The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (58 page)

Unterweger, a good-looking youth who was the son of a prostitute and an American GI, had been illiterate when he went to jail.
He had already been in prison fifteen times, for offences including rape and car theft.
He had even been a pimp.
But in prison for life, he set about learning to read and write.
Then he edited the prison newspaper, started a literary review, and wrote his autobiography, a book called
Purgatory
(‘
Fegefeur
’), which professed that he was totally rehabilitated, and had killed the prostitute because he hated his mother.

The book made him an overnight literary celebrity and intellectuals began to lobby for his release.
He was paroled on 23 May 1990, after sixteen years.
And he was now a celebrity, who quickly became rich when his book was made into a movie.
Since then he had written plays, had given readings of his poetry, and was a regular guest on TV talk shows.
He habitually wore a white suit and drove expensive cars.
Moreover, as a magazine writer, he had even interviewed the police about the ‘Vienna Courier’, and been critical of their failure to catch him.
Could this charming, brilliant new literary celebrity be a serial killer?

As they reviewed the evidence, the Vienna police – and especially a detective called Ernst Geiger – decided the answer had to be yes.
To begin with, when they checked his credit card receipts to establish his whereabouts at the times of crimes, they learned that Unterweger was in Graz in October, when Brunhilde Masser was killed.
And he was there again in March when Elfriede Schrempf vanished.
He was also in Bregenz, from where Heidemarie Hammerer was taken, in December and, moreover, resembled the last person with whom she was seen.

Unterweger had been in Prague the previous September, and when the police contacted their counterparts in Prague, they learned about the murder of Blanca Bockover.
Of course, all this could hardly be coincidence.
After months of secretly investigating the celebrity, investigators finally decided that it was time to show their hand.

They interviewed Unterweger on 2 October 1991.
Naturally, he denied everything.
Moreover, he renewed criticism of the police for their failure to catch the Vienna Courier.
Support for him among Viennese intellectuals and his society friends remained strong.
(But how could they admit that their enthusiasm for his writing had unleashed a killer on Vienna?
Was it not more likely, as Unterweger told them, that the authorities were persecuting this ex-criminal who had now become their scourge?)

Undeterred, investigator Ernst Geiger went on with his search.
Prostitutes who had been with Unterweger testified that he liked to handcuff them during sex – which was consistent with some of the marks on the wrists of the Vienna Courier’s victims.
Police tracked down the BMW that Unterweger had bought on his release from prison, and found in it a dark hair with skin on the root.
It was tiny, but using the PCR technique to make multiple copies of DNA, they were able to identify it as belonging to victim Blanca Bockover.

A search of Unterweger’s apartment revealed a red scarf whose fibres matched those found on Bockover, as well as a leather jacket, and receipts from California, where Unterweger had gone to research a magazine article on prostitution in Hollywood.
A check with the Los Angeles Police Department revealed that there had been three murders of prostitutes in the five weeks Unterweger was there, while the ‘Courier’s’ activities in Vienna ceased.
All three women – Irene Rodriguez, Shannon Exley and Sherri Long – had been strangled with their bras and left out in the open.

It seemed that Unweger had gone to the LAPD and introduced himself as a European writer researching red light areas.
He went on with police in patrol cars, and was treated as a distinguished guest.

It was time to arrest the suspect.
In February 1992 a judge signed a warrant.
But when the police arrived at his apartment, Unterweger was gone.
They learned from his friends that he had gone on holiday with his latest girlfriend, 18-year-old Bianca Mrak, whom he had picked up in a restaurant, and with whom he had been living since the previous December.

It seemed they had gone to Switzerland, and then, when friends tipped him off by telephone that there was a warrant out for him, to New York.

Before leaving Europe, Unterweger had telephoned Vienna newspapers to insist that the police were trying to frame him.
He also made an offer: if the officer in charge of the case would drop the warrant for his arrest, he would return voluntarily to ‘clear his name’.
He had alibis, he said, for all the murders – on one occasion he had been giving a reading of his work.

