I'm No Monster

by Stefanie Marsh

  An hour and a half passed. Josef then made the call to emergency services, which was relayed to an ambulance team of three paramedics at exactly 7:56 A.M. They arrived outside number 40, together with a doctor, less than ten minutes later. Josef answered the door and led them through the house and into his apartment on the second floor of the extension, where Kerstin was now lying pale, injured, and unconscious, in white trousers, a torn or lacerated orange pajama top, and a pair of red socks. Although the emergency doctor was not able to diagnose her condition, it was clear from their preliminary examination that even with medical intervention, Kerstin might not survive. While the paramedics lifted Kerstin onto a stretcher, Josef repeated what he had earlier told the operator over the phone, namely that “I found her on the doorstep. I’ve never seen her before.” One of the paramedics, Dr. Reiter’s son, would later that day share with his father the “strange feeling” he had about the practically furnitureless room where Kerstin had lain.

  Although it was suggested to Josef that he travel in the ambulance to the hospital, he declined and suggested that it would make more sense for him to follow in his car. And the reason why it would take him twenty minutes longer than it did the paramedics to reach the intensive care unit of Amstetten Hospital was that Josef had taken the opportunity to descend to the cellar again, where he had quickly made Elisabeth write one final letter, a brief note in which she described her daughter’s symptoms over the previous forty-eight hours. She also alluded in the letter to the existence of Stefan and Felix and the fact that they were still in her care. It ended with the words: “Kerstin, please hold on until we see each other again! We’ll be there soon!”

  Armed with the letter and leaving Stefan, Felix, and Elisabeth underground, Josef set off in his old black Mercedes through the still sleepy streets of Amstetten, south toward the hospital.

  Throughout the long years of imprisonment, Josef had come to employ, as one of the most effective methods of manipulating Elisabeth, death threats against their children. He had shown no compunction about using the children as weapons against her—indeed, he had made it clear that he would rather “kill you all” than risk exposing his secret—and this had the effect that, by the time of Kerstin’s illness, Elisabeth and her children had become unquestioningly submissive to their father. Even she would later admit that she had returned to the cellar voluntarily. And, as far as Josef was concerned, there was no danger that either Elisabeth or Kerstin, should she recover, would divulge to anyone the real reason behind their long absence from Amstetten. He was also confident enough in his own ability to convince the authorities of just about anything he chose to tell them that it never crossed his mind that the hospitalization of Kerstin would be the first step in a dramatic, almost farcical, unraveling of his double life.

  So it was a noticeably calm Josef Fritzl who walked into Amstetten Hospital’s reception area around 8:20 that Saturday morning, and who was summoned upstairs into intensive care to have a “private chat” in the office of Dr. Reiter about the exact circumstances surrounding Kerstin’s sudden appearance. Kerstin’s condition, Dr. Reiter would take pains to emphasize to her “grandfather” a few minutes later when he first walked Fritzl over to his department where Kerstin now lay in an artificially induced coma hooked up to a life-support machine, was “hanging in the balance.” The smallest scrap of information “could save her life.” Once the two men had seated themselves in Reiter’s office, it seems that Josef saw in the doctor’s concern for Kerstin an opportunity to manipulate the situation for his own ends. He had lied his way out of potentially dangerous situations often enough. If earlier that day he had been worried about the possible consequences of taking his daughter out of the cellar for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, these doubts were now rapidly fading. In their place was the old confidence he had employed many times over the years when dealing with the unsuspecting Amstetten authorities. Josef judged that the moment was right to produce Elisabeth’s handwritten note, which he now told the doctor he had found on Kerstin’s body.

