Josef Fritzl was the most horrific story I’ve ever reported in 30 years of journalism, and it was the most touching story, especially when the little children came out into the daylight for the first time in their lives.
Josef Fritzl was one of those offenders who could maintain a public face of respectability, but that public face of respectability merely hid a far darker private reality.
Surely the most extraordinary and the most tragic thing about Josef Fritzl is that he managed to camouflage himself as a respectable member of society, as a pillar of the community, while at the same time he was just leading this double life of monstrosity.
On the 27th of April, 2008, the horrific case of Josef Fritzl sent shockwaves around the world. News report after news report gave details of a quite unbelievable story.
For 24 years, Josef Fritzl had kept his own daughter captive in a cellar beneath his house. In that time, he’d used her as a 𝒔𝒆𝒙 slave and fathered seven children.
I have come to Austria to try and discover why Josef Fritzl carried out his terrible crimes, and how he kept his secret for so long.
I’m standing here in the heart of Vienna, the capital city of Austria. Here in 2008, the world learned the gruesome details of Josef Fritzl and what he did to his young daughter.
As a journalist, I find this story extraordinary. As a father, I find it abhorrent. How and why did this happen?
By the age of 42, Elisabeth Fritzl had spent over half of her life living in captivity without sunlight and in cramped conditions, controlled by her father.
When the police in Amstetten held a conference and broke the news of Josef Fritzl, the world’s press responded. The first journalist to break the story worldwide was British-born Mark Perry, who works for a Vienna-based newspaper called Kronen Zeitung.
Tell me about the impact in Austria when the story of Josef Fritzl broke.
It actually was a tremendous impact. People were shocked, flabbergasted. Nobody could believe it.
Nobody in the whole world could believe it. But people, especially in Amstetten, the neighbors, the police officers, all of them.
From the point of view of the criminal police, the missing person case, Elisabeth Fritzl, can now be deemed as solved. Nevertheless, police investigations will be continued.
Where were you at the time?
I was in the Waldviertel with my kids, got the phone call by my editor-in-chief. He just told me, “We’ve got a big case unfolding here.” I said, “A big case?”
“It’s about Fritzl.” I said, “Yeah.” “Because Elisabeth, she left her children on the doorstep.”
And he said, “No, it’s worse. It’s worse. It’s worse.
It’s worse.” Off I went to Amstetten, and that’s where I spent about 2 weeks.
Josef Fritzl had made world headlines. He was born here in the somewhat unglamorous town of Amstetten in Austria on the 9th of April, 1935. And it was this town and the house in which he lived that were to make world headlines in 2008.
Well, I’m joined here in Austria by Professor David Wilson, Britain’s leading criminologist, who’s helping me to uncover the real facts behind the headlines.
David Wilson, who was Josef Fritzl?
You’d imagine in this very ordinary town that Josef Fritzl was going to have a very ordinary childhood and life. In fact, his childhood was extraordinary.
Josef Fritzl’s childhood is dominated by his mother and his grandmother. Josef’s grandmother, Anna, is born also in Amstetten, but marries a mill owner.
The grandmother and the mill owner were in a very loveless relationship because his grandmother, Josef Fritzl’s grandmother, couldn’t have children. So, the mill owner resolved that particular problem by having a child with three different servants working in his household.
One of those children that he had by a servant, therefore out of wedlock, was Maria, Josef Fritzl’s mother. The family all lived at 40 Ybbsstraße.
In 1934, Fritzl’s mother, Maria, met a very poor man called Josef and became pregnant. The baby boy was also named Josef. He was given his grandmother, Anna’s, maiden name, Fritzl, ignoring his grandfather and father’s involvement.
On the 12th of March, 1938, when Josef Fritzl was nearly 3 years old, Hitler’s troops marched across the border into Amstetten. Hitler himself followed a few days later to be greeted by a large crowd. Young Josef Fritzl was in that crowd, perched on the shoulders of his father to greet the Führer.
Boyan Panchevsky is a European correspondent who has studied Josef Fritzl’s early life. I’m going to meet him.
Would it have been difficult at that time in Austria for a child born out of wedlock?
Most certainly, yes. I think until very recently would have been a difficult experience. The child would have been stigmatized by that experience within the local community.
