I'm No Monster

by Stefanie Marsh

  He claimed that he had never in his life sexually abused his daughter as a child. He’d been traveling so much with his job that he would never have had the time. And she was always around other children, so there would never have been an opportunity anyway. She must have gotten him mixed up with “Uncle Franz” or made it up. Or perhaps confused him with one of her other adventures. He claimed he had caught her once with one of the builders. She’d certainly never had occasion to fend him off with her hands and feet, as she had said in her statement to the police. It was “a total mystery” why she’d told the police that he had made death threats against her when she was only twelve or thirteen because she had refused to comply with his sexual advances.

  No hint of remorse or self-doubt, not the remotest trace of regret: needing to cast everything in a positive light, to shift the blame, to make things less bad than they were and, if the truth was too terrible, as was often the case, to tell elaborate lies. Outrageous lies that he would elaborate on further during his second cross-examination by Christiane Burkheiser, two months later, on July 10. Between them the two hearings would form the bulk of his defense.

  According to Josef Fritzl, he had never actually raped his daughter. There had been no sexual contact between them until “after four or five months [in the cellar]. I was trying to comfort her because I realized she wasn’t happy being locked up. She was crying and was very unhappy and pale.” He had tried to work something out: a solution that would suit both of them. He had “personally” been afraid of the legal consequences of “what had happened.” And his thoughts had also turned to Rosemarie and his other children, “who might have had problems with the situation. It would have brought scandal on the family.”

  According to Josef, Elisabeth had, with time, become quieter and more pliant, once she realized that “I wanted to lock her up for longer.” One day she had intimated to him that “she wanted to live her life differently in the future.” And he had taken her in his arms “and stroked her ... It was a father-daughter relationship.” At the same time, “I now realized for the first time that my daughter was a desirable woman. She didn’t fight against it.... She never said that she didn’t want it.... If she’d said no, I would have accepted it.” According to Joseph, the whole thing had taken place without any violence at all, no force, no threats. He had treated her “tenderly.” And although he conceded that Elisabeth wasn’t happy about things as they were, “she gave in to her fate. What I mean by that is that Elisabeth probably put up with my sexual demands so that she’d have a chance of one day escaping.” He never heard her scream for help or bang on the walls, his explanation being, “The ceilings are relatively thick.” When Burkheiser asked him the purpose of the many sex toys that the police had found in the cellar, Josef replied that he had bought them only for Elisabeth’s own personal use, “when I wasn’t there. But she told me she didn’t use them either.”

  According to Josef, it wasn’t true that he had hardly talked to her for the first few years when she was down in the cellar. With Elisabeth, “things tend to go in one ear and out the other.” That was his explanation. But things had improved; he had become “open” to the idea of children with Elisabeth, an inevitable part of their future together because Elisabeth, he said, had never wanted to use condoms anyway: “She would have felt less.”

  It is a measure of Josef Fritzl’s total inability to either find fault with himself or empathize with his victims that he also told the state prosecutor that what he was having with Elisabeth in the cellar was a “relationship.” “After Kerstin was born there developed between us a marriage-like relationship which became more intense with the birth of the other children.” Elisabeth’s allegation that he hit the children was untrue: “No, I wasn’t violent toward either Elisabeth or the children. It wasn’t at all necessary because Elisabeth would always acquiesce and would never pit herself against me. If Elisabeth says that I hit her in the first years, then the only explanation is that [she did so] because it will make her charges sound more believable. If it says in Elisabeth’s testimony that I hit Stefan, then that’s not true. I only playfully tussled and boxed with him and Kerstin. With Stefan I did it for practice because he was so slow. As a ‘reaction test’ I would wave my hand in his face and tell him he should be faster.” On second thought, maybe he had smacked Stefan on the bottom once or twice. But nothing more. He denied that he had ever threatened to chain up any of his children to the iron rings that he’d bored into the walls. The iron rings were there to hang a swing. When asked whether he had ever had thoughts about having sexual relations with Kerstin, he replied, “No, I never had that thought. One woman is enough for me.”

  When the prosecutor asked Josef about what had happened to his son, Michael, Josef said that he had been born dead: “One day I came into the dungeon and Kerstin and Stefan told me that Elisabeth had had a baby. When I went into the bedroom, Elisabeth was lying in bed and crying. She told me that she had given birth to twins and that one of them was dead.... I never saw Michael alive.... [He was] already dead when I came into the dungeon and wrapped in a piece of cloth. I’d never seen Elisabeth so downcast.” He had then spent “at least three hours” talking to his daughter about “what we should do with the dead child and we came to the joint conclusion that we should burn the corpse. I told Elisabeth that I would come and take the child the next day.” He had then turned up the boiler and put Michael’s corpse inside it. “The body burned without a trace.” He had scattered Michael’s ashes in the garden.

  It defied logic, Josef Fritzl claimed, that he would have let Michael die: “I had already rescued two children by that point. If I’m asked why Elisabeth would say such a thing I’d have to admit that she wants to dump me in it as much as possible. I can only speak about the facts.”

