Independent.co.uk
The Family Man of Amstetten: Double life of a pillar of Austrian society
How did the perpetrator of one of modern Europe's most horrific crimes
convince his neighbours he was a respectable man? By David Randall
Independent on Sunday
Sunday, 4 May 2008
He was a very good family man, was Josef Fritzl. In his home town of
Amstetten just eight days ago, they'd have been adamant about that. Hadn't
he brought his seven children up to be good boys and girls? Always so
polite; just like their father. And when that silly daughter of his ran
off
to join this religious cult, had he bothered people with lots of questions
about who she'd been seen with recently? No. Even when the little hussy
had
three children and just dumped them on his doorstep, did he complain? No.
He
just took them in and raised them as if they were his own. And he was
always
so smart. He had pride, did Fritzl. He really was a very good family man.
And then, everything began to change. On Saturday 19 April, a girl of 19
had
been taken seriously ill at 40 Ybbstrasse. As luck would have it, this was
Josef Fritzl's house. He found her, and called an ambulance. She was taken
to Amstetten hospital, where doctors saw she was very pale and bleeding
from
her tongue. Then, an hour after her admission, Fritzl arrived and saw Dr
Albert Reiter. He told him that the girl's mother, his daughter Elisabeth,
was unable and unwilling to look after her and had dumped her at his
house.
She had, he said, left a note. This said that the girl, Kerstin, had
suffered headaches, taken an aspirin, and then begun suffering
convulsions,
hence the bleeding tongue. Then Fritzl went away. After all, he had his
own
family to look after.
The girl got worse. The fits continued, she lapsed in and out of
consciousness, and her immune system did not seem to be working. Doctors
issued an appeal for her mother to come forward and tell the medical
history
of this mysterious patient, but there was no response. A week went by.
Kerstin deteriorated. By now she was on a ventilator, and in a medically
induced coma, with her kidneys functioning artificially. But still no
mother
came.
Then, last Saturday, 26 April, Elisabeth Fritzl appeared on the streets of
Amstetten for the first time since her disappearance. She was with her
father and heading towards the hospital. When they reached the grounds,
the
police, tipped off that they were on their way, detained them. So poor was
Kerstin's condition (she had lost nearly all her teeth, was excessively
pale
and severely malnourished) that they wanted to question her mother with a
view to bringing charges of child neglect.
They took her to a room and began to talk. Right from the start, there was
something very odd about her. Apparently only 42, she looked, with her
grey
hair and almost white complexion, like an institutionalised woman in her
sixties. She was nervous, too, and suddenly asked if they could guarantee
she and her children would never again have to see Fritzl, this helpful,
polite man who had brought his daughter's note and then his daughter to
the
hospital. And then she told them a story that even now, eight days after
its
telling, beggars belief.
Elisabeth had not run away to join a cult. Instead, her father had been
beating her since she was old enough to walk and sexually assaulting her
since she was 11. When she was 18, he had drugged her, dragged her to a
concealed cellar in his house, raped her, and gone on doing so for the
next
24 years. For nearly a quarter of a century, she and three of the seven
children that were the result of those rapes, had lived in a windowless
netherworld. The children had never seen the outside world or breathed its
air. They knew neither freedom, nor the rest of society. And the only
person
they had seen was their jailer, the man who would alternately play with
them
and terrorise them, who told them if they tried to escape they would be
gassed in their chamber, who raped their mother and yet, with his boxes of
groceries and meals shoved through a hatch, was their only lifeline: the
good family man of Amstetten.
The history of Josef Fritzl begins on 9 April 1935 with his birth in the
town he was to make notorious. Most of his first 10 years were spent under
the Third Reich, and a Franz Fritzl is listed on Amstetten's war memorial,
but the town council refused last week to say if this was Josef's father.
Fully five days after Fritzl was arrested, Colonel Franz Polzer, the chief
investigator for the Austrian police, said: "I don't even know who his
parents were." That lack of knowledge, even a seeming reluctance to
thoroughly seek it, is a theme that echoes and echoes through the Josef
Fritzl story.
