More than 200 people came to Amstetten's main square on Tuesday evening and lit candles for the victims of the family tragedy. The event was organized by a spontaneously founded citizens' initiative. Earlier the town's mayor had said: "We want to show that this is not a town of criminals and to counteract the impression of Amstetten which has arisen."
"We have been surrounded by shock, sadness, anger, perhaps even hate in the last few days," says local priest Peter Bösendorfer. "We were forced to recognize that there is something in our town that we cannot comprehend." The town's residents now had to "help and show solidarity so that a life is possible for the children and women."That will not be easy, because in a town of 23,000 like Amstetten, "everyone constantly runs into each other," says Lina Angermeier. "None of the (F.) family can really ever live here again -- if they want to be free, not only from fear, but also from allegations."
Amstetten residents held a candlelit vigil on Tuesday evening....
Perhaps we should have long become accustomed to the idea that students can go on killing sprees, that people can make arrangements to engage in cannibalism and that, in fact, every conceivable satisfaction of a monstrous drive is not just being imagined, but is being enacted somewhere, at some time and by someone.
But what kind of a person even comes up with this kind of idea? A constantly growing family, the product of incest, vegetating in a dungeon for decades, under the stern control of a despotic patriarch, tucked away in the midst of ordinary, small-town life? And all of this happening in a house on a busy street, under the noses of neighbors, tenants and friends of the family, people who had no idea of the existence of this abyss or, for that matter, of the chasms in this man's mind? According to Reinhard Haller, a forensic psychiatrist from the Austrian city of Innsbruck, there are "no comparable cases worldwide," not even that of Natascha Kampusch, who was kidnapped by a stranger and spent eight years in an underground prison.
Following his arrest on Saturday, Josef F. is being held on remand, and a DNA test has now confirmed that he is the childrens' father. Meanwhile, 42-year-old Elisabeth F. and her children are being given psychiatric treatment.
The Austrian news agency APA has reported that neither the mother nor her children had been provided with any medical care during their years of imprisonment. The suspect is believed only to have provided his victims with clothing and food...
How was Josef F. able to keep his daughter locked up for 24 years without anyone finding out? Did he have accomplices? And what role did his wife
Rosemarie play?...Who else could Josef F. have told, except for her? Who else could have been complicit in helping him lead a double life over decades?
"It certainly wasn't the son," Christian B., who lived in the building at the start of 2000, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "He acted as if he was
the building's superintendent, but he never did very much. And ... he had a key to the cellar....The heavy steel door to the cellar, the secret
location where the family of four lived and the systematic abuse of his own
child
(Josef F., who had worked as an electrician, continued to expand the dungeon over the years. Here, in the bathroom, some of the tiles are covered with stickers.)
Josef F., 73, "admitted that he locked his daughter, who was 18 at the time, in the cellar, that he repeatedly had sex with her, and that he is the father of her seven children," Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, told the Associated Press. "He also admitted that he had burned one of the children in the building's furnace." The infant apparently died several days after birth because it had not been given proper care.
With a confession now in hand, Polzer told the media that investigators were also looking at other factors in the case which might implicate other people. Who provided for the kidnapping victims? he asked. How were the infants in the basement cared for?
.According to psychiatrists, the mother and children, who are currently under psychological care, appear to have been deeply traumatized by their years of captivity and isolation. Two of the children who grew up underground have now been reunited with their three siblings. The family is being cared for in an apartment on the grounds of the Amstetten-Mauer neuropsychiatric clinic....Until their release, three children had never seen daylight. Josef F. is believed to have burned the corpse of another child, who apparently died because of a lack of medical attention shortly after his birth.Just a few steps away, a sense of feigned normalcy was the order of the day. The other three children lived above with their grandparents -- they went to school and were members of fire department and police groups. They were considered happy and successful as well as good students. Josef F. and his wife adopted one, and cared for two others as foster children. The authorities had made the usual inquiries and nothing unusual had turned up.
