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SavannahStar
 Posted:
Tue Apr 29, 2008 5:10 am |
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Fritzl: Articles
The Times April 29, 2008
Austria: incest father has sex assault conviction
The Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter and fathered a hidden incestuous family with her had previously been convicted of sexual assault, The Times has learnt.
Josef F has at least one other conviction, for arson, and he allegedly spent time in prison in the late 1960s. Austrian prosecutors said that they were aware of the allegations and trying to trace the records in court archives.
The revelation came as Austria struggled to come to terms with how the appalling abused of his children could have remained undiscovered for almost a quarter of a century.
According to most of their neighbours, Mr F and his wife Rosemarie appeared to be upright citizens – and commendable in the way that they had raised the three children dumped on their doorstep by the daughter who had walked out of their lives to join some kind of cult 24 years earlier.
"They appeared normal, just like any other family," Guenter Prameiter, who runs a bakery just down the street, said.
Mrs F "always looked after the kids so well, taking them to school. We said ‘It’s incredible what she manages to do at her age’," remarked another neighbour.
"They had a swimming pool in the garden. We would hear them [the children] laughing, the three of them," said a third.
But none of them – until now – had the faintest idea of the horrors taking place in the makeshift dungeon that Mr F had built beneath his nondescript house in the industrial town of Amstetten, in eastern Austria.
Mr F, 73, an electrical engineer with various other business interests, confessed to the police yesterday that he had held his daughter Elisabeth, 42, captive in three windowless underground rooms ever since she disappeared in 1984. He also admitted that he had fathered seven children by her, though he insisted that no force was involved.
He confessed also that he had tossed the body of one of those seven children into the building’s furnace after the baby died at birth.
The police said that three of the children "never saw sunlight" until they were freed over the weekend.
The dungeon in which they lived was so small that the older ones had to watch as his father delivered his daughter’s subsequent children. Presumably they also had to watch as he had intercourse with his daughter to beget them – she claims that he repeatedly raped her – and regularly beat her. The dungeon contained one padded room, its walls and floor covered in rubber, the purpose of which is still unclear.
Yesterday the police described the revelations as "one of Austria’s all-time worst crimes". Guenther Platter, the country’s Interior Minister, called it "unfathomable".
The Osterreich newspaper called it "the worst crime of all time". Despite that, the police said that Mr F, whom they described as "domineering, aggressive and tyrannical", appeared unrepentant.
Mrs F allegedly knew nothing of the evil that was taking place in the basement of her own home. "You have to imagine that this woman’s world fell apart," Hans-Heinz Lenze, a local official, said.
Her ignorance seems almost incredible given her husband’s previous record, the extraordinary stories that he asked her to believe and the fact that he built the basement cell quite literally under her nose and kept his secret family there for more than two decades.
Mr F asked his wife to believe that Elisabeth simply walked out of their lives on August 28, 1984, when she was 18. That was the date on which he allegedly sedated and handcuffed her and locked her in the cellar. A month later he produced a letter – written by her, but dictated by him – in which she asked her parents not to search for her.
Three times in subsequent years, in 1993, 1994 and 1997, Mr F produced babies that Elisabeth had allegedly left on the doorstep of their house, with notes saying that she could not look after them. Mrs F duly raised the three children.
All that time Elisabeth and her expanding family were living in the dungeon. It was hidden behind a 1m-high iron door that could be opened with a numbered code which only Mr F knew. The door was itself concealed behind shelves, and the police said that he used to tell his captive children that if anything happened to him, then they would die in the dungeon.
The police yesterday released photographs showing the door opening onto the narrowest of passages, a living area, a small kitchen and two bedrooms. The ceilings were no more than 5ft 6in high. Elisabeth had done her best to decorate them, with a toy elephant on top of a medicine cabinet and stickers showing a chubby butterfly and smiling octopus on the walls. There were hot plates for cooking and the prisoners’ only contact with the outside world came via a radio, television and a video recorder.
It was the television that finally helped Elisabeth to escape. Her father had apparently taken her eldest daughter out of the dungeon after she became seriously ill and delivered her to hospital.
Elisabeth saw a televised appeal from the hospital for the girl’s mother to come forward, and she persuaded her father to release her. The police then picked up Mr F and Elisabeth close to the hospital on Saturday. Mr F gave the police the code to his secret dungeon Asked why Mrs F was not being investigated, Colonel Franz Polzer, a police spokesman, replied: "Let me ask you a counter question: would any wife accept such a thing if she knew about it?"
A spokesman at the local school which Elisabeth’s other three children attended described Mrs F as "the perfect grandmother" and a member of the Parents’ Association who helped to organise school events. Elisabeth said that she and her children got food and clothing only from her father and her mother was not involved.
Mr F had seven other children by his wife – six daughters and a son aged between 37 and 51. They, too, have denied knowing anything of their sister’s fate, as have the occasional tenants who rented a flat in the house.
But it appears that some people did know that Mr F had a shady past. A spokeswoman for a company where he was employed as an engineer and procurement manager during the 1970s told The Times: "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 offence."
The Times also found several neighbours who said that he was known as a former sex offender by older members of the community.
One 50-year-old said: "I was 10 at the time, but I remember how we children were afraid to play near Mr F’s house because of the rumours that he had raped a woman and spent some time in jail for it."
Despite Mr F’s record, it appears that he was able to persuade the social services, friends and family that Elisabeth had run away in 1984 and subsequently left the three children on his doorstep.
Forensic experts spent yesterday searching the dungeon, and took away boxes of evidence. Mr F was questioned by a judge who extended his custody for two weeks until the investigation has been completed.
He is likely to face a string of charges including manslaughter or murder, rape, kidnapping, coercion and grievous bodily harm.
Colonel Polzer, the police spokesman, described Mr F as "extremely fit and in excellent physical condition" despite his age, as well as "extraordinarily sexually potent".
Elisabeth and two of her captive children were last night being treated in a psychiatric hospital near Amstetten, and were said to be in surprisingly good condition, except for the need to adapt to daylight.
One official said: "As we were driving with one of the boys towards the hospital he told me he was very happy to be driven in a car. He had seen cars on TV and always wanted to have a ride in one.
"I could not detect any obvious mental or physical malfunctions in him or his sister."
In addition to his electrical engineering, Mr F also dabbled in property management and retail underwear. He owned a second two-storey house in an Amstetten suburb which he was planning to tear down to make way for a block of flats and offices with an underground garage. Neighbours had taken legal action to try and stop the project.
The case has inevitably provoked comparisons with that of Natascha Kampusch, the ten-year-old girl who was snatched from another small town in Austria in 1998 and imprisoned in a basement in a Vienna suburb for the next eight years.
Ms Kampusch yesterday offered to use her experience to counsel Mr F’s victims. A spokesman told The Times: "Ms Kampusch was shaken by the latest revelation. Based on the experience she had to go through, she is prepared to meet the victims and share her experience with them and offer her assistance. She is also prepared to provide financial support."
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**SuperStar**
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
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Location: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
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| gwen
Posted:
Tue Apr 29, 2008 7:28 am |
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Austria shocked by incest captive case
AMSTETTEN, Austria (CNN) -- Austria was still coming to terms with its second horrific abduction case in two years on Tuesday as the 73-year-old who admitted holding his daughter captive for 24 years and fathering her seven children appeared in court.
Josef Fritzl, a retired electrical engineer, faces a possible 15 years in prison if charged and convicted of rape.
In court, he appeared calm and showed no emotion, according to an Austrian reporter present. He spoke, saying that he wanted to redeem himself.
The female judge presiding said he would be kept in custody, the reporter said, but gave no indication for how long.
Fritzl was on Monday moved from the town of Amstetten -- where he kept his now 42-year-old daughter Elisabeth and three of her children in the cellar of his house -- to the courthouse in nearby St. Poelten, the provincial capital of Lower Austria.
The central European country's newspapers were filled with details of the case, which has shocked the nation.
"Horror father breaks silence," "Hiding a double life without wife knowing" and "Soundproof dungeon behind 300kg steel door" were headlines in Die Kronen Zeitung.
It also ran a story questioning how people could survive deprived of sunlight for so long.
Die Presse went with "The man who deceived the world" and also accused authorities of allowing the atrocities to happen.
Police are searching other properties owned by Fritzl to make sure he was not keeping another captives, The Associated Press reported.
However, police said it was unlikely he would have had time to maintain other such cellar cells, AP said.
Thomas Birgfellner, a reporter with Austrian broadcaster ORF, said there was strong belief that Fritzl -- who installed an electronic security door in the cellar -- must have had help from other people.
"Everyone has said he could not do it alone. He could not install it alone, and now they have to investigate if there were some other people who assisted him," Birgfellner told CNN.
CNN's Phil Black reported from Amstetten that Austrian police were trying to deflect comparisons with the case of Natascha Kampusch, who 18 months ago escaped from a basement cell outside Vienna in which she had been held since she was kidnapped as a 10-year old on her way to school.
"There are similarities on the surface but police say this case is more extreme, and they do not believe that there is anything darker or more rotten here in Austria than in any other country," Black said.
He said the police were now trying to work out how Fritzl was able to deceive the authorities and his neighbors for so long.
"They are trying to work out how he was able to construct this cellar with nobody noticing, how he was able to feed this hidden family. This why they are being so public, making his name and images available so people can come forward to help," Black said.
The three children held in the cellar were still in hospital on Tuesday having treatment following their horrific ordeal.
The eldest of the children, 19-year-old Kerstin Fritzl, was in an induced coma.
It was her serious condition that led to the unraveling of the case at the weekend when her alleged father Josef -- who she thought was her grandfather -- was forced to take her to the hospital in Amstetten, west of Vienna.
Elisabeth said one of her seven children died at an early age to due inadequate care, while three were adopted by Josef and his wife Rosemarie and lived upstairs in the house.
Three were kept with her in the cramped cellar: Kerstin and sons Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5.
The boys are said to be doing "surprisingly well and in good health" in the circumstances but are still undergoing medical treatment, Black said.
Albert Reiter, head of the hospital's intensive care unit, confirmed to CNN that the children were still receiving "intensive medical treatment."
The breakthrough in the case began a week ago when Kerstin Fritzl fell seriously ill with convulsions. See how Austrians are troubled by the case. »
Her mother Elisabeth begged Josef to take her to a hospital, which he did.
Josef told his wife that their missing daughter had dropped off ailing Kerstin on the doorstep with a note asking that they get her medical care.
Josef took her to the town's clinic with the note, but doctors needed more information to determine why the young woman was unconscious and having violent convulsions.
So they contacted police, who asked the local media to report on Kerstin's situation in an effort to find the missing mother.
Elisabeth and her two sons saw the reports on the television provided to them in their 100-square-foot living quarters, police spokesman Franz Polzer said, and "they desperately pleaded with their father so they could be taken (to the hospital)... (and) do something for the 19-year-old."
Josef Fritzl agreed, and took all three of the remaining captives out of the basement, explaining to Rosemarie and the rest of the family that Elisabeth had reappeared with her two children after an absence of 24 years.
He took them to the hospital and, at some point, authorities there realized something was wrong. Police picked up both Josef and Elisabeth on Saturday near the hospital and brought them into the station for questioning.
Josef would not talk to police but Elisabeth began to tell her story once she was convinced she would never have to see her father again, and that her children would be safe.
"The young woman saw the window for her freedom and she entrusted herself to the criminal officer and began to talk about the 24 years in captivity," Polzer said.
Her story, Polzer said, was "a description that even for the experienced criminal officers (was) almost devastating."
She told police her father began sexually abusing her at age 11. On August 8, 1984 -- weeks before she was reported missing -- her father enticed her into the basement, where he drugged her, put her in handcuffs, and locked her in a room, she told police.
For the next 24 years, she was constantly raped by her father, resulting in seven children, six of whom survived, she said, according to the police statement.
She told police she gave birth to twins in 1996, but one of the babies died a few days later as a result of neglect, and Josef Fritzl removed the infant's body and burned it.
Elisabeth told police that only her father supplied her and her children with food and clothing, and that she did not think her mother, Rosemarie, knew anything about their situation.
Police continued to question Josef Fritzl and he led police to the underground cellar on Sunday. A day later, he confessed to raping his daughter, keeping her and their children in captivity, and burning the body of the dead infant in an oven in the house.
Pictures of the cellar released by the police show a narrow hallway that a normal-sized adult could barely walk down. The hallway leads to a tiny bathroom, spotless and sparsely decorated with tiny but colorful rugs and decals.
A three-foot-high hidden door led to the rooms in the cellar accessible only by an electronic passcode that Josef possessed and provided to police. Polzer said the door "was very, very well concealed and you wouldn't have been able to find it even if you were looking for it."
Josef Fritzl, who police described as an authoritarian figure, forbade anyone in the family from entering the cellar.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/29/austria.cellar/index.html
Timeline
1977: Elisabeth Fritzl claims she was first abused by her father Josef when she was 11 years old.
1984: Elisabeth is allegedly lured into the cellar of her house and drugged and handcuffed by her father. She is forced to write letters saying she has run away from home.
1988: Her first child, Kerstin, is born.
1989: Elisabeth gives birth to her first son, Stefan.
1993: A baby, nine-month-old Lisa, is left on the doorstep of the Fritzl house, with a letter asking Josef and his wife Rosemarie to look after her.
1994: Another child, Monika, arrives with another similar note and is adopted by the Fritzls.
1996: Elisabeth gives birth to twins, but one dies after three days. Josef allegedly burnt the body.
1997: Alexander, the surviving twin, is moved upstairs to join rest of family.
2003: Another letter from Elisabeth arrives saying she had a second son, Felix, the previous year. he is also raised in the cellar.
2008:
April 19: Kerstin is taken to hospital after falling serious ill, and doctors discover that her grandfather is in fact her father.
April 20-27: Josef releases Elisabeth along with Stefan and Felix and tells wife they have chosen to return home.
April 26: Police pick up Josef and Elisabeth near the Amstetten hospital where Kerstin is being treated.
April 27: Josef admits his guilt following Elisabeth's statement.
April 28: Police search the family's house and discover cramped cellar with special security door.
April 29: Josef Fritzl appears in court.
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 22416
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| gwen
Posted:
Tue Apr 29, 2008 9:18 am |
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DNA 'backs Austrian incest claim'
DNA evidence supports a man's confession that he fathered his daughter's children while imprisoning her for 24 years, Austrian police say.
Lower Austria police chief Franz Polzer said Josef Fritzl completely deceived his wife, his family and neighbours in Amstetten, northern Austria.
He said the 73-year-old had forced his daughter, Elisabeth, to write letters saying she had run away.
Mr Fritzl was earlier detained for a further 14 days by a regional court.
Speaking at a news conference, Mr Polzer said police investigators had found clear genetic evidence that Elisabeth's children had been fathered by the accused.
"You can be sure that this man left nothing undone in order to deceive the family, his wife, the relatives, the children and everybody around him," he said.
"He had no scruples to use every possible means to deceive the public and cover up his crime," he added.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7373689.stm
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 22416
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| gwen
Posted:
Tue Apr 29, 2008 9:29 am |
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Incest father remanded in custody after insisting he acted alone
Last updated at 15:10pm on 29th April 2008
The evil father who locked up his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered her seven children has insisted he acted alone, police said today.
Josef Fritzl has told detectives he was not helped to keep his daughter Elisabeth and three of their children hidden in his cramped basement.
But police are not yet convinced he is telling the truth and are investigating how he could have bought food and clothes for them without anyone suspecting.
The 73-year-old pensioner, who has now been confirmed as the father of all Elisabeth's children, was today remanded in custody for two weeks.
At a press conference in Austria after the brief hearing, police said: "He is saying that he worked alone, that he acted alone, in making sure his daughter was kept in that cellar but the authorities are not sure that is what happened.
"As a result they are now carrying out further inquiries. They want to know where the food came from to look after those children and where the clothes came from."
Experts have dubbed Fritzl a "ruler" who must have been mad to have carried out such a campaign of abuse against his own family.
