Secrets in the Cellar (6 page)

Taken

Tuesday, August 28, 1984, was a beautiful late summer day in Amstetten. Golden rays of sun streamed into Elisabeth Fritzl’s bedroom that morning, as she prepared for her shift at the Rosenberger restaurant.

A little before 9:00 a.m., her father walked into her room, asking if she would help him move a heavy steel door downstairs into the basement. She agreed.

She dutifully followed him down three flights of stairs to his workroom, which led to the cellar. When they reached the entrance, he asked her to help him drag the 600-pound steel-and-concrete door into position to seal it off.

Then suddenly, without warning, he pushed her into the cellar, grabbing the back of her head with one hand, and using his other to smother her face with an ether-soaked handkerchief.

Elisabeth desperately tried to fight him off, but she was no match for her powerful father. When she lost consciousness and dropped to the floor, he handcuffed her. He then dragged her through a long corridor with seven doors, and into his dungeon, throwing her onto a bed in the middle of the floor.

“He pushed me into this little room,” she later told police. “Tied me up and somehow kept me quiet.”

Like an animal he raped her again and again, until he was spent. Then he turned off the electric light, leaving her dazed in the pitch-black darkness, and left, carefully locking the eight heavy doors connecting the dungeon to the outside world.

Ironically, that day marked the forty-sixth anniversary of the opening of the Mauthausen concentration camps in Austria. It would be another 8,516 days before Elisabeth Fritzl would see daylight again.

Later, Elisabeth would remember waking up alone in the dark, finding herself handcuffed to a metal pole. As she slowly came out of her drugged state, the terrible truth dawned that she had been imprisoned by her father.

Time meant little in the dungeon. She had no way of knowing how long it was before she heard the door open, and her father appeared. He turned on the light and threw her back on the bed, repeatedly raping her like a wild animal. The terrified girl screamed as loudly as she could, but no one could hear.

“What followed was unimaginable brutality and sadism,” said a detective, who later interviewed Elisabeth. “He raped, drugged and tortured his daughter, before leaving her manacled to the wall.”

After he had gone, leaving her a bowl of food, she screamed until she was hoarse, banging on the walls as hard as she could. But he had soundproofed the dungeon so well, no one upstairs heard her desperate cries for help.

Two days later, he returned with more food and to rape her again. Once again she tried to fight him off, but he beat her mercilessly with his fists, until she gave up and stopped resisting.

Then after satisfying his twisted hunger, he tied an electric cable leash around her waist. It was just two yards long, allowing her to reach a small makeshift toilet he’d installed in one corner of her 15'9 × 15' prison. He attached another chain around her stomach.

“The only thing I could do was go to the toilet,” she told police.

Over the next nine months he would slowly wear down Elisabeth until she gave up, resigning herself to her terrible fate of being his sex slave.

The first night Elisabeth didn’t come home, her mother became very worried. Josef Fritzl seemed unusually sympathetic, staying up with Rosemarie and trying to console her, saying the girl had probably run away again.

And the next day, when their daughter had still not appeared, Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl went to Amstetten police station to report her missing. Her anxious father told police how she had run away in the past, and had probably done so again.

“From one day to the next she just vanished,” a police report at the time quoted Rosemarie as saying.

Over the next few days Josef Fritzl went through the motions of searching for his daughter. He and Rosemarie turned up at the Rosenberger restaurant, concerned for Elisabeth’s safety. Fritzl told her boss, Franz Perner, that she had run away, asking if any of the other waitresses might know where she had gone. No one did.

Over the next few days, Josef Fritzl continued his elaborate charade, fooling everyone. He and Rosemarie searched train stations, homeless shelters and bars, as he repeatedly berated their ungrateful daughter for causing them so much worry.

Rosemarie Fritzl was so heartbroken, she even consulted a fortune-teller, who shed little light on Elisabeth’s disappearance.

