Manhunters

by Colin Wilson

  The rapes began in May 1987. The perpetrator, who was described as young and white, would follow women who alighted from buses in the Scarborough area of east Toronto, attack them from behind, and make sure that they did not see his face. Scarborough is a middle-class area, and he sometimes dragged them behind bushes on the edge of lawns, or between the houses. He called them foul names, and used more violence than was necessary—in one case he broke the victim’s shoulder bone, and smeared her hair with dirt. He raped and sodomized them, and then force them to give him oral sex.

  McCrary profiled him as a young man who lived in the area—hence his care in making sure that his victims did not see his face. He felt hatred and resentment towards women. He was probably incapable of sex unless he was inspiring fear, and he was most likely unmarried and lived at home, since as a young man he would be unable to afford his own house in Scarborough.

  The rapes had reached a total of fifteen when, in June 1991, fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffy disappeared. Two weeks later, parts of her body, encased in concrete, were found on the edge of Lake Gibson, Saint Catherine’s. Then, in April of the following year, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Kristen French, vanished on her way home from school. A witness who had seen a cream-colored car speeding away left the police in no doubt that she had been abducted, almost certainly by two people. Two weeks later her body was found dumped down a side road. She had been beaten and strangled.

  The killer was arrested in late January 1993. It happened after DNA profiling had finally identified the Scarborough Rapist. There had been 224 suspects, among these Paul Bernardo, who resembled an identikit drawing of the rapist. Bernardo had given blood, hair, and saliva samples to be compared with the rapist, but had heard nothing further in two years, and assumed he was in the clear. In fact, the DNA testing had proceeded slowly, and Bernardo was among the last five suspects whose body samples were tested. It was only then that the police knew that Paul Bernardo was the Scarborough Rapist they had been seeking for more than five years. The person who revealed him as the killer of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French was his wife—and accomplice in the murders—Karla.

  Once again, Gregg McCrary’s profile of the rapist proved remarkably accurate. Bernardo lived in the Scarborough area, was then twenty-three, and was living at home with his parents.

  The story, as it then emerged, began when Paul Bernardo, a handsome young businessman of twenty-three met the seventeen-year-old blonde Karla Homolka in a Howard Johnson’s in 1987, and the two lost no time in climbing into bed. Later, it became clear that their affinity was based upon the fact that his sexual tastes veered towards sadism, and hers towards masochism. At sixteen, Karla had allowed a boyfriend to tie her up with his belt and slap her during sex, and discovered that she enjoyed it. The first time she and Paul were alone in her bedroom, he found handcuffs in her pocket, and asked: “Are these for me?” He then handcuffed her to the bed and pretended that he was raping her. As their relationship progressed, she had to dress up as a schoolgirl—with her hair in pigtails tied with ribbons—and he also liked her to wear a dog collar round her neck when they had sex. If she failed to comply with his demands, he beat her. She soon became expert at explaining away her bruises to friends.

  When she met Bernardo, Karla was unaware that he was the Scarborough Rapist, whose attacks continued for years after they had met and become engaged.

  Sometime before Christmas 1990, Karla had asked Bernardo—by now her fiancé, and living in her home—what he wanted for Christmas, and he had replied: “Your sister, Tammy.” Tammy was fifteen, and still at school. Desperate to please Bernardo, Karla obtained sedatives from the animal clinic where she worked, and on the evening of December 23, 1990, invited Tammy to join them in watching a film after midnight in the basement “den.” They plied the unsuspecting girl with drugged drinks and, when she fell unconscious, Bernardo undressed her and raped her on the floor.

  Although she presents an image of blonde sweetness, driven by a desire to present her fiancé with a “surrogate virgin,” Canada’s most notorious female criminal, Karla Homolka, presented her husband, Paul Bernardo, with schoolgirls to rape—and then kill. (Associated Press/Frank Gunn)

  It was while Bernardo was raping Tammy—filmed by Karla—that he noticed that she had stopped breathing, and her face had turned blue. The couple’s attempts to revive her failed so they re-dressed her and called an ambulance. No suspicion fell on Karla or Bernardo; the inquest ruled the death accidental. It was assumed that she drank too much and choked on her own vomit.

  In June 1991, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl named Leslie Mahaffy arrived at her home at 2 a.m. to find herself locked out. Bernardo came across her sitting disconsolately on a bench in her backyard, and offered her a cigarette. Then he held a knife to her throat, and took her back to the house that he and Karla shared—they were due to get married in two weeks. There he raped her and videotaped her urinating.

  The next day Karla had to join in, having lesbian sex with the schoolgirl while Bernardo videotaped them. Leslie was raped repeatedly. When left alone with Karla, Leslie begged her to let her go; Karla replied that if she did, she would be beaten. She gave Leslie two sleeping tablets to “make her feel better,” and while Leslie was asleep, Bernardo looped electrical cord around her throat and strangled her.