All three children had been left, one at a time, in front of the family's house as apparent foundlings -- that, at least, was the version of the story told by the father of the 42-year-old to conceal the truth. Each time, he left a letter from his daughter in the place where the child was "found," in which she supposedly expressed her worries about the children and asked for help for them. In this way, the man could maintain the story of his runaway daughter over all the years.
But can it really be the case that not only the man's 69-year-old wife, but also his first six children, who are now adults, did not notice the man's terrible activities? That they didn't even feel a hint of suspicion, even when they came to visit the family? Or did they all look away, out of fear or lack of courage to act?
'A Perfectly Constructed Framework of Lies'
Experts have certified that Josef F. is highly intelligent. The 73-year-old is regarded as an authoritarian figure. He repeatedly complained to the police about the fact that they were unable to track down his supposedly runaway daughter. He created, in the words of police chief Lang, "a perfectly constructed framework of lies."
In this respect, the criminologist sees a contrast with the case of the kidnapping victim Natascha Kampusch, in which -- as is emerging more and more -- errors had taken place in the police investigation, with far-reaching consequences. Kampusch had also been held in a sunlight-free dungeon for years. Unlike in the Kampusch case, Lang believes, given the current state of affairs, the police would have had no chance of uncovering the Amstetten case.
Nevertheless, there were warning signs.
Rosemarie, at age 17 became his wife. She had to put up with his solo vacations to Thailand's budget sex paradise, Pattaya. She accepted it when, as her sister recalled in an interview with the Austrian newspaper Österreich, he stopped having sex with her. She also said nothing about his constantly disappearing into the basement, where he told her he did not wish to be disturbed, because he was supposedly drawing machine plans there. Who else but this woman would have been so submissive? "Rosi," in other words, was the ideal wife for Fritzl, the ideal first wife, that is. She was a woman accustomed to knowing nothing. She was mother to seven children. She was a housewife and sometimes ran a guesthouse.
Josef F. apparently sexually abused Elisabeth, his daughter, for the first time when she was 11 years old. The girl twice tried to escape from her ordeal by running away, first at the age of 16 and then when she was 18. When she returned, Josef F. lured his daughter into the basement, put her in handcuffs and locked her up -- apparently out of fear that she would report his abuse....
The body of a 17-year-old girl, Martina Posch, was found on a shore of a lake in Upper Austria in November 1986, 10 days after she had gone missing. Fritzl's wife Rosemarie ran an inn on the other side of the lake at the time.As little as this first wife was a match for Fritzl, she was just as incapable of satisfying his needs. In the fall of 1967, after Rosemarie had already given him four children, Fritzl allegedly raped a woman in the northern Austrian city of Linz. He had apparently attempted to rape another woman earlier. He is believed to have spent one and a half years in prison, but his sentence was purged from the police record after 15 years.
An aerial view of the house on Ybbsstrasse.
"It's the kind of thing he would do," says Franz Haider, 58, who worked next to Fritzl for three months in 1969 at a local cement and building supply company, Zehetner Baustoffhandel und Betonwerk. Although Haider insists that he would never have believed a crime like Fritzl's to be possible in Amstetten, now that it has occurred, he says, he can't imagine anyone more capable of concealing it for 24 years.
When Fritzl was working with Haider, their department was developing a machine to pour concrete pipes, such as those used in sewage systems. It was a large and complicated construction, five meters tall, three meters wide and three meters deep. Fritzl, the technical director of the project, had already spent months developing it. Haider joined the project as an assistant, and all that he learned from Fritzl, other than the status of the machine, was that his boss was married. Other than that, Fritzl remained tight-lipped about his private life. He never had any personal phone calls and there were no family photos on his desk. He didn't even tell Haider that he had children. Haider is convinced that Fritzl was the kind of man capable of keeping a secret for years, even a monstrous one. Haider also says that Fritzl would have been well able to build the kind of basement dungeon where he kept his daughter imprisoned. "Concrete technology was Fritzl's specialty. He could have built anything himself."
