Secrets in the Cellar (10 page)

Losing Control

In summer 2003, Josef Fritzl’s meticulously constructed world began to come apart at the seams. When his much-vaunted Amstetten housing complex fell apart, he was left owing banks more than $1 million. Now facing bankruptcy, he was having difficulty maintaining his extravagant lifestyle and supporting two separate families.

Once again, investigators believe, he resorted to arson, just as he was suspected of having done twenty-one years earlier at Mondsee Lake.

Late at night on August 22, a suspicious fire broke out in one of his first-floor rental apartments. Police and firefighters arrived at the house to discover Fritzl and his son Josef Jr., fighting the fire together. A female tenant, who had been in the apartment when the fire started, was taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation.

A few days later, after Fritzl claimed $15,000 from his insurance company for the damage, two police officers were sent to investigate for suspected arson.

“It was started in two places—a classic sign of arson,” a source close to the investigation later said. “But despite that, the officers only carried out a brief investigation.”

Once again, Josef Fritzl’s secret dungeon went unnoticed.

That Christmas, another mysterious fire broke out at the house—this time in the Fritzl family’s third-floor apartment. A television in the children’s room burst into flames, Fritzl later informed authorities, before claiming $4,500 from his insurance company.

Several months later, he claimed a further $1,500, reporting that one of his electric meters had caught fire.

Neither of these two fires were investigated, and the insurance company paid him a total of almost $20,000, without any further questions.

On Saturday, April 9, 2005, Josef Fritzl turned 70, and Rosemarie threw a big birthday party on the roof garden in his honor. Several of his friends attended, including Paul Hoerer and Andrea Schmitt. Of his thirteen surviving children, ten came, including all the grown-up ones who had left home, as well as Lisa, Monika and Alexander. But downstairs Elisabeth and his three captive children heard nothing, remaining unaware of the festivities.

“We sat on the terrace,” said Paul Hoerer, “and had a really nice evening.”

Three weeks later, Sunday, August 28, marked the 21st anniversary of Elisabeth’s imprisonment. That day, like so many thousands of others, came and went in the dark, decaying underground bunker.

Elisabeth and her three children’s lives had no measurable landmarks. There was no perceivable day and night to mark time, or routines to follow. The only punctuations in their shadow lives were rotten teeth falling out, or their never-ending infections, for which the only medication available was aspirin.

They were getting weaker by the day, having nothing to look forward to. Even a murderer serving a life sentence can mark off the days on a prison wall until parole, but these four captives—who had done nothing except to be sired by Josef Fritzl—did not even have that to anticipate.

Now officially retired and collecting his state pension, Josef Fritzl was showing signs of slowing down. Although Viagra and other drugs still powered his out-of-control libido, he was no longer as menacing to Elisabeth as he had once seemed. And she was slowly beginning to assert herself, constantly pressing him for better conditions for her and the children.

Escape had never been an option. Elisabeth had always believed his threats of booby-trapping the cellar with poisonous gas. And her children never realized they were prisoners, or that their lives were anything but normal.

At 15, Stefan had grown into a handsome young man, but the terrible conditions in the cellar had stunted his normal development. He was too tall to stand erect without scraping his head on the ceiling, often finding it easier to crawl around on his hands and knees.

Elisabeth and her children all had terrible physical posture, and were anemic with severely challenged immune systems. Never seeing sunlight or breathing fresh air was starting to take a terrible toll on them.

There were also many unanswered questions lingering in Elisabeth’s mind about the medical repercussions of incest.

As Felix grew into a toddler, he bonded with Stefan, the two inventing their own language, largely composed of animal-like growls and coos.

The little boy would spend hours each day watching the color television, desperately clutching a stuffed teddy bear his father had given him. Across the room, his brother would stare blankly at his aquarium.

Sickly since birth, Kerstin now possibly faced the unspeakable trauma of succeeding her mother as Josef Fritzl’s sex slave.

In 2006, Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl passed another milestone, celebrating their golden wedding anniversary. The town of Amstetten honored its model family with a special party, where the mayor and a succession of town dignitaries paid gushing tributes to the elderly couple.

The 71-year-old retiree beamed with pride as he and his wife were lauded as devoted parents and grandparents, who had selflessly brought up their runaway daughter’s abandoned children.

Although considered a successful local property magnate, that was far from the truth. Fritzl was sinking into debt, and even after managing to have Elisabeth’s name removed from his property deeds, he owed an estimated $1.5 million to various banks.

But to the arrogant septuagenarian, appearances were everything—an impeccably dressed paragon of virtue, he still proudly drove around Amstetten in his top-of-the-line Mercedes.

