Prologue
On August 28, 1984, the day that 18-year old Elisabeth Fritzl’s father demanded that she help him carry a new door down to the basement, she could little have imagined the years of terror that would ensue from that simple chore. While such a mundane request would not ordinarily seem ominous, Josef Fritzl was no ordinary father. The imposing, stern man had allegedly first raped his daughter Elisabeth when she was just 11 years old. She had already tried to run away from home at 16, and she was again plotting an escape.
During the nearly 25 years that would follow no one — not Elisabeth’s mother or six siblings, not her neighbors or the family’s tenants, not the local or national authorities — imagined the horrors taking place just beneath their view in the tiny Austrian town of Amstetten. Or so we would like to think. We might like to think that nothing could have been done differently, that, regrettable as this was, it was unique and unavoidable, no one’s fault. We might like to think that we are safe. We would like to think that kind hearts are watching out for us and that we do what we can for each other; we would like to think that, should unspeakable evil arise, simple decency and social safeguards will ward it off.
But were there no clues? Was there no way Elisabeth Fritzl might have been spared?
On that fateful day in 1984 Elisabeth Fritzl did as she was told. She followed her father into the basement. There he handcuffed her, drugged her, and kept her captive for 24 years. For 24 years, Josef Fritzl vented his most monstrous impulses on his own daughter; over the course of which she would bear him seven children. For 24 years, he got away with it. The torture took place just feet from his wife Rosemarie, just a few floors down from his tenants; just down the street from the butcher, the baker and the post office.
How did this happen? Was Josef Fritzl a criminal mastermind, as devious as he was deviant? Or is it simply that no one was paying attention, that no one picked up on the hints of something awry, those incongruous details that betray something vicious? The Fritzl story’s beginnings testify to the mad man’s planning skills, if nothing else.
Fritzl had apparently been planning his chamber of horrors for quite some time before finally luring his daughter downstairs. In 1978 — around the time of his first rape of his daughter, according to her later statement — he began working on a subterranean extension to his modest but comfortable three-story home in Lower Austria’s Amstetten. Permits and building inspection records attest to a much smaller extension than Fritzl seems to have made even by 1983. Already, Fritzl knew he had something to conceal from the authorities: he built walls to hide the full size of his underground addition, hiding a smaller cellar behind the visible basement.
Elisabeth helped her father to position the hulking steel-and-concrete door that would hold her for years. For much of her first year there, she was tied up like a dog. Then Fritzl let her off the leash — to roam “freely” in the 15′ x 15′ cell that was her sunless home.
Soon they would need more room; Fritzl’s unending incestuous abuse of his captive daughter would produce seven children. After the first two were born, he started to further expand the cellar. Or, rather, Elisabeth did, as he made her do the work herself. Her reward for this ten-year project? He would rape her in one of the new rooms, rather than right in front of their children.
An engineer and electrician, Fritzl proved himself adept at dungeon design. He installed electronic locks on each of the rooms’ doors, and locked the main door with a remote code. Windowless and just five-and-a-half feet high, the wood-trimmed white rooms were surprisingly bright in their unnatural light, and Elisabeth kept them clean. There was a TV, a VCR, hotplates, a refrigerator. But this wasn’t a comfortable place to spend a short time, much less decades: in the end, police investigators would find they could work in this stifling hole for only limited periods and that they needed to drill holes to increase the air flow in the rooms.
Neighbors report having heard noise from all the construction over the years, but they never pressed for an explanation, perhaps content to find that nothing was being built that would block their views. Nor did the lodgers who rented from the Fritzls complain; they knew that they would be evicted if they went down to the garden or the basement, where Fritzl told his wife he was working and was not to be disturbed. Once complete, the basement was nearly soundproof, and Fritzl could blame any sporadic noise the tenants might complain about on the heating system.
But what could motivate a father to make such elaborate efforts to imprison his own daughter?
