May 20, 2008
(updated 6/25/08)
 |
|
Josef Fritzl,
photographed just after
his arrest, locked his 18-year-old daughter in his
cellar for 24 years. |
The Austrian Ogre:
The Case That Shocked the World
by
Marilyn Z. Tomlins
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 (65kms) from Linz and 81 miles
(130kms) from Vienna and just fewer than 23,000 people live there. The town,
which was first mentioned in writing in 995, is on the Ybbs River, a
contributory 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 about the town's
concentration camp past. He certainly was secretive about his own life. On a
month-long holiday in Pattaya, Thailand, with a friend of long-standing, he
confessed to having "a woman on the side" but only because he had been caught
buying skimpy woman's underwear and a dress. The friend, Paul Hoerer, 69, talkinging 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 two-story house. Rosemarie was, according to Chief
Inspector Franz Pölzer, head of criminal investigations for Lower Austria,
"discouraged" to go down to the cellar. Said Hoerer: "Fritzl was master of the
house and a bit of a dictator." So, Rosemarie, having been "discouraged," stayed
away from the cellar. Similarly, Fritzl had forbidden others, such as his
tenants, to approach the cellar. The Fritzl house was large and some rooms were
let to tenants. One tenant, Alfred Dubanovksy, 42, a gas station attendant in Amstetten, who had lived in the house
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. An elderly man
arrived at the hospital in Amstetten. He had brought in an emaciated young girl.
He told doctors and nurses the girl was his granddaughter; her mother, his
daughter, had abandoned her on his doorstep. The girl was obviously a victim of
gross neglect; she was incoherent and confused and her teeth were black rotting
stumps. The man left without leaving his name. The hospital summoned the police.
The police in turn issued an appeal for the mother to come forward: The hospital
desperately needed to know the girl's medical history. By then the doctors had
put the girl into an induced coma. Days passed while the girl's condition
deteriorated; she suffered from multiple organ failure. Then, an anonymous
caller tipped off the police that a man named Josef Fritzl was holding a woman,
perhaps the girl's mother, captive in the cellar of his house. (C.I. Pölzer refused
to reveal the caller's identity. He told journalists: "Knowing about a crime is not the same
as being an accomplice.")
On Sunday, April 26, the police went to the Fritzl house.
The house had a cellar, yes, but there was no way the police could force the
door; weighed afterwards, it hit the scale at 660 pounds (300kg). It was a
reinforced door, the kind once sold to businesses and to home owners in Europe
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.
|
 |
|
The
entryway to Fritzl's cellar "dungeon". |
Both the Fritzls were taken to the local station house and
questioned. Rosemarie convinced C.I. Pölzer that she'd never stepped foot in
their house's cellar and did not know what her husband had down there. She was
taken to a "safe house" to keep her out of the hands of journalists who had by
then got hold of the story. Fritzl remained in custody but he wouldn't say a word, not about the
cellar and not about the girl in hospital. The police by then no longer talked
of a "cellar" but of a "dungeon." The word instantly awakened memories of
Natascha Kampusch, also Austrian, who had been held captive by one Wolfgang
Priklopil (44 at the time) in a dungeon at his house for eight years and until
August 2006 when she, aged 18, succeeded in getting away. Also of Belgian serial
rapist and killer, Marc Dutroux, who had also imprisoned his victims in a
dungeon under his house.
Late that night, the police finally got the lock's
combination out of Fritzl. They were stunned at what they found in his cellar;
an old woman with a deeply-lined face and scraggy gray hair. With her were two
very pale and emaciated boys, one a teenager.
The woman, as she told police, was Fritzl's 42-year-old
daughter, Elisabeth. The boys were her children: Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5. She
told the police that for 24 years her father had kept her prisoner in the
cellar. Stefan and Felix had been held prisoner there too since their births.
Their father was her father: Josef Fritzl. "I have children," confessed C.I.
Pölzer to journalists later, "therefore such a discovery was not easy to deal
with."
Apart from Stefan and Felix, the girl in hospital –
Kerstin, 19 years old – was hers too. They had been conceived by the rape of her by her father.
So had another four children by her father: Lisa, 16, Monika, 14, and Alexander, 12.