Austrian psychiatrist Reinhard Haller said he appears to have been motivated by pronounced narcissism and a drive to exercise his control over others.
He said: "This man must have been insane and must have felt he was far superior to others."
Court psychiatrist Sigrun Rossmanith said Fritzl essentially had two personalities - "the underground one, and the one that existed above".
"He was obviously a ruler. If the cellar was taboo for his wife and children, and they heard that over and over, then they didn't dare to check on anything," she said.
"If someone has power and forces it on someone else, then his word is like the word of God."
The pensioner has not yet shown any remorse for his actions, according to prosecutor Gerhard Sedlacek.
At today's hearing, Mr Sedlacek said Fritzl was "completely calm, completely without emotion".
But his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said: "He is really hit by this. He is very serious, but he is emotionally broken.
Asked whether he showed any remorse, he added: "I cannot say at this point."
The revelation today that Fritzl had a criminal record will increase the anger that his behaviour could have gone undetected by social services for almost a quarter of a century.
It also indicates his wife Rosemarie must have been aware - at least to some degree - of her husband's sinister side.
Incredibly, it is still claimed she knew nothing about the secret dungeon beneath her home and the unimaginable horror going on under her nose.
Police in Amstetten are now trying to unravel why Fritzl, 73, was driven to lock up his daughter and subject her to decades of abuse.
The retired electrician faces charges of incest, abduction and imprisonment and could serve 15 years in jail if convicted.
He appeared in cout today in St Poelten, the provincial capital of Lower Austria, and was detained in investigative custody for two weeks.
During the brief hearing, the pensioner said nothing to the magistrate.
Prison officials said the pensioner was calm last night but that he had been placed in a large, two-person cell as a precaution to try to stop him killing himself.
Investigators were searching the 60-square metre cellar beneath Fritz's two-storey home today.
Forensic experts in white uniforms and gloves have been carrying out boxed of evidence from the building, which is on a busy street with shops and also home to several other families.
"Down there it is just chaos at the moment. We have to go over every detail very carefully," Franz Prucher, head of security in Lower Austria, said.
Police are desperate to determine how Fritzl's victims could have been hidden away for so long from their neighbours and everyone else in the town, which has a population of just 23,000.
They are said to be examining the padded walls of the cellar to work out whether the children's screams could be heard by neighbours.
Neighbours have told police they heard nothing but many are incredulous that they could have failed to spot anything unusual, not least because over the years Fritzl had built extension after extension to his cellar.
"The community of Amstetten should drown in shame ... The neighbours are turning a blind eye," the Oesterreich newspaper wrote in an editorial.
Meanwhile, residents refuse to believe Fritzl could have acted alone, while others cannot believe that the "normal" family were hiding such a horrendous secret.
Anita Fabian, a teacher in the town, said: "How is it possible that no one knew anything for years? This was not possible without accomplices."
Guenter Pramreiter, who owns a bakery down the street from the Fritzls' home said the couple were regular customers.
"They appeared normal, just like any other family," he said. "I'm totally shocked. This was next door. It's terrible."
Yesterday, Austrian police released details of Fritzl's secret family and the life he forced them to lead in the cramped cellar beneath his home.
His daughter Elisabeth had seven children in all during her 24 years in incarceration, all of whom were delivered by her father at their house.
Police said that when she had twin boys 12 years ago and one died, Fritzl merely tossed the body in a furnace used to heat the grey concrete villa.
He raised three of the children with his 60-year-old wife Rosemarie, while the remaining three lived with their mother behind a steel security door in the basement.
Apart from 42-year-old Elisabeth, he and Rosemarie had another six children of their own, now all grown-up, making him a father of 14.
Chillingly, details have emerged of a second house owned by Fritzl a mile away. It, too has an excavated cellar with stone bath and a 3ft hacksaw on the wall.
The man police described as "dynamic, bossy and authoritarian" faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of raping his daughter. His victims and wife are receiving psychiatric care at a secret location.
Her oldest child, 19-year-old Kerstin, was still fighting for life in hospital last night. It was her arrival there, suffering from a mystery condition, which led to the discovery of the cellar dungeon.
But the youngest of the freed children, five-year-old Felix, told carers of his joy at the simple pleasure of riding in a car after spending his entire life underground.
"He said how happy he was and how fantastic it was to ride in a real car," said Heinz Lenze, the local mayor.
Mr Lenze says he is convinced that Fritzl acted without his wife's knowledge.
"Is it possible she knew?" he asked. "For me it is beyond imagination that she would knowingly put up with her husband having a new family with their own daughter."
Rosemarie apparently accepted her husband's explanation that Elisabeth had run off to join a religious cult at the age of 18 - and that over the intervening years dumped three babies on their doorstep with notes saying she could not cope.
She and her husband formally adopted the three children - Lisa, 16, Monika, 14, and Alexander, 12 - bringing them up as their own.
The three were apparently unaware of their mother's existence, let alone that their siblings Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix were living below them.
It remains a mystery why Fritzl allowed three children to live a relatively normal existence while the others were kept locked up behind a steel doorway.
Neighbours said the three kept above ground were well-balanced and polite members of the police sports club and voluntary fire brigade.
Their grandmother, according to many, was a pillar of the community, baking cakes for fetes and becoming an active member of the parent teachers' association at their private school.
One of his sons by Rosemarie has told police that he was "tyrannical" and a "very controlling" man who even in his older years ruled the house with a rod of iron.
Franz Polzer, who is heading the police investigation, said Fritzl was "an extraordinarily sexually potent man".
He added: "If you look at him today, you would hardly believe he was capable of doing these things."
Asked why he thought the four in the cellar had not tried to escape over the years, the detective said they were all physically weak.
"You have to put yourself into the situation of these people. They led a completely different life to ours, they do not know what we know. These children were born into the jail, they knew nothing else."
Elisabeth told police that her father began sexually abusing her when she was 11 and some years later, on August 28, 1984, he sedated her, handcuffed her and locked her in the cellar. When she became pregnant, he delivered the babies.
Social workers admit regularly seeing Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl after they adopted three of Elisabeth's children but insist they had noticed nothing unusual during routine visits.
Jiosef Schloegl, who had responsibility for the adopted children, admitted that rules had been broken because they had been formally handed over to Fritzl without the approval of their missing mother Elisabeth.
He conceded that there had been questions over the whole procedure at the time but it had been finally approved after they found no irregularities.
At Fritzl's other property in the town, 80 miles west of Vienna, neighbours said he bought it several years ago and had initially planned to demolish it and build an office block but planning approval was rejected.
One said: "You would see him two or three years ago with the children and they would play in the garden. Sometimes you would see Josef's grown-up children there too."
News of Fritzl's sickening quarter-century of abuse has stunned a nation still shocked by the scandal of Natascha Kampusch, who was held captive by a paedophile for eight years in a Vienna suburb.
Miss Kampusch yesterday offered to help the victims, saying: "I can imagine that it is very difficult both for the mother of the children as well as for the wife of the perpetrator to get through this."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=562685&in_page_id=1770&ct=5
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 22416
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| gwen
Posted:
Tue Apr 29, 2008 11:15 am |
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Kin In Incest-Imprisonment Case Meet
Austrian Family Members Victimized By Dad Who Imprisoned Daughter, Fathered 7 Kids With Her
AMSTETTEN, Austria, April 29, 2008
(AP) Members of the Austrian family victimized by a man who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her have had an "astonishing" meeting, officials said Tuesday.
Authorities said the daughter, most of her children whom suspect Josef Fritzl fathered through incest, and Fritzl's wife met each other Sunday morning at a clinic where they have been getting psychiatric treatment and counseling.
"It was astonishing how easily it happened - how the mother and grandmother came together," clinic director Berthold Kepplinger told reporters Tuesday.
Kepplinger said the family members interacted very naturally - even though the three children who lived upstairs with the grandparents had never met their siblings in the windowless cell.
Officials said one of the children who is receiving medical treatment at another hospital was not part of the gathering.
Word of the reunion came as police announced that DNA tests confirmed Fritzl is the biological father of the six surviving children he had with his daughter.
Police also said they combed through Fritzl's other properties but found no other hidden windowless cells like the one where he had held his daughter - now 42 - captive since she was 18.
Police said Fritzl confessed Monday to holding the daughter captive, sexually abusing her, fathering her children and tossing the body of one child who died in infancy into a furnace.
Officials had said Fritzl faces up to 15 years in prison if charged, tried and convicted on rape charges, the most grave of his alleged offenses under Austrian law.
But prosecutors in Lower Austria said Tuesday they were looking into the possibility of charging Fritzl with "murder through failure to act" in connection with the infant death. Murder in Austria is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Investigators say they believe his wife, with whom he had seven children, was unaware that the daughter she believed ran away to join a religious cult in 1984 was living as a prisoner beneath her feet.
Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said his client also was under psychiatric care and "is really hit by this. He is very serious, but he is emotionally broken."
But prosecutor Gerhard Sedlacek said Fritzl was "completely calm, completely without emotion" when he was formally placed in pretrial detention Tuesday.
Austria is still scandalized by a 2006 case involving a girl who was kidnapped and imprisoned in a basement outside Vienna for more than eight years, and residents of Amstetten were puzzled as to how the Fritzl case could go undetected for so long.
"How is it possible that no one knew anything for 24 years?" asked Anita Fabian, a teacher in Amstetten. "This was not possible without accomplices."
Regarding the apartment building that Fritzl owned and lived in, the town's authorities authorized the construction of an addition with a basement in 1978, city spokesman Hermann Gruber told the Austria Press Agency. He said inspectors examined the project in 1983 - the year before the young woman went missing - and nothing looked suspicious.
Police said the surviving children are three boys and three girls, ranging in age from 5 to 19. Officials said three of the secret children - aged 19, 18 and 5 - "never saw sunlight" until they were freed a few days ago.
Police released several photos showing parts of the cramped basement cell, with a narrow passageway leading to a tiny bedroom. Investigators said an electronic keyless-entry system apparently kept them from escaping.
Three of the children lived with the grandparents. Fritzl and his wife registered those children with authorities, saying that they had found them outside their home in 1993, 1994 and 1997.
Leopold Etz, a regional police official, told APA that Fritzl apparently chose which of the children would live upstairs with him and his wife according to whether they were "crybabies."
Officials said social workers made regular visits to the family but found nothing out of the ordinary, reporting that Fritzl's wife was attentive, the three children were doing well in school and clubs, and that all of them played musical instruments.
The case unfolded after the eldest of the secret children, a 19-year-old woman, was found unconscious and gravely ill on April 19 in the building and was taken to a hospital.
Hospital officials said the 19-year-old remained in critical condition Tuesday because of the effects of lack of oxygen, and was undergoing dialysis.
Amstetten Mayor Herbert Katzengrueber told the AP in an interview that Fritzl was personable and well-liked, and that the town had honored the suspect and his wife in 2006 for their 50th wedding anniversary.
Katzengrueber said he was at a loss to explain how such an atrocity could happen.
"No one can really explain it," he said. "I am appalled and saddened that such a thing could happen in my hometown. ... These have been awful and sad days."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/29/world/main4053418.shtml
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 22416
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| SavannahStar
Posted:
Wed Apr 30, 2008 7:22 am |
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Incest family 'faces years in therapy'
Story Highlights
Austrian family held captive in a cellar will take years to recover, doctors say
Family are undergoing treatment at a local psychiatric clinic
Children kept underground may never lead normal lives, psychiatrist warns
Family have been offered opportunity to adopt new identities
(CNN) -- The woman and children held captive in a cellar for years by their incestuous father will take years to recover from their disturbing ordeal, doctors warned Wednesday as the family at the center of the case remained in psychiatric care.
Members of the Fritzl family will also be offered the chance to adopt new identities in an effort to help them lead normal lives, officials said.
Hans-Heinz Lenze, the head of local social services said the family was "doing as well as can be expected in the circumstances" and said any change of identity would be the family's decision.
Elizabeth Fritzl -- now 42 -- spent more than two decades in the windowless basement after being drugged, handcuffed and locked up by her father, Josef Fritzl, as an 18-year-old. Repeatedly raped, she gave birth to seven children by Fritzl, one of whom died as an infant.
Three of the children -- Kerstin, 19; Stefan, 18; and Felix, 5 -- remained imprisoned underground with their mother. The other three lived in an apartment upstairs with Fritzl and his wife who believed Elizabeth had abandoned them after running away from home.
Elizabeth and five of the children were continuing to receive treatment at a local clinic near Amstetten after being reunited on Sunday. Kerstin, whose hospitalization at the weekend finally brought the family's plight to the attention of authorities, remained in a coma at a nearby hospital.
"It is astonishing how easy it worked that the children came together, and also it was astonishing how easy it happened that the grandmother and the mother came together," clinic director Berthold Kepplinger said. But Kepplinger warned that the family would require extensive counseling.
"We're talking of 20 years of darkness, incest and its effects and other illnesses they might have suffered from."
Kepplinger said the two sets of children were tentatively getting to know one another, adding that the two boys who had lived underground had an unusual way of communicating with each other.
A policeman who had accompanied the boys to hospital after their discovery on Sunday said the pair had "screamed with excitement" during the car journey as they experienced the outside world for the first time.
"The two boys appeared overawed by the daylight they had never experienced before," said Chief Inspector Leopold Etz. "The real world was completely alien to them... We had to drive very slowly with them because they cringed at every car light and every bump. It was as if we had just landed on the moon."
In an interview with the Austrian newspaper, Oesterreich, psychiatrist Max Friedrich, who treated the abducted teenager Natascha Kampusch, estimated it would take "between five and eight years" for the children to recover from their experiences.
Another psychologist, Bernd Prosser, told Austrian television that it would be impossible for the four held prisoner underground to lead normal lives. "I am afraid it is too late for that."
Kampusch, the Austrian girl abducted as a 10-year-old and held captive in a basement for more than eight years until she escaped in 2007, also offered her help to the family on Tuesday, but questioned the decision to move them from the cellar into psychiatric care.
"Pulling them abruptly out of this situation, without transition, to hold them and isolating them to some extent, it can't be good for them," said Kampusch, now 20, in an interview with Austrian TV station Puls 4.
"I believe it might have been even better to leave them where they were, but that was probably impossible. This case is not like mine, where that was not my environment. They were born there and I can imagine that there is a strong attachment to that place."
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**SuperStar**
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 23940
Location: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
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| SavannahStar
Posted:
Wed Apr 30, 2008 7:23 am |
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Austrian family in incest case hold 'astonishing' reunion
Story Highlights
Austrian family terrorized by decades of incest meet for the first time
Josef Fritzl kept daughter imprisoned under home for 24 years, police say
Fritzl, who appeared in court Tuesday, has admitted guilt and faces 15 years
Natascha Kampusch, kidnap victim for eight years, offers her help to family
AMSTETTEN, Austria (CNN) -- Family members at the center of a bizarre incest and imprisonment case spanning 24 years have held an "astonishing" reunion, medical officials say.
"They met each other on Sunday morning," clinic director Berthold Kepplinger told reporters Tuesday. "And it is astonishing how easy it worked, that the children came together and also it was astonishing how easy it happened that the grandmother and the mother came together."
Investigators say 73-year-old Josef Fritzl held his daughter, Elisabeth, captive in a cellar for 24 years. He raped her repeatedly, they say, and eventually fathered seven of her children.
Elisabeth and two of her children were reunited Sunday with three of her other children and her mother, Kepplinger said Tuesday. The three children and her mother lived in the home above the cellar.
Elisabeth's eldest child, 19-year-old Kerstin Fritzl, remains in hospital.
A seventh child died years ago, shortly after birth. Fritzl told police he burned the infant's body in a furnace.
The story of the family's imprisonment began to unravel a week ago, when Kerstin fell seriously ill with convulsions and was hospitalized.
Austrian police Wednesday denied reports that they were investigating possible links between Fritzl and the unsolved murder of a woman.
Franz Polzer, director of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, said Fritzl had owned an Austrian hotel near wher a woman was found murdered. However, they were not investigating the decades-old incident at this stage.
