by John Glatt
“My babies!” cried Elisabeth, as she hugged them and stroked their faces. “You are so beautiful.”
Then Stefan and Felix came in to meet their upstairs siblings, and grandmother Rosemarie for the first time. The little boy, who had spent his entire life underground, seemed the “most distressed,” clinging to his mother the entire time.
“He would jump and start at the slightest disturbance,” said Dr. Kepplinger. “Now that the novelty of being free from the cellar has worn off, he needs some peace. After all, in his whole life he had only seen four other people.”
Also present were many of Elisabeth’s brothers and sisters, including Harald and Gabrielle, who were joining the rest of the family in therapy.
“None of us can believe how normal Elisabeth seems,” Gabrielle, 35, later told the London Daily Mail. “She is healthy and very chatty and doing very well.”
Gabrielle, who lived just outside Amstetten with her partner, said the family was totally devastated by what their father had done.
“I can’t say what the family is going through,” she said. “It’s more than anyone can believe. We are working together to support Elisabeth. She is overjoyed to see her children . . . and she is spending all the time getting to know them.”
Clinic Director Dr. Kepplinger, who witnessed the moving reunion, later described it as “a genuinely happy occasion [without being] forced.” And from what he’d seen, he was now convinced Rosemarie Fritzl had known nothing of her daughter’s imprisonment.
“It was a very moving meeting between Rosemarie and Elisabeth,” said Dr. Kepplinger. “[They] said they loved each other and pledged never to be separated again.”
The clinic director said things had gone better than anyone dared hope.
“The reunion went incredibly well,” he said. “It was astonishing how easily it happened. They got along very well and it was far more successful than anticipated.”
But Dr. Kepplinger was circumspect about the huge differences between the well-cared-for family upstairs, and their siblings downstairs, who had had none of their advantages.
“The children who grew up in the cellar are as you’d expect, considering what they’ve been through,” said Dr. Kepplinger. “They can speak and make themselves understood, but they’re far from being in a normal state. We are going very slowly.”
Late Sunday night, police finally entered the cellar at Ybbsstrasse 40, with the help of Josef Fritzl, who had been brought back to reveal the complex electronic codes needed to access the dungeon. The police were highly cautious, fearing the cellar had been booby-trapped with explosives or gas.
Fritzl led them through five different rooms in the cellar, to his workshop. He then pointed out the false shelf, containing paint cans and other containers, behind which lay a 660-pound three-foot-high reinforced concrete door on steel rails. Finally, before being taken away, he revealed the electronic codes that opened it, as well as the ones for the other six, leading to the dungeon.
Chief Inspector Franz Polzer and his team of detectives then entered, negotiating their way along the rat-infested, uneven-floored passageway, unlocking the doors one by one. Finally, they entered the dungeon through a four-foot door, discovering a maze of tiny rooms, connected by narrow stone-lined corridors, just 5 feet, 5 inches tall.
They paused for a couple of minutes, allowing their eyes to adapt to the dingy, almost airless cellar, that had housed Elisabeth Fritzl and her three children for so many years.
Inside they found a well-equipped kitchen and two bedrooms, one with a television and shower, with the children’s colorful painted posters adorning the plaster walls. They also discovered a cell padded top to bottom with rubber, coming off one of the rooms.
There was also a small bathroom and toilet, with tiles and wood trim, crudely decorated with starfish and other marine animals, and brightly colored paper stars on all four rotting walls and the ceiling.
“I went to see this dungeon, this prison for myself,” said Chief Inspector Polzer. “I went through it and was very glad to be able to leave.”
Another detective likened it to a scene from a horror movie.
“There are things that you just don’t want to see,” he said. “The fewer pictures you have in your head, the better.”
A few hours later, as teams of forensic scientists began combing through the cellar and the surrounding grounds for evidence, a calm Josef Fritzl arrived at St. Polten jail, 44 miles east of Amstetten. After being fingerprinted and photographed, he was put under suicide watch.