For the first few terrifying weeks of her captivity, Josef Fritzl kept Elisabeth in the dark, humid dungeon with its low ceiling. His crudely designed ventilation system provided barely enough oxygen, making her tired and lethargic.

Several times a day he would come to rape her, before giving her scraps of food. Later she would tell police that she had no choice but to submit to his violent sexual attacks or starve to death.

Her thoughts during those interminable hours of waiting for his next visit, while tethered to the pole in the dark, only she will ever know. Day and night no longer existed in this hell, and she could not even chalk off the hours, days and weeks, like a prisoner in solitary confinement.

Later she would tell police how she “quaked with fear” each time she heard the sound of the electronic sliding door opening, knowing her tormentor had arrived to satisfy his twisted sexual hunger.

At first she tried to fight back, but he beat her black and blue if she dared struggle. Then, after he’d left, she’d spend hours screaming and banging on the wall as hard as she could, but no one would ever come and rescue her.

It was all about control for Josef Fritzl, and this was the most enjoyable part of his game. It was a challenge to break his daughter’s spirit with rape, torture and force—just like breaking in a wild horse and putting on a saddle.

When Andreas Kruzik didn’t receive any reply to his letters from Elisabeth, he became more and more frustrated. He had thought they were a couple, and he could not fathom why she had suddenly broken off all contact.

He finally telephoned her Amstetten home. Her father answered, saying Elisabeth was unavailable and not to call back.

“I was palmed off,” Andreas recalled. “It was over and I didn’t hear from her again. I thought she had lost interest in me.”

By mid-September, Elisabeth Fritzl had stopped fighting back, resigning herself to captivity, much in the way that Nazi death camp prisoners had once done. At this point Fritzl stopped beating her, although still forcing her to have sex with him.

One day her father came into the dungeon, and, after satisfying himself, produced a pen and paper to dictate a letter for her to write.

Dated September 21, 1984, the letter to her parents explained that she had gone off with a friend to join a religious cult, saying she didn’t want to live at home any longer.

“Don’t look for me,” it said, asking them to respect her decision to live her own life, otherwise she would leave Austria forever. Then Fritzl made her address an envelope to him at Ybbsstrasse 40, Amstetten.

It must have been agonizing for Elisabeth to know that the letter would now cut off any possible chance of her being found.

Later that day, Josef Fritzl drove one hundred miles west to Braunau am Inn—where Adolf Hitler had been born almost a century earlier—and mailed it from a post office, so it bore a postmark from there. It would be the first of many cunning red herrings he would employ over the years to convince the world that Elisabeth had joined a mysterious cult.

Several days later, when the letter arrived at Ybbsstrasse 40, Rosemarie Fritzl read it with her husband. She was relieved that her daughter had been in touch, thinking that at least she was safe.

Josef Fritzl then brought the letter to Amstetten police, saying he had been right all along, and Elisabeth had run away. He then filled out an official missing persons report for his daughter.

Now confident that he had fooled everyone, he walked into the offices of a local newspaper, asking the editor to run a story about his daughter’s disappearance, even supplying her photo for publication.

After an initial investigation, Amstetten police forwarded Elisabeth Fritzl’s missing persons report to the Austrian Interior Ministry. Copies were also sent to the state financial authority and state education authorities. Interpol was also briefly brought in, but after questioning a number of religious sects, it came up with nothing.

Cunning Josef Fritzl’s letter had paid off, and there never was a major police search, as he had so successfully cast Elisabeth in the role of a selfish runaway.

Police never stopped to consider what could possibly make a girl with good prospects, who was looking forward to a new job, run away, not once, but several times.

Now armed with the letter, Josef Fritzl began telling friends and neighbors that his wayward daughter had left home to join a sect.

“One day he came to my door and told me Elisabeth was not coming home anymore,” remembered Anton Graf, who had rented him land at Mondsee Lake. “That she had left to join a cult.”

