Mühl remains a notorious figure to this day. And it is almost certain that the same headlines that are likely to have inspired Josef Fritzl left just as much of a mark on his fellow Amstettners, but for different reasons. This would help explain why both the police and the social services took for granted the fact that Elisabeth was living in a “cult,” despite the lack of any evidence. It may also account for the assumption among those who knew the Fritzls that cults were places where carefree sexual anarchy, and therefore accidental pregnancies, prevailed. Whatever the case, the view of many Amstettners, including the police and social services, remained that, even though Elisabeth was a “slut” who had brought shame on her family with her promiscuity and “degenerate” behavior, she was extremely fortunate to have been able to fall back in times of crisis on two such understanding and responsible parents as Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl.
Sepp Leitner’s recollection of the events surrounding the appearance of the child on the Fritzls’ doorstep is more or less identical to Frau Danielzyck’s. However, as a tenant of the couple, Leitner had, unlike Frau Danielzyck, known Elisabeth since she was a teenager, and he was still in touch with Brigitte, the friend with whom she had run away to Vienna. From Brigitte he had heard that some “funny stuff” had been going on between Josef Fritzl and his daughter in the years before her disappearance. “Funny stuff” as in sexual stuff. It wasn’t remotely surprising to him that Elisabeth had wanted to escape that family. The farther away, in his opinion, the better.
So when that baby had come along, it had all fitted into place. With her history, it was not surprising that Elisabeth had mixed herself up in some kind of “wretched” business. There were rumours circulating in Amstetten that she had become a prostitute in Holland. It was sad, but as he hardly knew the girl, Leitner, to his profound regret in years to come, didn’t dwell on the whys and wherefores of the child who had been so unceremoniously dumped on the doorstep of number 40. He had other things on his mind: parties and his campaign, with Ludwig the long-distance truck driver, to persuade Herr Fritzl to allow them to have barbecues in the garden. Herr Fritzl had said no to that. Leitner had been successful, however, in overturning his landlord’s “no pets” policy when he brought home Sam, a Labrador cross, to live with him in the apartment. He had convinced Herr Fritzl that the dog had belonged to his mother, who had recently passed away. Leitner’s mother was alive and well and had always hated animals, but he had sensed in Josef a sentimental streak and exploited it. Every now and again, Leitner noticed, the dog would for no reason start pawing the floor of Sepp’s ground-floor apartment and begin to whine.
The year after Lisa had appeared, the neighbours became aware of another child. Again Rosemarie was seen nursing it in and around the house. Like Lisa, the child had been found abandoned on the doorstep of number 40—this time by her grandmother and in a pram rather than a cardboard box. This was in December 1994 and, considering the subzero temperature outside, it was a miracle that the child had not frozen to death. Inside the pram Rosemarie Fritzl found another note from Elisabeth in which she had written the child’s name—Monika—along with an apology for her continued absence. Like her sister, Monika was at first a restless and unhappy baby. It would be Rosemarie who would discover the cause of her troubles: A tiny hair had somehow wound itself around one of her toes. It had been invisible to Elisabeth in the dim light of the cellar and had become ingrown and painful. Certainly it rescued Monika from the cellar, perhaps saved her life.
The precise details of Monika’s discovery by Rosemarie were mystifying to everyone who heard the story. Rosemarie had woken up to the sound of a child crying shortly after midnight on December 16. Minutes later she discovered the pram on the doorstep. She had only just about carried the child into the house when the phone started to ring. Rosemarie would tell the social worker that she had heard “a female voice, obviously recorded,” and that this voice described herself as the mother of the child and Rosemarie’s daughter Elisabeth. Several minutes later the phone rang again and the same message was played down the line. The whole episode, said Rosemarie, was “completely inexplicable,” especially considering that the Fritzls had only very recently changed their phone number; it wasn’t listed and nobody except for her and her husband had known it. But the curious circumstances surrounding the discovery of a second child on the Fritzls’ doorstep seemed to trigger no particular concern among the authorities.
Nevertheless, the case of the two foundlings was unusual enough to attract the attention of the papers. Mark Perry, a British-born journalist then working for the Austrian tabloid Kronen Zeitung, would later remember, “It was a bit of a spectacular case as it was unheard of that a mother would just disappear and then start sending her children to her own parents. People in Amstetten were pointing fingers: Elisabeth was seen as a bad mother.” Perry’s article appeared bearing the headline “Mother Gives Away Second Baby.” Josef had been happy to be interviewed by Perry about the matter and was quoted as saying, “Our daughter has been missing since 1984 and we suspect she has fallen into the hands of a sect.”
Having proved themselves to be loving and devoted parents, the Fritzls now received permission from Amstetten Council to foster Monika. Earlier in the same year they had also looked into the possibility of formally adopting Lisa. And, although it is generally forbidden by Austrian law for any couple to adopt a child without the consent of both of its natural parents, in view of what the authorities decided were mitigating circumstances surrounding the birth of Lisa, the adoption was granted. A lower Austrian court approved the adoption the same year, but, owing to a clerical error, Lisa’s adoption permit would forever list the names of her adoptive parents as Josef and “Maria” Fritzl. Officially, Elisabeth Fritzl had never been named as their mother. Notwithstanding the fuss the press had made over the story, Amstetten’s social services and police department remained convinced of the story of the cult. In their minds, Elisabeth had managed to abandon her children in one of the busiest streets in the town without having attracted the slightest notice because “it wouldn’t have been difficult for a member of the sect to give her a lift.”
