Watch Out

The defence team strategy is plain: if they can get their client off the hook on the murder charge (a possible 15-year jail term) and enslavement (up to 20 years), then the maximum time that Fritzl would have to serve would be for the rape charge.

Under Austrian law that is ten years’ imprisonment. With good behaviour and counting the year spent in pretrial arrest, Fritzl could hope to be free by the Christmas of 2016 – a triumph of sorts for Mr Mayer, who ranks as one of the most effective defence lawyers in the country.

The judge could avoid this politically embarrassing outcome – Austrian tabloids are already demanding a lifetime behind bars – if Fritzl were sent to a guarded psychiatric clinic for an indefinite period of observation before starting his jail sentence.

But the prosecutor, Ms Burkheiser, 33, seemed determined yesterday to secure the longest possible jail term. First she had to dismantle the myth of Fritzl as a caring man. There were, she emphasised, no mitigating circumstances. So the narrative underpinning the prosecution case became a horror story, the tale of a vicious man who abused his daughter for years before he threw her into his extraordinary dungeon at the age of 18.

The first part of the video testimony of Elisabeth, now 43, was shown to the jurors and to Fritzl in the darkened courtroom. Little notes – scribbled on the back of shopping bills left behind in the cellar by her father – constituted a kind of secret diary by Elisabeth, a chronicle of abuse.

The genre of the horror story has two conventions, and the prosecutor made use of both. The first is the mythic power of the locked door. The horror story seeks to stir the reader’s imagination about what lies beyond the door. For the imprisoned Fritzl family, the door became a potent symbol. “The accused repeatedly threatened the family with death if they should attempt to escape and he claimed to have an automatic switch which would cause a massive electric shock and a release of gas if the outer doors to the cellar were touched,” Ms Burkheiser said. “The effect would be death within a few minutes. There were no attempts to flee.”

Once he was beyond the door to the cellar, Fritzl let himself loose, behaved in an animalistic way. No details of his sex practices were made public yesterday and a court spokesman explained that they were one of the reasons why proceedings had to be held in camera.

The other horror story convention is the existential fear, the sense that one can wake up in an ordinary way one morning and by the end of that day be plunged into a living hell. That, said the prosecutor, is what happened to Elisabeth Fritzl on August 28, 1984. Drugged with ether and entombed in a soundproofed chamber behind eight locked doors for the next quarter of a century, Elisabeth lived a sub-human existence. There she gave birth – Fritzl provided a pair of rusty scissors to cut the umbilical cord.

It is not on the charge sheet, but Fritzl stole his daughter’s life. She and her downstairs children lived without sunlight, without human contact. On a whim Fritzl would cut off electricity for several days.

At lunchtime the drama ended abruptly – the one carried out in the public’s view, at any rate. Austria’s strict laws on privacy and the protection of victims does not merely restrict reporters in what they can say or write; if the judge so requires, it keeps them out of the courtroom altogether. Even the court spokesman, delegated with briefing the media at 4pm, would barely divulge anything, saying it was all confidential.

None of Fritzl’s alleged victims was present in court for the opening of the trial. They are spending the week in a psychiatric clinic to escape the publicity surrounding the trial. Journalists and the public are expected to remain excluded from the proceedings. They will be readmitted for the verdict, which is expected by Friday.

The horror story has one gentler variant: the tale where the protagonist, after undergoing numerous tortures, wakes up and realises he has merely survived an unpleasant nightmare. This, the prosecutor made plain, was sadly not the case of the Fritzl family. They are out in the sunlight at last, but their nightmare continues.

Chief prosecutor takes her first big case

Christiane Burkheiser, 33, is the star of the trial. She is conducting her first important case since being made chief prosecutor – she was on duty when the Fritzl family were released from the bunker in April. She has brought a new style to the courtroom: to evoke the dank atmosphere of the Fritzl dungeon she gave foetid pieces of material to the jury and ordered them to smell the evidence. Her office is only 20 metres away from Fritzl’s cell

Rupert Mayer, 61, Fritzl’s defence lawyer, is one of the most flamboyant figures in the Austrian legal profession. He has defended neo-Nazis, contract killers and, in one case, the parents of a girl held prisoner in a wooden cage. Mr Mayer makes a point of defending causes for which he has no sympathy: despite having a severe dog hair allergy he tried to enter the Vienna regional parliament as president of the newly established Party of Austrian Dog Friends

Judge Andrea Humer, 48, is an expert in trials from which the press and public are excluded. She has applied some of this experience, arguing that Fritzl’s daughter needs protection. Her most prominent case so far has been a gay sex scandal in the theological seminary in St Pölten. It is unusual for both the prosecutor and the judge to be women, but this case demands sensitive questioning of the main victim, Elisabeth Fritzl

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