Jack Unterweger was serving a life sentence for murder when he became one of Austria's best-known writers. In prison he wrote poems, plays, radio stories and an autobiographical novel, Fegefeuer (Purgatory), which was made into a film. Writers and public figures campaigned for his release, and he was paroled in May 1990 as a symbol of successful rehabilitation.
Within months, women began to be found dead, most of them sex workers, strangled with a piece of their own clothing tied in the same kind of knot. Between September 1990 and July 1991 there were eleven cases in all, in Prague, around Graz, near Bregenz, in the Vienna Woods and in Los Angeles. Unterweger had been in each place at the time, giving readings or working as a reporter. When the Graz Regional Court issued a warrant for his arrest in February 1992, he fled to the United States and was arrested in Miami.
His trial in Graz began on April 20, 1994. On the evening of June 28, the jury found him guilty of murder in nine of the eleven cases, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the second time. A few hours later he was found hanged in his cell. Because he died before the judgment could become legally final, the 1994 verdict never became a final conviction. His only final conviction is for the murder of Margret Schäfer in 1974.
Johann Unterweger was born on August 16, 1950, in Judenburg, in the Austrian province of Styria. He later used the name Jack. According to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, the German national biographical dictionary, his reputed father was a United States Army soldier stationed in Trieste whom he never met, and his mother worked as a domestic helper and waitress. The Austria Presse Agentur (APA) describes him as the child of a Viennese woman and an American soldier of the occupation forces; other accounts, including a 2004 VIENNA.AT retrospective and John Leake's 2007 book as summarized by Kirkus Reviews, describe his mother as a sex worker.
His mother had legal troubles while he was small, and he was raised for a time by his maternal grandfather in Carinthia, in a household that APA describes as marked by heavy drinking. He later lived with foster parents and in a children's home, and in 1966 and 1967 he was sent to a reform institution. As a young man he worked at a series of jobs, among them disc jockey. Between 1968 and 1975, the Neue Deutsche Biographie records, he was repeatedly imprisoned for property crimes, violence and sexual offenses.
In 1973, according to the news magazine profil, he came under suspicion after a woman from Salzburg was tied up and thrown into a lake near the city. His girlfriend gave him an alibi, which later proved false, but at the time the police had to let him go. He was never charged in that death.
Margret Schäfer was 18 and came from Germany. On December 11, 1974, according to profil, Unterweger killed her in Herborn, a town in the German state of Hesse. The Vorarlberg psychiatrist Reinhard Haller, who later examined Unterweger for the Graz court, told VOL.AT that the killing had been a sexually motivated crime but was treated as a robbery, because the killer took 100 marks.
Unterweger was arrested in Salzburg. On May 31, 1976, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, the date given by APA and by a 1992 parliamentary question in the Austrian National Council. profil gives the year of sentence as 1975; most sources give 1976. This conviction became final, and it is the only final murder conviction in his record.
Unterweger served his sentence in the prison at Stein, near Krems in Lower Austria. There he completed his schooling and began to write about life in prison. He founded a small publishing house, Edition Wortbrücke, and edited a literary magazine, Wortbrücke.
His autobiographical novel, Fegefeuer oder die Reise ins Zuchthaus (Purgatory, or the Journey to the Penitentiary), first appeared in the literary magazine manuskripte and then as a book; the Neue Deutsche Biographie dates the book to 1983. It linked his criminal life to his childhood, and it made his name in literary circles. The Graz writer and director Willi Hengstler filmed it in 1988, at a cost APA put at 6.5 million schillings. The film was shown at the World Film Festival in Montreal and won the Vienna Film Prize in 1989.
He also wrote plays, among them Kerker (Dungeon) and Schrei der Angst (Cry of Fear), the second about the exclusion of people with AIDS. He received an Austrian drama scholarship and, in 1989, the Ingeborg Drewitz Prize for prisoners' literature. In a written answer to Parliament in April 1992, the Ministry of Education and Arts listed the public money he had received: a drama scholarship of 25,000 schillings in 1986, a book prize of 20,000 schillings in 1987, printing grants of 10,000 to 30,000 schillings a year for Wortbrücke between 1986 and 1991, a printing grant of 20,000 schillings for his press in 1990, and support for his plays and a working grant of 15,000 schillings in 1990.