Graf found Fritzl so convincing, he felt terrible for all the “suffering” Elisabeth had caused her family.

“He told us that a letter had arrived [which] said it was pointless to search for her, because she was deeply involved with the sect. She was happy there and she was definitely not coming home.”

When he told his neighbor Regina Penz, she was not surprised.

“Elisabeth had already caused trouble before,” she later told an English documentary team. “She had disappeared once before and then turned up again.”

Regina said that if you had seven children, like the Fritzls, one of them was bound to be troublesome.

“You just accept [that] these things happen,” she said. “It doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong as a parent.”

Another friend, Leopold Styetz, deputy mayor of the Upper Austrian town of Lasberg, vacationed with the Fritzls during that period. He liked Josef, respecting him as “an intelligent and successful businessman.”

“He always liked to talk about his perfect family,” Styetz recalled in 2008, “but he was very hard on his children. Whenever we asked him about Liesel, he used to say Interpol was looking for her. He said he was so worried that he even went to a fortune-teller, to try and learn what had happened to her.”

When Elisabeth Fritzl’s friends heard she had run away and joined a religious cult, they had mixed feelings. Alfred Dubanovsky was not suspicious, knowing she had recently discussed leaving home.

“After she vanished, we were talking about it,” he remembered. “We knew she had run off before and we thought she had run off again, because she had told someone in our group she had had enough.”

Another friend, Josef Leitner, wondered why police had never questioned any of her friends to find out why she might have run away.

“She ran away on more than one occasion,” he said. “I’m surprised authorities didn’t investigate more intensely. Why didn’t they try and find out why Elisabeth wanted to run away again and again?”

Leitner now claims that many friends Elisabeth had confided in about her father’s abuse were too scared of him to go to the police.

The waitress Elisabeth had earlier run away to Vienna with believed she had now gone to Amsterdam and become involved in drugs and prostitution.

Elisabeth’s old school friend Christa Goetzinger says that although there was much gossip among their friends about Elisabeth joining a cult, she had never believed it.

“She was just not that type,” she said. “Not Sissy.”

His Second Wife

In the weeks following Elisabeth’s disappearance, Josef Fritzl painstakingly created what investigators would later describe as “a perfectly constructed framework of lies.” He made numerous visits to Amstetten police station, angrily complaining that investigators were not doing enough to track down his runaway daughter. Over the next few years, he and his wife would give countless emotional interviews on television and in newspapers, as the devastated parents of a missing teenage girl.

“We spoke about it often when we met,” remembered Christine. “And I would say, ‘Rosemarie, where can Elisabeth be?’ I even told myself she is definitely in a cult.”

The two sisters even did their own investigation into which cult she had joined.

“We really did detective work,” said Christine, “as to where the cult could be. But where can you find out where these cults are?”

Rosemarie Fritzl and her other children resumed their lives at Ybbsstrasse 40, unaware that three floors below, Elisabeth was living like a caged animal in the dank, airless dungeon. Her torturous existence was only punctuated by her father’s visits for sex every two or three days.

Slowly she was forced to accept the bizarre new role he had planned for so long—his second wife, and the mother of a new subterranean family.

On April 16, 1985, Elisabeth turned 19 and the official search for her was called off, as, under Austrian law, she was no longer a minor and could go wherever she wanted. To celebrate, her father removed the cable leash from her waist, so she could walk around the tiny dungeon. Over the next few months, Elisabeth’s relationship to her captor changed as her survival instincts kicked in.

“Since she was taken prisoner at the age of eighteen,” said Professor Max Friedrich, the head of the Medical University of Vienna’s Clinic for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. “The question is, how did she cope with her fear, and at what point was her will broken?”

Professor Friedrich believes Elisabeth Fritzl is a textbook victim of Stockholm syndrome—a psychological condition where a hostage becomes sympathetic or loyal to their captors to survive. The syndrome was first identified in 1973, when a team of bank robbers took employees at the Kreditbanken in Stockholm, Sweden, hostage for six days. During that time the victims became emotionally attached to their captors, eventually resisting rescue attempts by the police, later refusing to even testify against the robbers. Two of the hostages eventually became engaged to their captors.

