The Fritzl fiasco

Writen by Stephanie Marsh

The Times

BBC.news.

June 9, 2009

Elisabeth Fritzl and her children could have been freed years earlier if Austrian authorities had not missed dozens of clues, writes Stephanie Marsh, author of a new book on the man who held his daughter in a dungeon for a quarter of a century...

Josef Fritzl is ruthless, and an accomplished liar, but he is also a clumsy operator, a man who, by the time he had reached his mid-40s, had been arrested twice for arson, twice more for sex offences, and jailed once for the rape of a woman at knifepoint.

And though the Austrian authorities have always insisted that they bear no responsibility for Josef Fritzl's 24-year incarceration of his daughter, Elisabeth, evidence...suggests that this often flagrant criminal left a staggering number of clues in his wake - clues that were repeatedly ignored by social workers, the police and the judiciary.

In August 1984, four months after her 18th birthday, Elisabeth disappeared. She vanished at some point around lunch-time. She was living at home in the family house in Amstetten at the time and, except for her father, the house was empty. Her mother and one of her sisters were out shopping, another sister had been sent out by Fritzl for a walk.

By the time they returned, Elisabeth was gone. It was Josef Fritzl who, the next day, would report Elisabeth's disappearance to the police, hinting, without a shred of evidence to back up his claim, that she had joined "a cult".

Notwithstanding the fact that were no cults to speak of in Austria either now or at the time, there were other factors that might have alerted the police's suspicions.

Although Fritzl's conviction for rape had by this stage been wiped from his criminal record (by Austrian law sex offences were then automatically deleted from police files after a period of 10 to 15 years), it was commonly known in the tight-knit community that he was a convicted rapist. His arrests for arson were still on record but he nevertheless legally owned two guns: a Bernadelli pistol and a rifle.

It was also known to social workers that Elisabeth had run away from home two years previously. On her return to Amstetten, however, they had chosen to discuss the matter only with her father, though Elisabeth was in the room at the time.

Additionally, some of her friends suspected Elisabeth of self-harming - another obvious outward sign of abuse - but social workers simply accepted Josef Fritzl's account.

We now know that what in fact happened on that August afternoon in 1984. Josef Fritzl had locked his daughter into a specially prepared dungeon in his cellar. About a month into her incarceration, he forced her to write a letter which he then posted to himself and showed the police.

Again the authorities accepted everything Fritzl told them at face value. The letter was never examined by a relevant expert, despite the fact that Austria's expert on fringe religions actually lived in Amstetten (he would eventually be shown all Elisabeth's letters only in 2008, declaring them obvious fakes).

In 1993, nine years after Elisabeth disappeared, the first of three babies appeared on the Fritzl's doorstep. The precise details of these "discoveries" are particularly disturbing. The child was abandoned in a cardboard box along with a letter from Elisabeth. However, in a nonsensical piece of bureaucratic logic it was decided that there would be no official search for Elisabeth because she was an adult and could "go where she liked."

Just over a year later there was a second child, this time found abandoned on the doorstep in a pram. It was Rosemarie Fritzl who discovered this second child and it was she who then described what had happened to a social worker.

She said shortly before midnight she had heard the sound of a baby crying outside the house. She discovered the child on the doorstep and returned inside with it in her arms. Suddenly the telephone began to ring. On the other end of the line a woman, claiming to be Elisabeth, was apologising for having abandoned her child. It was obviously a taped message: Rosemarie Fritzl hung up, but the phone immediately began to ring again: when she picked up the same message was played down the receiver.

What was particularly mysterious to Mrs Fritzl, she told the social worker, was the fact that she and her husband had recently changed their home telephone number and this number was not yet known to anyone else.

Although the case of the two abandoned foundlings was unusual enough to attract the attention of the national press, nothing about this chain of events seems to have caused much concern among the authorities.

At Josef Fritzl's suggestion, one of the letters was examined by a graphologist who, of course, declared himself to be satisfied that it had indeed been written by Elisabeth Fritzl.

The fact that her letters never made any mention of a cult, and that, in later years, at least one letter would bear a post-mark from a town very close to Amstetten, in which Josef Fritzl was known to own a house, still did nothing to alert social workers or the police.

A third child would appear on the Fritzl's doorstep in 1997. He, too, would be taken in and raised by his "grandparents".

Time passed. Josef Fritzl spent more and more time in the cellar but nobody questioned his increasingly unusual behaviour. He was living apart from his wife, in a separate flat within the house in Amstetten, and he would often spend the night in the cellar, claiming he was away on a business trips.

Lodgers saw him bring bags of groceries into the cellar, as well as building material, appliances, and furniture: bed frames, mattresses, a shower unit, a washing machine. Things were constantly disappearing into the cellar and never coming out.

In late March 2008, Elisabeth Fritzl's oldest child, Kerstin, became desperately ill in the cellar and her father decided to evacuate her. Had it not been for the suspicions of one of the doctors treating Kerstin in hospital, it is more than likely the case would never have come to light.

The Austrians have prided themselves on their discreet handling of the case, but there has been no inquiry, no admission of failure on behalf of the police, social workers, or the government.
The Austrian media, for their part, have been side-tracked into a largely peripheral debate about press intrusion.

And, although it is true that the British paparazzi, in particular resorted to desperate and underhand tactics to get the first pictures of Elisabeth Fritzl and her children, many sections of the Austrian press showed no compunction in either publishing Josef Fritzl's confidential psychiatric report before his case came to trial, or printing many of the intimate details of Elisabeth Fritzl's ordeal when they were first leaked to an Austrian magazine. So much for privacy.

Meanwhile, serious questions regarding the competence, gullibility and accountability of the Austrian authorities have gone unanswered.

After horrific trial, Austria struggles to move on

AP Photo/Robert Jaeger, Pool) Defendant Josef Fritzl stands in the courtroom of the provincial courthouse in St. Poelten, Austria, Thursday, March 19, 2009. Josef Fritzl was convicted of homicide, enslavement, incest, rape and other charges Thursday and sentenced to life in a psychiatric prison for holding his daughter captive for 24 years and fathering her seven children.

Fritzl, 73, sat calmly and bowed his head as the verdicts by the Austrian jury were read. He later told the court he accepted the outcome and waived his right to appeal _ bringing a dramatic end to a shocking case that has drawn worldwide attention



Vienna - Long before Josef Fritzl and the horrendous crimes in his dungeon, Austria was maligned for its Nazi past, its right-wing politics and another high-profile abduction case.

Now that Fritzl has been sentenced to life in a psychiatric ward, a nation wearied and wounded by yet another dark episode seems desperate to move on. "We are glad it ended so quickly," Chancellor Werner Faymann said Friday of Fritzl's four-day trial.

To those who portrayed the 73-year-old Fritzl as the monstrous product of a country blemished by its complicity with the Nazis, Faymann had a stern message. "We will always defend ourselves against general prejudices and historical circumstances," he said.

Fritzl was convicted of homicide, rape, incest and other charges Thursday. He was sentenced to life in a psychiatric ward for enslaving his daughter Elisabeth, raping her more than 3,000 times over 24 years, fathering her seven children, and letting a newborn son die in captivity.

Austrians like Josef Leitner, who rented a room in the same house in Amstetten where Fritzl built his basement prison, want to put it all behind them. "On the day I heard what happened to Elisabeth, my breath stood still. Today I can breathe normally for the first time again," he said.

Many Austrians were scandalized by foreign media coverage of the case. British tabloids and other newspapers ran salacious headlines about Fritzl's crimes in the "Nazi nation," putting many Austrians on the defensive. Hitler, who was born in Austria, annexed the country in 1938. Although Austrians have made big strides in acknowledging their nation's role in Nazi-era war crimes and the Holocaust, it remains a sore spot.

"Vicious attack on our Austria!" the newspaper Heute wrote in a front-page headline this week. "Half the world is aiming at us." To be sure, there are reasons why the world sees more than Alpine meadows and Mozart sonatas when it sizes up Austria.

The Fritzl case broke less than two years after the dramatic escape of Natascha Kampusch, who had been confined to a windowless underground cell for more than 8 1/2 years. Kampusch was a freckle-faced 10-year-old walking to school when Wolfgang Priklopil seized her off a Vienna street and imprisoned her in the cell he had built beneath his suburban home. She escaped in August 2006, and Priklopil committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train.