The prison authorities gave him leave for some public appearances, among them a film screening in Wels and a play premiere in Vienna. In October 1989 the Justice Ministry refused him leave to attend a journalism competition in Klagenfurt, and an actor read his entry, Im Namen der Republik (In the Name of the Republic), for him.
As his reputation grew, writers, artists and other public figures took up his case. profil names the writer Elfriede Jelinek, later a Nobel laureate, and the actress and singer Erika Pluhar among those who campaigned for his early release, and the Neue Deutsche Biographie records a campaign for clemency. Lawrence Journal-World's 2007 report on Leake's book said that Unterweger's letters to writers, artists and officials disclosed his murder conviction but left out his other violent crimes.
In February 1992 three members of the National Council put a formal question to the Minister of Education and Arts. They argued that his work had been subsidized beyond its merits for political reasons, and that his presentation of himself as a victim of society had been accepted without reflection. The ministry replied that there was "a significant difference" between presenting an offender as a showpiece and helping him back into society.
Unterweger was released on parole on May 23, 1990, according to the parliamentary question, which says he held a press conference in Vienna the day before his formal release from Stein. Accounts of how long he had served vary between 14 and 16 years.
Once free, he lived in Vienna and moved in literary and media circles. He toured Austria and other countries giving readings, some of them in schools, and ORF gave him airtime. APA describes his usual appearance: a white suit, a black shirt, white shoes and a red flower in his buttonhole. Ernst Geiger, who later led the Vienna homicide unit's work on the case, told ORF in 2024 that the police had struggled to believe how smoothly his new life ran: a patron paid for his flat and his car, he had the backing of the cultural world and the media, and he had many relationships with women. According to his own diary, as profil reported, 152 women were in contact with him during his time out of prison.
A Vienna magazine journalist who became his friend in 1990 told news.at in 2015 that he was a sharp judge of people, proud, funny and at times bitter. She said he was disappointed by thinly attended readings, by smaller grants than he had hoped for and by publishers who would not take him on.
He also worked as a freelance reporter, and some of his assignments concerned prostitution and the killings of sex workers, the subject on which he would later be tried.
APA, citing the indictment, lists eleven killings charged against Unterweger, all between September 1990 and July 1991: one in Prague, one in Bregenz, two in the Graz area, four in the Vienna area and three in Los Angeles. In every case the woman had been strangled, and investigators said the ligature, an item of the woman's own clothing, was tied in the same distinctive knot. The dates of the killings are those published by the Vorarlberg news site VOL.AT in 2015.
None of these killings ended in a final conviction. The jury found him guilty in nine of the eleven cases; in two, profil reported, the bodies were too decomposed for the cause of death to be established with certainty. Which two cases those were was not reported.
Blanka Bočková died in Prague on September 15, 1990, less than four months after Unterweger's release. Hers was the first of the eleven cases in the indictment. A single hair later became the main physical evidence in the case: investigators said it came from her and was found in a car Unterweger had owned.
Brunhilde Masser died on October 26, 1990, in a forest near Graz, according to VOL.AT. Heide Hammerer was 31 and lived in Bregenz, where she worked as a sex worker. VOL.AT gives the date of her death as December 5, 1990. Her body was found in woods near Lustenau; the same report dates the discovery to December 31, 1990, in one place and to January 1, 1991, in another. A man walking his dog found her. A red fiber found on her body was later matched, investigators said, to a scarf belonging to Unterweger.
Elfriede Schrempf died on March 7, 1991, in a forest near Graz, according to VOL.AT. She was the second of the two Graz-area cases in the indictment.
In the spring of 1991 four women were killed in the Vienna Woods, the hills on the western edge of the city. VOL.AT gives these dates: Silvia Zagler on April 8, Sabine Moitzi on April 16, Regina Prem on April 28 and Karin Eroglu on May 7, 1991. All four cases were in the indictment.
Unterweger reported on the deaths. The Lawrence Journal-World, summarizing Leake's research in 2007, wrote that he obtained freelance assignments reporting on the very killings he was later charged with. His friend told news.at that he became visibly anxious once police began to question him.
