I'm No Monster

by Stefanie Marsh

  For a few years Josef had done little in the way of investing the capital that had been freed up by the sale of the house at Mondsee, but with the birth of Felix he once again threw himself into frenetic activity. Starting with the purchase in 2002 of a “villa” in Waidhoffnerstrasse, in one of the smarter areas of Amstetten, he now bought four properties in quick succession: In December 2004 he purchased a block of apartments in St. Pöllen, the capital of Lower Austria. Two years after that, on February 6, he would acquire another apartment block, in Waid hofen an der Ybbs, the so-called “town of spires.” And in 2007 he became the owner of another nondescript three-story apartment block in the neighbouring town of Kematen an der Ybbs. Like the house in Ybbsstrasse, all these properties were conspicuously plain buildings on main roads, which Josef would do up with his son Josef and rent to tenants. It is some measure of his persuasiveness that he had, within just five years, persuaded the banks to lend him close to 3.5 million euros.

  And it was no coincidence that his dreams of building a property empire finally began to be realized in the year of Felix’s birth. Sixty-seven by the time the boy was born, Josef would increasingly turn his thoughts to the future. He now began to ponder the fate of his family in the cellar, not, he later admitted, through any late-emerging altruism, but rather because, for the first time in his life, he began to perceive the cellar as a threat. Kerstin was fourteen, Stefan twelve. Soon they would be adults. And Josef would later tell a psychiatrist that he began to feel “frightened” of the “three against one” scenario that he could see developing in the cellar. He worried that sooner or later his children would rise up against him. And the thought that the cellar might one day claim even Josef Fritzl among its victims was at least part of the reason that a plan for his “underground family‘s” eventual evacuation now began to form in his mind.

  Part of his solution was to secure for all of his children an economically viable future; hence the property-buying spree. Later he would often refer to what he had achieved in the cellar as his “realm,” “kingdom,” or “domain,” and it is more than likely that he had similarly acquisitive ambitions in the outside world. Knowing that work, in any normal sense of the word, would be beyond both Kerstin and Stefan, should he ever hope to integrate them in the world above—permanently traumatized, perhaps: They were poorly educated, unused to open spaces, and unlikely to take well to socializing with other people—he assigned them small roles in the house above. While Elisabeth, Josef envisaged, would be his “secretary,” Kerstin could “cook” and Stefan, who had shown himself to have inherited some of his father’s talent for engineering—he was always playing around with his father’s tools—would help with the building work in much the same way that Josef junior had been doing. Felix, however, Josef judged still young and impressionable enough to be “saved.” And there hatched in his mind the idea that his youngest son would now be groomed as his “heir and successor.”

  It was a hugely ambitious if not unachievable plan, although Josef never regarded it as such. He would often sit around the kitchen table with Elisabeth discussing the various options. And she, on numerous occasions, saw him walking about in the cellar talking out loud to himself in a deeply involved way that suggested to her that he had now become completely obsessed with the problem of reuniting the two families. It was agreed between the two of them that at some point in the future, once he had smashed together the rooms of the ground floor in Ybbsstrasse and built from them an apartment for his “downstairs family,” his long-lost daughter and her children would “come back from the cult” to live together with his wife and the three “upstairs” children. Having, from early youth, been instilled with a terror and distrust of authority, Elisabeth went along with it. Late one evening in 1982, during their escape to Vienna, she had shared with Brigitte her reasons for never having reported her father to the police: “I knew this wasn’t the kind of thing that was supposed to be happening in a family. And they’ll never believe me. If it’s a fight between me and him, he’ll always win.” If anything, Elisabeth had become more helplessly subordinated to her father since then. It had never crossed his mind that his “downstairs family” would attempt to expose the lie of the “cult story.” Had it not been for the exceptional circumstances of her “escape,” Elisabeth may well have gone along unquestioningly with her father’s plan, at least until the first chance of escape had presented itself.