Around the world, people mindful of the Kampusch case struggled to make sense of the revelations about Fritzl, and some couldn't help wondering if something was wrong with Austria.

Then there is Austria's politics. The late President Kurt Waldheim, who served as U.N. chief from 1972-81, was barred for two decades from entering the U.S. after it became known he had belonged to a German army unit that committed atrocities in World War II.

More recently, far-right leader Joerg Haider, who died last year in a car crash, was the country's best-known politician - for all the wrong reasons. Haider praised aspects of Hitler's labor policies and made statements that sounded anti-Semitic. When his right-wing Freedom Party won 27 percent of the vote in 1999 elections and joined Austria's coalition government early in 2000, the European Union slapped the country with months of diplomatic sanctions.

When the details of the Fritzl case became known, he became a household name and a symbol - however unwanted - of his homeland virtually overnight. The four-day trial this week drew more than 200 journalists, including some from Brazil, Russia and the United States.
"We are not prosecuting a town or an entire country," judge Andrea Humer said in St. Poelten, west of Vienna, where the trial was held.

A few Austrians took it in stride, flashing a bit of the nation's sardonic and self-deprecating humor. Restaurants in St. Poelten served up "Fritzl schnitzel" until city hall apparently convinced them that maybe it wasn't such a good idea.

Only the passage of time will help erase what happened in people's memories, said Leitner, the former Fritzl tenant.

"People say that time heals all wounds, but for sure it will take a while," he said. "The media will pull back, everything will calm down slowly here in Amstetten, and I hope we will return to everyday life soon."

Fritzl feared an attack from cellar children

Thursday, March 26, 2009
independent.co.uk

Josef Fritzl feared his daughter and their two adolescent children he held in a windowless cellar would one day seek revenge and attack him, so he planned to move them to his home upstairs, his psychiatrist said yesterday.

Austria's so-called "Incest Monster" was jailed for life last week after being convicted of murder and of raping his daughter an estimated 3,000 times. Dr Adelheid Kastner, the psychiatrist who compiled a 300-page pre-trial report on Fritzl, said the 73-year-old had planned to move his daughter Elisabeth and her children Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix, six, to the home he shared with his wife upstairs.

"Fritzl was afraid that somebody down there might attack him," Dr Kastner told Germany's Stern magazine, "After all, there were three grown-up people living down there towards the end, so it was three against one."

See article posted earlier today.

Josef Fritzl: A monster caged

Reckoning:
Josef Fritzl is surrounded by guards before being sentenced
to a life behind bars. Picture: Getty

22 March 2009

AFTER 24 years of horror, it took just one look between father and daughter to end the trial of Josef Fritzl. Allan Hall reports on a rare glimpse into a mind of pure evil.

The making of Josef Fritzl the monster occurred at 10.04am on the morning of August 29, 1984. The breaking of Josef Fritzl the man came at 3.13pm on the afternoon of March 18, 2009.

Between those dates lies a cosmos of pain and suffering that is unimaginable to anyone but Elisabeth Fritzl, the wilful daughter who spellbound her sexually-obsessed father until the sick fantasy he nurtured of owning her could not be denied any longer.

Fritzl's trial last week can be summarised through numbers: 8,642 days his daughter spent underground, which breaks down to 207,408 hours; 3,000 rapes; seven incest children; one miscarriage; the 66 hours it took one newborn baby to die; 650 square feet of living space; six charges; eight jurors; and a 400-strong media pack to report to a world repelled yet fascinated by his crimes.

Ultimately, though, it was the moment at 3.13pm – not his sentencing, nor his tears, not even his confession – that the 73-year-old cellar-master became, however briefly, the man he should have been.

Minutes earlier, as the bushy-eyebrowed power freak stared at a video recording of the daughter whose life he stole recounting her 24 years of terror, rape, deprivation, humiliation, starvation, threats, beatings and torture at his hands, he failed to notice the thin woman who slipped into court accompanied by two others.

She came in through a side door, her hair bound up in a scarf, a long coat covering her thin body, which still looks undernourished after almost a quarter of a century of cheap food fed to her by her jailer father.

Elisabeth Fritzl didn't look a patch on the pretty girl who was kidnapped when she was just 18 and bundled into a cellar by her crazed father. But the fact that she had summoned up the strength and the courage to confront him in court was a giant leap forward in her therapy.

She was just six feet away from this thief of time – and much else besides – when she entered Court 119 in the Austrian city of St Poelten; a room, with its parquet floors and wood panelling, a universe distant from the clandestine hovel she endured for so long. On screen, she saw herself describing the degradation of the cellar. The tape had reached a part when Elisabeth said: "No one heard me scream down there. No one heard me cry out to God, to the heavens, why me… why, why, why… I was forsaken by the world."

At this point, the wolf-like eyes of Josef Fritzl landed on his daughter and he broke. The vacuum where compassion and reason should have resided was suddenly filled with the remorse that Elisabeth had waited so long to see. The eyes, those brutal eyes which she saw as he raped her and ignored her pleas for mercy through all the long and hopeless days and nights, misted over and tears rolled down his cheeks.

"When he heard this and he saw his daughter… it was all over for him," said Rudolf Mayer, his lawyer. "I asked him, and he said this was when he broke inside. This was when a quarter of a century of denial could be denied no longer." Fritzl could not hold his daughter's gaze for long. He bowed his head, turned back to the TV screen and began sobbing violently.

"There was a good deal of discussion about whether she should go or not," said a carer at the clinic that Elisabeth, now 42, moved back into for the duration of the media frenzy in Austria. "In this case we thought it would be cathartic. But she is stubborn anyway, Elisabeth, and probably would have gone no matter what we said."

She watched her tormentor sob and squirm for an hour before leaving through a side door of the court with her brother Harald, 46, and an unidentified family member. In that time, she described how her father would bring boxes of XXX-rated videotapes to the cellar and order her to copy the writhing and moaning of the actresses on screen to arouse him.

She told how he left her with serious internal injuries by using oversized sex toys on her. She described how he routinely turned off the power to the cellar if she, and later her children, should upset him.

Then she detailed how, in the dark, with the deep freeze food melting and water running over the floor, she and the children would cuddle up in bed and listen to the scurrying of the rats whose infestations were hallmarks of a confinement that was medieval in its cruelty. Sometimes they were in the dark for days. No matches, no candles, no torches (flashlights). Just the pitter-patter of vermin on the tiled floor and the sobbing of innocent children unable to grasp why God had chosen them to suffer in this way.

The moment of Josef Fritz's shame was a long time in coming. Elisabeth had nurtured it since that day in 1984 when her father, who had been abusing her since she was 11, gave in to the fantasy and made it a reality. What did it taste like, this victory? Was it hollow? Could she feel pity for him? "She felt a certain satisfaction but not a feeling of triumph," said the carer. "She felt more about herself and dealing with her feelings than for him and any regret he might have, real or imagined. For him, she feels nothing at all."

The breaking of Josef Fritzl caused the trial to take a 180-degree turn. What began on Monday as an arrogant Fritzl denying slavery and murder – relating to the death of baby Michael, the child who turned blue and died because his father wouldn't let him out of the cellar to be treated by doctors – morphed the next day into a man pleading guilty on all charges including rape, incest, imprisonment and "massive coercion", relating to the threats he made that his children would all die from booby traps if they ever tried to escape.

But perhaps a confession was never necessary anyway. There was not much in the legal arsenal of Josef Fritzl to use in mitigation anyway – not after a blistering opening by prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser who did the next best thing to letting the four-man, four-woman panel visit the cellar.

She let them smell it. In what is perhaps the first olfactory evidence ever presented in a murder case, she handed out items from the cellar for them to sniff.

The move was intended to convey the sense of utter corruption of Fritzl and his underworld, to get them to understand through the scent of mould and decay the vileness of everyday life in the windowless, despairing, concrete tomb.

Jurors picked out items from the cellar – one of them a cuddly toy owned by Elisabeth's youngest son Felix, who was five when released – and winced at their odour when removed from a plastic evidence bag. Their noses wrinkled, their brows furrowed; any notions that Fritzl the engineer had somehow created a subterranean des res in the ground beneath his house were dispelled as they caught the scent of 24 years of evil.

