The true story of a journalist serial killer

By John Leake

Sarah Crichton Books/FSG. 350 pp. $25

Reviewed by Sarah Weinman

Most stories of actual serial killers never live up to their fictional counterparts. Instead of cunning, Hannibal Lecter-style geniuses or the ticking-clock manifestations of tortured childhoods, we have memory-gapped, drug-fueled murderers working on a pattern that can only be described as random. Insight into their criminal behavior comes from what they don't say or what answers they evade. No wonder fiction, with its desire to create order out of chaos (or the reverse), is more appealing - and entertaining.

Then a story comes along that is too wild even for fiction, a gift for the author tasked with telling the tale. John Leake, a translator and editor who spent several years living and working in Vienna, doesn't reveal how he first stumbled onto accounts of Jack Unterweger's cross-continent killing spree, but he certainly makes the most of his material, thanks to access to Unterweger's diaries, extensive interviews with the man's friends and adversaries, and a propulsive narrative that has the feel of a thriller.

Leake begins

Entering Hades

with a somewhat perfunctory account of the three victims Unterweger killed during a two-week trip to Los Angeles, and doesn't really hit full stride until Unterweger himself is introduced - as an Austrian reporter riding along with police and pestering the country's most famous expat director to make a movie about him. "The notion that a writer and journalist would cruise around killing hookers and then interview the chief of police about the investigation - maybe in Hollywood, but never in real life," muses Vienna's chief of police, but Unterweger's life up until that point had hardly been ordinary. Instead of serving a life sentence for the 1974 murder of a young girl, Unterweger landed early parole and celebrity status thanks to the poems, novels and plays he wrote in prison. Several of his works, in hindsight, prove to be blueprints for the murders he would commit.

Like a cross between Jack Henry Abbott and Ted Bundy, Unterweger returned to killing, and as the bodies of his prostitute victims piled up in the Vienna Woods and elsewhere, his behavior became more brazen. Leake shows not only how blithe Unterweger could be in fashioning an alibi out of whole cloth but also how he could charm his many female friends and lovers into trusting him completely and damping down any suspicions about his true nature. The reader can see what a psychopath he is, but had any one of us encountered the slightly built, tattooed author feted at literary events, would our thinking have been as clear? The aftermath of guilt and bewilderment faced by Unterweger's champions is enough of an answer.

This emotional confusion is at the heart of why Unterweger was a frightening figure. His ego was so large as to reject anything that didn't suit his personal narrative; any monstrous acts committed could be explained away, despite what evidence the police had. The trial, which Leake details with appealing velocity, was a circus of media attention and expert witnesses all seeking to understand a killer unusual even in American circles but especially shocking for Austria. To be the most prolific serial killer to date is one thing; to be a government-funded literary figure is a disaster that not even relentless self-examination on the country's part can amend.

Entering Hades

might have been enhanced by a greater sense of how Austrian postwar society could have created Unterweger's brand of erudite monster and how its contemporary scene further enabled him to hunt. But perhaps such a context is not available. Maybe a black hole provides enough rationale for the making of a serial killer of a kind more often conjured by crime writers.