In 1938, 99. 7% of Austrians voted to become part of the Third Reich. But young Josef Fritzl’s mother didn’t always conform to the ways of her new leaders.
She had a feisty temper and angered the Nazi authorities.
During the Second World War, she was arrested and interned to a concentration camp where she spent a few months and Josef was left on his own, so that must have left scars on the young boy’s psyche.
Nine-year-old Josef was sent to an orphanage during this period and told that his mother was dead. Only as the war ended did he realize she was still alive.
Young Josef’s father had joined the German army and fought on the Eastern Front until he was taken prisoner by the Russians. He was released in 1948 and returned to Amstetten where he was shunned by both the boy and his mother.
After the war, Fritzl’s mother became even more eccentric and aggressive. Her discipline towards her son grew more violent.
Fritzl’s mother was not a loving mother. She wanted a child, but she didn’t have the wherewithal. She didn’t have the psychological makeup to understand that she had responsibilities for her child, that she should care for her child, and so she would regularly beat him.
The relationship changed when Fritzl turned 15. He finally stood up against his mother’s attacks. His own behavior also changed.
We see some really difficult psychosexual behaviors emerging around the time that Fritzl’s going to stand up to his mother. So, for example, he becomes what’s known as a lurker. We would probably call this a peeping Tom.
He’s going to listen out for young couples having 𝒔𝒆𝒙 in their homes so that he can hear their sexual activity. He’s also going to develop from that kind of behavior to exposing himself to women.
In 1951, at the age of 16, Fritzl left his home in Amstetten and came here to the Austrian city of Linz, some 40 miles away from Amstetten, where he became an engineer for Voest.
In 1956, he met his wife, Rosemary Bayer.
Well, they met when he was very young. He was working as a technical assistant in an engineering firm in Linz called Voest. And her father was a colleague of his.
I believe she was 16 or 17 years old. And he was immediately impressed with her. And then he told friends that she would make a good wife, good housewife, because she seemed to be obedient, you know, accepting of things.
By September 1963, after just 7 years of marriage, Fritzl and Rosemary had three children, two daughters and a son. Josef Fritzl’s job was going well. Engineers were in constant demand in the post-war years.
The shabby, illegitimate boy had turned into a confident and authoritative man. He’s sent by his employer to Ghana, and he doesn’t return from those experiences until 1965.
Meanwhile, his three children are getting older, and so one of the ways he deals with that situation is he’s going to be violent and domineering. And quite quickly, Rosemary will fall pregnant again and give birth to their fourth child.
On the 8th of April, 1966, Elisabeth was born into an increasingly volatile household. Fritzl was back working as an engineer in Linz and reverted to the predatory habits he’d picked up as a teenager.
Here we are in Linz, a not unattractive industrial city in the northern part of Austria, what they call Lower Austria, on the banks of the River Danube. And about an hour’s drive from Amstetten. And it was to here, Professor David Wilson, that Josef Fritzl would come when he wanted to escape Amstetten.
Very pragmatic reasons. This was the closest large city he could escape the scrutiny of a small town. And whilst he was here, of course, he could indulge in his sexual interests because he would visit the red-light area.
He got into trouble with the law here as well.
Yes, in 1967, he was convicted of a rape. He followed a young mother home to her house, and then after she had fallen asleep, he broke into her house and at knifepoint raped her in her bed as her child was sleeping beside her in a cot.
What sentence did he get?
Fritzl only received 18 months for the rape of this young mother.
But under Austrian law, the sentence doesn’t stay on the record forever.
No, and that’s a very crucial point. After 15 years, any offender’s record is wiped clean. And therefore, as far as the state is concerned, after 15 years, that rape never took place.
And as far as Fritzl’s wife was concerned, it was forgiven.
Yes, she stood by him. She visited him in the prison, and she never mentioned the fact that her husband had been convicted of rape.
By the end of 1972, the Fritzl family had grown. There were now seven children, four girls and three boys. Fritzl’s reputation as an engineer was also growing.
He was a respected member of the community. Or so they thought.
I’ve traveled to Austria to retrace the extraordinary case of Josef Fritzl and his 24-year reign of terror over his captive daughter, Elisabeth.
In 1973, Fritzl was a wealthy member of the Amstetten community. His reputation was growing. He decided to go into property and purchase the Zesten guesthouse next to Monsee Lake in Seits Gamagut, a three-story hotel with 40 bedrooms.