"Look at him, with his polite demeanour," said Burkheiser on that first day. "He will present to you a caring side, a selfless person, the nice man from next door. But what really troubles me is that he has not shown a single sign of regret.

"She outlined how building engineer Fritzl, concerned that his teenage daughter was sliding into a life of debauchery, tricked her into helping him fix a door in the cellar that he had secretly built beneath the family home in Amstetten in 1984. A cloth soaked in ether was placed over her mouth and she was locked in the cellar."

The second day," said Burkeheiser, "he came down and chained her up and raped her. He said nothing to her. He said nothing for years."

To give jurors an idea of the smallness of the cellar she pointed to the box they were seated in. "About 18 square metres (194 square feet], that was the size of the cellar for the first nine years. The size of the box you are seated in. He used her like a toy. He came, he took her, he left," she added.

"But worse than the rapes, worse than the food shortages, worse than the darkness, was always the uncertainty. How long would he be gone? How long would he stay when he returned? Would he ever come back from his long holidays? This uncertainty was the worst thing of all."

The Everest of evidence against Fritzl would almost certainly have convicted him anyway, especially the psychological profile drawn up by Austria's most eminent psychiatrist, Dr Adelheid Kastner. She drew a portrait of a monster that Hollywood scriptwriters would have been hard put to create.

He was an "emotional volcano". He had evil running through him "like a stream of unstoppable lava". He needed to assert power and control over people, driven to the cellar masterplan by a forbidden-fruit fantasy which she said ran through his head like a perpetually playing record.
"He knew what he was doing was wrong but he had fantasies and these amounted to a feeling of 'I'm not allowed to but it would be so good.'"

The end of his trial, when it came, was an anti-climax. The prosecution said Fritzl had only shed crocodile tears. Eva Plaz, Elisabeth's lawyer, told jurors he was a dangerous man who should never be freed. Even Mayer, who had the thankless job of defence lawyer, could find little good to say about him. "He is a sick man, he knows what he did was wrong. But he is not a murderer," he said, clutching at legal straws.

"I am sorry from the bottom of my heart," said Fritzl when the final curtain fell on his crimes at shortly before 3pm on Thursday. The sorry was as empty as the cellar now is and, like Elisabeth's cries in the darkness, unheard by the jurors, the judge and the wider world.

As he now begins his life behind bars in a secure psychiatric institution, Elisabeth is doing her best to claw back meaning and quality to the days that remain to her. She faces a lifetime of therapy, as do her eldest children Kerstin, 20, and Stefan, 19, who, along with Felix, now six, had spent all their lives underground until they were freed last April. Felix is young enough that he may be able to forget the cellar. Elisabeth and the others cannot.

They suffer from a severe form of chronic post-traumatic stress syndrome and cope with the flashbacks and panic attacks with a multitude of drugs and therapy sessions. Part of the therapy involves them being encouraged to confront the distress they feel by returning to the painful memories for "emotional processing" – a laundering of the past that, doctors hope, will give them a better chance for normality in the life left remaining to them.

The family try to pinpoint objects or memories of pain and neutralise them. All fear closed doors. All have a phobia, not unnaturally, of rooms below ground level. All have nightmares. All have abnormal behaviour patterns; obsessive-compulsive traits ranging from a need to continually check there is enough food – because there never was enough in the cellar – to disturbed sleep patterns.

When Elisabeth was released from the cellar last year, she developed an addiction to washing, sometimes showering up to 10 times a day as she physically tried to remove the corruption, the stench, the touch of the monster who stole her life. She has trouble falling asleep and she is hyper-vigilant when she wakes up.

But the maternal feelings she has for her children are what keeps her going. She has made it her task to bind the downstairs children with the upstairs clan – Monika, 15, Alexander, 12, and Lisa, 12. The upstairs children are angry: they resent having lost the normality of their lives and have had to be placed in new schools to save them from bullying.

But they are still called Fritzl. Whether they will get new identities remains uncertain. They are all said to be close to Elisabeth but have problems relating to the cellar tribe. "They have nothing in common," said a source. "But they do feel pity for what their siblings underwent."

Elisabeth has turned down £5m from an international media company and wants to be left alone to raise her family in the house in the village of Mitterkirchen, 25 miles from Amstetten, that has been given to the family by the authorities. Money means nothing to her, and, besides, Austria has promised them all the financial help they need as well as unstinting medical support.

Elisabeth has told her carers she wants to reach a stage where she can walk down a street and go shopping without fearing that someone is following her to kidnap her. That is some way off. So, too, is the healing of a rift with her mother Rosemarie, the other, sometimes forgotten victim of the case; the woman who endures the unending suspicion that she must have known something of her daughter's ordeal.

Elisabeth doesn't care about that: she cares that Rosemarie took her father back into the family home when she was a toddler and he was a convicted rapist. A rapist then free to channel his violent sexual appetites towards her. This is the elephant that now sits in the room with mother and daughter. This is the true legacy of Josef Fritzl; smashed minds, wrecked lives, scorched love. If ever a criminal deserved what was coming to him, there can be no doubt that Fritzl is that man.

"Monster" just is not an evil enough name for this man. I don't think there is a word to describe him. I only hope he is in a high security psychiatric facility so there is no escape. The hospitals in Austria are sparse but clean, so this will be too. I would be more satisfied if he was kept in a basement room with no windows and never allowed out.

Josef Fritzl convicted of homicide in incest case

March 19, 2009

Associated Press

ST. POELTEN, Austria (AP) — A jury has convicted Austrian incest father Josef Fritzl of homicide for the death in captivity of one of seven children he fathered with the daughter he imprisoned for 24 years.

Jurors did not immediately pronounce a sentence Thursday, but Fritzl faces up to life imprisonment for the charge

ST. POELTEN, Austria (AP) — Prosecutors urged an Austrian jury to hand down a life sentence Thursday to Josef Fritzl — who imprisoned his daughter in a windowless cell for 24 years and fathered her seven children — and not to show mercy just because he pleaded guilty.

In a weak and shaky voice, Fritzl told the court Thursday: "I regret it with all my heart. ... I can't make it right anymore."

Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser called for the maximum punishment in her closing arguments in Fritzl's trial in St. Poelten, west of Vienna. She urged the jury to think about his daughter Elisabeth's nearly quarter-century ordeal as it considers how much time he should serve.
"Don't be duped like Elisabeth was 24 years ago," when Fritzl took her captive in a cramped, rat-infested dungeon he built beneath the family's home.

The eight-member jury began deliberating at midmorning. Verdicts and sentences were expected Thursday afternoon in the case, which has drawn worldwide attention.

Fritzl, 73, pleaded guilty Wednesday to all the charges against him, including homicide for the 1996 death in captivity of an infant boy. Prosecutors contend the ailing newborn — a male twin called Michael — might have survived if Fritzl had arranged for medical care.

"Any amateur could have determined that the child was in the throes of death for 66 hours," Burkheiser said, arguing that Fritzl should be locked up for the rest of his life for refusing to intervene and save the baby's life.

Fritzl also has pleaded guilty to enslavement, rape, incest, forced imprisonment and coercion.
Eva Plaz, a lawyer for Elisabeth and the other victims, urged the jury not to lessen Fritzl's sentence just because he pleaded guilty. In Austria, guilty pleas can be a mitigating factor.
Fritzl's pleas "were not a confession," Plaz said, adding that Elisabeth's main reason for testifying was that she believed she "owed it to her child, Michael."

Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, did not argue that Fritzl was innocent — even telling the court at one point that Fritzl raped his daughter 3,000 times. But he said Fritzl had been plagued with guilt for the past 24 years, and he asked the jurors to take a hard look at the homicide charge.
"Look closely at murder," Mayer said, referring to the homicide count — literally "murder by neglect" in German. "In my opinion, that's not what it is," he said.

Mayer said Elisabeth made no mention in her diary of her baby's struggle to survive, noting instead that Fritzl brought her a crib, that both twins were born without incident and that their names were Michael and Alexander.

The Associated Press normally withholds the names of victims of sexual assault. In this case, withholding Elisabeth's name became impractical when her name and her father's were announced publicly by police and details about them became the subject of publicity both in their home country and around the world.