Meanwhile, an Austrian girl who was held prisoner in a basement for eight years said the family faced a long period of adjustment. See how Austrians are troubled by the case »
Natascha Kampusch was 10 years old when she was kidnapped on her way to school in March 1998.
She escaped from a bunker below the house of Wolfgang Priklopil in a suburb of Vienna in August 2007. Priklopil killed himself by throwing himself under a train only hours later.
"Although they are now in a secret location, I believe it might have been even better to leave them where they were but that was probably impossible," she said of the Fritzl family Tuesday.
"Yes, because that was of course the environment they were used to and now they're somewhere else. Pulling them abruptly out of this situation, without transition, to hold them and isolating them to some extent, it can't be good for them."
Officials said Tuesday that DNA testing had confirmed Fritzl fathered the children.
His DNA also was found on a letter sent to the Fritzl family that was made to look like it was from his daughter, Elisabeth, said Franz Polzer, director of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs. See inside the 'House of horrors' »
Authorities said Fritzl sent other letters over the years, leading the family to believe that Elisabeth was a runaway who had abandoned three of her children on their doorstep. He dictated at least one of the letters to his daughter, they said.
Authorities said it did not appear that Fritzl's wife, Rosemarie, was involved in or knew about her husband's activities. She had talked to her friend, Gertrude Baumgarten, about one of the infants left outside the Fritzl home.
"She said she believed her daughter had had the child with someone from [a] cult and couldn't take care of it. That's why Elisabeth laid it in front of the door.
"And she said, 'Well, what can we do? We have to take the child in,'" Baumgarten said.
"She never knew that something was so very wrong there," she said, and added: "I believe it would be fitting to get a rope and hang him. Such a pig!"
Reports have surfaced in The Times of London and Austria's Presse that Fritzl was convicted of sexual assault in the 1960s, but there is nothing in his record to confirm this, said District Governor Hans Heinz Lenze. He added, however, that records were expunged after a certain number of years.
Prosecutors were checking archives to find the information, said Gerhard Sedlacek, prosecutor for the state of Poelten.
The Times of London quotes a 50-year-old neighbor who said that when he was 10, he remembered "how we children were afraid to play near Mr. Fritzl's house because of the rumors that he had raped a woman and spent some time in jail for it."
Fritzl led police to the cellar on Sunday. A day later, he confessed to raping his daughter, now 42, and keeping her and their children in captivity, police said.
Fritzl was able to convince social service workers, friends and family that Elisabeth had run away in 1984, when she was about 18. The father, who police described as an authoritarian figure, forbade anyone from entering the cellar.
In the cellar with Elisabeth were Kerstin and two sons, aged 5 and 18.
Lenze told the The Times that Elisabeth, her children and her grown siblings would be offered new lives and new names. "The name Fritzl has been muddied," he said. Watch a report of how the case unfolded. »
Police said Tuesday they had searched other properties belonging to Fritzl, to make sure there were no similar situations. Nothing had been found.
Also Tuesday, a judge ordered Fritzl to remain in custody. The judge did not say how long he will remain detained. He can be held for 14 days without formal charges while the investigation is under way, and that amount of time can be extended.
Some neighbors have lived in the area for 30 years, and not only knew Fritzl, but also knew Elisabeth as a youngster, said Maria Otto Pries, who has lived in the area only three years and did not know the family.
"Many people have shaken his hand and said hello and gone to the same bakery with him and had a coffee with him at the coffee shop," she said. "The scarier fact is that it happened just around the corner."
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**SuperStar**
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 23940
Location: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
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| SavannahStar
Posted:
Wed Apr 30, 2008 7:29 am |
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Police Investigating Possible Link Between Austrian Incest Suspect, Unsolved Murder
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
AMSTETTEN, Austria —
Police say they are looking into possible links between the murder of a young woman and the man who has confessed to holding his daughter captive for 24 years and fathering her seven children.
A woman answering the telephone at police headquarters of Upper Austria province says investigators are looking into whether the incest suspect had anything to do with the murder of Martina Posch 22 years ago.
Posch's bound body was found on a shore of the Upper Austrian lake of Mondsee, 10 days after she disappeared. She was 17. An Austrian daily says the wife of the suspect owned an inn on the other side of the lake.
The woman refused to identify herself on the telephone Wednesday. She said only the head of the Upper Austria police could comment further.
The hospitalization of Kerstin Fritzl, which triggered the discovery that her family had been imprisoned and terrorized for decades was struggling for her life Wednesday, as authorities weighed the future of her five siblings.
Her condition was critical but stable, authorities said. The 19-year-old is one of seven children Josef Fritzl fathered with his daughter, who was held captive for 24 years in a dingy dungeon beneath his home.
Kerstin, who is an induced coma, is undergoing dialysis because of the effects of lack of oxygen. She was brought to the hospital unconscious and later suffered seizures. The fate of her family came to light after doctors, mystified by her ailment, publicly appealed for her mother to come forward because they needed her medical history.
Authorities were providing little information about Fritzl, 73, who has confessed to locking up daughter Elisabeth since she was 18 and repeatedly raping her. He said he incinerated the body of one of her children, who died in infancy.
Leopold Etz, chief of homicide for Lower Austria province, said authorities were confident that Fritzl acted alone.
"I think we can rule out accomplices," Etz told The Associated Press.
He said DNA tests confirmed that no other man entered the soundproof cellar rooms Fritzl made into a prison below his home. On Tuesday, tests confirmed Fritzl as the biological father of his daughter's six surviving children.
Fritzl led his wife to believe that Elisabeth had run away to join a religious cult when she disappeared, and authorities say there was no evidence the suspect's wife, Rosemarie, knew what was going on or was involved.
Elisabeth "never said that her mother was in the cellar," Etz said.
Fritzl brought three of the cellar-born children into his home, registering them officially as Elisabeth's abandoned children, but kept three more with their mother, cut off from the outside world. All, except Kerstin, have since been reunited with their mother and grandmother in an "astonishing" scene at a psychiatric clinic, authorities said Tuesday.
The father faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on rape charges, the most grave of his alleged offenses under Austrian law. However, prosecutors said Tuesday they were investigating whether he can be charged with "murder through failure to act" in connection with the infant's death. That is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Amid the sordid details, precious little has been revealed about Fritzl's life or what led him to commit such a crime.
He was born April 9, 1935, in Amstetten, a working-class town 75 miles west of Vienna. He owned a number of properties in the region and paid his dues at the fisherman's club. Beside that, most neighbors or townsfolk remember only an affable, if unremarkable, fellow.
"Who is Josef Fritzl?" state broadcaster ORF asked in an online article. "All of Austria is asking this question, if not the entire world. What type of life did he previously lead, where did he work, how did he appear in public?"
It compiled a brief biography:
After mandatory schooling, Fritzl studied electric engineering at a polytechnic school and got a first job with steel company Voest. From 1969 to 1971 he worked for a construction material company in Amstetten, where he gained a reputation as an intelligent worker and a good technician. Then he went into the service industry and took over an inn 15 years ago.
Etz told The AP a police team was further investigating Fritzl's past, adding that it could take weeks to develop a clearer profile.
Rosemarie, Elisabeth and her five other children, remained in psychiatric care Wednesday. Clinic director Berthold Kepplinger said Tuesday they were doing "quite well" under the circumstances in the care of a team of specialists.
Authorities, meanwhile, were deliberating the future of Kerstin and her two brothers, aged 5 and 18, who effectively have no identities. Officials have discussed the possibility of providing new names to the children, who "never saw sunlight" until they were freed from the basement Saturday.
Kepplinger said the 18-year-old could read and write in a "reduced form."
He said Elisabeth has spoken "quite a lot" about what she went through in captivity, but he declined to provide details. "It was definitely dreadful for her and for her children," Kepplinger said.
The case started unfolding on April 19 when Kerstin was found unconscious and was taken to a hospital. After receiving a tip, police picked up Elisabeth and her father on Saturday. Fritzl freed the captive children the same day.
Authorities have declined to comment on who provided the tip.
Austria is still scandalized by the 2006 case of Natascha Kampusch, who was kidnapped at age 10 and imprisoned in a basement outside Vienna for more than eight years.
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**SuperStar**
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 23940
Location: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
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| PerryPeabody
Posted:
Wed Apr 30, 2008 10:02 am |
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Tenant who lived in incest house for 12 years heard knocking from sex dungeon 'but did nothing'
Last updated at 15:37pm on 30.04.08
A tenant who lived above the cellar where Elisabeth Fritzl was imprisoned by her father for 24 years described today how he heard strange noises in the night - and saw Josef Fritzl ferrying wheelbarrows of food under cover of darkness.
Alfred Dubanovsky, 42, who lived in the building in the Austrian town of Amstetten for 12 years, said Josef Fritzl spent his days in the cellar but banned anyone from going near it.
It never occurred to him anything was unusual about his landlord's behaviour but he now says he will regret doing nothing for the rest of his life.
Mr Dubanovsky said: "I wish to God that I could turn back the clock. The signs were all there but it was impossible for me to recognise them.
"Who would ever believe something so terrible was going on right under my feet? It is a regret I will have to live with for the rest of my life."
Mr Dubanovsky, who moved out a year ago and still works at a filling station near the house, spoke out after 200 residents held a rainy candle-lit vigil in support of the family in the town square last night.
"The outside world seems to think Amstetten is a terrible town and that people in the community do not care for one another. We want to show this is not true," said organiser Elisabeth Anderson.
He told The Sun: "Herr Fritzl banned any of the tenants of the eight flats from going anywhere near the cellar or back yard.
"He told us the cellar was protected with a sophisticated electronic alarm, and whoever went there would have their contract cancelled without notice.
"He used to take food and shopping down there in a wheelbarrow - always at night. At other times I remember I could sometimes hear a knocking from the cellar that I couldn't explain.
"I never in my wildest dreams thought he was behind anything like this. He spent every day in his cellar but I thought his behaviour was pretty normal."
He added: "He would fly into a panic at the merest mention of the police or the law. When I moved out there was a dispute over who should pay for repairs to a door.
"I threatened to sue. He went pale and caved in immediately."
It also emerged today that Fritzl, 73, first applied for planning permission for a cellar in 1978, saying it was to protect his family in case of nuclear attack.
"Elisabeth would have been 12 at the time - making it about a year after she says her father started abusing her.
In 1983 he was allowed to extend it to proper living quarters with rooms and running water. It was a year later that Elisabeth - now 42 - says her father lured her into the cellar, drugged and handcuffed her before imprisoning her.
An investigator told The Sun: "Not only did Fritzl build a torture den to rape and assault his daughter - he went through official channels to do it.
"What kind of man follows council building laws to the letter only then to commit such a horrific crime? It shows how methodical and detached he is.
"The picture we are getting is that Fritzl planned his entrapment for years, maybe as soon as he started raping his daughter.
"We understand that Elisabeth was his favourite child because she was so pretty. He didn't want to lose her when she turned 18 so he spent six years building the dungeon to keep her for himself forever.
"It wasn't just a sudden idea to throw his daughter in the cellar - it was plotted for years."
Details also emerged about the condition of the three children held in the cellar with their mother.
Berthold Kepplinger, head of the clinic where they are being treated, said they could read and write, although not very well.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23481334-details/
Tenant+who+lived+in+incest+house+for+12+years
+heard+knocking+from+sex+dungeon+'but+did+nothing'/article.do
[There are pictures in the article; I didn't know how to bring them here.]
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Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 1600
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| PerryPeabody
Posted:
Wed Apr 30, 2008 12:52 pm |
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Suspicions Grow that Austrian Had Accomplices
By Julia Jüttner in Amstetten
There are still many unanswered questions in the Amstetten incest case. 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?
AP
Amstetten residents held a candlelit vigil on Tuesday evening.
The heavy steel door to the cellar, the secret location where the family of four lived and the systematic abuse of his own child (more...) which led to a total of seven births: There is growing suspicion in Austria that Josef F. could not have led his double life without the aid of accomplices.
"I never saw him with shopping bags," says Lina Angermeier (not her real name), who lived in the same house as the incestuous father from 1996 to 1997. The 32-year-old saleswoman told SPIEGEL ONLINE that, as a mother, she knows how much a family needs to live on. She finds it hard to imagine how F. was able to maintain this double life for 24 years without being noticed. "It could be that he smuggled groceries through the garage at the back of the house," she admits. "It's difficult to see that part of the property."
Angermeier's husband is a baker. He never noticed F. doing anything conspicuous, even though he arrived and left his apartment at very varied times of the day. She says they probably bumped into each other thousands of times on their way in or out of the house, saying hello or exchanging small talk. "And less than 10 meters away, a family was being held captive in a dungeon," she says. "You feel really bad, now that you know."
Like so many other people in Amstetten, Lina Angermeier believed all the lies down the years: That Elisabeth F. had fallen into the clutches of a sect or had become a prostitute, and that she had left three children on her parents' doorstep, because she either couldn’t or didn’t want to take care of them herself. "That was no secret," Angermeier says. "None of the tenants doubted that version of events. On the contrary, you felt sorry for the 'F' family because of their bad fortune."
Not just a brother of Elisabeth, but also one of her sisters, for a brief time, lived in the house at Ybbsstrasse 40. "They all seemed to get along well. The other kids came to visit a lot. Josef and Rosemarie F. were very loving and doted over their grandchildren. Elisabeth was portrayed as the black sheep of the family."
Lina Angermeier lived at that time in a small apartment on the first floor of the house with a view of the inner courtyard. She never went into the cellar, where the dungeon was hidden behind a secret door. "When I first looked at the apartment, Mrs. F. told me there was no cellar space for tenants. I didn't mind."
'The Worst Off'
"I'm especially sorry for Mrs. F.," Angermeier says. "She really made a lot of sacrifices for the sake of her grandchildren. She certainly would have done something, had she known. Unless Mr. F. had such a tight rein on her that she would never have dared. In any case, she is the worst off now. For her, the shame is the greatest -- to have shared her life with a person like that."
Local government official Hans-Heinz Lenze also says Rosemarie F. is in extremely bad shape.
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 just because he had a key to the cellar doesn't mean that he knew about the secret dungeon." The state office of criminal investigation in Lower Austria declined to comment on this issue.
PHOTO GALLERY: 24 YEARS IN A DUNGEON
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (9 Photos)
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/0,5538,30997,00.html
Specialists from the federal police are currently investigating to what extent the complex door construction, with its electronic lock mechanism and numerical access code, was professionally installed. It is also not clear how a single individual could have mounted the heavy steel door.
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.
'This Is Not a Town of Criminals'
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."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,550685,00.html
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Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 1600
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| PerryPeabody
Posted:
Wed Apr 30, 2008 5:50 pm |
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Austria incest case revives prison term debate
Lenient European sentences reviewed in light of rape, imprisonment case
Associated Press
VIENNA, Austria - Police say Josef Fritzl left a lot of human wreckage in his wake: the daughter he imprisoned and raped for 24 years, the seven children he fathered with her and the wife whose life he shattered.
Yet, for an atrocity that has stunned the world, he may wind up serving just 15 years in prison if charged, tried and convicted.
Practically speaking, that may translate into a life sentence for Fritzl, 73. But his case has revived a debate over Europe's lenient penal system — and whether harsher, U.S.-style sentencing guidelines might help deter such heinous crimes.
"Fifteen years for destroying human lives is unacceptable," said Harald Vilimsky, a public safety policy official with Austria's conservative Freedom Party. "Any punishment that falls a single day short of a life sentence is a mockery of the victims."
Many Europeans abhor the death penalty, and capital punishment is illegal across the 27-nation EU. But in many countries, even convicted murderers handed life sentences seldom serve more than 25 years.
Sweden has life imprisonment for murder, but the sentencing guidelines go as low as 10 years. That applies — in theory at least — even to serial killers.
In Germany, convicted rapists are punished with sentences of six months to five years. Serial cases, and those involving weapons or death threats, can fetch up to 10 years in prison — but also as little as 12 months.
Poland's maximum for rape is 15 years, and that would apply even for sexual assaults repeatedly carried out over two dozen years as alleged in the Austrian case. The standard time served? Two to 12 years.
