by John Glatt
Dear Reader:
The book you are about to read is the latest bestseller from the St. Martin’s True Crime Library, the imprint The New York Times calls “the leader in true crime!’’ Each month, we offer you a fascinating account of the latest, most sensational crime that has captured the national attention. St. Martin’s is the publisher of bestselling true crime author and crime journalist Kieran Crowley, who explores the dark, deadly links between a prominent Manhattan surgeon and the disappearance of his wife fifteen years earlier in THE SURGEON’S WIFE. Suzy Spencer’s BREAKING POINT guides readers through the tortuous twists and turns in the case of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five young children in the family’s bathtub. In Edgar Award-nominated DARK DREAMS, legendary FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood and bestselling crime author Stephen G. Michaud shine light on the inner workings of America’s most violent and depraved murderers. In the book you now hold, SECRETS IN THE CELLAR, acclaimed author John Glatt takes a closer look at the dark secrets of an Austrian family.
St. Martin’s True Crime Library gives you the stories behind the headlines. Our authors take you right to the scene of the crime and into the minds of the most notorious murderers to show you what really makes them tick. St. Martin’s True Crime Library paperbacks are better than the most terrifying thriller, because it’s all true! The next time you want a crackling good read, make sure it’s got the St. Martin’s True Crime Library logo on the spine—you’ll be up all night!
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OTHER TRUE CRIME TITLES FROM
JOHN GLATT
To Have and to Kill
Forgive Me, Father
The Doctor’s Wife
One Deadly Night
Depraved
Cries in the Desert
For I Have Sinned
Evil Twins
Cradle of Death
Blind Passion
Deadly American Beauty
Never Leave Me
Twisted
AVAILABLE FROM ST. MARTIN’S TRUE CRIME LIBRARY
SECRETS IN
THE CELLAR
A True Story of the Austrian Incest Case
that Shocked the World
John Glatt
St. Martin’s Paperbacks
NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
SECRETS IN THE CELLAR
Copyright © 2009 by John Glatt.
Cover photo of trap door © AP Images/John Moore. Cover photo of Josef Fritzl © US Press/Sipa Press.
All rights reserved.
For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
ISBN: 0-312-94786-0
EAN: 978-0-312-94786-6
Printed in the United States of America
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / March 2009
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
A Nazi Childhood
CHAPTER 2
Starting a Family
CHAPTER 3
“If You Scream, I Will Kill You!”
CHAPTER 4
Elisabeth
CHAPTER 5
“The Pig Will Beat Us to Death One Day”
CHAPTER 6
Escape
CHAPTER 7
Brief Encounter
CHAPTER 8
Taken
CHAPTER 9
His Second Wife
CHAPTER 10
Children of the Cellar
CHAPTER 11
The Foundlings
CHAPTER 12
Pillar of the Community
CHAPTER 13
A Double Life
CHAPTER 14
His Underground Kingdom
CHAPTER 15
Losing Control
CHAPTER 16
Into the Light
CHAPTER 17
Freedom
CHAPTER 18
A Reunion
CHAPTER 19
“It’s Beyond Comprehension”
CHAPTER 20
“Hey, Satan, Come Out and Play!”
CHAPTER 21
“The Devil Himself”
CHAPTER 22
Under Siege
CHAPTER 23
“I Could Have Killed Them All”
CHAPTER 24
“We, the Whole Family”
CHAPTER 25
Frankenstein
CHAPTER 26
Miracle
CHAPTER 27
A New Start
CHAPTER 28
Elisabeth Speaks
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Dr. Keith Ablow for his generous help with this project, as well as Dr. Laszlo Retsagi. Thanks also to Christa Woldrich, Trixi Mahd-Soltani, and Janina Alivio.
PROLOGUE
Vampire (as in “evil spirit’’) n. : (folklore) a corpse that rises at night to drink the blood of the living
April 2008
The call came in to Amstetten emergency services at precisely 7:00 a.m. that Saturday morning. An elderly man calmly informed the dispatcher that he had just discovered a young woman collapsed against a wall in his apartment building. She needed urgent medical help, he announced, giving the address Ybbsstrasse 40, before abruptly hanging up the phone.
The dispatcher immediately sent an ambulance and EMS crew to Ybbsstrasse, a busy main road near the center of the small Austrian town, 80 miles west of Vienna. There was little traffic that early on a weekend morning, and within minutes the medical crew had located the bedraggled young woman, lying unconscious on the doorstep. Her lip was covered in blood, where she had bitten her tongue, her skin was unnaturally pale and clumps of hair had been torn out of her head.