He owned guesthouses, he owned restaurants. He then bought this place in Monsee, which included a restaurant and a camping place. And he ran it with a profit for a while, and then when he got financially into trouble, a place caught fire and burned down.
And authorities suspected an insurance scam, but never managed to prove anything.
In 1978, Josef Fritzl decided to expand the family home at 40 Ybbsstraße in Amstetten. He wanted a roof terrace and a new extension in which to place nine new flats for tenants. He also applied for permission to build a rather large cellar.
The plans were approved and construction began on a major scale.
Fritzl’s family life is one in which we are having to deal with what the serial killer Ian Brady once described as a house divided. How does this very public face and this private reality?
So, the public face is of a successful businessman, an engineer who’s living a respectable life, bringing up his children, being responsible, sending them to school. But, the private reality is that nobody wants to talk about these very problematic psychosexual behaviors, which are clearly beginning to become more manifest in relation to his behavior towards his children, especially his female children, and especially one particular female child, Elisabeth Fritzl.
Elisabeth Fritzl was now 12 years old. Her manner reminded Fritzl of himself as a boy. He believed they had a special connection.
Fritzl had become obsessed with his daughter. He spied on her and demanded to know where she was at all times.
Elisabeth did have a few close friends, among them twins, Uta and Krista.
Tell me about her. What was she like?
Elisabeth actually was a very lovely girl. We became friends from the moment we started going to school. I always say that the right people always come together.
And that was the case with Elisabeth and I. We knew that several things in the family were not okay. Well, one sensed it, but you didn’t talk about it.
She was calm. I was also very calm. And that was why we got together.
We walked together to school. And that way, we became closer.
Tell me about Josef Fritzl. What sort of man was he? Can you describe him to me?
When I was a child and saw him, I thought, “Okay, not a good man.” Well, his appearance, you sensed it. But we never spoke to him when we were children.
We only saw him.
How could you tell he was not a good man?
The strictness in the face, the sinister eyes, no smile, no kindness.
In September 1981, Elisabeth started a tourism and gastronomy course in Waldegg, a small town 12 miles from Amstetten. She also worked in a petrol station restaurant to support herself. But at home, behind closed doors, Fritzl’s obsession grew.
In fact, what was happening to Elisabeth Fritzl in private was that her father was exposing himself to her, leaving pornographic magazines under her pillow, and was beginning to sexually 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 her.
Did Elisabeth ever speak to you about her father and what her father was doing?
No, she didn’t really speak about it. Also, it was forbidden. I realized that it was forbidden for her.
What happens at home stays at home and is not brought outside. That’s why she was a very calm, quiet person.
The construction work at the family home was developing. Fritzl had built a labyrinth of rooms beneath the new extension. The flats above were rented out to tenants but had a high turnover, so nobody asked any questions.
On the 28th of January, 1983, Elisabeth ran away from home.
She left her home when she was still underage. But then there was a warrant sent out obviously because she was a minor, so she got found by police in Vienna and they called her father and they drove all the way back from Vienna to Amstetten and in the car already he promised her that he will never let her run away again, which must have sounded like a terrible sentence to her at the time.
By the summer of 1983, the cellar was completed. It had lighting with many interconnecting rooms. It was to be used for storage and as a workshop.
He has been desperate to control that space since he was a boy. So he upgrades it, he uses his building skills, he uses his engineering skills, he uses his contacts in the building trade to be able to redecorate, to redesign, cutting up the space in a way that would allow him the maximum control of that space.
In May 1984, Elisabeth Fritzl announced she was going to move in with her sister in nearby Linz.
Now you see, here we’ve got a problem for Fritzl. He likes what he’s doing to Elisabeth. He does not want to lose Elisabeth, whom he’s been sexually abusing.
He wants to control her. He wants to dominate her. And in effect, Elisabeth has revealed to him her escape route.
I’m going to leave here. I’m leaving this space.
There could be a sense in which Fritzl himself might have been worried that once she was out of that private space, she might publicly talk about what had happened to her. So, this is a crisis point for him. He has to stop Elisabeth Fritzl from leaving 40 Ybbsstraße.
On the 28th of August, 1984, Josef Fritzl lured 18-year-old Elisabeth into the cellar of the house, drugging and handcuffing her before incarcerating his own daughter.
