(Josef Fritzl, photographed just after his arrest, locked his then-18-year-old daughter in his cellar for 24 years.)In the past only fly fishermen would have heard of the Lower Austria town of Amstetten and only a few elderly Austrians would have been able to say that they've heard the name Josef Fritzl before.
Amstetten is 40 miles (65 kms) from Linz and 81 miles (130kms) from Vienna, the Austrian capital, and just fewer than 23,000 people live there. The town, which was first mentioned in 995, is on the Ybbs River, a tributary to the Danube. The Ybbs's crystal clear water makes it a fly-fishing paradise. Few who have gone there to fish though would have known that the town had once been the seat of two sub-camps of the Nazis' Mauthausen-Güsen group of concentration camps. It's not something the locals wish anyone to recall or mention.
Resident Josef Fritzl, 73, a "respectable" and "respected" retired electrical engineer, no doubt felt the same way about the town's concentration camp past. He certainly was secretive about his own life. On a month-long vacation in Pattaya, Thailand, with a friend of long-standing, he confessed to having "a woman on the side" but such indiscretion was only because he had been caught buying skimpy woman's underwear and a dress. The friend, Paul Hoerer, 69, talking to journalists said: "He was really annoyed when he saw that I've been watching him". Fritzl had asked him to keep the information to himself. Of course, it was understandable that Fritzl did not want his wife, gray-haired, plump 68-year-old Rosemarie, to know about the lover.
There was also something else Fritzl didn't wish anyone to know about: the cellar of his house at Number 40 Ybbsstrasse, a large three-story structure divided into individual apartments for tenants. According to Chief Inspector Franz Pölzer, head of criminal investigations for Lower Austria, Rosemarie was "discouraged" to go down there. Said friend Hoerer: "Fritzl was master of the house and a bit of a dictator." So, Rosemarie, having been "discouraged" stayed away. Similarly, Fritzl had forbidden his tenants to approach the cellar. One tenant, Alfred Dubanovsky, 42, a gas station attendant in Amstetten, who had rented one of the apartments for 12 years, recalled having been told to stay away from the cellar and to know that if he did go that way, he would lose his lodging instantly.
Josef Fritzl's life is now no longer a secret. Forever now he will be known as the father who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and raped her almost daily so that she fell pregnant six times. And Amstetten, because this is where the Austrian Ogre had committed his foul deed, will no longer be known only to fly fishermen.
The Case
The case began on Saturday, April 19, 2008. That morning Josef Fritzl summoned Amstetten's emergency paramedics to Number 40 Ybbsstrasse. When an ambulance arrived he escorted the paramedics out to his back garden where his expensive German-made automobile was parked. On the rear seat lay a young girl. She was barely conscious and already unable to speak: Fritzl had earlier described her to the person who had taken his emergency call as his "granddaughter". Now, he briefly explained to the paramedics that she did not live with him but that he had found her in his hallway and that he had carried her to his car to race her to hospital but had decided that it would be quicker and wiser to summon an ambulance.
As is the custom in Austria, as well as in most of Europe, Fritzl was not allowed to accompany his "granddaughter" to hospital, but he was told to follow in his own car. He did not set off immediately though so by the time he arrived at Amstetten General Hospital, the head of its emergency unit, Dr. Albert Reiter, was desperate to have a word with him. The doctor had by then established that all the vital organs of the young girl, by then unconscious, had stopped working. In other words, she was moribund. But what puzzled the doctor was his patient's appearance: She was incredibly thin and pale, and she'd obviously never had dental treatment because her teeth were rotting stumps hanging from her bleeding gums.
Fritzl's explanation to Dr. Reiter was that the young girl's mother – his daughter who was 42 years old – lived away from home and that she had dropped the girl, Kerstin he said was her name, off at his house that morning. Having broken all ties with this wayward daughter very many years ago he had not seen her child before that morning. He seemed very worried about this "granddaughter" of his but balked when asked how old she was and where she was born or what school she attended. "Just get her better and leave the rest to me," he told the doctor angrily. The latter, suspicious, summoned the police and by the end of the day Austrian television was running a police request for the girl's mother, a woman last known as Elizabeth Fritzl from Amstetten, to come forward. What the television report did not mention was that the police were already themselves looking for her; they wanted to charge her with gross neglect of her child.
On Saturday, April 26, after night had fallen and eight days having passed since the search for Elizabeth Fritzl had begun, she walked into the hospital. With her was her father Josef; he had called the hospital earlier to announce that his "missing" daughter had turned up and that he was bringing her to the hospital. "We don't want any trouble so do not call the police," he had warned before ringing off. The hospital though had ignored the threat and the investigators on the case rushed to the hospital and when they returned to their station house a couple of hours later Elizabeth and Josef Fritzl were with them. Father and daughter rode the short distance between hospital and station house in separate squad cars: they had been informed that they were to be questioned and that what they would say could be used as evidence against them for a charge of neglect.
"I have a lot to tell you," were the first words Elizabeth Fritzl told the police once she was seated in an office at the station house. But before she was to speak she wanted their promise that she would never ever have to face her father again. Promised, she continued: "I was kidnapped by my father when I was 18 and he has kept me locked up in the cellar of our house ever since. I am now 42 years old. He locked me up down there and so too my children. I have seven children. He is their father. He raped me. I've not seen another human being apart from him and my children these past 24 years."
Two hours later, her story was told. Her father had started to rape her when she was 11 years old. She didn't tell her mother or anyone else about it because she feared his reaction; he beat not only her but also her siblings and her mother. When she turned 18 he lured her down to the cellar of their house to make him her sex slave. She remembered the date: Tuesday, August 28, 1984. Down there she had given birth six times, once to twins. Three of the children he had taken upstairs to be brought up by her mother (his wife Rosemarie) and one of the twins had died shortly after birth, but the remaining three children, Kerstin being one of them, had been held prisoner with her. Where were the two children who had been held prisoner with her and Kerstin, the police wanted to know. They were at home with her mother, she replied. Just as he had released her, he had also released them from their shared prison.
Those who listened to Elisabeth's story would describe her to the media – hundreds of journalists and television news crews had arrived from all over the world to cover the "Austrian Incest Father" story – as gray-haired, very pale and toothless, and looking very much older than her 42 years. They would also say that when, after having heard her story, they walked into the office where Fritzl was waiting to be questioned, they saw that he was smiling.
At first Fritzl would give the police only monosyllable replies to their questions, but then he admitted that he had locked up his daughter. "She was kind of mad," he said. Locking her and her children up, as he explained, was his way of protecting them. And, no, his wife did not know that he had kept Elizabeth and her children – his "grandchildren" – locked up. Where were the "grandchildren" he was asked. They were at home with their "grandmother", he replied. And he was still smiling.
Until that moment all that the police had known about the man in their custody were that he was 73 years old, that at the age of 22 he had met and married an 18-year-old kitchen assistant from Linz whose name was Rosemarie, and that the two were the parents of seven children, two of them twins. The couple's first child was born in 1957 and the last in 1972. Elizabeth was their third child born in 1966.
The following day, Sunday, April 27, the police went to Number 40 Ybbsstrasse. It was not their first visit to the house, but it was the first time that they would enter the cellar. A door which, weighed later, would hit the scale at 660 pounds (300 kilograms), had kept them out. It was a reinforced door, the kind once sold to European businesses and home owners to secure nuclear fallout shelters. (Many Europeans – especially Austrians and Germans – were constructing nuclear fallout shelters during the Cold War. It is even still compulsory that each building in Switzerland be equipped with such a shelter.) The door also had a complicated security code but this Fritzl had been forced to reveal.
The entryway to Fritzl's cellar "dungeon".
On the police's arrival the house that had once been filled with people – filled with people both above and below ground – was dark and silent. Rosemarie and all the children her husband had fathered either by her or her daughter were in hospital undergoing check-ups and mental assessments. And the tenants too were away; the police had moved all to safe houses for questioning as they might be witnesses in a future trial.
Once down the 11 stone steps that led to the reinforced door and a police technician having tapped the secret code into its lock, the police no longer spoke of a cellar. They spoke of a "dungeon." When the media heard the word it instantly awakened memories of Natascha Kampusch, also Austrian, who had been held captive by one Wolfgang Priklopol (44 at that time) in a dungeon at his house for eight years and until August 2006 when she, aged 18, succeeded in getting away. They were also reminded of Belgian serial rapist and killer, Marc Dutroux, who had imprisoned his female child victims in a dungeon under his house.
Investigation
While more journalists arrived in Amstetten, filling all the town's hotels and guesthouses as well as those in the neighboring towns, the police began the emotionally stressing task of finding out what exactly had gone on in the Fritzl household and for how long it had gone on.
The story went back to 1977. Elisabeth was 11 years old then.
Fritzl's friend Hoerer spoke to journalists about what she was like at that age. "I remember that Elisabeth was very withdrawn and shy. I got the impression he (Fritzl) did not like her very much, he did not treat her as well as he did the other children. He used to beat her a lot more than them. She used to get a slap for every small thing," he said.
