Secrets in the Cellar (9 page)

Hoerer remembers his friend being the perfect host, entertaining them by his roof garden pool, immaculately set with white marble tiles.

“We got on really well,” he remembered. “He was great company and seemed to be the picture-book head of the family. Looking back, I suppose it was a bit strange that the only garden we were ever allowed to use was the one on the roof.”

Hoerer said he was aware the cellar was “totally out of bounds,” but had no reason to go there.

“We never went down to the garden,” he said. “But sat on the terrace garden, looking down. I always thought it was a wonderful family. The children were well-mannered and so well-behaved.”

After dinner, the two friends adjourned to Fritzl’s media room, watching his favorite Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry television cartoons, which made him laugh hysterically.

Fritzl’s grown-up daughter Gabrielle spent three years living at Ybbsstrasse 40 with her husband Jergen Helm. During that time, Helm got close to his fatherin-law, often sharing an evening drink and a chat on the roof terrace by the pool.

“There was always a relaxed atmosphere,” he told the German newspaper
Heute
. “There was never any indication of anything wrong.”

He said he had been in the cellar on at least one occasion, never noticing anything untoward.

“It was scattered with junk,” he recalled. “And I had no idea that a few meters away this family were living.”

A Double Life

Even though he kept his daughter Elisabeth as his personal sex slave, Josef Fritzl’s libido was insatiable. He had discovered Viagra and other similar prescription drugs, and his esoteric tastes in deviant sex were becoming stranger and stranger. Villa Ostende owner Peter Stolz was becoming increasingly concerned about his long-time customer’s demands.

“He was a strange, stingy character,” remembered Stolz. “He liked trips to the dungeon”—the brothel’s underground lair—“with young girls he had selected personally.”

One of the few Villa Ostende girls still willing to accept him as a client told London’s
Sun
newspaper how he liked to tie her to a cross with manacles in the dungeon. The 36-year-old blonde prostitute, who charged Fritzl $220 an hour, said he was often violent and bad-tempered, punching her during sex.

“I was hired by him many times,” she told a reporter, refusing to give her name. “And he was sick beyond imagination.”

She said he especially liked her because she was young, plump and submissive.

“I had to call him ‘teacher,’ ” she remembered, “and was not allowed to engage in conversation with him. He would pay to have sex inside the brothel dungeon, which I hated. It was dark and sinister, but his favorite place.

“Once I asked him about his family and he told me, ‘I have none.’ I thought he was a lonely man.”

By Christmas 1998, Josef Fritzl seemed to have everything under control. He now lived his complicated double life with military precision, getting an extra thrill out of beating the system for thousands of dollars every month in government benefits.

He felt so secure, he was now planning another month-long “boys’ trip” to Thailand, to be immediately followed by a two-week Italian vacation. In anticipation of being away so long, once again he began stockpiling large amounts of food in a spare room in the cellar.

In the weeks up to Christmas, he had driven to various supermarkets around a fifty-mile radius of Amstetten. He often shopped at the Metro superstore in Linz, near the Villa Ostende, refueling afterwards at the gas station next door.

“He went shopping almost every week,” recalled a gas pump attendant, who served him regularly over a fifteen-year period. “Sometimes his wife was with him.”

The attendant, who wished to remain anonymous, said Fritzl was stingy, and never left a tip.

After his shopping expeditions, he would arrive home between 10 and 11 at night, using his wheelbarrow to transfer the large plastic bags full of groceries across the garden and into the cellar.

Alfred Dubanovsky would later claim to have seen Rosemarie Fritzl assist him on several occasions.

“The amount was far too much for Josef, his wife and the three kids still at home,” said Dubanovsky. “Rosemarie must have noticed. In fact, she often helped him unload things.”

Dubanovsky said another tenant also once expressed surprise about the enormous amounts of food regularly being taken into the cellar.

“Looking back,” he said, “I suppose this must have been shortly before he went on holiday.”