  Focused as he was on trying to gather together any clues that might save Kerstin’s life, Reiter would only later remember becoming vaguely aware of another feeling creeping up inside him as he sat alone with Josef Fritzl around the small coffee table in his office. Reiter had instinctively felt “puzzled” by the notion that any mother of a perhaps terminally ill girl would abandon her daughter on her father’s doorstep. It seemed a counterintuitive thing for a parent to do, something he’d never witnessed before in all his thirty-odd years as a doctor. But such “gut feelings” remained, for now, secondary considerations. And, fully taken in by Fritzl’s “grandfatherly concern,” Reiter proceeded in their ten-minute talk to extract from Kerstin’s “grandfather” any information that could possibly lead to either a treatment or a diagnosis. It would take another three days before the gnawing feeling in Reiter’s gut would compel him to question with any seriousness the validity of the story of the cult.

  A hundred miles away, in the former military barracks in Vienna’s Rennweg that now functioned as the headquarters of Lower Austria’s Criminal Police, two middle-ranking detectives attached to the homicide department had been keeping an eye on the case ever since the local police in Amstetten had informed them of what doctors now suspected to be a poisoning case. Convinced that it was their only hope of either rescuing Kerstin or uncovering the mysterious circumstances in which she had been found, Reiter had agreed with the inspectors, and with Christiane Burkheiser, the state prosecutor who happened to be on duty at the time, that an appeal for Elisabeth’s return to Amstetten would be made through the media. By midafternoon on Monday, April 21, two days after Kerstin had been rushed to the hospital, a public appeal for Elisabeth’s return was made on local radio. On the same day, the police issued a warrant for her arrest under Code 21. She was suspected of grievous bodily harm through neglect, abusing or neglecting a minor or defenseless person, and abandoning an injured person.

  One of the thousands of people who heard the appeal was Otto Stangl, a television reporter living in St. Pöllen who worked for the national television channel, ORF. Once he had confirmed the story with Dr. Reiter by telephone, it was decided that Stangl would put together a news story on the events of the morning, which would include a piece on camera from the doctor. Stangl, hoping to interview other members of Kerstin’s family for his report, now called the Amstetten police station for any contact numbers. He got through to Josef Fritzl on his mobile phone at exactly 11:54 A.M. the same day and asked Kerstin’s “grandfather” whether he would be prepared to make a public statement. “I was in the studio and asked him if he would give us an interview so we could help find his daughter,” says Stangl. “He wasn’t at all confused or withdrawn as, with hindsight, one might have expected. It never occurred to me that he might have been hiding something. He was completely normal, but very articulate. Nothing about what he said seemed remotely suspicious.”

  Fritzl seemed forthcoming enough at the beginning of their conversation, and Stangl still has the notebook in which he wrote down fragments of what Fritzl told him:“Herr Stangl, how do you think we feel? We’ve tried everything.

  I’ve looked all over the country for her. You wouldn’t believe what we’ve been through.“

  “There’s a rumour that she was living in Upper Austria.”

  “. . . I don’t know what to do because I’m not sure it should be made so public . . . I mean, we have seven children.”

  “She left her babies with us and from time to time a letter would appear. I’m already 73 years old. We’re completely desperate. Nobody understands this situation. We’re immensely grateful for any leads.”

  But when Stangl asked him whether he would be prepared to appear on television, Fritzl began to hesitate.

  “He then said he didn’t want to go on camera, and I told him he could think about it and that I would call him again once we’d arrived in Amstetten. Before he rang off he said, and, k
nowing what I know now, I find this particularly cynical, ‘Please make an appeal for Elisabeth. For me.’”

  Stangl and his cameraman then headed for Amstetten Hospital in the car.

