She knew that he would do almost anything to save Kerstin, if only because it had been part of his plan that she should be integrated into his life upstairs as some sort of maid. Fritzl was always complaining that doing the shopping was a burden. It would have been far more convenient for him if the downstairs family were brought upstairs—he’d have more people under his control.
Among other things, Josef had spent the week taking legal advice. He had explained to Elisabeth that there was no point in her resurfacing until he had arranged for a lawyer to sit with her during her questioning by the police. His plan was to convince a lawyer of the story of the cult and how he had managed to “buy off” the leaders of the cult his daughter had supposedly disappeared into and have him protect her from any legal consequences of having abandoned her, in one case possibly terminally ill, children. He intended to brief the lawyer not to allow Elisabeth to be questioned by police on her own, in order that she would not be pressured by investigators into revealing the true story of her long absence. Elisabeth was to say nothing if she didn’t want to endanger the children. Fritzl had threatened to kill all the family before, and he constantly reminded Elisabeth of the horror the media would put them through if it all came out in the open.
Just before midnight on the same Friday, Josef returned to the cellar with a change of clothing for Elisabeth, Stefan, and Felix: a pair of Levi’s jeans, slightly scuffed at the left knee, a gray T-shirt, and a black sweater for Elisabeth; a pair of pleated dark-blue trousers and a T-shirt bearing the Austrian flag for Stefan; and a light-blue T-shirt, matching sweater, and gray tracksuit trousers with an orange stripe for Felix.
It is not difficult to see how the story of Kerstin’s sudden appearance, her life-threatening illness, and the desperate attempt to track down her mother had fired the imagination of the media. And it is a measure of how very far most people were from guessing the true facts of the case, not to mention how susceptible even reporters were to the story of the “cult,” that, while Fritzl moved between the upper floors of the house and the cellar, ORF’s sister channel ORF2 had, a few hours before Josef had gone down to the cellar with the fresh laundry, circulated a press release to newspapers about a documentary that was scheduled to be screened on Monday in which it was hypothesized that Elisabeth had been living in a “sect” in which “only female children are tolerated.”
Nor is it difficult to understand that, with Kerstin’s condition so grave, the adult children of the Fritzls now began to rally around their parents. They were in and out of the house and making regular visits to the hospital.
What is, however, almost impossible to imagine is how, late on the same Friday evening, once Elisabeth and the children had changed into the clean clothes that Josef had brought down to the cellar, they had followed him, first through the two electronically secured doors of the “dungeon,” then through the hole in the wall that he had hidden behind a shelf unit in his workshop, through many doors, up the staircase that led into the little courtyard at the center of the house, and eventually into number 40 itself, where they would, the next day, either be reunited with, or meet for the first time, the children who had grown up in number 40. They were taken to a room upstairs at about midnight. The next day they were introduced to the other kids and the rest of the family. It was all strangely normal, and then they went off to the hospital. All the while, unaware of this significant breakthrough in the case, the police continued to chase clues to their possible whereabouts.
It was only the next day at 4 P.M., exactly a week after paramedics had rushed Kerstin Fritzl to the hospital, that Josef Fritzl finally called Dr. Reiter on his mobile with the news that his daughter had “returned.” And the two detectives from the homicide department, having been alerted by Reiter, finally made an arrest. Fritzl and Reiter agreed that they would meet that evening in intensive care at 8 P.M. and that Fritzl would be accompanied by Elisabeth. Having driven the four hours back from a conference in Carinthia, Dr. Reiter was waiting for them upstairs in the unit and, from the window in Kerstin’s room that looked out onto the hospital’s parking lot, he saw Fritzl’s black Mercedes turn in from the main road and a woman he correctly assumed to be Elisabeth get out of the passenger seat as her father emerged from the other side of the car. Everyone who caught sight of Elisabeth saw a “distressed,” “troubled” woman who resembled the picture they had in their heads of a person who had spent a lifetime in a commune. Josef Fritzl looked as calm, concerned, and neatly dressed as ever. He and Elisabeth spent several minutes in Kerstin’s room, but doctors were disappointed when neither of them was able to shed any further light on the cause of Kerstin’s condition. Toward 9 P.M. father and daughter finally made their way downstairs toward the hospital’s exit. But they never got as far as the parking lot. Tipped off by the doctors, the two detectives were waiting for them in the lobby. Some time between 8:30 and 9 P.M., Elisabeth Fritzl was apprehended.
