Artist murdered before starting new life in Southampton

Seeking urgent shelter from torrential rain on an alpine walk, Helen Munro, 43, was enticed into a cave where she was gagged, repeatedly raped and bludgeoned to death with an iron bar.

Former Nazi Guido Zingerle, 48, claimed he became enraged during a discussion on politics when she cast blame on Germany for instigating the Second World War. In reality, he was a sex fiend who had already murdered one woman, launched a horrific sex attack on an innocent teenager, and was suspected of carrying out a series of other sordid attacks on lone strangers.

Munro, a British Arts Council official, was well known in Hampshire and had purchased a flat in Portland Terrace, Southampton, a few days before she embarked on a holiday with her mother.

She was an ardent supporter of Southampton's art gallery where her contribution was lauded by curator Lorraine Conrad.

"The death of Helen is a sad and senseless loss which will be felt by an exceptionally large number in the world of art. By Joining the CEMA in its early days, she eclipsed a promising career as a sculptress. The untiring energy which she put into this wartime experiment for bringing art to the people, left little time for her own work. Indeed, many of us wonder if it left her any time for eating and sleeping. Her friends thought they had scored a point if they could cut short one of her innumerable journeys with a meal or a night's rest.

"The work with which Miss Munro was engaged needed a formidable array of qualities, wide knowledge of the arts, administrative duties, a personal charm and sincerity which can convince equally an alderman or an artist, and above all, enthusiasm. Everyone, who came into contact with Helen Munro, must have felt her genuine conviction and enthusiasm. Here was someone ready to help the smallest and most tentative effort and help to the last ounce of her strength."

A keen supporter of the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra and the midsummer concert at Beaulieu Cloisters, she also patronised the Salisbury Arts Theatre Company whose manager Michael Wide said of her death: "It came as a great shock and a personal loss to us all."

It was July 1, 1950, when she arrived in Innsbruck with her mother and shortly set off to walk along the 7,375-foot Patscher Koefel mountain when a fearsome storm struck. After she failed to return, her mother raised the alarm and her body was discovered two days later.

Suspicion for her disappearance quickly focused on the unkempt Zingerle who two years earlier had been convicted of keeping a girl imprisoned in a cave on the same mountain where he often stayed alone.

Naked, bound and gagged, Munro had suffered extensive head injuries and was left buried under several rocks. A dirty pair of men's trousers, a blood-stained check shirt, a crowbar, a mason's trowel, fibre boards and a candlestick lay nearby.

Hours later, Zingerle paid for a drink in an Innsbruck inn with a large note, the waiter noting he was carrying several other notes that did not match Austrian currency. But robbery had not been the motive as the police confirmed her handbag, discarded at the scene, had contained £35 in notes, French francs and Austrian schillings as well as some travellers' cheques. She was also still wearing her watch.

Police mounted a massive search of the South Tyrolean principally near the Italian border as he was known to speak fluid Italian but a month was to elapse before four police officers, disguised as hunters, surrounded him in a woodland hut near the Brenner Pass where he was armed with a pistol. Heavily chained, he was brought to Innsbruck for questioning and eventually confessed he had been drinking wine when he met Munro and invited her into the cave where they discussed politics. "Miss Munro said Germany had been the cause of the Second World War. That made me mad. I hit her in the face and stunned her."

He then described how he had bound her hands and feet but kept her alive until the following morning. "I found English, French and Austrian money in her purse and a railway ticket from Paris to Graz. I took 200 Austrian schillings and burnt the rest. Before I left the cave, I stripped her body and buried it under a pile of stones."

Zingerle was sentenced to life imprisonment after pleading guilty to murder, rape and robbery, confessing to the Innsbruck court he had repeatedly raped his victim before deciding he must "silence" her. "I turned her face downwards, grabbed an iron bar and hit her on the head like mad."

As an additional punishment, he was ordered to be locked in solitary confinement in a dark cell on each anniversary of her murder and sleep on bare boards one day every three months. He was then handed back to the Italian authorities where he had given another life sentence for the gruesome killing of a teacher.

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