Mayer confirmed Thursday that Elisabeth had been in the courtroom earlier this week, and he said Fritzl decided to stop contesting the homicide and enslavement counts after viewing her 11-hour heart-wrenching videotaped testimony.

Elisabeth, the prosecution's key witness, is 42. She was 18 when Fritzl imprisoned her in the squalid cell he built beneath the family's home in the town of Amstetten, where he raped her for years, sometimes in front of the children.

Elisabeth and her six surviving children, who range in age from 6 to 20, have spent months recovering in a psychiatric clinic and at a secret location. Prosecutors have described her as a "broken" woman.

Police say DNA tests prove Fritzl is the biological father of all six surviving children, three of whom never saw daylight until the crime was exposed 11 months ago.

The three other children were brought upstairs to be raised by Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, who was led to believe they were abandoned by Elisabeth when she ran off to join a cult.

Psychiatrist Adelheid Kastner told the court Wednesday that Fritzl has a serious personality disorder and would pose a threat to others if freed. She recommended that Fritzl serve his sentence in a special prison for psychologically deranged criminals or a ward for abnormal criminals in a regular jail.

Associated Press Writer William J. Kole in Vienna contributed to this report

Josef Fritzl sentenced to life in mental hospital for murder of baby son

Josef Fritzl will spend the rest of his life in a top-security psychiatric hospital for murdering a baby boy he fathered during the 24 years he kept his daughter Elisabeth locked up in a cellar.

Fritzl, 73, was jailed for life after a jury in St Poelten, Austria, unanimously found him guilty of murder at the end of a four-day trial at which he had already admitted incest, rape, false imprisonment and coercion.

The jury also convicted Fritzl of slavery – making him the first man to be convicted of the offence in Austria.

The murder charge related to Michael Fritzl, one of seven children Fritzl fathered by his daughter Elisabeth as he raped her more than 3,000 times.

The boy, one of twins, died in April 1996, just 66 hours after he was born. He developed breathing difficulties but Fritzl refused to seek medical help, making him guilty of "homicide by neglect".

He had changed his not guilty plea to the murder and slavery charges on Wednesday, having previously denied them, but the local judicial system dictated that the jury still had to return a formal verdict.

Earlier, Fritzl had apologised "from the bottom of my heart" for the horrific torture he meted out to Elisabeth. He claimed he wished he could "make amends" for his appalling crimes.

His lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, told the court that Fritzl's earlier decision to change his plea to guilty had come after he saw Elisabeth in court on Tuesday. "He burst into tears and when he saw Elisabeth actually in court it was all over for him," said Mr Mayer.

Speaking in a faltering voice, Fritzl, 73, told the jury: "I regret from the bottom of my heart what I did to my family. "Unfortunately I can't make amends for it. I can only try to find ways to limit the damage that has been done."

But the prosecutor, Christiane Burkheiser, dismissed Fritzl's last-minute confession as a cynical ploy to win a more lenient sentence. She said: "I don't see it as a confession but rather as an attempt to improve his position, to gain advantage through a show of weakness.

"At the last curtain call in the last act of this drama he is showing his true face in trying to exploit people's gullibility. Do not be deceived. Do not be manipulated."

Referring to the day in 1984 when Fritzl imprisoned his daughter after tricking her to go down to the cellar by asking her for help carrying a door, the prosecutor added: "Don't carry the door into the cellar like Elisabeth did 24 years ago."

Mr Mayer said Fritzl's confession to murder and slavery, which he had denied until Wednesday, came after he had seen his daughter sitting in court, and watched her harrowing 11-hour videotaped statement.

He said: "After he saw the video, after he had seen what she was saying, how she was, he saw her point of view, her experience of this time, which he was incapable of seeing at the time because of his inability to love.

"When my client was confronted with this you could see him break down. The judge asked him what he thought of what he had seen and Mr Fritzl said: 'What I saw was shocking.' "He accepted Elisabeth's version. He was shattered and broken inside. He was not trying to deceive the court."

Mr Mayer referred to extracts from Elisabeth's diaries, written at the time of Michael's death, which had earlier been read to the court. Michael and his twin brother Alexander were born on April 28, 1996, and Elisabeth recorded on April 30 that they had been named. But at 12.15pm that day she wrote: "Michael has died."

Mr Mayer claimed the diaries gave no hint that Fritzl knew Michael was dying, and so "it was not murder". Elisabeth Fritzl's lawyer, Eva Plaz, told the eight jurors that her client had found it painful giving evidence but went through with it because "she had to make him responsible for Michael's death. She owed it to her dead child".

Elisabeth believed Fritzl "always knew the child's death was his fault". She added: "Michael was suffering. Fritzl knew it and he let him die. He was the master of life and death. He has shown no regret, in any case I haven't felt any of it."

Fritzl fathered seven children by his daughter during her 24 years in captivity, raping her more than 3,000 times. Mr Mayer said his client's mental health must be taken into account when considering the appropriate sentence.

"My client was responsible for his actions," he said. "But his personality has psychological abnormalities. He didn't choose to be the way he is."

Elisabeth Fritzl confronts Austria's dungeon dad rapist Josef Fritzl in court

Agence France-Presse
March 19, 2009

THE woman held in a dungeon and repeatedly raped by her father has reportedly faced her abuser in court - just hours before he changed all his pleas to guilty.

While officials have refused to confirm Elisabeth Fritzl attended the hearing, her father's lawyer has said the presence of his victim would have "really shaken him up".

Josef Fritzl dramatically changed his plea last night to guilty of murder and slavery during the 24 years he held his daughter captive and forced her to bear seven children. The 73-year-old Austrian said his change of heart had come after seeing the video testimony of his daughter about her ordeal in a dark, damp bunker where Fritzl raped her at will.

But the Kurier newspaper reported that Elisabeth, now 43, also made an unexpected appearance in court while her father was being questioned.

"I plead guilty to the crimes I've been charged with," Fritzl told the court in the northeastern town of Sankt Poelten, about 60km from Amstetten, where the family lived. "I'm sorry." The retired electrical engineer had earlier admitted incest, rape and sequestration but denied murder, for which he faces a life prison term, and enslavement.

.

Asked by judge Andrea Humer what caused him to change his plea, Fritzl replied: "My daughter's videotaped testimony." Defence lawyer Rudolf Mayer said he was "completely surprised" by Fritzl's plea change.

'Shaken'

He declined to confirm if Elisabeth had been in court, but said there were people in the viewing gallery whom he did not identify.

"If Elisabeth were in the courtroom then I think that this would have really shaken him (Fritzl) up," he said. Fritzl admitted the murder of a baby son, a twin, who died shortly after being born in the soundproofed cellar.

Responding to questions from the judge, Fritzl said he should have taken seriously the fact that the infant was breathing poorly and tried to get the boy to a hospital quickly.

"I was hoping the little one would survive but I should have done something. I don't know why I didn't help. I just lost sight (of the issue)," he said in a low voice.

Fritzl's abuses only came to light last April when he took his eldest child with Elisabeth, 19-year-old Kerstin, to hospital after she became seriously ill.

New life

Elisabeth and her six children, three of whom were incarcerated from birth, are now living in an undisclosed location under new identities.

Three of the children were raised above ground by Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie after he told people that Elisabeth had abandoned them and joined a sect. Police say Rosemarie had no knowledge of her husband's actions.

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This causes me to ponder so many things. What order in the births were the twins? Did the other children know the baby died? Did Fritzl take Kirsten to hospital because he cared she was ill or because he didn't know what to do with a full grown woman's body, if she died?

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What did the other children go through when Fritzl came back to get Elisabeth when professionals at hospital demanded to speak to the girls mother)? Did they wonder if they would ever see the two again?

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Is Rosi in contact with her daughter and grandchildren? Previous articles state that Elisabeth and her six children have been relocated. Does this mean she now has the three children who were raised "above ground"?

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How could this sick s.o.b. operate for so long, first imprisoning his mother, then his daughter, etc with no one knowing? Surely Rosi knew about the Fritzl's mother in the attic. It is almost overwhelmingly too much to read about, much less to have lived. I hope the best for Elisabeth and her children.

Josef Fritzl: "I was born to rape"

Right: Should have known he was a little bitty short guy. They are often insecure and angry over stature, making them overcompensate through power and control. jmo.

Incest monster Josef Fritzl kept his daughter locked up as a sex slave in his cellar, had seven children with her and cremated one baby in an oven – now authorities say he would do it again.