Alexander's twin, also a boy, had died of breathing problems soon after birth.
Fritzl had burnt the body. Lisa, Monika and Alexander lived upstairs in the
house with Fritzl and Rosemarie. Elisabeth and the five children were taken to hospital
for medical checks and psychiatric supervision; Fritzl was locked in a cell at the local station house.
Rosemarie remained at the "safe house"; the police had many questions to ask her.
Investigation
While the hotels and guesthouses of Amstetten and the
neighboring towns filled up with journalists arriving from all over the world,
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 1976.
Elisabeth, one of seven children, was 11 years old then.
"I remember that Elisabeth as a child 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 the other children. He used to beat her a lot more than
them. She used to get a slap for every small thing," Hoerer told journalists.
"Elisabeth ran away from that house as a girl, police
searched for her, brought her back and delivered her back into the violent
embrace of her father," Hedwig Woelfl, the director of a child protection centre
in turn told journalists.
In 1984, Elisabeth, then 19, ran away again. Or this was
what Fritzl had told Rosemarie. He had showed Rosemarie a letter he had found
written by Elisabeth. She was off to join a sect, she had written. They should
not try to find her.
Fritzl told 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"
has he called him, had been raping Elisabeth since she was 11 years old; in
other words for the previous eight years while Hoerer had been enjoying
"Sepp's" company, "Sepp" had been raping Elisabeth.
Elisabeth had not however joined a sect. Her father had
locked her up in the cellar so that he could rape her whenever he wished. As she
told the police, he had put her out with ether, handcuffed her and then he had
dragged her down into the cellar. He had in the previous six years been getting
the cellar ready for its prisoner. Hammering and banging away, and never saying
what he was doing, he had installed electricity, put in a small kitchen,
bathroom and toilet and furnished the cellar too. Often he ordered Elisabeth to help him with the work.
 |
| The tiny cellar
bathroom Fritzl installed for his captives. |
Contrary to 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 the 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."
Elisabeth, once locked in the cellar, was not to see
daylight again for almost half a century. In that time, often attached by leash to the bedpost
to make escape impossible, she would fall pregnant
six times. Each time she would give birth without any medical assistance and
when Alexander's twin had been unable to breathe she had struggled on her own
for three days to keep him alive. Fritzl had always stayed away from the cellar
for the last days of her pregnancies and the confinements and so he had done
again for the twins' birth. Then, returning and finding that there was a dead
baby in the cellar, he had taken the body upstairs and had burnt it in an
incinerator in the garden.
Alexander, the dead twin's brother, he had taken upstairs.
There Alexander joined his two sisters, Lisa and Monika, 4 and 2 respectively
then. Alexander, he told Rosemarie, he had found on the doorstep, abandoned by
their terrible daughter, Elisabeth. He had already told Rosemarie this story
when he had brought Lisa and Monika up from the cellar. He was to explain to the
police why he had not left these three with their mother and siblings in the
cellar. "They were sickly and cried too much in the cellar for my liking."
Fritzl and Rosemarie legally adopted Lisa, Monika and
Alexander. The Amstetten adoption authorities fine-combed the couple's lives and
life-style but found nothing to make them unsuitable as adoptive parents. Fritzl
was by all appearance a perfectly law-abiding citizen. He had even requested
permission from the local building board for the alterations to the cellar and
had shown inspectors around what he told them would be a nuclear fallout
shelter. Later, Lisa, Monika and Alexander were enrolled at the local school and
on each of the 21 visits welfare officials had made to the Fritzls' house, they
had reported that the three were being well looked after and were happy
children, and the the Fritzls were "very loving with their children."
Meanwhile, Fritzl, having forbidden Rosemarie and the
couple's various tenants to go anywhere near the cellar, went down there almost
every day. He even spent entire nights down there, raping Elisabeth in front of the children.
Upstairs, Rosemarie and the tenants slept soundly.
Two tenants though did suspect that all was not quite right in the cellar.
Dubanovksy 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 gathering journalists, but to the world. It was a video and
he published it on the Web. Having accompanied Fritzl and Hoerer on the Thailand
holiday 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 holidaying 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 children; I remember thinking that he was buying a
lot of presents for just three children."
