House of Horrors. Nige Cawthorne
she might not be the only victim of his sexual deviancy. She said she had seen Fritzl on a number of occasions in Linz before she was assaulted by him. He had attracted attention because he behaved like a peeping Tom. ‘He was a voyeur. He used to ride around on his bicycle and watch everyone,’ she said.
Once Fritzl had been exposed as the dungeon rapist in the Austrian press and on television, it was then that the memory came flooding back and she realised that he was the same man who raped her more than 40 years before.
A third woman from Linz also went to the police in April 2008 to complain of an attempted rape by Fritzl. She had been 24 at the time and a work colleague of his. On 2 May, officials said a rape file had been found and was being studied. However, the Austrian justice authorities say the offence is irrelevant because it happened more than 15 years ago and was beyond the statute of limitations.
However, Fritzl was convicted and went to prison at the time. As a result, he lost his job. But he was such a good engineer, and such was his ability for inventing new devices that, in 1969, when he was released, he immediately found work, despite his record.
‘My father often said he was an absolute genius,’ said a daughter of his late boss, Karl Zehetner. ‘He was amazed at what he could do.’
Fritzl’s ingenuity would later be put to sinister use when constructing the elaborate dungeon where he imprisoned the hapless Elisabeth and their children, complete with its electronically-controlled sliding steel door.
When the sister-in-law of the company’s manager was told that Fritzl had been taken on, she spoke up. ‘I don’t want that,’ she protested. In her mind, Fritzl was a danger and she repeatedly warned her children to stay away from him.
A spokeswoman for a company where Josef Fritzl was employed as an engineer and procurement manager during the 1970s also had misgivings. ‘He did an excellent job,’ she said, ‘but there was always something uneasy about him as it was widely known that he had served time in prison for a sexual offence.’
Neighbours in Amstetten also knew of his record. ‘I was ten at the time,’ a 50-year-old resident now recalls, ‘but I remember how we children were afraid to play near Fritzl’s house because of the rumours that he had raped a woman and spent some time in jail for it.’
Later, Fritzl became a travelling salesman for a German company and then worked as an electrical engineer at a company that made industrial drills. In 1973, he and his wife bought a summer guesthouse and camping ground at an idyllic tourist spot in the mountains on the shores of Lake Mondsee in the Vöcklabruck district of the Salzkammergut near Salzburg, which they ran until 1996. Then, in the 1980s, he decided to move into real estate, buying several buildings around Amstetten. He already owned the large grey town house at 40 Ybbsstrasse in Amstetten, which he extended into the back garden to provide accommodation for up to eight tenants at a time. The family lived on the floors above; below was the cellar.
Over the years, Fritzl bought a further five properties and started an underwear company. But his attempts at property development came to nothing and his businesses failed. It is now known that he had run up debts of more than €2m (£1.56m) as a result of his various endeavours, but in the eyes of the townsfolk, he became ‘a man of stature’, as the local police chief put it. He was a respected, well-connected figure in Amstetten, often seen at the wheel of a Mercedes. He dressed in fine clothes, with gold rings on his fingers and a gold chain round his neck. Even when running errands, locals said, he wore a natty jacket, crisp shirt and tie.
Generally, Fritzl was known in Amstetten as a polite man who loved fishing, drinking beer and sharing a bawdy joke with his neighbours. But he was a private individual; he was not active in community or church groups. Even fellow members of his fishing club say he was something of a question mark. Fritzl made little attempt to socialise, but always paid his dues. ‘There was never a problem with him,’ said club treasurer Reinhard Kern. ‘Whether he actually went fishing or not, how am I to know? Maybe it was an alibi.’
However, most neighbours or townsfolk remember only an affable, if unremarkable, fellow who liked to keep himself to himself. In fact, he was part of a well-heeled coterie of businessmen who were not short of friends in all the right places.
With all record of the rape conviction eradicated after ten years under Austria’s statute of limitations, Fritzl was at liberty to present himself as the strong, wholesome family man. In a devoutly Catholic country like Austria, it is necessary for a ‘paterfamilias’ to sire a large brood and Fritzl fathered five girls and two boys. Ulrike was born in 1958; Rosemarie followed in 1961; Harald in 1964; Elisabeth in 1966; the twins Josef Jnr and Gabriele in 1971; and Doris in 1973.
Outwardly, all was well. Josef Fritzl was the smartly dressed engineer who drove a nice car and had such well behaved children. True, he was an autocratic task-master behind closed doors, but that was not an unknown characteristic among provincial Austrian men of his generation.
Fritzl said that his favourite daughter was Elisabeth, the fourth of his seven children with Rosemarie, but that did not mean that she was given an easy time. Because she was pretty, it appears that he was harder on her than the others and beat her mercilessly. Fritzl had no time for spoiling children. At home, in this traditional Austrian family, father ruled the roost – though, even in the eyes of others who shared his background, he was inordinately strict.
‘For me, I always had the impression that Sepp was an intelligent and successful man,’ said Leopold Stütz, deputy mayor of Lasberg, a town 30 miles from Amstetten. Stütz was a close friend of the Fritzls and even went on joint holidays with the family. ‘He often talked about his perfect family. He was very strict with his children, a strict but fair father, I would say. It was enough for him to snap his fingers and the youngsters would be in bed. He always stressed that, for him, education and career were the most important things.’
Others were not so sanguine. Fritzl’s sister-in-law Christine told the Austrian newspaper Österreich that her brother-in-law was a ‘disgusting despot’, who cleverly covered up his excesses. ‘Every person that looked in his eyes was fooled by him,’ she said.
The family lived in fear of his outbursts. ‘He tolerated no dissent,’ said Christine. ‘When he said it was black, it was black, even when it was ten times white.’ She loathed the way he was so harsh on the kids. ‘I always hated him,’ she said. ‘He was like an army drill instructor with his children. They had to stop whatever they were doing and stand still when he entered the room. Silence fell over everyone immediately – even when they were in the middle of playing a game. You could sense their constant fear of being punished.’
The children were required to remain silent while their father was in a room. If they failed to comply, or if they forgot to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, he would hit them until they toed the line. They were very rarely allowed to have friends round. If they did, the children’s friends had to leave the house immediately when he came home from work.
Christine believed that Fritzl’s tyrannical behaviour towards the seven children he had with her elder sister Rosemarie was the main reason why most of them had married young. ‘The only chance for the children to escape this atmosphere was to marry,’ she said. ‘And that’s what they all did as soon as they were old enough.’
When Elisabeth finally escaped the House of Horrors and the police eventually took an interest, they confirmed what Christine was saying. ‘We have spoken at length to Elisabeth’s brothers and sisters,’ said the detective in charge of the case, Chief Investigator Polzer. ‘All of them said their father wasn’t just very strict, aggressive, dominant and power-mad, he was a “real tyrant”. They weren’t ever allowed to address him or ask him anything. That was why every child except one son left the house as soon as they could.’
However, none of them moved very far. Their eldest daughter Rosemarie married at 21 and now lives with her husband, Horst Herlbauer, in an apartment in the Linz suburb of Traun, 30 miles from the family home. With his wife, Harald moved into an orange-painted cottage in the village of Mitterkirchen im Machland, eight miles from Amstetten. Doris left home when she married