There were only ever two serious disagreements between Sepp Leitner and Josef, the second of which would result in the tenant’s abrupt and unexpected departure from number 40. The first argument concerned Leitner’s tendency to play his music too loud in the early hours of the morning. Josef knocked at the door and angrily told him to turn it down. He was shouting, and it was the first time that Leitner had witnessed this other, bullying side to his landlord, the side he would normally only show women or children. Leitner threatened to “smash his face in.” And that had been enough for Josef. The next thing Leitner knew, Fritzl was disappearing back up the stairs and into his office.
The second argument happened toward the middle of 1994 and related to Leitner’s electricity bill, which for no apparent reason had risen to a level that he considered exorbitant. He was already paying a relatively high sum for his apartment, and when he confronted Josef about the electricity bill the two men ended up having a stand-up row. Down in the cellar, Josef had by this stage wired Elisabeth’s room to the electrical circuit of the apartment block above. It was very like him to drain his tenants’ electricity supply for his own ends in this way; to get something for nothing; to pull the wool over the eyes of others and to extract from this hidden advantage some secret pleasure and private feeling of power. But when Leitner had complained about the rising cost of the electricity, Josef took it as a warning. He wanted him out. And the day after their fierce argument Leitner returned to his apartment to find that his landlord had changed the locks on his door. When Leitner called the police, they arrived on the scene only to tell him that there was nothing they could do. His tenant, Josef knew, could never have afforded to hire a lawyer. And there was nothing Leitner could do except move out.
By the end of 1993, buoyed by his success in integrating Lisa into the world above without attracting the
merest hint of suspicion from anyone, Josef had entered into a period of joyful building activity. He did so equipped with a renewed sense of his own invulnerability. He had gotten away with it. And now he would push his experiments underground to even more reckless extremes.
The birth of his children had, in Josef’s mind, called for an expansion of the cellar. Elisabeth was now living in a single room together with two growing children—Kerstin was five, Stefan was three—and there was no doubt in Josef’s mind that other children would be born in the cellar in the future. His plan was to add to the original layout three rooms, rooms that he had discovered years earlier but had never connected to his daughter’s cell. And he set about preparing the three extra rooms, reclaiming for himself the cellar of number 40, which, through some error in the original plans of 40 Ybbsstrasse, did not officially exist, but which Josef had by chance unearthed during his subterranean wanderings. Now he knocked down its walls and dredged its interior, fashioning from its damp and low-ceilinged chambers what he considered to be an “apartment.”
He had in mind a total refurbishment. A project to get his teeth into. The kind of exercise he lived for but which he often had difficulty completing in the house above. He had never finished the second swimming pool on the terrace, and it would remain there, empty and useless, for as long as Josef lived in the house. Likewise, his initial spell of frenzied building activity on two of the units in the apartment block had done little more than turn the ground floor into a building site. For years it would remain an uninhabitable space with holes in the walls and piles of bricks strewn across the floor.
Upstairs he was always enthusiastically throwing himself into some project or other and then losing interest. But in the cellar he behaved very differently. Nothing was left to founder. In the cellar Josef always started as he meant to go on, and the things that he set in motion there would always reach their logical conclusion.
Work on the cellar had begun when Elisabeth found herself pregnant with Lisa. But Josef had intensified his labors some months after the birth.
Now all sorts of things went into the cellar: tiles, wood laminate, a shower unit, flat-pack cupboards, two wooden bed frames, two mattresses, and a bathroom cabinet. If she was at home at the time, it must have been difficult for Rosemarie not to have noticed her husband lugging these various heavy and unwieldy objects into the cellar. Envisioning a total “modernization” of the cellar, Josef also bought many new electrical items, which he hooked up to the mains and which, unknown to Leitner, would account for the sudden rise in his electricity bill in the same period: a refrigerator, an oven, an extractor fan, pipes that he would use to better ventilate the cellar. Things were endlessly disappearing into the cellar but never coming out.
The rooms had been there since he had excavated them in the late 1970s and early 1980s, behind one of the walls of the original cellar. They were accessible through a corridor next to the boiler room, which he now used as a “goods entrance” and sealed off with a concrete door. But he had never told Elisabeth of their existence, and she remained under the impression that he was building the rooms from scratch. She and the children could hear him working on the other side of the wall, imagining that he was tunneling into the earth when, in fact, all he was doing was furnishing and equipping the rooms with various electrical appliances and disposing of any rubble in the space behind what was to become a shower room. Finally he punched a hole in the wall of the room that divided the new rooms from Elisabeth and her children. But he had put iron bars on the hole and they had been forced to wait until, with some ceremony, on December 17, 1993, he removed the bars and allowed his family for the first time to explore their new home.
