Updated:14:59, Monday April 28, 2008
A 73-year-old Austrian man has confessed to imprisoning his daughter in a windowless cellar for 24 years and fathering her seven children, say police.
Officers are still searching the family house in Amstetten where Elisabeth Fritzl and her children were held in three cramped underground rooms.
"He has now said that he locked up his daughter for 24 years and that he alone fathered her seven children and that he locked them up in the cellar," said local detective Franz Polzer.
The rooms, measuring "50-60 square metres in all", were said to be furnished like a flat.
Some of the children were imprisoned with their mother. Others lived a relatively normal life above ground with the man who is their father AND grandfather, Josef Fritzl.
Police say his daughter Elisabeth, now aged 42, had been missing since August 29, 1984.
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She has told them she was drugged and handcuffed and imprisoned in the basement.
Authorities got access to the area, comprising a narrow hallway and several rooms, after Mr Fritzl told them how to unlock a hidden door using a code only he had known.
Speaking from outside the house, Sky's Europe correspondent Greg Milam said: "There are so many questions about why more wasn't done to follow up on this case.
"One newspaper here is saying the country needs to look at what had fundamentally gone wrong, as it put it - that's how seriously it views this."
The case follows that of Natascha Kampusch, the girl who was held in the basement of a house on the outskirts of Vienna for more than eight years.
The Fritzl story came to light after one of the children was taken to a local hospital.
The girl, 19-year-old Kerstin, was said by police to be "gravely ill".
Elisabeth told police her father began sexually abusing her when she was 11 and locked her in a room in the cellar several years later.
During the 24 years that followed her imprisonment, she said she had six children by him.
The seventh child was a twin who died shortly after birth. Mr Fritzl allegedly removed the body and burned it.
The two oldest children, aged 18 and 19, and the youngest aged 5, are said to have been locked up with their mother since birth.
Police said they had never seen sunlight or received any education.
Mr Fritzl's wife, Rosemarie, had been unaware of what happened to her daughter.
It had been assumed Elisabeth had disappeared voluntarily when the parents received a letter from her saying they should not search for her.
Three of her younger children were each left on her parents' doorstep, the first accompanied by a letter saying she could not look after the baby herself.
All were taken in by Mr Fritzl and his wife as foster or adopted children and went to school as normal.
Police said Elisabeth only agreed to talk after the authorities promised she would not have to see her father again and the children would be taken care of.
The mother and children are now being treated in hospital by a team of psychologists.
DNA tests are being carried out to determine whether Mr Fritzl is the father.
"We are faced with a crime that is incomprehensible," Interior Minister Guenther Platter said on Austrian television.
"Everything that has happened here goes beyond one's imagination."
Austrian papers asked on Monday how the local community could have been unaware of what was going on in the basement of the housing block.
Posted by: clifton
I saw this on the TV news. That's totally insane. I have no idea what punishment can compensate it, death will be a gift for this "father"
Posted by: forwardone
And his wife `knew nothing` about it?
Posted by: golddust
It is often reported that the 'spouse' knew nothing, usually as a result of emotional, phyiscal and/or psychological abuse they've endured, leading to denial. If you 'knew' something like this was going on, it is a inherent "defense mechanism" to suppress it, hence denial.
Posted by: forwardone
True, maybe it`s like the abused partner syndrome, I don`t know. It`s just so.... almost unbelievable, that when such things happen, the `innocents` don`t do something about it.
I still can`t understand how a wife can allow a husband to abuse her child(ren). It`s as though they`ve been desensitized to wrongdoing.
Posted by: golddust
The "innocents" (if they were locked up for 24 years) include the once 11 yo daughter, didn't know any differently; how they were living was the only way they 'knew', assuming they had no contact with the outside world.
Who can say about the wife, accepting the children left on their doorstep may have been her way of making the best of the bad. Most normal people would try and find the parents; in this case, she knew them. It's likely she had been so emotionally/psychologically damaged she believed she was to blame and also responsible for the welfare of the children, if she had left or reported her husband.
This is outside the theory of denial.
Posted by: forwardone
Oh I agree, the children can`t be blamed in any way for not doing something about it.
When I say `innocents` I`m here referring to the wife, and in general situations to wives who are abused in some way by their husbands.
Posted by: okosh
Quote:
Originally Posted by clifton
I saw this on the TV news. That's totally insane. I have no idea what punishment can compensate it, death will be a gift for this "father"
Made the news here to....How could someone do this to their own child??
Posted by: forwardone
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."