The interrogation rooms of the Amstetten police station are a simply furnished, pared-down affair. In a town of just twenty thousand predominantly law-abiding citizens, they can stand empty for days and, when occupied, are used for questioning petty criminals. It was now left to the two detectives to interrogate their two suspects by themselves, a job that, with their very limited experience in the field of abduction and incest, they might well have not managed to do. To all intents and purposes this was a missing-person case and, with the return of Elisabeth, it seemed to have been more or less solved.
The details of the police interviews are sketchy. Having first decided to separate father and daughter, the detectives set about interrogating Elisabeth. The interview began between 9 and 10 P.M., and for three hours she repeated the oft-rehearsed story of the cult and how, overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood, she had left it to her parents to raise her children. But either because her explanations proved to be too vague to satisfy, or because the inspectors felt that Elisabeth could not have acted as she did without the help of other “cult members,” they began to needle her. Did she realize that she was facing some very serious charges? That her daughter could now die as a result of her negligence, and that, if this should occur, Elisabeth could be charged with manslaughter? When this didn’t seem to move the suspect, one of the detectives now decided to risk bluffing her into a confession. Picking up the phone in front of her, he now started dialing a number. “Well, if you’re not going to tell us anything,” he said, “we’re going to be forced to call social services. Because your children are going to be put into care.”
It was to be a decisive point in the case. At around midnight Elisabeth, fearing that her children would be taken away from her, requested her right to make a phone call. She wasn’t sure what to do. She was terrified of saying anything, but the threat of losing her children seemed to have made her reconsider. A few minutes later, she finally agreed to talk, but only on the condition that her children would stay with her and that they would never have to face her father again. Ulrike, speaking to her sister for the first time in twenty-four years, could not believe what she was hearing. After their brief conversation Elisabeth then turned to the detectives and agreed to talk. She finally told her interrogators the full facts of the case, and spoke for almost an hour uninterrupted.
At 11:15 P.M. Josef Fritzl, who was waiting in a neighbouring room, was arrested. A junior officer was dispatched to notify Dr. Reiter, and Chief Inspector Leopold Etz was telephoned at his house in the Austrian countryside with news of the breakthrough. Etz would arrive at the Amstetten police station midway through Josef Fritzl’s interrogation. He would later describe Fritzl as “a polite and eloquent man, definitely an educated one. He was calm and composed and admitted to what had happened but tried to present the events very subjectively, in a positive light.” It would be Etz who arrived at 40 Ybbsstrasse that evening and discovered Stefan and Felix in two of the bedrooms. Having been wrapped in blankets, they were taken to the Mauer hospital in a white Volkswagen police van.
The next day, a Sunday, the police finally got their DNA sample.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Mostly Resolved”
The first reporters began to arrive early on Sunday morning. By midday Ybbsstrasse—never the prettiest road in Amstetten—was beginning to resemble a trailer park, except that the vans camped around number 40 had huge satellite dishes on their roofs and reporters were standing in front of them, barking urgent communications into their cameras. One after another the journalists first rang the doorbell, then, satisfied that the house was indeed empty of any Fritzls, went around to the back in what would prove to be frustrated attempts to get into the garden, which was now under the close guard of a team of uniformed police. Behind them, coming in and out of the garage, were more men, white-suited forensics experts, carrying objects unidentifiable to the media out of the house and into yet more vans.