"It's rare that anyone serves the full sentence in Europe," said James Whitman, a professor of comparative and foreign law at Yale. "It's expected that people are let out early."
In the U.S., by contrast, first-degree rape is punishable by up to life imprisonment in states ranging from Maryland to South Dakota.
More in American lock-ups
Experts say Europe's shorter sentences — and its reluctance to jail people for offenses considered minor, such as possessing small amounts of marijuana — help explain why its prisons are far less crowded than U.S. lockups.
The U.S. has the most prisoners per capita in the world, with 751 for every 100,000 people, according to the London-based International Center for Prison Studies. Most European nations trail far behind: Britain's rate is 151 per 100,000, Austria's is 108 and Denmark's is 66.
Fritzl surely would face a tougher prison term anywhere in America, and in some states maybe even the death penalty, said Dan Richman, a law professor at Columbia University.
"I think it's fair to say that in any jurisdiction in the U.S. his maximum sentence would be much more severe," he said.
In Italy, murder carries a minimum sentence of 21 years and a maximum of life. But life terms are rarely handed down in a system that emphasizes rehabilitation over incarceration, said Carlo Guarnieri, a justice expert at the University of Bologna Law School.
"The Italian system is very European and not American at all," Guarnieri said. "In general terms, penalties are lenient. The general outlook of the court is in favor of rehabilitation, although today there is a lot of discussion that this doesn't work."
Prosecutors try to build case
In Austria, prosecutors are still mulling how to charge Fritzl, who police say confessed to imprisoning his daughter Elisabeth — now 42 — in a warren of windowless, soundproofed rooms beneath his home when she was 18 and raping her repeatedly.
They say Fritzl also admitted to incinerating the body of one of the seven children he fathered after the child died in infancy.
Authorities say Fritzl could face up to 15 years if convicted of rape. Prosecutors are looking into whether the retired electrician could be tried for "murder through failure to act" in the infant's death.
Austria's criminal code prescribes prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years to life for murder — but in Austrian terms, a life sentence is interpreted as 20 to 25 years of confinement.
Courts also don't tack on extra time for related offenses, unlike in the U.S., where weapons charges or crossing state lines can add significantly to the time ultimately spent behind bars.
Fritzl has not yet been charged, but the most likely charges he faces are rape, incest and false imprisonment. If convicted of all three, he would serve the sentences concurrently and the maximum would be 15 years based on the rapes.
Potentially, it could be far less if he mounts a successful insanity defense. Either way, a trial could be a long way off: Police say their investigation may drag on for another six months.
Austria's justice minister, Maria Berger, said Wednesday the government will conduct a sweeping review of all sentencing laws and propose legislation doubling prison sentences for "especially dangerous" predators.
But Berger insists a more draconian approach probably wouldn't stop the next Fritzl.
"To this kind of perpetrator," she said, "the severity of the punishment means nothing."
Europeans frequently criticize the U.S. system, where first-degree murder and other heinous crimes are punishable by life without possibility of parole, or, in some states, death.
Many criticized this month's landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld Kentucky's three-drug lethal injection method and prompted other states to take steps to resume executions, a practice considered barbaric in Europe.
In 2005, death penalty opponents succeeded in getting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's name stripped from a soccer stadium in his Austrian hometown because he refused to pardon a convict on California's death row.
But Europeans have also been rattled by some singularly horrific cases that have challenged their approach to crime and punishment:
In Spain, groups representing victims of the 2004 Madrid commuter train terrorist bombings that killed 191 people and injured more than 1,800 expressed outrage over last year's acquittal of the alleged ringleader, Rabei Osman. Although the three main figures were sentenced to tens of thousands of years in prison, four other top suspects got off with sentences of 10 to 18 years. Prosecutors are appealing Osman's acquittal.
Belgium's notorious serial pedophile, Marc Dutroux, was on parole for raping schoolgirls when he committed a spree of child kidnappings, rapes and murders that eventually led to a life sentence in 2004. In theory, Dutroux eventually could come up for parole, though that's unlikely because a judge has pronounced him a danger to society and Belgium has toughened its parole rules.
Britons still debate the handling of the infamous 1993 murder of 2-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. They were tried as adults and jailed for the slaying, but released eight years later with new identities. Britain's maximum penalty for adults convicted of murder, rape or kidnapping is life imprisonment, but judges have broad discretion to decide whether to grant parole.
Guarnieri, the Italian justice system expert, said his country's approach reflects its Roman Catholic culture.
"There is an attitude to forgive," he said.
"If you read the newspapers or watch TV, every time there is a crime, the journalist tries to interview the victim and ask if they are forgiving. Always."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24392007/
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| gwen
Posted:
Thu May 01, 2008 4:21 pm |
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Grim Fate Awaits Children Held in Cellar
Genie -- the 'Feral Girl' -- Did Not Recover, Despite the Best Care
By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES
May 1, 2008
For the first 13 years of her life, "Genie" was confined to her bedroom, strapped to a toilet by day and bound in a sleeping bag under a metal screen in her crib at night.
Her only human contact was with her father, who beat her every time she vocalized, and barked at her like a dog to quiet her. By the time Genie was liberated in 1970, the child was nearly mute, uttering only a handful of phrases, including "stopit" and "nomore."
The girl was known for her "bunny walk," because she held her hands like paws, and her social interaction was limited to sniffing, spitting and clawing.
This American horror story, explored in the 2001 film "Mockingbird Don't Sing," bears a striking resemblance to another horrific case of abuse that played out in Austria this week.
Police learned that three children had been locked with their mother in the basement of their grandparents' home their entire lives, imprisoned by their 72-year-old grandfather. Although they spoke some German to authorities, the prisoners reportedly spoke to one another only in growls.
"It's as though they were kidnapped by aliens and woke up on another planet," Dr. Stuart Goldman, director of psychiatric education at Children's Hospital in Boston, told ABCNEWS.com. "The impact will be dependent on the age of children, and the younger are more likely to recover."
In addition to experiencing health problems, these children will struggle in their attachments to other people, language development and in their capacity for self-regulation, and in many other areas, Goldman said.
"A scientist can't predict because there are few valid comparisons," he said. "Sporadic reports are that feral kids have not adapted well."
Feral Kids
While German doctors attempt to unravel the toll the abuse has taken on these children, Genie's case offers some clues. The so-called "feral girl" had the best psychiatric help and most devoted foster care, but she never overcame her wounds.
"Their forever is compromised," said Alice Honig, professor of child development at Syracuse University. "Genie was given every bit of love and lessons and experts in language development, but she never recovered."
The Austrian children were exposed to television but had no books or outside stimulation. "Learning cannot take place without human love and care and interactions," said Honig.
German psychologist Bernd Prosser agreed in an interview on Austrian television: "The four will never be able to live normal lives. I am afraid it is too late for that," he said.
Josef Fritzl, 72, imprisoned his now 42-year-old daughter Elisabeth for 24 years, repeatedly raping her and fathering her seven children. One died, three were raised upstairs with Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, and three others were confined to a three-room, cramped cellar with their mother.
Rosemarie Fritzl had reportedly been told her daughter had joined a cult and told police she knew nothing about the children downstairs.
Sadistic Lair
Police found the sadistic lair after 19-year-old Kerstin, one of the children living in the basement, fell into a coma and Elisabeth persuaded her father to take the girl to the hospital. Hospital officials grew suspicious and called police, who made the discovery at the family home.
When the children emerged into daylight, 18-year-old Stefan made a squeaking noise and covered his face with his hands. Later, he made gurgling noises when he saw a cow.
"When the media write that the children speak, this is just half-true," said Austrian Police Chief Leopold Etz. "Among each other, they communicate with noises that are a mixture of growling and cooing. If they want to say something so others understand them as well, they have to focus and really concentrate, which seems to be extremely exhausting for them."
Not only is their language impaired, but all three children have defective immune systems and looked "terrified and terribly pale," according to police.
Kerstin, who is still hospitalized with kidney failure, has lost most of her teeth due to vitamin deficiency. Doctors are evaluating Stefan for hearing and sight damage. The entire family shows stooped posture due to the low ceilings in their underground enclosure. Felix, 5, crawls, rather than walks. He also sings to himself and startles easily.
Long-Term Outlook Unclear
Alan E. Kazdin, president of the American Psychological Association, who runs the Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic at Yale University, said the case is so complex there are "no clear answers" about the fate of the three children.
Old-fashioned theories suggest a child's development is fixed for life by the age of 5 or 6, but "all of that is wrong," according to Kazdin.
"There is remarkable plasticity in human beings," he said. "Not everything will be turned around, but there is brain growth at all ages and it is reflected in their ability to overcome these traumas."
Good psychiatric and medical evaluation, followed by treatment for the whole family is their best hope for healing.
"Separating them from their original environment adds to the anxiety," he said, recommending the family be kept intact. "The first priority should be their medical care."
With limited human contact, these children have not experienced "talking to people, seeing how other people get things solved in the world," according to Kazdin. "Language is not just talking. … It's the first step to thinking. It's those cognitive processes that help us negotiate the world."
Kazdin said it would be normal for children trapped in the "primitive society" of the basement to know only simple "yes," "no,' "leave me alone" and "shut up.
"You don't need 40 words for snow."
Sense of Safety Important
The American experts agreed that treatment needs to be gradual and predictable, assuring a "sense of safety" for the children. For now, the family is staying in a "treatment container that can be locked from the inside" to shield them from the outside world, according to European news reports.
Still, the lessons in the American case of Genie are disheartening. Her mother, who was blind, escaped from the father's clutches and sought help at a welfare center in California. He later committed suicide, and authorities took the child from her mother.
Genie received the best care in the country, according to psychologist Honig, who studied her case. Renowned psychologist James Kent became Genie's surrogate parent; the child also had a devoted team of medical workers, whose heroic efforts were compared to those of Annie Sullivan, who taught the blind and deaf Helen Keller.
Genie was eventually reunited with her mother, who could not cope with caring for her. The child was bounced around foster homes and later regressed. She now lives in a sheltered facility in an undisclosed location in Southern California.
In a Walter Cronkite report on Genie in 1970, Dr. Jay Shurley, a psychiatrist, said, "Solitary confinement is, diabolically, the most severe punishment, and in my experience, really quite dramatic symptoms develop in as little as 15 minutes to an hour, and certainly inside of two or three days. And try to expand this to 10 years boggles one's mind."
Still, Honig said the Austrian cases should not be treated as hopeless.
"We bother because they are human beings and God's children," she said. "These children deserve every effort to teach them."
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4758945&page=1
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 22416
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| gwen
Posted:
Thu May 01, 2008 5:46 pm |
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Anguished Austrians question how incest case went undetected
May 1, 5:25 PM (ET)
By WILLIAM J. KOLE
AMSTETTEN, Austria (AP) - Carefree children in alpine costumes danced around a maypole, and parents crowded a churchyard to snap photos of sons and daughters making their first communion.
But an unmistakable melancholy settled Thursday over this town where police say Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her in a windowless warren of soundproofed cellar rooms.
As the sheer monstrosity of his alleged atrocities sank in - less than two years after a young woman escaped her tormentor in another high-profile case - anguished Austrians questioned whether their clannish society and cherished privacy have steered them horribly wrong.
"Without question, this entire experience shows the system isn't working," said Wolfgang Bachmayer, who has been scrambling as one of the nation's chief image consultants to do some damage control.
"It's a question of having a functional society," said Bachmayer, who heads the Austrian Institute for Marketing. "The authorities can't train their eyes everywhere and peer into every bedroom. We can only hope our politicians make the right decisions."
Police allege that Fritzl confessed to taking his daughter Elisabeth - now 42 - captive when she was 18, repeatedly raping her, fathering seven children with her and tossing the body of one of their offspring into a furnace after the child died in infancy.
Authorities say DNA tests confirm Fritzl is the biological father of the six surviving children, three of whom he and his wife adopted and raised upstairs. The other three, along with Elisabeth, were held in the cellar and never saw daylight until - aged 19, 18 and 5 - they finally gained their freedom last Saturday.
Amstetten, reflecting shock and shame felt across Austria, has struggled to regain some kind of equilibrium since the revelations.
In a poignant reflection of how life goes on, bulletin boards displayed wedding engagements, the local soccer club's scores and photos of firefighters burning a barn in a training exercise. Tacked to a door just around the corner from the Fritzls' gray concrete apartment complex, a gaily painted poster proclaimed: "Hip Hip Hooray! Stella Turns 4 Today!"
But the mood was somber on Amstetten's tidy main square, where clusters of candles laid on the cobblestones during an evening vigil held earlier this week still flickered amid a pool of sticky wax.
Resident Maria Scheuch said she's convinced that Austria's closed society - a time-honored mind-your-own-business, live-and-let-live approach - will simply have to change.
"We like to say we are so child-friendly. But we must ask ourselves how child-friendly we really are," she said.
Privacy is almost sacrosanct in Austria, where it's not unusual for families living on the same street for many years to have little or no contact beyond a curt greeting exchanged on the street.
Witnesses have since come forward to claim they saw or heard unusual activity, such as Fritzl allegedly struggling under cover of darkness to bring large quantities of food and water into his home through a rear entrance.
Why, many Austrians now want to know, didn't they blow the whistle years ago?
"This could happen anywhere, but the country's image is taking a real hit. Everyone's saying: 'Austria, Land of Dungeons,'" said Karin Cwrtila. "After the Kampusch affair, we didn't think it could get worse."
Natascha Kampusch, who was a freckle-faced 10-year-old when she was kidnapped on her way to school in 1998 and held in a dungeon for nearly eight years, said she thinks Austria's past complicity with the Nazis is at least partly to blame.
Abuse exists worldwide, Kampusch told the British Broadcasting Corp., "but I think it's also a ramification of the Second World War."
During the Nazi era, "the suppression of women was propagated ... an authoritarian education was very important," said the 19-year-old, whose dramatic flight to freedom in August 2006 captured the world's attention.
Experts contend Fritzl may simply have been a wily criminal who outsmarted neighbors and police.
"To organize so many births, supply so many alibis and create an atmosphere where no one dared ask questions, he had to be very lucid and intelligent indeed," said Reinhard Haller, a leading Austrian psychologist.
There has been widespread speculation that Fritzl, 73, may have been traumatized by the war. He was only 3 when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. Yet he was an impressionable preteen when Amstetten - strategically situated on a key railway linking Vienna and the western city of Linz - sustained heavy Allied bombing.
Austria is still taking stock of the long-term effects of WWII, and only recently has it begun to break with decades of silence, denial and repression to confront its Nazi past.
In yet another bizarre twist to a fast-developing case, investigators disclosed Thursday that Fritzl repeatedly warned his captives that poisonous gas would be released if they were to attack him in a bid to escape.
The Nazis gassed to death millions of Jews in concentrations camps - including the Mauthausen camp not far from Amstetten.
It was unclear whether Fritzl had actually rigged the cellar to release toxic gas.
Legal experts say postwar Austria distanced itself from the Nazi legacy by enacting laws - some of which still form the backbone of the nation's modern criminal code - that effectively stripped police of much of their past authority to keep close tabs on citizens.
Both Franz Polzer, the regional police official leading the investigation, and prosecutor Gerhard Sedlacek confirmed an unusual practice: Austria destroys criminal records after a certain period - generally 15 years - when the statute of limitations is deemed to have erased old offenses.
"When such a crime has been atoned for, it's been atoned for," Polzer told the German weekly Der Spiegel this week.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080501/D90D3C2G0.html
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 22416
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| gwen
Posted:
Fri May 02, 2008 5:20 pm |
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Austria Police to Use Sonar to Search for More Dungeons in Incest Case
Friday, May 02, 2008
AMSTETTEN, Austria — Investigators plan to use sonar technology to probe the yard of an Austrian man who held his daughter captive for 24 years to ensure that no more underground dungeons exist on the property, police said Friday.
Leopold Etz, chief of homicide investigations for Lower Austria province, said investigators are also questioning more than 100 people who lived in Josef Fritzl's house.