  Two days later, he dismembered the body with an electric saw, encased the pieces in quick-drying cement, and then dropped them off a bridge into Lake Gibson, with Karla acting as lookout.

  Bernardo now decided to seduce a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Jane, who had been a friend of Tammy’s, and who bore a remarkable resemblance to the dead girl. As a “wedding present” for her husband, Karla invited Jane to their house. Jane was flattered by the attention of two adults, and developed a schoolgirl crush on Karla. Once there, the newlyweds served her drugged liquor, and after she fell asleep Karla anaesthetized her with halothane, again obtained from the animal clinic. Bernardo then raped and sodomized her while Karla videoed the acts; Bernardo was particularly delighted to find that Jane had been a virgin. Fortunately for her, she remained unconscious during the rape.

  On April 6, 1992, ten months after the murder of Leslie Mahaffy, Karla accompanied Bernardo as they drove in search of another victim. They passed fifteen-year-old Kristen French, walking alone on her way home from school, and Karla called out to ask her directions. The girl came over to their car as Karla produced a map. Bernardo then moved behind her and forced her into the car at knifepoint. After three days of being repeatedly raped and forced to take part in videotapes in which she had to address Bernardo as “master,” Kristen, like Leslie Mahaffy, was murdered. Her naked body was thrown on a dumpsite full of old washing machines.

  During the New Year 1993, Bernardo beat Karla more violently than usual, clubbing her with a rubber flashlight and blacking both her eyes. Finally, her mother and sister called when Bernardo was out, and insisted on taking her to hospital. After that she agreed to go home with them. To prevent Bernardo from discovering her whereabouts, she moved in with an aunt and uncle.

  Instead of arresting him immediately, the police went to interview Karla. She refused to admit that she knew her husband was the rapist, but when they had gone, blurted out to her uncle and aunt: “Christ, they know everything.” Pressed by her aunt, Karla finally told her about the murder of the two schoolgirls.

  Bernardo was arrested on February 17, 1993.

  When he finally met the killer, McCrary was able to gauge the remarkable accuracy of his profile. Bernardo hated women because he hated his hostile, neurotic mother, who had told him when he was ten that he was a bastard fathered by her lover. His sex life was therefore dominated by a desire to humiliate and punish woman. His preferred method of sex was to beat a woman as he sodomized her.

  In due course, Karla turned state’s evidence, in exchange for a promise of a lighter sentence. She was tried first, for manslaughter, and was sentenced to twelve years. She was released from prison in Ju
ly 2004. On September 1, 1995, Paul Bernardo was sentenced to life imprisonment, with the proviso that he should serve a minimum of twenty-five years before he could apply for parole.

  Perhaps the most fascinating of all the cases that McCrary profiled was that of Jack Unterweger, poet, dramatist, and TV celebrity. He was also Austria’s first serial killer.

  In the summer of 1992, McCrary received a phone call from Vienna. A man was about to go on trial for the murders of eleven women. Would he be willing to profile the case? He replied that if they had the right man, a profile would be unnecessary, and that a signature crime analysis would be more to the point. A “signature” means certain typical elements in a criminal’s modus operandi—for example, the way he ties a knot or takes a certain kind of “trophy.”

  Two leading investigators on the case, Ernst Geiger, the policeman who had put the suspect behind bars, and Thomas Muller, chief of the Psychiatric Service, agreed to travel to Quantico. McCrary mentioned in advance that he wanted to know nothing whatever about their suspect—just about the crime scenes.

  When Geiger and Muller arrived, the three men devoted several days to studying the files. The murders had taken place in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Los Angeles. The women had all been beaten, and then strangled with an item of their underwear, either bras or pantyhose. No semen was found, either in the bodies or on them. The victims were often killed in woodland, near water, and left covered in leaves.

  When McCrary had studied the files, and established that the MOs seemed to indicate the same killer, they turned to the man who had been arrested: Jack Unterweger, ex-convict and now one of Austria’s best-known writers.

  Born in 1950, the son of a prostitute and, according to rumor, an American GI, Jack had been abandoned by his mother. He was brought up by an alcoholic grandfather, who often brought prostitutes to the small hut where they lived in a single room. In his teens, Jack was in trouble repeatedly for offenses such as burglary and car theft, and became a pimp who was known for beating up his hookers. Then, in 1974, he was arrested for two murders. The first was of eighteen-year-old Margaret Schaefer, who happened to be a friend of a prostitute named Barbara Scholz. As Unterweger and the latter drove past her in the street, Unterweger invited the girl into the car, and then decided on impulse to rob her and her family’s home. After that he took her to the woods, forced her to undress, and demanded oral sex; when she refused, he beat her unconscious with a steel pipe and then strangled her with her bra. Barbara Scholz gave him away, and he was arrested.

