Secrets in the Cellar (4 page)

In 1974, there was a serious fire at the Seestern guest house, and police suspected it was arson. Josef Fritzl was brought in for questioning by Unterach investigators, but later released, as there was not enough evidence to charge him.

Over the next few years there would be several more suspicious fires at his Mondsee Lake property, with Fritzl collecting thousands of dollars in insurance claims.

Elisabeth

In 1975, Josef Fritzl and his family attended a christening. A photograph taken there shows 9-year-old Elisabeth wearing a pink V-neck suit, with a fashionably peaked rainbow hat. Next to her sits her elder brother Harald, her closest and most trusted sibling. Two seats away is her father, wearing a smart blue suit and kipper tie, a broad smile on his craggy face. It appears to be a perfect Kodak moment for a perfect family.

The Fritzl patriarch was a sentimental man, making a point of attending family reunions and holiday celebrations with his wife Rosemarie, playing the role of the model father. But appearances deceive.

Two years later, Elisabeth started at Amstetten Middle School (Hauptschule), and soon after her eleventh birthday, she later told police, her father raped her for the first time.

The pre-pubescent girl was far too traumatized to tell anyone. From then on, she learned to endure his violent sexual attacks and live with her shocking secret. Today, more than thirty years later, she is still unable to talk about the circumstances of how he first raped her.

Whether his twisted obsession for his own daughter was rooted in the incestuous feelings he admits having for his mother remains a mystery. But over the next few years he began a sexual relationship with Elisabeth, taking her by force whenever he wanted.

Despite all the tension between father and daughter, and his mother imprisoned upstairs, Rosemarie Fritzl never appeared to notice there was anything untoward going on under her own roof.

Josef Fritzl had always been ambitious, working hard to better himself—a valuable lesson learned from his mother. He was now dabbling in property, buying and selling houses around Amstetten and Lower Austria. While his wife was conveniently far away, running the Mondsee Lake guest house and camping site, Josef spent summers in Amstetten, looking after the children.

In summer 1977, Rosemarie left for an Italian beach vacation, taking all her children except Elisabeth, who remained in Amstetten at her father’s insistence.

Later she would tell police investigators how the rapes had escalated then, taking place in the cellar of their home, on the leather seats of his Mercedes or during walks through the forest.

“I don’t know why it was so,” she told police, “but my father simply chose me for himself.”

“That is not true,” Fritzl would say in May 2008. “I am not a man that has sex with little children. I only had sex with her later, much later,” maintaining that he had controlled his unnatural urges, at least until Elisabeth was 18, just as he had claimed to have withheld his sexual impulses years earlier with his mother.

For years, Elisabeth would be too ashamed to tell anyone about his attacks, later confiding in several close friends.

Although Josef Fritzl was raping his daughter at will, he thought nothing of later sitting down across from her at the family dinner table, jovially cracking his favorite off-color jokes.

As she matured, he became increasingly possessive, insisting she come straight home from school and never talk to boys. One of her classmates would later recall Elisabeth’s terror, if she was ever late getting home after school.

“When we went to her home,” said the friend, “we had to leave as soon as her father appeared.”

He would also violently punish her if she ever dared to wear makeup or dress in what he considered to be sexually provocative clothes.

Over time, her father’s constant sexual abuse changed Elisabeth from a strong-willed, outgoing girl into a shy, nervous recluse.

“I remember that Elisabeth as a child was very withdrawn and shy,” recalled Paul Hoerer, who visited the Fritzls’ home several times over this period. “I got the impression [Josef] did not like her very much.”

On one occasion, Hoerer even witnessed Josef Fritzl beating her for some minor infraction.

“He used to beat [Elisabeth] a lot more than the others,” he recalled. “She used to get a slap for every small thing.”

Hoerer also observed how his friend would change from being “a good laugh,” when they were out dining, to “a bit of a dictator,” when he got home.

“He could really get furious,” he recounted, “and become another person.”

But that was nothing compared to what Elisabeth endured on the days he demanded her body to satisfy his sexual cravings. He now regarded his little Liesel as his personal property—the ultimate expression of his own flesh and blood.

And like a proud collector of rare, exotic butterflies, Fritzl dreamed of one day mounting his ultimate specimen in a glass case, where no one but him could enjoy her rare beauty.

