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House of Horrors
The Horrific True Story of Josef Fritzl, the Father from Hell.
By Nigel Cawthorne John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Nigel Cawthorne
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85782-647-0
CHAPTER 1
A LIVING TOMB
In 1984, two weeks after the end of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, a young woman in a small town in Austria was drugged, dragged into a cellar and repeatedly raped by her own father. This ordeal would not just go on for one day, or one week, but 8,516 days – just a few months short of 24 years. In all that time, she would not see natural light or breathe fresh air. With the exception of her father – her jailer – no one knew what had happened to her.
And while Elisabeth Fritzl languished in her purpose-built dungeon, the global events of the end of the 20th century inexorably rolled by: the IRA bombing; the Tory conference in Brighton; the assassination of Indira Gandhi; Ronald Reagan's second term; Bhopal; the Sinclair C5; Gorbachev announcing glasnost and perestroika; the end of the British miners' strike; Live Aid; Boris Becker winning Wimbledon; the race riots on Broadwater Farm Estate; the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger; Chernobyl; the election of former UN General-Secretary Kurt Waldheim, president of Austria, and the revelation of his Nazi past; Argentina's 'hand of God' victory in the World Cup; the marriage of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson; the City of London's 'Big Bang'; the AIDS 'Don't Die of Ignorance' campaign; Mona Lisa; Irangate; the first-ever episode of EastEnders; the Zeebrugge disaster; Spycatcher; the Hungerford massacre; England's 'storm of the century'; the Remembrance Day bombing of Enniskillen; the King's Cross fire; the SAS shootings on Gibraltar; the Piper Alpha disaster; the 1988 Seoul Olympics; the election of George Bush Sr; Lockerbie; the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie; Tiananmen Square; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the US invasion of Panama; Paul Gascoigne's tears; Colin Powell becoming the first black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Nelson Mandela's release; the reunification of Germany; the fall of Mrs Thatcher; the First Gulf War; the break-up of the Soviet Union; Boris Yeltsin being elected President of Russia; the break-up of Yugoslavia; the beating of Rodney King; the election of Bill Clinton; Maastricht; Waco; South Africa adopting majority rule; Nelson Mandela becoming president; Rwanda; the siege of Sarajevo; the 'Supreme Truth' nerve-gas attack in Tokyo; the OJ Simpson trial; the arrest of Fred and Rosemary West in the Gloucester 'House of Horrors' case; 'mad cow' disease, the Spice Girls topping the charts; Robbie Williams' record-breaking world tour; the Taliban taking over in Afghanistan; Tony Blair becoming British Prime Minister; Hong Kong being returned to the Chinese; the death of Princess Diana; the Heaven's Gate cult committing mass suicide; the Oklahoma City bombing; Kosovo; the Good Friday agreement; al-Qaeda bombing the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; the introduction of the Euro; Pinochet's arrest in London; Monica Lewinsky; the Columbine High School Massacre; East Timor; Y2K; the Sydney Olympics; neo-Nazi Freedom Party joining the Austrian coalition; the conviction of Harold Shipman; the Internet bubble; George W Bush becoming the 43rd US President, thanks to 'hanging chads' in Florida; 9/11; the US and Britain retaliating in Afghanistan; the trial of Slobodan Milosevic; Hugo Chavez coming to power; Chechen rebels taking 763 hostages in a Moscow theatre; the second Gulf War; Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi being placed under house arrest; the publication of the Da Vinci Code; the space shuttle Columbia exploding; Saddam Hussein being caught, tried and executed; the train bombings in Madrid; the Athens Olympics; Chechen terrorists taking 1,200 schoolchildren hostage in Beslan; Abu Ghraib; Guantanamo Bay; a tsunami hitting south-east Asia; the death of Pope John Paul II; London's 11/7 bombings; Israel's evacuation of the Gaza strip; Angela Merkel becoming German Chancellor; Elton John's civil partnership with David Furnish; Danish Islamic cartoons causing riots in the Middle East; Hurricane Katrina; Austria's first girl-in-a-cellar, Natascha Kampusch, being released after six years in captivity; Nicholas Sarkozy election as President of France and marriage to Italian model Carla Bruni; Live 8; Tony Blair standing down; the Spice Girls tour (again); the assassination of Benazir Bhutto; the killings in Kenya; John McCain securing the Republican presidential nomination; Barack Obama securing the Democratic nomination; the Virginia Tech shootings; then, three days later ...
On Saturday, 19 April 2008, a young woman arrived by ambulance at the Mostviertel Red Cross hospital in the small town of Amstetten in Lower Austria, 75 miles west of Vienna. She was in a coma and no one could tell what was wrong with her. An hour later, 73-year-old Josef Fritzl turned up at the hospital. He said the girl was his 19-year-old granddaughter Kerstin. The unconscious teenager, he said, had been left outside his house.