  The second victim, a prostitute named Marcia Horveth, had been strangled with her stockings and dumped in a lake. Unterweger was not charged with this murder, because he had already confessed to the first and had been sentenced to life. He pleaded guilty, claiming that as he was having sex, he had seen the face of his mother before him. A psychologist had diagnosed him a sexually sadistic psychopath with narcissistic tendencies.

  When he went to jail for murder, Unterweger had been illiterate. He had already been in prison fifteen times. But condemned to life, he set about learning to read and write. He then edited the prison newspaper, started a literary review, and wrote his autobiography, a book called Purgatory (Fegefeur), in which he professed to be completely rehabilitated, and explained that he had killed the prostitute because he hated his mother.

  Purgatory was a literary sensation, and intellectuals began to lobby for his release. He was paroled on May 23, 1990, after sixteen years behind bars. And he quickly became prosperous as his book climbed to the top of the best-seller charts, and then was filmed. He wrote plays, gave readings of his poetry, and appeared as a guest on talk shows. A small, handsome man who wore white suits and drove expensive cars, his face was soon familiar to everyone in Austria.

  Then women began to disappear. The first, a shop assistant, Blanka Bockova, was found on the banks of the Vltava River, near Prague, on September 14, 1990. She had been beaten and strangled with a stocking.

  On New Year’s Eve 1991, in a forest near Graz, Austria, nearly three hundred miles south of Prague, another woman was found strangled with her pantyhose. She was Heidemarie Hammerer, a prostitute who had vanished from Graz on October 26, 1990. Five days later, the badly decomposed body of a woman was found in a forest north of Graz. She had been stabbed, and probably strangled with her pantyhose. She was identified as Brunhilde Masser, another prostitute. The decomposed body of a prostitute named Elfriende Schrempf was found eight months later, on October 5, in a forest near Graz. When four more prostitutes, Silvia Zagler, Sabine Moitzi, Regina Prem, and Karin Eroglu disappeared in Vienna during the next month, it looked as if the killer had changed his location.

  And at the point, the police were given their vital lead. Ex-policeman August Schenner, retired for five years from the Vienna force, was reminded of the MO of the prostitute-killer Jack Unterweger sixteen years earlier. Police who checked upon his tip were at first skeptical—Unterweger was rich, famous, and had plenty of girlfriends. Would such a man murder prostitutes? Moreover, as a magazine writer, Unterweger had interviewed prostitutes about the killer the press had labeled the “Vienna Courier,” and been critical of their failure to catch him. If they treated him as a suspect, would it not look as if they were pursuing a vendetta?

  Yet as they reviewed the evidence, the Vienna police—and especially Detective Ernst Geiger—decided that the case against Unterweger looked highly convincing. A check on his credit card receipts revealed that his travels had invariably taken him to the same areas where the women were killed. He had been on a magazine assignment in Los Angeles, interviewing prostitutes, when three of them were strangled there in a manner that recalled the Vienna murders. He had even persuaded the Los Angeles Police Department to drive him around red-light districts in their patrol cars.

  As his investigation continued, Ernst Geiger learned from prostitutes who had been picked up by Unterweger that he liked to handcuff them during sex—which was consistent with some of the marks on the wrists of 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 Blanka Bockova. When a search of his apartment revealed a red scarf whose fibers matched those found on her body, they decided to arrest their suspect.

  They interviewed Unterweger on October 2, 1991. Naturally, he denied everything. Moreover, he renewed criticism of the police for their failure to catch the Vienna Courier. And support for him among Viennese intellectuals and his society friends remained strong. 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?

  It was time to bring the suspect into custody. In February 1992 a judge signed the warrant. But when the police arrived at his apartment, Unterweger had already left. They learned from his friends that he had gone on holiday with his latest girlfriend, eighteen-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 of 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 cash, and Bianca took a job as a topless dancer. Her mother 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 n
ext 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 head in another direction. But he was caught after running through a restaurant, creating havoc. Out in the back, an armed agent 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, he chose to resist extradition to Europe and opt for a Los Angeles trial; however, when informed that California had the death penalty, he changed his mind.

  The trial began in Vienna in April 1994, and in spite of overwhelming circumstantial evidence, the result was by no means a foregone conclusion. Unterweger had hundreds of admirers, who were convinced that the police had picked on him because they were blinded with prejudice by his past criminal record. And there was virtually no forensic evidence to link him to the crimes—merely a few red fibers that matched his scarf.

  The part McCrary played in the prosecution proved to be central and vital. It was his task to explain to the court that the “signature” evidence amounted to overwhelming proof of Unterweger’s guilt. It was almost impossible, he told them, for eleven unconnected murders to be committed with an almost identical pattern—strangulation by underwear tied in a unique knot, and disposal in woodland in the same manner.

  McCrary had even fed the “signature analysis” into the VICAP computer, which covered nearly twelve thousand murders from all over the United States. He had expected dozens of matches; instead, it came up with only four, one of which had been solved. The other three were the murders attributed to Unterweger.