"Elisabeth ran away from that house, police searched for her, brought her back and delivered her back into the violent embrace of her father," Hedwig Woelfl, the director of an Amstetten child protection center, in turn told journalists.
It was in 1983 that Elizabeth, then 16, had run away. She had done so with a girlfriend and the two had set off for Vienna. However, the moment her father realized that she was gone he reported her missing and the police started to look for her. In Vienna, the two girls slept rough and then one night they joined some young people for a very noisy party in a private apartment. When neighbors called the police because of the noise, Elisabeth was recognized as the missing girl from Amstetten She was sent back home.
The following year Elisabeth, by no means an enthusiastic scholar, moved to the Tyrolean town of Angath, 186 miles (300 kms), away to work as a junior waitress at a motel. Friends from that time remembered that "Sissy," as they called her, liked to party and do whatever went with partying, including drinking. She also got a boyfriend. He would later tell police that they were never lovers: They used to caress but Elisabeth would always end the kissing abruptly.
Then Elisabeth returned to Amstetten; her father wanted her back home. It was 1984 and for the past six years, or since he had started to sexually abuse his daughter, he'd been constructing what he said was a "nuclear fall-out shelter" under the family home. It meant shifting what police would later say must have been about 150 tons of soil up to the surface and carting it away. He had the local planning authority's full agreement to build the shelter: It had even given him a 30,000 Austria Schilling (US$2900; ₤2000) subsidy for the work. Eventually the "nuclear fall-out shelter" would consist of eight rooms that included a kitchen-cum-bathroom with stove, fridge, freezer, toilet, shower, television set and video player.
The tiny cellar bathroom Fritzl installed for his captives.
In 1984, Elisabeth, then 19, ran away again. Or this was what Fritzl told Rosemarie. He showed her a letter he had "found" with the mail. It was from Elizabeth: She wrote that she had joined a sect and that she didn't want anyone to look for her.
Fritzl told friend Hoerer the same story and from then on whenever the latter dined with the Fritzls and Elisabeth's name was mentioned, as he told journalists: "Rosemarie would leave the table, but I never saw her cry."
What Hoerer did not know was that his pal Fritzl, or "Sepp" as he called him, had been raping Elizabeth for the past eight years. Therefore while he had been enjoying "Sepp's" company, "Sepp" had been raping a child.
Elizabeth had not joined a sect of course. Her father had locked her up in the cellar, or rather the new "nuclear fall-out shelter" so that he could rape her whenever he wanted to. As she told the police, he had lured her down to the cellar on the pretext that he needed assistance fitting a door down there and had knocked her out with ether. When she came to she was alone and handcuffed to the headboard of a bed. When he reappeared later that day she begged him to let her go. His reply was to rape her yet again. For the next few days she screamed and called for help as loud as she could. She also banged on the thick concrete walls, walls the electrical engineer and handyman had made sure would be soundproof; he had tested the cellar's acoustics by playing a radio down there as loud as he could while he stood upstairs in the house listening. This was a procedure he followed until he was satisfied that he could hear not a sound from below.
Contrary to friend Hoerer's belief that Fritzl had disliked Elisabeth, one of the investigators told journalists: "We understand that Elisabeth was his favorite child because she was so pretty. He didn't want to lose her when she turned 18 so he spent six years building a dungeon to keep her for himself forever. It wasn't just a sudden idea to throw his daughter in the cellar, it was plotted for years." Indeed. What friend Hoerer did not know was that his pal "Sepp" had a sexual perversion of having sex in a dark and enclosed place like a cellar: At one stage he was visiting a Linz brothel as often as three times a week where he took the prostitutes down into the basement for violent sex.
A narrow corridor in the cellar dungeon.
Elisabeth, once locked in the cellar, was to satisfy this man's perverted sexual desires. Cunningly, he'd been using condoms when he'd raped her when she was a child and so too for the first five years of her captivity, but then his libido started to play up and he thought that sex without birth control would be a booster. Therefore, one day Elisabeth found herself pregnant. She begged her father to allow her out. She promised that she would not speak of her captivity and that she would go along with the "sect" story he had fabricated, but he would hear nothing of it. She was accordingly to fall pregnant another five times, each time giving birth without any medical assistance and the only assistance she received from her father were a book on childbirth, some diapers and aspirin pills. Kerstin was her first child, then followed a boy named Stefan and a girl named Lisa. After her came another daughter, Monika, and then twins named Alexander and Michael. Finally another boy named Felix.
Michael, one of the twins, was the child who had died. Kerstin then only seven and Stefan then six had helped their mother bring him and his brother Alexander into the world and then afterwards they struggled with her to save his life. As was his pattern, Fritzl had kept away during the final days of Elisabeth's pregnancy and during the confinement as well.
Lisa, Monica and Alexander were the three children Fritzl had taken upstairs for Rosemarie to bring up. He had told her that he had "found" the toddlers on the doorstep; he had forced Elisabeth to write notes to explain that she was unable to keep them with her and Rosemarie had willingly accepted the three without querying their sudden arrival, and had loved them as if they were her own biological offspring. Fritzl was to explain to the police why he had taken the three upstairs. "They were sickly and cried too much in the cellar for my liking," he said. The three he and Rosemarie adopted legally: The Amstetten adoption authorities had fine-combed the couple's life and life-style but had found nothing to make them unsuitable as adoptive parents; they were by all appearance law-abiding citizens. Later, the three were enrolled at the local school and on each of 21 visits that welfare officials paid to the Fritzls' house, they had reported that the children were well looked after and that the couple were "very loving" parents.
During all that time, Fritzl, having forbidden Rosemarie and the couple's tenants to go anywhere near the cellar, went down their almost daily. He even spent entire nights down there, sometimes raping Elisabeth in front of her children after he had made her watch pornographic films to teach her how to satisfy him. Upstairs, Rosemarie and the other children and the tenants slept soundly.
Two tenants though did suspect that all was not quite right in the cellar. Dubanovsky told police and journalists that he had heard strange noises coming from it at night. "I wish to God that I could turn back the clock. The signs were all there but it was impossible for me to recognize them. I never in my wildest dreams thought he was behind anything like this. He spent every day in his cellar but I thought his behavior was pretty normal." Tenant, Sabine Kirschbichler said in an interview with the German magazine Brigitte that she used to see Fritzl go down to the cellar with heavy bags of provisions. "Now I realize why we weren't allowed to rent cellar space from him," she said. Dubanovksy also saw Fritzl taking provisions down to the cellar, but these had been packed onto a wheelbarrow, he said.
Another of Fritzl's friends, Rainer Wieczorak, 62, also came forward, not only to recount what he had on Fritzl, but to show what he had, and not only to the police and the journalists, but to the world. It was a video and he published it on the Web. Having accompanied Fritzl and Hoerer on the Thailand vacation of which Hoerer had already spoken, he had filmed Fritzl on the beach. The video showed Fritzl, tanned and smiling and dressed in a swimsuit a size or two too small, lying on a beach in the resort of Pattaya and being given a massage. "I needed to go there because the warm climate is much better for my health, but Fritzl had other interests. While we would all sit around the hotel bar enjoying a few quiet drinks, he was off on his own. We did not speak about where he went but it was pretty obvious that he had another agenda in mind. We almost never saw him. He was usually sleeping things off during the day, having a massage on the beach and a late breakfast," he said. Fritzl had explained to him that he was vacationing without Rosemarie because she had to look after the children. Hoerer's then girlfriend, Andrea Schmitt, had also gone along to Pattaya. She told journalists: "We traveled down there together but Fritzl very much did his own thing." She also said she had seen him with "carrier bags filled with things for the younger children" and added, "I remember thinking that he was buying a lot of presents for just three children."
The Fritzls' nearest neighbors also confided in journalists that they had their suspicions about the cellar because of the large and heavy shopping bags that Fritzl used to carry down there. One neighbor had even one day bumped into him in an out-of-town hypermarket when he was buying diapers.
The question the Austrians began to ask at that stage of the investigation was: Why had the friends, tenants and neighbors not gone to the police with their suspicions? And one police officer was puzzled why Rosemarie had never tried to get into the cellar. He said to a female reporter: "Ask yourself, if your husband forbids you entry to an area of your home and where he spends entire nights, will you accept that? Is it not in the female psyche to be inquisitive and suspicious? My wife, I know, would have been down there so fast with an axe, first axing the door down and then axing me."
Former captive Natascha Kampusch told the BBC in an interview that Austria's history played a role in the reason why no one had gone to the police with their suspicious. She said: "I think this exists worldwide, but I think it's also a ramification of the Second World War and its connection to education and so on. I think it can happen anywhere (she meant sequestration) and it also exists everywhere, not just in Austria. At the time of National Socialism (she meant Nazism; Hitler invaded and annexed a welcoming Austria in March 1938) the suppression of women was propagated. An authoritarian education was very important."
Amstetten women welcome Hitler (date unknown).
Austrian historians and psychologists also tried to explain the tenants and neighbors' silence by saying that the Austrian mentality is such that an Austrian's home is his castle and that the castle is impenetrable: Only the closest relatives and friends are invited across the threshold; others are met up with in a beer hall or bar. Only young Austrians with no memory of or guilt over the Nazi era's atrocities have a different outlook.