In 1978, Josef Fritzl first conceived of building a dungeon in his cellar, to permanently imprison his then–12-year-old daughter Elisabeth, to be his personal sex slave. It would take him another six years to construct it to his obsessively demanding specifications.

Since his own 18-month jail sentence for rape a decade earlier, he had been searching for a woman to submit to his perverse sadistic desires. Although he was still regularly visiting prostitutes, many wanted nothing to do with him, because of his perverted demands. In his warped mind, he wanted to create his own personal kingdom where he reigned like a god.

It would be his personal re-creation of the Amstetten Mauer death camp he’d seen as a little boy, but for the time being it would only have one inmate—his beautiful daughter.

He started drawing up plans for his bunker, to be built around the original 1890 cellar of his large gray townhouse. Always practical, he decided to extend the back of his house at the same time, to construct eight small rental apartments for extra income.

He realized he could even have the Austrian state finance his sadistic enterprise by pretending to construct a domestic nuclear shelter, eligible for generous grants during the Cold War.

That summer, he submitted plans to the Amstetten planning authority for a basement extension, along with an application for a state grant.

But he secretly planned something far more ambitious—an elaborate windowless dungeon to imprison Elisabeth, and raise a secret family with her. The house’s long-forgotten original cellar would provide the nucleus, with several other rooms running off it. There would be a ventilation pipe for air, as well as an underground furnace for waste. A bathroom, kitchen and toilet would be plumbed into the utility systems of his main house. He would also wire the dungeon for electricity, as well as soundproofing it so no one upstairs could hear anything.

His plans called for two separate entrances. One would go directly from the cellar of his house, with no fewer than eight locked doors, including three that required electronic codes. The largest one, weighing half a ton, would be hidden in a room beneath the stairs. The second entrance would be accessible through a secret door at the end of his garden.

“From the very beginning he planned a prison,” Austrian Police Chief Inspector Franz Polzer would later relate. “He was obsessed [and] he went to elaborate lengths.”

On October 31, 1978, the Amstetten town planning department granted Josef Fritzl permission to build a twenty-four-square-yard underground nuclear shelter—just one-seventh the size of what he’d really had in mind.

It would be a Herculean task. Over the next five years he would single-handedly remove 250 tons of earth from the ground, which would have taken seventeen trucks to carry away.

The brilliant engineer and technician would utilize his skills in pouring reinforced concrete to line the floors, walls and ceiling. He worked hard, with dedication and pride, as his wife and children lived upstairs, blissfully unaware of his six-year-long secret mission.

During all the years of hard work, Josef Fritzl would carefully file every single bill for materials and appliances, keeping a running total of his outlay. And he always shopped for bargains, delighting in getting the cheapest prices.

To ensure complete privacy, he planted evergreen trees and shrubbery bushes around his garden, creating a natural screen from his neighbors. Eventually, the back of his house would resemble a solid windowless concrete bunker, just like the ones he had seen as a child, built by the Nazis to resist heavy air attack.

“All the gardens are open while Herr Fritzl’s is all concealed,” said his neighbor Regina Penz, who lived three doors away. “You can’t see anything.”

Her husband Herbert remembers Fritzl laboring for years on his cellar, often hearing the sound of his cement mixer in his garden.

“[He] was always very hard-working,” Penz recalled. “I think [he] did most of the work himself. We thought he was adding on an extra room to rent out, or something like that.”

Gertrud Ramharter, who then lived directly across the street from Ybbsstrasse 40, remembers hammering and other loud construction sounds emanating from the Fritzl residence.

“What’s he building?” she wondered. “And how big is it going to be?”

When Josef Fritzl eventually finished excavating his cellar, he secretly brought in vast quantities of bricks, tiles, wall panels and pipes. Much of the work was done during the summer when Rosemarie was running the guest house in Mondsee Lake, and she would proudly tell friends how hard he was working back in Amstetten.

“Rosemarie once told me, ‘Josef is busy at home at the moment,’ ” remembered Elfriede Hoera. “ ‘He has lots of building work to do.’ ”

Later there would be speculation that Fritzl must have had help excavating and building the cellar, but nothing has ever been proven.

“Fritzl appears to have done all this by himself,” said Chief Inspector Polzer. “What this man did is beyond comprehension.”

While secretly building her future prison downstairs, Josef Fritzl continued raping Elisabeth. As she blossomed into a beautiful teenager, he became obsessed that other boys in her class might be interested in her. The terrible pressures of being forced to submit to her father’s twisted desires were now overwhelming her.

