Salzburg · AT
True Crime Salzburg
Baroque facades, cold cases and courtroom verdicts - the dark side of the Mozart city.
What's the walk about?
Welcome to Salzburg, the city of Mozart, Baroque domes and festival glamour. But behind the pastel facades and beneath the fortress cliffs lies another Salzburg — a city of an unsolved killing in its most beloved park, a 1980 cold case that still haunts the courts, a river that has seen more than it will ever tell, and a courthouse where the darkest chapters are finally read aloud. On this walk we leave the postcard behind and follow the trail of the Mozart city's most notorious crimes, standing on the very spots where they unfolded.
What you'll see
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1
Death Among the Dwarfs - Mirabell Gardens
Park
Beneath the Baroque hedges and the Pegasus fountain of Salzburg's most photographed park lies a cold case: on the morning of 8 June 2004, 59-year-old Wilhelm Schwab was found beaten to death here, and the man whose DNA was found at the scene has never been caught.
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2
Twenty Years for the Wrong Man? - Linzer Gasse
street
On 5 November 1980, 23-year-old Heidemarie Mayrhofer was found strangled with an electrical cable in an apartment on Salzburg's busiest right-bank street. Her pimp served a 20-year sentence on circumstantial evidence, yet decades later DNA and a stranger's fingerprint pointed to another man.
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3
The Butterfly-Knife at the Bridgehead - Griesgasse
Bridge
At the old-town foot of the Makartsteg, on Griesgasse, a drunken quarrel in the early hours of 28 December 2019 ended with a butterfly knife and two young men bleeding on the pavement - a double stabbing that brought fifteen- and ten-year sentences for attempted murder.
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4
Knife Before Dawn - Festspielbezirk
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Beside the Baroque horse pond and the festival halls, a night patrol turned into a stabbing at 1:50 am on 15 March 2021, when a security guard knifed a taxi driver over an illegally parked car and was hunted down in Getreidegasse.
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5
The Fall That Was Murder - Sigmund-Haffner-Gasse
Street
On 17 October 2001, 87 year old Margarete Lanz was found covered in blood on the landing outside her flat at Sigmund-Haffner-Gasse 5. Everyone assumed a fatal fall, until the autopsy revealed she had been beaten to death, a few steps from Salzburg's busiest shopping lane, by a killer who has never been identified.
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6
Vanished into the Crowd - Hypo Bank, Residenzplatz 7
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On Thursday 20 October 2022, at twenty to three in the afternoon, an armed man in a black FFP2 mask walked into the Hypo Salzburg bank on the Prince Archbishops' grand square, threatened the staff, demanded cash and dissolved into the old town tourist crowds. Despite a helicopter, assault rifles and published CCTV images, he was never named.
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7
Blood on the Bar Strip - Rudolfskai
street
Rudolfskai is Salzburg's riverside party mile - and in the small hours of 4 December 2016 a brawl outside its bars left a 24-year-old man with a knife wound to the stomach, while a crowd of a hundred onlookers blocked the ambulance and the attackers vanished into the night.
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8
Fifteen Hundred Rounds - Mozartsteg
bridge
On the Mozartsteg, the Art Nouveau footbridge by the Rudolfskai, police acting on a tip stopped a 19-year-old in June 2013 and found an air pistol, two knives and some 1,500 rounds of ammunition - the arrest of a young man whose real violence had been dealt out earlier, at the railway station.
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The First Life Sentence of Jack Unterweger - Justizgebäude Salzburg (Rudolfsplatz 2)
Courthouse
Behind the three tall windows of this 1909 Palace of Justice, on 1 June 1976, Salzburg's court sentenced a 24 year old drifter named Jack Unterweger to life for the murder of Margret Schäfer. Fourteen years later he walked free, and nine more women died.
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