I'm No Monster

by Stefanie Marsh

  Already the mob of more than seven hundred reporters, camera operators, sound technicians, photographers, protesters, and hangers-on knew a certain amount about what was going to happen over the next few days. It had been decided some months before that only ninety-eight representatives of the press, the majority of them German-speaking, would be allowed into the courtroom. They also knew that the trial would be compressed into no more than a week, a fact that even some Austrian commentators took to be evidence of a cover-up: “This is a secret trial,” the respected columnist Ricardo Payerl wrote in the Kurier, “and talking of protecting the victims is really just an excuse for keeping everyone in the dark.” Because investigations into the case had been carried out with such secrecy, what nobody could know was that neither Rosemarie Fritzl nor any of Elisabeth Fritzl’s siblings, except for her brother Harald, would be testifying against the defendant. Instead, the prosecution had gathered the majority of its evidence from the Fritzls’ tenants, friends of both the accused and the chief witness, DNA tests, reconstructions of the offenses, the testimony of Elisabeth, and the material that had been collected by the police from the cellar.

  At 9:30 A.M. on Monday, March 16, 2009, the first day of the trial, a black Volkswagen police car drew up outside the entrance to St. Pölten’s courthouse. Flanked by six guards and obscuring his face with a blue ring binder, Josef Fritzl was led from his seat in the back of the car and up the stairs of the courthouse into room 119, a baroque, oak-paneled chamber, where he took his place on a bench to the right of where Judge Andrea Humer and other adjudicating judges, all dressed in black robes, were already seated behind a large oak table. On the table in front of the judges stood a large crucifix and two cream-coloured candles in brass candlesticks. To their left, and in Josef Fritzl’s direct line of vision, sat the eight members of the jury. And at the back of the gallery were assembled the ninety-eight members of the international press, whose attempts to describe the expression on Josef Fritzl’s face were only made possible with the departure of the photographers, at which point Fritzl had finally set down the blue ring binder. A year in prison had clearly taken its toll: his face, drained of its ruddy complexion, looked almost gray. He wore a mismatched gray suit, dark shirt, and striped tie.

  Despite the grave nature of many aspects of the case, the subject that had most preoccupied the Austrian authorities and media in the days preceding the trial had been the reputation of their country abroad. And it was the first subject that Judge Humer now chose to address in her opening statement to the court.

  She reminded the packed gallery and the jury that Fritzl “acted alone” and that “we are not prosecuting a town or a whole country.” It then fell to Christiane Burkheiser to put her case to the court. In a well-rehearsed, some said “operatic,” speech, delivered in what the Guardian would later describe as “schoolmarmish” tones, the state prosecutor first directed her attention to the jury. “Have you ever thought about what actually happened down there in the cellar dungeon?” she began. “I have. And I honestly have to say, it’s unimaginable. What should we make of it? A Chinese metaphor holds that everything has three sides: the side that you see, the side that I see, and the side that we all see. And so it is with the truth. We are obliged to see many variations of the truth. And that’s why, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you should forget everything that you’ve heard and seen in the media.”

  Gesturing toward the dock, Burkheiser now asked members of the jury to “take a close look” at the accused.

  Josef, who would continue to stare in a detached way at the space in front of him throughout most of the prosecutor’s speech, refused to meet the eyes of the jury. “He has a neat appearance, a polite air about him, a cooperative manner,” she observed. “A nice old man from next door. Do you want to know what puzzled me? That he had given no indication of regret nor of remorse.”

  Burkheiser then reviewed in chronological detail the more harrowing facts of the case, beginning from the moment on August 29, 1984, when “Josef lured his daughter [into the cellar] with the excuse that she had to help him carry a door.” She continued: “On the second day he bound her with a chain with a padlock. This was also the day he raped his daughter for the first time. What did the cellar look like? The area you’re sitting in,” she said, gesturing toward the box where the jury was sitting, “measures eleven square metres. In these eleven square metres Elisabeth Fritzl lived in the first year of her imprisonment. It had no warm water, no shower, and no heating, but the worst thing about it was that there was no daylight.” Burkheiser had been in the dungeon herself twice. “A morbid atmosphere reigns down there,” she said. “It begins when you have to crawl on your hands and knees through the eighty-three-centimetre entrance door. It is damp, it is moldy, there is mildew everywhere.”