Unterweger and Bianca moved to Miami, Florida, and rented a beach apartment.
They were running short of money, and Bianca took a job as a topless dancer.
Bianca’s mother also kept them supplied with money by telegraph.

When the police learned about this, they called on the mother, and prevailed on her to inform them the next time her daughter made contact.
And when Bianca asked her mother to telegraph more cash to the Western Union office in Miami, two agents were waiting for them.
The alert Unterweger spotted them and fled, urging Bianca to go in another direction.
But he was caught after running through a restaurant, causing havoc, and out at the back, where an agent with a gun arrested him.
When told he was wanted for making a false customs declaration in New York – he had failed to admit his prison record – he looked relieved.
But when they added that he was also wanted in Vienna for murder, he began to sob.

Learning that he was also wanted in California, where his semen had been found in one of the victims, Unterweger decided to resist extradition to Europe and opt for trial in Los Angeles.
Then he was told that California – unlike Austria – had a death penalty.
So he immediately changed his mind.

Back in Vienna, the final outcome was inevitable.
The strength of the evidence against him was overwhelming.
As the trial – which began in April 1994 – dragged on for two and a half months, his support among journalists and former admirers began to ebb away.
He failed to produce any of the unshakeable alibis he had promised.
On 28 June 1994, a jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

American agent Gregg McCrary, who had been actively involved since 1992 as a psychological profiler, advised the Vienna police to keep a suicide watch on Unterweger, since he had frequently boasted that he would never spend another day in prison.
They failed to heed his warning, and a few hours after being sentenced to life imprisonment, he hanged himself in his cell with the cord from his jumpsuit.

Andrew Cunanan

In 1994, the Hollywood director Oliver Stone released the movie
Natural Born Killers
– a deliberately shocking story of a young couple who travel around America brutally killing strangers for fun.
A satire on the media’s casual attitude towards violence and murder, Stone’s film was clearly meant to be controversial, but perhaps he got more than he bargained for.

The very media Stone was satirising became almost hysterical over the film, with television and newspaper pundits wailing that it could inspire weak-minded people (not themselves, of course) to become serial killers.
On the whole this seems an unlikely possibility; as we have seen in this book, the path to becoming a serial killer usually involves being abused as an adolescent, followed by years of sadistic sexual fantasies – no movie could recreate such a psychological downward spiral in those who watched it.
But within three years, the US was traumatised by a series of killings that seemed as random and heartless as any of those depicted in Stone’s film.

The case started, some believe, when 28-eight-year-old male prostitute Andrew Cunanan began to suspect he had contracted AIDS.
He went for a blood test in early 1997, but could not bring himself to collect the results.
After that date his friends began to notice that the usually humorous and effervescent Cunanan seemed increasingly depressed – perhaps because he assumed that he indeed had the fatal disease.

Another cause of depression in Cunanan was his jealous fear that two of his former boyfriends, Jeffrey Trail (a former Navy officer) and David Madson (a Minneapolis architect) were seeing each other behind his back.
In an attempt to soothe his ex-lover’s suspicions, Madson invited Cunanan to fly from his home in San Diego to Minneapolis to meet with him and Trail to talk matters over.
The meeting, on 27 April 1997 in Madson’s apartment, proved stormy and ended with Cunanan grabbing a meat mallet from a kitchen drawer and beating Jeff Trail’s skull in.

It is a mystery just why David Madson – a respected and successful professional – then helped Cunanan to roll the corpse in a rug, and then went on the run with the killer, but he did.
The mystery will remain unsolved because Cunanan shot Madson dead and left him in a roadside ditch several days later.
Ironically, the revolver Cunanan used had belonged to Jeff Trail.

At this point, Andrew Cunanan seems to have decided to live the life of a carefree outlaw, and never made any particular effort to cover his tracks – even leaving photographs of himself in Madson’s Cherokee Jeep when he abandoned it in Danville, Illinois, a week after the murder of Jeff Trail.

As he left no diaries, or similar indication to his mental workings, it is a matter of conjecture why Cunanan became a serial killer.
However, his next killing almost certainly stemmed from a sick urge to re-enact a scene from one of the sadomasochistic pornographic videos he loved to watch (and had at least once ‘acted’ in).

