House of Horrors. Nige Cawthorne
Elisabeth’s dungeon ordeal began.
Elfriede later speculated that Rosemarie might have had some inkling that something was going on in the cellar. ‘Rosemarie once told me, “Josef is busy at home at the moment – he has lots of building work to do,”’ Elfriede said. ‘she did not know what he was doing.’
Elfriede is sure that Rosemarie did not know what her husband was up to, because she was too cowed by his brutality even to ask questions.
However, in 1973, Rosemarie plucked up the courage to leave her husband, although she was not allowed to take the children with her. It seems she simply made the excuse that she had to stay at a guesthouse at Mondsee to take care of business there. It was two hours from the family home. Fritzl insisted their seven children stay with him at Ybbsstrasse, although she was allowed to see them occasionally.
Rosemarie’s former colleague Anton Klammer said, ‘Josef beat her and she was petrified of him. She loved her kids but the guest house they owned was a good excuse to leave him. She thought that if she didn’t leave, he may kill her. Rosemarie was happy and normal but when he was around she used to shrink away. You could tell she was terrified of him. The children stayed with Josef because they had to go to school but sometimes he would come up and drop the children off with Rosemarie for a few nights. She was a loving mother.’
Rosemarie had to move back into 40 Ybbsstrasse nine years later when the guesthouse was burnt down. Soon after Fritzl was arrested for arson. A local newspaper published a picture of Fritzl taken at a court hearing in 1982. However, he was released due to lack of evidence.
Beate Schmidinger, the owner of a nearby café, said, ‘Everyone thought he set fire to the place because we knew he had money trouble.’
Despite the appearance of prosperity, it is clear that Fritzl was already badly in debt, but the real motivation for the fire might have been to force Rosemarie to return to Ybbsstrasse, where he could control her.
Paul Ruhdorfer, who took over the guesthouse after it had been restored, said, ‘There were two Rosemaries. One was the owner and competent businesswoman who was happy and carefree. The other was a timid victim, controlled by her overbearing husband.’
While Fritzl was a tyrant, that did not mean he could not enjoy life as well. A friend, who went on holiday with him to Thailand, filmed him having a massage on a beach and cheerfully tucking into a knuckle of roast ham. A home video from this Thailand trip, shown widely on Austrian television, showed Fritzl and a friend from Munich riding on an elephant. The off-camera commentary says, ‘Hey, Sepp, you had better show this to your wife to convince her that we’re on safari, not hunting for humans.’ The police do not believe this was significant. It may simply have been a reference to his predilection for seeking out young Thai prostitutes. However, the remark now appears chilling.
It is clear that Fritzl had, indeed, once hunted humans – his rape victims. Even before his daughter disappeared into the cellar, he could have feasibly perpetrated a series of ghoulish crimes. Despite the removal of his 1967 rape conviction from the record, the Linz police now believe he was a suspect in two other sex attacks, in 1974 and 1982. He was also investigated for arson and insurance fraud on more than one occasion and there are indications that he had at least one other conviction. However, once again, the records have been expunged and the authorities said they were unable to give further details of the crime.
‘I don’t know what happened then,’ said District Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze. ‘It happened too long ago. It’s beyond the statute of limitations and it’s therefore no longer of relevance to the authorities.’
Along with Austria’s laws governing the lapsing of criminal records for the purpose of rehabilitating criminals, Fritzl has also been the beneficiary of an informal ‘Masonic’ network that has brought ‘good chaps’ with murky pasts back into main-stream respectability. Without a de-Nazification programme, a large number of former Nazis – some of whom were involved in the concentration camps or implicated in the Holocaust or other atrocities – managed to find their way back into society. As a result, it was usually best not to ask too many personal questions. Austrian diplomat Kurt Waldheim, for example, had served two terms as Secretary General of the United Nations and was standing for election for the Austrian presidency when it was revealed that he had not been studying law at the University of Vienna during the war as he claimed. Instead, he had been with a German unit in the Balkans that took brutal reprisals against Yugoslav partisans and shot civilians, and was responsible for the deportation of the Jews from Salonika in Greece to the death camps in 1943. Nevertheless, he won the election and served for six years as President.
In Fritzl’s case, the Austrian unwillingness to ask questions may have covered up some more recent crimes. On 22 November 1986, 17-year-old Martina Posch was found dead on the southern shore of Mondsee Lake, opposite the Fritzls’ guesthouse and camping ground near Salzburg. Two divers found Martina’s naked body, bound and wrapped in two green plastic sheets, ten days after she had gone missing from her home. She was thought to have been raped and murdered before her body was dumped in the lake.
No one was arrested. Fritzl’s best friend, Paul Hoera, who first met him at Mondsee on a camping holiday with his wife, Rosemarie’s friend Elfriede, in 1973, said he made regular trips to the lake and could have been in the area when Martina went missing. Since Fritzl hit the headlines, the police made the connection between the two cases and Martina Posch’s 22-year-old murder file has been re-opened. A pretty 17-year-old, Martina bore a striking resemblance to Elisabeth who, by then, had already been in captivity for over two years.
‘We have found no sign of a concrete link up to now,’ said Alois Lissl, Chief of Police of Upper Austria province, but he said Fritzl would be questioned about the murder as he could have been in the area when Martina was killed.
Although Fritzl was no longer co-operating with the police, he had claimed earlier that he had an alibi for the day Martina Posch was killed and dumped in the lake. This has yet to be tested in court, but his close friend Andrea Schmitt said that her husband was staying at Lake Mondsee at the time – and she believes Fritzl was there, too.
The police were also hoping to find a DNA match, and they searched Fritzl’s house for the murdered girl’s missing possessions, which include a blue jacket, a grey purse and a pair of black ankle boots.
‘The perpetrator could have kept these items as a kind of trophy,’ said Police Chief Lissl, adding, ‘What really stands out is that, without her permanent wave, Martina looks similar to Fritzl’s daughter Elisabeth. When we put the portrait photographs next to each other, it was unbelievable.’
The artist’s drawing of Elisabeth published so far bears little similarity to the only photographs of Martina released to date. Observers say Elisabeth now looks more like the sister of her mother, Rosemarie, who is 69. However, a black-and-white snap of Elisabeth as a smiling teenager and a colour picture of her as a 14-year-old secondary school pupil are said to bear an uncanny resemblance.
Austrian police are also investigating the possibility that Fritzl was involved in another unsolved sexually-motivated murder of a teenager in the 1960s. In 1966, prior to Fritzl’s first conviction for rape, the body of 17-year-old Anna Neumauer was found in a cornfield near her home in Pfaffstaett bei Mattinghofen in Lower Austria, 65 miles from Amstetten. She had been killed with a captive bolt pistol, the type used for slaughtering livestock.
The police are reviewing the case of 16-year-old Julia Kuehrer, who disappeared from Pulkau, 60 miles from Amstetten, in June 2006, and they are also looking for any possible connection between Fritzl and the murder of Gabriele Supekova, a 42-year-old prostitute, whose body was found in August 2007 near the Austrian border, where Fritzl is said to have spent time on holiday.
It may be that the police are just trying to write off their unsolved cases. On the other hand, Fritzl might have been conducting a parallel career as a serial killer. It is not unknown for criminals to progress from minor crimes such as flashing or theft, via rape to murder – and, in this case, possibly, to incest, imprisonment and enslavery.
After his arrest, Fritzl condemned the media coverage