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Mummy: Is there one small hope? | Factfile
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are child abuse scandals happening in Austria?
The Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter and fathered a hidden incestuous
family with her had previously been convicted of sexual assault, The Times
has learnt.
Josef F has at least one other conviction, for arson, and he allegedly spent
time in prison in the late 1960s. Austrian prosecutors said that they were
aware of the allegations and trying to trace the records in court archives.
The revelation came as Austria struggled to come to terms with how the
appalling abused of his children could have remained undiscovered for almost
a quarter of a century.
According to most of their neighbours, Mr F and his wife Rosemarie appeared to
be upright citizens – and commendable in the way that they had raised the
three children dumped on their doorstep by the daughter who had walked out
of their lives to join some kind of cult 24 years earlier.
"They appeared normal, just like any other family," Guenter
Prameiter, who runs a bakery just down the street, said.
Mrs F "always looked after the kids so well, taking them to school. We
said ‘It’s incredible what she manages to do at her age’,"
remarked another neighbour.
"They had a swimming pool in the garden. We would hear them [the
children] laughing, the three of them," said a third.
But none of them – until now – had the faintest idea of the horrors taking
place in the makeshift dungeon that Mr F had built beneath his nondescript
house in the industrial town of Amstetten, in eastern Austria.
Mr F, 73, an electrical engineer with various other business interests,
confessed to the police yesterday that he had held his daughter Elisabeth,
42, captive in three windowless underground rooms ever since she disappeared
in 1984. He also admitted that he had fathered seven children by her, though
he insisted that no force was involved.
He confessed also that he had tossed the body of one of those seven children
into the building’s furnace after the baby died at birth.
The police said that three of the children "never saw sunlight"
until they were freed over the weekend.
The dungeon in which they lived was so small that the older ones had to watch
as his father delivered his daughter’s subsequent children. Presumably they
also had to watch as he had intercourse with his daughter to beget them –
she claims that he repeatedly raped her – and regularly beat her. The
dungeon contained one padded room, its walls and floor covered in rubber,
the purpose of which is still unclear.
Yesterday the police described the revelations as "one of Austria’s
all-time worst crimes". Guenther Platter, the country’s Interior
Minister, called it "unfathomable".
The Osterreich newspaper called it "the worst crime of all time".
Despite that, the police said that Mr F, whom they described as "domineering,
aggressive and tyrannical", appeared unrepentant.
Mrs F allegedly knew nothing of the evil that was taking place in the basement
of her own home. "You have to imagine that this woman’s world fell
apart," Hans-Heinz Lenze, a local official, said.
Her ignorance seems almost incredible given her husband’s previous record, the
extraordinary stories that he asked her to believe and the fact that he
built the basement cell quite literally under her nose and kept his secret
family there for more than two decades.
Mr F asked his wife to believe that Elisabeth simply walked out of their lives
on August 28, 1984, when she was 18. That was the date on which he allegedly
sedated and handcuffed her and locked her in the cellar. A month later he
produced a letter – written by her, but dictated by him – in which she asked
her parents not to search for her.
Three times in subsequent years, in 1993, 1994 and 1997, Mr F produced babies
that Elisabeth had allegedly left on the doorstep of their house, with notes
saying that she could not look after them. Mrs F duly raised the three
children.
All that time Elisabeth and her expanding family were living in the dungeon.
It was hidden behind a 1m-high iron door that could be opened with a
numbered code which only Mr F knew. The door was itself concealed behind
shelves, and the police said that he used to tell his captive children that
if anything happened to him, then they would die in the dungeon.
The police yesterday released photographs showing the door opening onto the
narrowest of passages, a living area, a small kitchen and two bedrooms. The
ceilings were no more than 5ft 6in high. Elisabeth had done her best to
decorate them, with a toy elephant on top of a medicine cabinet and stickers
showing a chubby butterfly and smiling octopus on the walls. There were hot
plates for cooking and the prisoners’ only contact with the outside world
came via a radio, television and a video recorder.
It was the television that finally helped Elisabeth to escape. Her father had
apparently taken her eldest daughter out of the dungeon after she became
seriously ill and delivered her to hospital.
Elisabeth saw a televised appeal from the hospital for the girl’s mother to
come forward, and she persuaded her father to release her. The police then
picked up Mr F and Elisabeth close to the hospital on Saturday. Mr F gave
the police the code to his secret dungeon Asked why Mrs F was not being
investigated, Colonel Franz Polzer, a police spokesman, replied: "Let
me ask you a counter question: would any wife accept such a thing if she
knew about it?"
A spokesman at the local school which Elisabeth’s other three children
attended described Mrs F as "the perfect grandmother" and a member
of the Parents’ Association who helped to organise school events. Elisabeth
said that she and her children got food and clothing only from her father
and her mother was not involved.
Mr F had seven other children by his wife – six daughters and a son aged
between 37 and 51. They, too, have denied knowing anything of their sister’s
fate, as have the occasional tenants who rented a flat in the house.
But it appears that some people did know that Mr F had a shady past. A
spokeswoman for a company where he was employed as an engineer and
procurement manager during the 1970s told The Times: "He did an
excellent job, but there was always something uneasy about him as it was
widely known that he had served time in prison for a sexual offence."
The Times also found several neighbours who said that he was known as a former
sex offender by older members of the community.
One 50-year-old said: "I was 10 at the time, but I remember how we
children were afraid to play near Mr F’s house because of the rumours that
he had raped a woman and spent some time in jail for it."
Despite Mr F’s record, it appears that he was able to persuade the social
services, friends and family that Elisabeth had run away in 1984 and
subsequently left the three children on his doorstep.
Forensic experts spent yesterday searching the dungeon, and took away boxes of
evidence. Mr F was questioned by a judge who extended his custody for two
weeks until the investigation has been completed.
He is likely to face a string of charges including manslaughter or murder,
rape, kidnapping, coercion and grievous bodily harm.
Colonel Polzer, the police spokesman, described Mr F as "extremely fit
and in excellent physical condition" despite his age, as well as "extraordinarily
sexually potent".
Elisabeth and two of her captive children were last night being treated in a
psychiatric hospital near Amstetten, and were said to be in surprisingly
good condition, except for the need to adapt to daylight.
One official said: "As we were driving with one of the boys towards the
hospital he told me he was very happy to be driven in a car. He had seen
cars on TV and always wanted to have a ride in one.
"I could not detect any obvious mental or physical malfunctions in him or
his sister."
In addition to his electrical engineering, Mr F also dabbled in property
management and retail underwear. He owned a second two-storey house in an
Amstetten suburb which he was planning to tear down to make way for a block
of flats and offices with an underground garage. Neighbours had taken legal
action to try and stop the project.
The case has inevitably provoked comparisons with that of Natascha Kampusch,
the ten-year-old girl who was snatched from another small town in Austria in
1998 and imprisoned in a basement in a Vienna suburb for the next eight
years.
Ms Kampusch yesterday offered to use her experience to counsel Mr F’s victims.
A spokesman told The Times: "Ms Kampusch was shaken by the latest
revelation. Based on the experience she had to go through, she is prepared
to meet the victims and share her experience with them and offer her
assistance. She is also prepared to provide financial support."
