Josef Fritzl barely quivered when he was sentenced yesterday to life in a prison for psychologically disturbed criminals. He was found guilty of murdering a boy, one of seven children fathered with his daughter, of enslaving her, incarcerating her, beating her and raping her 3,000 times in the cellar of the family home.

Fritzl, 73, said in a croaking voice that he accepted the verdict — there will be no appeal — and he was marched off by a phalanx of policemen to a cell that lets in more sunlight than his daughter Elisabeth saw in almost a quarter of a century.

It marked the end of an extraordinary trial, unusual not only for the depravity of the crimes but also for its theatricality. Courtroom 119 in St Pölten became for four short days a stage with one central drama: the struggle between a vicious, controlling father and his strong-willed daughter.

“She wants the accused to face up to his responsibility until his death,” said Eva Plaz, the lawyer representing Josef Fritzl’s victims, speaking on behalf of Elisabeth. That was Ms Plaz’s only comment in the whole trial but it ranked as perhaps the most decisive moment.

Brutal double-life of Josef Fritzl emerges

How the horrifying news spread from a sleepy town in Austria throughout the rest of the world

Multimedia

• Video: Fritzl in court

• Pictures: Josef Fritzl trial

BACKGROUND

• The face in court that finally shamed Fritzl

• Fritzl incest children in 'astonishing' reunion

• Josef Fritzl is the limit, the death of hope

• Elisabeth Fritzl tells of father's cruelty

• Great evil took place in that cellar

Related Links

• Children face weekly visits to the psychotherapist

• Austria must examine itself

• COMMENT: Fitzl children face a lifetime of fear

After that statement, the eight jurors and Judge Andrea Humer were left in no doubt. There could, from the perspective of the victims, be no mitigating circumstances, no hair-splitting about whether the baby had really been murdered in the dungeon in 1996, or whether it was perhaps manslaughter. Elisabeth had spoken.

“The victim is directing the proceedings,” said the Kurier newspaper.

But then, on Tuesday, Elisabeth slipped into the darkened courtroom as the judge, jury and accused watched her recorded testimony on television.

And that was the astonishing truth of the matter. At the outset of the trial on Monday Fritzl, though now a shrunken figure, still had a swagger about him. His pre-trial utterances oozed contempt. “Elisabeth was exaggerating,” he said in one police interrogation. “I always made sure they had plenty to eat.”

“Josef Fritzl recognised that Elisabeth was in court,” his defence lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said during his final plea yesterday. “From this point on, you could see Josef Fritzl going pale and he broke down.”

Within 24 hours Fritzl’s tone had changed. He confessed to all the charges without reservation: murder, enslavement, rape, sequestration, grievous assault. “It was a meeting of eyes that changed his mind,” Mr Mayer told the jurors.

It was payback time for Elisabeth. The trial naturally followed correct procedure, though it seemed to sprint through the hearings. The state prosecutor, Christiane Burkheiser, added her own contribution to the performance by presenting a box of fetid cloth recovered from Fritzl’s dungeon so that the jurors could imagine the squalor. “Smell!” she commanded, and the jury flinched.

The trial was far more emotionally charged than is normal anywhere else in Austria, or indeed in Europe. Austria has had its reckoning with its monster.

When Fritzl offered his first clear public apology for his crimes — “I am sorry from the bottom of my heart,” — Miss Burkheiser put him in his place. “Don’t believe him,” she said, “He has shown his true face in trying to exploit people’s gullibility. Don’t be duped as Elisabeth was.”

Elisabeth, however, has retained her willpower at the age of 42. Plainly the horrors downstairs did not break her.

What seems to have pushed her into an avenging rather than a martyr’s role is her bitterness about the death of her baby in 1996.

Everything else — the internal injuries caused by Fritzl’s sex toys, the physical decay, the teeth spat out in the sink, the rats that danced over the beds, the damp and cold in the twilight zone — all that paled when it came to the death of her baby. Elisabeth gave birth to twins in April 1996. Fritzl ate his dinner calmly in the cellar while she was in labour, went upstairs when one of the babies turned blue, stiffened and choked.

Elisabeth’s early anger when she was raped two or three times a day in the dungeon had subsided over the years and she had accepted, for better or worse, her utter dependency on the goodwill of her father. If Fritzl did not buy food she and her children would die. But the buried anger surged up again when her child was allowed to die. Fritzl burnt the infant’s body in the wood stove.

Elisabeth’s deep hurt fuelled her determination in April last year to persuade Fritzl to open the eight doors of the bunker and seek medical care for their 19-year-old child. She was having fits and was close to death. Elisabeth fought for her liberty with all of her remaining strength and her father seems to have accepted that he owed this to Elisabeth, the mother of his second family.

There could be no repeat of the baby's death. Even an incestuous father, it seems, has to bear paternal responsibility.

That was the beginning of the end of Fritzl’s secret existence. And it all clotted for both father and daughter in the courtroom this week. It was a strange trial but also a remarkably powerful one.

Fritzl will be held for the next few days in the St Pölten detention centre. There he shares a cell with a violent suspect.

It is a privileged existence compared with the one that he forced on his daughter and their children: he has an hour of exercise in the yard and is allowed to mix with fellow inmates in the common room. Yesterday he was served a frankfurter in a roll.

Next week he will be taken to a psychiatric clinic in Vienna, run by his therapist, Patrick Frottier, who is an expert on suicide. The doctors have been placed on suicide watch — Fritzl’s shoelaces and belt have been removed — because the moment of sentencing is always one of the most dangerous for psychologically vulnerable prisoners.

The court’s spokesman, Franz Cutka, said that the doctors would determine whether any kind of therapy could help Fritzl.

If the psychiatrists believe, after extended treatment in the prison clinic, that Fritzl is capable of reintegrating into society, then he could be released after 15 years.

With 11 months of pretrial imprisonment deducted from the total, it is just feasible that Fritzl — who will then be 87 — could be out in time to celebrate Easter 2023.

“This is a very theoretical possibility,” Mr Cutka said.

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