If we believe Josef Fritzl’s police statements, this vile confinement was his way of protecting his daughter, although it was he from whom she most needed protection.
He was a strict man and set in his ways. He taught his children to be obedient and polite, and he did not hesitate to employ corporal punishment if they fell short of his high standards. Little surprise, then, that he had little patience for the vicissitudes and rebellions of adolescence.
Young Elisabeth was a vivacious, active girl who loved swimming, tennis and soccer. But when the teenager grew more interested in music, day-dreaming and going out, and she replaced those childhood pursuits with adolescent concerns and started sneaking out, drinking in bars and spending time with boys, Fritzl was incensed. He claims he started her in a waitress training program to distract her from these new bad habits.
But it was waitressing that was bringing Elisabeth toward freedom. When she was 15 and moved east to Strengberg to the dorms while learning waitressing, she spent her first time away from home — and the first time she was safe from her brutal and domineering father. Returning home from school, she ran away to alluring Vienna with a friend from work. The police picked her up before a month had passed and sent her home. But that taste of freedom would sate her for the next few years while she finished her training. In the summer of ’84 she finished the program and was waiting to hear about a new job in Linz in the country’s north. She told friends that she might move in with her sister soon, that she would move in any case and would send them her address once she was settled.
But in fact she would stay in little Amstetten, hidden away behind the hedges and beneath the ground at Ybbsstrasse 99 for decades to come. It was easy enough: in running away, Elisabeth had already set a precedent her father could use as cover. It would be easy to let the world believe that this supposedly troubled child had simply run away again. Indeed, no one questioned it. Fritzl got away with it for a very long time.
He kept her safe from the dangerous world and her growing independence; he kept her to himself. His young daughter was something he would claim to be powerless to resist: he wanted a big family, he would say later, and he wanted children with his daughter. She reminded him of his mother, a woman as strict and violent as he.
Josef Fritzl was born in Amstetten in 1935, on the eve of the Nazi-orchestrated Anschluss — unification with the Third Reich. His father abandoned the family, and his mother raised him on her own and with an iron fist. She beat him until he bruised, according to family members. And beyond her own strictness was was the social context of the entrenched authoritarianism of the fallen Austro-Hungarian empire, the militaristic aggression and totalitarian discipline of the Nazi regime and the austerity and struggle of Europe at war.
In post-war Amstetten, Fritzl did not stick out. He drove an engineer’s well-maintained Mercedes. He dressed precisely and sharply, but not extravagantly. He kept his home and investment properties in good shape. He seemed the epitome of the period’s bourgeoisie: controlled and controlling, respectable and responsible, a credit to his village and his street. Coworkers would later realize they barely knew even the barest outline of his life. He was not a man to give away his feelings or his secrets.
And secrets this man had.
Nuremberg, November 9, 1935
In 1967, Fritzl seems to have been convicted of a rape in the nearby city of Linz, for which he spent a year and a half in prison. Among its other soft points, post-war Austrian law erases most crimes from the record after 15 years. This meant that, when Fritzl later adopted or fostered three of Elisabeth’s (and his own!) children, there would be no record of his having committed a sex crime. He was also a suspect in two other assault cases in the area during that time, and rumored to indulge in indecent exposure. Later, it would be alleged that he raped his wife’s sister. But none of this constituted sufficient alert to the authorities of any potential danger to the community or to his own children.
In 1972, after giving up on a mail-order lingerie business, Fritzl bought an inn and campsite on the Mondsee, a privately owned Alpine lake in Upper Austria, near Salzburg. There were two fires at the inn, neither of which was ever connected to Fritzl or wrongdoing. But now that Fritzl’s story has been revealed, police are re-examining the unsolved murder of a young girl near that inn.
If his oddities did not ultimately concern the authorities, they did not trouble his wife either. She seems in hindsight to have been a bullied, passive woman at the mercy of this domineering man.