A few minutes later, the critically ill woman was admitted into the intensive care ward of the Mostviertel Amstetten-Mauer state hospital.
“She was in a life-threatening condition,” recalled Dr. Albert Reiter, the head of the unit. “She was unconscious and had to be ventilated. Several of her vital organs had failed.”
Three hours later, a silver Mercedes pulled into the hospital’s parking lot, and a distinguished-looking gray-haired man with a bushy mustache got out. He walked briskly into the emergency room and introduced himself as Josef Fritzl, the grandfather of 19-year-old Kerstin, who had just been brought in by ambulance. He demanded to see a doctor immediately, saying he had an important note from the patient’s mother about her condition.
“He was a very polite, very normal man,” recalled Dr. Reiter, who met Fritzl in his office. “He was a correct man.”
Fritzl explained he had been awakened by noises in the stairway of the building he owned. On further investigation, he had discovered the young woman, lying unconscious on his doorstep.
But there was more, he said, reaching for his jacket pocket. She had been clutching a handwritten note from his daughter Elisabeth, who had run away to join a religious sect twenty-four years earlier and not been seen since.
Then, handing the note to Dr. Reiter, he said this was the fourth child his wayward daughter had abandoned outside his house, for him and his wife to care for.
“Please, please help her,” it read.
Wednesday, I gave her aspirin and cough medicine for the condition. Thursday, the cough worsened. Friday the coughing got even worse. She has
been biting her lip as well as her tongue.
Kerstin is very scared of strangers. She has never been in a hospital before. I’ve asked my father for help, because he is the only person she knows.
At the bottom of the note, Elisabeth had added a postscript:
Kerstin, please stay strong, until we see each other again! We will come back to you soon!
Then the elderly man explained how, with each baby his daughter had deposited on his doorstep over the years, there was always a note, begging him to care for the baby, as her cult disapproved of children.
What else could he do under the circumstances? he asked Dr. Reiter, shrugging his shoulders. So he and his wife Rosemarie had brought up Elisabeth’s three abandoned children, Lisa, 16, Monika, 15, and Alex, 12, as if they were their own.
When the bewildered doctor questioned Fritzl about his daughter’s disappearance and whether he had tried to find her, the elderly man said he had to leave.
“I did not like his tone,” remembered Dr. Reiter. “Something didn’t seem right. He simply demanded we make Kerstin better, so he could take her away again.”
Over the years, the head of the busy intensive care ward had seen thousands of emergency cases, but nothing compared to the apparent neglect suffered by Kerstin. On closer inspection, he was amazed to discover that the teenager was missing most of her teeth and had several large bald patches. Her skin was deathly white and she appeared to be severely anemic.
Initially, he thought she might have been poisoned, ordering immediate blood tests. But these came back negative. Then he speculated that she might be suffering from epilepsy. When the young girl’s vital organs started to shut down, Dr. Reiter put her on life support.
The experienced doctor was puzzled and disturbed at how a mother could just abandon such a sick daughter on a doorstep before vanishing.
“From the tone of the letter,” said Dr. Reiter, “it was clear that she cared very deeply for her child.”
So at 10:37 a.m., he telephoned Amstetten police, reporting that he had admitted a mysterious female in critical condition, and they needed to investigate.
A few hours later, a policeman arrived at Ybbsstrasse 40 to interview Josef Fritzl about what had happened to his granddaughter. Amstetten police were well acquainted with how Elisabeth had run off in 1984, at the age of 18, to join a religious cult. Her worried parents had reported her missing at the time, and the local police, then Interpol, had all investigated. But she had disappeared without a trace, and there were no leads.
The following year, when Elisabeth turned 19, they’d stopped looking. She was no longer a minor under Austrian law, and was free to go wherever she liked.
At the house, her seemingly upright 73-year-old father told the officer about discovering Kerstin collapsed on his doorstep, bearing a note from her mother. He then produced three other notes his daughter had sent over the years, explaining that each one had accompanied a baby.
In January, he explained, Elisabeth had sent him a letter referring to Kerstin’s medical problems. She had written that she would soon be coming home with her other children, Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5, to rejoin the family so they could all celebrate birthdays together.
Although Amstetten police didn’t doubt Josef, a successful property speculator, they nevertheless re-opened the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, who was still officially classified after twenty-four years as “missing.” Dr. Reiter had convinced them that knowledge of the mother’s medical history was essential to diagnosing her mysterious illness, and saving her life.
The January letter bore a postmark from the town of Kematen an der Krems, 43 miles east of Amstetten, so that’s where the search began. Over the next several days, investigators contacted all the nearby hospitals and schools for any information about Elisabeth, who would now be 42 years old. They also searched the central registry database and social security offices.