Those people lived in the building over the years that Fritzl held his daughter Elisabeth prisoner in a secret dungeon, fathering seven of her children.
Others who have come forward saying they knew the 73-year-old Fritzl are also being questioned.
"We're casting a wide net," Etz said. "It's a lot of work."
He said officers were combing the entire property, photographing, filming and mapping it. They also plan to use sonar to determine if there are any more secret underground spaces on the property, Etz said.
Fritzl's elaborate crime came to the attention of authorities on April 19 when one of Elisabeth's daughters, 19-year-old Kerstin, was admitted to a hospital suffering from an illness linked to an unidentified infection.
Baffled doctors appealed on TV for Kerstin's mother to come forward because they needed information about the girl's medical history. Fritzl accompanied Elisabeth to the hospital on April 26, and her story came to light.
Klaus Schwertner, a spokesman for the family's medical issues, said Kerstin remains in critical condition "but has stabilized somewhat in recent days."
He declined to confirm a report that she is suffering from multiple organ failure, but said she remains in an induced coma at the Landeskrankenhaus Amstetten.
Etz also said authorities were trying to verify whether a mechanism existed to pump gas into the dingy, windowless rooms where Elisabeth lived with Kerstin and two of her sons, as Fritzl had claimed during initial police questioning.
Authorities have said the house had an official gas line, but for now they believe Fritzl's threat was nothing more than an attempt to keep his captives from trying to escape.
Police Col. Franz Polzer, who heads the criminal investigation, said investigators have determined that the entrance to the dungeon was protected by a reinforced double steel door that opened and closed using a remote control.
Investigators working in the underground rooms had to take frequent breaks due to a lack of oxygen.
"We are trying to think of some way to improve the air circulation," Polzer said.
Former tenants of the house have said that Fritzl told all residents of the apartment house that the basement was off limits and that they were not allowed to take photos in the area. Anyone who broke that verbal agreement was threatened with eviction.
A son and two daughters of Elisabeth by Fritzl were removed from the cellar by him when they were babies. He and his wife, Rosemarie — who was told that Elisabeth had abandoned the children and was in a sect — officially adopted one and were granted custody over the others. A seventh child died as an infant and Fritzl has confessed to burning its body in an incinerator.
Josef Schloegl, head of the Amstetten district court that approved the Fritzl's adoption of the first child in 1994 and awarded them custody of a second several years later, said the couple had no criminal records and appeared entirely normal.
"The grandmother cared for the children in an exemplary manner," Schloegl said.
The Fritzls never formally applied for legal custody of the third child, but were allowed to keep it, he said, noting all three children were "inconspicuous," "popular" and well taken care of.
Fritzl faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on rape charges, the most grave of his alleged offenses. However, prosecutors said Tuesday they were investigating whether he can be charged with "murder through failure to act" in connection with the infant's death. That crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,353988,00.html
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 22416
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| gwen
Posted:
Fri May 02, 2008 8:44 pm |
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Austrian Dad Known As An Obsessive Tyrant
Acquaintences Say The Man Who Allegedly Imprisoned His Daughter For 24 Years Is Shrewd, Deceitful And Calculating
AP) Casual acquaintances knew Josef Fritzl as a jovial fellow who drank beer and liked a bawdy joke.
But former neighbors say the 73-year-old Austrian - accused of imprisoning his daughter for 24 years and fathering her seven children - ran his household like a dictator, and ordered people to leave the campground he owned if they didn't keep their areas clean.
Piece by piece, a picture is emerging of a shrewd liar and an obsessive tyrant.
"At home, he was clearly the lord of the manor. Even at his campground, he was very strict and his rules had to be followed," said Anton Graf, who rented him land along Austria's Mondsee lake.
"He was inflexible and had no sensitivity," Graf, 57, told The Associated Press. "You were sick, something happened, he didn't care ... There was a rule - and that was it."
Although authorities have clamped down hard on records, examples of Fritzl's double life are coming to light.
Fritzl was both a hard worker respected by his peers, and a fiercely private man whose life revolved around the home he ruled with an iron fist.
The mosaic of Fritzl now taking shape also points to an astonishingly agile criminal mind: He allegedly forged letters, concocted an elaborate but consistent cover story that his daughter Elisabeth had joined a cult, and even impersonated her in a phone call to his wife.
"Only a sharp and precise thinker could plan such a thing," said Reinhard Haller, an Austrian psychiatrist. "To organize so many births, supply so many alibis at the same time and create an atmosphere where no one dared ask questions, he had to be very lucid and intelligent."
Fritzl apparently complemented trickery with a heavy reliance on authoritarianism: To keep family and tenants from the windowless, soundproofed rooms he built for Elisabeth and three of the children, he menacingly banned them from the basement.
"He was obviously a tyrant," said Sigrun Rossmanith, who works with Austria's court system. "If they heard over and over that the cellar was taboo, then they didn't dare to check on anything. His word was like the word of God."
Fritzl was born in Amstetten on April 9, 1935, but little is known of his early life. Even his parents' names have been withheld by authorities, who say privacy laws prevent them from granting access to basic documents such as birth, marriage and death certificates.
A class photo from a school trip in 1951 - obtained by AP - shows a 16-year-old Fritzl as tall and handsome, with dark hair and a serious demeanor. A former classmate who gave his name only as Erich S. recalled Fritzl as "slightly different" teenager and remembers his unfashionable haircut.
Johann Kreitler, director of the high school Fritzl attended from 1947-51, said he graduated "with a positive record," and later attended a vocational school to become an electrician.
Fritz's later employers and colleagues say he gained their respect.
"If you put 50 men in a line, he would be one of the last who could ever be suspected of committing such a crime," said Herbert Katzengrueber, Amstetten's mayor.
Yet outside the workplace, there were warning signs.
Reports suggest Fritzl was arrested in the 1960s in Linz and may have served prison time. Police have declined to comment, saying records that old would have been erased under Austria's statutes of limitation. But the daughter of a former employer backed up the reports.
"He was hired even though he had a record," said Sigrid Reisinger, who heads the Amstetten construction material firm Zehetner and whose father employed Fritzl there from 1969-71. She said the alleged crime was of a sexual nature but did not recall details.
Calls to Rudolf Mayer, Fritzl's lawyer, went unanswered Friday.
After leaving Zehetner, Fritzl sold machines for a Germany company in Austria and was often on the road. He purchased an inn and campground that his wife Rosemarie - who police contend was unaware of the cellar dungeon - ran during summers from 1973 to 1996.
"One day he came to my door and told me that Elisabeth was not coming home any more, that she had left to join a cult," Graf said.
He said Fritzl delivered the story with such aplomb that no one was suspicious. Graf said Fritzl also told him how he "discovered" one of Elisabeth's children on his doorstep - and Graf said he never doubted the tale.
"He was so convincing of the sorrow he felt and the suffering of his family," Graf said. "Nobody had any clue."
Local authorities say Fritzl twice was suspected of arson. But Gerhard Neuhuber, an Unterach police official, said Fritzl was cleared in both cases - in 1974 and 1982 - because of lack of evidence.
During the second investigation, Fritzl was forced to spend a short time in prison, Neuhuber told the AP. Since the story of Fritzl's kidnapping and incest became known, police in Upper Austria have also been examining whether he might be linked to an unsolved murder nearby.
Yet Fritzl remained little-known in Unterach, where those who dealt with him say they saw little in his character that seemed exceptional or suspicious.
Graf said he sometimes met Fritzl for business dealings, and the pair would share a beer. "He told jokes, not always the cleanest," Graf said. "He laughed loud, a real boom."
Germany's Bild newspaper interviewed a man it identified only as Paul H., who claims he twice vacationed in Thailand with Fritzl, and obtained video showing Fritzl on the beach receiving a massage, eating supper and laughing.
"We sat out on the terrace and had a nice evening," it quoted the friend as saying.
When the friend visited Fritzl in Amstetten, and realized no one was allowed to go into the cellar, "we never thought anything of it," he told Bild.
Fritzl, who acquired a number of properties in the region, managed to persuade social workers he was fit to care for the three small children he allegedly moved upstairs from the cellar.
"There was no reason to suspect that something was wrong," said Josef Schloegl, head of the Amstetten district court. He said the house was visited about 20 times, and inspectors found nothing amiss.
Yet much about Fritzl remains a mystery - even to police, who say he clammed up this week.
He wasn't active in community or church groups. Even his fishing club says he was something of a question mark.
Fritzl paid his dues, and "there was never a problem with him," said club treasurer Reinhard Kern.
"Whether he actually went fishing or not, how am I to know? Maybe it was an alibi."
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 22416
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| PerryPeabody
Posted:
Sun May 04, 2008 11:40 am |
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From Times Online U.K.
May 4, 2008
Josef Fritzl 'will plead insanity' to dodge prison
Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who fathered seven children with his daughter while keeping her locked up in a subterranean dungeon as a sex slave for 24 years, will plead insanity to avoid a prison sentence.
Lawyers for Fritzl, 73, dubbed the Incest Monster by local media will argue that he was not responsible for his actions and will try to acquire a certificate of insanity for their client.
Rudolf Mayer, a prominent Vienna lawyer who represents Fritzl, said: “In my personal opinion, Josef Fritzl is mentally ill and therefore not responsible for his actions. I believe that my client does not belong in a prison but rather in a closed psychiatry ward.”
A forensic psychiatrist has been appointed by the St Ploelten court, where Fritzl will stand trial, in order to asses his mental health and determine whether he was responsible for his actions when he imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth, 42.
But Fritzl’s lawyer Mr Mayer said he was convinced in that his client was “mentally incompetent” and that he would challenge any other decisions by the court psychiatrist and demand another expert opinion from a psychiatrist of his choice – a right granted to him by Austrian law.
He said: “If I would feel that the expert opinion does not correctly portray the personality of my client, I will order another expert examination.”
Mr Mayer also complained that he is receiving hate mail and telephone threats because of his decision to defend Fritzl. He said: “I am getting letters saying I should be locked up together with Fritzl. But I am not representing a monster; I am representing a human being.
“As I first saw him, the Latin term Pater Familias came to mind. It was used to describe the absolute head of the family – caring, but strict. Nowadays people would call that a patriarch.”
Meanwhile, it emerged that Fritzl, a retired engineer and real estate developer who was joggling with millions in numerous property deals, was financially ruined, with debts amounting to millions of pounds.
It also emerged that Fritzl’s wife Rosemarie, and well as his abused daughter Elisabeth and her six children, could end up on the street as there is a mortgage on the Fritzl family house in 40 Ybbsstrasse in Amstetten. Fritzl lived in the house with his wife and three of his children by his daughter Elisabeth – Lisa, 15, Monika, 14 and Alexander, 12 – while the other three children, Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5, were forced to dwell together with their mother in a concrete dungeon in the cellar.
A local bank has already requested the immediate return of a loan of over one million euros that Josef Fritzl took out for property investments. In addition, authorities investigating his financial affairs have so far found mortgages amounting to 2.2 million euros.
On top of the horrors of abuse and deprivation, as well as the humiliation in the local media where they are known as the Incest Family, the Fritzls are now facing financial ruin because of their father and husband’s debts, as well as the high costs of the long-term therapy that are expected to exceed the million Euro mark.
Local charities are now setting up funds to support the tormented Fritzl family, while authorities are looking for legal mechanisms to provide immediate financial aid.
In a separate development, more chilling details about the family’s life underground were revealed by investigators.
According to Colonel Franz Polzer, Elisabeth, Kerstin and Stefan were kept in a single narrow room, designed to be a nuclear shelter, between 1984 and 1993, when their father and captor started expanding their prison.
Col Polzer said: “She [Elisabeth] said that there was only one single room at first. The dungeon was expanded as the children were getting born.”
In the nine months of her captivity, Elisabeth was kept tethered on an extended cable, resembling a dog leash, which only allowed her to reach the toilet but otherwise restricted her movement.
The life in the narrow concrete cube also meant that the children would witness how Fritzl would sexually abuse their daughter.
The children are now being treated in a local clinic together with their mother Elisabeth and their grandmother Rosemarie.
Doctors have reportedly installed an aquarium with goldfish for Stefan, 18, who is having difficulties speaking and moving in open space due to the years of captivity, and brought teddy bears for Felix, who reportedly has the best chances of recovering from the horrific ordeal.
Authorities have now stepped up security around the Amstteten-Mauer clinic where the family are being treated. Following several violent incidents involving reporters attempting to enter the premises – one of them reportedly dressed as an Austrian police officer and tried to walk in at the front door – the Austrian anti-terrorism unit Cobra have been deployed to secure the hospital.
http://tinyurl.com/5h5drd
Edited in order to bold section
Last edited by PerryPeabody on Sun May 04, 2008 12:38 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 1600
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| PerryPeabody
Posted:
Sun May 04, 2008 1:06 pm |
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Man's wife never believed he had imprisoned daughter, her sister says
updated 2 hours, 9 minutes ago
AMSTETTEN, Austria - The wife of an Austrian man accused of imprisoning their daughter for 24 years never believed her husband was involved in her disappearance, even though he served 18 months for a 1967 rape conviction, her sister said.
In an exclusive television interview for The Associated Press, the sister-in-law of the man accused of imprisoning his daughter in a cellar dungeon, repeatedly raping her and fathering her seven children, has provided the intimate details of the life of oppression inside the Fritzl home.
The woman, who asked only to be identified as Christine R. because of the wide attention the story has received, said incest victim Elisabeth ran away from home as a 17-year-old, about six months before police say she was locked into the soundproofed, windowless cellar beneath their apartment — hinting at a motive for the crime.
She described the father as a "tyrant" who instilled a culture of fear at home, which helped him create an elaborate cover story that no one questioned of Elisabeth running away to join a cult and abandoning three children on their doorstep.
"When he said it was black, it was black, even when it was 10 times white," said the woman, who was interviewed Saturday evening at her home in Austria. "He tolerated no dissent.
"Listen, if I myself was scared of him at a family party, and I did not feel confident to say anything in any form that could possibly offend him, then you can imagine how it must have been for a woman that spent so many years with him," she said.
If wife Rosemarie had challenged Fritzl, "we don't know what he would have done to her. Maybe he would have slapped her," the sister said.
Christine R. also painted the most complete picture to date of her sister: a woman who against all odds fought to hold together a troubled family, yet never suspected that the cause of so much pain was in her own home.
"She never believed him capable of it," the woman said of her 68-year-old sister. "We spoke about it often when we met. And I would say, 'Rosemarie, where can Elisabeth be?' I even told her myself, she is definitely in a cult where you can only have a certain amount of children, or they don't want sick children."
But why was the cult story so easily accepted? And did Rosemarie search for her missing daughter? Such questions have puzzled this Alpine nation, which has grappled with whether Rosemarie might have had knowledge of the crime.
Police say they have no evidence that Rosemarie was complicit in her husband's alleged atrocities. They say the 73-year-old electrician confessed to the imprisonment and rape and to incinerating the body of one of the children he had with his daughter after it died in infancy.
Josef is accused of concocting the cult story and even impersonating her in a phone call to convince his wife of its truth. He is also accused of forcing his daughter to write letters that were used to explain the three children apparently found at their doorstep.
"Every person that looked in his eyes was fooled by him," Christine R. said of her brother-in-law.
She said Rosemarie had no idea that her daughter was locked in the basement and did for a while frantically look for her elsewhere. The sister, 12 years her junior, remembered herself searching for Elisabeth in train stations and where homeless people hang out.
"But where can you find out where these cults are?" the woman asked. "We really did detective work all around as to where the cult could be."
Christine R. said her sister devoted her life to her children — a task that she focused on with even greater effort after her husband was jailed. "I believe he spent a year and half in prison," she said.
She did not have more information on the rape conviction.
The Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten daily on Saturday printed an excerpt of what it said was a 1967 court record found in the state archives in Linz, in which a Josef F. was accused of breaking into the apartment of a 24-year-old nurse and raping her.
Police have declined to comment, saying records that old would have been erased under Austria's statutes of limitation. But authorities are awaiting old court records that the media say document the case.