He reserved Saturdays for Rosemarie and his three “grandchildren,” Lisa, Monika and Alexander. Saturday afternoons he would take Alexander to watch the Amstetten soccer team play, and afterwards they would all enjoy a pizza dinner at the Casa Verona Italian restaurant in Karl-Benz-Strasse, a few blocks away from their home. To the owner, Wael Saham, the Fritzls seemed the perfect family.

“They just seemed so normal,” he later told David Jones of London’s
Daily Mail
. “The two teenage girls and their younger brother were smartly dressed and really polite, unlike some kids we serve.”

During the meal, a jovial Josef Fritzl held court, telling jokes.

“There was lots of laughter from their table,” recalled Saham, “particularly when the father cracked a joke.”

All three children were top students at their various schools. Alexander, now 10, could always be relied upon to help other students if they struggled in their English and German classes, two subjects in which he excelled. He was an award-winning athlete and a member of the school ice-hockey team. “He has a lot of feeling for the others,” said classmate Jelena Krsic “and whenever someone cried, he helped them.” But Jelena also remembers Alexander breaking down in tears in front of the other children after once failing in a jumping competition.

On August 23, 2006, Natascha Kampusch escaped, after more than eight years’ imprisonment in her underground cellar. Wolfgang Priklopil had allowed his captive, now 18, far more freedom than Josef Fritzl ever gave his. Just before 1:00 p.m., she had been vacuuming his BMW in the garden, when Priklopil received a phone call.

While his back was turned, Natascha, in a desperate dash to freedom, vaulted over several neighbors’ fences and ran across gardens, screaming at astonished passers-by to call the police.

But everyone ignored her. Finally, she banged on an elderly lady’s kitchen window, shouting, “I am Natascha Kampusch!”

Finally someone called the police, who arrived minutes later, bringing Kampusch to the Deutsch-Wagram police station.

As soon as police identified Kampusch, they launched a manhunt for Priklopil. After a dramatic police chase, he managed to get away in his BMW, heading to Vienna.

A few hours later he committed suicide by jumping in front of an oncoming commuter train outside Vienna’s Wien Nord station.

On September 6, two weeks after her escape, Kampusch gave an exclusive interview to the main Austrian TV station ORF, about her eight-year ordeal. It was a huge international story, and the now beautiful and highly photogenic former captive suddenly found herself a genuine Austrian superstar, being compared to Princess Diana.

The interview had one of the biggest television audiences in Austrian history, with an estimated 90 percent of televisions tuned to it.

It can only have given hope to Elisabeth and her children, who reportedly watched it on their cellar television, which was never turned off.

In June 2007, 16-year-old Lisa Fritzl graduated from Kloster’s Private School. She attended a big farewell celebration with all her friends, wearing a beautiful party dress her grandfather had bought her for the occasion.

“Lisa looked very pretty in her dress,” recalled one former classmate.

All three upstairs children never wanted for anything financially. But that had far more to do with their nurturing grandmother than her husband, who did little except grudgingly pay the bills.

“Rosemarie was a devoted parent,” said the classmate. “Josef never came to parent evenings and was never mentioned by her.”

Lisa Fritzl was a good-natured teenager, often playing class clown.

“[She] would always make us laugh,” recalled the classmate, “and was very popular. She was just a normal, happy kid.”

But before saying good-bye to her classmates that June, Lisa had never discussed her future plans.

An enthusiastic member of the social arm of the Amstetten fire brigade, Rosemarie would bring along Monika and Alexander to learn elementary first aid and other survival skills.

She also attended all the brigade’s social functions, baking Christmas cookies and cooking large bowls of spaghetti, helped by the children.

“They were both always willing to learn,” said brigade member Karl Dallinger. “They were good kids, they seemed to be happy.”

That summer, Alfred Dubanovsky had a confrontation with his landlord, and was told to leave.

After twelve years living there, he had noticed how Fritzl avoided trouble with the law at any cost. Once, when police had come over after a problem with a neighbor’s apartment, Fritzl had become visibly scared, doing everything he could to settle things, to avoid an escalation.

“I used that when I moved out,” said Dubanovsky. “He refused to pay for my new security door. I threatened to sue, he went pale, and as I suspected, the problem was resolved.”

Just a few weeks earlier, while chatting with Dubanovsky, Fritzl had made a strange comment that didn’t seem important at the time.

“One day this house is going to make history,” Fritzl declared, before turning on his heel and walking off.

The now 72-year-old Josef Fritzl was becoming increasingly paranoid. When neighbors wanted to prune a hedge overlooking his garden, the old man lashed out angrily, ordering them to stop.

All the time and energy needed to maintain his two families was tiring him out. He was finding it increasingly difficult to juggle the various parts of his lives, without dropping any.

That long, cold winter, his prisoners in the cellar were constantly sick. Like her mother, Kerstin’s teeth were falling out, and all four had suffered flu and acute coughing attacks, as well as circulation and heart problems. At Elisabeth’s urging, Fritzl had brought in over-the-counter medicines, easily purchased at a drugstore with no questions asked, but they had not helped.

