Even his name sounded fictional. Like the name from a film noir or piece of pulp fiction. I was in Austria looking for Jack, but then so was everyone, Interpol included. Jack was on the run. The bungling Austrian police had missed him and now the French, the Swiss and the Italian police all lost him.
He was gone. Jack Unterweger was a genuine mystery, but the reason everyone was looking for him was not. He was a suspected prostitute killer.
They had several things in common: they were all prostitutes; they were all from Graz or Vienna; and they had all been strangled, probably with the bra or stockings they were wearing, and then dumped in woodland. The Austrian media hummed with talk of nothing else. Just Jack. Forty-two years old, a convicted killer and notorious ex-pimp renowned for a history of violence, Jack β as the police were constantly reminding us β had always been obsessed with prostitutes.
He had already been convicted of strangling one prostitute, in , when he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the brutal murder two years earlier of an year-old named Margaret Schafer. Prostitutes tormented Jack. At night, he strangled them in his dreams.
Jack had related a horrendous childhood growing up in a hovel among prostitutes, pimps, alcoholics and criminals and being kicked from orphanage to institution after both his mother and his father, an American GI serving in the occupying army, deserted him when he was still a baby. He was mostly raised by his grandfather an alcoholic who beat him and his aunt also a prostitute, who would coincidentally one day be murdered by a psychopathic whore-hater herself.