By the standards of how they had been used to living, this was an unhoped-for improvement. Josef had converted Elisabeth’s old room into a twin room with two single beds. From there a narrow corridor, sixty centimetres wide, ran into the new combined kitchen and washing area, where there was hot running water for the first time, serving a shower as well as a sink, cooking facilities, a table, and some chairs. Along another narrow corridor was the second, “parental” bedroom, in which stood a double bed and the television. In order to give the place a more “homely” feel, Josef had fixed Alpine-style varnished pine planks to the ceilings and installed wall lights. He had bought a toilet seat in what he considered to be a cheerful lime green and lined one of the tables in the cellar with brightly coloured adhesive plastic sheeting in a swirling red and orange pattern, probably left over from the redecoration of some part of the house above. He had covered the walls and floor with stone-effect vinyl laminate and tiles. He had given the children some permanent marker pens with which to draw pictures on the walls.
But nothing he could do managed to convert this dank, windowless space into a normal household. No matter how hard he tried to dress up the cellar with toys or new furniture, within days these objects would start to show evidence of decay. “The stink of the cellar,” the governor of Amstetten County would someday say, “a smell that I could never forget”: a fertile, fetid odour that would attach itself to your clothes and permeate them even after they were washed. In the cellar the mold would burrow deep into the mattresses and wooden furniture and play havoc with the television and the lights, which continued also to be subject to the occasional failure of the main electricity, when the cellar would be unexpectedly plunged into darkness for days. In its new, expanded form the cellar had an area of about 55 square metres (592 square feet). The ceiling height, which was just 1.7 metres in the “old cellar,” increased slightly to almost 1.8 metres, but Josef and Elisabeth, and later Stefan and Kerstin, would still have had to move about all the rooms in a perpetual stoop.
Nevertheless, the mood in the cellar had been buoyant, if you believe Josef. Elisabeth and Kerstin were later said by their father to have been “thrilled” at the thought of these new rooms: the luxury of all that extra space, warm running water for the first time. Elisabeth was thrilled at the idea of taking a normal shower. Only Stefan was left untouched by the sudden feeling of general optimism. Stefan was frightened. At first there was nothing anybody could do to persuade Stefan to enter the new rooms. He wouldn’t budge. He was terrified by all this new space and activity. It was overwhelming for a four-year-old whose entire world until then had been contained within four walls.
Elisabeth would note the heights and weights of the children as they grew older, as well as all their health problems. They were constantly ill. One or the other always had flu or toothache or a cold, or had symptoms resembling mild epilepsy. One of the reasons that Elisabeth had felt relieved when Lisa and Monika had been taken upstairs was because of the persistent health problems of the two girls. Almost immediately after she had been released from the cellar, Lisa was diagnosed with a heart condition and underwent surgery. Elisabeth was still very afraid for her little girl. She knew she would fight; she had proved capable of it when she was born. She wished she could be by her side and help her. She missed her terribly and thanked God they noticed the condition right away. She was going almost mad at the thought that something could go wrong.... She prayed and thought only of Lisa.
Lisa had recovered, but life continued to be frightening and precarious for Kerstin and Stefan. When they were ill Josef would bring down aspirin and cough medicine—that was as much of a concession as he was prepared to make. On special occasions, “to cheer everybody up,” he would do Elisabeth the “favour” of bringing Lisa downstairs. This was until Lisa started speaking. So from then on it was only Monika who would, every now and again, be carried down into the cellar by her father, to be babysat by Elisabeth if he was busy with work. But in time even these much-anticipated visits were terminated. It was too upsetting for Kerstin and Stefan to be confronted by this evidence of the other life. And it had been Elisabeth who had eventually asked Josef not to bring the babies anymore. It was too painful for the older children to watch their siblings disappear upstairs where they had never been and would nev
er be permitted to go.
For the first ten years the cellar had been chaos, but its expansion in late 1993 and early 1994—as well as the furniture and labor-saving electrical devices that were now installed—had in some ways ushered in a new era in the life of Elisabeth and her children. It was still moldy, the air was foul, and it was a full-time job just cleaning the place. But gone were the utter confusion and uncertainty of previous years; in their place was some semblance of order and routine.
And there was television. Perpetual day in the perpetual night of the cellar. The television in the cellar was often constantly on—when it was working—which is why it would be wrong to assume that, living in the cellar as they did, Elisabeth and her children were living in ignorance of the things that were going on above their heads: the everyday things, as well as the momentous events and innovations of the age. They watched them all on television, of course. Every day in the cellar there would be the things that happened in the cellar and then there would be the things that happened on TV—besides Josef, their only real source of information. They were often glued to the set. Nature documentaries were their favourites; the children knew what grass and sunshine and rain looked like, though they wouldn‘t, for many years, know what they felt like or how they smelled or tasted. The television gave them a rich participatory life. A very painful reminder, every day, of how things might have been. In fact, Elisabeth and her children would have been acutely aware of how things were in the life above. They needed the information. Sometimes Josef would join them down in the cellar to watch the evening news and, Elisabeth would later tell the prosecution team, whenever a story of drug abuse came on, Josef would turn to her and say, “Look, that could have been you.”
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