Christine R. said her sister reacted with "shock" but believed in the maxim that "everyone makes a mistake" and focused on keeping her family healthy.
"I think this changed their relationship a little," Christine R. said. "You can surely imagine that a woman in such a situation would have been utterly broken and shocked over something like this."
As time went on, the relationship between Fritzl and his wife soured, and "there were some things she had to swallow, curses and so on," said the sister.
No warning signs
Still, there were no warning signs that something was disturbing about the relationship between the father and Elisabeth, whom police say may have been sexually abused when she was as young as 12.
"He was just as strict with her as he was to every other child," Christine R. said. "There was nothing in particular that could lead you to say he was more intimate with her. From the child as well it never came out. She never confided in anyone."
Authorities first began to unravel the complex story on April 19, when Elisabeth's eldest daughter was admitted to a hospital suffering from an unidentified infection.
Doctors, unable to find any medical records for the girl, appealed on TV for her mother to come forward. Fritzl then accompanied Elisabeth to the hospital April 26 and opened up to police.
Fritzl has not been formally charged. He faces up to 15 years in prison if he is ultimately convicted on rape charges, the most grave of his alleged offenses, unless prosecutors can charge him with "murder through failure to act" in connection with the death of the infant. That is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Christine R. said she laset spoke to her sister "four or five days" after the daughter's admission to the hospital, which would mean about a day or two before Fritzl's arrest. She said she has received updates on the condition of her sister and Elisabeth from a "good source."
"My sister is apparently doing very badly and Elisabeth is not in the best shape either," she said. "I know my sister and when something is wrong with her children the world collapses.
"For sure, the world has collapsed for her."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24451125/
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Joined: 24 Mar 2006
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| PerryPeabody
Posted:
Sun May 04, 2008 5:11 pm |
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The two following articles from Scotland contain factoids (or nonfactoids, as the case may be) that some here have asked or commented about that are not contained in other articles here:
Tenant knew Fritzl was raping daughter before she 'vanished'
Published Date: 04 May 2008
By Mike Leidig
in Vienna
A CHILDHOOD friend of Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian teenager imprisoned in a basement for 24 years, has admitted he was told she had been raped by her father but decided to say nothing so he could keep the flat he was renting from him.
Joseph Leitner went to secondary school in the same town as Elisabeth in the early Eighties and knew her best friend well.
He said that when he moved into an apartment in the house rented out by her father Josef in 1990, their mutual friend tolADVERTISEMENTd him Elizabeth had been sexually abused by her father before she apparently ran away from home to join a cult in 1984.
He said: "I knew Sissi (Elisabeth] was being raped by her father before she disappeared. I have had a good friend from school who was really close to Elisabeth. I would say they were best friends – they spent a lot of time together.
"She confided in me, telling everything that had happened. She told me what a monster Josef was – and what he had done to Sissi.
"But I decided I did not want to get involved. I did not want to get kicked out of the flat. I did not want to lose it. I kept myself to myself." Asked who the friend was, Leitner said: "I can't say, but she was really close to Elisabeth. They didn't tell anyone, but came up with a plan to run away together.
"Elisabeth packed her bags and left the house in 1983. She and my friend were 17 years old at the time.
"They went to Linz and I think they spent some time in Vienna as well."
He added that Josef Fritzl had eventually found his daughter and brought her back home.
"He was furious, and I know Sissi was banned from having anything to do with my friend."
When Elisabeth vanished at the age of 18, her friends were among those who believed her father's story that she had left home to seek a new life.
"When Elisabeth vanished (in 1984], my friend thought she had run off again. She never said anything because she was scared. It wasn't only Elisabeth that was terrified of Fritzl. My friend was as well. That was why she kept quiet for so long."
Leitner, a waiter, was a resident in the Fritzl family building in Amstetten between 1990 and 1994. Like many other tenants, he was unaware that Elisabeth and her children were living in the cellar beneath his feet. He was eventually turfed out of the flat when he broke the terms of his contract by getting a dog.
He said: "Every time I went on the stairs the dog tried to run to the cellar door and barked. When Fritzl noticed, he kicked me out by changing the locks from my flat. He was furious."
Leitner had also crossed swords with his landlord over his high electricity bill.
Even when all his electric devices were shut off, the counter kept running, he said, adding: "If I had put more effort into finding out what was behind all that, maybe the dungeon would have been discovered much earlier.
I know what the problem was now. I was paying for the electricity being used downstairs."
Police are continuing to interview the tenants who lived in the apartment block over the period that Elisabeth was held captive beneath. Fritzl fathered seven children with his daughter with three living upstairs with him and his wife and three in the cellar with their mother.
The cellar three were freed last weekend after the oldest, Kerstin, fell ill and had to be admitted to hospital. She remains critically ill.
http://tinyurl.com/6jc83w
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Rape, incest and lies: the warped world of Herr Fritzl
Published Date: 04 May 2008
By Jeremy Watson
As Austria is left reeling by the discovery of a daughter locked in a cellar as a sex slave for 24 years, Jeremy Watson asks how her father's sickening crimes went unnoticed for two decades
IT WAS 1978, 11 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Cold War still exerted its iron grip across Europe. Paranoia was rife. For the citizens of Austria, on the front line between east and west, the threat of nuclear obliteration by the former USSR was an everyday fear.
In the small industrial town of Amstetten, 80 miles west of the capital Vienna, neighbours shrugged when Josef Fritzl made clear his intentions to build a nuclear shelter in the basement of their home. He told them he wanted to provide protection for his wife and children in the event of a Soviet attack.
The actions of an obsessive perhaps, but Fritzl was by no means alone in wanting to attempt to ensure his survival should a nuclear holocaust be unleashed. Eyebrows were raised, but as it was his property he could do as he liked.
A practical man and an electrical engineer by trade, Fritzl applied for the necessary planning permissions from his local council and work on converting the cellar began. Five years later, Fritzl obtained further official permission to extend the cellar and install running water. Going beyond the approved plans, he installed a 300kg, electronically controlled steel sliding door at the entrance to the bunker. Inside, the tiny rooms were insulated and soundproofed.
The three-storey Fritzl home was large enough to allow tenants to rent the area immediately above the cellar while the family lived above. All accepted Fritzl's warning that the cellar was off limits. When the owner casually remarked to Alfred Dubanovsky, who lived there for 12 years, that one day, the home at 40 Ybbstrasse would make history, the tenant thought nothing other than that his landlord was being strangely houseproud of the unattractive concrete building.
Only now, after a series of extraordinary events brought the cellar's long-held secret to light, has the true significance of Fritzl's odd remark become clear. For beneath the feet of the unsuspecting tenants, Fritzl had kept his own daughter Elisabeth, now 42, imprisoned as a sex slave for 24 years.
If that was not enough, he had also fathered seven children in the sexually abusive incestuous relationship that started when she was just 11 years old and continued at least until 2003 when the last of her babies were born. Of the six who survived – Fritzl burned the body of a twin who died in his basement incinerator – three lived upstairs with him and his wife Rosemarie. She had been deceived into thinking that Elisabeth had run away to join a cult when she was 18 and was now somehow returning her own children to be looked after by doting grandparents.
The other three, a 19-year-old girl, Kerstin, 18-year-old Stefan and younger brother Felix, aged five, had been left to exist as well as they could with their mother in the dungeon below. Until they emerged last weekend – Kerstin in a coma from which she has not yet woken – none had ever seen the outside world except on a TV screen.
This weekend, 73-year-old Fritzl is in custody, still undergoing questioning by Austrian police and still largely insisting that what he did to his daughter was not wrong, insisting he drugged and imprisoned her to save her from addiction to drugs.
But like the Soham murders and the Fred West case in the UK, the case of the cellar children has prompted a bout of soul-searching not only in Austria but across the world. With fresh details of their imprisonment emerging daily, new questions arise over how Fritzl, who was jailed for rape in the Sixties, got away with his crime for so long in the midst of a busy and orderly community. Why did the authorities allow a convicted sex offender to adopt and foster children when there was no proof he was their grandfather? Is it conceivable that his wife, as police seem to believe, knew nothing of the tragedy being played out daily in the basement of her own home? And what does the crime say about an Austrian society still collectively embarrassed by the story of Natascha Kampusch, who only two years ago escaped after eight years of captivity in Vienna?
Police pictures of the dungeon give a heartbreaking insight into the world of Elisabeth and her three imprisoned children. The most poignant shows a family bathroom which while cramped – the pine-panelled ceiling is only 5ft 6in high – shows signs of normality in total conflict with the reality of their situation.
A toy elephant sits on top of a glass cabinet above a small porcelain sink. A hot-water bottle hangs down next to a green towel. Behind a tiled partition is a small bath and shower unit with a black octopus, tentacles waving, and a crudely drawn flower decorating the wall. A shower curtain, a small concession to privacy, is tied up neatly behind a hook.
It's a bathroom that would not look that out of place in many suburban homes throughout the world. Until you remember that is part of Fritzl's cruel prison.
Fritzl's alternative life began when he entered the basement utility room, which led through to a smaller storage area. There, hidden by shelving and boxes, was the steel hatch, opened by a combination lock, that concealed his secret.
A narrow tunnel led through into a cooking and eating area where the family television, constantly on, was located, with the bathroom to the left-hand side. Beyond were four bedrooms, in one of which Fritzl repeatedly raped his daughter over a 20-year period, with her children close by.
Elisabeth's ordeal began long before she was incarcerated. She has told police that she was being sexually abused by her father from the age of 11 and twice ran away from home in her mid-teens. She hid her nightmare well; one of the last pictures of her taken at her school before she "disappeared" shows a pretty young girl smiling politely at the camera.
She was the fourth-born of seven siblings brought up in the apartment house, in which several flats were let while the family lived on the top floor. To his neighbours, Fritzl was nothing other than a family man who worked hard to provide for his wife and children.
His wife, whom he married when she was just 17, was a pillar of the local community, active in the school council.
Yet even in those early years Fritzl was living a lie. In 1967 he was convicted for rape and sentenced to jail. Last week, a woman came forward claiming Fritzl had raped her too but she was frightened to report it at the time. Under Austrian law previous offences are expunged from all records after 10 years as part of the process of rehabilitation.
Fritzl told investigators that by her late teens, Elisabeth's behaviour was deteriorating. In August 1984, when she was 18 he lured her to the cellar, drugged her and locked the steel door. She was apparently given a choice – submit to rape or starve in the dark.
A story was concocted that she had run off to join a cult and her father became known locally for berating police officers for failing to track her down. The story was confirmed a month later when a letter arrived, supposedly from Elisabeth, confirming she had deliberately left home and she did not want her parents to look for her.
One of Fritzl's former friends said last week that Elisabeth's father was so convincing in his account of her disappearance that no one was suspicious. "His grief was so well delivered that no one had any reason to doubt it, even when Elisabeth's three allegedly abandoned children later appeared," said Anton Graf.
Kerstin was born, delivered by her father and grandfather in 1987, Stefan a year later. When Monika, now 16, arrived in 1993 the cellar became too crowded with small children and Fritzl was forced to act. Astonishingly, he managed to convince his wife and the local social services and police that Monika had been dumped on their doorstep with a letter from Elisabeth explaining she could not look after the child.
Lisa was born in 1994 and this time Fritzl phoned Rosemarie, pretending to be his daughter, saying she had left another daughter outside their home for the same reasons. There was a gap of four years until the birth of Alexander and his twin, who died soon afterwards and whose body was incinerated by his father.
lThe three children above ground thrived and their grandparents were lauded by friends, neighbours and Elizabeth's six siblings for providing a loving home for the offspring of their errant daughter. Meanwhile, Fritzl was smuggling food into the dungeon to feed his other family while he rigged the power meter of one of his tenants to disguise the extra costs of the electricity they were using. Josef Leitner remembers being puzzled when he switched his power supply off, only to see his meter wheels still turning.
Fritzl established a routine, disappearing into the cellar at 9pm each evening, ostensibly to work on electrical engineering plans long after his wife went to bed. She was told never to disturb him.
So comfortable was he with the way his secret life was operating, he was confident enough, in 1998, to take a three-week holiday with a male friend in Thailand. All police can surmise at present is that he left enough food in the cellar to cover his absence.
There have been no accounts of Elisabeth and her children attempting to escape or overwhelm their captor. Fritzl told his daughter that if anything happened to him, the cellar would be flooded with gas.
Their last child, Felix, was born in 2003 but Fritzl decided to leave him in the cellar with his mother and two teenage siblings. It is likely they would be there now except for a fateful intervention.
During the third week of April, Kerstin fell ill and Elisabeth administered cough medicine and aspirin, the only medicines she had to hand. On Saturday April 19, Kerstin lapsed into unconsciousness and her mother begged Fritzl to call an ambulance to take her to Amstetten Community Hospital. She was diagnosed as having life-threatening kidney failure but what Fritzl did not know is that Elisabeth had concealed a note in her clothing to be found by hospital staff.
It read: "Wednesday, I gave her aspirin and cough medicine for the condition. Thursday, the cough worsened. Friday, the coughing gets even worse. She has been biting her lip as well as her tongue. Please, please help her! Kerstin is really terrified of other people, she was never in a hospital.
"If there are any problems please ask my father for help. He is the only person that she knows. Kerstin, please stay strong, until we see each other again! We will come back to you soon!"
When Fritzl arrived at the hospital and discussed Kerstin's condition and the mother's note with staff, they found aspects of the story to be odd. He used the old story of a child being dumped on his doorstep with a note but suspicious staff alerted the police two days later. Dr Albert Reiter said: "I could not believe that a mother who wrote such a note and seemed so concerned would just vanish. I raised the alarm with the police and we launched a TV appeal for her to get in touch."
Austrian police issued an nationwide appeal to missing person Elisabeth Fritzl to contact them about her daughter. Back in the cellar, Elisabeth spotted the appeal on TV and persuaded her father to allow her to visit Kerstin.
By this time, Fritzl must have realised that his carefully constructed secret world was close to collapse. He is believed to have told his wife that Elisabeth had chosen to return home, with two more children, hoping that the cover story of spending years with a cult would explain away her own failing health and dishevelled appearance.
Last Saturday, as the pair visited the hospital, police confronted them. They were questioned separately and the following day the dungeon was uncovered and Stefan and Felix were freed.
At first Elisabeth refused to say anything but eventually, seizing her opportunity to free herself at last, she agreed to speak. Police officers had to promise she would never have to see her father again, and that the children would be cared for.
Meanwhile, Austria as a whole is taking a long hard look at a dark place in its soul. Commentators have criticised the Austrian chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer's concerns that the dungeon drama will damage the country's chocolate-box image.
"It would make sense to start looking for answers – many of which are slumbering deep within ourselves – instead of reacting in a patriotic knee-jerk way," said an editorial in the Vienna daily Kurier.
One of the Alpine country's leading writers says the Fritzl story typifies the Austrian trait of looking the other way when moral failings occur.
"My country has the fatal tradition of sweeping things under the carpet," says Josef Haslinger. "In Austria, private shortcomings and public morality have no connection with each other."
He linked the issue to Austria's failure to deal with its Nazi past. Haslinger said: "The de-Nazification process actually never succeeded. Until decades after the Second World War, we did not deal with the moral failings of private individuals.
"There is a double-character. The cheerful face and behind the facade the unspeakable and horrific. That has a real tradition in Austrian art and literature. That is no coincidence. We have a culture of looking away."
'IT WAS as if they had landed on the moon," said Leopold Etz, the head of Lower Austria's Murder Commission, the officer who led the Fritzl children, blinking, outside for the first time into the alien spring night. After a lifetime spent underground, Stefan, 18 and Felix, five, took their first slow, faltering steps, into a world they had only ever glimpsed through the prism of their television set. And they gazed in terrified wonder.
It had been difficult enough for them to come to terms with coming upstairs after their father released them from their cellar prison some time earlier. But how could their two-dimensional viewing of tower blocks, crowds, cars or rain possibly have prepared them for the giddy experience of the real thing?
