Entering Hades
The Double Life of a Serial Killer
-
-
4.8 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
The chilling true story of Jack Unterweger, a serial killer who used his literary fame to lure victims on two continents.
"I was a greedy, ravenous individual, determined to rise from the bottom to the top . . . It wasn't me!"--Jack Unterweger's final words to his jury
In the early 1990s, detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department began to find bodies of women strangled with their own bras. Meanwhile, in Austria, police followed clues to similar crimes. Intrigued by the case was Jack Unterweger, a local celebrity and journalist who cut a striking figure in expensive white suits. His expertise on Vienna's criminal underworld was hard-earned--he had been sentenced to life in jail as a young man. But while incarcerated, he began to write, and his work earned him the attention of the literary elite who lobbied for his release.
By 1990, Jack was free and continued writing. But though he now traveled in the highest circles, he had a secret life. He was killing again, and in a great irony, reporting on the very crimes he had committed. With unprecedented access to Jack's diaries and letters, John Leake reveals the life and crimes of Jack Unterweger, exposing the thrilling twists in the United States and Europe that led to Jack's capture and Austria's "trial of the century" in Entering Hades.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Austrian Jack Unterweger was many things to many people celebrated author, well-known bon vivant and loyal friend. To prostitutes plying their trade in Vienna, he was a ruthless killer. When he hanged himself in his jail cell after being convicted of murder in 1994, Unterweger brought to a close a story of cold-blooded murder that crossed social boundaries and international borders. As told in page-turning, savagely intimate style in this debut by translator and editor Leake, Unterweger's vicious killing spree comes alive in horrifying detail. Released from prison in 1990 for an earlier murder, Unterweger quickly began killing again. Passing himself off as a journalist, he took to calling the relatives of his victims. "At 5:00 p.m. the same voice called back and said, 'They lie in the place of atonement, facing downward, toward Hades, because otherwise it would have been an outrage.' " His 1991 murder of a hooker in Los Angeles proves his undoing as the American police, working with Austrian authorities, track him down. Leake gets bogged down in the minutiae of the 1994 trial in Vienna, but this is a minor glitch in an otherwise cracking good true-crime tale that, while demonstrating respect to the victims, conjures a character in Unterweger that readers will not soon forget.