He has some ruse about carrying a door down to the garage. And then, once the door is in the garage, he says to Elisabeth, “Oh, come into my study. I want to talk about something privately with you.”
She goes into his study, and whilst her back is turned to him, we now know that he used a chloroform-infused rag to cover her face to knock her out.
He’s then going to carry Elisabeth’s body into this hidden space that, as far as the authorities are concerned, doesn’t exist. And that hidden space contains simply a bed, a TV, a video, and he chains Elisabeth within that space.
Fritzl forced his daughter to write a letter saying she’d run away and joined a cult. He then drove 100 miles out of town to post the letter.
When did you first report on anything to do with the Fritzl family?
That was, I think, in 1984, or was it ’85? That’s when I got the call from the local police station in Amstetten, and they asked me, “Please put a picture of Elisabeth in the paper. We’re looking for her desperately.
It looks like a crime, but we don’t know what happened to her.” And that was the first ever item on Elisabeth Fritzl that was ever published worldwide.
Elisabeth Fritzl had said, “My daughter has run away. She’s run away.” We had an anonymous phone call, although we had a secret number, but she said, “Ah, yeah, I was phoned and she’s in the cult and dad, I’m not coming back home.”
And in reality, she was downstairs and being raped and on a dog’s leash. But that’s when I first reported.
Fritzl kept his daughter in the secret cellar. He’d beat her, torture her, and rape her repeatedly.
Elisabeth Fritzl, inevitably, is going to become pregnant because her father is raping her on a recurring basis. The first child that she has miscarriages. So, the first child that’s actually born is in 1988 and it’s a girl, a girl called Kerstin.
Can we just try and imagine how awful this birth must have been?
In fetid, humid, dark, and dank conditions, Fritzl has given his daughter a book on childbirth, a towel, a pair of scissors, and a couple of nappies, and in effect, has just allowed Elisabeth to deliver her child by herself.
In 1990, a second child, Stefan, was born.
By 1991, Elisabeth Fritzl had been incarcerated in the cellar beneath number 40 Ybbsstraße for almost 7 years. In that time, she’d given birth to two children, Kerstin and Stefan. Now, she was pregnant with a third.
Meanwhile, upstairs, her mother, brothers, and sisters lived on, completely unaware of her plight.
I’m exploring the kidnapping and enslavement of 18-year-old Elisabeth Fritzl in Amstetten, in Austria, in 1984. And the man behind the atrocity, her father, Josef Fritzl.
There were now two families living at 40 Ybbsstraße in Amstetten. One upstairs and one below, and all controlled by Josef Fritzl.
In August 1992, Elisabeth and Fritzl’s third child, Lisa, was born. She had a heart defect.
Pragmatically, I think Fritzl is worried that the so-called soundproofed cellar is not going to be able to cope with a small baby who is constantly in pain and therefore constantly crying. And one can also presume that Elisabeth herself is saying to her father that there’s something wrong with the baby and he has to take action.
And the action that he takes is that he puts Lisa on their doorstep of 40 Ybbsstraße with a note, which again, Elisabeth has been forced to write, saying this is her daughter, would her parents please look after the little girl. The little girl’s found on the doorstep and brought into the household.
Baby Lisa had emergency surgery to correct the heart defect and began life with her grandparents, Rosemary and Josef.
Downstairs, the children had grown considerably and the cellar was becoming cramped. Fritzl started converting more space for Elisabeth, Kerstin, and Stefan.
Fritzl is beginning to try to normalize this downstairs life. So, he’s moving in refrigerators. He’s moving in things that the children downstairs might want to play with.
There’s a television there, so they’re aware of what the outside world is like. They have pets. There’s a goldfish.
There’s a canary. But Fritzl is responsible for everything that goes into that space.
On the 16th of December, 1994, a second child arrived on the doorstep. Another note was found from Elisabeth saying the baby was called Monika. Lisa and Monika were adopted by their grandparents.
British-born reporter Mark Perry ran the story of the second baby in the newspaper Kronen Zeitung.
When the babies were dropped on the doorstep, two of them, the police constable phoned me again because I’ve good contact with them, and he said, “Yeah, we have this funny case and baby lying in front of the door, and we have no suspicions, but where’s the mother? We’ve got to find the mother because the children they want to grow up with a mom, with a real mom, and granddad is looking for her, and he was all the desperate father with the hell where she I hope she’s not been murdered or anything like that. No crime committed.