Walter Werner, who lived near the Fritzls for eleven years, also observed the mysterious food runs into the cellar, but never said anything.

“In retrospect,” he would later say, “I have to say I found it strange that they used to carry so many groceries into the house, they needed a wheelbarrow to transport them.”

Over the Christmas holidays, Josef Fritzl held his annual family reunion at Ybbsstrasse 40. Ironically, he had a sentimental streak, delighting in celebrating birthdays and holidays separately with both his upstairs and downstairs families, although they might have been on different planets.

Over the holiday period, all the grown-up Fritzl children returned with their spouses for a lavish festive meal. As usual, the family patriarch sat at the head of the table, presiding over everything. Sometimes the conversation turned to Elisabeth and where she could possibly be.

“We went back for family occasions,” said Fritzl’s son-in-law Horst Herlbauer. “Josef seemed to be a normal dad and family man. He was always working hard [at] his job or on the house. There never appeared to be any problems at home.”

But although Herlbauer found his fatherin-law “outgoing” and “friendly,” other members of the family did not. Rosemarie Fritzl’s younger sister Christine had detested her brother-in-law ever since his 1967 rape imprisonment, and she made no secret of it when they met at family reunions.

When Fritzl would mock his wife at the dinner table, saying, “Chubby women are below my standard,” Christine would gamely reply, “Better to be chubby than bald.”

It had been after one of these exchanges that he had secretly gone to Vienna for an expensive hair transplant.

Throughout family meals, he would crack off-color jokes in front of the children, embarrassing everyone as he laughed heartily. Rosemarie was often the butt of his savage humor, and he appeared to take pleasure in publicly humiliating her.

“He was relaxed and sociable with everyone in the family apart from Rosi,” said Christine. “He used to tell her off in front of the others. The worst things were his crude, dirty jokes, which he used to laugh loudly about. This was embarrassing for everyone, because we all knew that the two of them hadn’t had sex for twenty years. He would always say, ‘My wife is much too chubby for me.’ ”

Then later, after his family had left, he’d sneak down into the cellar to celebrate Christmas with Elisabeth and his secret family, bearing cakes and little presents. One year he even arrived with a small Christmas tree, which Kerstin and Stefan decorated.

On Tuesday, January 6, 1998, Josef Fritzl flew to Pattaya, Thailand, for a month-long beach vacation. Before leaving, he had told Elisabeth he would be back on February 3, leaving enough food for her and the children. As he’d left, he’d repeated his warning that any attempt to escape would release deadly gas into the cellar.

Paul Hoerer, his girlfriend Andrea Schmitt and stepfather Rainer Wieczorak accompanied him. Over the next four weeks, while Elisabeth and the children languished underground, Fritzl sunbathed, swam in the deep blue sea and took boat trips to the nearby island Ko Lan. Then at night he went off by himself, indulging in sex with both male and female Thai hookers.

“He traveled alone without his wife. He told me she had to look after the children,” said Hoerer.

“The first time he really admitted to me that he was not the perfect family man was in Thailand,” Hoerer recalled. “He obviously liked women, and good-looking women at that. But I know his wife was not his type.”

Hoerer had brought along a camcorder, shooting video of Josef Fritzl enjoying himself. The paunchy senior citizen is seen lying on the beach, wearing a skimpy zebra-striped Speedo and receiving a back massage from a young Thai masseur. After the massage, he gets up, walks toward the camera and gives a peace sign with a big smile on his face.

In another shot, he’s wearing a smart black-and-white shirt for dinner. He mugs for the camera, as he greedily stuffs a large knuckle of roast ham into his mouth.

“Once we were at a market in Pattaya,” said Hoerer, “and he didn’t know that I was behind him when he bought an evening dress and underwear for a thin woman. It would not have fit his wife.”

When Fritzl turned around and saw Hoerer filming him, he was furious. Later, when he had calmed down, Hoerer asked who the frilly underwear was for.

