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Jack Unterweger had style enough for 10 men. "Who is that character?" he made people ask. And before they knew it, he started reeling them in, because Jack Unterweger was also a gifted conversationalist who could go into a bar and walk out with every woman's phone number. Unterweger was many things, we learn in John Leake's Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux). He was a promising Austrian fiction writer who had charmed the literary underground. He was a journalist who traveled halfway around the world to do research. And he was a murderer of women, clearly committing more than the nine killings he was ultimately convicted of during wanderings from Vienna to Prague to Los Angeles.
This is an age of great literary charlatans, writers—like James Frey and JT LeRoy—posing as people they are not. Yet Unterweger's story may be the most compelling one yet. As Leake puts it, "Jack learned that, by writing his stories—his version of reality—and submitting them to influential people, he could get away with murder." Midway through the book you can't quite tell whether his adult years amount to one long crime spree or a massive book tour.
Born in 1950, Unterweger became a teenage thief and pimp, and in 1974 he murdered an 18-year-old girl. Sentenced to life in prison, he underwent a transformation. He began writing, and during his years behind bars he published four books—memoirs, poetry, even children's stories. Unterweger was a national symbol of rehabilitation and a cause célèbre; Austrian officials and future Nobel Prize winners petitioned for his freedom. A statement demanding his release declared: "Austrian justice will be measured by the Unterweger case." The jail doors opened in 1990, at which point he got really busy.
Unterweger began directing plays and writing articles for assorted magazines. He interviewed police officers on their methods and he hung out with prostitutes, he explained, for stories he was writing. He was such good company that many couldn't believe it when the bodies were discovered, frequently in the woods just outside of places he'd been staying.
The short bursts of Unterweger's prose quoted throughout Entering Hades (translated by the author) do reveal a vividly pulpy, confessional style that has some swagger to it. Ultimately, though, his true medium was the art of seduction. He gained the confidence of cops, journalists, and filmmakers. At his 1994 trial in Austria, 20 or so women all sobbed for his fate as his crimes were described.
Leake, a translator and editor who has lived in Vienna, juggles chronology and countries, literary escapades and murder, with dazzling storytelling skills. He wisely underplays his subject's demented peregrinations, as when Unterweger, arriving in L.A. in 1991 to cover crime stories for an Austrian magazine, searches for his idol Charles Bukowski at the race track, buys a map of the stars' homes, and rings Zsa Zsa Gabor's doorbell. Just another day in paradise.