Theirs was not a storybook or an expected marriage. Josef Fritzl, a searingly intelligent young man of 21 with a promising career, married unsophisticated 17-year-old Rosemarie, at the time newly employed as a kitchen helper.
He dominated her just as he would dominate their children and grandchildren years later. She was a submissive and, it would seem, unsuspicious housewife, dealing ably with the home, the children and the guesthouse but deferring to her husband on any matters of real significance. Fritzl’s Linz crimes did not seem to affect their marriage. Nor did his solo vacations to Pattaya — a seaside Thai city that, popular as it is with European families, also has a reputation as a sex tourism destination. Rosemarie’s sister has said that when the couple stopped having sex, Rosemarie simply accepted it. It seems clear, though, that when Fritzl went down to the basement, supposedly to work on mechanical drawings, she knew not to follow or to ask questions.
Did Rosemarie not find herself with lingering questions when her daughter disappeared?
Fritzl seems to have convinced her without great effort that her daughter was gone and that there was nothing to be done. Elisabeth’s running away proved a valuable plot point, one that cunning Fritzl made good use of. Rosemarie reported Elisabeth as missing the day after she disappeared. A few weeks later Fritzl handed over to the police a letter from their daughter (postmarked from Branau am Inn, the Bavarian-bordering town most notorious for being Hitler’s birthplace) stating that if they tried to find her, she would disappear for good. That threat likely convinced Rosemarie; while witnesses attested to her heartbreak, she does not seem to have tried to take action. The Austrian authorities, having filed the missing person report, do not seem to have pursued the case further either.
In later letters, Elisabeth, writing at her father’s command, implied she had joined a cult. The authorities were not concerned enough by this to investigate the mysterious sect; the matter raised no suspicions with them. This no doubt made the situation seem all the more hopeless to Rosemarie.
Yet one can’t help wondering: was Rosemarie Fritzl really so naïve that she trusted her husband all that time, never suspecting his deceptions, or at least wondering what he was doing in his basement hideaway? Was she unaware of the initial abuse? And how did Fritzl treat their other children? Was she so gullible, or was she so cowed herself that she could not stand up to this man, or even think for herself? While the investigation shows that Fritzl acted alone in holding his daughter and their children captive, surely Elisabeth Fritzl must find it hard to avoid asking herself how it is that her mother was blind to her torture.
But Fritzl was an expert at covering his secret criminal life and second family. He even considered the potential danger of letting the neighbors see him buying twice as much food and supplies as would be customary for a family the size of his aboveground household. For 24 years, he used his properties as an excuse to drive away and shop in another town for Elisabeth and their children.
Time must have passed strangely for Elisabeth: day after day in that cramped, windowless warren, never seeing natural light, visited, battered and raped again and again by her father. An old TV set gave her some idea of the passing world, but it must have been the succession of pregnancies and departures—of children delivered and taken away—that marked her time.
First born was Kerstin, in 1988. It changed little; her imprisonment and her father’s visits continued. Stefan was born in 1990 and Lisa in 1992.
When she was still an infant, Fritzl brought Lisa out of the basement in a cardboard box, with a letter from Elisabeth, asking her parents to take care of the girl and warning them not to look for her. The letter seems to have satisfied the welfare office with its authenticity. Josef and Rosemarie adopted the child without raising suspicion as to how or why Elisabeth had left the child with the family she’d apparently fled.
Next, in 1994, was Monika. Fritzl simply brought her upstairs and put her in Lisa’s stroller—and waited for his wife to receive the call, presumably recorded, he’d arranged from their daughter. That the Fritzls had a new and unlisted phone number should have been a clue, but it merely baffled Rosemarie, and went unnoticed by the welfare officials.
Elisabeth then gave birth to twins, Alexander and Michael, in 1996. Michael died shortly thereafter under circumstances that remain unclear. Fritzl cremated him in the household furnace and brought Alexander upstairs. Their last child, 2002’s Felix, stayed downstairs with his mother, who sent a letter to let Rosemarie know she’d had another child. Fritzl evidently felt he couldn’t impose another baby on his aging wife.