The psychology of the horror father Fritzl (73), from Amstetten in Austria, was detailed in a 130 page report, and published in the newspaper 'Österreich'. It came to the horrifying conclusion that Fritzl would REPEAT his callous deeds, if given the chance.

The psychologist wrote that Fritzl has an EVIL soul: "He is like a volcano. He feels torn apart and has acknowledged, that he has an evil vein, a flow of destructive lava that is hardly able to stop anymore."

Sick Fritzl said: "I was born to rape."

The cellar monster admitted to molesting his daughter Elisabeth thousands of times.

"I never looked at her face while having sex with her... I only gave her so many children so that she would always stays with me, because a mother with six children is no longer attractive for other men."

Fritzl is still a danger to society. The psychologist admitted that Fritzl is 'sick', but that he is also 'completely sane' and knew exactly what he was doing. But vile Fritzl said he still dreams of growing old with his wife Rosi.

Josef Fritzl Trial Begins

You might want to start at the bottom and read up.



One judge, spare jurors and a man trying to show Fritzl as a human

Helen Pidd

The Guardian, Tuesday 17 March 2009



The judge



Andrea Hummer specialises in hearing cases involving sex crimes. A softly spoken 48-year-old, she has been a judge for 10 years and made her name presiding over a case in St Pölten involving sex abuse at a local seminary.



The defence lawyer



Rudolf Mayer, 60, is one of Austria's most famous lawyers. 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.



He claims to have received death threats for the first time in his career since taking on Fritzl's case, and says his job is "to show Josef Fritzl as a human". Mayer claims that when Fritzl was offered his services, he said: "Yes, I know him from the TV!"



The prosecutor



Christiane Burkheiser, 33, has been working on the prosecution since Fritzl's arrest last April. Lively and extroverted, she had only been in office for 10 months when she "inherited" the case, but has since compiled the 27-page indictment.



She is often seen around St Pölten with her black, flat-coated retriever, Jogi, who accompanies her to the office. To relax, she runs and has recently taken up ju-jitsu. She recently revealed the pressure of the case has caused her to start smoking again, five years after giving up.

The expert witness



The forensic psychiatrist Heidi Kastner, 46, conducted six lengthy interviews with Fritzl. The resulting 130-page psychological report details Fritzl's destructive relationship with his mother and his "abnormal personality", and is due to be read on Thursday.



The victims' lawyer



Eva Platz has worked in victim protection for decades, and in this trial is looking after the interests of Elisabeth Fritzl and her six surviving children. Platz was on hand when Elisabeth gave her evidence last year.



The jury



It comprises people randomly chosen from lower Austria's electoral roll, aged between 25 and 65. There are 12 jurors sitting in on the trial but just eight of them will eventually return Friday's verdict - four are on standby, ready to step in should any juror feel unable to hear the harrowing details of the case.



Daughter's cellar hell: locked up for 24 years; raped 3,000 times



Josef Fritzl, the Austrian electrical engineer on trial for incarcerating his daughter in an underground prison for 24 years and fathering seven children with her, yesterday pleaded guilty to charges of rape, incest, false imprisonment and coercion.



The 73-year-old denied one charge of murder for the death of a twin boy born to his daughter, for whom Fritzl failed to seek medical help. He also denied a charge of slavery, which has been on the Austrian statute book since the 1960s, but has never been tried in court. Fritzl faces a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison, and a maximum of life.



Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser told the court how Fritzl had raped his daughter an estimated 3,000 times while holding her in appalling conditions.



She said he had lured his daughter into the purpose-built cellar in August 1984 when she was just 18, on the pretence of asking her to help him fix a door. He then sedated her by placing a cloth soaked with ether over her nose and mouth and slammed the door closed.



On the second day after her incarceration, he put an iron chain around her stomach, attaching it to a pole "so that she had no chance of escape".



He raped her the same day for the first time, Burkheiser said. She said the underground cell had been "his playground" and that he had "used [Elisabeth] like a toy". "He came, took her and went again," she said.



Listing the dates Elisabeth had given birth over a 12-year period, Burkheiser spoke of the pain she had felt at her father's decision to take three of the children to live with him upstairs.



"Can you imagine what that was like for her, on the one hand the relief that the child would have a better life, on the other, the fact that he was taking away her dearest?" she asked.



She detailed how his failure to fetch medical help for a twin boy called Michael, born to his daughter in 1996, had led to his death, and how he later disposed of the body by burning it.



Defending Fritzl, Rudolf Mayer said his client was not a monster, as he had been portrayed by the media. "Despite the way he's been described, try to see the accused as a human being," he told the eight-strong jury and four replacement jurors. He argued that Fritzl could have let the cellar children die and that his determination to provide for both his "upstairs" and "downstairs" families was proof that he was not a monster.



Having submitted his pleas on the six charges, Fritzl then answered detailed questions from Humer about his childhood, early adulthood and career, including his apprenticeship as an electrical engineer.



Fritzl said he had hardly known his father, who had only played a "periodic and sporadic" role in his life, and that had been abused as a child by his mother. "I had a very difficult childhood," he said in a weak and sometimes barely audible voice. "My mother rejected me. She was 42 when she had me. She just didn't want a child and she treated me accordingly."



He said he had been hit repeatedly, even for bringing school friends home. "I had friends but mother didn't allow them. I got a clip round the ear every time. Then when I was 12 I said to her: 'If you do that again I'll hit you back,' and then she stopped."



Asked if he had any friends in adulthood, Fritzl said: "I had no friends. You need to nurture friendships and I had no time for that." He told the court that he had met his wife, Rosemarie, at the age of 19, and she had been "the first woman I had sexual relations with". She had been "very domesticated, and wanted at least 10 children".



The press and public were made to leave the courtroom before a video of Elisabeth Fritzl was played on a huge screen. Investigators recorded an interview with her last July in the presence of psychiatrists, to spare her the ordeal of having to face her father in person.



Court officials said the 11-hour long recording will be played to the court in "small portions" throughout the week, due to their apparently harrowing content.



Four expert witnesses are also on hand to give evidence. For the duration of the trial, Elisabeth and her six children are being looked after in the nearby psychiatric clinic they were taken to after their release last year, having been allegedly hounded out of their new home by British paparazzi.



One British tabloid has published pictures of Elisabeth in her new environment, while another has printed the name of the village where the family had set up home in a new house.



'Light out. Rape. Light on. Rape. In front of the children. Birth. Death. Rape'



She pulled back the lid of the brown cardboard box, and invited the jurors to take a sniff at the objects inside. It was, said Christiane Burkheiser, a chance for the jury to experience for themselves the rancid stink that pervaded every inch of the underground prison beneath the family home in Amstetten, west of Vienna, where Josef Fritzl held his daughter for 24 years and allegedly raped her repeatedly.



It was one of the more dramatic moments of the opening yesterday of the long-awaited trial of the Austrian electrical engineer. No one in the public gallery could see what was in the box - children's toys, books, clothing perhaps - but the crumpled looks on the jurors' faces left little to the imagination.



The state prosecutor had felt the full impact of the cellar prison when she visited it herself. "I've seen the cellar dungeon twice," Burkheiser said. "It has a morbid atmosphere, which starts with having to crawl in on your hands and knees through the 83cm entranceway. And it's sinister. It's really bad. It's incredibly damp, a damp that creeps into you after just a few minutes."



Fritzl sat listening impassively on a suede-upholstered chair, wearing grey trousers and a black and white check jacket that was slightly too large for him.



Minutes earlier he had shuffled into room 119 of the St Pölten district court, flanked by six police officers and clutching tightly at a royal blue folder to shield his face from the clicking cameras.

The 73-year-old looked a shadow of his former self as he walked across the creaking oak floor.



Gone were his healthy suntan and the confident gait shown in video footage of him on holiday or in snapshots enjoying barbecues in the garden - while his daughter, and the offspring he fathered during years of sexual abuse, languished beneath his feet.



Fritzl refused to answer the questions fired at him by two Austrian reporters.

"If you had your chance again, would you do it all the same way?" one reporter asked, provoking nervous laughter from the public gallery. Fritzl kept his shield in place, although at times he was seen to apparently grin as his grey moustache twitched behind the folder. When he finally sat after cameras had been ordered from the court, he placed the file on the table in front of him and held his hands to the side of his head like blinkers instead.



