Shannon agreed to leave with this handsome man, believing it would be another service. However, within a few minutes the stranger became his worst nightmare. After savagely sexually assaulting her, the man took a stick and beat her until she was unconscious. After her, he ripped off her bra, strangled her, and abandoned her body.
Nobody could imagine that, behind that brutal crime, was the hand of Jack Unterweger, a rehabilitated murderer turned reporter and famous best-selling writer, who had never stopped killing. The nicknamed Vienna Strangler led such a double life that he even dared to write about some of the murders for a local newspaper.
Johann Unterweger, better known as Jack, was born on August 16, 1950 in the Austrian town of Judenburg, into a broken and unloving family. His father was an American soldier who abandoned her mother as soon as she became pregnant, and the woman was forced into prostitution to survive.
However, faced with the impossibility of supporting the little boy, the mother sent Jack to his maternal grandfather. But things didn’t get better. The boy grew up in absolute poverty, with practically no food to put in his mouth and no possibility of going to school or learning to read and write.
Furthermore, Jack was a victim of abuse – his grandfather preferred to give him a beating rather than a hug – and he saw prostitution as the best way to relate to women. So much so that his grandfather not only frequented brothels daily, but also took prostitutes home.
That amalgam led Jack to spend more time on the street and to prefer any unhealthy and criminal environment than that of his own home. This is how the little boy began to commit his first crimes, from robberies and robberies to assaults on prostitutes, and to go to jail for the first time, although only for a few days.
Until 1974 when he committed his first murder. He was 24 years old and his victim was only eighteen. She was a German prostitute, Margaret Schäfer, whom he savagely raped, after beating her with an iron bar until she was unconscious, and ending up suffocating her with her own stockings. Her corpse appeared naked and beaten, covered in leaves, in the middle of a forest.
Almost a year later, Jack was arrested accused of Margaret’s murder. From the first moment, the young man confessed the facts to the police, asked for forgiveness and showed remorse. In court, he cried uncontrollably, begging for a second chance. He was sentenced to life in prison.
For the next fifteen years, Jack became a model prisoner, an example of social reintegration: he enrolled in a literacy program, learned to read and write, and began publishing children’s stories, poems, novels and plays. He had just become a famous writer.
His autobiography titled Fegefeuer – eine Reise ins Zuchthaus (Purgatory – A Trip to Prison) hit the best-seller list in Europe and they bought the rights to make a television series. His fame grew as interviews in the media did as well. In fact, Jack always begged for a new opportunity to show what had changed. This arrived on May 23, 1990.
Thanks to his popularity, but also to the pressure exerted by writers, politicians, artists and intellectuals such as the writer Elfriede Jelinek (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004), the Austrian government granted him a pardon. Jack Unterweger was the symbol of true social reintegration. But, in reality, he was never like that.
While the writer dedicated himself to working as a reporter in a newspaper and participating in conferences and congresses on the rehabilitation of prisoners, he combined this public facet of redemption with that of a murderer. Because for years he led a double life and killed again. He did it up to twelve times in the United States, the Czech Republic and Switzerland.
His second crime was committed four months after being released and, as he did with his first murder, he carried out the same modus operandi. Jack selected prostitutes from the red light districts of the cities he visited, savagely sexually assaulted them, then beat and even stabbed them, culminating his atrocious work with strangulation. In all the murders, his fetish object was the prostitutes’ bra because it allowed him to suffocate them quickly.
In 1991, Jack was hired by an Austrian magazine to travel to Los Angeles and do a study on the differences between North American and European prostitution. During his stay in the city of Los Angeles, the writer killed three women: Shannon Exley, Irene Rodríguez and Sherri Ann Long.
During the investigation of the crimes, police discovered that Jack had frequented the same location as the victims, supposedly to interview them. Jack was questioned, but he used his girlfriend as an alibi. When investigators discovered the hoax, the writer had already taken a plane back to Vienna.
Among the incriminating evidence, there was a red scarf whose fibers matched those found on the neck of one of the victims, as well as bank transactions on the same dates and places where the murders had been committed.
While the FBI was trying to track him down, Jack killed nine more women in Vienna and Prague. In fact, the media warned the authorities that the crimes were the work of a serial killer, whom they dubbed the Vienna Strangler, but the police believed that they were isolated events without any connection.
Thanks to the police acumen of a retired investigator, August Schenner, the Vienna Strangler case was solved. The agent recalled the first murder of Jack Unterweger and his modus operandi and reported it to his active colleagues. As soon as they looked for the writer, the FBI alert went off and a joint search began.
All efforts paid off on February 27, 1992: the writer made the mistake of clandestinely entering the United States again through Canada and was hunted down. The North American authorities proceeded to extradite him to Austria after the request of the competent European authorities.
Once in Vienna and while waiting for the start of the trial, Jack did not hesitate to give interviews boasting of his innocence. “Would it be so stupid and crazy that, during the best period of my life, in which I write in various media… do plays… act… tour and have many wonderful friends, that I would start killing someone every week? ”, he declared on television.
In mid-April 1994, the trial against the writer for twelve murders and a request for life imprisonment by the Prosecutor’s Office began. This time Jack showed no remorse, nor did he apologize for the crimes, nor did he cry or beg for mercy. He knew there would be no more opportunities.
After hearing the verdict, the murderer only managed to say: “I will not spend years in prison again, I will not be able to.” And he fulfilled it. Six hours later, he took her shoelaces and his belt, tied them to the bars of his cell window, and hanged himself. It was June 29, 1994.
