I'm No Monster

by Stefanie Marsh

  Her sister, Christine Renner, had drawn the public’s attention to Rosemarie’s impoverished new circumstances in the Austrian tabloid Österreich. In various other interviews with journalists, Christine would subsequently come to her sister’s defense when the decision by the police not to interview her began to raise questions in the minds of the public. They wondered whether Polzer and his team hadn’t been a little naive to assume that the wife of a man who had kept his daughter enslaved in the cellar beneath the family home for twenty-four years hadn’t known a thing about it. Rosemarie herself kept her own counsel on the matter. She wouldn’t speak to the press at all despite the seven-figure sums she was being offered for her story.

  But Christine was a constant source of information about the “shadow children,” as she called them, and she never held back, either, from airing her views on Rosemarie’s plight. The Fritzl family was “at war,” she had told the journalist from Österreich, “torn apart.” Rosemarie had practically been “thrown out” of the Amstetten-Mauer Clinic, said Christine: “Rosemarie has no contact with the children from downstairs. But Alexander is attached to her. Elisabeth didn’t want him to see Rosie anymore.... She was very angry that Alex was saying ‘Mama’ to Rosie rather than ’Granny.‘” Another sister of Rosemarie’s had been the one to fix her up with the apartment in Linz; for whatever reason, the sixty-eight-year-old mother had decided not to stay in the home of any of her six other children.

  Rosemarie was “in a really bad way,” Christine let it be known. “She’s lonely. She hardly has any money. And she keeps having to hear about how she must have known something about the long years in the cellar.” Christine took particular issue with the fact that Rosie was being “treated as the wife of a perpetrator rather than a victim.... I’m one thousand percent sure she didn’t know. You can’t compare Rosie’s marriage to other relationships. Josef was a tyrant and treated her like a dog. The two of them had been living separately for years ... and the cellar was completely off-limits because he apparently kept important work documents down there.”

  Worse than this, Rosemarie was on the brink of destitution, according to her sister. Just changing her name cost three hundred fifty euros, Christine said. And when certain sections of the press had expressed surprise, even disbelief, when it emerged that Rosemarie was not seeking to divorce her husband, Christine had explained that her sister’s restricted financial circumstances had left her no choice. By the time of his arrest Josef Fritzl had accumulated a property empire of sorts; he owned six houses, all of them profitable properties. But now his wife of more than fifty years hardly had the means to support herself. She was a pensioner. The only paid work she had ever done in her life had been the stint in the bakery in the very early days of her marriage. But as long as she remained married to Josef, Christine said, “she’ll get sixty percent of his pension if he kills himself in prison or something happens to him.”

  And, if Christine was to be believed, Elisabeth was exhibiting very few signs of concern about her mother’s rapid descent into penury. There had been an unpleasant episode after social services had accidentally transferred to Rosemarie’s account three thousand euros in benefits that should have been paid to Elisabeth; it was intended to go toward the care of Kerstin, Stefan, and Felix. Although Rosemarie had immediately telephoned Elisabeth to tell her about the mistake, she had—according to Christine—secretly hoped that Elisabeth might turn a blind eye and let her mother keep the money. Instead Rosemarie had received a terse letter from her daughter’s lawyer, Christoph Herbst, requesting the return of the sum to Elisabeth within a period not exceeding fourteen days. Christine believed that Elisabeth could have easily afforded to behave a little more generously toward her mother, given that she had recently received a lump sum of sixty thousand euros in income support, not to mention a twenty-five-thousand-euro donation that Natascha Kampusch had recently made toward the welfare of Elisabeth and her children. It wasn’t fair. Rosemarie, Christine said, was as much of a victim of this as the rest of the family.