Elisabeth, please, please, please phone us. As every parent who has a child going missing because you never know what happens. Murder case, kidnapping.”
And he put forward the story later. “Oh, she’s in a cult somewhere, satanistic cult, all with devils and what’s-her-name and then all in his sick mind.”
You weren’t suspicious?
I wasn’t suspicious now. I thought, “What a terrible mother.” And then I feel sorry for that now because calling Elisabeth a terrible mother, but anyway, I’m not to blame because everybody believed that.
On the 28th of April, 1996, Elisabeth Fritzl gave birth to twins, Michael and Alexander. Josef Fritzl had now fathered six children with his own daughter.
Michael is very sick, has breathing difficulties, and Fritzl, in effect, allows the little boy to die. What Fritzl does with Michael is burn him in the furnace of the house. So, he destroys the body.
That leaves the second little boy, Alexander. And again, I think simply pragmatically, Fritzl can’t take the risk of Alexander dying. So, here’s a third foundling that’s left on the doorstep of 40 Ybbsstraße.
This is the main street in Amstetten, a small town in lower Austria. And this is the house where the Fritzl family lived, 40 Ybbsstraße.
Professor David Wilson, it is so ordinary. It’s just a typical everyday Austrian scene. You cannot believe it, can you?
Yes, the banality of evil is a phrase that comes to mind. Amstetten, a very quiet town, but look, this is a very busy street. And yet, Fritzl would have us believe, would have the Amstetten authorities believe that three babies could be left on a doorstep with nobody noticing.
Elisabeth Fritzl spent all those years in a cellar at the back of this property. How did she survive?
Well, I think the only way we can explain that survival is her own personal resilience, and then the psychological concept of the Stockholm syndrome, whereby the person who’s been taken hostage learns to accommodate the hostage-taker. In other words, if the hostage wants to survive that experience, they have to do basically what the hostage-taker wants them to do.
And Fritzl made her frightened to try and escape.
Absolutely. Part of the Stockholm syndrome is making the hostage feel as if there is literally no escape. He convinces Elisabeth that there’s gas traps, and there’s electronic doors, that there’s no way anybody can hear her cry.
It’s part of the process of controlling her in that space.
Josef Fritzl had control over two families, his upstairs life and his downstairs secret. But this still wasn’t enough. Work trips provided him with more opportunities and left Elisabeth completely alone in the cellar with her two children.
He would often be gone for a few weeks at a time, and during that time the family would be left to their own devices. I mean, there would be enough food and water for them to survive, but of course anything could have happened. There could have been a fire, there could have been a case of illness, there could have been an emergency.
He didn’t seem to much care about that. He would just leave them without any contact to the outside world and then just come back 3 weeks later after a nice little holiday in the sun.
By December 2002, Elisabeth Fritzl had been incarcerated for 18 years in the cellar beneath the house. 14-year-old Kerstin and 12-year-old Stefan had never been outside the cellar. They’d never seen the sun.
Elisabeth gave birth to a final child, a boy called Felix.
Interestingly, there’s a kind of mirroring going on here. Fritzl has seven legitimate children, and Fritzl, with the birth of Felix, has seven children through his incestuous relationship. So, there’s a sense of mirroring.
And because he’s so fond of Felix and wants Felix to inherit his world, you begin to see Fritzl trying to manage that process. How do I get this downstairs family integrated with the upstairs family?
And part of that’s pragmatic. He wants Felix to go to school. He realizes he can’t send Felix to school.
And perhaps even by this stage, Fritzl had realized there can’t be a fourth foundling found on the doorstep.
Fritzl started to make plans to free Elisabeth at the end of 2008. But in the middle of March that year, 19-year-old Kerstin became seriously ill. The only medication at their disposal was aspirin.
So, she had been given aspirin for weeks, but it obviously didn’t help. And Elisabeth managed to convince Fritzl to take Kerstin to the hospital. And this was probably the first time in those 24 years where she really put her foot down.
She was adamant that she would just not go on if he were to allow Kerstin to die, which was probably what would have happened.
On the 19th of April, 2008, Elisabeth helped her father carry Kerstin upstairs before returning to join Stefan and Felix.