Fritzl on Himself
Having been confronted with DNA evidence that showed that he had fathered his daughter's children, Fritzl confessed to the police. He said he was ashamed but had no idea why he had done what he had done.
"Herr Fritzl admits he raped and imprisoned his daughter, but he does regret what he did. He is emotionally destroyed," his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, told journalists: Fritzl had in those first few days also opened up to his lawyer.
What Fritzl told Mayer was that when he was four years old his father had left his mother whose name was Rosa; the two were cousins and had never legally married. The father, a Nazi supporter, had in 1938, the year before he had disappeared from his lover's and son's life, taken the child to watch Hitler's triumphant arrival in Amstetten and the rapturous welcome the locals had given the Nazi leader. "I grew up in the Nazi times and that meant the need to be controlled and the respect of authority. I suppose I took on some of those old values. It was all subconscious, of course," he told Mayer.
He continued: "I come from a small family (he was an only child) and grew up in a tiny apartment. My father was a waster, he never took responsibility and he was just a loser and always cheated on my mother.
"After my father left, my mother and I never had contact with him again. He did not interest us. Then there was just the two of us."
He described his mother as a "strong woman", a woman who had taught him discipline and control and the "values of hard work." She was "simply the best woman in the world."
Rosemarie he also described as a "wonderful woman." He always wanted a large family and this she provided. "The dream of a big family was with me from when I was very small and Rosemarie seemed the perfect mother to realize that dream. This is not a good reason to marry, but it is also true to say that I loved her and still love her," he said.
The truth was somehow different.
Fritzl grew up in a fairly large apartment in the very house where he still lived on his arrest – Number 40 Ybbsstrasse – and where he had imprisoned his daughter and the children he had fathered by her. He had inherited the house from his mother who had inherited it from a man she had briefly been married to before she had taken up with Fritzl's father.
As for his statement that his mother had been "simply the best woman in the world," six months into the police's investigation of Fritzl's past, the Austrian newspapers Kronen Zeitung and Osterreich reported that he had revealed to a prison psychiatrist that he had kept her locked up in an attic room at Number 40 Ybbsstrasse for perhaps all of 20 years and until she died in 1980. He told Dr. Adelheid Kastner: "She never showed me any love; she beat me and kicked me until I was on the floor and bleeding. I felt so weak and humiliated. I never got a kiss from her or even a hug although I tried very hard to please her. The only thing she did with me was go to church.
"I had a horrible fear of her. She kept insulting me and told me I was a Satan, a criminal, a no-good."
Yet, when speaking to his lawyer, he had confessed that he had been sexually attracted to his mother. "I was strong," he said. "I kept my desires under control." Those who had known her described her as "looking rather like what we think a witch would look like: Small, thin, her shoulders bent, and always dressed in a long, black dress."
As for Fritzl and Rosemarie's relationship, they had stopped having sexual relations some years before he had taken their daughter down into the cellar.
Police investigators would unravel Fritzl's past.
He was indeed not the upright Austrian citizen the adoption authorities had considered him. Three times he had been investigated for arson although he was not charged; fires had broken out at summer guesthouses on lake Mondsee close to Amstetten of which he and Rosemarie were the owners but which she had run on her own while he remained behind in Amstetten, either raping his daughter down in the cellar or visiting the Linz brothel. He was also known as an exhibitionist, but worse than that: He had served time as a rapist. He had raped a 24-year-old nurse, having climbed through a window after her husband, a night worker, had left the couple's apartment. Then, holding a knife to her throat he had threatened to kill her should she not do as he wished. Convicted, he had served less than a year of an 18-month sentence; he was released for good behavior. Police are now investigating other Austrian rape cold cases believing him to have been the rapist.
What awaits Fritzl?
At first, Fritzl has been charged with rape, incest, false imprisonment and enslavement. Now he also faces a murder charge. From evidence given by Elizabeth and the three children who had remained locked up with her in the cellar, police have established that she had begged him to either allow her to take the ill and suffering twin, Michael, to a doctor, or to do so himself. He had refused despite that the baby had turned blue, could not breathe and his little body being grotesquely swollen. After the child had died he had wrapped the body in a blanket and had taken it upstairs. By his own confession he had then burned it in a rubbish burner and had buried the ashes in the garden.
He faces between 20 years and life. Legal experts say that he will probably be confined to a secure mental institution for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, he has settled down well in prison and has not manifested any suicidal tendencies.
On his first night in jail in the town of St. Pölten (52,000 inhabitants), the capital town of Lower Austria and 39 miles (64 kms) from Amstetten, he had supped on the Austrian dish of apricot dumplings. "He ate heartily," one of his warders told journalists. He is still eating heartily. "He loves his food, especially fish served with boiled potatoes and red cabbage," another warder has revealed.
He also loves watching television, especially news and reports about himself. And he has asked his lawyer how Rosemarie was, as well as how "the other children" were bearing up meaning the three children who had remained locked up with Elisabeth. "I always wanted to be a good husband and a good father," he said quietly.
Fritzl has however received several death threats. The prison inmates have also threatened to "top him" – kill him. He is accordingly being kept away from others, showering alone and taking his daily walk in the prison yard on his own.
Asked by Mayer how he would describe himself he replied: "On the face of it, probably as a monster."
His trial is scheduled to commence in March of 2009.
The Victims
Lawyer Christopher Herbst representing Elisabeth, Rosemarie and the two women's children – the upstairs as well as the downstairs ones – revealed on December 30, 2008 that Elisabeth and her children have left the psychiatric unit of the Amstetten-Mauer clinic where they had been held since last April. Rosemarie, also considered a victim, had left a few months earlier; having been given a quick divorce from Fritzl and a new identity, now lives in Linz but no one knows her address. Elisabeth and her children's new identities and whereabouts are also being kept secret.
Soon after the mother and her children had entered the clinic, its Dr. Kepplinger, had told journalists that the two sets of children were adapting to liberty at different tempos. "Things are going too fast for the one set, but too slow for the other. A cloud passing by is exciting to one set of the family, while the others don't even notice it." At that time, should daylight, space and sound or noise have become too much for the "downstairs" set, they were able to retreat to a cargo container the doctor had placed on the clinic's premises.
After a month in an artificially-induced coma, Kerstin was slowly brought back to consciousness. A tearful Elisabeth was at her daughter's bedside the day she finally woke up. Dr. Albert Reiter (he was the one who had treated Kerstin from the day of her admission) described that moment: "She opened her eyes and showed emotion for the first time. We smiled at her and she smiled back." She turned her face to the window and blinked at the sunshine she saw for the very first time in her 19 years. She had to receive daily injections to reactive her immune system and to treat her weakened muscles. Asked what she would like to do, she replied that she would like to "go on a boat ride." She then added that she would also like to attend a Robbie Williams concert; she had seen him signing on television down in the cellar and had become a fan.
Psychiatrists and psychologists who do not wish to be named now say that Lisa, Monika and Alexander had to come to terms with the appalling fact that their granddad was in reality their "dad." Stefan and Felix had to be guided into and prepared for living in the real world. Elisabeth had taught the two, as well as Kerstin, to read and write but all they knew of life was what they'd seen on television. They had therefore never seen a real sunset or sunrise. They had never felt rain on their faces, never driven in a car. Felix, as the police said, was overcome with excitement on his first ever car drive; the one from the house to the hospital. With a few words, but mostly with grunts and gurgles, he had made this excitement clear to his big brother Stefan. He and Stefan had invented a series of "animal-like sounds," as the police would also say, to communicate with one another.
Bad or Mad?
What the Austrians are currently asking themselves is whether Fritzl belongs in a prison or a mental asylum?
Psychiatrists and psychologists will have to answer this question before Fritzl steps into the dock. However, Mayer, Fritzl's lawyer, already has a reply: "In my personal opinion Josef Fritzl's mentally ill and therefore of diminished responsibility. I believe my client does not belong in prison but in a secure psychiatric unit."
Mayer has been receiving letters from people who say that he should be locked up together with his client. "But I am not representing a monster," he argues back. He says he is representing a human being.
Josef Fritzl has also been receiving letters; indeed, he is still receiving letters. The letter writers are mostly women. They want to marry him.
Trial and Verdict
The year 2008 ended and the international media began to ask the Lower Austrian legal authorities when Josef Fritzl's trial will commence. They were told that the trial will open in the St.Pölten courthouse 'in the spring', next they were told that it will begin 'towards March', and then finally, at the end of February, the date Monday, March 16, was given.
The police were meanwhile making arrangements with the Austrian air traffic controllers to enforce a no-fly zone over the courthouse for the duration of the trial expected to last a week.
Said Johann Schadwasser, Police Chief for St. Pölten: "We want to rule out that anything flying overhead might be used to help organize an escape."
