Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
The sadistic serial killer Werner Kniesek went down in criminal history as one of Austria’s most dangerous criminals. Werner went off the rails at a young age, stealing, skipping school, and repeatedly running away from home. For these reasons, on June 5, 1962, his completely overwhelmed mother told him that he would have to live in a children’s home from then on. When Werner heard this, he stabbed his mother repeatedly with a bread knife before fleeing to Germany with her money, where the then 16-year-old Werner was arrested and extradited back to Austria. After two years in juvenile detention, Werner was released and continued his criminal career. He committed several burglaries and shot and killed a 73-year-old woman for no reason. Werner was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison on the grounds of insanity. Due to good behavior, he was released in January 1980. Werner had even been granted a three-day furlough from prison so he could look for work. Once free, he used the money he had earned in prison by illegally distilling schnapps to buy a gas pistol in Vienna. He then took the train to St. Pölten, where he got into a taxi and had the driver take him to the “Am Eisberg” housing development. There, he broke into the Altreiter family’s villa. Inside the elegant villa, he encountered the family’s 26-year-old son, Walter, who was in a wheelchair. Werner calmly told him that he was going to kill him, but that he would wait a little while longer. A short time later, Walter’s 55-year-old mother, Gertrude, came home. Werner overpowered the widow in the hallway. The shocked Gertrude believed she was the victim of a robbery and wrote Werner a check for 20,000 schillings. Before he tied Gertrude up, he made her take her heart medication so she wouldn’t lose consciousness later when he tortured her to death. But first, in front of the weeping Gertrude, he strangled her son Walter with his bare hands. Next it was Gertrude’s turn; after hours of torture, Werner strangled her with a noose. A few hours later, their 34-year-old daughter Ingrid came home and found not only the bodies of her mother and brother, but also Werner. Ingrid begged Werner for her life, but he first tortured, abused, and beat her before strangling her as well, and then the family cat. Afterward, Werner lay down to sleep next to the bodies, which he packed into the trunk of the family’s Mercedes the next day. He drove to the bank to cash the check. With the money, he went on a shopping spree, after which he took a break at a restaurant in Karlstetten. The taciturn man with the large amount of cash—who didn’t even take off his black gloves while eating—seemed suspicious to the other guests, so one of them wrote down the car’s license plate number and notified the police. The police drove to Villa Altreiter, where they found a smashed window. Since there was no sign of the residents, an Austria-wide manhunt for the car and the family was launched. Before midnight, the Mercedes was found at the Salzburg train station with the bodies in the trunk. Werner, who had returned to the car after a brief bathroom break, was arrested on the spot. During questioning, he confessed to the horrific murders, which he had committed out of pure lust for killing. Werner Kniesek was sentenced to life imprisonment and committed to an institution for mentally abnormal offenders, from which he attempted to escape in 1983, though the attempt failed.
