Most of his first 10 years were spent under the Third Reich, and a Franz Fritzl is listed on Amstetten's war memorial, but the town council refused last week to say if this was Josef's father. The history of Josef Fritzl begins on 9 April 1935 with his birth in the town he was to make notorious. And the only person they had seen was their jailer, the man who would alternately play with them and terrorise them, who told them if they tried to escape they would be gassed in their chamber, who raped their mother and yet, with his boxes of groceries and meals shoved through a hatch, was their only lifeline: the good family man of Amstetten. They knew neither freedom, nor the rest of society. The children had never seen the outside world or breathed its air. For nearly a quarter of a century, she and three of the seven children that were the result of those rapes, had lived in a windowless netherworld. When she was 18, he had drugged her, dragged her to a concealed cellar in his house, raped her, and gone on doing so for the next 24 years. Instead, her father had been beating her since she was old enough to walk and sexually assaulting her since she was 11. And then she told them a story that even now, eight days after its telling, beggars belief.Įlisabeth had not run away to join a cult. She was nervous, too, and suddenly asked if they could guarantee she and her children would never again have to see Fritzl, this helpful, polite man who had brought his daughter's note and then his daughter to the hospital. Apparently only 42, she looked, with her grey hair and almost white complexion, like an institutionalised woman in her sixties. Right from the start, there was something very odd about her. They took her to a room and began to talk. After all, he had his own family to look after. This said that the girl, Kerstin, had suffered headaches, taken an aspirin, and then begun suffering convulsions, hence the bleeding tongue. He told him that the girl's mother, his daughter Elisabeth, was unable and unwilling to look after her and had dumped her at his house. Then, an hour after her admission, Fritzl arrived and saw Dr Albert Reiter. She was taken to Amstetten hospital, where doctors saw she was very pale and bleeding from her tongue. As luck would have it, this was Josef Fritzl's house. On Saturday 19 April, a girl of 19 had been taken seriously ill at 40 Ybbstrasse. He really was a very good family man.Īnd then, everything began to change. He just took them in and raised them as if they were his own. Even when the little hussy had three children and just dumped them on his doorstep, did he complain? No. And when that silly daughter of his ran off to join this religious cult, had he bothered people with lots of questions about who she'd been seen with recently? No. Hadn't he brought his seven children up to be good boys and girls? Always so polite just like their father. In his home town of Amstetten just eight days ago, they'd have been adamant about that. Given a new identity, relocated to a tiny hamlet known only as Village X whose residents proved fiercely protective of her, she was able to form a happy, long-term relationship with one of the security guards assigned to protect her.He was a very good family man, was Josef Fritzl. When the judge asked him how he felt after watching his daughter’s testimony, he quietly answered: “I plead guilty.” He was sentenced to life in a psychiatric institution.Įlisabeth went on to forge a new, better life for herself. The next day, Fritzl for the first time made no attempt to hide his face from the photographers. But then he watched Elisabeth’s video testimony, and was “devastated” to spot her in court, in person, as it was being played. He still, however, denied the charges of enslaving his daughter and murdering Michael by denying him professional medical assistance. They marvelled at how she had withstood her ordeal without losing her sanity.Ī year later, at the trial, the unbreakable Elisabeth Fritzl comprehensively defeated her jailer.įritzl initially pleaded guilty to rape, incest, coercion and deprivation of liberty. After the police had examined her, it was the turn of the doctors. As his lies collapsed in on him, it seems Fritzl felt he had no choice but to take the enormous gamble of arriving at the hospital with Elisabeth.
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