Late Sunday night, the Lower Austrian police released a statement to the press. It stated that they had found a 42-year-old woman, only referred to as Elisabeth F., who had been missing since August 29, 1984, after an anonymous tip-off. A month after her disappearance, Elisabeth F. had been forced by her father to write a letter to her parents asking them not to search for her. The statement went on to outline how Josef F. and his wife Rosemarie had alerted authorities, after finding three babies left outside their home in 1993, 1994 and 1997, each accompanied by a note from the mother.
The statement said police had brought Elisabeth and her father to police headquarters on Saturday night. During questioning, Elisabeth had revealed that her father had first begun molesting her when she was 11. Then, in August 1984, he’d sedated and handcuffed her, locking her into the cellar for the next twenty-four years.
During her incarceration, said the statement, she had given birth to seven of his children, one dying soon after being born. Three of the younger children had been found on his doorstep, along with letters from his kidnapped daughter Elisabeth. So they were brought up by Josef and his wife Rosemarie as adopted or foster children.
As Austrian reporters converged on Ybbsstrasse 40, Chief Inspector Polzer gave an impromptu press conference.
“It is one of the most remarkable criminal cases in Austria,” stated the white-haired veteran policeman.
He then outlined the chronology of events leading to the discovery of the cellar, emphasizing that Rosemarie Fritzl had not known about her daughter’s imprisonment, believing that Elisabeth had run away and joined a cult.
“The father seems to be very authoritarian,” he told TV news reporters, “and decided what happened and what was supposed to happen in the family—and today we know why he very closely guarded the basement.”
He said police were awaiting the results of DNA tests, to definitely determine the paternity of Elisabeth’s six surviving children.
“They all apparently share the same father,” he said.
In the days to come, the incredible story—by far eclipsing the Natascha Kampusch kidnapping—would capture the imagination of the world and plunge Austria into a national scandal.
When Amstetten residents awoke the next morning, learning the full horror of the crime Josef Fritzl had perpetrated in their midst, there was stunned disbelief. Ybbsstrasse was a main shopping street, and every one of the town’s 23,000 residents had walked past his house at one time or another.
And while Elisabeth and the children had been held captive, more than one hundred tenants had lived there, just a few feet over the cellar dungeon. Finally all the late-night banging and other strange occurrences started making sense. Within hours of the story breaking, someone placed a sign outside the house, reading, “Why did nobody notice?”
The Austrian press immediately dubbed Josef Fritzl “Das Inzest-Monster,” branding his actions “The Worst Crime in History.” Many were now looking back at Austria’s role in the Second World War, asking if this was just the latest and worst example yet of a national malaise.
Now the troubled country, only just coming to terms with the horrific eight-year kidnapping of Natascha Kampusch, had a new and far lower benchmark for depravity.
“The community of Amstetten should drown in shame,” declared a Monday morning editorial in the Osterreich. “The neighbors are turning a blind eye.”
In the wake of the story, onlookers milled arou
nd the drab three-story Fritzl house, watching the forensic teams of investigators go in and out.
“I only have a small pension,” Gertrude Baumgarten, who once worked with Fritzl, told CNN, “but I would spend my money to see him hang on a rope.”
She described him as “arrogant” and someone she deliberately avoided, saying she felt sorry for his wife, who had often spoken of Elisabeth running away.
Like many in Amstetten, Herbert Schneider had considered Josef Fritzl to be the soul of respectability, regularly seeing him breezing around town in his Mercedes-Benz.
“He did not seem to have much to do with many people here,” Schneider recalled. “But he was always very friendly.”
Erika Manhalter, who grew up near Josef Fritzl’s house, remembered him as aloof, never getting close to anyone.
“It certainly seemed as if they were a perfect family unit,” she said. “It just goes to show you cannot really ever see what is happening behind closed doors. I am truly shocked.”