The term was first used in a media interview by Swedish psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who had advised police during the incident.

A year later, American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst went even further, after being kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army. She eventually joined the group, participating in several bank robberies, and subsequently serving a 2-year jail sentence, later commuted by President Jimmy Carter.

“Psychologically,” said renowned forensic psychiatrist and bestselling author Keith Ablow, M.D., “you would expect a constriction of [Elisabeth’s] emotional world . . . to survive in circumstances like that. You need to deny a lot of suffering to focus on practical matters, like food and survival. You may well feel allied with your captor in a Stockholm way.

“The general paradigm would be a psyche twisting itself into the grotesque pattern of daily existence and normalizing it, in order to not go insane. And at a certain point you imagine hope being extinguished.”

Dr. Ablow compares Elisabeth’s psychological situation to anticipatory avoidance experiments with laboratory mice, where food would be placed on an electrified side of a cage. After repeatedly being shocked, the mice stop trying to retrieve the food, even after the electric current is turned off.

“And at a certain point,” said Dr. Ablow, “the human mind shuts down too. ‘I’ll take my gains where they come. I didn’t get beaten as much today. I got food today. It was a good day, underground here.’ ”

Kidnapped hostages, fearing for their lives, often start identifying with their captors as a psychological defense mechanism. Then even the smallest act of kindness is magnified, as there is little perspective in such a situation.

Always the master manipulator, Josef Fritzl exploited this, by softening his domination. He now began arriving with clothes and blankets and other small presents, in some kind of bizarre courting ritual. He was no longer as violent during sex, and stopped using any contraception, appearing to want to get his daughter pregnant.

In 2008, Fritzl would vehemently deny having any sexual relations with Elisabeth prior to that spring. Perhaps his denial revealed how his obsession had changed course, with him now viewing her as a beautiful new wife, instead of an unruly daughter.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he would claim they’d first had sex in spring 1985, as he could no longer control himself.

“The pressure to do the forbidden thing was just too big to withstand,” he would explain. “At some stage somewhere in the night, I went into the cellar and laid her down on the bed and had sex with her.”

He said she did not resist his advances by “scratching, biting or beating,” just making “small whimpering noises,” as he had his way.

Then after he’d finished raping her, he’d sit and chat as she hungrily ate her food. He would tell her news about her brothers and sisters, and how they were doing at school, as well as gossiping about life upstairs, what he had planted in his garden, or movies he had seen on television. And he’d tell her how upset her mother was since she had gone.

On the way out, he would always start tinkering with a gadget by the sliding steel door, warning her it was booby-trapped, and if she ever tried to escape, deadly gas would be automatically released into the dungeon.

Upstairs at Ybbsstrasse 40, Josef Fritzl ordered his family never to go into the cellar, saying it was his own private office with all his business files. His tenants were also banned from using his garden, keeping pets, or ever going into the backyard, with the threat of immediate eviction.

Before he allowed a prospective tenant to rent one of his eight rooms, he would warn that the cellar was out-of-bounds, and never to go anywhere near it. He also stressed that no photographs could be taken of it, and he would only allow them to move in after agreeing to his terms.

Any music or loud noises after 10:00 p.m., were also banned, on pain of eviction. Ironically, over the years, many tenants would hear mysterious sounds coming from the cellar. But they were far too scared of their landlord to ever investigate or complain.

Fritzl found tenants by placing ads in the local newspaper, always preferring ones on social security, guaranteeing a monthly government rent check.

In 1990, Josef Leitner, who now worked as a waiter, moved into Ybbsstrasse 40, even though he had once been told by a friend that his new landlord had raped his own daughter.