“He then admitted he had a woman on the side,” said Hoerer, “and asked me to keep it secret and not to tell his wife.”

Hoerer’s girlfriend Andrea remembers Fritzl spending much time on the trip buying children’s presents.

“He had several carrier bags filled with things,” she said. “And I remember thinking, ‘What a lot of presents for just three children.’ ”

Rainer Wieczorak, who was also on the trip, rarely saw Fritzl during the entire vacation.

“I need to go there because the warm climate is much better for my health,” he said. “But Josef had other interests. While we would all sit around the hotel bar enjoying a few quiet drinks, he was off on his own.”

Hoerer said his friend was very secretive about his nights in Pattaya, and whenever street girls approached Fritzl to offer sex, he “blocked” them, saying he was not interested.

But his friends all knew he trawled the sex bars every night, though they never mentioned it for fear of making him angry.

“He always went off on his own at night,” said Andrea. “I believe he went to some of the clubs.”

And when he finally reappeared the next morning, he looked exhausted, spending the day recovering.

“He was usually sleeping things off during the day,” said Wieczorak, “having a massage on the beach and a late breakfast.”

Josef Fritzl also bought himself expensive gifts in Pattaya, including several pairs of flashy crocodile shoes and some handmade shirts.

During the flight back, Fritzl told his friends it had been one of the greatest vacations of his life.

“He enjoyed it so much,” said Schmitt, “that he said when he got back he was going to go on holiday again to Italy. That meant he would have been on holiday about six weeks in total.”

On March 2, 1998—almost fourteen years after Josef Fritzl had first lured Elisabeth into the cellar—a 10--year-old girl named Natascha Kampusch disappeared on the way to her school. The troubled young girl from a broken home, who was the same age as Kerstin, was seen being dragged into a white minibus near her home in Vienna.

After Natascha’s disappearance, a massive police hunt was launched to try to find her. Among the many hundreds of minivan owners questioned was a 35-year-old communications technician named Wolfgang Priklopil, who told police he’d been using his van to transport rubbish the morning of the kidnapping and was allowed to go.

In fact, Priklopil had become obsessed with Natascha, fantasizing about kidnapping her and turning her into his sex slave. Just like Josef Fritzl, in the months leading up to the abduction, he had constructed an elaborate dungeon in the cellar of his family house in Strasshof an der Nordbahn in Lower Austria.

The house had been built by his grandfather Oskar Priklopil, who had later converted the cellar into a nuclear bomb shelter during the Cold War. When Oskar died in 1984, his grandson Wolfgang inherited the house.

Then, in the mid-1990s, Wolfgang, who lived with his mother, began constructing an underground “bunker” for his victim, as yet unselected.

Like Josef Fritzl, Priklopil was a highly organized and meticulous man. The parallels between the two, who were living within a hundred miles of each other, were astonishing. As Fritzl had done years earlier, Priklopil spent years constructing a series of concrete-lined narrow tunnels and passageways. He installed a bathroom with a tiny sink and toilet, connecting the plumbing to the main house, as the electricity also was. He soundproofed his dungeon, which was only ventilated by an air system that he controlled from above.

This tiny dungeon, measuring just 54 square feet, would be Natascha Kampusch’s world for more than eight years. It contained a bed, a ladder and little else. For the first six months of her captivity, the little girl was never allowed to leave, being told by her kidnapper that the door and windows were booby-trapped with high explosives, set to go off if she tried to escape.

That March, Natascha Kampusch’s abduction was big news in Austria. And the chances are that Elisabeth and the children saw news reports on the television, flickering day and night in their prison, just 100 miles due west of hers.

His Underground Kingdom

In late 1999, two Amstetten fire inspectors arrived at Ybbsstrasse 40 for a routine fire inspection. An unfazed Josef Fritzl led them downstairs into the cellar heating room, only yards away from the secret dungeon entrance. The officials carefully inspected the boiler furnace, where, three years earlier, he had tossed baby Michael’s body. The inspectors found that it met official requirements, failing to notice the well-hidden cellar entrance behind some shelving.