Family man Fritzl spent every few evenings with Elisabeth and the three children in the basement. He watched videos with them and ate dinner with this hidden family. Meanwhile, he and his wife raised the three other children publicly, affording them all the support and extracurricular activities granted the child of a comfortable Austrian family. This might have gone on indefinitely, or until Fritzl’s eventual death. The old man had long warned the captive family that they would be gassed or electrocuted if they tried the doors. But in fact the electronic locks would have opened and released them had Fritzl died—a timer was set to open them if a period of time passed with them closed.
But then Kerstin saved the family.
In April of 2008, Elisabeth’s eldest captive child, the 19-year old Kerstin, became gravely ill. She had long been suffering. She had in the past pulled her own hair out, and ripped her clothing into pieces and used them to flood the toilet. Now she was feverish, experiencing abdominal cramps, coughing, and biting her lips and tongue until the bled.
Elisabeth begged Fritzl to take the girl to the hospital. Shockingly, he relented. Whether out of actual tenderness, or out of fear of what might happen if the girl died, Fritzl agreed that the girl needed immediate medical attention. For the first time in her life, she went outside and was touched by the air and sun.
Fritzl stuck with his old device: he pretended Elisabeth had abandoned Kerstin. After an ambulance brought them to Mostviertel-Amstetten State Hospital, Fritzl told police that he had of course found the girl outside with a note from Elisabeth saying she needed help—and that the doctors should rely on Fritzl, who, inexplicably by the logic of Fritzl’s earlier lies, was the only person Kerstin knew and trusted.
Doctors struggled to assess what was wrong with Kerstin—and they made a widely publicized plea begging Elisabeth to meet to talk with them about Kerstin’s medical history, prompting the police to reopen the case on her disappearance. Fritzl once again produced a letter from Elisabeth to try to reassure them, once again postmarking it from another town, this time Kematen an der Krems.
Elisabeth saw on her television that the hospital was looking for her. Somehow she convinced Fritzl to let her go. Was he simply tired of the ruses or sensing that the jig was up? Would he get a sick enjoyment from convincing the world that Elisabeth had given up on the cult and was returning home? In any case, the Elisabeth and the other two children were free, if still tied to the pretense that they were returning from a cult.
Hospital authorities derailed that plan. They saw Elisabeth’s arrival as suspicious and called the police. Investigators questioned Fritzl and Elisabeth separately. Once she was promised that her family would be safe and they would not have to see Josef Fritzl again, Elisabeth told police the whole horrible story behind her captivity and abuse. Fritzl initially confessed to many of her allegations.
The case against Josef Fritzl had finally begun—and the family’s recovery could begin.
The three children and Elisabeth face obvious physical and emotional challenges.
Kerstin was put into a medically induced coma, from which she has since emerged, and is doing better. She and her brothers were malnourished and had gone without exercise in the cramped basement. Stefan may have permanent spinal problems due to the cramped quarters.
They were raised without normal socialization outside the bounds of their disturbed family and will need to learn how to deal with others. Even getting used to large spaces, natural lights, freedom and unconstrained movement will be a cognitive jump. And the life the man both father and grandfather forced upon them may well mean that they will experience posttraumatic stress disorder.
The three children who Rosemarie and her husband had been rearing joined their lost mother and siblings in a psychiatric clinic; later all moved into an apartment for help in adjusting as the secrets of this tragedy surfaced.
Fritzl initially confessed to the police, but is now less cooperative. He’s receiving hate mail — as is his wife, who many in the public blame for not better recognizing her husband’s dangerous impulses and protecting her daughter. Rosemarie had been staying with Elisabeth and the children in the apartment provided by authorities — but Elisabeth has since asked her to leave.