“She told me what a monster Josef was,” recalled Leitner, who had studied with Elisabeth at a technical college before she disappeared. “But I did not want to get involved. I did not want to get kicked out of the room. I kept myself to myself.”

Fritzl’s overbearing attitude and tough set of rules led to a revolving door of tenants, with more than one hundred moving in and out over the years.

Soon after imprisoning Elisabeth, Josef Fritzl developed a regular routine, often spending entire nights in the cellar, telling Rosemarie he was busy on a new project that would make their fortune.

“Every day at nine o’clock he would go down in the cellar,” remembered his sister-in-law Christine, “supposedly to develop plans for machines that he would sell to businesses. Often he would spend whole nights down there. Rosi wasn’t even allowed to bring him a coffee.”

And no one in the family ever dared ask why he was now spending so much time down in the cellar.

“His word was law,” explained Christine.

After Elisabeth’s disappearance, her mother sank into a depression and began gaining more weight, causing her husband to humiliate her in public. It was common knowledge amongst their friends and family that they never had sex.

“He always put Rosi down and called her fat,” recalled her sister. “[He said] ‘chubby women are below my standard.’ ”

In September 1986, Elisabeth became pregnant with her father’s child and fell into a deep depression. And when she miscarried alone at ten weeks, she contemplated suicide.

Her father showed no sympathy whatsoever, as he coldly disposed of the fetus, turning the lights off in the dungeon to punish her.

On November 12, 1986, two skin-divers found the bound body of 17-year-old Martina Posch on the shores of Lake Mondsee, near Josef Fritzl’s boarding house. Later a friend would claim Fritzl had been staying there the day she disappeared.

The young girl, who closely resembled Elisabeth, had disappeared ten days earlier. Police said she had been raped and then wrapped in two green plastic covers, before being dumped by the picturesque lake. Her clothes and personal belongings have never been found.

It would be another twenty-two years before Austrian police would begin investigating Josef Fritzl for her murder.

By now, Josef Fritzl had become a pillar of the Amstetten community, considered a successful businessman, an upright citizen and a good family man. He dressed well, favoring expensive blazers, silk cravats and Italian patent leather shoes. Now in his early fifties and starting to lose his hair, he secretly went to Vienna for an expensive hair transplant.

“He is a very vain man,” remembered his friend Gerda Schmidt. “His shoes were always glistening, his tie was never askew, he could have been a diplomat.”

And he would often talk about how Elisabeth had run away to join a cult, and broken his and his wife’s hearts.

“He often talked about his family,” his friend Leopold Styetz told the London
Times
. “He was very strict with his children, a strict but fair father, I would say. It was enough for him to snap his fingers and the youngsters would be in bed already. He always stressed that, for him, education and career were
the
most important things.”

By 1987, Josef Fritzl left with a friend for the first of several lengthy trips to Pattaya, the notorious Thailand sex resort. Before leaving, he packed the cellar’s refrigerator with frozen food so his prisoner could feed herself while he was away. But she knew that if anything happened to him 5,000 miles away in Thailand, she would be doomed.

Later he would claim to have installed a mechanism to open the doors to the cellar and free his prisoner after a certain period of time. But that was a lie.

During his vacation, Fritzl played tourist during the day, riding elephants and sunbathing. His habit of using his beach towel to reserve sun loungers upset the other tourists at his hotel.

“Fritzl would lord it around us at the beach,” recalled Briton Stephen Crickson, who was vacationing there with his girlfriend. “He treated staff with contempt. He was universally unpopular.”

Later, Crickson would tell the London
Sun
how he’d once seen Fritzl walking hand in hand with a 16-year--old rent boy on the beach. And there was much gossip regarding the Austrian’s nightly visits to the town’s infamous “Boys Town” red-light area.

“He was a disgusting pervert,” said Crickson, “and all the ex-pats and regular holidaymakers knew what he was up to. Rent boys, ladyboys, he would go with anything.”