The Guardian was one of only two British newspapers represented in the small courtroom as Burkheiser, for 25 minutes, laid out her emotional arguments, sometimes using a laser pointer to indicate masking tape she had stuck to the walls of the wood-panelled courtroom to illustrate the narrowness of entrances, the low heights of ceilings that Elisabeth and her children had had to endure.



The space constraints and the damp were, she said, minor compared with the other hardships and sufferings. For years Elisabeth had had no sink, no warm water, no daylight. She had "got her air from the cracks in the walls". Sometimes she went without light for days at a time - "no lamp, not even a torch or candles". And there were also the repeated rapes.



"But do you know what the worst thing was?" she asked the jury of four men and four women. "The uncertainty: when will he return, when will he turn on the electricity, when will he go again, what will happen if he doesn't return?" she said, reducing her voice to a whisper as if to maximise the impact of telling a scary bedtime tale.



She said they should not be fooled by Fritzl's polite demeanour, the image he projected of "a nice old man from next door". She said the trials of the cellar inhabitants were best encapsulated in a single paragraph, which she delivered in staccato fashion: "Light out. Rape. Light on. Mould. Rape. In front of the children. The uncertainty. Birth. Death. Rape."



She detailed the births over 12 years of Elisabeth's children, the three who stayed in the cellar and the three who were taken upstairs to live with their "grandparents" - Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie. She also told of the birth in 1996 of a twin, Michael, who died after suffering from severe breathing difficulties, which she said would probably have been avoided had Fritzl sought medical help.



"That, ladies and gentlemen, is murder."



Then turning to Fritzl, who has admitted disposing of the body in an incinerator, she squinted her eyes and, reducing her voice to a sibilant whisper, said: "Herr Fritzl, your own flesh and blood. To treat it that way?" The accused moved his head slightly but did not appear to express any emotion.



Rudolf Mayer, Fritzl's lawyer and a veteran presence at Austria's more obscure criminal cases, urged the jury to take a less passionate view of his client.



"You need to keep emotion out of this," he said, arguing that it was wrong to call him a monster, as he has repeatedly been referred to in the media.



"A man who put so much effort into keeping two families cannot be called a monster," he said. "If I only want a daughter as a sex slave, I don't let her bring children into the world. You'd let them starve," he said.



In an indirect reference to the Belgian criminal Marc Dutroux, who kidnapped and murdered four girls in 1996, Mayer said the "Belgian case" was an example of monstrous behaviour, but it was unfair to put the label on Fritzl.



"When his eldest daughter was seriously ill, he put her in his Mercedes and took her to hospital," he said, referring to Kerstin, 19, whose hospitalisation last April caused suspicious police to close in and was the catalyst that brought Fritzl's underground empire crashing down.



The charges:



• Murder - maximum sentence of life imprisonment [Prosecutors say Fritzl is guilty of murder through neglect because he failed to seek help for a male baby twin, who died soon after he was born. Fritzl later incinerated the body]

• Enslavement - 20 years

• Rape - 15 years

• Deprivation of liberty - 10 years

• Coercion - five years

• Incest - one year



Fritzl on suicide watch as incest, rape and baby murder trial begins



Josef Fritzl, the Austrian engineer accused of imprisoning his daughter beneath his family home for more than two decades and fathering seven children with her goes on trial today amid tight security and huge media and public interest in a case said to be unprecedented in criminal history.



The 73-year-old will appear in the dock in St Pölten, around 40 miles east of the town of Amstetten, where he held his daughter Elisabeth, now 42, in a purpose-built dungeon.



When he is led into the courtroom at 9.30am, the press and public will get its first live glimpse of the robust pensioner who has admitted to leading a complex double life, providing for an "upstairs" and a "downstairs" family without his wife, neighbours or authorities ever becoming suspicious enough to question his activities.



On the second day of the trial an eight-member jury will hear videotaped evidence from Elisabeth detailing her 24-year ordeal. The 11 hours of evidence was recorded last July so she would not have to see her father in court again. Her brother, Harald, is also expected to give evidence.



Prison officials said last night that Fritzl was under an obligatory suicide watch in the final hours leading up to the trial. "We're taking no risks," said Günther Mörwald, head of the St Pölten prison where Fritzl has been held in custody since his arrest last April.



"He's under constant watch. We're aware of the possibility he might self-harm." A no-fly zone has also been established in the airspace over the courtroom to prevent media intrusion and escape attempts and even the locks of the court have been changed to avoid any security lapses.



Fritzl is expected to plead guilty to most of the charges he is facing, including rape, incest and abuse but will probably contest the charges of enslavement and murder, according to his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer.



Central to the trial will be the ­accusation that Fritzl murdered, through neglect, a baby twin called Michael born to his daughter in the cellar in 1996.



The boy had breathing difficulties and died when he was three days old. Prosecutors will argue that Fritzl could have saved his life if he had fetched medical help. Instead he died in his mother's arms and Fritzl disposed of the corpse in an incinerator in his backyard.



If convicted of murder, Fritzl faces a sentence of life imprisonment. If not, the maximum sentence he could expect to receive would be 15 years. According to legal experts he could potentially be out of prison in six and a half years, having already served a year in prison.



Neither the three children who were born and brought up with their mother in the cellar, nor the three who were taken upstairs to live with Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie, will give evidence.



They have been given protection with their mother for the duration of the trial in the nearby psychiatric clinic where they were treated in the days and months after they were freed.



Doctors and counsellors will be on hand in court to give any assistance to anyone who finds the evidence too ­harrowing. Four replacement jurors will also be available.



Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, has questioned if it was possible for Fritzl to have a fair trial, stating: "It seems like people just want to hang him by his ­testicles."



A verdict is expected on Friday.



Josef Fritzl shows no regret for years of abuse, says prosecutor

Jurors shown objects from "morbid" cellar where daughter was imprisoned



When Josef Fritzl walked across the creaking oak floorboards of the packed courtroom in St Pölten at 9:25am it was the first time the former electrical engineer had been seen in public since his arrest last April.



The 73-year-old did his best to evade the cameras waiting for him, shielding his face with a blue ringbinder containing his court papers and ignoring questions from waiting journalists.



"Will you receive a fair trial?" asked one. Fritzl declined to answer. But those who could see his moustachioed face said he was smiling behind the folder.



At 9:33am 12 jurors filed in. Eight of them will eventually return Friday's verdict — four are on standby, ready to step in should any juror feel unable to hear the harrowing details of the case, which will include 11 hours of pre-recorded video evidence from Elisabeth, the daughter Fritzl raped over the 24-year period in which he secretly imprisoned her underneath his home.



Addressing the jury, the state prosecutor, Christiane Burkheiser, said Fritzl might come across as "a nice old man", but she urged the jury to bear in mind that he had not shown any signs of regret since his arrest in April last year.



In response, Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, appealed to the jury to be objective. "Despite the way he has been described, try to see the accused as a human being," he said.



In her opening statement, Burkheiser described how Fritzl had imprisoned the then 18-year-old Elisabeth in August 1984 and subsequently raped her numerous times. The sexual abuse resulted in seven children, one of whom, a twin called Michael, died after birth. Prosecutors allege Fritzl is guilty of murder through neglect, for failing to seek medical attention for the seriously ill baby, who suffered breathing problems after birth.



Burkheiser told the jury: "That, ladies and gentlemen, is murder."



At this point, the prosecutor leaned towards Fritzl. In a whisper she said: "Mr Fritzl, your own flesh and blood, and to treat it that way." He moved his head slightly, but appeared unmoved.



The cellar in its original form, said Burkheiser, was the same size as the jury box, 11 metres squared. "I've seen the cellar prison twice," she told the jury. "It has a morbid atmosphere. It starts with having to crawl in on your knees and it's dark. It's really bad. It's unbelievably damp. A damp that creeps into you within minutes. It's mouldy."



She then passed the jurors a shoebox containing objects taken from the dank cellar. Each peered into the box, some crumpling their noses at the smell.



Elisabeth, the court heard, had no hot water. She couldn't wash her clothes. "There was not ever a torch. No candles. The electricity was often off for days," said Burkheiser. "It was his playground. He used her like a toy."