The doctor at the hospital, Dr. Reiter, needed more medical information. But without the mother, no one could answer his questions.
So, a television appeal went out looking for Elisabeth, which Elisabeth saw on her television in the cellar.
Elisabeth’s world changed forever on Saturday, the 26th of April. Elisabeth persuades Josef that she has to go to the hospital to explain what’s been happening to Kerstin. And therefore, Josef takes Elisabeth to the hospital.
Dr. Reiter interviews Elisabeth, tries to get as much information as possible. And once that interview is finished, the police arrest Elisabeth, take her into a room, and begin to interrogate her.
And it’s only when they threaten to take away her children that Elisabeth reveals for the first time what Josef Fritzl has been doing to her, and the police arrest Josef Fritzl, and the game is in effect up.
Fritzl freed his other two children, Stefan and Felix, at the same time as releasing Elisabeth.
What condition were they in, as far as you know, when they were released?
Well, they were in a very bad condition at the time of their release. I mean, you have to know that Fritzl kind of did try to provide as much care as possible for them. He brought them vitamin supplements.
He bought them lamps because of the vitamin D deficiency, you know, they were never 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 to the sun. And so on, but they were in an extremely bad condition, obviously. Their skins were all pale.
They had all sorts of infections because of the filth of the humidity of the place where they lived. It was infested with bacteria, with insects, and so on.
By Sunday, the 27th of April, news of Elisabeth’s 24 years of enslavement had spread. The press began to arrive, and the forensic experts entered the cellar of 40 Ybbsstraße in Amstetten.
The years of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 and rape had ended. And now the family had to adapt to a strange, new world outside.
I’m reinvestigating the horrifying incarceration of Elisabeth Fritzl by her father, Josef, and Austria’s reaction to his brutal actions.
It was at the end of April 2008 when the world realized the horror that was unfolding in the small town of Amstetten. Elisabeth Fritzl had revealed the unimaginable crimes of her father. But the immediate focus though was on her first child, 19-year-old Kerstin, who was seriously ill in hospital.
Tell me a little about the reaction of first of all Kerstin when she woke up in hospital.
Actually very moving. I talked to the doctors. She just like in a film, just slowly opened the eyes, looked around, and the first thing she said, “I want to watch a Robin Williams concert.”
The second thing, “A new life is starting for all of us. Let us be happy.”
Little Felix pressing his nose to the window, going in this car for the first time in this little life, watching all the lights, seeing the moonlight for the first time, and glowing his little nose till it’s white to the windshield of the car, just looking, staring, wide eyes, saying nothing. That was his first look at the normal life.
Colonel Frank Polzer, the head of Lower Austria’s criminal police, held an impromptu press conference on the 27th of April. He told the world that Josef Fritzl had kept his daughter in his cellar for 24 years, and that she’d borne him several children. The press went wild.
Boyan, tell me what the reaction was like in Austria when news of the whole Fritzl 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 became public.
The reports were quite erratic, and I think the news readers were themselves in disbelief about what they were actually reading from the local wire which was based on a press release from Amstetten’s police. Within 2 days they had about 800 camera teams and journalists and interpreters, fixers, TV vans, satellite dishes.
It is our duty to investigate the concurrent circumstances which made it possible that such crime which shocked all of us deeply could happen.
In Austria there was a huge backlash against the international coverage and part of it was justified because, you know, especially tabloids from the English-speaking world were very intrusive because they were hungry, they were demanding images from the family, you know, they were demanding details of the ordeal and the family refused, Elisabeth refused and she refuses to this very day to be photographed, to speak to anyone, you know, she doesn’t want her story told by herself or the family, she doesn’t want them to be in the spotlight.
Following his arrest, the authorities ordered a psychiatric evaluation of the 73-year-old Josef Fritzl. Was he insane or was he suffering from a deep-rooted personality disorder?
Dr. Adelheid Kastner was asked by the courts to assess Fritzl’s reasons behind his actions.
Was this the most awful case you have been involved with yourself?
You can’t really imagine what 24 years mean. You can’t. I remember I was standing down there in the cellar and thought well they were down there for 24 years.
So, now I try to imagine what that means. And I thought, well, where have I been 24 years ago and what happened in this time? And it feels like forever.
It feels like endless.