  Old age made Josef sentimental. In 2006 he and Rosemarie would celebrate their golden wedding anniversary in their new Amstetten “villa,” and Michaela Bernhard would remember thinking “how sweet” when she came across a photograph of the Fritzls in the local paper, where they were seen being congratulated by the town’s deputy mayor. Josef also became a regular fixture at the Kirchenstrasse school reunions, joining his old friends Karl Dunkl and Friedrich Leimlehner on excursions to historic sites or nature reserves around Austria. By 2005 these “field trips,” organized by Karl, had become so popular among the school’s former pupils that their spouses had been invited along. And in the same year a group of perhaps thirty Amstetten pensioners, including Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl, would hire a bus to make a day trip to the Wachau, a popular tourist destination, equidistant between the towns of Melk and Krems, where Maria Nenning, toward the end of her life, had been sent to live in a nursing home. On their arrival the old teacher, Josef Freihammer, delivered to his former pupils a specially prepared lecture on the history of the many fortresses of the region and some little-known facts about the excellent Rieslings that are produced in the local vineyards. The group visited the Greinburg Castle, which stands on a small hill above the town of Grein and overlooks the River Danube, where they hired a local tour guide and took in the castle’s magnificent Knights’ Hall, its chapel with its baroque altarpiece, and the Diamantgewölbe, or Diamond Vault, whose arched ceiling is pierced with dozens of tiny glass windows. After a light supper at one of the local guesthouses, the group returned, contented, to Amstetten toward late evening. The Fritzls, however, turned down the offer of one last beer at a local pub because their foster children were waiting for them at home and it did not do to leave them alone so long. Still, his friends would later remember Josef as one of the most enthusiastic participants of the reunions. He hadn’t missed a single one of the get-togethers and seemed to genuinely enjoy the company of his old school friends.

  Josef Fritzl was looking nostalgically back over the past, and enthusiastically forward to the future, the desire in him to fuse the two different worlds growing very strong in him now. By 2003 he was down in the cellar almost constantly: in time for the seven o‘clock news, then dinner, more television, and sometimes he would stay the night. They would spend some of Christmas together, a ritual that had begun in the 1990s when Josef had brought down a plastic tree—made in China—and sometimes he brought with him other gifts: teddy bears, a model train for Felix, a toolbox for Stefan, a goldfish, even a budgerigar. He would often talk to Elisabeth about the day he would take them to live upstairs, merging the two “families.” By the autumn of 2007 he had written to tenants of two of the downstairs apartments telling them that he would need them to move out by the end of the year. He told them he needed their apartments for his daughter, who was coming back to live in Amstetten. She was “getting divorced” and bringing her three children to live at number 40. As soon as his tenants had gone, he smashed the two units together with a view to creating an apartment large enough for the imminent arrival of his “downstairs family.”

  At around the same time, he extracted from Elisabeth another letter. He sent it to himself at 40 Ybbsstrasse from Kematen, a town not twenty miles away where he had two properties, and when it arrived a few days later, he opened it and read it out loud in front of Rosemarie and other people. Elisabeth, the letter said, was intending to return home with her children.

  It had been his intention to stage a spectacular “reunion” of the two “families” toward the end of 2008. But when, around the middle of
March 2008, nineteen-year-old Kerstin had, for the first time in her life, become life-threateningly ill, he saw an opportunity to orchestrate Elisabeth’s “miraculous return from the cult.”

  It had begun with Felix. His health had suddenly severely deteriorated. And not long afterward Kerstin, too, became ill. And although Felix gradually recovered, his sister’s health began to seriously falter. She was coughing a lot, feverish, and dropping in and out of consciousness. When, by the beginning of April, she began to suffer fits that seemed to resemble epilepsy, it became clear that hers was not an affliction that could be remedied in the cellar with aspirin. Elisabeth was telling her father that now was the time.