'Horror House' Father Had Prior Sex Conviction, Newspapers Say
Josef F. had a prior conviction for a sexual offense, according to newspaper reports which, if confirmed, would deepen the scandal over
how his crime went unnoticed.
The Times quoted a spokeswoman for a company where Josef F. was employed as an engineer and procurement manager during the 1970s as saying: "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 offense."
The Times also found several neighbours in the small Austrian town of Amstetten who said he was known as a former sex offender by older members of the community. One 50-year-old told the paper: "I was 10 at the time, but I remember how we children were afraid to play near (F.'s) house because of the rumors that he had raped a woman and spent some time in jail for it."...
Such old convictions would have been deleted from his record in the meantime, in line with standard practice. When a local court allowed Fritzl and his wife to adopt one of the children in 1994, he had a clean record. "There was no reason to suspect that something was wrong," Josef Schloegl, head of the Amstetten district court, told the Associated Press.
In a further development, a woman in Linz, Upper Austria, has claimed that she was raped by Fritzl in 1967. Austrian media reported this week that Fritzl had been convicted of attempted rape in 1969...first Josef F. had to find the woman who was to obey him and submit to his wishes; and he found her in the place where the risk of being discovered was the lowest for sex offenders like him -- in his own family. He chose Elisabeth.
She was still a girl at the time, and he raped her. But even when she was questioned just over a week ago, Elisabeth was still unable to talk about how and where she was first raped, except that it happened in 1977, or possibly 1978. She was only 11 or 12 at the time, and she told no one. She was unable to defend herself, nor could anyone else have defended her. Even her older siblings were powerless against Fritzl...His daughter Elisabeth, now 42 but prematurely aged with pale skin and white hair because of the lack of natural light, was kept locked in the cellar with the other three children she had borne. None of those three had seen daylight, reportedly, until their release on Sunday. One child died at birth and was incinerated by Josef F. in an oven, police said.
The six children are aged between five and 19. Police said on Tuesday that DNA tests confirmed Josef F. was their father.
Nothing but His Flesh and Blood
When he came home from work, the children's friends had to leave the house immediately, and the children were required to remain silent when he walked into a room. If they failed to comply, or if they forgot to say "please" or "thank you," he would hit them so that they would continue to toe the line. But Elisabeth had to do more than merely toe the line. She was afraid of the days when he came to her, when he would mercilessly take possession of her because, in his eyes, she was nothing but his flesh and his blood.
In 1972, Fritzl and his wife purchased an inn and an adjacent campsite on Mondsee Lake in Upper Austria. He had decided to enter the hospitability -- and possibly the insurance fraud -- business. There were two fires at the inn, but it was never proven that Fritzl was involved. Later on, he sold real estate and ran a mail-order lingerie business. But the application for a building permit that he submitted in 1978, shortly after he had raped Elisabeth for the first time, was not for the inn, but for an "extension with basement" to the Fritzl family's new home in Amstetten. Five years later, he reported that he had completed the work, and when the building inspectors came to the site, they confirmed that Fritzl had indeed build the new extension in accordance with the permits he had been issued.
Presumably, he excavated enough space to accommodate a much larger basement but then built walls to conceal the dungeon. Later on, he apparently dug a passageway to a forgotten basement under the main house, which he would later use to expand the dungeon to its current size.There is one reason to suggest that he had already developed the idea for his incest dungeon early on. Time was running out for Fritzl, because his daughter was threatening to slip out of his control.
JÜRGEN DAHLKAMP, MARION KRASKE, JULIANE VON MITTELSTAEDT, SVEN RÖBEL, MATHIEU VON ROHR
The second half of this SPIEGEL cover story will be published online on Tuesday.
The six surviving children he had with his daughter are receiving psychiatric care in hospital. F. himself is "emotionally broken," according to his lawyer....
What the children witnessed in the three-room, 60-square-meter cellar behind a steel door locked with a security code can only be imagined -- beatings, rape, births without medical attention. Josef F. is likely to face a string of charges including manslaughter or murder (for the death of a seventh baby), rape, kidnapping, coercion and grievous bodily harm.
