House of Horrors. Nige Cawthorne
prospect – particularly if the victim is your own flesh and blood. Perhaps he knew that he really could kill his dungeon captives because he had already killed elsewhere. He was plainly a man who placed little value on the lives of others – whether they were strangers or his own flesh and blood.
Elisabeth was the prettiest of Fritzl’s daughters when she fell prey to her monstrous father. With her picture-book Austrian good looks – high cheekbones, wide eyes and a rosebud smile – she was always the apple of his eye. Despite Rosemarie saying that Ulrike, the oldest girl, was Fritzl’s favourite, he himself insisted it was Elisabeth. Ulrike answered him back, Rosemarie said, and Fritzl respected that, but it was no good for his purpose: he needed someone he could intimidate.
During a crucial part of Ulrike’s development, Fritzl had been away in jail. Perhaps that’s what had made her so single-minded. But Elisabeth was still an infant when her father was in prison. By 1977, Ulrike was 19 and getting ready to slip from his grasp by leaving home, but Elisabeth was only 11 and had not begun the ‘youthful rebellion’ he complained of later. She still took care to hide the evidence of the beatings she suffered from her teachers and school friends. What began as a vicious over-indulgence in discipline and punishment developed into a sadistic fixation and Fritzl began to sexually assault his helpless daughter. This may have begun while her brother and sisters were enjoying a holiday with their mother. Having lost interest sexually in his wife, Fritzl began to go on vacation on his own. One holiday snap released to the press shows him on a trip to the Mediterranean in the late 1970s – at a time when it is thought he was already sexually abusing the ill-fated Elisabeth.
Elisabeth said that the abuse started when she was 11. Fritzl denies it, saying that it began much later, but there is circumstantial evidence to substantiate Elisabeth’s allegation. In 1977, Rosemarie took Ulrike, Rosi (then 16) and their brother Harald (13) to Italy. Family pictures show the sisters enjoying their two-week vacation. But Fritzl refused to let Elisabeth go and so she spent the fortnight at home with her depraved father. His perverted lust was the driving force behind his later crimes and, being at home alone for two weeks with the child he had already cowed, he had manufactured the perfect opportunity to inflict himself on her.
Family friend Paul Hoera joined the Fritzl family with his own children for the break. ‘I can’t bear to see them any more,’ he said, after discovering the secret of Fritzl’s House of Horrors. ‘While we enjoyed ourselves, he could have been putting Elisabeth through goodness knows what.’
Paul, now 69, added, ‘Elisabeth as a child was withdrawn and shy. I got the impression Josef didn’t like her much. He didn’t treat her as well as his other kids. He used to beat her a lot more. She used to get a slap for small things. I feel sick every time I think of her under the house when we were sitting in the garden laughing and joking.’
Denied the simple pleasures of a family holiday, Elisabeth was trapped at home with her tyrannical and sexually predatory father. That year, Fritzl had begun raping her, the police report says – although, even now, she can barely bring herself to speak of it and the details are yet to come out.
As a young girl, she could not understand her predicament. Although her father was a domineering man, as a child she had offered him total obedience, but somehow he was now treating her differently from her brothers and sisters. ‘I don’t know why it was so,’ she said, ‘but my father simply chose me for himself.’
She later told the police that Fritzl would rape her without warning, in his car and on walks through the forest – even in the cellar. He denied this, saying that he only began to have sexual contact with his daughter some time after he locked her in the dungeon. Elisabeth was terrified of the days when he came to her, when he would mercilessly abuse her because, in his eyes, she belonged to him. She was nothing beyond being his possession to do with as he pleased.
‘I am not a man who would molest children,’ he said. ‘I only had sex with her later, much later.’
However, it seems plain now that something was going on – the signs were all too obvious. Elisabeth, already an outsider at school, became more withdrawn. Her best friend at Amstetten High School, Christa Woldrich, said that she always had to be home half an hour after school finished.
‘I was never allowed to visit her,’ said Christa. ‘The only explanation she ever gave was that her father was very strict. I did not see him, but he was always there between us because of his influence over her, like an invisible presence you could always feel.’
Another school friend recalled how Elisabeth was ‘terrified of not being home on time’. ‘When we went to her home, we had to leave as soon as her father appeared,’ she said.
Christa Woldrich said the teenage Elisabeth was noticeably reserved when speaking of life outside the classroom. ‘I did get the impression that she felt more comfortable at school than at home,’ said Christa. ‘And sometimes she went quiet when it was time to go home again. It was the same for both of us – it was like a silence descending.’
It was clear that Elisabeth was being physically abused by her father. Other school friends said that she had sometimes avoided gym classes for fear that the teacher would ask about the bruises all over her body. Classmate Christa Gotzinger, who also had a violent father, said, ‘We learnt to take the beatings … We learnt how to pull ourselves together when the pain was unbearable.’
Another friend, who refused to be identified, said that Fritzl punched his children. ‘He didn’t slap or spank them,’ she said. ‘He hit them with his fists. Her brother once told me, “The pig will beat us to death one day”.’
As Elisabeth grew older and began to show the first signs of becoming a woman, Fritzl grew frighteningly possessive over his daughter. He flew into a tempestuous rage if she attempted to dress fashionably, wore make-up or mentioned boys. Christa Woldrich noted the effect these furious outbursts had on her. ‘Elisabeth became very sullen and withdrawn,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t allowed out in the evenings or to invite friends to the house. I think she was comfortable only at school, though she wasn’t very good at anything.’
It was clear that she was not developing along the lines of other girls. There was no chance that she could get close to a boy, or even develop a crush. ‘She was so pretty she could have had boyfriends, but she never did,’ said Christa. ‘She just sat quietly and no one noticed her. When I think about it, I wonder why the teachers never realised something was wrong.’
Though it was widely known at school that Fritzl was violent towards his daughter, not even Elisabeth’s best friend Christa knew about the sexual abuse at the time. ‘The abuse at 11?’ said Christa, after it eventually came out. ‘I have thought about it a lot recently, whether I noticed anything when we were back at school. Now it is easier to understand why she didn’t talk about boys or about sex. Now, with hindsight, I understand why she didn’t talk about certain things or why she was distant and quiet, but we didn’t realise it back then. You just think, oh, you’re having a bad day.’
In 1978, when Elisabeth was just 12, Josef Fritzl applied for planning permission to turn his basement into a nuclear shelter. This was not unusual during the Cold War years. Austria was on the front line in the confrontation between the Soviet Bloc and the West. At the end of the Second World War, much of the country was in Russian hands and the Red Army stayed on as an occupying force in the Soviet zone for ten years. When they withdrew in 1955, eastern Austria was left surrounded on three sides by the Iron Curtain with Communist Czechoslovakia to the north, Hungary to the east and Yugoslavia to the south. Amstetten was barely 30 miles from the heavily guarded border that divided East from West. Both sides of the frontier bristled with nuclear weapons. The situation remained that way until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Fritzl worked single-handedly on building the shelter over the next