Books

As he casually flipped through a newspaper in Vienna one day back in 2002, a small article caught John Leake's eye.

It was a piece on the notorious Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger – or more precisely, Mr. Unterweger's last girlfriend, Bianca Mrak, and what she was doing a decade after her name first flashed in the news.

"The article mentioned that 10 years earlier, she fled with Jack to Miami," said Mr. Leake, "and I saw that and thought, 'Isn't that weird, an Austrian killer fleeing to South Beach.' "

Mr. Leake, Dallas born and raised but by then based mostly in Vienna, was intrigued.

He'd arrived a few years before on a graduate school fellowship and moved on to editing an English-language newsletter. He was getting requests to do translation work and had a vague plan for doing a book about his adopted hometown.

Instead, he began chasing the story of Mr. Unterweger, a man both charming and chilling who killed 10 women, and probably more, even as he was embraced as an example of the rehabilitative powers of the Austrian prison system.

Mr. Leake's book, Entering Hades – The Double Life of a Serial Killer, is being released this week to strong early reviews. But it was an unlikely choice of topics for a first-time author with little interest in writing about criminals and their crimes.

"I have to admit, true crime was not one of my favorites," said Mr. Leake, 37. "But what I liked about this story was not that it was just a murder story, but that the murderer had a place in Austrian culture as an author and even managed to get freelance assignments reporting on his own murders."

Mr. Unterweger began killing in the 1970s. He was convicted for one murder in 1976, then became a cause célèbre after he wrote a book in prison. Set free in 1990, he began to kill again almost immediately.

Mr. Leake started his study with a book written by Astrid Wagner, a young lawyer who fell in love with Mr. Unterweger as he awaited trial again in 1994.

"I thought he must have been a really seductive, manipulative guy. Then I read Jack's book, Purgatory. Very quickly, I decided he's way more than your strange guy living at the edge of society," Mr. Leake said. "Here you have a serial murderer who's kind of a celebrity in his own right. He isn't trying to stay in the background. He's right in the middle of the stage!

"I think it was that aspect of his story that made me think it was worthy of a book."

Entering Hades is the meticulously researched story of a flamboyant, narcissistic sociopath who never knew his American GI father and was abandoned by his prostitute mother when he was young. He was raised by his alcoholic grandfather. One of his earliest recollections was helping him cheat his uncle at cards.

Mr. Leake built the bones of his book from details in a mountain of police reports in Austria and California, which Mr. Unterweger visited for a little more than a month in 1991, killing three Los Angeles prostitutes while he was there. Mr. Leake's interviews with police investigators, prosecutors and many of Mr. Unterweger's former girlfriends showed exactly how charming and cunning he could be and how truly savage he was.

But it was Mr. Leake's access to his obsessively detailed diaries that laid bare Mr. Unterweger's most intimate thoughts.

"What you find when you spend time with all this is that his criminal career in the 1970s, leading to his first murder conviction, was pretty clear," Mr. Leake said. "But when he became an author in prison, the intelligentsia didn't make any efforts to learn this. Everything they knew about him came from his book, Purgatory."

And for Mr. Unterweger, Purgatory was a public relations coup.

"I was fascinated by the book," Mr. Leake said, "because in it, he does two things. He covers up a lot of his true past, and at the same time he gives little glimpses into his true character. In the opening scene, he's having a nightmare about being put into handcuffs, and that's exactly what he did to his victims. He put them in handcuffs.

"And then he describes committing an act of fraud with his grandfather. This whole book is a fraud perpetrated on his readership."

But Mr. Unterweger managed to win the support of the literary world with his talent and with the judicious editing of his past.

"While still in prison, he'd write letters to different authors, artists and officials, saying, 'I wrote this book and I'd like to get permission to do a reading and get press coverage,' and he'd include his résumé," Mr. Leake said. "He had to include his murder conviction, because everyone knew about that, but he edited out every other crime of aggression."

That same charm and cunning worked with many of the women Mr. Unterweger met after his eventual release. He could be alternately boyish or tough, a little boy or a bad boy, whatever worked to win what he wanted.

"I talked with a lot of women about this, and they said there was definitely something to the fact that Jack might not have been the nicest guy, but he was never boring," Mr. Leake said. "They said, 'He's exciting, he's funny, you feel like you're doing something forbidden by being with him.' "

But what was much harder to understand is that many of the women taken with Mr. Unterweger knew he was a killer.

"Some women thought it was fascinating to sleep with a man who had killed a woman," Mr. Leake said.

"They found it forbidden and dangerous and erotic in a kinky, scary kind of way."

Mr. Unterweger committed suicide in his holding cell the night he was convicted of the final nine murders. He hanged himself using a noose made from shoelaces and the drawstring from a pair of pants, tied with the same ornate knots he used to strangle his victims.

And Mr. Leake, who never imagined writing a true crime book, is working on his second book now. This one is based in the United States, a case still working its way through the courts.

It is, he said, "another criminal thing."Plan your life

John Leake will discuss and sign Entering Hades at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Borders, 3600 McKinney Ave. He's also scheduled to appear that day on Good Morning Texas, which airs 9 a.m. on WFAA-TV (Channel 8).

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