But the worst thing for Elisabeth, said Burkheiser, was the uncertainty. "When will he return? When will he turn on the electricity? When will he go again?"



Speaking to the jury, Burkheiser described how, in August 1988, Elisabeth bore her first child, Kirsten, in the cellar. In preparation, Fritzl had provided her with "disinfectant, a dirty pair of scissors and a book on child birth".



The jury then heard of how Fritzl decided that Elisabeth's third "cellar" child, Lisa, should come out of the cellar aged nine months, and go to live upstairs with him and his wife, Rosemarie.



After Elisabeth had given birth to another of his children, Fritzl once went to a phone box down the road and called his wife Rosemarie pretending to be Elisabeth, announcing she was going to leave the child with her, Rosemarie said.



When it was time for Fritzl to enter his pleas the judge, Andrea Hummer, read through the charge sheet. To the charge of incest, in a croaky voice, Fritzl said just one word: "Ja".



To coercion – specifically the accusation that he told Elisabeth and the children that they would be gassed or electrocuted were they to escape — Fritzl said "guilty".



He denied that last year he had told Elisabeth and the children that if they told anybody that they had been held and imprisoned, he would kill them.



But he admitted he was guilty of robbing the children of their freedom. To sexual abuse, he was "partly" guilty, he said. But of the central murder charge, he insisted, he was not guilty.





Fritzl in dock in Austria's trial of century

Kate Connolly in Berlin

The Observer, Saturday 14 March 2009



Austria is bracing itself for one of the most extraordinary trials in its history as Josef Fritzl, 74, steps into the dock tomorrow, accused of imprisoning his own daughter for 24 years in a catacomb under the family home and fathering her seven children.



He is expected to plead guilty to most of the charges in the courtroom in St Pölten, west of Vienna, but his lawyer will argue in mitigation that his initial intention was to protect his then 18-year-old from debauchery.



Fritzl is expected to contest the charge – one never before heard in an Austrian courtroom – that he enslaved his daughter Elisabeth. He will also reject the charge of murder. Prosecutors will argue that his failure to call for medical assistance in 1996, when a new-born baby twin named Michael fought for breath and turned blue, led to the boy's death. Fritzl has admitted to disposing of the corpse in an incinerator.



Authorities have enforced a 1km-radius no-fly zone around the courtroom and prison. "We fear that some media will try to fly over the courtroom to get pictures and the helicopter noise could disturb the proceedings. We also want to avoid possible breakouts from the prison," said the court's vice-president, Franz Cutkatold The Observer.



Of some 2,000 journalists and technicians expected for the trial, only 95 will find a place in the courtroom. Three places have been reserved for members of the public.



They will get the first in-the-flesh glimpse of Fritzl when he is brought into the courtroom at 9.30am tomorrow. On Tuesday, jurors will hear evidence from Elisabeth, now 43, via a huge TV screen. The evidence was recorded last year, to save her from having to face her father.



A verdict is expected on Friday. Austria's weekend press revealed yesterday in every last detail how Fritzl was preparing for the trial, including that his last pre-trial supper would consist of devilled cutlets, rice and cucumber salad. Prison head Colonel Gunther Mörwald was quoted as saying: "A fellow prisoner will be giving him a trim and a shave, as he was looking like he needed one before his big day."





Josef Fritzl pleads guilty to incest, imprisonment charges.



ST. POELTEN, Austria (CNN) -- Josef Fritzl, accused of imprisoning his daughter in a cellar for decades and fathering her seven children, pleaded guilty to incest, imprisonment and one charge of assault Monday at the opening of his trial in Austria.





He denied charges of murder and enslavement. When asked to enter a plea on a charge of rape, the 73-year-old replied: "Partly guilty."



Franz Cutka, a press spokesman for the Landesgericht St. Poelten court, said the "partly guilty" plea might mean that Fritzl contends he is not guilty of all the individual rape charges or that the violence used wasn't as severe as rape.





Cutka was not in court for the plea and does not speak for the defendant. Fritzl's attorney was not immediately available to explain what he meant.





The case first came to light in April 2008 when Elisabeth's daughter, Kerstin, became seriously ill with convulsions.



Elisabeth persuaded her father to allow Kerstin, then 19, to be taken to a hospital for treatment.

Hospital staff became suspicious of the case and alerted police, who discovered the family members in the cellar.





Fritzl confessed to police that he raped his daughter, kept her and their children in captivity and burned the body of the dead infant in an oven in the house. Elisabeth told police the infant was one of twins who died a few days after birth.





When Elisabeth gained her freedom, she told police her father began sexually abusing her at age 11. On August 8, 1984, she told police, her father enticed her into the basement, where he drugged her, put her in handcuffs and locked her in a room.





Fritzl explained Elisabeth's disappearance in 1984 by saying the girl, who was then 18, had run away from home. He backed up the story with letters he forced Elisabeth to write.



Elisabeth Fritzl and all but three of her children lived in the specially designed cellar beneath her father's home in Amstetten, Austria, west of Vienna. The other three children lived upstairs with Fritzl and his wife; Fritzl had left them on his own doorstep, pretending the missing Elisabeth had dropped them off.





Under Austrian law, if Fritzl is convicted on several offenses, he will be given the sentence linked to the worst crime. The charges he faces are:





• Murder: The infant who died in 1996 died from a lack of medical care, the state prosecutor said. The charge carries a sentence of life in prison.





• Involvement in slave trade: From 1984 until 2008, prosecutors allege, Fritzl held his daughter, Elisabeth, captive in a dungeon, abused her sexually and treated her as if she were his personal property -- in a situation similar to slavery. If he is convicted, the sentence could range from 10 to 20 years in prison.





• Rape: Between August 30, 1984, and June 30, 1989, Fritzl "regularly sexually abused Elisabeth," according to the prosecutor. The sentence could be from five to 15 years in prison.



• Incest: Parallel to the rape charge. It carries a sentence of up to one year.





• Withdrawal of liberty: Three of the children Fritzl had with Elisabeth were illegally held captive in a dungeon with no daylight or fresh air, according to prosecutors. That charge carries a sentence of one to 10 years.





• Assault: Between August 28, 1984, and April 26, 2006, Fritzl repeatedly threatened Elisabeth and their three children with gas and booby traps as warnings in case they tried to escape, authorities allege. The sentence would range from six months to five years.





Fritzl arrived at the courthouse in St. Poelten covering his face with a blue binder to shield himself from reporters, television cameras and photographers and escorted by a phalanx of police officers.





Fritzl faces six charges at a closed-door trial in St. Poelten, 45 miles (70 km) east of Amstetten, where Fritzl lived. Cameras were removed from the court.





The trial is scheduled to last five days, but his attorney Rudolph Mayer said it could be shorter.

Fritzl was charged in November with incest and the repeated rape of his daughter, Elisabeth, over a 24-year period.



But he was also charged with the murder of one of the children he fathered with her, an infant who died soon after birth. State Prosecutor Gerhard Sedlacek said Michael Fritzl died from lack of medical care.



In an opening statement, prosecuting attorney Christiane Burkheiser handed damp-smelling items from the cellar where Elisabeth and her children had lived to jurors to give them an idea of the conditions in which they were allegedly locked up.



In all, Fritzl is charged with: murder, involvement in slave trade (slavery), rape, incest, assault and deprivation of liberty, Sedlacek's office said. He could face a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted of murder. Mayer said Sunday that Fritzl expected to spend the rest of his life in prison.





"This man obviously led a double life for 24 years. He had a wife and had seven kids with her. And then he had another family with his daughter, fathered another seven children with her," said Franz Polzer, a police officer in Amstetten, the town where Fritzl lived, at the time of his arrest.

Austrian monster Josef Fritzl kept sick mother locked in attic, leaked papers reveal

• Treatment of mother was 'revenge for abuse she inflicted'

• Pychiatrist declares Austrian is sane and fit for trial

October 31,2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Josef Fritzl, the Austrian accused of raping and imprisoning his daughter, kept his ailing mother locked in an attic room with bricked-up windows until her death, according to leaked court reports.

The Austrian newspapers Kronen Zeitung and Österreich have published accounts of Fritzl's interviews with a forensic psychiatrist in which he says he incarcerated his mother - who he blames for his actions - in the attic of her own house shortly before he locked up his daughter.
The retired engineer and property developer said it was revenge for the abuse he claims she inflicted upon him.