  Other details from other sources were now beginning to surface about how the Fritzls were coming to terms with their new lives. Kerstin had finally awoken from her coma in May. But it was only on June 9 that doctors had felt confident enough in her “miraculous recovery” to share details of this momentous turn of events with the public. Dr. Reiter had held a press conference in which he had described “the intensely dramatic moment” when, at 9 A.M. on May 15, Kerstin had opened her eyes for the first time since she had been “discovered on the doorstep” of number 40 by her father and rushed by ambulance to Amstetten Hospital, where doctors had put her into an artificial coma. For ten days she had remained dangerously ill, but by the second week of May she had started to show sufficient “positive improvements” for doctors to have been able to start reducing the levels of anesthetic they were giving her.

  Dr. Reiter was there when Kerstin opened her eyes; it had been the first time she had ever seen daylight. “She slowly started showing signs of emotional reaction,” Reiter said. “We smiled at her and she smiled back. Later I said ‘Hi’ to her and she replied with a ’Hello.‘ Even immediately after she woke up and still had the tracheotomy tube in to help her breathe, she was listening to Robbie Williams until 3 A.M. I then had to put my foot down and ask her to turn down the music and get some rest.” Within a few days Kerstin was even managing to go for short walks around the intensive care unit. She could read, write, and communicate easily. Among the hundreds of things she wanted to do once she was discharged was to go on a boat trip and attend a Robbie Williams concert. Kerstin’s first words had reportedly been: “Hello, a new life.”

  While Kerstin made a slow but encouraging recovery in Amstetten Hospital, down the road in the Amstetten-Mauer Clinic her brothers and sisters were being kept under the close supervision of Dr. Berthold Kepplinger, the head of the hospital’s neuropsychiatric department. It had been Dr. Kepplinger’s controversial decision to treat Elisabeth, all of her children, and Rosemarie in the same ward. And he had assembled the multidisciplinary team of fourteen doctors, therapists, and nurses who would now work toward rehabilitating Elisabeth and her children, mentally as well as physically. It was a gigantic task, unprecedented in medical history and significantly complicated by the presence of the hundreds of journalists who had now become a permanent, and occasionally rowdy, presence in and around the hospital’s grounds. Britain’s Sun newspaper alone had sent more than a dozen reporters to cover the story, as had Germany’s Bild. And in their desperation to catch the first glimpse of what many of them now referred to in their reports as “the incest family,” some journalists had resorted to force; a scuffle with a reporter on one of the balconies of the clinic had sent a security guard flying over the edge of the balustrade. And when, not long after, a Belgian television crew almost succeeded in storming the reception area, the already considerable police presence at the clinic was beefed up with a team of guards from a private security firm as well as more than thirty members of Amstetten’s fire brigade. But this tightening of security around the hospital only encouraged the less scrupulous members of the press, especially the paparazzi—the first photographs of the “cellar children” were now estimated to be worth about three hundred thousand euros—to resort to increasingly imaginative tactics to get their picture. Hospital staff had already apprehended two photographers who had separately attempted to enter the building in disguise—one had been dressed as a policeman, the other as a cleaner. A third photographer was later discovered by a police sniffer dog in a hole he had dug overnight in the grounds of the hospital. He had camouflaged himself beneath a birdwatcher’s blind.

  Partly because of the overwhelming media interest, Dr. Kepplinger and his team kept the details of the family’s treatment at the Amstetten-Mauer Clinic deliberately vague. A series of press statements revealed that Elisabeth and her children were receiving physiotherapy as well as psychiatric care and were said by Kepplinger to be “in surpri
singly good shape, considering the circumstances.” The aim of the treatment, he said, was “to give all members of the family support for the future and a good start in their new lives. Because of this it is important that they should be introduced to reality very gently and gradually.” Elisabeth, Stefan, and Felix were making “good progress where light sensitivity and difficulties adapting to open space are concerned,” and that, as time had progressed relatively slowly in the cellar, it was important not to rush the family’s rehabilitation. Kepplinger reported that Felix and Stefan had shown a remarkable proficiency in computer gaming; that the children spent much of their days in a loose routine of taking lessons from a private tutor, reading children’s books, and playing table football; and that much of their psychological treatment took the form of games and play. Their ward had also been furnished with many stuffed toys and an aquarium. The only thing they lacked was the freedom to go outside—not only because, for the first few days, the sunlight would have been too harsh on their eyes and skin, but because of the risk of being photographed or even mobbed by journalists. Kepplinger’s concluding thoughts in one of his press releases read, “Owing to an earlier incident between a member of staff and a photographer, I would like to again make an urgent appeal to these people: This madness must end!”

