I'm No Monster

by Stefanie Marsh

  The next day, Monday, Fritzl made a partial confession, and Polzer was able to speak about the accused in more explicit terms. Another press conference was held, this time in a room at Amstetten’s Hotel Excel. Flanking Polzer on a long, rectangular table were Gerhard Sedlacek, the St. Pölten prosecutor’s office spokesman; Hans-Heinz Lenze, the district governor; Dr. Franz Prucher, the security director of Lower Austria; and Dr. Albert Reiter. A photograph of Josef Fritzl was now distributed to the press for the first time. It showed an exhausted-looking elderly man with a graying mustache, dressed entirely in black: a rumpled shirt tucked into trousers from the bottom of which peeped workman’s boots with both laces undone. His thin lips were clamped tightly shut—no more than a line on his strikingly unsymmetrical face—and his hair was disheveled into something that almost resembled a bouffant. Although he stood in an almost apologetic posture, with his hands clasped in front of him, his gaze was unflinching, pragmatic, and, it was said, “cold.” Also disseminated for the first time were two photographs of the dungeon.

  Colonel Polzer declared the case “mostly resolved.” He bridled, however, when a reporter asked him why the police seemed to be excluding the possibility that Rosemarie Fritzl knew about the cellar. “Would any wife accept such a thing if she knew about it?” Polzer had replied. To the further dismay of some of those present, he also described the accused as “extraordinarily sexually potent.” Fritzl, Polzer continued, was “extremely fit and in excellent physical condition,” a man who was known to be a “tyrant” at home, appeared to be unrepentant about what he had done, and had something of a “stately air” about him. A British journalist asked Polzer, “Do the Austrian authorities accept any responsibility for having allowed this crime to go unnoticed for almost a quarter of a century?” But, as was to happen every time the same question was brought up in the future, the authorities either misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted it. “The result of the investigation so far shows that the accused must be seen as a person who acted alone,” Polzer replied. In broken English the district governor, Lenze, later attempted to respond to accusations that the social services had failed in their duty to protect Elisabeth: “I don’t know which fault I have made. I’m really shocked.” In an almost farcical scene that he would subsequently describe to reporters, Lenze had visited Josef Fritzl in Amstetten’s jail, unaware that this was “the same Fritzl” whom he had greeted on the street over the years and who had called him in his office on the previous Friday to thank him for his efforts to find Elisabeth. “Mr. Fritzl, it’s you! I’m appalled,” Lenze had cried out, to which Fritzl had replied, “I’m very, very sorry for my family but it cannot be undone.” “Well, you should have thought about that earlier,” Lenze had shot back.

  Another day passed. The press had unearthed a newspaper report of Josef Fritzl’s conviction for rape, dating from 1967, of which the police had made no mention and the veracity of which they now refused to confirm or deny. The same day, Fritzl’s DNA test came in. It showed that he was indeed the father of Kerstin, Stefan, Lisa, Monika, Alexander, and Felix. Polzer gave another statement in which he reiterated the police’s belief that Rosemarie Fritzl could not have been involved in her husband’s crime, despite the fact that she had only been interviewed once, and only informally. “It defies logical thought to believe that a woman who had seven children with her husband would make it possible for him to have another relationship and father a further seven children with her daughter,” he said. Because Rosemarie was in a fragile condition, the police decided against questioning her in any more depth. By the summer of 2008 Rosemarie Fritzl had apparently still not been questioned again. And records available don’t suggest she ever was.

  On the evening of Tuesday, April 29, the people of Amstetten held a candlelit vigil for the victims of the cellar. Although Kerstin’s condition remained precarious, the “two families” now being looked after in the Amstetten-Mauer Clinic were said by doctors to be bonding “remarkably quickly.” It was also announced that the children had received an aquarium and some of their favourite stuffed toys from the cellar.