After abandoning Madson’s Jeep, he walked a few blocks and approached 72-year-old Chicago-based property developer Lee Miglin.
Drawing his revolver, Cunanan forced Miglin into the garage of Miglin’s home and bound and gagged the old man with duct tape.
Then, apparently recreating a scene from a video called
Target for Torture,
he beat and kicked Miglin, stabbed him several times in the chest with a pair of pruning shears, then slowly sawed the old man’s throat open with a hack saw.
Cunanan then crushed the corpse to a pulp with Miglin’s own car – driving over it backwards and forwards several times.
Then, after stealing some ornamental gold coins from the house, Cunanan simply drove off.

Is this evidence that movies like
Natural Born Killers
and
Target for Torture
can turn people into serial killers?
It would seem more likely that the sort of person who will eventually become a serial killer is highly likely to want to watch sadomasochistic movies.
But sadists with no access to such material still become serial killers – so blaming the movies for serial crime is as over-simplistic as blaming wars on Hollywood, because the politicians who declare wars sometimes watch war movies.

The Miglin murder, taking place as it did in a separate state from the first two killings, allowed the FBI to become involved in the case.
They realised that they had a very unstable serial killer on the loose (Cunanan had killed the requisite three people to earn this categorisation).
The Federal Authorities issued a nationwide police alert and placed Cunanan at the top of the Ten Most Wanted list.
Yet he avoided all attempts to catch him, either through incredible luck or, more likely, grotesque police bungling.
Cunanan certainly wasn’t making much effort to avoid detection, driving Miglin’s stolen, blood-spattered Lexus all the way to New Jersey before dumping it to steal a new vehicle.

To do this he murdered 45-year-old William Reese – a harmless grounds keeper at the Finn’s Point Cemetery, near Pennsville.
It seems that Cunanan arrived at the cemetery, abandoned the Lexus and then approached Reese and asked for an aspirin and a glass of water (both were found spilled next to the body).
Following him into the grounds keeper’s lodge, Cunanan shot Reese dead and stole his Chevy pickup truck.
Then he drove to Florida.

It seems certain that Cunanan pre-planned his next killing – that of the high-flying fashion designer Gianni Versace.
At fifty, Versace was at the top of his profession and counted international idols like Princess Diana among his closest friends.
When it was later discovered that, some years before, Versace had met Cunanan at a San Francisco party, some wondered if the homosexual fashion designer and the gay toy boy had been lovers, but there is no evidence to back this conjecture.
For whatever reason Andrew Cunanan had decided to kill Versace, it doesn’t seem to have been a crime of passion.

For two months Cunanan wandered about Miami quite openly, keeping an eye on Versace’s favourite clubs and restaurants.
The fact that the Miami police failed to pick Cunanan up in this time is a matter of considerable embarrassment to the department – especially as it was quickly realised – as soon as Reese’s abandoned Chevy was found – that the killer might be at large in the city.

On the morning of 15 July 1997, Cunanan finally caught sight of Gianni Versace outside his Miami mansion.
As the designer went to open the gate, Cunanan stepped up behind him and shot him twice in the head, killing him instantly.

This was to be Cunanan’s last murder.
He went into hiding as hundreds of law officers and FBI agents flooded the city to hunt for him.
Eventually, eight days after the Versace killing, he was discovered hiding in a luxury houseboat by the caretaker.
Before the police could capture him, however, Cunanan shot himself in the temple with Jeff Trail’s revolver.

Some experts believe that Cunanan went on his killing spree because he thought he was dying of AIDS.
While it remains uncertain just what it takes to turn a person into a serial killer, it is clear that fear of retribution is the main break that stops many borderline sadists from becoming habitual killers.
Perhaps, with that break removed – thinking he had nothing left to lose – Andrew Cunanan gave in to his dark temptations.

Ironically, although it has never been officially confirmed, it is rumoured that the AIDS test carried out during Cunanan’s autopsy proved negative.
If true, he might have never become a serial killer if he had had the courage to collect the results of his blood test earlier in the year.