At Amstetten Middle School, she had become best friends with Christa Goetzinger and her twin sister Jutta, who sat two rows behind her. The 11-year-olds were all considered “outsiders,” as their parents were not as affluent as those of the other girls in class. Although Josef Fritzl always dressed well, buying expensive Italian suits and silk ties, Elisabeth often arrived at school looking like a pauper.

“[The Fritzls] had very little money, and that meant that although [she] got fresh clothes on Monday, [she] was still wearing them on Friday,” said Christa.

Elisabeth and the Goetzinger twins shared a tough home life and strict parents, but at the time Christa had no idea what her friend was going through. “We were always together,” Christa remembered. “Elisabeth never talked about her father, except to say that he was very strict. I never really met him, but I saw her mother sometimes in school. She was very nice and polite, but not anything unusual.”

For the next four years, Elisabeth and the twins were inseparable. They shared a love of music, especially Schlager—a style of romantic folk music highly popular in Austria in the 1970s.

“Elisabeth loved music and sang in the school choir,” Christa remembered. “We listened to various pop artists when we were kids. She loved ABBA and the Bee Gees, but she really loved Schlager.”

Christa and Jutta came from a musical family, performing ABBA hits and Schlager songs at concerts after school and on weekends. But Elisabeth was never around to see them play.

“Her father would not allow her to go anywhere,” said Christa. “She was a very quiet girl and never complained.”

In hindsight, Christa remembers the change in her friend around the time that her father’s sexual abuse began.

“Elisabeth became very sullen and withdrawn,” she said. “She wasn’t allowed out in the evenings or to invite her friends home. We laughed and talked about boys, [but] Elisabeth never did. I remember thinking at the time that was strange, and now I realize why.”

After school, the three girls would often walk home together, occasionally buying candy from a local store if they had the money. Elisabeth particularly loved Brause sherbet powder.

“Elisabeth always had to be home at the latest half an hour after school had finished,” said Christa. “Then she had to do her homework and study. We were always jealous of the other children, who were allowed out occasionally to go to the playground. We were forced to stay home.”

It was obvious Elisabeth dreaded going home after school, and Christa would wonder why.

“She felt more comfortable at school than at home,” Christa recalled. “Sometimes she went quiet when it was time to go home.”

During the five years they were best friends, Elisabeth never once invited Christa back to her house on Ybbsstrasse.

“The only explanation she ever gave,” said Christa, “was that her father was very strict. I never saw him, but he was always there between us—like an invisible presence.”

“The Pig Will Beat Us to Death One Day”

By the early 1980s, Josef Fritzl was approaching middle age. Although fully occupied building his dungeon, he still found time to drive to Linz, to visit the Villa Ostende brothel. While his family was struggling financially, Fritzl lived the good life, indulging in expensive Mediterranean holidays, champagne and hookers.

In Austria, prostitution is legal, and the Villa Ostende has a high turnover of girls, mostly coming from Eastern Europe. Since 1970, Fritzl had been a regular at the brothel, becoming notorious for his bizarre sexual demands, including having the $225-an-hour hookers play corpses, while he pleasured himself.

Many girls of the establishment were so creeped out by him, they refused his business—something extremely uncommon in Austrian brothels.

“He visited two or three times a week,” Villa Ostende owner Peter Stolz, 60, later told the
News of the World
. “He always wanted all the works, but wanted to pay the least amount of money. And he had the most warped and perverted fantasies of anyone.”

According to Stolz, the outwardly respectable businessman tortured his girls to the edge of death to achieve sexual gratification. He especially liked to tie up a prostitute, so she was helpless. Then he would furiously order her into a sack, tying the end shut until she was near suffocation, while berating her.

“I want to hear you gasping for breath,” he’d scream. “I want to see you on the point of dying, [then] I will let you free again.”

According to Stolz, Fritzl could only achieve orgasm by having the power over life and death.

“He had a God complex that was out of control,” Stolz explained. “He was extremely perverse and needed to torture in order to be sexually satisfied.”

On other occasions he indulged in violent rape fantasies. First he would have a girl put on heavy makeup with scarlet lipstick, before hunting her down and raping her.

“He insisted that the rape had to be real,” said Stolz.