  There remained the matter of appointing for Elisabeth and her children a legal representative. This was a decision that lay in the hands of Erwin Pröll, the governor of Lower Austria, whose name would be mentioned some months later in an article in the German magazine Spiegel, which revealed that Fritzl had hoped that the governor would help him fast-track Alexander’s Austrian citizenship because the family wanted to go on a vacation abroad. It’s not clear whether Pröll ever intervened on the matter. But he now made the controversial decision to appoint Dr. Christoph Herbst, a corporate lawyer with no significant experience in criminal law, as Elisabeth Fritzl’s legal representative. Herbst and Pröll were said to be close, and Pröll had personally asked his friend to take on the case. When Herbst declined, Pröll had insisted. But the only public condemnation in Austria of Herbst’s appointment came from a women’s group who argued that, as a corporate lawyer, Herbst was not a suitable candidate to represent the alleged victim of abduction, multiple rape, and incest. To appease public opinion, a second lawyer, Eva Plaz, was assigned to the case. Plaz had spent her career deeply involved in cases of abuse of women. Herbst, however, remained in charge of the day-to-day running of the case, and he would show no inclination to investigate the role of the authorities in his client’s ordeal. Despite demands, mainly from the foreign press, for a public inquiry, there was no backing from Herbst, although there might have been very good grounds to argue that, for example, the social services department had exhibited naivete or even negligence in its handling of the Fritzls’ many fosterings. Austria’s oft-quoted stringent privacy laws and its press’s reluctance to do any digging of their own ensured that the case files on the fosterings and adoption would appear only much later, published not in Austria, but Germany. The revelations caused not a ripple of outrage in Austria.

  Meanwhile Josef Fritzl had chosen as his lawyer a certain Rudolf Mayer, a veteran presence at Austria’s most outlandish criminal cases, who liked to plaster the walls of his ramshackle Vienna office with press cuttings of his past career triumphs: his successful defense of an alleged neo-Nazi charged with sending letter bombs, as well as a man suspected of having been involved in the murder of a Georgian mafia boss. But some of Mayer’s most prominent clients, such as the “Black Widow,” Elfriede Blauensteiner, a serial poisoner, had received lengthy sentences.

  Mayer wasted no time in announcing to the media that his client had heard about him “from TV” and that Fritzl was a “shattered and emotionally broken man” who had spent the past twenty-four years torn apart by feelings of guilt. Mayer advised Fritzl to say nothing when he was questioned on April 29 by a remand judge, Claudia Matzka-Löschenberger. Fritzl did as his lawyer told him, opening his mouth only to admit that, forty years earlier, he had been convicted for rape. Later that day he would be transferred to a cell in the Lower Austrian capital, St. Pölten, where the police confiscated from his person one key, a notepad, a mobile phone, and a wallet containing three bank cards, a Metro supermarket “loyalty card,” and a family-discount rail pass.

  The picture that investigators were beginning to assemble of Josef Fritzl showed him to be very far from the guilt-ridden personality described by Mayer. Having searched the cellars of all of Fritzl’s other properties and found nothing of significance, they had experienced better luck in the upper stories of the house in Ybbsstrasse, notably in Fritzl’s office on the second floor of the extension. There they had seized a second gun—a 22-mm Bernadelli pistol—a firearms licence, a small bag containing five bullets, a voice recorder—possibly the one used years before to play a recorded message on the telephone to Rosemarie—two desktop computers, Josef Fritzl’s current passport, a contract for an “erection enhancing product” from an online company specializing in sex aids, and another cardboard box, this one green.

  The police were used to watching detective series in which stalk ers, murdere
rs, or sex offenders would keep files of press cuttings on their victims, but it was very rare to come across a criminal doing so in real life. Nevertheless, it was about to become clear that, true to his meticulous nature, Josef Fritzl had, for years, kept in his possession such a file. Or rather two files: the green cardboard box discovered in his office, and a red plastic bag the police would later retrieve from the cellar. Together these formed a sort of chronicle of the whole of Elisabeth’s life: many documents spanning the unhappy years of her childhood, her thwarted attempts to escape her father in her teens, and the twenty-four years that she had been forced to spend in the cellar as an adult. It was a conclusive and very disturbing collection of evidence against Fritzl. The police knew they had a cast-iron case.