So disorientated were they, in fact, that the journey to the Mauer psychiatric clinic near their home town of Amstetten was taken at a snail's pace. "We had to drive very slowly with them because they cringed at every car light and every bump," said Etz.
Of the two children, Stefan has been the more subdued. Despite Felix's obvious confusion (he clings to his mother Elisabeth when he encounters startling new phenomena such as escalators and lifts) he can scarcely contain his excitement as he comes across everyday things other children take for granted.
The sight of a cow, a car, a stream and a police officer using a mobile phone all provoked gurgles of delight. Then he squealed with glee as he tried to look at the sun through his hands and beams danced across his face. The moon provoked an equally spontaneous response. "Is God up there?" he asked, as if concepts he had heard about in his windowless prison were somehow beginning to slot into place.
There were other encouraging signs. The boys' first proper encounter with their three siblings – Lisa, Monika and Alexander – who lived a comparatively normal life in the house upstairs with Fritzl's wife Rosemarie, is said to have gone remarkably well. As Elisabeth and Rosemarie collapsed in each other's arms, the children were given space to talk and play together. Staff at the clinic even threw an impromptu birthday party with a cake for Alexander, who had turned 12.
If their sister Kerstin's illness brought about a new beginning for Stefan and Felix, it in no way marked the end of their ordeal. Even in the midst of the euphoria that surrounded their release, it was apparent they and their mother have many hurdles to overcome if they are ever to reclaim their lives.
Inevitably – given the length of their incarceration – the siblings are in a poor physical condition. Kerstin is critically ill in hospital after suffering multi-organ failure. Elisabeth, Stefan and Felix are all said to be Vitamin D deficient, due to lack of sunlight, which has left them with rotten teeth and depleted immune systems. Elisabeth and Stefan walk with a stoop caused by the low ceilings and Elisabeth, is said to look at least two decades older than her 42 years.
Of equal concern to psychologists is the family's mental state. After so long in captivity, Elisabeth is likely to have lost many basic life skills and to depend on those who are caring for her to make her decisions for her. "She will be feeling a range of conflicting and confusing emotions – shock, disorientation, anger, guilt, sadness as well as happiness and relief," consultant forensic clinical psychologist Anne Carpenter has said.
Although Stefan and Felix can speak German when talking to others, they prefer to communicate with each other with animal-like grunts. Felix also appears to have suffered developmentally, preferring to crawl, although he can walk.
Since Elisabeth was repeatedly raped in the cellar, the children have probably lived with the burden of their mother's distress – a trauma that could have its own developmental impact.
Now they are out, they will also have to confront other painful truths: that they are the products of an abusive, incestuous relationship; that the only man they have ever known was the architect of their suffering and that a whim or a quirk of fate kept them imprisoned and set their siblings free.
Kevin Durkin, a professor of psychology at Strathclyde University, says it is too early to tell if Stefan and Felix will ever learn to communicate normally. "These children have been with their mother and had siblings with them. That should help them. But a lot will depend on how (Elisabeth] was affected," he said.
The fact the children spent so much time watching television may mean they have some notion of appropriate social behaviour. But in using it to form a picture of the outside world, will the children have been able to distinguish between fact or fantasy?
"In normal circumstances, a child will be able to tell the difference at around four or five years old, although they will still occasionally get it wrong," says Durkin. "But whether this would still be true of those who have no first-hand experience of the outside world is something we have yet to establish."
The problem for psychologists trying to predict the future for the Fritzl family is that there has never been another case like this one. There have been instances of feral children – brought up in the wild – who have rejoined society. After seeing his father kill his mother in the mid-Eighties, toddler John Ssebunya fled into the Ugandan jungle and lived with monkeys for several years before he was rescued. He couldn't talk or cry, but later learned not only to speak, but to sing, joining the Pearl of Africa children's choir.
Closer to home, of course, there have been the well-publicised stories of 10-year-old Natascha Kampusch and 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne, who were abducted and imprisoned (Natascha for eight years, Sabine for 80 days).
But perhaps the children who have come closest to sharing the Fritzl siblings' ordeal are sisters Viktoria, Katharina and Elisabeth who were kept in a dark, filthy house – aged seven, 11 and 13 – in Linz, Austria, for seven years, after their lawyer mother had a nervous breakdown.
When they were released in 2005, the three victims could not stand exposure to natural light and communicated in their own singsong form of German. Even after a year of therapy, Elisabeth was said to be so disturbed that she stood on one foot for long periods staring at the floor. But the youngest girl, Viktoria, was doing well and was expected to be reunited with her father.
In the same way, psychologists believe that of the three cellar children, Felix stands the best chance of making a full recovery. In the meantime, they insist, a softly-softly approach is the best way forward.
Last week, it emerged a windowless chamber resembling the dungeon had been built inside the Mauer Clinic so the family would have somewhere familiar to retreat to when the outside world got too much. Elisabeth is said to huddle forlornly in it for hours, with Felix wailing at her side. The prisoners may have family escaped Josef Fritzl's clutches, but it's going to be a long time before any of them are truly free.
In the Greek fable of Oedipus, a mythical king kills his father and unknowingly marries his mother, bringing disaster on himself and his family. Then story can be traced to the eighth century BC, and over the centuries since, incest has been one of humanity's most abiding taboos.
In Roman times, incestuous unions were considered against the laws of gods and man, and were forbidden by an imperial edict in 295 AD. Punishment ranged from deportation to death. The world's religions have also weighed in on the issue. In the Bible's Book of Leviticus, men are prohibited on pain of death to have sexual relations with family members, and the Koran and Hindu scriptures also forbid the practice.
In England incest wasn't a officially a crime until 1650, when along with other moral crimes, it became punishable by death. Even before it was still a heinous charge – Henry VII accused Anne Boleyn, right, of sleeping with her brother to help get her executed. North of the border, until the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1887, incest was nominally punishable with death. However, more often the guilty faced penal servitude for life.
Elsewhere, in some countries there has been a more relaxed view. Napoleon legalised incest in France, and in the Netherlands consensual incest is no longer prosecuted. Sweden allows marriage between siblings who share a parent.
The medical risks of in-breeding are illustrated in the few well-documented cases of consensual incestuous couples. In Germany, a brother and sister couple challenged the courts so they could continue their relationship. They had four children, three of whom are in foster care and two have unspecified disabilities. In Australia, John Deaves and his daughter Jenny have been in a relationship for the past seven years. The pair had two daughters but one died shortly after birth because of a congenital heart disease.
The taboo subject has also been a subject in the art world. Murmur Of The Heart, a film about a sexual relationship between a mother and her son, caused a sensation at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.
http://tinyurl.com/6jtzrd
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| gwen
Posted:
Mon May 05, 2008 5:41 am |
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Fritzl kept sex slave daughter chained up with a dog lead in the dungeon that SHE helped to build
By JULIE MOULT - More by this author »
Last updated at 11:05am on 5th May 2008
Elisabeth Fritzl was forced to help build the dungeon where she was kept by her sadistic father Josef, it emerged yesterday.
For the first nine months of her 24 years in captivity, she was also tethered with a 5ft dog leash around her neck to prevent her escape.
Elisabeth, now 42, had been sexually abused by her father since the age of 11.
She ran away from home at the age of 16 but was dragged back by Fritzl and locked up when he suspected she was planning to leave again.
For the first nine years, he imprisoned her in a grim 15ft by 15ft box room which had a makeshift toilet in one corner.
She told police that Fritzl forced her to help drag a 600lb concrete and steel door into position to seal the dungeon.
It was only when it was in place that she discovered she had helped to build her own prison.
Fritzl finally agreed to expand the cellar - again with Elisabeth's help - after she had given birth to two of his children.
He forced her to dig out the chambers by hand, working for hours at a time. The process took nearly a decade.
One of the new rooms was used as a punishment area and Fritzl would take his daughter there and rape her.
He also used it to chastise the three of their children - Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and six-year- old Felix - who lived underground with her. Their siblings Lisa, 16, Monika, 14 and 12-year-old Alexander lived a 'normal' life upstairs.
Franz Polzer, who is leading the police investigation, said: "She said that there was only one single room at first between 1984 and 1993. The dungeon was expanded as the children were getting born.
"There are still areas we haven't found inside the dungeon and I expect it to take at least two weeks before we have answered all the questions we need to about how Fritzl controlled the areas and imprisoned the children.
"Areas of the dungeon appear to have been under construction and it is possible Fritzl may have been planning to expand it even further."
Austrian police said the air inside the inner chambers was so stifling they have been forced to drill holes to allow investigators to breathe.
The grim details emerged as police revealed that Fritzl, now 73, could escape justice by pleading insanity. A team of psychiatrists are due to examine him today at St Poelten Prison, after which he is expected to be officially sectioned.
Police want to see him die in prison but under the country's law the maximum sentence - even for double murder - is 15 years. That can be reduced to ten for good behaviour.
So far Fritzl is facing charges of rape, incest and kidnap.
Prosecutors also want to see him charged with murder following the death of his and Elisabeth's three-day-old child 12 years ago. And if Kerstin - who is suffering from multiple organ failure - dies, he could face another murder charge because of the delay seeking medical treatment.
Detective Inspector Polzer said: "We want to see this man die in prison. It will take a lot longer than ten years for his victims to recover from what he put them through.
"The man is evil beyond words. The misery he has inflicted on his family is unimaginable." But Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said: "In my personal opinion, Josef Fritzl is mentally ill and therefore not responsible for his actions."
Fritzl is said to be obsessively watching TV reports about the incarceration and abuse of his daughter from his isolated cell.
He receives up to four bags of hate mail a day - but is said to remain unrepentant. His wife Rosemarie, who police believe was completely unaware of his double life, has also received hate mail.
One letter read: "You must have known when he went on holiday to Thailand that he was messing around with children. Your sick paedophile husband should kill himself."
Mrs Fritzl is living in a specialist unit in a psychiatric clinic with her daughter and five of her grandchildren.
Doctors have installed an aquarium for Stefan, who is having difficulties speaking and moving due to his years of captivity.
Elisabeth has been making secret visits to Kerstin's hospital bedside, praying she will recover.
But local priest Franz Halbartschlager, who was called in to perform the last rites on the sick teenager soon after she arrived in hospital, said Kerstin was "pale and thin".
"She was in a coma between life and death," he said after his visit last month. "I prayed for her."
Rosemarie's sister Christine said that the family was struggling to comprehend what had happened.
She added: "My sister is doing very badly and Elisabeth is not in the best shape either.
"I know my sister and when something is wrong with her children the world collapses. For sure, the world has collapsed for her."
She said she was sure her sister did not know what was going on in the cellar of the family's house.
"We spoke about it often when we met. And I would say, 'Rosemarie, where can Elisabeth be?' I even told her myself, she is definitely in a cult."
In police interviews, Elisabeth said that at the start she had fought against the imprisonment, banging on the walls and screaming until she could no longer speak, but no one had come as the weeks turned into months, and the years into decades.
She said she had eventually stopped arguing with her father who in turn had stopped beating her as frequently.
Eventually she had become pregnant with Kerstin, now 19, and she had informed her father - fearing that he would be furious because he would now have to release her to go to hospital.
He had reportedly replied: "Do not think you are getting away from me so easily."
Details of the birth have not been spoken about by Elisabeth but afterwards Fritzl had continued to return frequently for more sex, at least once every three days.
After Kerstin there were further children, Stefan, 18, Lisa, 16 Monika, 15, Alexander, 12, whose twin brother died from neglect before he could even be given a name, and finally Felix, 6.
Elisabeth remained in the cellar until last month when her daughter who had reportedly suffered from epileptic attacks since birth, started once again to get severe cramps.
He agreed reluctantly to take Kerstin to hospital but only after chillingly making Elisabeth write a note to doctors.
It read: "Wednesday, I gave her aspirin and cough medicine for the condition. Thursday, the cough worsened. Friday, the coughing gets even worse. She has been biting her lip as well as her tongue. Please, please help her! Kerstin is really terrified of other people, she was never in a hospital. If there are any problems please ask my father for help, he is the only person that she knows."
Elisabeth had to carry Kerstin, who weighed 50 kilos, upstairs to the car. It was the first time she had seen sunlight that reportedly temporarily blinded her.
As her eyesight slowly adjusted she noticed the way the house had changed, a swimming pool - and what seemed to be a conservatory and another garage had been added.
But just two minutes later she was back in the cellar and the door closed.
Kerstin's two brothers were reportedly both distressed at the sudden disappearance of their sister and had both asked where she was and what was happening to her "outside the door".
Records show the Fritzl then rang the emergency services saying: "This is an emergency, I have just found my niece unconscious."
On the 26 of April, Elisabeth was listening to the local television on the small TV she had in the cellar and saw a report from a doctor that she was being sought because the condition of her daughter had worsened.
For the first time in years she stood up to her father and demanded to be taken to the hospital - where she was found by police.
When Elisabeth spoke to police after she was rescued at the hospital on the 26 April, the information she gave was so shocking officers said they just sat and listened.
They described how she spoke fast, with long pauses as she seemed to struggle to gather her thoughts and look for the right words.
The interview lasted two hours, and produced notes that covered eight sides of A4 paper.
Elisabeth who is in a secure ward with her mother Rosemarie, 69, and five of her six children told investigators her father had acted alone in providing food and clothing for them.
Kerstin is still in an intensive care ward.
Elisabeth Fritzl as a child (left) and her father and captor Josef Fritzl, as he looked when he first imprisoned her
Christening: Elisabeth (circled right) aged nine with her family, including her mother Rosemarie (circled left) and her brother Josef sitting next to her
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=563912&in_page_id=1770
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
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| gwen
Posted:
Mon May 05, 2008 5:44 am |
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Fritzl's family facing financial ruin: Incestuous father owes millionsLast updated at 00:10am on 5th May 2008
Josef Fritzl's family have been warned they are facing financial ruin because of the 73-year-old's failed business deals.
Fritzl is said to owe millions in loans and a local bank has already requested the immediate repayment of more than a million euros he borrowed for property deals.
Authorities investigating his financial affairs have so far found mortgages amounting to more than £1.5million.
This leaves the family with no money to pay for medical care and education, which is expected to cost £700,000.
A fund has been set up in Austria to try to raise money, with the country's celebrities and the media appealing for cash.
Fellow Austrian Natasha Kampusch - who was held captive by a paedophile for eight years - has already made a donation of 25,000 euros.
The Oesterreich newspaper said: "We now know that there will be no compensation coming from Joseph Fritzl whose property speculation had left him almost bankrupt.
"It is not enough to have vague promises from politicians, we need to act."
Dr Udo Jesionek, a spokesman for the victim support agency White Ring - which also helped Miss Kampusch - said the imprisoned children and their mother would need therapy for at least eight years.
The appeal for money to support the family was launched as doctors at the Amstetten-Mauer clinic said that they were concentrating on making Elisabeth, Stefan and Felix happy - and trying to help them bond with the rest of their family.
Financial problems: Evil Josef Fritzl, pictured on holiday in Thailand while his daughter was imprisoned, owes millions of euros to banks and financial firms
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=564045&in_page_id=1811
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AKA Gagal_05
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| gwen
Posted:
Mon May 05, 2008 6:18 am |
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Lawyer: Austrian suspect Fritzl has mental disorder
Lawyer for Austrian suspect in incest-imprisonment case prepares insanity defense
The lawyer for the Austrian man who allegedly imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her has said he is preparing an insanity defense.
In an interview broadcast late Sunday, attorney Rudolf Mayer said he believes Josef Fritzl has a serious mental disorder and that anyone with that kind of psychological illness "didn't choose" to do what police allege he did.
Mayer said experts will have to determine Fritzl's mental state and decide whether the suspect can be considered certifiably insane. If that is the case, and Fritzl is convicted, he would be confined to a psychiatric institution rather than a prison, he said.
Investigators have said Fritzl, 73, confessed last week that he held his daughter captive in a windowless cell, fathered her seven children, and tossed the body of one who died in infancy into a furnace.
"I believe that the trigger was a mental disorder, because I can't imagine that someone has sex with his own daughter without having a mental disorder," Mayer said.