  Josef had successfully carried out the masquerade of “finding” a child abandoned on his doorstep three times. Now he prepared to “discover” a fourth.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER TEN

  Into the Light

  It came as a profound shock to Hubert Schrankmaier when, one sunny morning in late April 2008, his favourite classical music program was interrupted by the news that a man from Amstetten, Lower Austria, had been arrested for having “fathered seven children with the daughter he kept in a cellar for twenty-four years.” Schrankmaier had been driving through the Mostviertel at the time with the radio on and had at first failed to make the connection between the “Herr F” in the breaking news story and the man he had, only three days previously, spoken to at some length about the risk of flooding posed to a house in Amstetten’s Waidhoffnerstrasse by a stream toward the back of its garden.

  A tall, likable, well-spoken man in his early fifties, Schrankmaier had been doing business with Josef Fritzl since 2004. They had first been introduced through a colleague of Schrankmaier’s and had subsequently become business partners, working closely together on the acquisition of a handful of properties in Lower Austria with a view to either developing them or letting them to tenants. Schrankmaier, a surveyor by training, had been involved in the development of the Waidhoffnerstrasse “villa” project, the two-story detached house whose large garden made it an ideal candidate for converting and expanding into apartments, penthouses, and offices. Although the proposed expansion had caused an outcry among the neighbours—fearing that their peaceful residential street would thus be horribly commercialized, they had sought to block the project by sending a petition to the council—it was more or less a foregone conclusion that with Fritzl’s connections, there would be no problem obtaining planning permission. By the time Schrankmaier came to know him, Fritzl was on friendly terms with almost everyone there was to know in the region—certainly all the “important” people—and once, Schrankmaier had been impressed to observe, Fritzl had even been greeted warmly in one of the smart restaurants they would meet in by the district governor, Hans-Heinz Lenze.

  Fritzl, it had become Schrankmaier’s opinion over the course of their acquaintance, was a “solid, totally dependable” person. He was also “one of the most dynamic people I’ve ever met: a great negotiator and fascinated by new technology; anything that was new on the market, he’d know about. And he had a very quick mind. I mean, he could take one look at a plan of a house and immediately grasp its potential. That was his strength: These terrific ideas combined with that rare ability to actually carry them out. In Austria you’d say he has a good ‘handshake quality’: He always stuck to his word. He was so reliable that he wouldn’t borrow a pen without making sure to return it the next day.” Just the other day the seventy-three-year-old Fritzl had said to Schrankmaier, “One thing I can’t imagine is retiring and spending all day on the sofa watching television with a beer in my hand. I’m going to live to be a hundred and twenty.”

  The two men had rapidly become friends of sorts, with Schrankmaier introducing his business partner to the haute cuisine and fine wines of Austria—about which Fritzl had been embarrassed to admit he knew virtually nothing—and Fritzl, in return, sharing his vast knowledge “about just about everything else.” One of the many things that Schrankmaier particularly admired about Fritzl was his capacity for soaking up new information at an age when many people have begun to decline. Often the two of them would set off in the car first thing in the morning to drive around to have a look at some property or other. But no matter how early they met, Fritzl would always have been up since at least 5 A.M., scanning the Internet for news and committing to memory the exchange rates: “how the yen was doing against the Swiss franc, or he’d have checked the share prices of all the local companies. He was always totally clued up.” It was Schrankmaier’s role, as Fritzl’s adviser in such matters, to survey any properties in which his business partner showed an interest, to assess them for future profitability, and to help raise the money to buy them. “We’d always go to two or three banks for loans. It was never a problem to get credit. Herr Fritzl had a good reputation and he would always pay back his loans on time. He would mainly do up the properties himself—with his son, Josef.

  “And I respected him for that. You could tell he was proud of what he had achieved in his life, but he never got lazy. He was a total professional and very ambitious.”