He also wanted to keep the zone free for the police's own helicopters should a riot break out outside the courthouse. A riot against Fritzl for the shame he had brought on to Austria, but there was also a possibility that someone might organize some kind of action in support of him. Teacups with his photograph and the words 'Josef der Verführer' – Josef the Seducer – had gone on sale and were fast disappearing from shops. A name cup is a favorite Austrian gift item. One such cup says 'Steffi the Friendly' – Steffi Graff, the former German No 1 ranked female tennis player and wife of the former No 1 ranked male tennis player Andre Agassi.
On Sunday, March 15, Fritzl, prepared for his trial. He had his hair shampooed and cut. A fellow inmate shortened his 'Elvis Presley' cut for something more modern. The prison's budget did not however cover hair implants; Fritzl had implants on several occasions in the past. Therefore, arriving at the courthouse on Monday morning all that the world would see of him later on television was the back of his balding head. His face he hid behind a blue loose-leaf file binder.
Other such blue file binders lay on the desks in front of Judge Andrea Hummer (48), Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser (33), and Forensic Psychiatrist Heidi Kastner (46) – the three women in whose hands rested Fritzl's future.
In those file binders were their case and evidence against him.
He faced the charges of murder by negligence (he refused to get medical help for the dying twin Michael); slavery; multiple rape; false imprisonment; incest and coercion. If found guilty of all, he will never be a free man again.
Fritzl entered the courtroom flanked by ten heavily-armed police in their special dark-blue riot uniforms and black berets. His gray-blue jacket hung loosely; he had not only lost hair in the 11 months of his incarceration, but also weight.
The trial would be held in secret, but the media – over 200 journalists had arrived to cover the trial – were allowed to enter and take photographs; some even pushed microphones into Fritzl's face and tried to get him to reply to their questions. He remained silent.
Burkheiser read the indictment and Fritzl listened, staring straight ahead of him. He seemed oblivious to what he was hearing, yet there was an indication that he was all the same nervous; his long, thin, pale fingers trembled.
After the reading of the indictment, Judge Hummer turned to Fritzl. "Mr. Fritzl, how could you have done this to your own flesh and blood?" she asked.
Fritzl did not reply, and she, turning to face the jury of eight – four of each sex – chosen from the electoral roll, told them: "Look at him with his polite demeanor. He will present to you a caring side, a selfless person, the nice man from next door. But what really troubles me is that he has not shown a single sign of regret."
Austrian law allows an accused to explain what had driven him or her to crime, so Fritzl delivered a brief speech. He blamed his mother for what he had become. "I did not have a good relationship with my mother," he said. She had tried to stop him having friends; she beat him; she never showed him affection. But he could not condemn her all the same. "Her life wasn't the best either. She grew up on a farm and had to work from the age of eight," he said.
Fritzl was pleading guilty to all the charges against him, but not to the most serious, the murder by negligence of the twin Michael.
At this stage of the trial the media were ordered to leave the courtroom.
On Tuesday, the court as well as Fritzl, again in the gray-blue jacket, watched a harrowing 13-hour video testimony Elisabeth Fritzl had given the police. The jury even had to smell items from the dungeon.
That night Fritzl called his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, to the jail. He told him that he had decided to change his plea: He was also going to plead guilty to the murder charge. What had persuaded him to do so he would tell the judge the following morning was, "My daughter's videotaped testimony."
To that he added, "I'm sorry".
No one quite knew what he was sorry for: The trouble he was causing by changing his plea, or for what he had done to his daughter.
What no one also knew was that Elisabeth Fritzl had slipped into the courtroom while the video-tape of her ordeal was being played and that her father had seen her and that for a brief moment their eyes had met. His had apparently filled with tears.
In her testimony Elisabeth had spoken of being 11 years old and finding pornographic magazines under her pillow, put there by her father. She spoke of the 24 years of rape down in the dungeon. "He raped me 3,000 times," she said. She went through each of her eight pregnancies – the first pregnancy when she was 20 ended in a miscarriage – and the death of the twin Michael.
The jurors were only to render their verdict on Friday, but Fritzl, having changed his plea, the verdict was given on Thursday. The jury had needed only three hours to decide his fate: Guilty on all charges.
The Austrian Ogre was to spend the rest of his life in a secure psychiatric institution. He did not even bat an eyelid.
Fritzl immediately began serving his sentence in the secure hospital unit of Mittersteig Prison in Vienna. Two-thirds of the prison's 90 inmates are sex offenders undergoing intensive therapy. Fritzl will also undergo therapy and then, if ever he is to be diagnosed as almost free from the demons that have ruled just about all of his 74 years, he will be transferred to another prison. It is thought that this will be Göllersdorff Prison in the town of the same name: there, all his fellow inmates will be criminally insane.
One of Göllersdorff's inmates is the 19-year-old Robert Ackermann who is serving a life-sentence for the murder of a 48-year-old homeless man whose flesh he had then eaten.
Ackerman dreams of being diagnosed 'normal' and fit to resume life outside prison; he wants to become a surgeon.
As for Josef Fritzl, his lawyer said that his client does not mind in what prison he is to serve his sentence. Fritzl only wants it not to be too far from 'home'.
"He does not mind where he goes. It's not like it's a hotel but he would like a prison close to home," said Mayer.
Fritzl is hoping his family will visit him.
What now for Elisabeth Fritzl?
Elisabeth, her children and her mother Rosemarie have been given new identities. They live in Linz; Elisabeth and her children live together, but Rosemarie, now divorced from Josef Fritzl, lives in a small apartment on her own. The Austrian media have reported that Rosemarie visits her daughter and grand-children, but that the two women's relationship is strained. They greet each other with a handshake but never with a kiss. Rosemarie also does not like that Lisa, Monica and Alexander - the three children she had brought up believing that her 'wayward' daughter had abandoned them – now call her grandmother where they had previously called her mutter – mother.
Moving on ... 16 months later … summer 2009
A veil of secrecy has descended over the town of Perg, 22 miles from Amstetten. According to Austrian media reports, it is in this town where Elisabeth Fritzl now lives with her children, or with some of them; Kerstin and Stefan, the oldest ones, are still undergoing treatment in an undisclosed clinic.
Only a little over 7,000 people live in Perg, and whether Elisabeth is one of them, the others are not saying, but it is not a secret that she and her children are not the only ones living in a house the Austrian state has made available to her. With them lives a man. He is 28 years old and his identity is being protected too so that the media knows him only as Thomas W. He used to be Elisabeth’s bodyguard, assigned to protect her in December 2008 when she had recovered sufficiently to leave the psychiatric unit at the Amstetten hospital. He is now her lover; the fact that he is 14 years her junior, did not stop the two from falling in love.
One of her psychiatrists, pleased that she has been able to put the ordeal of having been raped 3,000 times by her father over 24 years, behind her, told journalists: “Everyone saw from the beginning how secure she felt with him.”
The relationship, he said, has given Elisabeth “renewed strength.”
Her teeth have been repaired; her gray hair has been colored to the blond of the day when her father lured her down to the cellar when she was only 18, and she’s learning to drive. Her therapy was stopped in May of 2009; diagnosed, recovered, she no longer needed it.
“This is vivid proof of the power of love being the strongest force in the world,” said the psychiatrist.
Is she writing a book about her ordeal?
According to the psychiatrist, she is not.
He said: “Right now all that this young woman wants is for the world to help her forget her ordeal, and the only way the world can do so, is to forget that she exists. To allow her to live her new life in total anonymity. To be happy.”
Josef Fritzl is certainly not happy.
As was scheduled when he was sentenced, in July of 2009, he was moved from Vienna’s Mittersteig Prison to Stein Prison near the town of Krems on the Danube River.
Christian Timm of the prison’s director’s board told the Austrian English-language newspaper Austrian Times that Fritzl “seems healthy” and that he was “not suicidal.”
Fritzl does however spend long hours staring at the walls of his cell. Such inertia some members of his prison’s medical staff have now said is “the first signs of senile dementia.”
He also spends time filling the pages of exercise books. He is, as he has said, writing a memoir. He will, he said, hand over to Elisabeth and “their” children whatever royalties the book will earn.
He might have forgotten that a judicial order forbids him to write about the case or to accept any kind of remuneration from a publisher, a TV network or a film company for his story.
He will also not be given whatever proceeds there will be from the sale of his various properties. The money will be used to pay for the medical care Elisabeth, her children and her mother had received. The Austrian state’s health authority has told his lawyers that it already has a one million Euro ($1.5 million) bill they want him to settle.
He also has other debts – loans from banks and building societies – which he must repay.
The “dungeon” house, Number 40 Ybbstrasse, is expected to be sold to a property developer for about one million Euros, while his other properties could fetch another million and a half.
To the chagrin of the people of Amstetten, the Ybbstrasse house has become a tourist attraction.
In the past only fly fishermen would have heard of the Lower Austria town of Amstetten and only a few elderly Austrians would have been able to say that they've heard the name Josef Fritzl before.
Amstetten is 40 miles (65 kms) from Linz and 81 miles (130kms) from Vienna, the Austrian capital, and just fewer than 23,000 people live there. The town, which was first mentioned in 995, is on the Ybbs River, a tributary to the Danube. The Ybbs's crystal clear water makes it a fly-fishing paradise. Few who have gone there to fish though would have known that the town had once been the seat of two sub-camps of the Nazis' Mauthausen-Güsen group of concentration camps. It's not something the locals wish anyone to recall or mention.
