Secrets in the Cellar (19 page)
A family friend was quoted as saying that the 19-year-old had “closed the door on many dark things that have happened to her, and she may never be well enough to open it.”
According to the report, Stefan was also in a bad state. At 5 feet 9 inches, 3 inches taller than the highest point in the cellar, he still could not walk properly. After more than three months’ physiotherapy, he still had serious problems with coordination and his motor skills. He got dizzy when he walked and doctors feared his spine might never straighten, leaving him crippled.
“They are suffering far more than previously thought,” reported the newspaper.
The only one of the downstairs children doctors believed would make a complete recovery was Felix, who’d spent far less time down there, and might be able to forget his past nightmare.
Attorney Plaz has told prosecutors that Felix is too young to give evidence against his father, and Kerstin and Stefan are still not ready.
At the beginning of September, Lisa, Monika and Alexander returned to their studies at secret schools around Amstetten. They were said to be looking forward to returning to their studies and meeting their new classmates.
“We wanted a harmonic start in the new school year,” explained the Mauer Clinic’s security chief, Fritz Lengauer.
A few days later, the neonatologist’s report that Josef Fritzl must have been aware of baby Michael’s medical condition and could have saved his life was leaked to the Austrian press. And it was widely reported that Fritzl, who had now hired a second lawyer to negotiate a book deal and arrange to turn Ybbstrasse 40 into a ghoulish tourist site and rent out rooms to help finance his defense, would now be charged with manslaughter.
This would be in addition to St. Polten’s prosecutor’s office’s previous announcement that Josef Fritzl will face up to 3,000 rape charges, after admitting having sex with his daughter Elisabeth up to three times a week during her twenty-four-year incarceration.
Prosecutors have now decided that Rosemarie and Elisabeth’s six surviving children will not have to testify. But court officials are worried about whether it will be possible to find an impartial jury of eight, with two alternates, as required by Austrian law, with all the intense publicity surrounding the case.
“We are a small country,” said a court official. “There can’t be ten people out there who don’t already have strong opinions about this man and what he’s done.”
The entire trial will be held in private, except for the opening formalities and sentencing. So the full extent of Josef Fritzl’s crimes may never be known.
On Thursday, September 25, Josef Fritzl returned to Ybbstrasse 40, accompanied by Judge Nikolaus Obrovsky and three police officers. He arrived at 9:46
A.M.
in a white Volkswagen minibus, calmly reading a book, and was photographed being escorted up the drive. In the five months since his arrest, he had visibly aged, losing much weight and most of his hair.
The judge had ordered the visit to allow him to explain his “escape plan” for Elisabeth and the children in the event that anything ever happened to him. And he spent three hours inside the cellar, taking the judge on a guided tour and answering questions about the 660-pound eighth door to the dungeon. Also present were his attorney Rudolf Mayer and prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser, who would say he had acted strangely, constantly referring to himself in the third person.
“He didn’t show any emotion,” said a neighbor who observed his return. “He talked to the police who were pointing things out in the garden, then they went inside.”
A few days later, after Fritzl had reportedly failed to persuade the judge that he had installed any kind of escape mechanism in the dungeon, he accused the police of removing his time-lock so they could increase the charges against him.
On Oct. 22, St. Polten court-appointed psychiatrist Heidi Kastner’s 130-page report was leaked to the Austrian Press. The result of six long prison interviews, the report revealed that Josef Fritzl now blamed his abusive mother for his behavior.
“I was born to rape,” he told Dr. Kastner. “Bearing that in mind, I controlled myself for quite a long time. I could have behaved a lot worse than locking up my daughter.”
Fritzl described himself as an “alibi child,” claiming his mother had only had him to prove her fertility. He also likened himself to “a volcano”—quiet on the surface, but then “the evil in him would break out” when he could no longer “control his urges.”
He complained to Dr. Kastner that his tyrannical mother had neglected him, claiming that as the bombs rained down over Amstetten in the Second World War, she had abandoned him in the family home alone, while she went into a shelter. He also moaned that she had waited years before taking him to the doctor to treat a painful urinary tract illness.
Fritzl also admitted to never being able to look Elisabeth in the face when he raped her, distancing himself from his actions. And that he stopped having sex with his wife, Rosemarie, the very day he imprisoned Elisabeth.
In her summing up, Dr. Kastner found that although Fritzl had profound psychological issues, as well as severe personality and sexual deviancy disorders, he was sane enough to stand trial. But she recommended that he should spend his remaining days in a secure psychiatric unit, and should never be a free man again, as he would always be a danger to society.
“His narcissism,” wrote Dr. Kastner, “combined with the lack of empathy and exploitative way of turning others into instruments of satisfying his own needs. There is also a noticeable ability or tendency to ‘modify’ reality according to his own wishes.”
A week later, the Austrian magazine
News
reported that Fritzl had also told Dr. Kastner how he had imprisoned his mother in an upstairs room for over twenty years before her eventual death. According to another batch of leaked court papers, Fritzl was quoted as saying, “I locked her up in a room at the top of the house. I then bricked in the window so that she never again saw the light of day.”
The report said that in 1959, after assuming ownership of her Ybbstrasse 40 home, he had told neighbors that she had died. According to Fritzl, she did not die until 1980, four years before he imprisoned Elisabeth.
But his latest claim seems highly unlikely, as in 1968 he served an 18-month jail sentence, later spending time abroad on his release.
Maria Fritzl’s ultimate fate remains a mystery.