  In another car, another man was driving to the same hospital, equally baffled by the events of the past three days. He was on his way there to pick up from Dr. Reiter the letter that Josef Fritzl had discovered on Kerstin’s body, and he spent the half-mile journey pondering the clues laid before him. At least one other of the letters that the Fritzls had received from their daughter over the years had already been verified by a graphologist as having been written by Elisabeth. Amstetten social services had copies of some of these letters, and one of the detectives had been able to cast an eye over them himself after Hans-Heinz Lenze, the district governor, who also functioned as the head of Amstetten’s social services, had passed on to the police the caseworker’s file. Meanwhile a further conversation between Josef Fritzl and the police had revealed that as recently as February, Elisabeth had written a letter to her parents in which she had conveyed her desire to return to Amstetten. That letter had borne a Kematen postmark, a fact that had confused the detective who had seen it; Kematen was a town just eight miles down the road from Amstetten and, although he wasn’t to make the connection until long after the case was “solved,” it was where Josef Fritzl had spent the best part of the past five months doing up the block of apartments that he had bought there in November 2007.

  Having picked up from Dr. Reiter the note that Josef Fritzl had found on Kerstin’s body, the two police detectives from the homicide department now determined to put all the letters under the nose of a different kind of expert. By midafternoon they were on the phone to Dr. Manfred Wohlfahrt, the Catholic Church’s local diocese’s expert on cults and fringe religious groups.

  Wohlfahrt, a veteran in all matters concerning sects and communes, had occupied his position in St. Pölten Diocese since 1980, four years before Elisabeth Fritzl had disappeared. But he had never been consulted about the Fritzl case before Kerstin’s hospitalization, even though he was a resident of Amstetten and actually lived close to both the Fritzls’ house and the police station. Late on Monday afternoon he, too, arrived in Amstetten. In front of the detectives he examined the evidence.

  “The handwriting was plain and her style was very simple, though grammatically correct,” he remembers. “I can’t remember noticing any grammar or spelling mistakes. But there was nothing in the content or the style of this letter that indicated any connection with a cult. The ‘cult’ wasn’t even mentioned, and so I immediately assumed that the whole idea that Elisabeth had joined a cult must have derived from what her father had already told the authorities. There wasn’t a single reference to this woman’s life or whereabouts and everything about it was very vague.

  “Normally people who live in cults make numerous references to their religious beliefs, for example, or their way of life—anything that’s important to them. And the writing was far too plain, formal even, too colourless, and I said that it didn’t appear remotely authentic, and that it resembled something that had been dictated. I told the officers that they should really start turning their attention to Elisabeth’s family, to the environment she grew up in. And that they should try and talk with the father about the reasons she ran away. Of course, I never suspected the real truth about her father’s involvement. But, in the majority of cases where a young person leaves home to join a religious group, the first question that needs to be asked is: Why did they run away in the first place? More often than not it’s because of whatever has been going on in the family.”

  Wohlfart then began to cast further doubt on the “cult” story. He pointed out that there were only a handful of cults and smaller religious groups in existence at the time of Elisabeth’s disappearance: Otto Mühl’s commune, the Moon Cult, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Adventists, Scientologists, Hari Krishna, and the Children of God, plus various evangelical fringe groups. “However, none of them have been known to actually make people disappear. And it would be very untypical for any of these groups to send away children born in their community. On the contrary, they would be more inclined to keep and raise the children according to their religious beliefs or doctrine.” As the detectives from the homicide department listened, their suspicions began to shift for the first time from Elisabeth to her respectable-seeming and elderly father. Another telephone call to Reiter elicited the doctor’s “gut feeling” about Josef Fritzl’s “abandoned grandchildren” story, as well as his paramedic son’s thoughts on the “strange” room at number 40 in which Kerstin had been found unconscious.

  While the police and the doctors endeavoured to untangle the clues laid before them, outside on the streets of Amstetten, Otto Stangl and his cameraman were busy interviewing some of the neighbours of the Fritzls to bulk up their news story. Over and over they heard the story of the cult and the missing Elisabeth and the strain that the three foundlings had put on their grandparents. By 5 P.M. they had gathered enough material and were editing it down in time to be broadcast that evening. Stangl had been unable to persuade Fritzl to be interviewed. But Stangl had managed to interview Dr. Reiter, and about a minute of this interview was included in the report. Looking straight into the camera with an expression of unmistakable seriousness, Dr. Reiter says: “I would like the mother to contact us. We will treat any contact with discretion and we will probably get a step further with our diagnosis and treatment.” The report was screened on ORF that evening between 7 and 8 P.M.