Resident Josef Fritzl, 73, a "respectable" and "respected" retired electrical engineer, no doubt felt the same way about the town's concentration camp past. He certainly was secretive about his own life. On a month-long vacation in Pattaya, Thailand, with a friend of long-standing, he confessed to having "a woman on the side" but such indiscretion was only because he had been caught buying skimpy woman's underwear and a dress. The friend, Paul Hoerer, 69, talking to journalists said: "He was really annoyed when he saw that I've been watching him". Fritzl had asked him to keep the information to himself. Of course, it was understandable that Fritzl did not want his wife, gray-haired, plump 68-year-old Rosemarie, to know about the lover.
There was also something else Fritzl didn't wish anyone to know about: the cellar of his house at Number 40 Ybbsstrasse, a large three-story structure divided into individual apartments for tenants. According to Chief Inspector Franz Pölzer, head of criminal investigations for Lower Austria, Rosemarie was "discouraged" to go down there. Said friend Hoerer: "Fritzl was master of the house and a bit of a dictator." So, Rosemarie, having been "discouraged" stayed away. Similarly, Fritzl had forbidden his tenants to approach the cellar. One tenant, Alfred Dubanovsky, 42, a gas station attendant in Amstetten, who had rented one of the apartments for 12 years, recalled having been told to stay away from the cellar and to know that if he did go that way, he would lose his lodging instantly.
Josef Fritzl's life is now no longer a secret. Forever now he will be known as the father who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and raped her almost daily so that she fell pregnant six times. And Amstetten, because this is where the Austrian Ogre had committed his foul deed, will no longer be known only to fly fishermen.
The Case
The case began on Saturday, April 19, 2008. That morning Josef Fritzl summoned Amstetten's emergency paramedics to Number 40 Ybbsstrasse. When an ambulance arrived he escorted the paramedics out to his back garden where his expensive German-made automobile was parked. On the rear seat lay a young girl. She was barely conscious and already unable to speak: Fritzl had earlier described her to the person who had taken his emergency call as his "granddaughter". Now, he briefly explained to the paramedics that she did not live with him but that he had found her in his hallway and that he had carried her to his car to race her to hospital but had decided that it would be quicker and wiser to summon an ambulance.
As is the custom in Austria, as well as in most of Europe, Fritzl was not allowed to accompany his "granddaughter" to hospital, but he was told to follow in his own car. He did not set off immediately though so by the time he arrived at Amstetten General Hospital, the head of its emergency unit, Dr. Albert Reiter, was desperate to have a word with him. The doctor had by then established that all the vital organs of the young girl, by then unconscious, had stopped working. In other words, she was moribund. But what puzzled the doctor was his patient's appearance: She was incredibly thin and pale, and she'd obviously never had dental treatment because her teeth were rotting stumps hanging from her bleeding gums.
Fritzl's explanation to Dr. Reiter was that the young girl's mother – his daughter who was 42 years old – lived away from home and that she had dropped the girl, Kerstin he said was her name, off at his house that morning. Having broken all ties with this wayward daughter very many years ago he had not seen her child before that morning. He seemed very worried about this "granddaughter" of his but balked when asked how old she was and where she was born or what school she attended. "Just get her better and leave the rest to me," he told the doctor angrily. The latter, suspicious, summoned the police and by the end of the day Austrian television was running a police request for the girl's mother, a woman last known as Elizabeth Fritzl from Amstetten, to come forward. What the television report did not mention was that the police were already themselves looking for her; they wanted to charge her with gross neglect of her child.
On Saturday, April 26, after night had fallen and eight days having passed since the search for Elizabeth Fritzl had begun, she walked into the hospital. With her was her father Josef; he had called the hospital earlier to announce that his "missing" daughter had turned up and that he was bringing her to the hospital. "We don't want any trouble so do not call the police," he had warned before ringing off. The hospital though had ignored the threat and the investigators on the case rushed to the hospital and when they returned to their station house a couple of hours later Elizabeth and Josef Fritzl were with them. Father and daughter rode the short distance between hospital and station house in separate squad cars: they had been informed that they were to be questioned and that what they would say could be used as evidence against them for a charge of neglect.
"I have a lot to tell you," were the first words Elizabeth Fritzl told the police once she was seated in an office at the station house. But before she was to speak she wanted their promise that she would never ever have to face her father again. Promised, she continued: "I was kidnapped by my father when I was 18 and he has kept me locked up in the cellar of our house ever since. I am now 42 years old. He locked me up down there and so too my children. I have seven children. He is their father. He raped me. I've not seen another human being apart from him and my children these past 24 years."
Two hours later, her story was told. Her father had started to rape her when she was 11 years old. She didn't tell her mother or anyone else about it because she feared his reaction; he beat not only her but also her siblings and her mother. When she turned 18 he lured her down to the cellar of their house to make him her sex slave. She remembered the date: Tuesday, August 28, 1984. Down there she had given birth six times, once to twins. Three of the children he had taken upstairs to be brought up by her mother (his wife Rosemarie) and one of the twins had died shortly after birth, but the remaining three children, Kerstin being one of them, had been held prisoner with her. Where were the two children who had been held prisoner with her and Kerstin, the police wanted to know. They were at home with her mother, she replied. Just as he had released her, he had also released them from their shared prison.
Those who listened to Elisabeth's story would describe her to the media – hundreds of journalists and television news crews had arrived from all over the world to cover the "Austrian Incest Father" story – as gray-haired, very pale and toothless, and looking very much older than her 42 years. They would also say that when, after having heard her story, they walked into the office where Fritzl was waiting to be questioned, they saw that he was smiling.
At first Fritzl would give the police only monosyllable replies to their questions, but then he admitted that he had locked up his daughter. "She was kind of mad," he said. Locking her and her children up, as he explained, was his way of protecting them. And, no, his wife did not know that he had kept Elizabeth and her children – his "grandchildren" – locked up. Where were the "grandchildren" he was asked. They were at home with their "grandmother", he replied. And he was still smiling.
Until that moment all that the police had known about the man in their custody were that he was 73 years old, that at the age of 22 he had met and married an 18-year-old kitchen assistant from Linz whose name was Rosemarie, and that the two were the parents of seven children, two of them twins. The couple's first child was born in 1957 and the last in 1972. Elizabeth was their third child born in 1966.
The following day, Sunday, April 27, the police went to Number 40 Ybbsstrasse. It was not their first visit to the house, but it was the first time that they would enter the cellar. A door which, weighed later, would hit the scale at 660 pounds (300 kilograms), had kept them out. It was a reinforced door, the kind once sold to European businesses and home owners to secure nuclear fallout shelters. (Many Europeans – especially Austrians and Germans – were constructing nuclear fallout shelters during the Cold War. It is even still compulsory that each building in Switzerland be equipped with such a shelter.) The door also had a complicated security code but this Fritzl had been forced to reveal.
The entryway to Fritzl's cellar "dungeon".
On the police's arrival the house that had once been filled with people – filled with people both above and below ground – was dark and silent. Rosemarie and all the children her husband had fathered either by her or her daughter were in hospital undergoing check-ups and mental assessments. And the tenants too were away; the police had moved all to safe houses for questioning as they might be witnesses in a future trial.
Once down the 11 stone steps that led to the reinforced door and a police technician having tapped the secret code into its lock, the police no longer spoke of a cellar. They spoke of a "dungeon." When the media heard the word it instantly awakened memories of Natascha Kampusch, also Austrian, who had been held captive by one Wolfgang Priklopol (44 at that time) in a dungeon at his house for eight years and until August 2006 when she, aged 18, succeeded in getting away. They were also reminded of Belgian serial rapist and killer, Marc Dutroux, who had imprisoned his female child victims in a dungeon under his house.
Investigation
While more journalists arrived in Amstetten, filling all the town's hotels and guesthouses as well as those in the neighboring towns, the police began the emotionally stressing task of finding out what exactly had gone on in the Fritzl household and for how long it had gone on.
The story went back to 1977. Elisabeth was 11 years old then.
Fritzl's friend Hoerer spoke to journalists about what she was like at that age. "I remember that Elisabeth was very withdrawn and shy. I got the impression he (Fritzl) did not like her very much, he did not treat her as well as he did the other children. He used to beat her a lot more than them. She used to get a slap for every small thing," he said.
"Elisabeth ran away from that house, police searched for her, brought her back and delivered her back into the violent embrace of her father," Hedwig Woelfl, the director of an Amstetten child protection center, in turn told journalists.
It was in 1983 that Elizabeth, then 16, had run away. She had done so with a girlfriend and the two had set off for Vienna. However, the moment her father realized that she was gone he reported her missing and the police started to look for her. In Vienna, the two girls slept rough and then one night they joined some young people for a very noisy party in a private apartment. When neighbors called the police because of the noise, Elisabeth was recognized as the missing girl from Amstetten She was sent back home.
