Warner Bros. nabs rights to 1990’s serial killer story

Warner Brothers has acquired the film rights to John Leake’s non-fiction book Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer, according to Screenhead.

The book told the story of Austrian Jack Unterweger, a journalist who led a double life strangling prostitutes in Vienna and Los Angeles. He used to act on and then cover his hideous crimes in the early 1990s. His 1991 murder of a prostitute in Los Angeles proved his unraveling as U.S. authories working with Austrian police, tracked him down. Unterweger later hung himself in jail after receiving the life sentence for murder in 1994. A seriously dark story.

Robert Schwentke, who directed the 2005 Jodie Foster thriller Flighplan, as well as the upcoming The Time Traveler’s Wife, due in theaters later this year, and the Enron scandal-based drama Conspiracy of Fools, due in 2011, is attached to helm the adaptation.