Wall of silence hid Josef Fritzl's crimes
By Bojan Pancevski in Amstetten and Tony Paterson in Berlin
Sunday Telegraph
Last updated: 3:27 AM BST 04/05/2008
Evidence of how a wall of silence hid the crimes of Josef Fritzl mounted
on
Saturday as it was revealed that his abuse of his daughter Elisabeth as a
teenager was virtually an open secret among people who knew the family.
Former lodgers at the family house and school friends of Elisabeth have
admitted that they heard she was being ***ually abused and mistreated, yet
none contacted police or social services either before or after she
disappeared.
Joseph Leitner, a former lodger, said that shortly after he moved in, he
learnt through a friend that she had been repeatedly raped by her father.
"I had a good friend from school who was really close to Elisabeth," said
Mr
Leitner, who lived at the house in the small and close-knit Austrian town
of
Amstetten between 1990 and 1994.
"I would say they were best friends - they spent a lot of time together.
She
confided in me, and told me what a monster Josef was - and what he had
done
to Elisabeth.
"But I decided I did not want to get involved. I did not want to get
kicked
out of the flat, I did not want to lose it. I kept myself to myself."
Elisabeth spent 24 years trapped in the cellar of her family home, bearing
seven children through her father's forced ***ual attentions.
The fact that Fritzl, now 73, had convictions for rape, attempted rape and
indecent exposure was well known in the local community among those who
had
lived there for some time - but this was not acted on when police were
informed of Elisabeth's disappearance after she vanished in 1984.
Austrian officialdom appears to have accepted Fritzl's explanation that
Elisabeth, now 42, had run off to join a cult.
A school friend of Elisabeth, whose family lodged in the Fritzl household,
claimed that shortly before she vanished Elisabeth had said she planned to
run away for good to escape her father.
"We were in the same class and we were friends," said Alfred Dubanovsky,
42.
"After she vanished we talked about it, and we knew she had run off
before.
"We thought she had run off again because she had told someone in our
group
that she had had enough, couldn't stand it any more at home and that her
father had beat her, and had hurt her. She said she was scared of him."
Mr Dubanovsky broke down in tears as he admitted that he saw Fritzl taking
food into the cellar by wheelbarrow after Elisabeth's disappearance.
"At the time, he thought nothing of it. He said that even before her
captivity Elisabeth had spent most of her time indoors.
"She was a great girl, but very shy and pretty nervous," he said.
"You needed to know her before she would trust you. But we got on really
well, we had even danced together a couple of times. We all used to go the
Belami disco on her road, but she was rarely allowed out to see us."
Mr Leitner, a waiter who now lives in Neustadt near Amstetten, declined to
name the friend of his in whom Elisabeth had confided about the abuse.
He said that the pair briefly ran away together to Vienna until Fritzl
brought Elisabeth back home.
"When Elisabeth vanished, my friend thought she had run off again," he
said.
"She never said anything because she was scared. It wasn't only Elisabeth
that was terrified of Fritzl, my friend was as well."
He also cast doubt on police insistence that Fritzl's wife, Rosemarie, 68,
was entirely unaware of what was going on.
The pair, he pointed out, routinely holidayed separately - an arrangement
that would have meant there was someone at home to look after the
prisoners.
"I am almost certain that she was [aware]," he said. "They always went on
separate holidays. When she came back, he flew off to Thailand for a few
weeks.
"Somebody had to do it otherwise they would have starved to death."
Police - who have 300 officers working on the case - are planning to track
down and interview all 100 tenants who lived in the various flats that
Fritzl owned.
It is expected that many others may have harboured similar suspicions,
although it appears that at no point was the alarm raised.
On Saturday, it was also claimed that for the first nine years following
her
imprisonment in 1984, Elisabeth was kept in only one basement room beneath
the house.
Pictures of the complex released so far show an extended basement thought
to
contain at least four rooms, but Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, citing
sources close to the investigation, said the extensions were not carried
out
until 1993, and that until then Elisabeth was confined to a single
basement
chamber within what was originally built as a nuclear bunker.
The magazine said it meant that the three children born during those first
nine years must have witnessed Fritzl raping their mother at close
quarters.
Story from Telegraph News:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1924847/Austria-Wal
l-of-silence-hid-Josef-Fritzl%27s-***-crimes.html
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