In the summer of 1991 Unterweger traveled to Los Angeles on a freelance assignment about prostitution. The historian Kristina E. Poznan, writing for the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, says sources describe the commission as coming from an Austrian newspaper or magazine. He stayed in California for a little over a month, the Lawrence Journal-World reported in 2007. Poznan writes that the Los Angeles Police Department gave him a ride-along during the trip, and that police later found maps of Los Angeles and business cards of LAPD officers in his Vienna apartment.
Three women were killed in the Los Angeles area while he was there. VOL.AT gives the dates: Shannon Exley on June 19, Irene Rodriguez on June 28, and Peggy Jean Booth, who also used the name Sherri Ann Long, on July 3, 1991, near Malibu. Poznan gives their ages as 35, 33 and 26. Each was strangled with an item of her own clothing, and the knot, she writes, was what linked the Los Angeles cases to the Austrian ones.
The first person to connect the new killings with Unterweger, according to Poznan and profil, was August Schenner, a retired Salzburg detective who had dealt with him in the 1970s and had suspected him in the Salzburg lake case. Schenner saw parallels between that death, the Schäfer murder and the women found in 1990 and 1991. Police in Vienna and Graz followed up, but early surveillance of Unterweger produced nothing, Poznan writes.
Ernst Geiger, who led the work for the Vienna homicide unit, told ORF in 2024 that he had become almost obsessed with the case and that it had strained his private life. He said Austria's forensic resources at the time were not enough, and that help with DNA analysis and other forensic work came from Switzerland and the United States. He described Unterweger as a manipulator who quickly worked out whom he could win over; when that failed with Geiger, Unterweger turned against him, and in his last book written in custody he called the detective "Geifer" (slobber) instead of Geiger.
Investigators built the case on three kinds of evidence, as APA summarized it: Unterweger's movements, which put him in Prague, Graz and the Bregenz area on the dates of the killings, often for readings; the knot used in the strangulations; and physical traces. The most important trace was a hair. profil reports that it turned up in a BMW Unterweger had owned, a car that had long since been scrapped, only about two months before the trial. Poznan writes that hair from Unterweger and from Blanka Bočková was recovered from the car, which had been broken down and sold for parts, at a garage in Linz. The second trace was the red fiber from his scarf found on Heide Hammerer's body.
On February 13, 1992, the Graz Regional Court issued a warrant for Unterweger's arrest. He had already been questioned by police by then. His friend from the Vienna magazine told news.at that she had warned him during a photo session that he was under investigation, and that he panicked and began calling officials and media outlets.
He fled with his girlfriend, who was 18 at the time, according to VIENNA.AT. The Kirkus review of Leake's book says the police pursuit took in Europe and parts of Canada. On February 27, 1992, he was arrested in Miami, the date given by news.at. Poznan writes that the Austrian business magazine Erfolg (Success) had offered him 10,000 dollars for an interview on the run, and that the editor told the police where he would collect the money, at a money exchange in Miami Beach. She writes that he was held by immigration authorities because he had entered the United States on a tourist visa without disclosing his felony conviction. His girlfriend was not charged. During his flight he sent a written defense statement to a staff member at Erfolg, news.at reported. profil counts 673 days of freedom between his release and his arrest.
Los Angeles police wanted to try him for the three California killings, Poznan writes, but the DNA work was slow, and he was sent to Austria to face the Austrian charges first. California had the death penalty; Austria did not. He was extradited at the end of May 1992, according to APA. He was never tried in the United States; the three Los Angeles deaths were included in the Graz indictment.
Unterweger was held in custody in Graz until his trial. His friend told news.at that from pretrial detention he asked her to visit twice a week and to do research for him, and that she refused. The lawyer Astrid Wagner met him in this period. The Lawrence Journal-World reported in 2007 that she fell in love with him while he awaited trial; ORF in 2024 described her as his last partner. She later wrote and edited books about him.
The defense lawyers were Georg Zanger and Hans Lehhofer (the spelling used by the taz). The lawyer Alfred Noll also worked on the case, according to profil.