Although the Amstetten authorities had prepared themselves, in a meeting convened at dawn that included, among others, the head of the police and of the social services, for something of a “media storm,” they hadn’t quite envisaged the enduring fascination the breaking news story would hold for the public, not just in Austria, but all over the world. Nor had they anticipated the lengths to which the press, especially some of the foreign publications, would be prepared to go to get their story. Already one of the German tabloids had chartered a helicopter that now intermittently buzzed overhead, as the photographer inside it craned his neck to get aerial shots of the house. His colleagues on the ground, meanwhile, were busy persuading neighbours of the Fritzls whose houses afforded a view onto number 40 to allow them access to their homes. Others raced to be the first to track down and sign up for exclusive newspaper interviews the Fritzls’ current and former lodgers, many of whom would now claim that they had seen Josef Fritzl carrying bags of groceries into the cellar and had heard “strange sounds” or “knocking” emanating from the lower regions of the house, which their landlord had explained away as “the noise of the downstairs boiler.”
Already some of the tabloid hacks had raided the Fritzls’ letter-box, extracting from it, among other items of interest—phone bills, credit-card statements—a postcard that Rosemarie had sent home on the last day of her vacation in Italy, a few hours before her husband had summoned her back to Amstetten. Proof, the Daily Mail later claimed when the postcard found its way onto the pages of the U.K. newspaper, that “the dungeon fiend Fritzl” had sneaked his daughter out of the cellar without his wife’s knowledge: Dear Family, Rosemarie had written, I am having a lovely holiday. Although I’m on my feet all the time, I fall into bed dead tired. I’ll soon be home. Your Mama.
Today there was no trace of Rosemarie at the house. She had long since fled and was being looked after—along with Elisabeth and her children—in the Amstetten-Mauer Clinic, a psychiatric and medical facility, not five miles away, also now fenced off from the public by a large police presence. And, frustrated by the absence of any photographs of the suspected perpetrator, his wife, or any of his alleged victims, some reporters were, as a substitute, filing to their newsrooms their thoughts on “what Elisabeth would look like now”: The resulting images would show a woman of indeterminate age with no teeth and a shock of white hair. Early on, the press were almost unanimously referring in their reports to number 40 as “the House of Horrors,” the same phrase that had, in previous years, been employed with the same hysterical zeal to describe almost every other house in which there had been uncovered a grisly secret of some kind: 4 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, the home of Fred and Rose West; 924 North 25th Street, Milwaukee, the apartment of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer; and 23 Cranley Gardens, north London, where Dennis Nilsen had dismembered his victims. Most people agreed, however, that the prolonged cruelty of Josef Fritzl’s incarceration of his daughter in the cellar somehow seemed to overshadow even these horrific crimes.
At the center of this tumult the old house stood “tomblike,” according to a newspaper, its curtains drawn. The only thing that could be seen from outside were children’s drawings displayed in the upper windows: innocent pictures of stars and rainbows that would be eerily echoed the next day, when police released the first photographs of the cellar, by the cartoons that Kerstin, Stefan, and Felix had drawn on the walls of their squalid underground “bathroom.”
If the police were initially tight-lipped about the case, this was because, to some extent, they still weren’t exactly sure what they were dealing with. It was only when, some time toward noon the same day, Josef Fritzl had given investigators the electronic passwords to the two remote-control doors at the entrance to the “dungeon” that the terrible reality of the case began to make itself felt.
The forensic team entered the cellar on Sunday afternoon, together with Chief Inspector Leopold Etz and other investigating officers. Already, at the entrance to the courtyard, they had seized a plastic bag containing four mismatching socks, two pairs of tights, a wash-cloth, two women’s smocks, a T-shirt, and a sanitary napkin. Once down in Fritzl’s workshop they would discover a rifle and six packs of ammunition, an expired passport in the name of Josef Fritzl, and two remote-control devices with their delivery receipt and instructions for use.