And Gunther Pramreiter, who owned the bakery next door to the Fritzls’ house, said the old couple or their adopted grandchildren came in every day to buy bread.
“You’re amazed that something like this can happen in your neighborhood,” he said.
When Josef Fritzl’s best friend Paul Hoerer, saw Fritzl’s mugshot, accompanying news reports of his arrest, he was speechless.
“I thought there must be some mistake,” he said. “A mix-up.”
Hoerer and his girlfriend Andrea Schmitt, who had often vacationed with Fritzl, last visiting his home three years earlier, could not believe it possible.
“Now I think of the dungeon down there,” he said. “I feel sick. I am ashamed to be linked to him.”
The only member of the Fritzl family willing to give an interview was Jurgen Helm, who was married to Elisabeth’s younger sister Gabrielle. He told the Austrian Times that he and his wife had once spent three years living at Ybbsstrasse 40, even going down into the cellar on several occasions.
“I had no idea that a few meters away, this family [was] living,” he said.
As hundreds of reporters converged on Amstetten from all over the world, all the grown-up Fritzl children went into hiding. Hours after her husband’s brief interview, Gabrielle Helm had placed a sign on her chalet-style home just outside Amstetten, reading, “Reporters not welcome.” And in the coming weeks, her brothers and sisters refused to talk to the press during their frequent trips to the Amstetten-Mauer psychiatric hospital for counseling.
Elisabeth’s older brother Harald, 44, who she had always been closest to growing up, would be particularly important in her recovery. He and their sister Doris would also help detectives build a case against their father.
Later, when reporters tracked Harald Fritzl down to a little cottage in Mitterkirchen im Machland, fifteen miles from Amstetten near the River Danube, his wife came out, screaming, “Leave us alone!”
On Monday afternoon, police released color photographs of the cellar, refusing reporters’ requests for pictures of the bedrooms and rubber-padded cell reportedly used by Fritzl to rape his daughter.
At a press conference held in a local hotel, Chief Inspector Franz Polzer, District Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze and Mauer clinic director Dr. Berthold Kepplinger all sat at a table, briefing the media.
“He was a man of stature,” declared Polzer, holding up a large photograph of Josef Fritzl, taken soon after his arrest. “He led a double life with a family of seven children, with his wife, and a second family of seven children with his daughter. If you look at him today, you would hardly believe he was capable of doing these things.”
Polzer said his men were searching several other properties Fritzl owned around Amstetten, although he doubted they would find any further dungeons, as this one must have occupied most of his time.
“We have not found a further hiding place or a dungeon,” he said. “It’s quite logical that Mr. Josef Fritzl was very busy looking after his two families—the family which lived in the house upstairs, and the one he had in the dungeon.”
Dr. Kepplinger then addressed the press, saying that Elisabeth’s six children were now doing “quite well” at his clinic.
“There’s a team of professionals, consisting of a psychiatrist, neurologist, speech therapist and other experts looking after them,” he said.
But when a reporter asked for details of the family’s daily routine, Chief Inspector Polzer refused to discuss it.
“These regrettable people,” he said, “deserve a right to privacy about the intimate details of their life.”
The questions then turned to Rosemarie Fritzl, and whether she had helped her husband.
“You have to imagine this woman’s world fell apart,” said District Governor Lenze, visibly shocked by what had happened.
Reporters then asked how Fritzl could have gotten away with it for so long, after at least twenty visits from social services over the years.
Lenze, in charge of Amstetten social services for the last fifteen years, defended the authorities. He pointed out that if Fritzl had been able to fool his wife for so long, and they lived in the same house, what chance did anyone else have?
“The criminal is always one step ahead of the police,” he explained. “If we had sensed something, we would have acted.”
Late Monday night, the English tabloid newspapers printed a series of color photographs, showing Josef Fritzl enjoying himself on a beach in Thailand, more than five thousand miles away from his captives. The photographs, taken in January 1998 during one of his sex vacations to Pattaya, came from a video that his best friend Paul Hoerer had shot on the trip. It showed a grinning Fritzl in skimpy Speedos, enjoying a beach massage, sunbathing and shopping in a local bazaar.