Fritzl will make his first appearance before prosecutors Monday, and police planned to brief reporters on the status of their investigation into a case that has stunned Austria and the world.
Fritzl has not yet been charged, but remains in pretrial detention. His family is receiving psychiatric care and counseling.
Authorities first began to unravel the complex story April 19, when a 19-year-old girl who Fritzl fathered with his daughter, Elisabeth, was admitted to a hospital suffering from an unidentified infection.
Doctors, unable to find any medical records for the girl, appealed on television for her mother to come forward. Fritzl then accompanied Elisabeth to the hospital on April 26 and opened up to police.
The 19-year-old remained hospitalized Monday in critical but stable condition, although clinic spokesman Klaus Schwertner said her situation "has stabilized somewhat in recent days."
Investigators have said they believe Fritzl concealed his crimes from his wife, Rosemarie, and her sister said Rosemarie believed her husband's cover story that Elisabeth had run away from home to join a cult.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=4785700
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 22416
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| PerryPeabody
Posted:
Mon May 05, 2008 8:46 am |
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Catastrophe tourists descend on Austrian 'House of Horrors'
GETTY
By Tony Paterson in Berlin
Monday, 5 May 2008
The Austrian authorities have complained that "catastrophe tourists" are descending on the house where Elisabeth Fritzl was imprisoned in a cellar for 24 years – while new evidence revealed that her father raped her in front of their first two children when they were toddlers.
Ursula Puchebner, the deputy mayor of Amstetten, said that increasing numbers of German and Austrian sightseers appeared bent on getting a first-hand glimpse of the so-called "House of Horrors" where the incest ordeal went on for nearly a quarter of a century.
"These people are using Amstetten's proximity to Austria's main motorway to make a detour to the house where they indulge in what I call catastrophe tourism," she said. "I find this shocking and I do not understand their motivation. It shows no respect for the victims."
A side street that leads to the back of No 40 Ybbsstrasse, where Elisabeth Fritzl was held prisoner in the cellar of her father Josef's house and forced to bear him seven children, has been the haunt of hundreds of journalists and television crews since the story broke a week ago.
However, media attention has also turned to the Amstetten clinic, five miles from the city centre, where 42-year-old Elisabeth and three of her children who were born and raised in the cellar prison, have been receiving psychiatric care.
The hospital authorities have been forced to employ a private security company to maintain a round-the-clock armed guard on the premises after a camera crew broke into the clinic compound and apparently tried to find members of the Fritzl family and film them.
Christoph Herbst, Elisabeth Fritzl's lawyer, said that he had been inundated with media requests for interviews with his client. He said some had offered to pay more than €1m (£780,000) for an exclusive.
Police forensic experts yesterday continued their inch by inch examination of the bunker rooms beneath the Fritzls' back garden where Elisabeth and her children were imprisoned. They said they were hampered by the poor quality of air in the cellar complex and could only stay down for about an hour before having to surface.
At the same time, police released more details of disturbing evidence supplied to them by Elisabeth Fritzl, which showed that her first two children must have witnessed her being raped repeatedly by her father from the day they were born until they were toddlers.
Elisabeth Fritzl, who is now 42, was 18 in 1984 when she was drugged with ether by her father and dragged into his cellar, where he handcuffed her to a metal pole for two days at the start of her 24-year imprisonment. Police now say that, for the first nine years of her ordeal, she was held in only one room in the bunker. Fritzl only connected that room with other underground chambers in the complex in 1993. Kerstin, who was the first child born from their incestuous relationship, was born in 1989. She is now in a coma in hospital. The second, Stefan, was born in 1990. As both children were born underground and spent their whole lives there, police conclude that they would have had no choice but to witness their mother being repeatedly abused.
Police said that, during the early years of her imprisonment, Fritzl kept his daughter on a leash in the cellar that was just long enough to enable her to reach the lavatory.
Her third child, Lisa, was born in 1992, but because there was insufficient room in the cellar, Fritzl "adopted" the girl as a baby and allowed her to live with his "normal" family in his house upstairs. After that, Fritzl extended his underground bunker complex to provide a separate room for his prisoner children. Fritzl has been remanded in custody in a prison in St Pölten while state prosecutors prepare to charge him. He is sharing a small cell with another prisoner to minimise the risk of suicide.
http://tinyurl.com/47ngs2
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| Mariah
Posted:
Mon May 05, 2008 4:40 pm |
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Austrian police: Suspect's dungeon plans date back to 1978
By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 14 minutes ago
AMSTETTEN, Austria - An Austrian man came up with the idea for a windowless warren under his apartment building years before locking his daughter in a cell secured by sophisticated electronics, locks and a half-ton door, authorities said Monday.
Josef Fritzl may have been plotting the design of the basement dungeon six years before authorities say he took his daughter Elisabeth captive in 1984 when she was 18, investigators said. He is accused of detaining and raping her for 24 years, and fathering seven children with her.
"We can't just look back to 1984," Police Col. Franz Polzer said. "The logic says the idea was already there, or an obsessive thought played a role, to build this jail, dig out these rooms and later to equip them and imprison the daughter there."
Local building authorities by 1978 had approved expansion plans for the apartment building Fritzl owned in Amstetten, 75 miles west of Vienna.
"We are working with certainty on the idea that already in the planning phase he had the intention to build a small space, a small secret, a small dungeon unknown to the building authorities," Polzer said.
The half-ton door guarded the main entry. Investigators uncovered a second entry involving multiple doors, including one made of steel and protected by an electronic code, he added.
The underground area was enlarged after Elisabeth had her fourth child, Polzer said.
Police claim Fritzl, 73, has confessed. He has not yet been charged and remains in pretrial detention. Prosecutors said they planned to meet with him for the first time this Wednesday or Thursday.
Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, indicated he is preparing an insanity defense.
In a broadcast interview, Mayer said he believes Fritzl has a serious mental disorder and that anyone with that kind of psychological illness "didn't choose" to do what police allege he did.
Mayer said experts will have to determine Fritzl's mental state and decide whether the suspect can be considered certifiably insane. If that is the case, and Fritzl is convicted, he would be confined to a psychiatric institution rather than a prison, he said.
"I believe that the trigger was a mental disorder, because I can't imagine that someone has sex with his own daughter without having a mental disorder," Mayer said.
Berthold Kepplinger — director of the psychiatric clinic that has been counseling and caring for Elisabeth, Fritzl's wife and the children he had with his daughter — said the victims are slowly learning how to live as a family.
He said the children were given a fish tank and the youngest — a 5-year-old boy — received a teddy bear.
"Both sides of the family are slowly growing together," Kepplinger said. "What is nice is to see how the family is starting to organize daily life. Mother and grandmother are preparing breakfast and dinner together. The children are making their beds themselves."
Authorities first began to unravel the complex story on April 19, when a 19-year-old girl whom Fritzl fathered with his daughter was admitted to a hospital suffering from a lung infection.
Doctors, unable to find any medical records for the girl, appealed on television for her mother to come forward. Fritzl then accompanied Elisabeth to the hospital on April 26 and opened up to police.
The 19-year-old remained hospitalized Monday in critical but stable condition. Officials said she is still being kept in an artificial coma to help her breathe.
Investigators have said they believe Fritzl concealed his crimes from his wife, and Polzer on Monday reiterated officials' belief that the retired electrician acted alone.
http://tinyurl.com/5wsb5v[/b]
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Joined: 24 Mar 2006
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| PerryPeabody
Posted:
Tue May 06, 2008 8:38 am |
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Spiegel Online International May 05, 2008
CONSTRUCTING HELL
Josef Stefan Fritzl was born in Amstetten -- today a town with 23,000 inhabitants -- in 1935. His parents were Josef and Maria Fritzl, he was raised Roman Catholic and he attended school in Amstetten. A photograph depicts him with his class of 1951, a boy wearing a traditional Austrian knit jacket, looking into the camera from a serious, narrow and withdrawn face. "He grew up without a father, and his mother raised him with her fist, beating him until he was black and blue almost every day," says Fritzl's sister-in-law, Christine R.
At 21 he married Rosemarie, the woman with whom he would spend the next 51 years. She was 17, poorly educated, trained as a kitchen help, and he was all she had. Fritzl, an electrical engineer, was highly intelligent, as some would later say. But it was precisely his intelligence and resourcefulness that prevented him from taking his wife seriously. He was the one who was completely in control in their marriage. 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? . . . .
When Fritzl went down to his basement, "Rosi wasn't even allowed to bring him coffee," claims the sister-in-law. "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. She was the wife for the part of the house that could be opened up to outsiders without arousing any suspicion that there were also dark chambers in the house and in the soul of its owner.
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.
After that, Fritzl never again attracted attention for his hidden obsessions, but not because he had learned to control them, as everyone believed. A man used to tinkering and DIY, he had apparently decided that his future attempts to find a second wife, one who would be at his mercy at all times, and who would submit to his moods and his desires, had to be more carefully planned. His new approach was more circumspect, precise and intended for the long term. He realized that all he had to do was to properly design the environment in which he would commit his crimes, minimize the potential sources of error and make the necessary arrangements for supplies -- food and beverages, at first, followed by diapers.
"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 build anything."
But first he 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.
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 hospitality -- 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.
The police now believe that he managed to conceal the rooms he had built for the dungeon from the authorities. 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. . . .
8,516 Days in Darkness
On the happiest day of her life, little Lisa was lying in a cardboard box in front of a house door in Amstetten in Lower Austria. She weighed only 5.5 kilograms (12 lbs.) and was 61 centimeters (24 inches) tall. The only other thing in the box was a letter. There was no envelope and no return address, just the signature of "Elisabeth," a daughter who had disappeared. "Dear parents," she wrote in her delicate, feminine handwriting, "I am leaving you my little daughter Lisa. Take good care of my little girl."
It was May 19, 1993, and it was the happiest day in the life of little Lisa Fritzl because it was the first time she had ever seen the light of day. She had been born almost nine months earlier.
The only light she had seen since birth was the light of an underworld, the never-changing, cold, artificial light of a basement. It was the only light that her mother, Elisabeth, had seen in the years leading up to Lisa's birth, the years her father had kept her locked in that basement. It was also the only light Lisa's brother, Michael, would ever see. He died in the basement only a few days after his birth.
That basement in which little Lisa spent close to nine months of her life has now become front-page news around the world: as a concrete cavern, a hell on earth, the horrific dungeon of Amstetten. It was a claustrophobic space with no view of the outside world, and it offered no hope of life beyond its walls. And it was the scene of a crime so unimaginable that it is still incomprehensible, even in today's hardened Internet age where all of the horrors of the world are just a click away. . . .
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.
Josef Fritzl, now 73, kept his daughter Elisabeth, 42, imprisoned in his basement for 24 years, all the while claiming that she had run away from home and joined a sect. Meanwhile, Fritzl lived upstairs with his wife Rosemarie and their six other children. Down in the basement, he subjected his own daughter to half a lifetime of rape. He controlled her, owned her and fathered another seven children with her. 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. Lisa was one of the three when she was supposedly left at his doorstep in 1993.
It was Fritzl's own daughter Elisabeth who provided the necessary cover. He forced her to write the letters that were included with the supposedly abandoned children, letters that were both perfect deceptions and documentation of the lunacy of the crime and the sick genius of its perpetrator. "I hope that you are all healthy," the letter that came with Lisa read. "I will contact you again later, and I beg you not to look for me, because I am doing well."
Fritzl took the letter to the authorities so that he could adopt Lisa, and to ward off even the slightest hint of suspicion, he told the police, on that May 19, 1993, that he happened to have a few of his daughter Elisabeth's old school notebooks. He said that he wanted to give the notebooks and the letter to a handwriting expert so that he and his wife, as the grandparents, could be completely certain that the child they were adopting was indeed their flesh and blood. . . .
At 15, Elisabeth entered a training program as a waitress at the "Rosenberger" highway rest stop on the A1 autobahn near Strengberg in eastern Austria. After the years of abuse, it must have felt liberating for her to get away. She and other girls in the program slept in a dormitory below the kitchen. For the first time, she felt safe from her father, safe from his greed and his lasciviousness.
On Jan. 28, 1983, Elisabeth ran away from home and, together with another girl from work, went to Vienna, where she lived -- in hiding -- in the city's 20th district.
But after three weeks the police picked her up and returned her to her parents. By attempting to escape and failing, Elisabeth helped provide her father with the story he would later use when he took her down to his basement and kept her imprisoned there. Now she was a runaway, a rascal, a troubled child. In the end, who would really care where she had gone and what had happened to her? Her father didn't touch her during the first few weeks, but then, as she says today, it started all over again. She decided to stick it out and endure for another year and a half, when her training program would be finished and she would be free. She completed the program in the late summer of 1984 and had a job prospect in the city of Linz in northern Austria. Just as she was on the verge of finally getting away from him, her father asked her for a favor. He wanted Elisabeth to help him carry a door into the basement. It was Aug. 28, 1984, and she would not see the sky again for 24 years.
Once they were in the basement, he raped Elisabeth and reportedly handcuffed her to a column, where he left her for two days. Later on, according to her testimony, he attached her to a leash so that she could go to the bathroom. Although Fritzl denies it, Elisabeth claims that he kept her attached to the leash for the next six months, perhaps even nine. Whichever version of the story is true, he now had her entirely to himself -- for good. From then on, he was completely in control of her in the basement dungeon, like some maniacal god. Elisabeth no longer remembers how often he raped her while she was on his leash. . . . .
http://tinyurl.com/6q3lcc
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| PerryPeabody
Posted:
Tue May 06, 2008 8:50 am |
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More than you want to know:
Times OnlineMay 6, 2008
Scared prostitutes 'shunned Josef Fritzl' at brothel
A barman at a brothel frequented by Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned his own daughter in a dungeon under his house, has told how some of the prostitutes were so frightened by his perversions that they refused to accept him as a client.
He listed various extreme demands made by the retired electrical engineer, who liked to inflict pain on the women and asked them to act like corpses.
Christoph F, 38, worked at the Villa Ostende in Linz for six years and said that Mr Fritzl, a regular customer, was notorious for being "domineering" towards the staff.
"Ninety-five per cent of the guests are entirely normal, 3 per cent are slightly ‘derailed’, but Fritzl belonged to the last 2 per cent of extreme perverts, who are surely mentally deranged," Mr F told the Oesterreich newspaper.
He said that some of the prostitutes would refuse to go upstairs with him – "which was extremely rare in this business" – because of demands including sadism and "demanding that a girl should pretend to be a corpse".
Prostitution is legal in Austria, and the Villa Ostende charges its customers €150 an hour. Most of the prostitutes come from Eastern Europe and change every few weeks.
The barman said that Mr Fritzl, who kept his daughter Elisabeth captive in the cellar of the family home for 24 years and fathered seven children by her, was a longstanding customer renowned for his meanness.
"I was working there for six years and Fritzl would come regularly. I will never forget his stinginess," he said. "If he would consume drinks for €97 and would pay with a €100 bill – he would demand the €3 back.
"At the bar he was domineering. If he liked a girl he would order champagne for her, but after a short while he would start behaving like a headmaster with pupils and say things like ‘Sit straight!’ or ‘Don’t speak nonsense!’. Such behaviour is unusual in sex clubs."
In the aftermath of the Fritzl case, the Austrian Parliament is to discuss the introduction of more severe punishments for sex offenders.
The Nationalrat will discuss the case tomorrow, when MPs will debate a motion on whether to change the law to introduce tougher penalties for rapists, as well as to allow criminal records to be kept for a longer period of time.
Despite the fact that Mr Fritzl had a previous conviction for rape he was allowed to adopt, or become the foster parent, of three of the children claiming he was their grandfather. This is because Austrian law sees files on convictions for sex offences removed from the records after ten to 15 years.
Mr Fritzl served 18 months in prison for raping a 24-year-old nurse in Linz in 1967, when he was 32, after he threatened to kill her and put a knife on her throat. The judge at the time allegedly pronounced what was considered a lenient sentence because Mr Fritzl had four children.
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