  The first thought that occurred to Schrankmaier as he listened to the revelations about “Herr F” on his car radio was that the newsreader’s normally mellifluous voice had taken on a “starchy and abrupt” tone, as if even she had been shocked by what she was now reading out over the airwaves. And it was only when she went on to report that “the man had previously claimed to police and social services that his daughter had joined a cult” that Schrankmaier’s memory of a conversation he had had with Josef Fritzl on their very first meeting suddenly came into sharp focus. “I remembered him mentioning something about his daughter having gone missing and something to do with a commune. And, to be honest, I sympathized. To me Herr Fritzl always came across as a relaxed, though firm, grandfather. I saw how he was with the children; he had his boundaries, but he was always laughing or amusing them with jokes or wordplay. In a funny way I sort of looked up to him as a role model. I remember thinking: That’s how I want to be when my turn comes around. So to hear this. Well, it was just . . . beyond comprehension.”

  So appalling were the charges that were now being relayed on every radio station in Austria at fifteen-minute intervals that Schrankmaier actually began to feel unwell and was forced to pull over. There was now no doubt in his mind that “Herr F,” as the majority of Austrian media would continue to refer to him for reasons of confidentiality, and Josef Fritzl were one and the same. “I simply couldn’t believe it,” he says. “It didn’t make sense. They were two completely different people: this grotesque person I was hearing about on the radio and the decent, incredibly industrious man I had worked with for four years.” Nevertheless, Schrankmaier couldn’t help but question the veracity of the story. “I was completely convinced that someone had made a mistake or that Herr Fritzl had been, I don’t know, set up in some way—you know, that kind of thing has been known to happen in Austria. Our police service hasn’t the best reputation. And there’s the issue of loyalty. You don’t just drop your friends because of an allegation. You stick by them. I thought, well, they must have made some kind of mistake. By tomorrow it will have all blown over.” Schrankmaier continued the rest of his car journey with the car radio turned off.

  Both the Austrian authorities and the majority of the Fritzls’ tenants and neighbours had spent the past twenty-four years accepting as fact anything Josef Fritzl had chosen to tell them about the story of his missing daughter. And when, on the morning of Saturday, April 19, a week before Schrankmaier had been forced in disgust to turn off his car radio, the “grandfatherly” seventy-three-year-old Josef Fritzl had reported the discovery of a fourth “grandchild”—nineteen-year-old Kerstin—on his doorstep, suspicions once again immediately turned in the direction of Fritzl’s missing daughter, Elisabeth. Indeed, had it not been for Dr. Albert Reiter’s disquiet about the story, and later the common sense of an employee of St. Pöllen Catholic Diocese who was
an expert on religious fringe groups, it is more than likely that Fritzl’s version of events would have simply been accepted as the truth, along with all the other lies that had, over the years, come to define his occupancy of number 40. Given the reluctance of those who knew the Fritzls to question any of the extraordinary and often very public goings-on at the house in Ybbsstrasse, it is not inconceivable that his secret might not have come to light at all.

  Rosemarie Fritzl was vacationing with a friend near Lake Maggiore in Italy when, shortly before dawn on Saturday, April 19, Josef had finally been persuaded to evacuate his now seriously ill daughter, Kerstin, from the cellar. Josef and Elisabeth had carried Kerstin up from the cellar into the house, which was empty of any other adults; only the three “grandchildren”—Lisa, Monika, and Alexander—were at home and still fast asleep in their beds. They continued up the stairs and into the corridor that connected the old house and the new extension, then through this to the apartment block and into Josef’s second-floor apartment, where, at the end of another corridor, Elisabeth and her father now entered his sparsely furnished bedroom and laid Kerstin in his single bed. It was the first time that Elisabeth had been out of the cellar in almost twenty-four years. But, mindful of the effect that her absence would have on Felix and Stefan, she remained in the house for only a few minutes. Having extracted from her father a promise to take Kerstin to a hospital, she was back in the cellar by about 6 A.M.