Apparently, this was not an unusual event in the Fritzl household. Fritzl told anyone who would listen that his daughter Elisabeth had run off to a mysterious religious sect in August 1984 when she was just 18. In the 24 years since then, she had not been seen by her family or friends, but she had written to them. Seemingly unable to cope with motherhood, Elisabeth had left three babies outside the family home with notes begging her parents to look after them – at least, that was Josef Fritzl's story. He and his wife Rosemarie, now in her late sixties, had taken them in and, in due course, adopted one and officially fostered the other two.
The patient, Fritzl's granddaughter, was having convulsions and was bleeding from the mouth. She had lost nearly all her teeth, was severely malnourished and deathly pallid. According to the doctor who treated her, 'She hung in a state between life and death.' She would remain that way for weeks.
Despite her shocking state, her grandfather seemed unconcerned. Instead of staying at the hospital – at least long enough to get a diagnosis – or waiting until the girl's condition stabilised, Fritzl rushed away, adding somewhat puzzlingly that the doctors should not call the police. He left a note from her mother, which he said he had found with the unconscious child. It read, 'Wednesday, I gave her aspirin and cough medicine for the condition. Thursday, the cough worsened. Friday, the coughing gets even worse. She has been biting her lip as well as her tongue. Please, please help her! Kerstin is really terrified of other people, she was never in a hospital. If there are any problems please ask my father for help, he is the only person that she knows.'
There was a curious postscript to the note, addressed to the stricken girl, 'Kerstin – please stay strong, until we see each other again! We will come back to you soon!'
This seemed an unlikely sentiment from a woman who, the medical staff had been told, was unable and unwilling to look after her own children; a woman who had simply dumped her children outside her parent's three-storey house at 40 Ybbsstrasse in Amstetten.
Dr Albert Reiter, who was in charge of the case, said, 'I could not believe that a mother who wrote such a note and seemed so concerned would just vanish. I raised the alarm with the police and we launched a TV appeal for her to get in touch.'
Kerstin's condition deteriorated. The fits continued, she lapsed in and out of consciousness, and her immune system did not seem to be working. The doctors needed to know more about the medical history of their mysterious patient, but the appeal for her mother to come forward brought no response. A week went by, during which time Kerstin deteriorated. Eventually, she was placed on a ventilator; her kidneys had stopped working. She was on a dialysis machine and was being kept in a medically induced coma, yet still no mother appeared.
Elisabeth Fritzl, however, had seen the TV appeal and suddenly turned up in Amstetten as if returning from the dead. This was no surprise to the family and those who knew them. Around Christmas 2007, another letter arrived from Elisabeth, telling her parents that she intended to leave the cult and return home. 'If all goes well, I hope to be back within six months,' she wrote. Now, prematurely, she had returned.
She, too, was in an appalling condition – deathly pale and prematurely aged. This was explained by the cult's bizarre ascetic lifestyle, which also seemed to have had a shockingly deleterious effect on Kerstin.
On Saturday, 26 April 2008, Elisabeth Fritzl appeared on the streets of Amstetten for the first time in 24 years. She was seen with her father and was heading towards the hospital, on her way to see her sick daughter. When they reached the grounds of the hospital, the police, tipped off that they were on their way, detained them. Kerstin was in such a bad condition that they wanted to question her mother with a view to bringing charges of child neglect. Father and daughter were taken to the police headquarters where they were questioned separately. At first, Elisabeth stuck to her father's story that she had been in a cult, but, from the start, the police sensed there was something very odd about her. Although she was only 42, she had grey hair, no teeth and a morbidly pallid complexion. She looked like a woman in her sixties, who had been locked up in an institution. It was also quite plain that she was terrified.
Suddenly, she said that she would tell them everything, provided they could guarantee she and her children would never have to see her father again. This was a shock to the detectives. Fritzl was a pillar of the community; a retired electrical engineer and the owner of a number of properties in the town, he had lived there all his life. He had brought up three of Elisabeth's abandoned children and had even taken her critically ill daughter to the hospital after she had, apparently, neglected the child. But Elisabeth then told them a story that beggared belief.
She said she had not run away to join a cult and her father was not the caring family man that he pretended to be. A strict disciplinarian, he had been beating her brutally from the time she was old enough to walk. The sexual assaults had begun when she was 11. She then said that, when she was 18, he had drugged her, dragged her to a concealed cellar in his house, raped her, and had continued to do so for the next 24 years. The rapes had resulted in seven children. For nearly a quarter-of-a-century, she and three of the children had lived in a windowless hell-hole beneath the family home. The children had never seen the outside world or breathed fresh air; they had never known freedom, nor had had any contact with wider society. The only other person they had seen was their jailer, a man who would alternately play with them and terrorise them.