  Monday evening: Elisabeth Fritzl and her sons Stefan and Felix had now spent three days in the cellar without Kerstin, unaware of what was going on above their heads, frantic with worry about the fate of Kerstin and the nonappearance of their father in the cellar. Because of the increased police presence in the house—inspectors were now making regular calls at number 40—Josef had been hard-pressed to find the time to go down there. In addition, Rosemarie had by this stage rushed back from Italy and she was at home most of the day, save for a couple of hours when she visited Kerstin in the hospital. And other family members had started arriving at number 40, among them Elisabeth’s eldest sister, Ulrike. Beneath them, Elisabeth, Stefan, and Felix waited.

  As had become normal in the cellar, the television was on almost constantly. By chance Elisabeth and her children had been watching ORF when Stangl’s news story was aired. Now they watched in terror as a doctor they had never seen before appealed in the strongest terms for the return of Kerstin’s mother.

  Nobody who knew or came across Josef Fritzl during those few days, or the week that followed, would remark on anything remotely out of the ordinary about his behavior. Only Rosemarie seemed in any way traumatized by the sudden appearance and hospitalization of Kerstin. Shortly after 9 A.M. on Tuesday, April 22, paramedics were once again dispatched to 40 Ybbsstrasse. Rosemarie had called emergency services—all that had been audible to the operator was the sounds of a woman apparently moaning, and it was thought that she had collapsed—and a request was put through to the Amstetten police that they send an officer to the house in case Rosemarie had fallen unconscious and the paramedics needed to force the door. It is unclear what happened in the interim, but it seems that the situation had resolved itself within the ten minutes or so that it took either the police or the ambulance to arrive there. The call was later logged as a “false alarm.”

  Rosemarie’s husband, though, carried on with his building work as calmly and industriously as he ever had done. He was often on the phone to Schrankmaier, who, two weeks earlier, had taken him to see a property in Hölzöster, a lakeside town in the area, which Fritzl was now considering buying. The rest of the time he seemed to be spending driving, with his son Josef, to and fro between Amstetten and Kematen, where father and son continued to renovate the block of apartments that he had bought there the previous November. Wednesday passed without any notable occurrences. On Thursday, however, Fritzl received a telephone call from a police detecti
ve in which he was asked to come down to the station to undergo DNA testing. The police had concluded that a woman with “as many children as Elisabeth” might have conceived them with multiple partners, or even—they had heard that such situations were common in communes—raised another woman’s child as her own. In Elisabeth’s absence they had decided to request DNA samples from both of her parents, hoping thereby to firmly establish that Kerstin was in fact her daughter. Although Josef agreed to the DNA test, he apologized for the fact that, as he would be working all day on the property in Kematen, he wouldn’t be able to find the time to come to the police station. He was simply “too busy with work.” He was equally “busy” the next day, Friday, although he did find time to call Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze to thank him “for all your good work in trying to find Elisabeth.” Lenze reassured him, “Somehow we’ll find her, Herr Fritzl.”

  Late on the evening of Friday, April 25, Josef returned home to Ybbsstrasse. Unbeknownst to his family, the authorities, or indeed anybody else in Amstetten, he had been visiting the cellar at regular intervals during the week with news of Kerstin’s still worsening condition. It had long been his intention to somehow, that year, reintegrate Elisabeth and her children into the house above; he had often discussed the plan with Elisabeth, and it had been with a view to enabling her to make a more convincing show of her eventual “return” to Amstetten that he had, back in February, made her write the letter that he had sent to himself and Rosemarie from Kematen. Elisabeth, mindful of the fact that her father was, as she would later say, incapable of tolerating a situation that did not go exactly according to his plan, seems to have persuaded him that now would be a credible moment for her to “reappear” from the cult.