  Among other lies and embellishments that Josef made about Elisabeth’s twenty-four-year incarceration, he told Burkheiser that several times he had taken Elisabeth upstairs through the house to look at the view from the roof terrace. They had gone onto the terrace when Rosemarie was out and he showed her the garden and the swimming pool. He hadn’t taken her into the garden, though, because that would have been too risky. One of the tenants might have seen her. He couldn’t remember how many times he had allowed her upstairs in this way, but the main point was that she had never attempted to flee.

  The prosecutor wanted to know about the time-delay switch that he had told police he had installed on both the remote-control doors to the “dungeon.” Josef replied that he had made sure, right from the start, to ensure that his “second family” would never be trapped underground. Should anything have ever happened to him, the doors would have opened eventually of their own accord. Because the time-delay switch made a “buzzing noise” every time he opened one of the doors, he knew it was fully operational.

  Almost sentimentally he would try to explain why he had kept his daughter in the cellar for so many years: “I had always wanted someone there for me with whom I could exchange intimacies, a person who wouldn’t be influenced by other people. What was also important for me was that Elisabeth was at my disposal for all my needs all the time. I mean, for conversations as much as sexual contact.” When asked whether it was true that he had repeatedly told Elisabeth that it was all “her fault,” he conceded, “It is true. I always told her that she had been locked up because she had taken drugs. I told her that she wouldn’t have been locked up had she not taken any drugs and that it was her fault.”

  Many of his lies would be read back to Elisabeth when she underwent her own cross-examination by a judge. Almost every word of his account of what had happened in the cellar was false. To spare her the ordeal of facing her father in court, her testimony would be prerecorded and played back to the jury on a screen. But investigators had enough evidence for themselves to suggest that almost everything her father said would be a lie.

  The intense media interest and speculation that the case had generated all over the world continued to inte
nsify over the summer and autumn of 2008. Despite the virtual blackout on news regarding Elisabeth Fritzl and her children, their father would be in and out of the papers almost constantly for the remainder of the year, thanks in part to a steady stream of revelations regarding his past published in the pages of News and, later, other Austrian publications. The only other member of the family speaking to the media was Fritzl’s sister-in-law Christine Renner, who would regularly share her thoughts on his treatment of her sister. Journalists working for some of the British tabloids, frustrated by the lack of photographs of Elisabeth or the “cellar children,” were meanwhile in hot pursuit of any illicitly taken picture and were disappointed when a man who had been convalescing in the Amstetten-Mauer Clinic after a failed suicide attempt had been banned from selling the hundreds of photographs he had secretly made of the family in the hospital. All sorts of alleged former victims of Josef Fritzl now suddenly recollected their somewhat vague and unsubstantiated maltreatment at the hands of “evil Fritzl.” A woman who was marketing herself as “Fritzl’s lover” was offering, for 8,900 euros, the story of how she had been “sexually attacked” by him in Thailand shortly before Elisabeth disappeared. Starved of enough new material about the Fritzl family to satisfy their editors, some journalists now began to fabricate stories. Fritzl “was a regular at a brothel where he ordered terrified prostitutes to pretend to be dead” and he had “humiliated his dowdy wife, Rosemarie, at a swingers’ club by forcing her to watch him romp with another woman.” The brothel owner would later insist that the story was “made up” and Mrs. Fritzl took legal action regarding the other claims. These reports began to circle the globe, indistinguishable to the public from the equally bizarre, often unimaginable, but true facts of the case.

  Sections of the conservative Austrian press were appalled. “The greed for news and pictures needs to end once and for all,” thundered one. While another columnist’s thought on the matter was: “The press pack is hungry for prey, it needs feeding.”

  When the story had broken, many foreign journalists had assumed that it would provoke a period of deep self-analysis in Austria. Just two years earlier, in a strikingly similar case, eighteen-year-old Natascha Kampusch had finally escaped her own cellar in the outskirts of Vienna, where Wolfgang Priklopil, a technician, had her imprisoned ever since abducting her when she was ten. Over in Linz in Upper Austria a respected female lawyer had, in the same year, been found to have kept her three daughters in the house in squalor and total darkness for almost seven years. A journalist at the BBC had, in April 2008, predicted that the clear similarities in the Fritzl case were bound to provoke “a period of soul searching” in Austria. “Austrians can’t understand how this could have happened and they want answers,” he had asserted. But the truth was quite the opposite. In April, the first remark the then-Austrian chancellor had made about the case was, “We won’t allow the whole country to be held hostage by one man. Austria is not the perpetrator. This is an unfathomable criminal case but also an isolated case.” He had immediately set about boosting the country’s tourism industry. Except for an admission by the minister of justice, Maria Berger, that the Austrian authorities might have been guilty of “a certain gullibility” in their dealings with Josef Fritzl, there was little appetite within government or the press for any thorough investigation of the case.

