Jack Unterweger's Fake Redemption Tour
In 1976, Austrian criminal Jack Unterweger received a life sentence for strangling 18-year-old Margaret Schäfer, but he reinvented himself in prison as a gifted writer, publishing plays, stories, and an autobiography that convinced intellectuals he was rehabilitated. After his parole in 1990, he became a media celebrity, appearing on television talk shows about prison reform and the recent murders of prostitutes, and he worked as a journalist who interviewed sex workers and even police officers about those crimes.
While presenting himself as a reformed expert on violence, he secretly resumed killing, murdering at least a dozen women in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the United States, often beating them and strangling them with their own underwear. Police finally arrested him in Miami in 1992, and an Austrian court convicted him of nine murders in 1994; that same night, Unterweger hanged himself in his cell using a ligature tied with the same kind of knot found on several of his victims.