Fritzl's mother died in 1980. By then, Fritzl had begun building the concrete dungeon that would imprison his daughter, Elisabeth.

Fritzl is awaiting trial for raping and incarcerating Elisabeth for 24 years in a purpose-built prison beneath his home in the town of Amstetten. He faces charges of sexual abuse, incest, coercion and manslaughter.

He fathered seven children with Elisabeth, now 42, during her years of captivity. One of the children, a baby boy called Michael, died shortly after birth and it is alleged Fritzl disposed of the body in an incinerator.

The confessions were made to Dr Adelheid Kastner, an Austrian prison psychiatrist who is assessing the 73-year-old's mental state during six in-depth sessions before Fritzl's trial, which is expected to start in January.

This week, Austrian newspapers reported Fritzl describing how his abusive relationship with his mother fed his life as a rapist. "She never showed me any love, she beat me and kicked me until I was on the floor and bleeding," he said. "I felt so weak and humiliated. I never got a kiss from her or even a hug although I tried very hard to please her. The only thing she did with me was go to church. I had a horrible fear from her. She kept insulting me and told me I was a Satan, a criminal, a no-good."

Reports revealed that Fritzl's mother raised him alone after a bitter divorce. Fritzl claims he was isolated from other children and was an "alibi child"– his mother only had him to prove to her husband she was not sterile.

According to Fritzl, he moved into the Amstetten house in 1959 soon after he married his wife, Rosmarie. His mother moved into the house with them and Kastner was told how their roles gradually reversed with Fritzl's mother coming to fear her son.

It is unknown how long his mother was kept in a room without daylight, but Austrian newspapers speculate it could have been for up to 20 years.

In the leaked confidential report, the psychiatrist declared Fritzl as sane and fit for trial despite suffering from a "severe combined personality disorder" and "a sexual disorder".

In the first of the leaked accounts in Austrian newspapers, Fritzl said: "I have realised that I had a mean streak. For someone who was born to be a rapist, I have managed to contain myself for a relatively long period."

He allegedly hatched his plan to incarcerate his daughter, Elisabeth, while he was in prison for rape. In 1967 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for brutally raping a 24-year-old woman at knifepoint in her home.

Kastner writes that Fritzl devised the "ideal solution" to his deranged fantasies after he was released from prison. He decided to lock up his daughter in the cellar so that he could "live out" his "evil side" while leading a seemingly normal life in the flat upstairs.

Kastner came to the conclusion when dissecting the personality of Fritzl that the electrician managed to distance himself from what he was doing by never looking his victim in the face when he raped her.

"He was not only incredibly able to lead a double life but also managed to maintain a triple life without any problems," she wrote, indicating that Fritzl played down the gravity of his crimes in his mind.

"Mr Fritzl resembles a volcano: under the surface that appears almost banal there is an evil streak. He is torn apart by his desires that he cannot master."

Three children aged 12 to 15 whom Fritzl fathered with Elisabeth lived in the large upstairs apartment with him and his wife, Rosemarie, 69. Their other three siblings, aged five to 19, were kept in the cellar with their mother, never seeing the light of day until they were freed by police on April 26 of 2008.

Fritzl believed himself to be a good father to his incestuous family, he told the psychiatrist, and took them games and celebrated birthdays and Christmas with them. It is believed Fritzl will try to use his claims of his own alleged childhood abuse to explain his actions towards his daughter.
Kastner concluded in her report that Fritzl was cold-blooded and calculating.

"His narcissism combines with the lack of empathy and contributes to the exploitative way of turning others into instruments of satisfying his own needs. There is also a noticeable ability or tendency to 'modify' reality according to his own wishes," she wrote.

Austria: Josef Fritzl :Dungeon man faces slavery charge

VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- A prosecutor says Josef Fritzl, the man who held his daughter captive for 24 years in a cellar and fathered seven children with her, may be charged with slavery.

St. Poelten prosecutor Gerhard Sedlacek also says authorities hope to have formal charges -- likely to include a series of crimes -- ready by the end of September and that a trial would likely begin in December.

Investigators say Fritzl confessed to taking his daughter Elisabeth prisoner when she was 18, sexually abusing her and fathering seven children with her, including one whose body he allegedly tossed into a furnace.

They say subsequent DNA tests confirmed he is the surviving children's biological father.

Profile: Josef Fritzl

The story of Josef Fritzl, the man believed to have imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered her seven children, has been described as one of the worst cases in Austria's criminal history.

Mr Fritzl, aged 73, remains in police custody. He has not yet been charged. Police say he has confessed to the alleged crimes and that his confession is supported by DNA evidence.

They do not believe anyone else was involved in his daughter's incarceration.
The picture that emerges is of a man who led a double life. In public he appeared to be a respectable member of the community, living in Amstetten with his wife Rosemarie, with whom he had seven grown-up children.

But DNA tests have confirmed he had a second, secret family with his daughter Elisabeth, whom police say he lured into a cellar, aged 18, in 1984 and raped repeatedly.

She gave birth to seven children, three of whom he and Rosemarie adopted or fostered. Three children remained in the cellar with their mother.

Police say Mr Fritzl has also confessed to burning the body of a seventh child shortly after it died in infancy.

'Very intelligent'

Not one member of the family was aware that down in the soundproof cellar their sister had to live with her children.

Local social services have said that there appeared to be nothing suspicious about the family and that Mr Fritzl managed to explain "very plausibly" how three of his infant grandchildren had turned up on his doorstep.

Amstetten's local governor, Hans-Heinz Lenze, told Austria's public broadcaster ORF that investigations had not revealed any major discrepancies with Mr Fritzl's story that Elisabeth had run away to join a sect.

When Elisabeth was still a toddler, Mr Fritzl was convicted of raping a woman in Linz in 1967 and was sentenced to a term in prison. However, under current Austrian law, unless the crime carries a life sentence, a conviction must be removed after no more than 15 years.

Mr Fritzl and his wife did not have any criminal convictions on record at the time of the first adoption in 1994.

A qualified electrician, police described Mr Fritzl as "a very intelligent man" who had installed electric locks on the cellar rooms which could only be opened with a special code.

They say he locked the sliding reinforced concrete door with a secret remote control, and hid it behind shelves in his cellar workshop. Mr Fritzl was allegedly able to supply his secret family with clothes and food without arousing suspicion by shopping outside of Amstetten.

Police say he had an excuse to travel away from home as he owned some land and could shop in other towns and deliver goods to the cellar dungeon in the evening, unnoticed.

Domineering

Neighbours and acquaintances initially expressed shock at the allegations and said that Mr Fritzl treated his grandchildren affectionately and appeared to be a good grandfather. Former colleagues described him as hard-working and polite.

Police say Mrs Fritzl "had no idea" what was going on, and was devastated to hear of her husband's alleged crimes. Mr Fritzl was reportedly extremely careful to make sure no one went near the cellar where the dungeon was concealed.

Police say that they were told by Elisabeth's siblings that he had always been an "authoritarian and domineering father" and was controlling towards his wife. Former tenants who rented apartments in the Fritzl house also describe him as a strict father, and said his wife deferred to him in any decision making.

The only indication of his motives and psychological state comes from a series of conversations he has had with his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer.

Details of what Mr Fritzl told Mr Mayer have been published in News, an Austrian current affairs magazine. "I constantly knew, over the entire 24 years, that what I did was not right, that I must have been crazy because I did something like this," Mr Fritzl was quoted as saying.

He said he was driven by an "addiction", that "got out of control" but that he had tried to care for his family in the cellar as best as he could, taking them flowers, books and toys. He also spoke about how he would watch videos with his children while Elisabeth cooked them their favourite meals.

Mr Mayer says his client claims he locked Elisabeth up in order to protect her from the outside world: "She did not obey any rules, she hung around in dodgy bars all night and drank and smoked," Mr Fritzl was quoted as saying.

Mr Fritzl said that he started preparing the cellar dungeon "around 1981 or 1982".
"The cellar in my building belonged to me and me alone. It was my kingdom, that only I had access to. Everyone who lived there knew it," he said.

Mr Mayer has said that he believes his client is mentally ill, and should not go to jail, but remain in a psychiatric unit.