The Fritzls' nearest neighbors also confessed that they had had their suspicions
about the cellar. They recalled having heard banging and scratching noises come
from the depths of the house – the cellar - at night.
Meanwhile, Fritzl had become a suspect in an unsolved sex murder. In 1986, two
years after Elisabeth had begun her captivity, a 17-year-old girl, Martina Posch,
had been raped and beaten to death. Her body was found on the shore of Lake
Mondsee close to Amstetten 10 days after she had disappeared. Fritzl and
Rosemarie were at that time the owners of a guesthouse on the other side of the
lake. The police have now reopened this "cold" case.
Police records also showed that Fritzl had two criminal convictions and that he
was on record as an exhibitionist. Both convictions dated from the 1960s. One
was for insurance fraud when a fire had broken out at another guesthouse owned
by him and his wife. The other was for the rape of a young nurse in 1967: he had
entered the nurse's apartment by forcing open a window. He had served 18 months
in jail. Rosemary had welcomed him back home afterwards and they had three more
children to add to the four they already had together. This meant that Fritzl
had 14 children in all: Seven with Rosemarie and seven with Elisabeth.
(Elisabeth's six siblings were described as "healthy and normal": Fritz had not
sexually molested them.)
The question the Austrians were asking at that stage of the investigation was:
Why had the tenants and the neighbors not gone to the police with their
suspicions?
Former captive Natascha Kampusch told the BBC in an interview that Austria's
history plays a role in the reason why no one had. 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
means sequestration) and it also exists everywhere, not just in Austria. At the
time of National Socialism (she's talking about 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 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.
The Victims
At first, Elisabeth and her children, both the "upstairs" and "downstairs"
children, as the German media had begun to call them, underwent medical
examinations at the local Amstetten general hospital. The "upstairs" children
were in good health. The "downstairs" ones were found to suffer from Vitamin D
deficiency because of lack of sunshine. Stefan and Felix also had bone
deformation due to lack of exercise and having had to stoop because of the
cellar's low ceiling.
Next, Elisabeth and her children were transferred to the Amstetten-Mauer
psychiatric clinic. Rosemarie waited for them at the clinic. She herself was a
patient: She needed treatment to overcome the psychological shock of having
learned what she had had under her feet for the past 24 years. Elisabeth, seeing
her mother for the first time, threw herself into the woman's arms; both were in
tears. Onlookers described the daughter looking older than the mother.
Clinic director Dr. Berthold Kepplinger's first task was to assess the
psychological effect the captivity had on the victims; Rosemarie was regarded as
a "victim" too. 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
taught the two, as well as Kerstin, to read and write but all they knew of life
was what they'd seen on television: Fritzl, yes, had installed a television in
the cellar. The two, therefore, had never seen the sun rise or set, 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; from the house to
hospital. With grunts and gurgles he had made this excitement clear to his big
brother; he and Stefan invented a series of "animal-like sounds," as the police
would also say, to communicate with one another.
According to Dr. Kepplinger, 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."
Should daylight, space and sound or noise become too much for the "downstairs"
set, they would be able to retreat to a cargo container the doctor had placed on
the clinic's premises.
After a month in a coma, Kerstin's physician, Dr. Albert Reiter (he had treated
her from the day of her admission when she was virtually moribund) decided to
end her induced coma. He described her recovery as "surprising." He also spoke
of the emotion everyone, including Kerstin, felt when she had first "woken up".
Said he: "She opened her eyes and showed emotion for the first time. We smiled
at her and she smiled back." Turning her face to the window, she saw natural
daylight for the first time in her 19 years. Tearfully, her mother and siblings
gathered at her bedside. At the time of writing (June 2008) she's still in
hospital undergoing treatment for muscle weakness and to receive daily
injections to revive her immune system. A fan of English singer, Robbie
Williams, she listens to his songs all day long: She wants to, she said, attend
a future concert of his. She also wants to "go on a boat ride." Unlike Stefan
and Felix, she has no communication abnormality and reads and writes well.
