Entering Hades

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.