  In the green box was a neatly ordered red ring binder. It contained:• four copies of the letter that Josef had “discovered on the body of Kerstin”

  • two copies of the letter that Elisabeth Fritzl had written earlier that year about her intention of returning home and that Josef had mailed at the end of January from Kematen

  • the original letter that Elisabeth had written when Monika was “abandoned on the Fritzls’ doorstep” in 1994

  • a list of Lisa’s school things

  • a memo from Amstetten Council regarding the deeds of a property

  • documents pertaining to the fostering of Alexander, Monika, and Lisa by the Fritzls

  • the original letter written by Elisabeth that had been found, alongside Lisa, when she was “discovered on the doorstep” in a cardboard box

  • the graphological analysis of Elisabeth’s handwriting that had proved, in the year that Monika was “found,” that the letters had been written by her

  Also in the box were:• a newspaper article from April 24, 2008, which reported an interview given by Natascha Kampusch (a Viennese teenager who, in 2006, was released after being held captive in a cellar for eight years) about Elisabeth’s experience

  • handwritten documentation on the “appearance” of Kerstin

  • several copies of letters that Elisabeth had written to her family, including one that Josef had sent from the town of Grieskirchen on April 13, 2007

  • a three-page receipt from the electronics store Conrad

  • a photograph of an unknown woman

  • the blueprints of a house in the Hölzöster “vacation village” that he had looked at with Hubert Schrankmaier a few weeks before his arrest

  • a hand-drawn plan of a door

  • two pornographic video tapes; an erotic video titled Through the Keyhole: Girls Who Work Their Way Up; and a fourth tape, a recording of a celebrity news program, Klass

  The red plastic bag, meanwhile, was full of letters. Twenty-one letters: letters that had been written to Elisabeth in her teens but that she had never received. Letters that she had intended to mail but that had never arrived at their destinations. All of them dated from the early 1980s. Most were love letters: simple, innocent scribblings written on paper that was now yellowing with age. Letters that Josef had intercepted, confiscated, hoarded, pored over countless times, and used as justifications for raping and locking up his daughter, the basis of his groundless assertion that as a teenager Elisabeth had been “consorting with people of questionable repute.” Mixed in with the love letters was the note that Harald had sent to Elisabeth when they were still teenagers—ten pages long—in which he had attempted to comfort his sister about the situation at home and advised her how to deal with her father. She had never read it. But Josef had and promptly filed it away. Another letter, from Elisabeth’s sister Gabriele, tells of how Gabby had just started a new job in Linz. The letter was sent on August 6, 1984, just over a month before Elisabeth was due to move there, just over two weeks before Elisabeth disappeared. She had never received Gabby’s letter, either. In among the letters was a notepad of square paper in which police found a description of Elisabeth in English and a rough diagram of her classroom at her secondary school, complete with a seating plan and the names of the other students. Who sat where, what their names were; there was hardly anything that Elisabeth had been able to keep secret from her father. He had always been watching her.

  Josef Fritzl was interviewed for the first time by state prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser on May 7, 2008. Earlier in the week the Austrian magazine News had carried on its front page an exclusive interview with Rudolf Mayer in which Fritzl’s lawyer had conveyed his client’s disappointment with “the completely one-sided” press coverage of the case. “I’m no monster,” Fritzl had said. Through Mayer, Fritzl had released a statement in which he was quoted as saying: “Kerstin would not be alive today if it wasn’t for me. I made sure that she got to a hospital. I could have killed all of them, and nothing would have ever been known about it. No one would have ever found out about it.” This self-justifying, occasionally self-pitying tone would characterize all the other “exclusives” that Mayer would leak to News over the coming months. Fritzl was in prison on remand, but he still had a voice, and this voice would dominate and manipulate public opinion from behind the scenes. All the way up to the trial. “I am not the monster the media depicts me as,” Mayer quotes him as saying. “When I was in the bunker I bought flowers for my daughter and books and toys for the children, and I watched adventure videos with them while Elisabeth was cooking our favourite dish. And then we all sat around the table and ate together.” It was speculated that Mayer was going for an insanity plea.