What Fritzl Has To Say For Himself
At first Fritzl denied having done anything illegal or even wrong. He had, he
told the police, kept Elisabeth confined to the family home for her own
protection; she was a drug addict. He denied the children were his. Confronted
with DNA evidence that showed that he had fathered the children, he confessed.
He said he was ashamed and 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.
Once having admitted to the police that he had imprisoned Elisabeth, had raped
her and had fathered her seven children, one of which had died within days of
birth, he opened up to Mayer. "In my personal opinion, Josef Fritzl is mentally
ill and therefore of diminished responsibility. I believe my client does not
belong in prison but in a secure psychiatric unit. I am getting letters saying I
should be locked up together with Fritzl, but I am not representing a monster; I
am representing a human being," said Mayer.
Fritzl blames Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler for what he had done. In 1938,
Hitler had been given a rapturous welcome in Amstetten. Fritzl was only 3 years
old, but, as he told Mayer: "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 these
old values. It was all subconscious, of course."
His confession to Mayer and the police continued:
"I come from a small family 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."
When Fritzl was 4 years old, his mother, Rosa, threw her husband out of the
house.
"After that my mother and I had no contact with this man, he did not interest
us. Then there was just the two of us," he said.
He described his mother as a "strong woman." a woman who taught him discipline
and control and the "values of hard work": She was simply "the best woman in the
world."
"I was strong," he said, "I kept my desires under control." The desires were to
have sex with his mother.
Then, as he said, he started to date other women. He chose Rosemarie as his wife
because he wanted a large family and she, shy and quiet, seemed "perfect to be
mother for a large family."
But he also loved her.
"Rosemarie is also a wonderful woman. 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 I still love her," he said.
What Happens Next?
The police still need to find out from those in Fritzl's entourage whether they
had really not known what was going on in the cellar. "Ask yourself," said one
police officer, who prefers to remain anonymous, to a female reporter, "if your
husband forbids you entry to an area of your home and where he even 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."
Questions that need answers are: Had Rosemarie not seen her husband go
downstairs with a wheelbarrow laden with provisions; did she not ever see him
emerging from the cellar with bags of garbage and if she did, did she not go and
scratch in the bin to see what he had brought up from the cellar and was
throwing away. Did she not wonder why he was always going to the supermarket and
taking his purchases straight down to the cellar?
 |
| A narrow corridor in
the cellar dungeon. |
Others questions are: When Fritzl was in Thailand for a month's holiday, who
had fed the captives? Could they have lived on tinned food for a month? There
was a fridge in the cellar but it was not big enough to store a month's supply
of perishable food. And what about noise? Elisabeth had given birth seven times
and this is not something a woman does quietly. Babies also cry; small children
run around and fall over and cry; they can often scream loudly in a tantrum, and
they can laugh very loudly. Did the house's inhabitants not ever hear a child
cry? What about the television? It was apparently on around the clock because
down in that cellar there was no night, just always one long boring day.
In Austria, the maximum sentence for rape, incest and abduction, even for
murder, is 15 years. Therefore, Fritzl faces only 15 years behind bars. His
compatriots say this is ridiculous; he should be put away for the rest of his
life. He probably will be because a 15-year prison term will take him through to
the age of 88.
The case has also generated a clamor across Europe with Europeans saying that
the continent's penal systems are too lenient and should be remodeled on that of
the United States. In the United States they say Fritzl would get life, and in
some U.S. states it would be capital punishment.
Life in Jail
On Josef Fritzl's first night in jail in St. Pölten, capital town of Lower
Austria, he supped on the Austrian dish of apricot dumplings. "He is a healthy
eater," a prison warden told journalists. He loves fish with boiled potatoes and
red cabbage.
He also loves watching television, especially news and reports about himself.
He has received several death threats. The prison inmates have also threatened
to "top him" – kill him. He is therefore being kept away from other prisoners:
He showers alone and takes his daily walk in the prison yard also on his own. He
has not manifested any suicidal tendencies. He has asked his lawyer how
Rosemarie and "the children" were bearing up. "I always wanted to be a good
husband and a good father," he said.
Asked by Mayer how he would describe himself, he replied: "On the face of it,
probably as a monster."
