Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent research and writing on a fascinating case, 23 Oct 2007
This book is a standout in the true crime genre - very well researched, that is obvious, and very well told.
Jack Unterweger had so many extraordinary facets to his personality that it is hard to even know where to begin. He was, for one thing, a serial sex killer. And he was a journalist who covered his own murders. Jack Unterweger murdered women from California to Austria - when he wasn't busy simply seducing every female who came within hailing distance. The record of his conquests short of murder is in and of itself incredible. Unterweger seemed to have a mesmerist's ability to get a woman to do literally whatever he wanted.
The story is dense, quite detailed, well written, and of such large scope it is bound to be regarded as the definitive book on its subject and a highly regarded entry on the shelf of serial killer literature.
Laura James
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Creepy look at Austria's first serial killer, 15 Dec 2007
Truth is stranger than fiction, and no more so than in the case of Jack Unterweger, a convicted murderer hailed as Austria's greatest example of criminal rehabilitation. While serving a life sentence for the brutal murder of 18-year-old Margaret Schäfer in 1976, Jack developed a flair for writing poetry, fiction and non-fiction. His work was so well received he became the darling of the literary elite who campaigned, successfully, for his early release in 1990.
But despite his apparent reform, everything was not quite as it seemed. When four prostitutes disappeared from Vienna's red light district in the first year of Jack's release he was one of the first to write about the crimes. He ingratiated himself with the local police chief and interviewed many of the city's street workers for articles that were published in the press.
Capitalising on new found celebrity, Jack then went to California to research a magazine article about crime in LA. He accompanied police on their patrols of the city's red light districts. During the time of his visit three prostitutes were brutally murdered. Their deaths, in which they had been beaten, tied up and strangled, bore striking resemblances to the deaths of the Viennese prostitutes.
This book by American journalist John Leake traces Jack's life and the painstaking lengths that police on two continents undertook to charge him with the murder of 11 women. It is an absolutely fascinating story about one man's ability to hoodwink society into thinking he had put his criminal past behind him while living a secret life as a serial killer. What emerges is a portrait of a sociopath who was so careful and clever at carrying out these despicable crimes that it took police many years of hard work to catch him.
The Vienna Woods Killer: A Writer's Double Life is creepy and spine-chilling in places, with so many twists and turns in the narrative that it seems almost too unreal, too fantastical to be true, but Leake never resorts to sensationalism or cheap literary tricks. The tone of this thoroughly researched book (Leake had privileged access to Jack's diaries and interviewed all the major players) is restrained but never dull. It's a well plotted, cleverly crafted investigative piece of non-fiction that had me enthralled from the first page to the satisfying -- and wholly unexpected -- conclusion on the last.
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