Johann Unterweger was born in Judenburg, Austria, on August 16, 1950, to a prostitute, and raised by a violent alcoholic grandfather. He had sixteen convictions by his twenties. In 1974 he strangled an eighteen-year-old, Margaret Schafer, with her own brassiere and was given life.
In prison he taught himself to write and produced poems, plays, children's books and an autobiography, Fegefeuer, or Purgatory, which was made into a film. Austrian writers and intellectuals took him up as proof that a man could be remade, and a public campaign secured his parole in May 1990 after fifteen years. Austrian reporting called him the Vienna Woods Killer.
He became a minor celebrity, writing for magazines and appearing on television. Within weeks of release women began to be found strangled with their own underwear knotted in a distinctive way, in Graz, Vienna and Prague. A magazine sent him to Los Angeles in 1991 to report on how American police handle prostitution; he rode with LAPD officers, and three women were killed in Los Angeles with the same knot while he was there.
Austrian investigators built the case on the ligature signature, his movements and, eventually, a hair in his car. He fled to Miami in February 1992 and was arrested there. He was tried in Graz in 1994 and convicted on June 28 of nine murders. He hanged himself in his cell that night with the cord of a tracksuit, using the same knot. Under Austrian law a conviction not yet final is void if the accused dies, so he is technically not a convicted man, which he is said to have known.