  The first drops of rain, the first car journey, the first time the children had ever seen sunlight: These were instances when other members of the various teams that had been involved in the Fritzl children’s hospitalization and rehabilitation had been present; however, some of them could not hold themselves back from sharing with the public. Leopold Etz had been particularly touched by five-year-old Felix’s reaction when he had driven Felix and his brother Stefan to the hospital on the night his father was arrested: “We had to drive very slowly because every bit of light made the children flinch,” he told a journalist from Bild. “They’d never in their lives seen streetlights, traffic lights, cars, or even other people. It was as if we were suddenly on the moon.” When Felix had seen the moon for the first time that night, he had turned to Etz and asked, “Is that where God lives?” It was a touching detail that was quickly seized upon by the international press and embellished. The popular press in particular, at least in some cases, had shown a gift for exaggerating or even reporting as fact its own imaginings about how a lifetime’s imprisonment in a cellar might have affected the family’s appearance and behavior. In the continued absence of any photographs of Elisabeth, Stefan, Kerstin, or Felix, Bild held that the “incest children” spoke in their own “animal tongue ... a mixture of growling and cooing.” Meanwhile a journalist for Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported that Elisabeth Fritzl “has aged so much she looks more like a sister to her mother, Rosemarie.” Felix, the Sun conjectured, “sometimes crawls on all fours.... The little lad walks like a monkey.” Elisabeth, it was also wrongly speculated in the same newspaper, “never told [her children] the truth about their terrible plight. Instead she invented a fantasy world for them with wondrous stories of princes and princesses.” The British media had been especially thrilled when Josef Fritzl’s lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, had released to the public his client’s alleged assertion that his “need to control” stemmed from his country’s Nazi past. And the tabloids had devoted many of their pages to articles with headlines such as “Hitler Made Me Do It” and “Dungeon Dad and the Nazis.”

  In many ways the prosecution had a straightforward case on its hands. The very existence of the cellar, let alone the physical evidence that had been collected by the forensics team in number 40, would incriminate Josef Fritzl beyond reasonable doubt. And Rudolf Mayer seemed to be out of his depth. After leaks to the press of sections of Fritzl’s confidential assessment by a forensic psychiatrist in which the accused described in self-pitying detail the events of his deprived childhood and his difficult relationship with his mother, Mayer seemed to have changed tack. Fritzl the victim of difficult circumstances suddenly became Fritzl the caring father who, according to his lawyer, would have simply killed his family had he really been “a monster.” Mayer’s public musings on the matter were often glib and offhand, not to say inappropriate. In one interview he claimed that Fritzl’s “perversion is to be found in the fact that he dealt with [his children] so affectionately. It reminds me of the film Misery: A woman smashes up a man’s feet so he can’t run away. It’s just that if someone is in love, there is always the danger that you’ll be disappointed. Fritzl thinks that without power you can’t hold anyone. It actually shows his inner pow erlessness.” They were inconsistent arguments unlikely to convince a jury.

  But the prosecution still faced the problem of how to ensure that a life sentence was passed on Josef Fritzl; anything else would have been unacceptable, not only to Elisabeth Fritzl and her family, but in the eyes of the public and the media. By Austrian law the crime of incest was punishable by a mere one-year sentence. And although a person charged with rape can expect to serve a fifteen-year term if found guilty in an Austrian court, the prosecution was hamstrung by the fact that Austrian law does not allow for cumulative sentencing. Even if he was convicted of multiple rapes, Fritzl would serve only the longest of the sentences handed down to him. As it stood, of all the offenses that the prosecution hoped to pin on Fritzl, the one that carried the longest sentence was slavery, an offense that derived from the country’s penal code of the nineteenth century, when slavery in its traditional form still existed in Europe and some of its colonies. But even a slavery conviction carried a maximum sentence of only twenty years and would not reflect the severity of Fritzl’s crimes. And it was more than likely, considering his vitality and determination, that he would outlive even this term. The notion that Fritzl would not end up spending the rest of his days behind bars was not a possibility that the prosecution, or the Austrian state, was prepared to consider.