Then it was through the small hole, eighty-three centimetres high, in the workshop wall that Josef Fritzl had obscured behind a shelf unit. On the floor was a plastic drinking straw. The space was so narrow that the investigating team were forced to crawl in, one after another, to the first heavy door, through to the padded corridor, where a pair of children’s trousers lay crumpled on the floor next to a cardboard box. Next they came to the second door and, using the code and instructions that Fritzl had finally reluctantly given them, they now entered the “dungeon” proper, where the walls were wet with condensation and the air so foul that it was immediately decided that they would work in three-hour shifts. The following items were confiscated from the scene:
From a shelf in the “laundry room”:• fifteen annotated diaries
• a yellow folder covered in stickers
• another folder containing letters
• newspaper clippings
From the floor next to the washing machine: a packet of ten Rohypnol tablets, the “date rape drug.”
From the children’s bedroom: four blankets, a journal in which had been written various birthdays, a receipt from the Metro supermarket in Linz that inspectors had found pinned to the wall, and two videotapes, one of which was marked “Private!”
The contents of the yellow folder and the innocuous-looking cardboard box were to prove the most disturbing. Among the items in the folder was a Christmas card bearing Felix’s handprints and footprints; a photograph of an unknown child; a handwritten description of Felix’s symptoms during an illness in September 1997; a debit card bearing the name Elisabeth Fritzl; a copy of the note sent from Amstetten Council confirming the fostering of Alexander Fritzl; a letter, dating from 1995 and sent to the Fritzls by the producer working at the German television station RTL, that outlined a planned documentary about Elisabeth’s disappearance; a clear plastic folder containing one of Elisabeth’s own end-of-term reports, dating from the 1980s; two newspaper articles, including one that outlined the risks of heart operations on young children; a handwritten note discussing the notions of “Good and Evil”; an astrological profile of Elisabeth Fritzl; and a red paper heart in the center of which was a passport picture of Alexander Fritzl.
The contents of the cardboard box were even more sinister. It held two pairs of handcuffs, a leather whip, two colour photographs of an unknown girl sitting naked in one of the bathtubs of the apartment block, five black-and-white photographs of naked women on a beach, a Billyboy condom, a sex toy, a typewritten story titled “The St. Bernard” that described a young widow’s sexual relations with a dog, a ten-page sadomasochistic questionnaire headed “Imaginary Conversation between a Whore and a Slave,” and the photocopied contents of a diary of a young woman who, it would later be established, had been
a tenant at Ybbsstrasse between 1989 and 1991; Josef Fritzl must have secretly entered her apartment to obtain the diary, photocopied it, and then replaced it without anyone having noticed, she later told detectives.
The things that the police found in the cellar on the morning of Sunday, April 27, were to make up just a small sample of the horrific and abundantly incriminating physical evidence that would be discovered at number 40 over the coming weeks. But when Josef Fritzl was later questioned about the meaning of these objects by the state prosecutor, Christiane Burkheiser, he would continue to appear calm, even jaunty, for a man at the center of such serious allegations, taking every opportunity to wave away or minimize their significance. Asked about the purpose of the handcuffs, he would say, “I bought the handcuffs some time ago in a flea market. I can no longer remember why exactly. I never used handcuffs with Elisabeth.” He added that he and his daughter had never played what he referred to as “tying-up games.” Josef Fritzl was a man who would always gloss over even his cruel- est behavior. Far from rendering him more convincing, however, the transparency of the lies he would repeatedly tell the police and state prosecutor over the coming weeks about the evidence collected in Ybbsstrasse made it difficult for his interlocutors to understand why anybody had ever believed a word he’d said.
Toward late afternoon on Sunday, Colonel Franz Polzer, the head of Lower Austria’s Criminal Police, Etz’s superior by several ranks, held an impromptu press conference outside the house in Ybbsstrasse. A youthful-looking man in his fifties, Polzer had made a name for himself when he led an investigation into the so-called wine scandal of 1985 in which hundreds of gallons of Austrian wine were found to have been adulterated with antifreeze. Now he outlined the bare facts of the Fritzl case for the benefit of the huddle of expectant journalists: “Josef F” had kept his daughter in his cellar for twenty-four years, and she had borne him several children; “Herr F” had ruled his family with “an iron fist”; and the cellar had been “off-limits” for the rest of the family.
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