The fleeting certainty in his biography begins when he finished his
schooling. First, he studied electrical engineering at a polytechnic
school,
then took a job with steel company, Voest. It was in his early days there,
in 1956, when he was 21, that he married 17-year-old Rosemarie and started
a
family of seven children with her. From that point, the facts of his
business life become patchy. From 1969 to 1971, he worked for Zehetner, a
construction materials firm in Amstetten, where he was described as "an
intelligent worker and a good technician".
After that he was a travelling salesman for a German company, and, in
1973,
he and his wife bought an inn and summer campground in the mountains,
which
they ran until 1996. And at some point the man who already owned a large
greying townhouse in Amstetten (and which he eventually filled with eight
tenants) got into property, buying further houses.
All the while, his family was growing. Rosemarie was born in 1961, then
Ulrike, Doris, Harald, Elisabeth in 1966, and twins Josef Jnr and Gabriele
in 1971. Outwardly, all was well. Josef Fritzl was the smartly dressed
engineer who drove a Mercedes and had such well-behaved children. But now
we
know that even before he dragged his daughter off to spawn the
subterranean
brood, he was showing signs of a freakish criminality. Its details are
clouded by a seeming lack of official curiosity.
There is, for instance, his reported conviction for rape: either of a
woman
in Linz in 1967, or, around the same time, of a nurse in her flat.
Officials
earlier said they knew of no record of such a conviction, and that one of
such age would have been expunged long ago by laws designed to
rehabilitate
criminals but which are also part of an informal masonry that has sped
"good
chaps" with murky pasts back into respectability.
But, by Wednesday, a woman told reporters: "I was raped by Fritzl. When I
saw his picture yesterday, I knew, yes, that is him." Her attacker broke
into her home, held a knife to her throat, and raped her in her own bed.
On
Friday, officials said a rape file had been found and is being studied.
Linz
police, it now turns out, also recorded him as a suspect in two other sex
attacks, and in 1974 and 1982 he was investigated for arson. There is also
the unsolved matter of Martina Posch, whose body was found in 1986 in a
lake
near the inn the Fritzls owned. Martina, 17, who had been raped, bore a
striking resemblance to Elisabeth.
Inside the home, too, the domestic martinet not an unknown character in
provincial Austria among men of that age was something altogether more
ugly. In 1977, when Elisabeth was 11, he began to sexually assault her.
The
girl, already an outsider at school, became more withdrawn. Her best
friend
then, Christa Woldrich, said Elisabeth always had to be home half an hour
after school finished, and added: "I was never allowed to visit her. The
only explanation she ever gave was that her father was very strict. I did
not see him, but he was always there between us because of his influence
over her, like an invisible presence you could always feel."
A year after the molesting of Elisabeth began, Josef Fritzl applied for
planning permission to turn his basement into a nuclear shelter, as many
did
in those Cold War years. He worked on it over the next five years,
installing a steel door (it is thought, with some help, for it weighed
661lbs), and officials came and approved what he was doing in 1983. They
even gave him state funds towards its construction. Why not? After all,
ever
the good family man, he was only building a shelter for his wife and
children.
But it is possible that he was, all along, planning the newly secured
quarters as Elisabeth's underworld prison. For the victim of his assaults
was now showing a wilful desire to break free. Twice as a teenager she ran
away. Twice she was found and brought her back. Twice no one inquired if
there were some reason for her wanting to get away from home so badly. As
with Fritzl's criminal record, best, perhaps, not to ask.
But whenever the scheme to capture Elisabeth was first conceived, in 1984
he
put it into effect. One night in August, he sedated his 18-year-old
daughter, and hauled her down to his basement and over to a cupboard. He
moved this to reveal a 3ft-high door, took her and himself through it, and
so into the cramped and primitive rooms that were to be her sole
environment
for the next 24 years. He raped her, and then manacled her to an iron
pipe,
returning every so often to feed her and repeat the rape. Up above her
head,
her mother Rosemarie reported her missing, and fretted and worried about
what could have become of her until Josef, good old reliable Josef, told
her the girl had run off to join a religious cult. After all, he told
everyone, had she not run away before?
For the next five years, Elisabeth lived here alone, her entire universe
consisting, at its largest, of 60sq yards, defined by 5ft 6in-high
ceilings
and guarded by an electronically operated steel door. She was as trapped
as
an insect in a jar. No windows, no books, no sun, fresh air or rain; just
a
few bare rooms in a bunker and a bed upon which to be raped.
