Video: inside the mind of the sex captor

Josef Fritzl has broken his silence about why he kept his daughter as a sex slave in a dungeon for 24 years.

Mr Fritzl, who fathered seven children by his daughter after abusing her in the cellar of his house in eastern Austria, claimed that he was obsessed with a desire to have a family with her because she was a “great housewife and a mother”.

The retired electrical engineer, who is currently on remand facing a range of possible charges including manslaughter and rape, also revealed that he projected on to Elisabeth, now 42, the incestuous desires he had for his own mother.

“I knew that Elisabeth did not want the things I did to her. I knew that I was hurting her," Mr Fritzl said in notes given by his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, to an Austrian magazine.

“But the urge to finally be able to taste the forbidden fruit was too strong. It was like an addiction.”

Mr Fritzl also admitted he did not use contraception while sexually abusing his daughter and said that he planned to have a “proper family” with her.

“In reality I wanted to have children with her. I was looking forward to the offspring. It was a beautiful idea for me — to have a proper family, also down in the cellar, with a good wife and a couple of children.

“I always wanted to have many children. Not children that would have to, like I had, grow up alone but children that would always have someone to play with. I had a dream about a large family ever since I was a little boy.”

He also confessed to having lured his daughter to the underground dungeon he secretly constructed in the cellar of his home in Amstetten and admitted that he designed and equipped the underground chamber solely for that purpose – claiming to have wanted to protect his daughter from “bad people”.

But he denied having abused Elisabeth sexually at the age of 11 – as she reportedly told police – claiming that he was not a man “that would molest children”.

“Ever since she entered puberty she did not adhere to rules anymore. She would spend whole nights in dingy bars, drinking alcohol and smoking. I only tried to pull her out of that misery," he said.

“I got her a job as a waitress but she would not go to work for days. She even escaped twice and hung out with bad people during this time and they were not good company for her. I would bring her back home each time but she would try to escape again.

“That is why I had to do something. I had to create a place where I could keep Elisabeth, by force if necessary, away from the outside world.”

According to Mr Fritzl, he kept his daughter hostage for several months without sexually assaulting her but gradually started to “lose control” and went to the cellar one night to rape her.

“The urge to have sex with Elisabeth was getting stronger and stronger. It was a vicious circle, a circle from which there was no exit — not only for Elisabeth but also for myself.

“With every passing week in which I kept my daughter captive my situation was getting crazier. I really was thinking about whether I should let her go or not. But I was not able to make that decision, although — or maybe exactly because of that — I knew that with every passing day what I had done would be more severely judged.

“But I was afraid of being arrested and of having my family and everyone out there find out about my crime — and so I postponed my decision again and again. Until one day it was really too late to free Elisabeth and take her upstairs.”

Fritzl also revealed that he had incestuous desires for his mother, Maria, since early childhood but managed to suppress them. His mother raised him on her own and had to take several jobs in order to support them in the years after the Second World War after she separated from her husband, who, according to Fritzl, “was a no-good scoundrel who was cheating on her".

“She was as strict as it was necessary. She was the best woman in the world. And I was her husband in some way. She was the boss at home but I was the only man in the house.

“But I was strong, almost as strong as she was, and I have succeeded in suppressing my desires.”

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