“Every avenue was explored,” said Amstetten District Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze. “There wasn’t a shred of evidence about Elisabeth.”
On Monday morning—two days after Kerstin had been admitted to the hospital—investigators summoned Manfred Wohlfahrt, the officer in charge of sects for the nearby St. Polten diocese, to Amstetten police station. This was the first time he had ever been consulted about the case.
Wohlfahrt was asked to study Elisabeth’s first letter, written soon after her disappearance, as well as the new one found on Kerstin. Did the two letters hold any clues to the sect she had joined, or her present whereabouts?
The expert thought the strangely stilted handwriting resembled “calligraphy.” He also noted the unusual construction of the sentences, as if they had been “dictated.” Later he would describe the notes as “odd” and “not very authentic.” But he wasn’t able to come to any conclusions about the sect or her whereabouts.
Back at the hospital, as Kerstin’s condition worsened, she was put on dialysis, and a local priest was summoned to give last rites.
Dr. Reiter was becoming more and more frustrated at the lack of progress being made to find her mother.
“I was certain of only one thing,” he said. “That the mother was the only one that could help.”
So he telephoned Josef Fritzl, explaining the “desperate” situation, and how Elisabeth must be contacted to save Kerstin’s life. Once again her father seemed evasive and uncooperative.
“I could not understand why he was so reluctant to help,” said the doctor.
By Monday afternoon, Dr. Reiter decided to take matters into his own hands. He instructed the hospital’s public relations department to issue a press release, appealing for Elisabeth to come forward, giving his personal mobile phone number as a contact hotline. Then he made another call to Josef Fritzl, somehow persuading him to supply an old photograph of Elisabeth for the media.
That night the doctor appeared on the Austrian ORF television news and made a plea to the public.
“I would like the mother to contact us,” he replied. “We’ll treat the contact with high discretion and will probably get a step further in our diagnosis and treatment.”
The following day, when several journalists arrived at Josef Fritzl’s house for an interview, they found him strangely hostile, as he ordered them off his property.
“I asked him for a photo of his daughter,” recalled reporter Andrea Kramer of the Osterreich newspaper. “He was really aggressive and wanted to chase me away. He said he would help himself and didn’t need help from anyone else.”
Another journalist was also “shocked” by his surprising response.
“Instead of being the concerned father I expected,” she said, “he told me to clear off. He said he wanted nothing to do with the appeal, but that the ‘bloody doctor’ had forced him into it.”
By Wednesday, April 23, still with no leads, Amstetten police changed tack, concentrating their efforts on the Fritzl family. They arrived at Ybbsstrasse 40 to take DNA samples from Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl, as well as Lisa, Monika, and Alexander—the children Elisabeth had abandoned, whom the Fritzls were bringing up.
Investigators reasoned that since she had given birth to the children in a sect, there might be more than one father, one of whom might have a criminal record and be traceable.
“Herr Fritzl didn’t have time to give a DNA sample,” said the chief investigator, Inspector Franz Polzer, “and kept postponing, because he had so much to do.”
The following Saturday evening—one week after Kerstin had been found—Josef called Dr. Reiter with astonishing news.
“Elisabeth has returned,” he announced triumphantly. “I am bringing her to the hospital and she wants to see her daughter.”
He urged the doctor not to call the police, saying he and Elisabeth “do not want any trouble.”
Half an hour later, a disoriented woman with snow-white hair weakly shuffled up to the reception desk at the hospital, asking for Dr. Reiter.
“I am Kerstin’s mother,” she said. “I am here to
help my daughter.”
After nervously talking to Dr. Reiter for a few minutes about Kerstin’s medical problems, Elisabeth said she had to go and meet her father, who was waiting for her outside. Soon afterward, Amstetten police, having been tipped off by Dr. Reiter, picked them both up for questioning.
They first interviewed Elisabeth, still believed to be a dangerously irresponsible mother. Initially she stuck to her father’s story that she was a runaway who had joined a sect as a teenager and been there ever since. But slowly, under the investigators’ persistent questioning, her credibility began to fall apart.
Finally, she took a deep breath and said she would tell them the truth. But first they had to promise to protect her, her mother and her children, and that she would never have to see her father again.
After they’d agreed, the 42-year-old woman broke down in tears, telling how her father Josef Fritzl had started raping her when she was 11. Then, on August 28, 1984, he had drugged her and locked her up in a dungeon under their home, beating her mercilessly and making her his sex slave. Since then, she had given birth to seven of his children, one of them dying at just three days old because of medical neglect.
