Reportage: The Vienna Woods Killer: A Writer's Double Life By John Leake Granta Books, 350pp. £16.99Jack Unterweger murdered, in a wood, on December 11th, 1974, an 18-year-old girl who was a neighbour of his girlfriend. Having struck her on the head, he eventually strangled her with her bra.
The girlfriend was left sitting in his white Mustang car some distance from the scene of the crime. When confronted by police four weeks later the girlfriend confessed. Unterweger was duly sentenced to life imprisonment.
When he was in prison, he wrote seven books and became Austria's most high-profile rehabilitated offender. Unterweger impressed the powers-that-be who had influence over the parole processes and, to much ballyhoo, he was released from jail after serving 15 years on May 23rd, 1990. He launched himself into Viennese literary life and during his first year of freedom, he published two novels and produced two plays.
Meanwhile on October 25th, 1990, a prostitute was murdered in a wood near Graz, about a two-hour drive from Vienna; then on March 7th, a similar murder took place in Graz, and then between April 8th and May 7th, four prostitutes were murdered in the Vienna Woods.
On May 31st, a retired Munich detective contacted the chief of police about the murders and referred to an old unsolved murder of a young woman and his belief that Unterweger was the killer. A very slow fuse had been lit.
Unterweger's new career included work for the principal Austrian broadcaster and in particular for the "highest quality current-events radio programme" he was employed on to do a story about the murders. On June 3rd, Unterweger visited the chief of police to question him about his investigation. Following the broadcast on June 5th, Unterweger sought the help of the chief of police again, as he needed contacts in Los Angeles for research on a crime and law enforcement piece.
Armed with contacts, Unterweger took himself off to Tinseltown dressed in a brash rig-out consisting of a white jacket bearing a very large hibiscus-plant print, white trousers, a shirt with a Navajo design and white snakeskin cowboy boots, with the entire ensemble topped off with a white cowboy hat.
SHORTLY AFTERWARDS, THREE prostitutes were murdered in the Los Angeles area, the third taking place in a wood near Malibu. Each was strangled with her bra. Leake, with an eye on the Hollywood blockbuster, begins his book with an account of a partial solar eclipse as a couple of men and their children, on July 11th, 1991, climbed into the Malibu hills to get a good view of the eclipse - "but as they reached the top, they were too horrified by what they saw lying on the ground to pay attention to the sky". Shortly afterwards, the just appointed chief investigating officer delicately asks "Is it a decomp?". It was.
Leake, choosing to begin so far into the story and using short chapters rarely longer than 10 pages and some as short as two, proceeds to hop backwards and forwards in time, with a cast of personalities who are trying to solve the murders, and female friends of Unterweger who are having intimate relationships with him.
Such a melange may be important for a movie script, but it ensures an awkward read for the description of the steps involved in solving a series of murders.
At last the trial, which lasts 70-odd pages, begins, and it proceeds chronologically, which is a relief. There is no courtroom drama, just a recitation of solid, undramatic detective work. Unterweger is convicted. Next day he commits suicide.
To conclude the book, in Malibu, where he chose to begin, Leake describes a lunch the chief detective, who had lived with the case for over two years, had on vacation with his wife and child in Gladstone's restaurant, one of Unterweger's favourites. I hope for Leake's sake that the director of any putative movie can bring some Hollywood magic to the last sentence: "She looked out at the Pacific. 'I'm just so glad he's dead. I don't know what I'd have done if he'd appealed. Thank God, he's dead'."
John McBratney is a barrister