Can Elisabeth Fritzl forgive the world for not discovering, rescuing and protecting her?
A significant gap in the case was the authorities’ failure to investigate the cult allegations. Manfred Wohlfahrt, the authority on sects in the Fritzl’s diocese, was not consulted until Kerstin showed up in the hospital. He concluded that Elisabeth’s letters may have been written under coercion, but that it was unlikely Elisabeth was involved in a cult.
Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, concerned about his country’s image, was quick to declare that the Fritzl case is “not an Austrian phenomenon,” declaring, “We won’t allow the whole country to be held hostage by one man.” The Fritzl case has, unfortunately, some similarity to another recent Austrian case: in 1998 Wolfgang Priklopil abducted ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch, keeping her captive in a small cellar until she escaped in 2006.
The Fritzl case has not yet gone to trial. Josef Fritzl may face charges of rape, incest, coercion and deprivation of freedom; he could also face a manslaughter or murder charge for the death of his infant twin son, Michael. Fritzl, however, will likely not serve much time. Even for murder, Austria’s current maximum sentence is a mere 15 years. Furthermore, those convicted in Austrian courts of multiple crimes serve the time only on the longest sentence; sentences are not served consecutively. Additionally, Fritzl’s lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, has suggested that the man is mentally ill and should be treated rather than condemned.
While Elisabeth Fritzl has cooperated with the investigation and provided evidence, it is rumored that some of her children may not testify. Their statements would serve as key testimony in the case and would be especially important on the rape and murder charges. Barring a conviction on one of those charges, Fritzl would at most serve ten years for deprivation of freedom.
Josef Fritzl’s trial will likely begin in early 2009. His fate will be determined by eight jurors consulting with three judges.
Leading up to a November 2008 indictment, Fritzl submitted to extensive interviews with prison psychiatrist Dr. Adelheid Kastner. Leaked court reports connected to these interviews reveal yet more horrors.
Fritzl has told forensic psychiatrist Kastner that his mother regularly severely beat him as a child, kicking him even when he collapsed to the floor, bleeding. She never hugged or kissed him or told him she loved him, Fritzl claims, and she brought him into this world only to prove to his father that she wasn’t infertile. The couple went through a bitter divorce, and she raised Fritzl alone, working as a servant and diligently taking him to church. Whether she was an astute judge of character or this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, his mother called young Josef a devil and a criminal.
When Fritzl married, he moved his wife, Rosemarie, into his mother’s Amstetten home. In 1959 he told friends that his mother had passed away. In fact, his mother lived until 1980 — imprisoned in the top floor of Fritzl’s house. Once he learned how to bully his old tormentor, he locked her in a room, bricking over the windows to deprive the old woman of even the light of day.
The leaked information further reveals that Fritzl traveled to Ghana in 1963 in search of easy sex; he notes that, afraid of sexually transmitted diseases, he consorted only with “nice girls”, never prostitutes. It also confirms that in 1967 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for the Linz rape. There he decided that a secret dungeon would let him explore without consequence what he saw as his inescapably fated dark side. Dr. Kastner writes that Fritzl was comfortable raping his daughter, Elisabeth, if he avoided looking her in the face. He convinced himself that his crimes were slight. His justification? He would have committed greater atrocities had he not imprisoned and abused Elisabeth. Fritzl claims he was “born to rape.” He says that he did not abuse the children he fathered with Elisabeth; the children reportedly claim otherwise. Fritzl maintains that his second family offered him a fresh chance for a loving family, asserting that the children he had fathered with Rosemarie were cold and distant with him, and that Rosemarie had grown fat.
Fritzl will presumably use his mother’s abuse as part of his defense. Kastner has declared that he suffers from a severe combined personality disorder and a sexual disorder, but that he’s fit to stand trial. She recommends that the evil family jailer spend the rest of his life in prison. He would likely be held in Goellersdorf in the same prison for the criminally insane as Robert Ackerman, the teenage cannibal murderer.