At other times he would have a prostitute savagely beat him up, until he achieved orgasm.

Villa Ostende barman Christoph Flugel described Josef Fritzl as
the
cheapest customer he had ever seen in all his years working there.

“If he would consume drinks for ninety-seven euros, and would pay with a hundred-euro bill,” Flugel told the Austrian daily newspaper
Osterreich
, “he would demand the three euros back.”

As he got to know Fritzl better, Flugel realized he was far more interested in dominance and humiliation than actual sex.

“He was bossy with everyone,” Flugel remembered. “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, saying things like, ‘Sit straight!’ or ‘Don’t speak nonsense!’ Such behavior is unusual in sex clubs—you go there to relax and have fun.”

Flugel said the girls would later discuss Fritzl’s unnatural sexual demands, including some involving excrement or pretending to be a corpse.

“He got completely [off] track,” Flugel said. “Perverse. Two of them said, ‘Never again with that guy.’ Such a thing is very rare in this business.”

Josef Fritzl compartmentalized his life, moving smoothly from one area to another without missing a beat. Apart from the increasing time and energy he devoted to satisfying his sexual needs, as well as constructing his daughter’s future prison, he was also starting to make money.

At the beginning of the 1980s, he began selling real estate and further dabbling in property development. He eventually bought five houses in Lower Austria, including a home less than two miles from Ybbsstrasse 40. He also later ran a short-lived mail-order lingerie business.

Fritzl was now projecting the image of a successful Amstetten businessman. He had shaved off his mustache and was buying expensive Italian suits to play his new role to perfection. He began frequenting bars and dance clubs in Amstetten such as the James Dean Club, although only drinking coffee with double milk, as he always had to be in control.

Back at home, he feared he was losing control of Elisabeth, as she grew into a beautiful young girl.

“She was so pretty, she could have had boyfriends,” remembered Christa Goetzinger, “but she never did. She just sat quietly and no one noticed her. Unlike the other girls, she never talked about getting married or having children.”

Another of Elisabeth’s classmates later told the German magazine
Stern
how all the Fritzl children were terrified of their father.

“He didn’t slap or spank them,” said the friend, who wanted to remain anonymous. “He hit them with his fists. Her brother once told me, ‘The pig will beat us to death one day.’ ”

Another of Elisabeth’s brothers was so petrified of his father that whenever he heard his key turning in the front door lock, he would hide in a corner of the front room and wet his pants.

Elfriede Hoera once witnessed Josef Fritzl’s violent abuse first-hand, when his daughter Rosemarie disobeyed him at the Mondsee Lake campground. She watched in horror as Fritzl dragged the sobbing little girl out of a caravan by her hair, slapping her hard across the face with his open hand.

“Josef was very cruel to them,” said Hoera. “Rosemarie told me it was very common for him to attack them. They always burst into tears.”

On another occasion, she saw him fly into a rage and attack several of his children outside Ybbsstrasse 40.

“Josef was driving down the road one night,” she recalled, “and saw the kids running around. He stopped the car and got out in the middle of the street and started beating them. It was awful—I heard the screams.”

Concerned for the children’s welfare, Elfriede once asked Rosemarie why Josef appeared to love some of his children, but hated others. Rosemarie said she had no idea, noting that Ulrike was his favorite, as he respected her for daring to answer him back.

One day Rosemarie told Elfriede that she hated “the bastard” and was only happy when he was out of the house.

“My marriage is made up of quarrels and arguments,” she tearfully told her friend. “We haven’t had sex for a very long time, though I’m happy when he doesn’t touch me.”

Another of her friends, Roswita Zmug, called the Fritzls’ marriage a complete sham.

“The marriage was over,” she told London’s
Sunday People
newspaper. “There was a coldness between them and they couldn’t even talk to each other. Fritzl would just sit in the bar all day, ogling women and grinning, as if he had no cares in the world, while she ran around doing all the work.”

Later many would ask why no one had ever reported Josef Fritzl to the police, after witnessing his physical abuse of his children. But in the 1960s and 1970s, it was common in Lower Austria for the patriarch to discipline his children.

According to
Stern
magazine, Josef Fritzl, in line with many fathers, used Scheitlknien, a traditional punishment dating back to the Austrian–Hungarian empire, which was then perfectly legal. Disobedient children were made to kneel for up to an hour on a sharply cut log of wood until they bled. In another punishment he poured rice seeds onto the marble-tiled kitchen floor, before making the unfortunate child stand on top of them in bare feet, arms outstretched horizontally, while balancing a heavy book.

