The Austrian Ripper

In 1974, a young woman named Margaret Schafer disappeared from her hometown of Ewersbach, Germany. She was taken to deserted woodlands and strangled to death. It wasn’t long before a suspect was apprehended and the young man, Jack Unterweger, was found guilty of her murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

After Margaret’s murder, eleven further strangulation deaths occurred in Los Angeles, Prague and in two Austrian towns – Vienna and Graz. Investigators were flummoxed as the murders that spanned three different countries seemed linked. All victims had ties to the sex work industry, were dumped in woodlands or in water and all had been strangled by their undergarments, which had been tied in a complex series of unique knots. It wasn’t until a phone call to authorities from a retired police investigator who remembered a drowning murder in 1973 in Salzburg, Austria that the case began to come together. And amongst it all was a beloved Austrian journalist and writer.