Nigel Jones
Jack the Bad
The Vienna Woods Killer: A Writer's Double Life
By John Leake
Granta Books 350pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Jack Unterweger, the subject of this cautionary tale, was born in 1950 to an unknown American GI father. Abandoned by his Austrian mother to be raised by his grandfather deep in rural Styria, Jack grew up a runty 5′ 6″, with cold button eyes.
From his earliest years Jack exhibited psychopathic tendencies, rat-like cunning, an ability to charm women and an obsession with prostitutes. In 1974, on the road in Germany, he casually murdered an eighteen-year-old girl in front of his then girlfriend – his victim’s neighbour – in a fashion that became his trademark: handcuffing her hands behind her back, battering her with his fists, driving her to isolated woodland before marching her to the site of her own death, and then slowly strangling her with her bra tied in an unusual knot to draw out the process as painfully as possible.
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