Then, as they weakened and fell to the ground, Fritzl would whip them.

“Elisabeth learnt to take the beatings,” said Christa Goetzinger, “to pull [herself] together when the pain was unendurable.”

Christa and her twin sister Jutta said Elisabeth often excused herself from sports, ashamed that others would see the heavy bruising from her father’s beatings.

“But she never spoke about what her father was doing to her,” said Christa. “I never realized the truth about what was happening.”

Christa believes that as her friend got older, she only ever felt “comfortable” in school, although she was not a particularly good student.

Alfred Dubanovsky, who was in Elisabeth’s class at technical school, spent a lot of time with her.

“She was a great girl,” said Dubanovsky, who would later rent a room in Josef Fritzl’s house, “but very shy and pretty nervous. You needed to get to know her before she would trust you.

“We used to go to the Belami disco on her road, Ybbsstrasse, but she was rarely allowed to see us.”

In summer 1981, 15-year-old Elisabeth Fritzl left Amstetten Technical School with average grades. On the last day of school, after getting her report card, she said good-bye to the Goetzinger twins, who were going off to Tyrol to study catering. Elisabeth complained that she wanted to be a cosmetician, but her father was insisting she work at his guest house restaurant.

In a school photograph taken shortly before she left, a fresh-faced Elisabeth is pictured with the twins, her classmates and teachers. The beautiful teenager, wearing a plain starched white blouse, stands out from the other girls with her enigmatic smile.

“I was very sad to say good-bye to Elisabeth, after we’d become so close,” said Christa. “We promised to write to each other, but we lost contact. That would be the last time I would ever see her.”

A few months later, Josef Fritzl used his business connections to find Elisabeth a job as a waitress at a local highway rest stop. For the next three years she learned the hospitality business while working at the busy Rosenberger diner at Strengberg, on the main A1 Autobahn, linking Vienna to Salzberg.

It was just thirteen miles away from Amstetten, and part of a chain of eleven motorway restaurants dotted throughout Austria. Fritzl reportedly thought it excellent training so she could prepare him meals when the dungeon was completed.

She was first sent on a two-month initiation course at a technical college in Waldegg, a small town 100 miles southeast of Amstetten. Reluctantly her father allowed her to share a dormitory below the kitchen with the other female students.

Elisabeth was overjoyed to finally get away from her father’s clutches and his constant sexual demands. She felt liberated, praying he would let her finally start living her own life.

Over the two months she studied there, Elisabeth made several close friends, whom she confided in about her father’s abuse.

“Sissy always wanted to run away,” said a fellow trainee waitress. “She was always afraid of her father, and she told her friends about that.”

After completing the initiation, Elisabeth moved back to the family home in Amstetten, where life continued as before. Each day she took the twenty-minute bus ride to the Strengberg Rosenberger restaurant, always putting on a cheerful face for her customers, however much turmoil she was going through inside.

Like the other rest stop staff, Elisabeth wore traditional Austrian dirndl dress, while serving coffee and snacks to customers on the busy Autobahn. She was popular with the other employees, occasionally going out after work with them to local bars and nightclubs.

“She was so quiet and nice to everyone,” remembered Franz Hochwallner, who worked as a cook at the restaurant while Elisabeth was there.

None of them dreamed of the unspeakable horrors that awaited her most nights after she got the bus home.

The year 1982 marked the fifteenth anniversary of Josef Fritzl’s rape conviction. It was officially expunged, in accordance with the strict Austrian privacy law, leaving him with a clean record.

A few months later he was arrested again and charged with arson after another suspicious fire at his Mondsee Lake guest house. At the police station, he was photographed clean-shaven before being booked. But after spending a short time in Unterach prison, he was released because of lack of any evidence against him.

“Everyone thought he set fire to the place,” recalled Beate Schmidinger, who owned a café nearby, “because we knew he had money trouble.”

In any case, from now on, at least in the eyes of the Austrian authorities, Josef Fritzl was a citizen beyond reproach, with a clean slate. It was as if he had never crawled in through the window that 1967 night in Linz, savagely raping a young nurse at knifepoint. Now, under the Austrian legal system, he would enjoy the same privileges as any other upright citizen.