  Having described in some detail the rapes, the pregnancies, and the conditions to which Josef Fritzl had subjected his children, Burkheiser turned to the reasons why he had done it: “Josef Fritzl treated his daughter like his property. He made her completely dependent on him. He treated her as if she was a toy.... Do you know what the worst thing is?” she asked the jury in a whisper. “The not knowing. The uncertainty can break a person.”

  What was later referred to as the “most dramatic” moment of Burkheiser’s speech came when she pulled back the lid of a brown cardboard box and invited the members of the jury to take a sniff at what was inside. This was an opportunity, Burkheiser said, for the jury to experience for themselves the foul stink of the cellar where the accused had kept his daughter and their children for twenty-four years. Nobody in the public gallery could see what was inside the box—children’s toys, books, clothing perhaps—but the crumpled expressions on the jurors’ faces left little to the imagination. “Smell, smell those twenty-four years,” she said.

  Throughout her thirty-minute speech, Josef Fritzl would glance up only once, when, addressing him directly about the events surrounding his son Michael’s death, she said: “Herr Fritzl, to your own flesh and blood, you really went too far that time.” But it was difficult for anyone to read from his expression whether this constituted a mark of his regret or indifference.

  Next it was Rudolf Mayer’s turn to address the court. He did so from his place to the right of where Fritzl was sitting in the dock, separated by about twenty feet from the jurors, never moving from his position except to stand up. Even more astonishing to everyone in the court that day was Mayer’s decision to begin his opening statement by reading out the contents of a personal e-mail: one of many death threats that Mayer had received from members of the public ever since he had taken on Fritzl’s case. Mayer had even gone so far as to make copies of the e-mail, which were later distributed among members of the press. “I can no longer understand why I have been threatened in this way,” Mayer began in a calm, slightly nasal voice before warning the court that Austria risked becoming “like Italy,” where lawyers representing notorious criminals had been known to come to grief. A few minutes into his rambling and at times seemingly irrelevant speech, Mayer eventually came around to the matter in hand. “What is so spectacular about this case?” he asked. “The unusual thing about it is that here is somebody who has a second family.”

  According to Mayer, Fritzl was not a “monster.” A “monster,” he said, would have left his family to perish in the cellar. But Fritzl, said his lawyer, not only saved the life of his desperately ill daughter by “bringing her to the hospital,” but he had done so in the knowledge that he was thereby sabotaging his own reputation. “Do you know what the monster would have done? The monster would have killed them all. The end, finished.”

  “A monster,” said Mayer, would have ended his days in Amstetten with his reputation intact. Then, speaking as if he were Fritzl, he continued: “I go on with my life as a good citizen of Amstetten. It says on my gravestone that I was a model citizen of the town who never did anything bad to anyone.”

  Mayer, who had on behalf of his client only “partia
lly” accepted the charges of rape (Fritzl had denied murder and slavery but was pleading guilty to incest and deprivation of liberty, and partly guilty to coercion), then closed his brief and unconvincing speech by implying that Elisabeth Fritzl had not technically been raped throughout the entirety of her imprisonment because: “Of course, a sense of resignation will have set in. There would have been an attempt [by Elisabeth Fritzl] after a while to go along with him.”

  Before the hearing went into private session, Judge Humer put two questions to Fritzl himself. She asked him to explain his purpose in building the cellar, to which Fritzl had replied, “It was partly conceived of as an office, and partly as a place to store spare parts.” When Humer further asked Fritzl to describe his relationship with his late mother, the defendant said that it had been “normal”: “We didn’t have any difficulties with each other.”

  That evening Mathias Stadler, the mayor of St. Pölten, invited the journalists covering the trial to a lavish reception in the handsome old baroque town hall in the main square. Addressing the group of journalists who had come to the town for the sole purpose of reporting on the sentencing of one of the world’s most reviled criminals, Herr Stadler talked of how he hoped the occasion might be used to promote St. Pölten as a tourist destination and cultural center in the future.

  On his desk lay a book, A Hundred Proposals for a Better Austria. And on the walls of his office hung oil portraits of past mayors of the town, going back to the eighteenth century. Conspicuously absent from this parade of dignitaries were only two of the town’s mayors: Franz Hörhann and Emmo Langer, both well-known Nazis.

