Reuters
- Austria incest family lawyer speaks
The wife of Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years beneath
their house and had seven children with her, is to be questioned again by
police to determine whether she knew about his secret life in the cellar.
Detectives are to conduct a forensic search of the upper floors of the “house
of horrors” where Fritzl, 73, lived with Rosemarie, his 68-year-old wife,
while their daughter Elisabeth was locked in the basement.
“We think Fritzl acted alone but cannot exclude the possibility that someone
else was aware of what was going on downstairs,” said Frank Polzer, the
chief investigator, in an interview with The Sunday Times.
Fritzl last week urged his wife to visit him in jail. It is not known if she
intends to do so. Her claim to have known nothing about her daughter’s
ordeal has raised eyebrows, as has the collective blindness of Amstetten, a
town 75 miles west of Vienna, to what was unfolding beneath one of its main
streets.
Fritzl kept Elisabeth, now 42, as a sex slave in a warren of sound-proofed,
windowless rooms. She and three of the children were rescued two weeks ago.
Another three children born in captivity were brought up by Rosemarie, who
was told that the babies had been abandoned on the doorstep. The seventh
child died shortly after birth.
Police want to ask Rosemarie, who had seven children with Fritzl before he
started his second family in the cellar, how she accounted for her husband’s
long stints below ground and whether she ever helped him to manage the
dungeon.
Polzer, a dapper figure in a blue blazer and striped tie, does not regard
Rosemarie, described by one neighbour as a “perfect grandmother”, as a
suspect: “What woman,” he said, “would stay silent if she knew that her
husband had seven children with his daughter and was holding her prisoner in
the cellar?”
He added, however, that she and other family members would be questioned again
to determine if there was any degree of complicity. Psychologists have
speculated that Rosemarie may have subconsciously “suppressed” knowledge of
her husband’s double life.
Coming so soon after the ordeal of Natascha Kampusch, the schoolgirl held
prisoner for eight years in a basement at Strasshof, near Vienna, until her
escape in 2006, the case has shamed Austria. It has focused attention on
failures by local authorities whose singular lack of curiosity about
Elisabeth’s disappearance in 1984, when Fritzl locked her in the cellar,
helped him to maintain the fiction that she had run off to join a sect.
Just as surprising was the community’s failure to intervene before the
kidnapping, when Elisabeth was being sexually abused and beaten by Fritzl.
Two former friends of Elisabeth said last week that she had sometimes
avoided gym classes for fear that the teacher would ask about bruises all
over her body.
“We learnt to take the beatings,” said Christa Gotzinger, 42, who said she
had, in common with Elisabeth, a violent father. “We learnt how to pull
ourselves together when the pain was unbearable.”
Another friend of Elisabeth, who refused to be identified, claimed that Fritzl
punched his children. “He didn’t slap or spank them,” said the friend. “He
hit them with his fists. Her brother once told me, ‘The pig will beat us to
death one day’.”
It turned out that friends had always been sceptical about Elisabeth’s
disappearance. At school reunions, when the talk turned to how Elisabeth had
run away to join a cult, “I would always say, ‘Don’t be crazy, she would
never do such a thing’,” said Christa Woldrich, 42, another former
schoolfriend.
Letters from “Lisi” to friends just weeks before she was kidnapped revealed a
chirpy teenager looking forward to leaving home for a flat she was planning
to share with a sister. According to a sister of Rosemarie, all of the
Fritzl children moved out as soon as they could because of their father’s
brutality.
Polzer said Elisabeth had told police that her father had begun sexually
abusing her at the age of 11. In comments to his lawyer last week, Fritzl
denied this.
He claimed he had raped his daughter only after locking her in the cellar in
1984, when she was 18. The “urge to taste the forbidden fruit was too
strong” for him to resist, he said.
He claimed he had been forced to lock up his daughter because of her “drinking
alcohol and smoking”. She had run away to Vienna for three weeks to escape
what she described in a letter to a friend as “this hell”. A worse hell
awaited her, however.
“I had to do something,” her father said. “I had to create a place where I
could keep Elisabeth, by force if necessary, away from the outside world.”
Fritzl, who is planning to plead insanity at his trial, said that being an
only child had influenced him, as had the Nazi-era mania for order and
discipline.
“In reality, I wanted to have children with her [Elisabeth],” he said. “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.”
He went on: “I always wanted to have many children. Not children that would
have to grow up alone as I did, but children who would always have someone
to play with. I had dreamt about a large family ever since I was a little
boy.”
He got his wish, but it was a grotesque travesty of family life. “When I went
into the bunker, I brought flowers for my daughter, and books and stuffed
animals for the children,” Fritzl said. They watched films while Elisabeth
cooked their favourite meals. “And then we all sat around the table and ate
together,” he said.
Striking an even more sinister tone, he said he could easily have killed his
daughter and children and disposed of the bodies without anyone knowing: “I
am not a beast,” he said, complaining of his portrayal in the press.
Last week his wife, daughter and children were undergoing therapy in a clinic
not far from Amstetten. Doctors said that they were making “remarkable”
progress.
“They are leading a surprisingly normal life given the circumstances,” said
Christophe Herbst, the family’s lawyer.
In one sense, however, they have exchanged one prison for another. “The
original plan was to let them walk outside in the grounds, a tranquil and
secluded place,” said Klaus Schwertner, a spokesman for the clinic. “But
they cannot go outside. We’re under siege from the press. They’re climbing
the trees to try to see in. They’re literally storming the clinic.”
One newspaper was reported to have offered €1m (£800,000) for a photograph of
Elisabeth and 17 photographers have been detained by police for trying to
enter the clinic. One of them was dressed as a policeman.
Remaining confined might not be so much of a burden for Stefan, 18, and
five-year-old Felix: they had never tasted fresh air or seen the sun before
being rescued two weeks ago from the cellar after Elisabeth persuaded Fritzl
to take 19-year-old Kerstin to hospital. Until then, their only glimpse of
the outside world was on television.
Their three “upstairs” siblings, however, had led relatively normal lives
until the arrest of their father and being shut up in the clinic was harder
for them.
“It is a very frustrating situation,” said Schwertner, adding that instead of
returning to school, the children would receive private tuition in the
clinic. “They will probably be here for months.”
He denied press reports that the cramped conditions of the cellar had been
recreated so that the “downstairs” children would feel more at home in the
clinic. It turned out that newspaper accounts of Fritzl brutalising
prostitutes in a brothel cellar in Linz were just as much fantasy.
Fritzl was remanded in custody for another month on Friday. The investigation
into how he managed to run his private concentration camp under the noses of
neighbours was expected to take six months and his trial could be held
before the end of the year.
Prosecutors said Fritzl was likely to face charges of manslaughter – as well
as rape and unlawful imprisonment – for not providing proper care for
Michael, the baby who died in the cellar in 1996. Fritzl incinerated the
corpse in the basement furnace.
Polzer is unsettled by the thought that there might be other men like Fritzl
who have imprisoned their children in secret bunkers. “It is a real
possibility,” he said with a sigh.
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