She said that he told them that the doors to the cellar were electrified and, if they tried to escape, they would be gassed. He raped their mother in front of them and yet, with the boxes of groceries and meals he shoved through a hatch, he was their only lifeline. The good family man of Amstetten was, in truth, a brutal monster, and the respectable family home at 40 Ybbsstrasse was, in fact, a House of Hrrors.
All this was hard to believe, but the police could not put aside the evidence of their own eyes. Elisabeth was in such a shocking state that she had clearly gone through some terrible ordeal – possibly the one she had just described.
The police had to put her allegations to Fritzl. Initially, he refused to talk, even producing the letter from his daughter saying that she was intending to return from the religious sect where she had spent the last 24 years in an attempt to deflect her accusations. Later, he even complained that he was disappointed that Elisabeth had seized her opportunity to 'betray' him so rapidly.
The following morning, the police took Josef Fritzl back to his house at 40 Ybbsstrasse. The front was a typical suburban townhouse on an ordinary street, but at the rear was an imposing concrete structure, not unlike a wartime bunker. Although it was set among leafy suburban gardens where those neighbouring the Fritzls' property were all visible, the back of the house was screened off by high hedges. Fritzl's garden was the only one not overlooked by neighbours.
At first, the police could not find the dungeon where Elisabeth said she had been held; it was so well hidden. But, sensing the game was up, Fritzl led them down the cellar stairs and through eight locked doors and a warren of rooms. Concealed behind a shelving unit in his basement workshop was a heavy steel door just 1m high with a remote-control locking device. After some prompting, Fritzl gave the police the code to open it; he was the only one who knew the code. He had told Elisabeth and her children that if they harmed him or overpowered him while he was in the cellar, they would find themselves locked in there for ever. He taunted them that, if he died suddenly from a heart-attack outside, they would starve. Their prison was also rigged with security systems that would electrocute them if they tried to tamper with the door, and led them to believe toxic gas would be pumped in, should they try to escape.
Later, he told Lower Austria's top criminal investigator, Oberst Franz Polzer, that the lock on the heavy steel door that shut the basement dungeon off from the outside world worked on a timer. It would open automatically if he was away for a protracted period, so his daughter and her children would be freed if he died, he said.
'But there was no mechanism in place that we have found to release them,' said Chief Investigator Polzer. 'I do not want to think about what would have happened to the mother and her three children if anything had happened to Fritzl.'
Beyond a basement workshop, Fritzl had built a perfectly concealed bunker to imprison his own daughter and her children. Ducking through the first door – just 3 feet 3 inches high – the police found a narrow corridor. At the end was a padded room, sound-proofed with rubber cladding, where he would rape his daughter while the children cowered elsewhere. It was so well insulated that no scream, cry or sob could be heard in any other part of the building. Beyond that was a living area, then down a passage little more than a foot wide that you would have to turn sideways to negotiate were a rudimentary kitchen and bathroom. Further on, there were two small bedrooms, each with two beds in them. There was no natural light and little air.
On the white-tiled walls of a tiny shower cubicle, the captives had painted an octopus, a snail, a butterfly and a flower in an attempt to brighten their prison. The furnishings were sparse. The police found a toy elephant perched on a mirrored medicine cabinet and scraps of paper and glue that the children had used to make toys. The only other distraction was a small TV, which provided flickering images of the outside world, which the children had never experienced and, for Elisabeth, was an increasingly dim memory. There was also a washing machine and a fridge and freezer, where food could be stored when Fritzl took off on the holidays he denied his captives.
The entire space was lit by electric light bulbs – the only source of light – although Elisabeth had begged her father to give her vitamin D supplements and an ultraviolet light to prevent her kids from suffering growth abnormalities. The lights went on and off on a timer to give them some sense of day and night, something else that the children had never experienced.
The police found two children who had survived these appalling conditions – 18-year-old Stefan and 5-year-old Felix. They were in a poor physical state and unused to strangers; they were so lacking in social skills that the police found they were practically feral. Because of the low ceilings in the dungeon – never more than 1.7 metres, or 5 feet 6 inches – Stefan was stooped. In his excitement, young Felix resorted to going on all fours. Having never been required to communicate with anyone beyond their immediate circle, the police found the boys had difficulty talking and, between themselves, resorted to grunts. For the first time in their lives, they were taken out into the daylight.
Confronted with the evidence, Fritzl confessed that he had imprisoned his daughter. 'Yes,' he told the police, 'I locked her up, but only to protect her from drugs. She was a difficult child.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from House of Horrors by Nigel Cawthorne. Copyright © 2008 Nigel Cawthorne. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
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