  In the end, the results of the neonatologist’s report commissioned by the state prosecutor, Christiane Burkheiser, finally gave the prosecution the ammunition it needed. Professor Gerhard Trittenwein, the neonatologist, concluded in his assessment of the case that Fritzl could indeed be held responsible for the death of his infant son, Michael, whose rasping breath and stiff little limbs his father had, thirteen years earlier, chosen to ignore. Had Michael been taken to the hospital in those first three crucial days of his life, he would have survived, said Trittenwein. Which meant that—Christiane Burkheiser could now argue in court—Fritzl was guilty of murder, a crime that carried a life sentence. On Monday, November 12, 2007, the prosecution team completed its charges; Josef Fritzl was to be tried for the crimes of murder, slavery, rape, deprivation of liberty, coercion, and incest. The trial, which was to be held in St. Pölten, was scheduled for December but was moved to January because of the Christmas break, and then moved again to March because—a court spokesperson said—of a reported timetable clash with the vacation plans of one of the judges who would be involved in the court case. Because of the sensitivity of the case and Elisabeth Fritzl’s express wish never to see her father again, it was to be a closed hearing. Elisabeth would testify in a prerecorded set of interviews that would be shown privately to a jury of four men and four women, and only the opening statements of the prosecution and the defense, as well as the results of the four forensic reports commissioned by Burkheiser, would be held in public. The seriousness of the charges called for a jury trial; Josef Fritzl’s future lay in the hands of four male and four female jurors.

  The trial opened amid an almost carnivalesque atmosphere. While in Amstetten, the residents of Ybbsstrasse had prepared for yet another media invasion by erecting barbed wire on their windows to prevent photographers from climbing onto them to get better shots of number 40, many of the citizens of St. Pölten saw the impending influx of hundreds of journalists from around the world as an opportunity to promote their hitherto little-known town. By the time members of the press started arriving on Friday, March 14, the trees and hedges around the courthouse in St. Pölten’s main square had been
trimmed and a large marquee resembling a beer tent had been erected for the convenience of those who required Internet access, refreshments, or information about the town’s rich culinary and cultural life. Inside, for the benefit of journalists, were stacked hundreds of brochures listing its best restaurants and most fashionable nightclubs. Across the street from the courthouse, the council had banned a restaurant from serving what it had taken to referring to on its menu as “the Fritzl Schnitzl,” but a nearby patisserie had managed to display in its window something called a Gittertorte, or “prison bar cake.” Around the corner, Isabella Suppanz, the artistic director of St. Pölten’s main theater, claimed that it was “sheer coincidence” that an adaptation of Franz Nabel’s novel The Living Grave, which concerns the fate of a boy who is locked in the cellar of his home, was being staged.

  Along with the journalists came various fringe groups. They were there in front of the courthouse by 7 A.M. on the first day of the trial: a far-right group and a group of artists led by the Austrian actor Hubsi Kramar, who had achieved a modicum of fame abroad many years earlier when he had played an SS guard in the film Schindler’s List. Earlier that year Kramer had written and performed a play, Pension Fritzl, which, owing to its controversial subject matter, he had been forced to rename Pension F. Now he and several other actors stood in front of the courthouse smeared in blood in a street performance that he claimed aimed to condemn Austria’s patriarchal mentality. Beside them, the country’s most media-friendly psychiatrist, Reinhard Haller, was on standby to answer any questions journalists might have on the nature of Fritzl’s psychological makeup; he was well acquainted with the case from media reports.