My dad, who turned 87 today, warned me as I left for college about “over-educated idiots” — people with a surfeit of book learning but a paucity of wisdom. It helps explain why universities are so liberal–smart people can reach stupid conclusions.

This came to mind reading a book review about…

Jack Unterweger, a Viennese writer with a checkered past, came to Los Angeles with assignments from Austrian media to report on the city’s dark side. He insinuated himself into Hollywood’s expatriate Austrian and German crowd, visited LAPD headquarters, and went on a ride-along with a patrol officer.

At night, Unterweger the journalist became Unterweger the killer, picking up three prostitutes downtown and in Hollywood and strangling them with a signature ligature he fashioned from his victims’ bra straps. It was a pattern he’d honed back home, where he’d been killing prostitutes and dumping their naked bodies in wooded areas, posed obscenely and strangled with their own clothing.

An intelligent and charismatic man, Unterweger was a classic “malignant narcissist” who strangled at least nine women in the early 1990s while reporting on the crime wave and enjoying the fawning support of Vienna’s radical chic salons.

So Jack just managed to be in the right place to cover these grisly murders. Did anyone think he might be the killer?

He should also have been a prime suspect from the beginning, since he’d already been incarcerated for 15 years for bludgeoning an Austrian teenage girl to death. It was while in prison for that murder that he wrote an autobiography that endeared him to the Viennese intellectual set. He was set free with a rare presidential pardon in 1990. Six months later, Austrian prostitutes began disappearing.

Hmmm.

While incarcerated, Unterweger began to write brooding memoirs and novels filled with sadistic fantasies that became bestsellers. He also wrote children’s stories broadcast on Austrian radio and had “almost a supernatural ability to win helpers and advocates, whom he used to obtain privileges and influences.”

The photo on the book cover shows the menace and dark allure that Unterweger exploited so successfully. Slender, with piercing eyes, chains slung around his neck and a large prison tattoo across his bare chest, women wanted to rescue him.

Among those who lobbied for Unterweger’s pardon was future Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek, who wrote, “The clarity and great literary quality with which Jack Unterweger described his childhood made a great impression on me.”

Over-educated idiot, indeed. The memoir that moved her so much was a fraud.

Unterweger fabricated a prostitute aunt slain by her john. His portrait of a brutal grandfather was challenged by relatives. He blamed Schäfer’s murder on a blackout rage but had cold-bloodedly marched her into the forest before strangling and beating her.

Nonetheless, Unterweger’s patrons used these works as proof that he’d been rehabilitated. Austrian writer Sonja Eisenstein paid for correspondence classes (he scored highest in religion) and was moved by a poem he wrote (plagiarized from Hermann Hesse). Years later, as suspicion grew in her mind, Eisenstein realized she’d been duped. She wrote to Austria’s largest newspaper: “Jack Unterweger is a shark in the Austrian cultural scene . . . an agent of destruction that threatens all society. No one is safe from him.”

But the newspaper didn’t print her warning.

Prophetic words, but the paper never printed them.

Instead, the ex-con won a state grant to produce his play “Scream of Fear” and prostitutes disappeared in towns the playwright toured. Fearing a political scandal, authorities dithered.

“The idea that the poster boy for rehabilitation cruised around the country strangling hookers, paying for gas, food, and lodging with state subsidies, was too embarrassing to contemplate,” Leake writes.

He explains differences between the U.S. and Austrian justice systems and drops references to Nietzsche (an Unterweger favorite), Freud, the classic film noir “The Third Man,” and Nazi persecution of so-called “degenerate artists,” which Leake believes made “the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme in postwar Vienna, and no one dared call an artist or writer a degenerate.”

Heavens, no.

We’ve had similar instances of “artists” getting mushy about some stone cold killer. Witness Ed Asner demanding justice for Mumia. Or Norman Mailer getting someone killed. As Wikipedia recalls:

In 1980, Mailer spearheaded convicted killer Jack Abbott’s successful bid for parole. In 1977, Abbott had read about Mailer’s work on The Executioner’s Song and wrote to Mailer, offering to enlighten the author about Abbott’s time behind bars and the conditions he was experiencing.

Mailer, impressed, helped to publish In the Belly of the Beast, a book on life in the prison system consisting of Abbott’s letters to Mailer. Once paroled, Abbott committed a murder in New York City six weeks after his release, stabbing to death 22-year-old Richard Adan.

Educated. Dense. Dangerous.