Is it possible for you to paint a picture for me of what the cellar was like?
It was quite a mess. With all kinds of machine parts lying around and the writing desk and it was a rabbit warren of rooms of cellar rooms. And in the far corner was a cupboard.
And behind that cupboard was a door. It was 1 m per 1 m. And it was a metal frame filled with concrete like that.
And you had to creep through it because it was only 1 m high to go on your knees. And then you could behind the door you could stand up again and it was a corridor. It was leading to another door like that.
You had to go down on your knees again and then you came to a kind of provisions room where you had shelves and a fridge. And then you came to the living quarters. From there on the doors were relatively normal.
And the rooms were so that I could stand there. Could easily stand there. And it was humid.
It smelled rotten. It was not a nice place to live in.
On the 16th of March, 2009, Josef Fritzl was brought to trial here at Sankt Pölten, the capital of Lower Austria. He was charged with rape, enslavement, incest, and the murder of one of the children he’d conceived with his daughter, Elisabeth.
At first, Josef Fritzl entered a plea of not guilty.
What was his demeanor at the trial?
He was polite. He answered the questions. He was sitting there like a stone.
But he changed his plea when he saw Elisabeth. He had to listen to her. And he couldn’t close his ears.
Yeah, he had to listen to what she was saying. And what she was saying was quite another story than he was telling. And she was telling about how horrible the time was and had been and how brutally it had been and how horrible the time was and that she did not at all feel like a partner or that she didn’t see that as a partnership.
But she saw it as a crime. And I think somehow this got to him.
Her testimony was recorded, was video recorded, and this was used as evidence throughout the trial. As were the testimonies of some of the children, but she decided to show up as a final act of defiance. You know, she just wanted to see him there in the dock, you know, being put on trial, shamed, you know, his crimes 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 for everyone to see.
For the first time in her life, she was over 40 years old at the time. She had been abused by him for the whole of her life, basically, ever since her early childhood. Her whole family had been abused by him.
He was a tyrant. He kind of ruled over her fate for the whole of her life and this was the one final moment where she kind of appeared as a free independent woman. And he was on trial.
So I think that appearance made an impact.
He burst into tears reportedly. And then changed his plea to guilty.
After a four-day trial, Josef Fritzl was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment for murder by neglect, 20 years for enslavement, 15 years for rape, 10 years for deprivation of liberty, five years for coercion, and one year for incest.
Elisabeth and her children are now living a secluded life away from the media in an undisclosed location so the children can have normal lives.
It’s amazing she didn’t go mad, isn’t it?
I think she didn’t go mad because she had the children. I think it would have been almost impossible for her to survive alone on her own. But she had a reason to live.
And she had the children. She taught the children. She tried to maintain an almost normal life.
Yes, she made the children get up at a set time and she made breakfast for the family and she had them go to school, so to speak. That is she taught them. She tried to maintain a normal almost seemingly normal life.
And I think that is what saved her.
Do you think in his own strange, perverted way, he loved her?
He can’t love anybody. He definitely can’t. He’s incapable of loving anybody.
But he is convinced that he loved her. And he says, “Well, she was like a second wife to me. She was like my second marriage.”
What are your feelings now about Josef Fritzl?
You can’t have feelings for such a person. I don’t have feelings. Anyway, the sentence is well, he’s an old man.
He won’t get out of there. I didn’t like him as a child. He was unlikable.
And now, after the 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇, I can’t find words. It is good that he’s been put away and that you don’t have to see him anymore.
And as we stand in front of this grim, fortress-like building, your final thoughts on Josef Fritzl, the man?
I think this is almost the best angle to view 40 Ybbsstraße in Amstetten because this building behind me reminds me of some of the prisons I’ve worked in. And you know, my final thoughts would be these. This isn’t New York.
This isn’t London. This isn’t some kind of anonymous urban environment. It’s sleepy Amstetten.
And therefore, the thing to take away is sometimes the most dreadful of crimes can happen in the most ordinary of places.
For me, the case of Josef Fritzl is one of the most 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 ever. The word cruelty doesn’t begin to describe the torture handed out to Elisabeth and her young family by their father. How any father could commit such a crime is beyond me.
Justice, of course, has been served. Josef Fritzl will die in prison. But for Elisabeth and her children, the scars will last a lifetime.