  And now, as tabloids from other countries, particularly Britain, became increasingly intrusive and aggressive in their “investigations”—at one point they would publish Elisabeth Fritzl’s new home address as well as paparazzi pictures of her and her daughter—many Austrian papers retaliated by attacking the foreign press in print. What they failed to notice, or perhaps merely to point out, was that the main generator of stories surrounding the case was News and the tabloid newspaper Österreich, which now printed extracts from the confidential psychiatric assessment that had been prepared on Josef Fritzl for his trial. Although printing such prejudicial material before the trial was highly controversial, the magazine was neither fined nor prevented from doing it again with various other documents that should not have at this stage found their way into the public domain.

  The psychiatric report on Fritzl was not the only expert testimony that the state prosecutor would be relying on to win her case when it came to trial, as it was now decided, on March 16, 2009. Behind closed doors, the results of a neonatologist’s assessment of Michael Fritzl’s death had concluded that his father could have saved his life and was therefore liable to a charge of either manslaughter or murder. Another specially commissioned report from an electrical engineer had also found that the time-delay switch that Josef Fritzl had made so much of during his cross-examination had never existed. But the conclusions of a third report into how well soundproofed the cellar had been were less satisfactory. And they would only be mentioned in court and never discussed in public. Peter Kopecky, an engineer and expert witness, had tested the cellar’s acoustics from the ground floor, where the lodgers lived, and delivered his findings to the prosecution on a single sheet of paper in June. His findings were very clear. Contrary to what most people believe, Mr Kopecky would explain, concrete is one of the least soundproof building materials.

  Fist on rafters—very audible

  Broom handle on ceiling wall—very audible

  TV—just about audible

  Radio—just about audible

  CD player—just about audible

  Chairs moving—very audible

  Cries for help—audible

  Fists on the wall of the corridor—very audible

  Knocking and cries for help—very audible

  Knocks on the ceiling—very audible

  Knocking on entrance—very audible

  Although almost everyone who had come across the story of Josef Fritzl had assumed that his underground “dungeon” must have been soundproofed, the results of Kopecky’s research revealed a very different picture. It revealed a scenario almost too terrible to contemplate: one in which Elisabeth Fritzl had not only spent her entire adult life thus far living in the most wretched circumstances conceivable, but that, all the while, the people who lived above her had been able to hear, but had never been able to identify as anything out of the ordinary, the noises that occasionally came from the cellar. The noises that the tenants “thought” they had heard coming from the cellar beneath them had been real: the thumping, the moaning, the strange clanking noises emanating from deep underground. But nobody had thought to investigate.

  And this is where the myth that Josef Fritzl possessed a “brilliant criminal mind,” espoused by both the police and the press, began to fall apart. In fact his life was a catalog of violent, strange, and suspicious behavior, much of which had attracted the attention of the police: He was known by a number of his friends to be a physically abusive husband and father; he had a conviction for violent rape, had twice more been arrested for sexual offenses, and had been suspected of arson. He had a daughter who had issues with her weight and a history of self-harming and ran away from home when she was sixteen. When she disappeared again two years later, Fritzl claimed, she had joined a cult that was happy enough for her to give up three of her children, who had appeared on the doorstep of their “grandparents” under increasingly murky circumstances. He had spent long periods of time in his cellar; his tenants and neighbours had seen him going down there late at night with a flashlight and bags of groceries. Over the years he and his wife had received dozens of letters from their daughter, but no attempt had been made to find her, despite the fact that many of these letters bore the postmarks of towns not five miles from Amstetten and where her father was known to spend much of his time.

  Everything pointed to the fact that Josef Fritzl was not in fact the brilliant operator that the authorities and the media had painted him. He was clumsy. He was a bad liar. He had left clues all over the place. But he had an unshakable belief in his own fantasies, and he had been lucky. Even when everything had pointed to the fact that something ve
ry wrong was happening in the house on Ybbsstrasse, nobody had looked. But when, a few days before Josef Fritzl was tried, in the second week of March 2009, Austria’s minister of justice was interviewed again, she was adamant: “You can never really prevent these kinds of cases.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Trial

  Two months after Elisabeth, her children, and Rosemarie had first become inpatients at the Amstetten-Mauer Clinic, Rosemarie was asked to leave. The eight of them had been sharing a ward in the neuropsychiatric unit ever since the night of Josef Fritzl’s arrest, on April 29, 2008, the same night that Chief Inspector Leopold Etz had arrived at number 40 and picked up Rosemarie and the children in a police van. And although the doctors at the clinic who were treating them had initially been “astonished” at how well the “two families” were getting along, relations between Rosemarie and Elisabeth had become strained.

  The cause of the tensions between mother and daughter seems to have centered on twelve-year-old Alexander. Having grown up upstairs in number 40, he was used to referring to his grandmother as “Mama” and when he continued to do so in front of Elisabeth, she had asked her mother to go. By the summer of 2008, while prosecutors were cross-examining her husband in a prison cell in St. Pölten, Rosemarie was living under an assumed name on the outskirts of Linz. She lived alone in government housing, surviving on a monthly pension of seven hundred euros, of which four hundred went toward her rent. Because number 40 was still being treated as a crime scene, the police had allowed her to salvage from the house only a washing machine and dryer.