had been beaten. No sexual discharge was present on or around the body. One potential piece of evidence was the presence of several foreign red fibers on her clothing. The regional office of the Austrian Federal Police began an immediate investigation.

Five days after Hammerer’s body was discovered in Bregenz, hikers came across some badly decomposed remains of a woman in an isolated forest north of Graz. The local pathologist determined that the killer had stabbed her and possibly strangled her with her own panty hose. Her clothing, handbag, and other personal property were missing, yet she still had her jewelry. The police soon identified her as Brunhilde Masser.

The Austrian Federal Police assigned to the Styrian region took over this investigation, but they found no one who knew about Hammerer’s or Masser’s last customers. Someone had seen a man in a leather jacket with Hammerer but could not identify him.

Three months later, on March 17, in Graz, Elfriede Schrempf vanished from her usual corner. Soon, a stranger called Schrempf’s family. He mentioned her by name, made threatening comments, and hung up. He called once more with the same message, but the family could not identify him. While the Austrian police did not yet know about the murder of Blanka Bockova in Prague, they did have two disturbing murders and one missing-person case that bore similar associations.

There were no real leads, although the police kept on the case for several months. Then, just as the investigation began to fade, on October 5, hikers called in a set of skeletonized remains that they’d found in a forested area outside Graz. These remains suggested a woman about the size of Schrempf, who was soon identified as the victim.

Then, over the course of a month, Silvia Zagler, Sabine Moitzi, Regina Prem, and Karin Eroglu, all prostitutes, vanished from the streets of Vienna. It appeared that the killer had selected a specific victim group, workers in the sex trade, but there was no evidence of sexual violation or ejaculation on or near the bodies. The victims’ bruises indicated anger, so this man might have been committing murder in frustration. A team of investigators from the various relevant jurisdictions came together to discuss the crimes, but concluded that they did not have a serial killer on their hands. There were similarities, yes, but there were also differences.

On May 20, Sabine Moitzi’s body turned up, and three days later, so did the remains of Karin Eroglu. Both had been dumped in forested areas outside of Vienna, lying prone, and both had been strangled with an article of their own clothing. Eroglu’s body was naked except for her jewelry and Moitzi wore only a jersey, pulled up. Moitzi’s money was missing, but her clothing and handbag were found a few yards away from her body. Eroglu had been subjected to blunt-force trauma to the face. Her handbag and clothing were missing, except for her shoes and a body stocking, which her killer had forced down her throat. The press began printing articles about a serial killer, dubbing him “the Vienna Courier” and “the Vienna Woods Killer.”

It was around this time that August Schenner, retired from the Criminal Investigation Department in Salzburg, made a call to his former colleagues. He asked about the status of a convicted killer named Johann “Jack” Unterweger. Something about the prostitute killer’s MO reminded Schenner of this man.

Back in 1974, he said, he had investigated two murders. Margaret Schaefer, eighteen, had been strangled and left in the woods. She was a friend of Barbara Scholz, a prostitute who had been involved in the killing. Scholz and Unterweger had robbed Schaefer’s house and then took her into the woods. With a belt from her coat, Unterweger tied her hands behind her back, beat her, removed her clothes, and demanded sex. She refused, so he hit her in the head with a steel pipe. Then he used her bra to strangle her to death, leaving her nude body faceup in the forest, covered with leaves.

When the police questioned Unterweger, he broke down and confessed. In court, he defended himself by claiming that as he had hit Fräulein Schaefer, he had envisioned his mother in front of him. His anger was such that he could not stop. (It seems likely that he borrowed this notion from a psychiatrist who had interviewed him.)

Dr. Klaus Jarosch pronounced him a sexually sadistic psychopath with narcissistic and histrionic tendencies. “He tends to sudden fits of rage and anger,” Jarosch wrote. “His physical activities are enormously aggressive with sexually sadistic perversion...He is an incorrigible perpetrator.”

The second murdered woman, Schenner said, was Marcia Horveth, a prostitute, who was strangled with her stockings and a necktie. Adhesive tape was applied to her mouth, and her body was thrown into Lake Salzachsee near Salzburg. The police did not investigate Unterweger for this murder, because he was already in prison for life. It had seemed a waste of resources. Yet Schenner, convinced that Unterweger was responsible, interviewed him, finding him quite vehement in his denials.

While at the prison, Schenner had the impression that the charming convict was running the place. That was reason enough to suspect that, despite a life sentence, he had persuaded officials to give him a parole hearing, where he could then strut his best stuff. Schenner learned that fifteen years into his sentence—just a few months before Brunhilde Masser was murdered—Jack Unterweger had indeed been paroled. Not only was he free, he was a national celebrity.