The following year Elisabeth, by no means an enthusiastic scholar, moved to the Tyrolean town of Angath, 186 miles (300 kms), away to work as a junior waitress at a motel. Friends from that time remembered that "Sissy," as they called her, liked to party and do whatever went with partying, including drinking. She also got a boyfriend. He would later tell police that they were never lovers: They used to caress but Elisabeth would always end the kissing abruptly.
Then Elisabeth returned to Amstetten; her father wanted her back home. It was 1984 and for the past six years, or since he had started to sexually abuse his daughter, he'd been constructing what he said was a "nuclear fall-out shelter" under the family home. It meant shifting what police would later say must have been about 150 tons of soil up to the surface and carting it away. He had the local planning authority's full agreement to build the shelter: It had even given him a 30,000 Austria Schilling (US$2900; ₤2000) subsidy for the work. Eventually the "nuclear fall-out shelter" would consist of eight rooms that included a kitchen-cum-bathroom with stove, fridge, freezer, toilet, shower, television set and video player.
The tiny cellar bathroom Fritzl installed for his captives.
In 1984, Elisabeth, then 19, ran away again. Or this was what Fritzl told Rosemarie. He showed her a letter he had "found" with the mail. It was from Elizabeth: She wrote that she had joined a sect and that she didn't want anyone to look for her.Fritzl told friend Hoerer the same story and from then on whenever the latter dined with the Fritzls and Elisabeth's name was mentioned, as he told journalists: "Rosemarie would leave the table, but I never saw her cry."
What Hoerer did not know was that his pal Fritzl, or "Sepp" as he called him, had been raping Elizabeth for the past eight years. Therefore while he had been enjoying "Sepp's" company, "Sepp" had been raping a child.
Elizabeth had not joined a sect of course. Her father had locked her up in the cellar, or rather the new "nuclear fall-out shelter" so that he could rape her whenever he wanted to. As she told the police, he had lured her down to the cellar on the pretext that he needed assistance fitting a door down there and had knocked her out with ether. When she came to she was alone and handcuffed to the headboard of a bed. When he reappeared later that day she begged him to let her go. His reply was to rape her yet again. For the next few days she screamed and called for help as loud as she could. She also banged on the thick concrete walls, walls the electrical engineer and handyman had made sure would be soundproof; he had tested the cellar's acoustics by playing a radio down there as loud as he could while he stood upstairs in the house listening. This was a procedure he followed until he was satisfied that he could hear not a sound from below.
Contrary to friend Hoerer's belief that Fritzl had disliked Elisabeth, one of the investigators told journalists: "We understand that Elisabeth was his favorite child because she was so pretty. He didn't want to lose her when she turned 18 so he spent six years building a dungeon to keep her for himself forever. It wasn't just a sudden idea to throw his daughter in the cellar, it was plotted for years." Indeed. What friend Hoerer did not know was that his pal "Sepp" had a sexual perversion of having sex in a dark and enclosed place like a cellar: At one stage he was visiting a Linz brothel as often as three times a week where he took the prostitutes down into the basement for violent sex.
A narrow corridor in the cellar dungeon.
Elisabeth, once locked in the cellar, was to satisfy this man's perverted sexual desires. Cunningly, he'd been using condoms when he'd raped her when she was a child and so too for the first five years of her captivity, but then his libido started to play up and he thought that sex without birth control would be a booster. Therefore, one day Elisabeth found herself pregnant. She begged her father to allow her out. She promised that she would not speak of her captivity and that she would go along with the "sect" story he had fabricated, but he would hear nothing of it. She was accordingly to fall pregnant another five times, each time giving birth without any medical assistance and the only assistance she received from her father were a book on childbirth, some diapers and aspirin pills. Kerstin was her first child, then followed a boy named Stefan and a girl named Lisa. After her came another daughter, Monika, and then twins named Alexander and Michael. Finally another boy named Felix.Michael, one of the twins, was the child who had died. Kerstin then only seven and Stefan then six had helped their mother bring him and his brother Alexander into the world and then afterwards they struggled with her to save his life. As was his pattern, Fritzl had kept away during the final days of Elisabeth's pregnancy and during the confinement as well.
Lisa, Monica and Alexander were the three children Fritzl had taken upstairs for Rosemarie to bring up. He had told her that he had "found" the toddlers on the doorstep; he had forced Elisabeth to write notes to explain that she was unable to keep them with her and Rosemarie had willingly accepted the three without querying their sudden arrival, and had loved them as if they were her own biological offspring. Fritzl was to explain to the police why he had taken the three upstairs. "They were sickly and cried too much in the cellar for my liking," he said. The three he and Rosemarie adopted legally: The Amstetten adoption authorities had fine-combed the couple's life and life-style but had found nothing to make them unsuitable as adoptive parents; they were by all appearance law-abiding citizens. Later, the three were enrolled at the local school and on each of 21 visits that welfare officials paid to the Fritzls' house, they had reported that the children were well looked after and that the couple were "very loving" parents.
During all that time, Fritzl, having forbidden Rosemarie and the couple's tenants to go anywhere near the cellar, went down their almost daily. He even spent entire nights down there, sometimes raping Elisabeth in front of her children after he had made her watch pornographic films to teach her how to satisfy him. Upstairs, Rosemarie and the other children and the tenants slept soundly.
Two tenants though did suspect that all was not quite right in the cellar. Dubanovsky told police and journalists that he had heard strange noises coming from it at night. "I wish to God that I could turn back the clock. The signs were all there but it was impossible for me to recognize them. I never in my wildest dreams thought he was behind anything like this. He spent every day in his cellar but I thought his behavior was pretty normal." Tenant, Sabine Kirschbichler said in an interview with the German magazine Brigitte that she used to see Fritzl go down to the cellar with heavy bags of provisions. "Now I realize why we weren't allowed to rent cellar space from him," she said. Dubanovksy also saw Fritzl taking provisions down to the cellar, but these had been packed onto a wheelbarrow, he said.
Another of Fritzl's friends, Rainer Wieczorak, 62, also came forward, not only to recount what he had on Fritzl, but to show what he had, and not only to the police and the journalists, but to the world. It was a video and he published it on the Web. Having accompanied Fritzl and Hoerer on the Thailand vacation of which Hoerer had already spoken, he had filmed Fritzl on the beach. The video showed Fritzl, tanned and smiling and dressed in a swimsuit a size or two too small, lying on a beach in the resort of Pattaya and being given a massage. "I needed to go there because the warm climate is much better for my health, but Fritzl had other interests. While we would all sit around the hotel bar enjoying a few quiet drinks, he was off on his own. We did not speak about where he went but it was pretty obvious that he had another agenda in mind. We almost never saw him. He was usually sleeping things off during the day, having a massage on the beach and a late breakfast," he said. Fritzl had explained to him that he was vacationing without Rosemarie because she had to look after the children. Hoerer's then girlfriend, Andrea Schmitt, had also gone along to Pattaya. She told journalists: "We traveled down there together but Fritzl very much did his own thing." She also said she had seen him with "carrier bags filled with things for the younger children" and added, "I remember thinking that he was buying a lot of presents for just three children."
The Fritzls' nearest neighbors also confided in journalists that they had their suspicions about the cellar because of the large and heavy shopping bags that Fritzl used to carry down there. One neighbor had even one day bumped into him in an out-of-town hypermarket when he was buying diapers.
The question the Austrians began to ask at that stage of the investigation was: Why had the friends, tenants and neighbors not gone to the police with their suspicions? And one police officer was puzzled why Rosemarie had never tried to get into the cellar. He said to a female reporter: "Ask yourself, if your husband forbids you entry to an area of your home and where he spends entire nights, will you accept that? Is it not in the female psyche to be inquisitive and suspicious? My wife, I know, would have been down there so fast with an axe, first axing the door down and then axing me."
Former captive Natascha Kampusch told the BBC in an interview that Austria's history played a role in the reason why no one had gone to the police with their suspicious. She said: "I think this exists worldwide, but I think it's also a ramification of the Second World War and its connection to education and so on. I think it can happen anywhere (she meant sequestration) and it also exists everywhere, not just in Austria. At the time of National Socialism (she meant Nazism; Hitler invaded and annexed a welcoming Austria in March 1938) the suppression of women was propagated. An authoritarian education was very important."
Amstetten women welcome Hitler (date unknown).
Austrian historians and psychologists also tried to explain the tenants and neighbors' silence by saying that the Austrian mentality is such that an Austrian's home is his castle and that the castle is impenetrable: Only the closest relatives and friends are invited across the threshold; others are met up with in a beer hall or bar. Only young Austrians with no memory of or guilt over the Nazi era's atrocities have a different outlook.
Fritzl on Himself
Having been confronted with DNA evidence that showed that he had fathered his daughter's children, Fritzl confessed to the police. He said he was ashamed but had no idea why he had done what he had done.
"Herr Fritzl admits he raped and imprisoned his daughter, but he does regret what he did. He is emotionally destroyed," his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, told journalists: Fritzl had in those first few days also opened up to his lawyer.
