House of Horrors. Nige Cawthorne
see her father again. This was a shock to the detectives. Fritzl was a pillar of the community; a retired electrical engineer and the owner of a number of properties in the town, he had lived there all his life. He had brought up three of Elisabeth’s abandoned children and had even taken her critically ill daughter to the hospital after she had, apparently, neglected the child. But Elisabeth then told them a story that beggared belief.
She said she had not run away to join a cult and her father was not the caring family man that he pretended to be. A strict disciplinarian, he had been beating her brutally from the time she was old enough to walk. The sexual assaults had begun when she was 11. She then said that, when she was 18, he had drugged her, dragged her to a concealed cellar in his house, raped her, and had continued to do so for the next 24 years. The rapes had resulted in seven children. For nearly a quarter-of-a-century, she and three of the children had lived in a windowless hell-hole beneath the family home. The children had never seen the outside world or breathed fresh air; they had never known freedom, nor had had any contact with wider society. The only other person they had seen was their jailer, a man who would alternately play with them and terrorise them.
She said that he told them that the doors to the cellar were electrified and, if they tried to escape, they would be gassed. He raped their mother in front of them and yet, with the boxes of groceries and meals he shoved through a hatch, he was their only lifeline. The good family man of Amstetten was, in truth, a brutal monster, and the respectable family home at 40 Ybbsstrasse was, in fact, a House of Hrrors.
All this was hard to believe, but the police could not put aside the evidence of their own eyes. Elisabeth was in such a shocking state that she had clearly gone through some terrible ordeal – possibly the one she had just described.
The police had to put her allegations to Fritzl. Initially, he refused to talk, even producing the letter from his daughter saying that she was intending to return from the religious sect where she had spent the last 24 years in an attempt to deflect her accusations. Later, he even complained that he was disappointed that Elisabeth had seized her opportunity to ‘betray’ him so rapidly.
The following morning, the police took Josef Fritzl back to his house at 40 Ybbsstrasse. The front was a typical suburban townhouse on an ordinary street, but at the rear was an imposing concrete structure, not unlike a wartime bunker. Although it was set among leafy suburban gardens where those neighbouring the Fritzls’ property were all visible, the back of the house was screened off by high hedges. Fritzl’s garden was the only one not overlooked by neighbours.
At first, the police could not find the dungeon where Elisabeth said she had been held; it was so well hidden. But, sensing the game was up, Fritzl led them down the cellar stairs and through eight locked doors and a warren of rooms. Concealed behind a shelving unit in his basement workshop was a heavy steel door just 1m high with a remote-control locking device. After some prompting, Fritzl gave the police the code to open it; he was the only one who knew the code. He had told Elisabeth and her children that if they harmed him or overpowered him while he was in the cellar, they would find themselves locked in there for ever. He taunted them that, if he died suddenly from a heart-attack outside, they would starve. Their prison was also rigged with security systems that would electrocute them if they tried to tamper with the door, and led them to believe toxic gas would be pumped in, should they try to escape.
Later, he told Lower Austria’s top criminal investigator, Oberst Franz Polzer, that the lock on the heavy steel door that shut the basement dungeon off from the outside world worked on a timer. It would open automatically if he was away for a protracted period, so his daughter and her children would be freed if he died, he said.
‘But there was no mechanism in place that we have found to release them,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer. ‘I do not want to think about what would have happened to the mother and her three children if anything had happened to Fritzl.’
Beyond a basement workshop, Fritzl had built a perfectly concealed bunker to imprison his own daughter and her children. Ducking through the first door – just 3 feet 3 inches high – the police found a narrow corridor. At the end was a padded room, sound-proofed with rubber cladding, where he would rape his daughter while the children cowered elsewhere. It was so well insulated that no scream, cry or sob could be heard in any other part of the building. Beyond that was a living area, then down a passage little more than a foot wide that you would have to turn sideways to negotiate were a rudimentary kitchen and bathroom. Further on, there were two small bedrooms, each with two beds in them. There was no natural light and little air.
On the white-tiled walls of a tiny shower cubicle, the captives had painted an octopus, a snail, a butterfly and a flower in an attempt to brighten their prison. The furnishings were sparse. The police found a toy elephant perched on a mirrored medicine cabinet and scraps of paper and glue that the children had used to make toys. The only other distraction was a small TV, which provided flickering images of the outside world, which the children had never experienced and, for Elisabeth, was an increasingly dim memory. There was also a washing machine and a fridge and freezer, where food could be stored when Fritzl took off on the holidays he denied his captives.
The entire space was lit by electric light bulbs – the only source of light – although Elisabeth had begged her father to give her vitamin D supplements and an ultraviolet light to prevent her kids from suffering growth abnormalities. The lights went on and off on a timer to give them some sense of day and night, something else that the children had never experienced.
The police found two children who had survived these appalling conditions – 18-year-old Stefan and 5-year-old Felix. They were in a poor physical state and unused to strangers; they were so lacking in social skills that the police found they were practically feral. Because of the low ceilings in the dungeon – never more than 1.7 metres, or 5 feet 6 inches – Stefan was stooped. In his excitement, young Felix resorted to going on all fours. Having never been required to communicate with anyone beyond their immediate circle, the police found the boys had difficulty talking and, between themselves, resorted to grunts. For the first time in their lives, they were taken out into the daylight.
Confronted with the evidence, Fritzl confessed that he had imprisoned his daughter. ‘Yes,’ he told the police, ‘I locked her up, but only to protect her from drugs. She was a difficult child.’
While admitting to having repeatedly raped her, he rejected his daughter’s allegations that he had chained her to the cellar wall and kept her ‘like an animal’, claiming he had been kind to the ‘second family’ he kept in the cellar. He admitted that the children were his own, the offspring of incest with his own daughter, and subsequent DNA tests confirmed that he was their father. However, the police did not understand why he had decided that three of the children – Lisa, 16; Monika, 14 and Alexander, 12 – should live upstairs with him and his wife and go to school, while the other three – Kerstin, 19; Stefan, 18 and Felix, 5 – should remain downstairs in their subterranean prison. Asked by police how he had come to that decision, Fritzl told them he had feared the noise of their cries might lead to their discovery. ‘They were sickly and cried too much in the cellar for my liking,’ he said.
There had been another child, Alexander’s twin, who had died at just three days old, back in 1996. The infant’s sex has not been determined, but it is now thought to have been a boy and has posthumously been named Michael. Fritzl had taken the child’s tiny body and burnt it in the furnace that provides hot water and central heating for the family home that lay just beyond the steel door in the more open part of the cellar.
Fritzl confessed in an almost matter-of-fact manner to the abduction and rape of his daughter, and to the imprisonment and enslavement of Elisabeth and their children, as well to incinerating the body of Michael. Otherwise, he was not particularly forthcoming during his interrogation, officers said. He did not bother to explain himself; he just said he was ‘sorry’ for his family and announced that he wanted to be left in peace.
Despite the DNA tests confirming that Fritzl fathered the cellar children, in court he may yet plead not guilty to rape, incest and false imprisonment. His lawyer Rudolf Mayer declared, ‘The allegations of rape and enslaving people have not been proved. We need to reassess the confessions