Werner Kniesek

With the money that Kniesek received in jail through making illegal liquor, he bought a gas pistol in Vienna and on January 16, 1980 went by train to St. Pölten, where he posed as a carpet representative, and took a taxi to the Am Kupferbrunnberg settlement. Arbitrarily, he broke into the villa of the Altreiter family in the Fuchsenkellergasse, where 26-year-old wheelchair user Walter was living. He held Walter down, and when his 55-year-old mother Gertrude and 24-year-old sister Ingrid came home in the evening, they were overwhelmed and tied by Kniesek in the hallway. Since the mother believed this was a robbery, she presented the offender with a check for 20,000 schillings.

On July 4, 1980, Werner Kniesek was sentenced by the St. Pölten district court to life imprisonment and admitted to an institution for the mentally unstable. In 1983, he made an escape attempt from the Stein Prison, but he failed.

At a press conference, Minister of Justice Christian Broda commented on the case of Werner Kniesek, stressing the importance of scientific and medical advice in prison, and that if Kniesek had been convicted after January 1, 1975, this crime would not have happened. At that point in time, the concept of insanity had been extended so that perpetrators like Kniesek could be accommodated to mental hospitals, even beyond the expiration of their judiciously received punishment. Since there are no retroactive laws in Austria under the rule of law, dangerous prisoners such as Kniesek could not be included in the enforcement of measures retrospectively.

Therefore, a nine-member working group was formed, which would capture prisoners who were sentenced under the existing penal code until 1975, the new penal code but could fall into the group of mentally abnormal lawbreakers and potential recidivists. Although these could not subsequently be transferred to the enforcement, they would serve their remainder in a special institution.

Born illegitimately and raised in Salzburg, Kniesek began skipping school, stealing and running away from home as a youth. He had never met his father and his mother was overwhelmed with him, so she wanted him to find himself a house. When he learned this, Werner stabbed her with a knife, stole some money and fled to Germany, where the 16-year-old was arrested in Hamburg and extradited back to Austria. After two years of juvenile detention for attempted murder, Kniesek was released. After committing several burglaries, he shot a 73-year-old woman. In 1973, he pleaded insanity and was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison, where he was dismissed in early January 1980 for good behaviour. A few weeks before his release, he was given a three-day prison leave from the Garsten Prison to seek work. He had been convicted seven times since the age of 16, had been in prison for 15 years, and spent 13 months in a workhouse.

Werner Kniesek (born November 17, 1946 in Salzburg) is an Austrian triple murderer, who was one of the most dangerous offenders in Austria's criminal history, torturing and killing a family of three while on parole.