  Josef Fritzl’s account of what had happened in the cellar over the past twenty-four years would contain a striking element of fantasy to it. In his first cross-examination by Christiane Burkheiser, Josef Fritzl said that he had originally taken Elisabeth down to the cellar for “a talk.” It had never been his intention to lock her up. It was a Wednesday morning. At 7 A.M. he had gone into her room and found her lying fully clothed on her bed. She had looked as if she had “fallen over,” and he had immediately suspected that she had been “sniffing paint stripper.” He had therefore decided that this would be a good time for a conversation: about her “drug problem,” her absenteeism from work, her inability to hold down any job whatsoever. Ever since she’d gotten back from Vienna she’d been difficult: answering back, locking herself in her room, telling him she didn’t “give a stuff” about what he thought. So he’d decided to sit her down and have a proper conversation. And the best place to do this seemed to be the cellar.

  He claimed she had accompanied him down to the office in the cellar, where he had then shown her a letter he’d found, addressed to Elisabeth from a married man. It was a love letter, and she was obviously having an “affair,” and he hadn’t liked the sound of it at all. Not under his roof. Of course, Elisabeth had reacted typically defensively and had threatened to leave the family home. He could tell that she was high on paint stripper, “because she was giving strange answers.” And he had become angry, threatened to lock her up. The next thing he knew, he had “grabbed her by the hand and pushed her ... into the corridor and locked her in the storeroom ... I picked her up, because she was under the influence of the paint stripper. But then she went on her own. I took her by her upper arm but didn’t grab her. She could have defended herself at any time, and she could have run away because I had accidentally activated the remote control and left the garage door open.” She “never protested or said anything.”

  He claimed that he had never used handcuffs, as his daughter had claimed, nor had he tied a chain around her waist and attached it to a metal post that he had screwed to the floor for this purpose. That was nonsense. “I’ve no idea why she would come up with that. For a start, I’d have had to have a padlock with me and, secondly, she wouldn’t have been able to get out anyway.” Possibly he’d threatened to chain her up but he had never actually done so. And he certainly had never starved her. Indeed, he brought “a plastic bottle of lemonade, bread, and cheese” to the cellar the very same day. Elisabeth’s memory of the day of her incarceration was bound to b
e hazy considering her “solvent abuse.” And there had never been a gun on the shelf in the workshop; this was another false memory of hers. “I only have one pistol, but it was never in the downstairs office; I kept it in my bedroom.” Elisabeth must have gotten confused. “I’d bought a gun to protect myself.”

  He claimed that he had never in any way prepared the cellar in advance for Elisabeth’s arrival. Everything had been completely spontaneous. Despite what she had since claimed to the police, he hadn’t yet installed the toilet or brought down the bed, or the video recorder, or the television. As the day had worn on he had taken down cushions forming a mattress to make her more comfortable. A few days later he had attempted to broach the issue of the “drug problem” and told her that he might let her go if she was prepared to find a job in Amstetten. He suggested that they could pretend that she had run away again, but that she hadn’t wanted to listen or discuss it or even engage with anything he said. She had only wanted to move to Linz and live there independently of her family, which would have been fine had it not been for the drugs. But there had to be some boundaries. “A framework.” He had had no choice but to intervene. He had been a fairly relaxed father until she had disappeared to Vienna. “It was only when Elisabeth came back from running away that my wife and I decided to monitor her, so that she had no more contact with people from the drug scene.”