His cure-all drug of choice had always been aspirin, but it did little to help such serious ailments. Felix and Kerstin were the worst affected, both running high fevers. The 4-year-old boy sometimes shook for hours, while his elder sister had screaming fits.

Josef Fritzl was tiring of all the subterfuge required to feed and clothe his underground family. There was also the question of sex—he was no longer attracted to Elisabeth, with her loss of teeth and snow-white hair, and Kerstin was gravely ill.

So he was now contemplating somehow bringing Elisabeth and the children upstairs, looking for a plausible explanation for their sudden appearance into the world. He had seriously considered the final solution of killing them all. But disposing of Elisabeth and the three children would be far more difficult than throwing the body of a 3-day-old baby into the incinerator.

“I was getting older,” he would later explain. “I was finding it harder to move, and I knew that in the future I would no longer be able to care for my second family in the cellar.”

By Christmas, Josef Fritzl had come up with a diabolical plan to bring his captive family into the real world. He planned to use his original story of Elisabeth running away to join a cult to account for her sudden reappearance with Kerstin, Stefan and Felix. He would explain their deplorable mental and physical condition by blaming the cult for treating them badly.

So once again he handed Elisabeth a sheet of paper and a pen for another letter. In this one she told her parents she was finally tiring of the religious sect, and wanted to come home. It mentioned Kerstin’s medical problems, saying she hoped the whole family would soon be reunited and celebrating birthdays together.

“But it’s not possible yet,” he dictated. “If all goes well, I hope to be back within six months.”

He then mailed the letter from a post office many miles outside Amstetten, timing it to arrive during the Christmas holiday, as a special present for his wife.

Into the Light

At the Fritzl family reunion that Christmas, Josef solemnly announced that he had received a new letter from Elisabeth. She had finally come to her senses, and was now considering leaving the cult to come home with her three children. Over the next few months he spoke of little else, paving the way for their entry into the world.

But at the beginning of April 2008, his carefully laid plans were thrown into disarray when Kerstin became dangerously ill and started having seizures, due to lack of fresh oxygen. Elisabeth gave her aspirin, which was no help whatsoever in fighting the infection.

Kerstin then had a complete mental and physical breakdown, and began tearing out her own hair in clumps. Then, to protest her abysmal living conditions, she ripped off her clothes, throwing them into the toilet to block it up.

Her mother could do little except watch her eldest daughter’s condition deteriorate, and try to comfort her between her seizures.

On Wednesday, April 16, Elisabeth’s 42
^nd
birthday, her father came into the cellar bearing a present. She then begged him to set Kerstin free, so she could get medical treatment. It was now painfully obvious just how ill the 19-year-old girl was, and Fritzl knew she could no longer survive in the cellar.

Nevertheless, he decided to wait until Rosemarie left on her annual vacation to northern Italy with a friend. He reasoned that this would give him ample time to take her to the hospital and have her treated, before bringing her back into the cellar to stage their return.

The following Friday night, after Rosemarie departed for Italy, Kerstin’s condition deteriorated further. She began cramping and having convulsions, biting her lips until they bled. Then she lost consciousness.

Once again, Elisabeth tearfully pleaded with her father to take Kerstin to the hospital and save her life. Finally he agreed, instinctively adapting his plans to suit the emergency situation.

But first he dictated a note for Elisabeth to write, explaining Kerstin’s predicament to doctors.

“Please help her,” it read. “She has never been in a hospital before.”

As he was no longer strong enough to carry Kerstin out of the cellar and upstairs on his own, he asked Elisabeth to help him.

And so, in the early hours of Saturday, April 19, Elisabeth Fritzl finally came back into the light, after spending more than half her life in the underground cellar. It was the first time in twenty-four years that she had seen natural light and breathed fresh air.

But her taste of freedom would be short-lived. For as soon as she helped her father lay Kerstin out on the doorstep, he led her back into the dungeon, slamming the concrete door on her once again.

Once upstairs, Josef Fritzl dialed the emergency services, reporting that he had found an unconscious young woman on his doorstep. Then he peered through a window, observing an ambulance arrive and EMS staff putting Kerstin on a stretcher, before driving off.

Three hours later, he drove to the Mostviertel Amstetten-Maurer state hospital, heading straight for the emergency room. There he demanded to see a doctor immediately, as he had vital information about his recently admitted granddaughter.

He was shown into Dr. Albert Reiter’s office, where he handed the head of intensive care a note, saying it was from his daughter Elisabeth, who had left it in his granddaughter’s coat pocket, after abandoning her on his doorstep a few hours earlier.

Then he told the doctor about Elisabeth’s past with the cult, and how she had already left three of her babies on his doorstep, before Kerstin this morning.

After asking Dr. Reiter to cure his granddaughter as soon as possible and not to go to the police, he walked out.