What Fritzl told Mayer was that when he was four years old his father had left his mother whose name was Rosa; the two were cousins and had never legally married. The father, a Nazi supporter, had in 1938, the year before he had disappeared from his lover's and son's life, taken the child to watch Hitler's triumphant arrival in Amstetten and the rapturous welcome the locals had given the Nazi leader. "I grew up in the Nazi times and that meant the need to be controlled and the respect of authority. I suppose I took on some of those old values. It was all subconscious, of course," he told Mayer.
He continued: "I come from a small family (he was an only child) and grew up in a tiny apartment. My father was a waster, he never took responsibility and he was just a loser and always cheated on my mother.
"After my father left, my mother and I never had contact with him again. He did not interest us. Then there was just the two of us."
He described his mother as a "strong woman", a woman who had taught him discipline and control and the "values of hard work." She was "simply the best woman in the world."
Rosemarie he also described as a "wonderful woman." He always wanted a large family and this she provided. "The dream of a big family was with me from when I was very small and Rosemarie seemed the perfect mother to realize that dream. This is not a good reason to marry, but it is also true to say that I loved her and still love her," he said.
The truth was somehow different.
Fritzl grew up in a fairly large apartment in the very house where he still lived on his arrest – Number 40 Ybbsstrasse – and where he had imprisoned his daughter and the children he had fathered by her. He had inherited the house from his mother who had inherited it from a man she had briefly been married to before she had taken up with Fritzl's father.
As for his statement that his mother had been "simply the best woman in the world," six months into the police's investigation of Fritzl's past, the Austrian newspapers Kronen Zeitung and Osterreich reported that he had revealed to a prison psychiatrist that he had kept her locked up in an attic room at Number 40 Ybbsstrasse for perhaps all of 20 years and until she died in 1980. He told Dr. Adelheid Kastner: "She never showed me any love; she beat me and kicked me until I was on the floor and bleeding. I felt so weak and humiliated. I never got a kiss from her or even a hug although I tried very hard to please her. The only thing she did with me was go to church.
"I had a horrible fear of her. She kept insulting me and told me I was a Satan, a criminal, a no-good."
Yet, when speaking to his lawyer, he had confessed that he had been sexually attracted to his mother. "I was strong," he said. "I kept my desires under control." Those who had known her described her as "looking rather like what we think a witch would look like: Small, thin, her shoulders bent, and always dressed in a long, black dress."
As for Fritzl and Rosemarie's relationship, they had stopped having sexual relations some years before he had taken their daughter down into the cellar.
Police investigators would unravel Fritzl's past.
He was indeed not the upright Austrian citizen the adoption authorities had considered him. Three times he had been investigated for arson although he was not charged; fires had broken out at summer guesthouses on lake Mondsee close to Amstetten of which he and Rosemarie were the owners but which she had run on her own while he remained behind in Amstetten, either raping his daughter down in the cellar or visiting the Linz brothel. He was also known as an exhibitionist, but worse than that: He had served time as a rapist. He had raped a 24-year-old nurse, having climbed through a window after her husband, a night worker, had left the couple's apartment. Then, holding a knife to her throat he had threatened to kill her should she not do as he wished. Convicted, he had served less than a year of an 18-month sentence; he was released for good behavior. Police are now investigating other Austrian rape cold cases believing him to have been the rapist.
What awaits Fritzl?
At first, Fritzl has been charged with rape, incest, false imprisonment and enslavement. Now he also faces a murder charge. From evidence given by Elizabeth and the three children who had remained locked up with her in the cellar, police have established that she had begged him to either allow her to take the ill and suffering twin, Michael, to a doctor, or to do so himself. He had refused despite that the baby had turned blue, could not breathe and his little body being grotesquely swollen. After the child had died he had wrapped the body in a blanket and had taken it upstairs. By his own confession he had then burned it in a rubbish burner and had buried the ashes in the garden.
He faces between 20 years and life. Legal experts say that he will probably be confined to a secure mental institution for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, he has settled down well in prison and has not manifested any suicidal tendencies.
On his first night in jail in the town of St. Pölten (52,000 inhabitants), the capital town of Lower Austria and 39 miles (64 kms) from Amstetten, he had supped on the Austrian dish of apricot dumplings. "He ate heartily," one of his warders told journalists. He is still eating heartily. "He loves his food, especially fish served with boiled potatoes and red cabbage," another warder has revealed.
He also loves watching television, especially news and reports about himself. And he has asked his lawyer how Rosemarie was, as well as how "the other children" were bearing up meaning the three children who had remained locked up with Elisabeth. "I always wanted to be a good husband and a good father," he said quietly.
Fritzl has however received several death threats. The prison inmates have also threatened to "top him" – kill him. He is accordingly being kept away from others, showering alone and taking his daily walk in the prison yard on his own.
Asked by Mayer how he would describe himself he replied: "On the face of it, probably as a monster."
His trial is scheduled to commence in March of 2009.
The Victims
Lawyer Christopher Herbst representing Elisabeth, Rosemarie and the two women's children – the upstairs as well as the downstairs ones – revealed on December 30, 2008 that Elisabeth and her children have left the psychiatric unit of the Amstetten-Mauer clinic where they had been held since last April. Rosemarie, also considered a victim, had left a few months earlier; having been given a quick divorce from Fritzl and a new identity, now lives in Linz but no one knows her address. Elisabeth and her children's new identities and whereabouts are also being kept secret.
Soon after the mother and her children had entered the clinic, its Dr. Kepplinger, had told journalists that the two sets of children were adapting to liberty at different tempos. "Things are going too fast for the one set, but too slow for the other. A cloud passing by is exciting to one set of the family, while the others don't even notice it." At that time, should daylight, space and sound or noise have become too much for the "downstairs" set, they were able to retreat to a cargo container the doctor had placed on the clinic's premises.
After a month in an artificially-induced coma, Kerstin was slowly brought back to consciousness. A tearful Elisabeth was at her daughter's bedside the day she finally woke up. Dr. Albert Reiter (he was the one who had treated Kerstin from the day of her admission) described that moment: "She opened her eyes and showed emotion for the first time. We smiled at her and she smiled back." She turned her face to the window and blinked at the sunshine she saw for the very first time in her 19 years. She had to receive daily injections to reactive her immune system and to treat her weakened muscles. Asked what she would like to do, she replied that she would like to "go on a boat ride." She then added that she would also like to attend a Robbie Williams concert; she had seen him signing on television down in the cellar and had become a fan.
Psychiatrists and psychologists who do not wish to be named now say that Lisa, Monika and Alexander had to come to terms with the appalling fact that their granddad was in reality their "dad." Stefan and Felix had to be guided into and prepared for living in the real world. Elisabeth had taught the two, as well as Kerstin, to read and write but all they knew of life was what they'd seen on television. They had therefore never seen a real sunset or sunrise. They had never felt rain on their faces, never driven in a car. Felix, as the police said, was overcome with excitement on his first ever car drive; the one from the house to the hospital. With a few words, but mostly with grunts and gurgles, he had made this excitement clear to his big brother Stefan. He and Stefan had invented a series of "animal-like sounds," as the police would also say, to communicate with one another.
Bad or Mad?
What the Austrians are currently asking themselves is whether Fritzl belongs in a prison or a mental asylum?
Psychiatrists and psychologists will have to answer this question before Fritzl steps into the dock. However, Mayer, Fritzl's lawyer, already has a reply: "In my personal opinion Josef Fritzl's mentally ill and therefore of diminished responsibility. I believe my client does not belong in prison but in a secure psychiatric unit."
Mayer has been receiving letters from people who say that he should be locked up together with his client. "But I am not representing a monster," he argues back. He says he is representing a human being.
Josef Fritzl has also been receiving letters; indeed, he is still receiving letters. The letter writers are mostly women. They want to marry him.
Trial and Verdict
The year 2008 ended and the international media began to ask the Lower Austrian legal authorities when Josef Fritzl's trial will commence. They were told that the trial will open in the St.Pölten courthouse 'in the spring', next they were told that it will begin 'towards March', and then finally, at the end of February, the date Monday, March 16, was given.
The police were meanwhile making arrangements with the Austrian air traffic controllers to enforce a no-fly zone over the courthouse for the duration of the trial expected to last a week.
Said Johann Schadwasser, Police Chief for St. Pölten: "We want to rule out that anything flying overhead might be used to help organize an escape."
He also wanted to keep the zone free for the police's own helicopters should a riot break out outside the courthouse. A riot against Fritzl for the shame he had brought on to Austria, but there was also a possibility that someone might organize some kind of action in support of him. Teacups with his photograph and the words 'Josef der Verführer' – Josef the Seducer – had gone on sale and were fast disappearing from shops. A name cup is a favorite Austrian gift item. One such cup says 'Steffi the Friendly' – Steffi Graff, the former German No 1 ranked female tennis player and wife of the former No 1 ranked male tennis player Andre Agassi.
On Sunday, March 15, Fritzl, prepared for his trial. He had his hair shampooed and cut. A fellow inmate shortened his 'Elvis Presley' cut for something more modern. The prison's budget did not however cover hair implants; Fritzl had implants on several occasions in the past. Therefore, arriving at the courthouse on Monday morning all that the world would see of him later on television was the back of his balding head. His face he hid behind a blue loose-leaf file binder.
