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Hell Unearthed
John
Leake digs up Hades
By John Hood
 Jack
Unterweger was not a nice guy, even before he became a serial
killer; then again, I suppose most murderers aren’t. Imprisoned
at age 24 for killing a young German woman, the Austrian dandy
would spend 15 years behind bars before a coterie of big-shot
bleeding hearts — inspired both by his voluminous cellblock
scribblings and the sad-sack fact that he had been birthed by a
hooker and beaten by a granddad — would secure his pardon.
Within 18 months of his release, he would become a celebrity,
lauded by the radical chic and hired by
Austria’s ORF (their BBC) — oh, yeah, during that time he’d also
kill 11 more women in four different countries.
Such is the story of John Leake’s slewful Entering Hades: The
Double Life of a Serial Killer (Farrar Strauss & Giroux,
$25), one formidably comprehensive chronicle of one despicably
ugly man.
Funnily enough, ugly as was the mug, in both soul and surface,
Jack considered himself something of a pretty boy, a player if
you will, donning a crisp white suit for readings of his
best-selling Purgatory, posing in a straw boater for his
publicity shots and riding into Los Angeles dressed as a nappy
cowboy who’d just been sprung from some sauerkraut Western.
And from the gallery of weeping women at his last trial, the
pretty boy also had a knack for the pretties, despite his
penchant for killing ’em. Hookers would trick for him, squares
would steal from their own husbands on his behalf and few were
faithful to anyone else — ever again.
Jack also happened to have had more moxie than almost any other
killer who ever lived. Really. When a rash of corpses started
showing up in the woods surrounding
Vienna,
Jack got himself assigned to write about the case. He’d hit up
the mayor for quotes, powwow with the police chief, until
eventually he became one of the most vocal advocates of catching
the killer, which of course was himself. Later, after landing a
gig penning a piece on porn in LA, he used his daytime po-po
ride-alongs not just to inform his nighttime putdowns of
prostitutes, but to ensure that the cops would always look
elsewhere when the bodies turned up.
Naturally, all bad men come to an end, and Jack was no
exception. Convicted on multiple counts of homicide and
sentenced to life, Jack fashioned a noose from the drawstring of
his trousers and strangled himself to death. Fittingly, it was
the same method he used on his many victims.
Leake, an ex-pat translator with loads of
Vienna experience, combed through scads of data to map out this
pitiless portrayal of a pitiless ponce (like most hyperliterate
psychopaths, Jack kept copious notes), and, thankfully, he
doesn’t once succumb to forgiveness or excuse. He doesn’t
succumb to understanding either, but with a mad cat like Jack
there is perhaps no such thing.
John Leake reads from
Entering Hades at
6 p.m.
Monday, Jan. 28, at Books & Books,
265 Aragon Ave.,
Coral Gables. For more information, call 305-442-4408.
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