On Thursday, March 19, 2009, a jury in St. Poelten, in Lower Austria, found Josef Fritzl guilty of all charges. It took the eight-person jury just four hours of deliberation to convict Fritzl of charges including rape and incest against the daughter he’d imprisoned for 24 years, as well as of the imprisonment of their children and the murder-through-neglect of their son, Michael, who died just a few days after his birth. Judge Andrea Humer sentenced him to life in a psychiatric institution.
At the trial’s Monday opening, Fritzl pleaded guilty only to charges of incest, coercion and the deprivation of liberty. He said he was not guilty of the enslavement and murder charges and he contested the wording of the rape charge. The prosecution had accused him of raping his daughter, Elisabeth, over 3,000 times.
Most of the trial was closed to the public, typical in Austria’s secretive, privacy-fixated culture, but a slurry of disturbing new details emerged on this lost family’s trapped decades. Elisabeth sustained injuries from her father’s sex toys, and she lost several of her teeth going without medical or dental care all those years. The cellar was infested with rats year after year. Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser stated that Fritzl barely spoke to his daughter during Elisabeth’s first few years of imprisonment; he descended into the cellar silently, only to rape her. Burkheiser, just 32 and in office only 11 months before taking on this high profile case, vividly described the cellar’s dark, damp conditions, passing dank items of clothing from the family’s captivity around so that jurors could smell what the living conditions had been like.
On Monday and Tuesday, the court saw Elisabeth’s grueling 11-hour videotaped testimony. She made a surprise appearance at the Tuesday session, slipping into a seat as her testimony played. Her court representative, Eva Plaz, said Elisabeth wanted to make sure her father was held accountable for his wretched actions, including young Michael’s death from a respiratory problem that could have been treated. She wanted justice. Maybe even vengeance. When her father spotted Elisabeth, he blanched, and broke down.
Finally Josef Fritzl wept.
Wednesday, following closing arguments, Fritzl reversed himself and pleaded guilty on the charges of murder, enslavement and rape. Only when he watched his daughter’s testimony and saw her in the courtroom, he told Judge Humer, did he fully realize how he’d hurt her. He told the court that he repented for what he’d done. His defense attorney, Rudolph Mayer, insisted that Fritzl was genuinely sorry, and that the old man could not help the deviant psychology that spurred his horrible crimes. This is consistent with Dr. Adelheid Kastner’s testimony: She suggested that Fritzl’s abuse-filled childhood left him with a need to abuse and dominate others — but she noted that he was legally sane and knew all along that what he was doing was wrong. Burkheiser viewed Fritzl’s painful childhood as a distraction, and she warned the jury not to be swayed by Fritzl’s apologies or to let down their guard, as Elisabeth had that day in 1984.
The judge asked Fritzl what he thought of Elisabeth’s testimony, saying that surely Fritzl had known that young Michael’s breathing problems were serious and that he should have brought him to a doctor. Fritzl insisted he thought the baby would get better on his own, but he acknowledged in the end that he should have done something.
Judge Humer followed Kastner’s opinion that Fritzl was at risk of reoffending without treatment and should be placed in a psychiatric insititution. At the trial’s close, Fritzl waived his right to appeal; he will not contest the ruling. He could be paroled in as few as 14 years, but if the court believes he may repeat his offenses, he will remain incarcerated.
Fritzl’s new life is considerably more comfortable than the one he provided for his cellar-dwelling family. Along with access to the psychiatric institution’s common areas, including a gym and a garden, he’ll have a private room and shower, as well as his own television and computer—and plenty of natural light. He’ll even have the opportunity to see whether he can treat a pet better than he treated his family.
Fritzl is supposed to pay all court costs, and though he has offered to make payments to his family, he has already initiated bankruptcy proceedings.
Locals expect authorities to bulldoze Fritzl’s Amstetten house and its infamous dungeon.