Hoerer told reporters how he had become suspicious after he and his girlfriend Andrea Schmitt had once spotted him buying some frilly underwear, far too small for his wife Rosemarie. He said Fritzl had been “really annoyed” when he realized he’d been caught, finally admitting to having a girlfriend, and making him promise to keep it a secret.
He also revealed that Fritzl would disappear late at night, to indulge in Pattaya’s infamous sex industry.
“Fritzl had other interests,” said Rainer Wieczorak, 62, who accompanied them on the 1998 trip. “He had another agenda.”
Hoerer said he had visited the Fritzl home as recently as 2005, and before she was imprisoned, he remembered Elisabeth well as a “withdrawn and shy” child. He said it was obvious that her father did not like her as much as his other children, as he beat her for the smallest thing.
Then, in 1984, Fritzl had told him that Elisabeth had run away and joined a sect. Over the years he remembered how upset Rosemarie would become if her missing daughter was ever brought up in conversation.
“She would leave the table,” he said. “But I never saw her cry.”
The Fritzl house soon became a ghoulish tourist attraction, drawing hundreds of people who stood staring at it. One of Monika Fritzl’s teachers organized a special school trip to view it, so her classmates could have a better idea of what their friend was going through.
“The children are desperate to see it for themselves,” said the teacher, refusing to give her name. “There’s no point keeping it from them, that will only make it worse, and they’ll find out anyway, because it’s all anyone’s talking about.”
CHAPTER 19
“It’s Beyond Comprehension”
On Tuesday morning, as doctors battled to save Kerstin Fritzl’s life, her father briefly appeared before a judge in St. Polten, the provincial capital of Lower Austria. He was remanded for fourteen-day pre-trial detention, while police continued their investigation. On the way back to jail, he was photographed shielding his face in the back of a police car.
“He was completely calm,” prosecutor Gerhard Sedlacek later told reporters. “Completely without emotion.”
As each hour brought shocking new details of Josef Fritzl’s
crimes, the case took center stage in Austrian politics. Just a month away from Austria hosting the much-anticipated European Cup, Interior Minister Günther Platter called for calm, dispatching a team of officials to Amstetten for an official investigation.
“We’re being faced with an unfathomable crime,” he declared. “This case is one of incomprehensible brutality and horror—the most shattering and serious case of its kind that has ever come to light in Austria.”
That morning an Austrian newspaper reported that Josef Fritzl had a previous rape conviction, and had served jail time. The London Times quoted a representative of the Amstetten building company Zehetner, which had employed Fritzl in 1969, admitting he was hired with the knowledge that he had been convicted of rape and had served jail time. Another ex-colleague said that in the early 1970s, it was well known in Amstetten that Fritzl was a convicted rapist.
“I can neither confirm nor deny it,” said Inspector Polzer defensively, citing Austria’s overly lenient privacy laws, erasing criminal records after a fifteen-year period.
On Tuesday afternoon, Chief Inspector Franz Polzer called another press conference, announcing that DNA tests had confirmed Josef Fritzl fathered all his daughter Elisabeth’s children. They also proved that no other males had been inside the cellar, ruling out an accomplice.
“We have the results of the DNA,” said Polzer. “Josef Fritzl is the true father of these seven children of his own daughter.”
Polzer said police were now considering charging Fritzl with “murder through failure to act,” as he had admitted throwing the body of his baby son Michael into an incinerator.
“You can be sure this man left nothing undone,” said Polzer, “in order to deceive the family, his wife, the relatives, the children and everybody around him. In twenty-four years we have never seen anything like it. It’s beyond comprehension.”
The inspector said Fritzl had initially designed the prison to fulfill Elisabeth’s basic needs, gradually enlarging it as her children were born.