Fritzl must have breathed a sigh of relief as he led them back upstairs, knowing that his secret was safe for the time being.

Though approaching 65, Josef Fritzl showed no signs of slowing down. He was now consumed with an ambitious plan to build a three-story apartment housing project, with offices and an underground garage in the Amstetten town center. He had already raised $1.5 million in loans, using his five rental properties as collateral.

But he ran into problems, after listing Elisabeth on all the deeds as a tax dodge. His Austrian bankers now refused to re-mortgage the properties, as his missing daughter was technically a sitting tenant, making it impossible to sell if he defaulted on the loan.

To get around this, he pretended to need the money for a new ladies’ underwear business, to be run from his home on the Internet. But, although he eventually got the loans, the project never materialized, after angry residents took legal action to prevent it, saying it would ruin the neighborhood.

Most afternoons, Josef Fritzl visited the James Dean Club, which catered to an older clientele. Located at Waidhofner Strasse 56, just a short walk from his home, he would stroll into the club with a big grin, always greeting the pretty Slavic hostesses by their first names.

“What’s new?” he’d ask, as he stood at the bar, ordering coffee with two milks. And for the next several hours he would hold court, chatting with old school friends and flirting with the waitresses. He also used the club for business meetings, never dancing with the miniskirted hostesses or drinking alcohol.

But there were other types of clubs around Amstetten that he also patronized.

Local builder Paul Stocker first met Fritzl in 1997, when he came to view a house Stocker was selling. Although the deal never materialized, the two men, both in their sixties, became friends. They occasionally met for a “boys’ night out” at the Caribik swingers’ club, a few miles outside Amstetten.

The club’s website boasts of its “small dungeon and guestrooms for overnight stays.” The entrance fee is $115 for couples and $15 for women.

“Fritzl told me someone of our age can have a lot of fun with sex,” recalled Stocker. “He said you needed to take three tablets—Viagra, Levitra and Cialis. The pills kick in one after the other and you can go for it like a bull.”

A week later, Stocker was at the club when he claims Josef Fritzl walked in with his wife Rosemarie.

“They looked just like an old pair that you might see sitting on a bench feeding pigeons,” he said. “I was speechless when I realized who it was.”

According to Stocker, Fritzl sent Rosemarie to stand in a corner, before hooking up with a young woman. Then they had sex by the tree-lined pool, as his wife looked on.

“He treated [Rosemarie] like a dog,” said Stocker. “She had to sit in a corner and watch, as he did stuff with a young woman. I think it’s fair to say he made a good job of it. Then he left with his totally humiliated and degraded wife and went home.”

In 2000, the Fritzls celebrated their 44th wedding anniversary with a small family party. After so many years in such a turbulent marriage, Rosemarie still kept up the pretense of living an idyllic family life. She played the part of happy wife and mother to perfection, becoming her husband’s unwitting accomplice.

She devoted herself to bringing up Lisa, now 8, Monika, 6, and Alexander, 4. Amstetten social workers, who regularly interviewed the children, were most impressed with their excellent upbringing.

One report noted how the grandparents went to great pains “to encourage the children in many ways.” It lauded the Fritzls for providing the children with “books and cassettes from the city library,” as well as facilitating their “children’s gymnastics.”

“[The Fritzls] are very loving with their children,” the report concluded.

“To the outside world they seemed like a great family,” said neighbor Anita Lachinger. “She cooked and cleaned for them . . . she loved them.”

Most days Rosemarie Fritzl, now in her mid-sixties, drove the children to their ice hockey league games or classical music lessons. Lisa played flute in the school orchestra, while Monika and Alexander studied trumpet. Rosemarie would also take various classes, including one on the art of napkin folding, at a nearby crafts shop.