Then, in 1988, she fell pregnant. The world her father had built for her
not
only lacked pity, it lacked doctors. And so, the following year, her first
child was delivered in her dungeon by the man who was her father, her
captor
and her rapist. It was a girl and she called her Kerstin.
Gradually, over the years, this grotesquely conceived family expanded:
Stefan in 1990, Lisa in 1992, Monika in 1994, Alex in 1996 (he had a twin
who, dead at three days, was thrown by Fritzl into the cellar
incinerator),
and then Felix in 2002. Three of them, Lisa, Monika and Alex the "cry
babies" who he feared might attract attention with their mewling were
taken upstairs and "found" by Fritzl, some with notes saying their mother
could not deal with them. And the good family man agreed to adopt one and
foster the other two.
Over the next dozen or so years, childcare officials visited the Fritzls
at
least 21 times, and, despite his criminal record, his daughter running
away
twice, his incessant absence when they called, and the mysterious
regularity
with which babies appeared on his doorstep, they consented to the legal
niceties on the grounds that Josef and Rosemarie were "family". Indeed
they
were. His own flesh and blood, in every appalling sense.
The other three children remained underground with Elisabeth. In time,
Josef
extended their dungeon, and spent hours down there at a time, sometimes
whole nights, playing with or terrorising the children, chatting to, or
raping, their mother. And when he wasn't there, he was buying and selling
property, acting the paterfamilias, giving his wife the rough end of his
tongue in public ("We don't have sex any more; she's too fat"), and going
twice on lengthy holidays to Thailand, venue of choice for perspiring men
who no longer have sex with their wives. Police were not impressed with
such
information. "His holidays," said Colonel Polzer, "are none of our
concern."
A companion on the Thai jaunts was "Paul H", one of the few friends who
visited Fritzl in his home, most recently in 2005. "The children were all
scared stiff in the presence of their dad," he told Germany's Bild, "They
were never allowed downstairs into the cellar, but we never thought
anything
of it." Fritzl's tenants were even warned that if they ever strayed near
the
cellar, or took photographs of it, they would be summarily evicted. In
another place such an exclusion zone would have invited curiosity. But not
here.
And, occasionally, a letter would arrive from what the rest of the family
assumed was their errant daughter and sister, Elisabeth. "Do not search
for
me," began one, "it would be pointless and would only increase my and my
children's suffering. Too many children and an education are not wanted
there." Even without hindsight, it is odd that Elisabeth's mother, her
adult
sisters or brother seem never once to have mounted an effort to find the
author of this distressing note.
The years in the dungeon so easily summarised in a paragraph, so
dreadful
endured in dank reality went on in their seasonless way. In 1999,
Kerstin
was 10; three years later she was a teenager with a new baby brother, and
the following year Stefan reached 13. Did he, one wonders, even know how
old
he was? For this was a life measured not by days and nights, routines and
holidays, but only by the rotting of another tooth, the greying of their
mother. Upstairs, time was measured. In 2006, Amstetten honoured the
Fritzls
for reaching their golden wedding. Such a good family man, Josef.
But his secret family was beginning to hang heavy on Josef Fritzl. Around
Christmas 2007, he got his daughter to write another letter. It seems that
Fritzl, bored by the daily chores the shopping, the rubbish burning
and
no longer beguiled by a daughter who now resembled a woman of his wife's
age, was preparing the endgame. At some point, he would stage-manage the
release of Elisabeth from the cult that had held her this past quarter of
a
century, and she would return to the house that she had, in reality, never
left.
But Kerstin's illness aborted that plan. As the 19-year-old grew
increasingly sick in a cellar whose only medicines were aspirin and cough
mixture, Elisabeth pleaded with her father to take her to a hospital. When
the girl fell unconscious, the weary Fritzl agreed. Within a week,
Elisabeth
was making her revelations to the police.
The two remaining underground children, Stefan, 18, and Felix, five, were
released that Saturday evening, and so saw for the first time a world they
had previously only ever seen on television. They gazed in awe at the
moon,
and, although they shrieked with excitement as the police car set off,
they
flinched every time a vehicle went past, thinking it was about to hit
them.