Later that morning, Josef Fritzl’s fears were realized, when a policeman arrived at Ybbsstrasse 40. It was a routine visit, seeking an explanation about Kerstin’s condition and her circumstances. But the master manipulator stayed cool, once again recounting his fictitious story about the cult, producing Elisabeth’s Christmas letter, and saying that she would soon be home.

After the policeman left, Josef Fritzl could do little but wait.

On Monday, April 21, Fritzl received a telephone call from Dr. Reiter, saying that Kerstin’s condition had deteriorated and she was near death. The doctor said he had no idea what was wrong with her, but she had suffered multiple organ failure and had been placed in a medically induced coma. He stressed that there was no time to waste, and they
had
to contact her mother Elisabeth to save her life.

Fritzl curtly replied that he had no idea where his daughter was or what sect she was living with. Then, saying he had to go, he put down the telephone.

After a lifetime of total control, he now felt it all slipping away from him.

The same day, Rosemarie Fritzl sent her family a postcard from Lake Maggiore, completely unaware of what was taking place back in Amstetten.

“Dear family,” she wrote.

My holiday has been lovely. Although I’m really busy every day, I fall into bed tired. But I will soon be home, Love, Mama

That night, ORF’s evening news broadcast a story on Kerstin, with Dr. Reiter appealing for any information about Elisabeth. After watching the news segment, Fritzl contacted his 69-year-old wife in Italy, saying she had better come home immediately, as Elisabeth had abandoned her sick daughter on their doorstep.

The next day, when reporters knocked on his door for an interview, he lost control. They had been expecting a concerned, cooperative grandfather, but came face-to-face with a furious Josef Fritzl, berating them and cursing out Dr. Reiter for making trouble. Then he threw them off his property, ordering them never to return.

On Wednesday, when police arrived at the house, requesting a DNA sample, Fritzl said he was too busy to provide one, fearful that it would prove that he was Kerstin’s father. Over the next two days, Rosemarie—who had now returned home—Lisa, Monika and Alexander all gave DNA samples. But he kept making excuses and postponing it.

Down in the cellar, Elisabeth had spent the week worrying about Kerstin’s condition, and comforting Stefan and Felix. Whenever their father visited, they asked for news about Kerstin, but he said little, only that she was recovering.

On Friday morning—six days after Kerstin had been admitted to the hospital—Josef Fritzl telephoned the district governor of Amstetten, Hans-Heinz Lenze, thanking him for the excellent treatment she was receiving. The 64-year-old civil servant oversaw the Amstetten police, the town’s hospitals and the social services department, as well as supervising planning permissions for the district. Fritzl impressed the busy district governor with his politeness and good manners.

That night, Elisabeth and the children were in front of the television, watching the ORF evening news. Suddenly, a photograph of a teenage Elisabeth came on the screen, as Dr. Reiter appealed for her to contact the hospital immediately, as they desperately needed Kerstin’s medical information to save her life.

“I can’t simply look on,” Elisabeth saw the emotional doctor tell a reporter. “I am deeply distressed about this case. I have never seen anything like it.”

When her father next came into the cellar, Elisabeth confronted him with the news report. She pleaded with him to release her to save Kerstin’s life. She promised it would just be “temporarily,” and she would return to the cellar once she had visited the hospital.

By Saturday morning, Josef Fritzl had reached a decision. He had no choice but to free Elisabeth and the children if he was to maintain his charade.

But first he made a bargain with Elisabeth, making her swear that in return for all their freedom, she would maintain the illusion that she had been in the fictitious cult for the last twenty-four years. She would also have to coach Stefan and Felix, to back this up. She must also admit to abandoning Lisa, Monika and Alexander on his doorstep and swear never to betray him.

After so long in captivity, and to save Kerstin’s life, she had no choice but to agree to his terms.

Later that morning, while Rosemarie and the three upstairs children were out of the house, Josef Fritzl brought Elisabeth, Stefan and Felix out of the cellar and into the daylight.

It had been 8,516 days since he had first lured Elisabeth into the dungeon.

A few hours later, Rosemarie Fritzl and her three grandchildren arrived home to discover three strangers in their living room. Her husband then announced that Elisabeth had finally come home with her two children. Mother and daughter, who now looked more like elderly sisters, fell into each other’s arms, bursting into tears. It was the first time they had seen each other in twenty-four years, and they were both overcome with emotion. Stefan and Felix just sat there, too shocked to do anything.

That evening, Josef Fritzl telephoned Dr. Albert Reiter, announcing that Elisabeth had come home. He said he would drive her straight to the hospital to be reunited with Kerstin. Once again he asked the doctor not to alert police, as it would only embarrass Elisabeth and the family.

And then Elisabeth walked out of Ybbsstrasse 40 for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, for the short drive to the hospital.