Other such blue file binders lay on the desks in front of Judge Andrea Hummer (48), Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser (33), and Forensic Psychiatrist Heidi Kastner (46) – the three women in whose hands rested Fritzl's future.
In those file binders were their case and evidence against him.
He faced the charges of murder by negligence (he refused to get medical help for the dying twin Michael); slavery; multiple rape; false imprisonment; incest and coercion. If found guilty of all, he will never be a free man again.
Fritzl entered the courtroom flanked by ten heavily-armed police in their special dark-blue riot uniforms and black berets. His gray-blue jacket hung loosely; he had not only lost hair in the 11 months of his incarceration, but also weight.
The trial would be held in secret, but the media – over 200 journalists had arrived to cover the trial – were allowed to enter and take photographs; some even pushed microphones into Fritzl's face and tried to get him to reply to their questions. He remained silent.
Burkheiser read the indictment and Fritzl listened, staring straight ahead of him. He seemed oblivious to what he was hearing, yet there was an indication that he was all the same nervous; his long, thin, pale fingers trembled.
After the reading of the indictment, Judge Hummer turned to Fritzl. "Mr. Fritzl, how could you have done this to your own flesh and blood?" she asked.
Fritzl did not reply, and she, turning to face the jury of eight – four of each sex – chosen from the electoral roll, told them: "Look at him with his polite demeanor. He will present to you a caring side, a selfless person, the nice man from next door. But what really troubles me is that he has not shown a single sign of regret."
Austrian law allows an accused to explain what had driven him or her to crime, so Fritzl delivered a brief speech. He blamed his mother for what he had become. "I did not have a good relationship with my mother," he said. She had tried to stop him having friends; she beat him; she never showed him affection. But he could not condemn her all the same. "Her life wasn't the best either. She grew up on a farm and had to work from the age of eight," he said.
Fritzl was pleading guilty to all the charges against him, but not to the most serious, the murder by negligence of the twin Michael.
At this stage of the trial the media were ordered to leave the courtroom.
On Tuesday, the court as well as Fritzl, again in the gray-blue jacket, watched a harrowing 13-hour video testimony Elisabeth Fritzl had given the police. The jury even had to smell items from the dungeon.
That night Fritzl called his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, to the jail. He told him that he had decided to change his plea: He was also going to plead guilty to the murder charge. What had persuaded him to do so he would tell the judge the following morning was, "My daughter's videotaped testimony."
To that he added, "I'm sorry".
No one quite knew what he was sorry for: The trouble he was causing by changing his plea, or for what he had done to his daughter.
What no one also knew was that Elisabeth Fritzl had slipped into the courtroom while the video-tape of her ordeal was being played and that her father had seen her and that for a brief moment their eyes had met. His had apparently filled with tears.
In her testimony Elisabeth had spoken of being 11 years old and finding pornographic magazines under her pillow, put there by her father. She spoke of the 24 years of rape down in the dungeon. "He raped me 3,000 times," she said. She went through each of her eight pregnancies – the first pregnancy when she was 20 ended in a miscarriage – and the death of the twin Michael.
The jurors were only to render their verdict on Friday, but Fritzl, having changed his plea, the verdict was given on Thursday. The jury had needed only three hours to decide his fate: Guilty on all charges.
The Austrian Ogre was to spend the rest of his life in a secure psychiatric institution. He did not even bat an eyelid.
Fritzl immediately began serving his sentence in the secure hospital unit of Mittersteig Prison in Vienna. Two-thirds of the prison's 90 inmates are sex offenders undergoing intensive therapy. Fritzl will also undergo therapy and then, if ever he is to be diagnosed as almost free from the demons that have ruled just about all of his 74 years, he will be transferred to another prison. It is thought that this will be Göllersdorff Prison in the town of the same name: there, all his fellow inmates will be criminally insane.
One of Göllersdorff's inmates is the 19-year-old Robert Ackermann who is serving a life-sentence for the murder of a 48-year-old homeless man whose flesh he had then eaten.
Ackerman dreams of being diagnosed 'normal' and fit to resume life outside prison; he wants to become a surgeon.
As for Josef Fritzl, his lawyer said that his client does not mind in what prison he is to serve his sentence. Fritzl only wants it not to be too far from 'home'.
"He does not mind where he goes. It's not like it's a hotel but he would like a prison close to home," said Mayer.
Fritzl is hoping his family will visit him.
What now for Elisabeth Fritzl?
Elisabeth, her children and her mother Rosemarie have been given new identities. They live in Linz; Elisabeth and her children live together, but Rosemarie, now divorced from Josef Fritzl, lives in a small apartment on her own. The Austrian media have reported that Rosemarie visits her daughter and grand-children, but that the two women's relationship is strained. They greet each other with a handshake but never with a kiss. Rosemarie also does not like that Lisa, Monica and Alexander - the three children she had brought up believing that her 'wayward' daughter had abandoned them – now call her grandmother where they had previously called her mutter – mother.
Moving on ... 16 months later … summer 2009
A veil of secrecy has descended over the town of Perg, 22 miles from Amstetten. According to Austrian media reports, it is in this town where Elisabeth Fritzl now lives with her children, or with some of them; Kerstin and Stefan, the oldest ones, are still undergoing treatment in an undisclosed clinic.
Only a little over 7,000 people live in Perg, and whether Elisabeth is one of them, the others are not saying, but it is not a secret that she and her children are not the only ones living in a house the Austrian state has made available to her. With them lives a man. He is 28 years old and his identity is being protected too so that the media knows him only as Thomas W. He used to be Elisabeth’s bodyguard, assigned to protect her in December 2008 when she had recovered sufficiently to leave the psychiatric unit at the Amstetten hospital. He is now her lover; the fact that he is 14 years her junior, did not stop the two from falling in love.
One of her psychiatrists, pleased that she has been able to put the ordeal of having been raped 3,000 times by her father over 24 years, behind her, told journalists: “Everyone saw from the beginning how secure she felt with him.”
The relationship, he said, has given Elisabeth “renewed strength.”
Her teeth have been repaired; her gray hair has been colored to the blond of the day when her father lured her down to the cellar when she was only 18, and she’s learning to drive. Her therapy was stopped in May of 2009; diagnosed, recovered, she no longer needed it.
“This is vivid proof of the power of love being the strongest force in the world,” said the psychiatrist.
Is she writing a book about her ordeal?
According to the psychiatrist, she is not.
He said: “Right now all that this young woman wants is for the world to help her forget her ordeal, and the only way the world can do so, is to forget that she exists. To allow her to live her new life in total anonymity. To be happy.”
Josef Fritzl is certainly not happy.
As was scheduled when he was sentenced, in July of 2009, he was moved from Vienna’s Mittersteig Prison to Stein Prison near the town of Krems on the Danube River.
Christian Timm of the prison’s director’s board told the Austrian English-language newspaper Austrian Times that Fritzl “seems healthy” and that he was “not suicidal.”
Fritzl does however spend long hours staring at the walls of his cell. Such inertia some members of his prison’s medical staff have now said is “the first signs of senile dementia.”
He also spends time filling the pages of exercise books. He is, as he has said, writing a memoir. He will, he said, hand over to Elisabeth and “their” children whatever royalties the book will earn.
He might have forgotten that a judicial order forbids him to write about the case or to accept any kind of remuneration from a publisher, a TV network or a film company for his story.
He will also not be given whatever proceeds there will be from the sale of his various properties. The money will be used to pay for the medical care Elisabeth, her children and her mother had received. The Austrian state’s health authority has told his lawyers that it already has a one million Euro ($1.5 million) bill they want him to settle.
He also has other debts – loans from banks and building societies – which he must repay.
The “dungeon” house, Number 40 Ybbstrasse, is expected to be sold to a property developer for about one million Euros, while his other properties could fetch another million and a half.
To the chagrin of the people of Amstetten, the Ybbstrasse house has become a tourist attraction.
One tourist, Annette Walker, 43, from England, has even claimed to have seen the face of a ghost baby at one of the windows.
She told the Austrian Times, which published a photo that her young son had taken of the baby ghost, that on a visit to her family in the area, she had felt drawn to the house.
She said: “I had to go to the house and see it. I walked from the train station and when I reached Ybbstrasse my heart started pounding and my legs turned to jelly.”
The photo was taken just as the curtain of a shut window suddenly moved to one side.
The house stands abandoned and locked.
All are hoping that the property developer will demolish it, and do so without delay.One tourist, Annette Walker, 43, from England, has even claimed to have seen the face of a ghost baby at one of the windows.
She told the Austrian Times, which published a photo that her young son had taken of the baby ghost, that on a visit to her family in the area, she had felt drawn to the house.
She said: “I had to go to the house and see it. I walked from the train station and when I reached Ybbstrasse my heart started pounding and my legs turned to jelly.”
The photo was taken just as the curtain of a shut window suddenly moved to one side.
The house stands abandoned and locked.
All are hoping that the property developer will demolish it, and do so without delay.
- by Marilyn Z. Tomlins
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