The following morning, at the Mostviertel Clinic, extraordinary
encounters:
the boys meeting their above-ground family for the first time, and their
mother the children Lisa, Monika, and Alex she had not known since
they
were babies, and the mother she had not seen since she was a teenager.
The clinic's director, Berthold Kepplinger, said: "The two women fell into
each other's arms and wept bitterly. They held each other and did not want
to let go." The older just said: "I'm so sorry. I had no idea."
It will take more than hugs to repair the damage done to this family,
especially the underground part. Stefan and Felix, say police, cannot
speak
normally, and use mainly growls and coos to communicate with each other.
Mr
Kepplinger said: "The one who seemed most distressed was Felix. He'd jump
and start at the slightest disturbance and held on to his mother the whole
time." Going in a lift especially frightened him, although, according to
police chief Leopold Etz, he has moments of joy, and then "he slaps the
air
with his hand when he can't control his excitement". The older boy is
hunched after living in only the low-ceilinged cellar, and both of them
and
their mother suffer from chronic vitamin D deficiency.
Therapy of a different order might well be delivered on Fritzl himself
when
in due course he is given a taste of being behind a heavy locked door that
does not open from the inside. There are conflicting reports about his
mental state defiant, say police; a broken man says his lawyer but
they
seem immaterial. Either way, he's not giving much away. The only group of
people who are talking freely are assorted former tenants. Alfred
Dubanovsky
has been the most voluble, saying of the cellar: "He used to take food and
shopping down there in a wheelbarrow at night. Other times I could
sometimes
hear a knocking from the cellar I couldn't explain." Best, of course, not
to
ask.
Meanwhile, the big questions go unanswered: did his wife (whom police have
not yet interviewed) know? Or did he latterly let someone in on his dread
secret? There have been reports that one of Elisabeth's brothers had
access
to the cellar. Six officers are now in the cellar looking for evidence. It
would have been worse if Fritzl had not had a confidant. Long past the age
when men have heart attacks and strokes, imagine if he had keeled over
before his captives had been released. A coronary, perhaps, as he pawed a
little Thai prostitute in a Pattaya parlour? Or a fatal seizure as he
walked
to his car under the weight of the extra groceries. What then? A funeral
with his widow and seven children and three "grandchildren" in weeping
attendance; local traders turning up to pay their respects, and a few old
lads from the fishing club come along to salute their fellow angler. And,
afterwards, a few eats and drinks at the Fritzl house.
All the while, beneath their feet, Elisabeth, Kerstin, Stefan and Felix
Fritzl would have been slowly starving to death, their hammerings and
shouts
insulated. How long would it have been before their skeletons were found?
Ten years? Twenty? Or maybe never.
Their imprisonment in three cases their very existence dying with the
respectable old engineer who was, his town would have told you, a very
good
family man.
What next?
Kerstin Fritzl: Now feared to be losing her fight for life, as she lies in
Amstetten hospital with multiple organ failure two weeks after her
admission.
The investigation: Police now searching cellar for traces of DNA of any
possible accomplice. After that, they will bring in sonar equipment to
look
for more hiding places. Officers can work only one hour at a time because
of
the severe lack of oxygen. Police will also question more than 100 people
who lived in Fritzl's house during his daughter Elisabeth's captivity, and
others who say they knew him.
Elisabeth and her children: Being cared for at clinic, which has provided
them with a confined space similar to cellar into which they can retreat.
Will require years of therapy, and the older children, and Elisabeth, may
never lead normal lives. Authorities offered to give them, and other
members
of the clan, new identities.
Josef Fritzl: Held in custody facing charges of incest, rape and false
imprisonment. Also a possible "murder through failure to act" charge in
connection with baby who died in the basement and, with Kerstin, too, if
she dies. Links to other sex crimes being examined. So far has said
little,
save to admit fathering the children, and that he imprisoned his daughter
to
"save her from drugs".
Austria: The President has proposed, in order to restore the nation's
image,
that most modern of elixirs: a public relations campaign. Others have
urged
Austrians "not to look the other way" in future.
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