Elisabeth and her six children are in a hospital in Amstetten. "The children are quite well," the director of the clinic, Berthold Kepplinger, told a news conference. "There is a team of professionals consisting of a psychiatrist, neurologist, speech therapist and other experts looking after them. "
Kepplinger said the children were being kept together. They were reunited with each other on Sunday after the incarcerated ones were released. "It is astonishing how easily it worked, how the children came together and how easily the grandmother and the mother came together. For us is was astonishing that this meeting was in such a good mood," said Kepplinger.
He said the children were pale and and that their physical coordination was impaired. One of them, an 18-year-old youth, was able to read and write. The other two children are a five-year-old boy and a 19-year-old woman who is seriously ill in hospital.
Police declined to reveal details of their everyday life in the cellar. Investigators also want to verify whether a mechanism existed to pump gas into the windowless rooms where Elisabeth and three of her children livedToday Elisabeth is pale and her hair has turned white, says Heinz Lenze, the district commissioner in Amstetten who is visibly shocked by what has happened in his community. You can tell by looking at her what she has suffered all these years, he says....
However the investigators are ruling out the possibility that there might be another hideout or a new horror story to be uncovered. Chief investigator Franz Polzer said that police had searched other houses belonging to Josef F. In total, Josef F. owned five properties, some in Lower Austria, including a campsite complete with pub....
It was pure chance that her ordeal ended at all. Only when space began running out in his dungeon for the products of his omnipotence, when children started falling ill in his family vault, did he release three of them to a life above, into his own house, into his other family and into a seemingly normal life.Last week her 19-year-old daughter Kerstin became very ill, and Elisabeth was able to persuade her father and tormentor that he should bring the teenager to the hospital immediately. It is possible that the illness was a serious hereditary disease that was a result of incest. That would at least explain why the authorities began to appeal through the media for the supposedly missing Elisabeth to contact them immediately -- they said they urgently required information from her.
Then the usually cool and calculated perpetrator made a mistake. Elisabeth persuaded Josef F. to take her to the hospital. On the way there a police patrol stopped them and arrested the pensioner after receiving an anonymous tip-off. It would seem that there was indeed someone who knew what was going on -- someone who had kept quiet all these years. Apparently the web of lies that he had spun in Amstetten was not as perfect as it seemed....Elisabeth's eldest daughter, 19-year-old Kerstin, whose illness led to the discovery of the incest case, is still in a critical condition, and is receiving artificial respiration and dialysis....
During his interrogation, Josef F. did not prove to be particularly forthcoming. He just said he was "sorry" for his family. And then he announced
that he wanted to be left in peace.
LAWYER OUT FOR FAME; FORTUNE & €€€€€€s:
Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, one of the best known defenders in Austria, sees the good in his client and wants to understand him.
It's a statement that is sure to provoke criticism from the public, and Mayer knows it. The first letters and threatening e-mails from the public have started to arrive. "Lawyers who refuse to defend certain acts contradict my view of professional ethics," he says. The 60-year-old lawyer sees the hate mail as an occupational hazard.
Rudolf Mayer, Josef Fritzl's lawyer:
"He seems a bit afraid," says Günther Mörwald, prison governor at St. Pölten. The prisoner from Amstetten is not speaking much, but, according to Mörwald, he is slowly understanding "what he did to his family." The prison governor says he is seeing the "first signs of regret," from Fritzl.
This is not the first case with which the well-known lawyer has hit the headlines. In 1996 he defended two alleged neo-Nazis in the so-called "letter bomb trial," during which he revealed the true perpetrator and succeeded in getting his two clients acquitted.
Mayer must be aware that the chances of getting any kind of light sentence for Josef Fritzl look slim, but that doesn't seem to deter him.
The coming trial already looks like it will be a huge sensation, which will be watched by the whole world. Mayer doesn't seem to mind all the attention. On the contrary. "Even a Colombian radio station has asked me if I am prepared to do a live interview," he says.