The trial opened at the Graz Regional Court on April 20, 1994, before a jury court. The indictment charged eleven counts of murder. No eyewitness testified to any of the killings. The prosecution's case was circumstantial, and the prosecutor told the jury it formed a chain "at the end of which stands Unterweger", as the taz reported. The trial drew more media attention than any before it in Austria, the taz wrote; the courtroom was rebuilt and telephone and fax lines were installed for the press.
Unterweger denied every charge throughout. The court psychiatrist Reinhard Haller spent eight days with him, profil reported, and described him as charming and highly manipulative. VIENNA.AT reported that Haller diagnosed a narcissistic histrionic personality disorder. The Neue Deutsche Biographie notes that the trial was the first in Austria in which DNA analysis and criminal profiling were used to support a circumstantial case, and profil calls it the first DNA trial in Austria.
On June 28, 1994, Unterweger made his closing statement to the court. He spoke about his past and repeated that he was innocent, ending, as profil quoted him: "Ich bin unschuldig, danke" ("I am innocent, thank you"). VIENNA.AT reported that he said to the end, "I was not the perpetrator, I am not the perpetrator."
At about 9 p.m. on June 28, 1994, the verdict was announced, profil reported. The jury found him guilty of murder in nine of the eleven charged cases. Of the eight jurors, six accepted the prosecution's case and two voted to acquit, according to the taz, which did not say whether the vote differed between cases. In the two remaining cases, the state of the bodies meant that the cause of death could not be determined with certainty, profil reported. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and the taz reported that the court also ordered his committal to an institution for mentally abnormal offenders.
Zanger told reporters that the verdict was faulty. If it was a miscarriage of justice, he said, according to The Moscow Times, it would be "the biggest scandal of the republic." Lehhofer said that his client had broken down inside, and that suicide could not be ruled out, the taz reported.
After the verdict, Unterweger was returned to his cell in the prison of the Graz Regional Court. According to Austria's justice minister, Nikolaus Michalek, as quoted by the taz, a guard saw him asleep at 3 a.m. on June 29. At the next check, at 3:40 a.m., he was found hanged. He was 43.
He had always said he would kill himself if convicted, the taz reported, and he had tried to take his own life three times the year before. A spokesman for the Graz court said there had been no real signs of suicide risk, and Michalek rejected criticism of the authorities. profil reports that the politician Michael Graff made a cynical public remark about the death.
Unterweger died within hours of the verdict, and APA, profil, VOL.AT, news.at and the Neue Deutsche Biographie all state that the 1994 judgment never became legally final. The jury's findings stand as the court's decision at first instance, but no final conviction exists for any of the killings of 1990 and 1991.
His 1976 conviction for the murder of Margret Schäfer was final.
The verdict and his death divided opinion in Austria. profil wrote in 2015 that liberal commentators criticized what they called a manhunt, while conservatives welcomed the outcome. The journalist Günther Nenning later admitted that intellectuals had raised Unterweger up without scrutiny.
Some of those close to the defense have kept their doubts. Astrid Wagner told profil that the late appearance of the hair, in a car scrapped long before, was "extraordinarily strange." Zanger argued that the media had convicted Unterweger before the trial began and that the jury wanted to punish a man it already believed guilty. Noll said it was both very likely and very unlikely that Unterweger was the killer. His friend from the Vienna magazine told news.at in 2015 that she had once believed him innocent and no longer knew; she said the investigation had looked only for incriminating evidence and that many documents were missing from the court file, so that a retrial would no longer be possible.
The investigators did not share those doubts. Geiger told ORF in 2024 that Unterweger had deceived everyone, including the court's experts, and that the victims had received too little attention.
Geiger told APA in 2024 that the case changed Austrian police work: it led to modernized criminal investigation, better crime scene work, a DNA database and a criminal psychology service. Austria had no regime of preventive detention that would have applied to Unterweger in 1990, he said.