On Nov. 13, Josef Fritzl was formally charged with murder, rape, slavery, incest, abuse and imprisonment. The twenty-seven-page indictment accused Fritzl of killing baby Michael in the cellar by failing to get medical help even though “he knew the life-threatening situation of the newborn.” It also accused him of subjecting Elisabeth to “multiple attacks,” making her completely dependant on him for her survival, giving her no alternative but to provide “sexual services.”
His attorney, Rudolf Mayer, said his client would not appeal the charges.
“I realize now that I am not normal,” Mayer reported Fritzl as telling him. “With the help of therapists I want to know what the real reasons are for why I behaved like I did. I want to get treatment.”
The Josef Fritzl case is so disturbingly unique that in order to gain some insight into the depths of his dark mind, and his possible motivations, I consulted the highly respected forensic psychiatrist Keith Ablow, M.D., known to millions for his novels and true crime books, including a bestselling book called
Inside the Mind of Scott Peterson
. He also hosts a daily syndicated talk program,
The Dr. Keith Ablow Show
, and is a Fox News contributor.
“The kind of things from which I draw a psychological profile,” Dr. Ablow explained, “are really about things of one’s family of origin and culture.”
Dr. Ablow, while emphasizing that he would never hazard a complete diagnosis of Josef Fritzl without a deeper exploration of his psyche, including an interview, believes two events in his past may have led to this tragedy—his childhood in Nazi Germany and his relationship with his mother.
“If it’s the case that his mother seduced him and they actually had sex,” said Dr. Ablow, “or it was a kind of unrealized but very powerful seduction, then that can become a determining factor for a young person, as he develops psychosexually.”
The doctor says Fritzl’s abhorrent behavior in later life could possibly be explained by boyhood Oedipal fantasies involving his mother.
“It can be the case that his imprisoning his own child and hiding her,” said Dr. Ablow, “while creating a family with her, is a pathologic outgrowth of something in his own psyche. So you could see the imprisonment and burial of her, and the actual sexual acts with her, and even creating a family with her in secret, as a real-life expression of his psychosexual fantasies as a boy.
“So he’s become the mother and actualized what did not occur. One could say his childhood wish to raise a family with a parent in secret, as such impulses generally are, resulted in him doing it in the real world, behind very thick walls.”
Dr. Ablow also found significance in Fritzl’s statement of being as strong as his mother, and therefore able to control his lustful desires for her.
“Those desires come from somewhere,” noted the doctor. “And most boys’ Oedipal feelings are not so consciously powerful as to require them to resist day in and day out, and consider themselves very strong because they didn’t have sex with their mothers. That’s a highly unusual assessment of oneself.”
Fritzl’s powerful sexual attraction to his mother must have been fed by something, possibly her crossing into improper boundaries when he was a boy. And any subsequent deep psychological damage caused, if left unexplored and unhealed, could remain dormant for a while—but not forever.
“It can manifest itself in later years,” explained the doctor, “when he is sideswiped or overcome by, or becomes this dark fantasy. He takes six years to construct his fantasy eventually, in which time he isn’t the vulnerable one, he is the one caging the child. And so that’s the way really dark psychological dramas play out. They go away, underground, unaddressed.”
Particularly significant is his early history of exposing himself to women, before progressing to violent rape.
“It may tell us he has a history of some sexual trauma,” said Dr. Ablow. “And I think those things are relevant. It goes along with the psychological picture that if he felt disempowered as a young person by this manipulative, controlling mother, who maybe took things from him sexually that she shouldn’t have—whether his desires or the physical act itself—and then as an extension of that fantasy, he takes his own daughter.
“Up to that point he’s been caging women, whether insisting that they look at him naked when they don’t want to, or raping one at knifepoint, for which he was caught. He may have raped more than one, because getting caught your first time maybe isn’t so common. And then he caged his daughter, when the original thing that he references, which is interesting, is that he wanted to cage his mother.”
Dr. Ablow also thinks the political backdrop of Nazi Germany, unfolding behind his dark psychic fantasies, could have helped fuel them. He finds it relevant that Fritzl grew up in the shadows of the Mauthausen death camp in Amstetten, while feeling imprisoned by his mother and fighting his Oedipal desires.
Dr. Ablow likens it to the famous M. C. Escher drawing of two hands drawing each other.
“I would venture that whatever was happening in that death camp had its mirror image in what was happening in his personal life,” said Dr. Ablow. “I think that he lived within a half mile of the death camp, in an environment that felt to him like a death camp, led to him creating something not unlike it for his offspring.
“And that is the backdrop against which the man develops—the smoke of the crematorium echoing, or perhaps for his own slow death in whatever oven represented his childhood.”
The doctor sees the vampires of literature as a fitting metaphor for Josef Fritzl.
“He is a dead man,” said Dr. Ablow. “He is feasting on the emotional lives of others, because he lacks that core empathy and emotion himself. And the way you get to be a vampire is that you get bitten by another one. So that the question is in part: Who was the vampire that bit him? Who turned him into the living dead?”
The doctor thinks Fritzl may have selected Elisabeth as his wife and the mother of his downstairs family, seeing some part of her that he was missing.
“You wonder if she was especially sensitive,” he said. “Whether she represented something that he lacked, and therefore wanted to imprison it. And yet paradoxically he reproduces it, intuitively at some level. It has real value as regards goodness, that he doesn’t have himself.
“So I wouldn’t be surprised if she had some magical, emotional, intuitive quality that he found destructive, because he doesn’t have it, and therefore wanted to lock it up.
“Nothing comes from nowhere,” Ablow said. “Everything that [Josef Fritzl] did will ultimately be explained by what he experienced in his life.”