Rosemarie brought the three children up to believe that their mother Elisabeth had abandoned them, after running away to join a religious sect. Little Alexander became so terrified that his mother would come and kidnap him from his bed, he almost stopped talking.

“Rosemarie was desperate to give the children a normal start in life, with a proper mom and dad,” said a family friend. “She was deeply hurt and embarrassed about Elisabeth supposedly running off.”

One of the children’s music teachers was “amazed” at her strength, only once seeing her break down and cry, when she told him how her daughter had run away and joined a cult.

When Lisa started school, her teachers were so alarmed when she referred to the elderly Fritzls as “Mama and Papa,” that the couple was summoned to school.

“The teachers told Rosemarie she had to come clean,” said the friend, “or the children would be totally messed up when they discovered the truth later.”

So in summer 2000, Rosemarie hired a child psychologist to counsel the children.

“Then she threw a party to make them feel positive about the new family setup,” said the friend. “From then on she and [Josef] were ‘Omi and Opi’ ” (Grandma and Grandpa).

Rosemarie also determined that the children should have a religious upbringing, organizing their first communions.

But behind closed doors, Josef Fritzl was the same bullying dictator he had always been. Once Rosemarie confided to her friend that Josef was so domineering that he terrified Lisa and Alexander, making their lives miserable.

At the age of 11, Lisa, who bore an uncanny resemblance to her mother Elisabeth, persuaded Fritzl to send her to the prestigious Kloster’s private girls’ school, run by Catholic nuns.

The two younger children went to local schools, where they became well-behaved model students, always getting good grades. Their proud grandmother became an active member of the parent–teacher association.

Soon after starting Kloster’s, just outside Amstetten, Lisa told her new classmates how her mother had left her on her grandparents’ doorstep when she was a baby.

“We know Lisa and Monika were foundling children,” a former classmate told the London
Mirror
newspaper, “and had both been abandoned at the front door of the Fritzl home when they were born, almost like a Bible story. Lisa told us her story at the start of school, but we never mentioned it again out of respect and politeness.”

But several years later, when Alexander started high school, he told his classmates a different story.

“He always told us his mother was dead,” remembered classmate Verena Huber.

That summer, Josef Fritzl hosted twenty-five members of his family at his favorite Linz restaurant, Bratwurstglockerl. After enjoying a hearty meal of traditional Austrian cuisine, Fritzl, who was in an unusually good mood that day, took an official family photograph outside the restaurant.

In the photograph Rosemarie is all smiles, sitting next to her grandson Alexander. Lisa and Monika stand to her right, surrounded by the other members of the extended Fritzl family.

In February 2002, Elisabeth became pregnant for the seventh time. She had been down in the cellar for eighteen years, and was suffering from serious vitamin deficiency, malnourishment and acute emotional stress. Although she was only in her mid-thirties, her teeth were falling out because of gum disease, and her once flame red hair had turned grey.

But for Kerstin and Stefan’s sake, she never complained, realizing that she had to be strong for the family to survive. Even her father grudgingly admired his daughter’s fortitude in some kind of twisted way. He would later talk of her strength, and how she had caused him “almost no problems” during this time, never complaining even as her teeth fell out one by one.

After she became pregnant for the last time, her father no longer demanded sex, as he was no longer attracted to her. Investigators believe he may have turned his attention to 13-year-old Kerstin, and started grooming the frail, sickly girl to take over her mother’s duties.

On December 16, 2002, Elisabeth delivered a little boy she named Felix. Soon after his birth, his father came into the dungeon, announcing that this time the baby boy would remain underground, as Rosemarie could not handle another baby.

Then he magnanimously brought a washing machine into the cellar, so Elizabeth would no longer have to wash her and the children’s clothes by hand.

A few months later, Josef Fritzl dictated another letter for Elisabeth to write, announcing that she had given birth to a baby boy the previous December. Once again Fritzl mailed the letter from a postbox far away from Amstetten, providing no further clues of his daughter’s whereabouts.