The case has been retold many times. The American writer John Leake, based in Vienna, published Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer in 2007, drawing on Austrian and California police reports, interviews with investigators and prosecutors and Unterweger's diaries, according to the Lawrence Journal-World; its German edition is Der Mann aus dem Fegefeuer. Franzobel's monodrama Black Jack put him on stage, and the music theater piece The Infernal Comedy, by Michael Sturminger with John Malkovich, premiered in Vienna in 2009. Elisabeth Scharang's feature film Jack, with Johannes Krisch in the title role, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2015. Geiger criticized it as a romantic glorification.
In January 2024 Geiger published Mordsmann, a novel based on the case, which he said invents nothing, and the German journalist Malte Herwig published Austrian Psycho, which draws on records and on interviews with contemporaries including Elfriede Jelinek and Peter Handke. ORF broadcast a program on the case with Geiger and Wagner the same month.
Jack Unterweger died on June 29, 1994, in Graz. His conviction for the 1974 murder of Margret Schäfer is final. The 1994 jury verdict on nine of the eleven later killings never became final, and no court has ruled on the charges since his death. No later proceedings had been reported as of October 22, 2026.
Final: the murder of Margret Schäfer in December 1974 (life sentence, 1976).
Found by a jury, never final: murder in nine of the eleven charged cases from September 1990 to July 1991, in Austria, Prague and Los Angeles. In two cases the jury did not find him guilty because the cause of death could not be established; the reports do not say which two.
Suspected, never charged: the death of a woman from Salzburg found in a lake near the city in the early 1970s. Sources give her name differently and place the case in 1973 or 1974.
Never tried in the United States: the three Los Angeles deaths were tried only as part of the Graz indictment.
Points on which sources differ: the year of the 1976 sentence (1975 in profil); how long he served before parole (14, about 15 or 16 years); the date Fegefeuer appeared as a book (1983 in the Neue Deutsche Biographie; eight years before 1990 in a 2024 APA report); and the date of the verdict, which news.at gives as June 29 although profil and the 1994 press put it on the evening of June 28.
A Lustenau man who found Heide Hammerer's body told VOL.AT in 2015 that he had seen Unterweger carrying something into the woods. That claim was made more than two decades later and is not known to have been tested in court.
August 16, 1950: Johann Unterweger is born in Judenburg, Styria.
1966 to 1967: sent to a reform institution.
1968 to 1975: repeated prison terms for property crimes, violence and sexual offenses.
1973: suspected in the death of a woman found in a lake near Salzburg; released.
December 11, 1974: Margret Schäfer, 18, is killed in Herborn, Germany.
May 31, 1976: sentenced to life imprisonment in Salzburg.
1983: Fegefeuer is published as a book.
1986: receives an Austrian drama scholarship.
1988: Willi Hengstler's film of Fegefeuer is made.
1989: the film wins the Vienna Film Prize; Unterweger receives the Ingeborg Drewitz Prize; in October he is refused leave to attend a competition in Klagenfurt.
May 22, 1990: press conference in Vienna.
May 23, 1990: released on parole from Stein.
September 15, 1990: Blanka Bočková dies in Prague.
October 26, 1990: Brunhilde Masser dies near Graz.
December 5, 1990: Heide Hammerer dies; her body is found near Lustenau around New Year.
March 7, 1991: Elfriede Schrempf dies near Graz.
April 8 to May 7, 1991: Silvia Zagler, Sabine Moitzi, Regina Prem and Karin Eroglu die in the Vienna Woods.
June 19 to July 3, 1991: Shannon Exley, Irene Rodriguez and Peggy Jean Booth die in the Los Angeles area.
February 13, 1992: Graz Regional Court issues an arrest warrant.
February 27, 1992: arrested in Miami.
February 28, 1992: question on his public funding filed in the National Council.
April 1992: the Education Ministry answers.
End of May 1992: extradited to Austria.
April 20, 1994: trial opens in Graz.
June 28, 1994, about 9 p.m.: jury finds him guilty of murder in nine of eleven cases; life sentence.
June 29, 1994, 3:40 a.m.: found hanged in his cell; the verdict never becomes final.
2007: John Leake's Entering Hades is published.
2009: The Infernal Comedy premieres in Vienna.
August 2015: Elisabeth Scharang's film Jack premieres at Locarno.
January 2024: Ernst Geiger's novel Mordsmann and Malte Herwig's Austrian Psycho are published.