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Entering Hades

PostPosted: Tue Feb 10, 2015 12:03 am
by cptmarginal
This is one book, among many others, that I will never read. I've seen it on the shelf at the local library many times; don't think anyone has ever checked it out.

No photographs of him or specific details provided here. It's disgusting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/books ... .html?_r=0

A Murderous Talent

By ROBERT MacFARLANE
Published: January 13, 2008

Serial killers are localists. They murder within their chosen patch — a red-light district, a city quarter — and tend not to travel beyond it. Changing location means recoding the method; learning a new vernacular of murder. It also increases the risk of detection: an out-of-towner is more likely to be remembered from a crime scene.

Jack Unterweger, the subject of John Leake’s bleak book, had no anxieties about being remembered, nor about exporting his method. For this eerily charming dandy wasn’t just a tourist but a murderer, who killed 12 women in four countries. Visiting Los Angeles in 1991 — ostensibly to research a radio program on prostitution — he dressed as a cross between a cowhand and a Mississippi preacher (white snakeskin boots and a white coat emblazoned with a hibiscus). By day he rode along with the Los Angeles Police Department on a journalist’s ticket, observing its method and its milieu.

Unterweger’s idiosyncrasies stand out even within the idiosyncratic world of serial killers. Born in Austria in 1950, he was imprisoned at age 24 for the murder of a young German woman. While incarcerated, he began to write poems, plays and self-refashioning autobiographical novels. One novel, “Purgatory,” was a best seller. Unterweger became the darling of Vienna’s radical-chic set, who discovered in his literature the proof of a reformed man.

A lobbying campaign began for his release. Writers, artists, journalists and politicians — mostly Socialists — agitated for a pardon. Among them was Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian playwright who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Alfred Kolleritsch, editor of the magazine Manuskripte, went to the Stein prison to hear Unterweger read from his work. “He was so tender,” Kolleritsch later recalled, “and at that moment we decided we had to get him pardoned.” Unterweger became the poster boy of successful rehabilitation: his story was told, Leake notes, “as a triumph of the individual over all the social and political pathologies into which he’d been born.”

On May 23, 1990, having served the minimum possible sentence, Unterweger was paroled. In the 18 months following his release, he became an Austrian celebrity, lionized by literarniks (literary intellectuals) and promis (prominent people) alike. He gave readings throughout Austria and Germany, he staged his plays and he worked as a reporter for the ORF — Austria’s equivalent of the BBC. He also killed 11 women.

Unterweger’s modus operandi was one of brute violence garnished with ritual.

[...]

Unterweger also turned his skills as a noose-man upon himself. On the night of June 29, 1994 — after his conviction and sentencing to life in prison — he improvised a noose from a trouser drawstring and a leash of thin wire. He was found dead at 3:40 a.m. Because he died before the court could hear an appeal, Unterweger’s guilty verdict was not legally binding.

John Leake has written the definitive book — dispassionate, superbly detailed — on Jack Unterweger. Of its subject, no more now needs saying, beyond the words with which Leake ends his story, citing the wife of the Vienna detective who spent years unraveling the case: “Thank God, he’s dead.”


Can't help but suspect that there's more to the story.

See also:

viewtopic.php?p=493175#p493175

Excuse me while I take a shower (and never look back at this again.)