  On the second day of the trial it snowed, and most of what happened in court proceeded behind closed doors: Elisabeth’s prerecorded testimony and the cross-examination of her father by the prosecution. Josef Fritzl had appeared that morning from the black Volkswagen in much the same manner as on the previous day, again obscuring his face with the blue ring binder. On closer inspection, some journalists later noted in their articles, the ring binder was found to have been “made by the office supply manufacturer Esselte.” It contained, a photographer with a zoom lens had managed to ascertain, what appeared to be a breakdown of the costs—63,672 euros—for Monika Fritzl’s hospital treatment. Outside the courtroom Reinhard Haller was still debriefing journalists and now explained the deep meaning of the ring binder: “The disguise is deeply symbolic,” he said. “The folder is like a wall, similar to those involved in the crime.” It was further noted in some newspapers the following day that Fritzl had breakfasted on 350 grams of bread, the daily ration, and a miniature portion of jam and butter; lunched on soya loaves; and dined on frankfurters with mustard.

  The first sign that something momentous was about to happen in court the next day, Wednesday, was the fact that Fritzl was no longer hiding his face behind the ring binder. Rumours had already circulated that Elisabeth Fritzl had paid a surprise visit to the court the previous day, and her father’s new demeanour seemed to confirm it. At 9 A.M. the session began. Humer briefly surmised the planned itinerary, then turned to Fritzl:

  “Do you have anything to say to me?” asked Humer, to which, to the great astonishment of even the judge, Josef Fritzl replied, “I recognize that I am guilty. I regret it.”

  “Why are you saying this now?”

  “Because of the videotape testimony of my daughter.”

  The judge then asked the defendant why he had done nothing to save his son Michael: “Did you not realize he was gravely ill?” In a barely audible whisper, Fritzl replied, “I just overlooked it. I should have done something. I thought the little one was going to survive. It was only yesterday that I realized for the first time how cruel I was to Elisabeth. I had never realized it before.”

  A few minutes of silence passed while the implications of what the defendant had just confessed sank in.

  Two more assessments were due to be heard that day, but owing to the astonishing turnaround in the day’s events, it was decided that only the report of the forensic psychiatrist Dr. Adelheid Kastner would be heard. Dr. Kastner had prepared a 130-page psychiatric assessment of Fritzl after interviewing him six times. Because most of what she now said had already been published in the pages of News and other publications, Kastner’s assertion that his mother’s failure to love him as a child was central to his understanding did not provoke the consternation that it otherwise might have done among those present, although some journalists noticed that Fritzl began “twisting his fingers” as Kastner described his relationship with his mother. The rest of the time he listened passively with his hands crossed on his lap, alternatively sitting with his legs crossed or jiggling his left leg and wiping his nose with a tissue. Kastner told the court that she believed that his sexual behavior and his need to dominate women was his way of “compensating for the defenselessness and humiliation he felt as a child”; Fritzl had described himself to her as a “volcano” who felt “torn” and had come to the conclusion that he possessed a “mean streak” and a “flood of destructive lava that was barely controllable.” Kastner believed that Fritzl could be deemed “responsible for his actions” but that he suffered from “a severe combined personality disorder.” She believed that the defendant had a “thin grasp of the gravity of his crime,” having expressed to Kastner the belief that he would spend his final days with his wife and pleading for a short prison sentence so that he could continue to run his property business and so provide for his family. The jury took four hours—including the time it took them to eat lunch—to make their decision. The next day, Thursday, March 19, Josef Fritzl was declared guilty on all counts. For a week he stayed in his cell in St. Pölten, after which he was transferred to Mittersteig Prison in Vienna to be psychiatrically assessed. From there he would eventually be moved to a psychiatric unit in Stein Prison, a former monastery and one of the best-equipped jails in Austria, to undergo counseling and therapy in a special ward. According to authorities, Fritzl was sent there due to his advanced age; the facility has a hospital on-site as well as a “suitable security structure” to protect him from the eventual attacks by other inmates. Stein’s head warden, Christian Timm, described Fritzl as “healthy, cooperative, and leaves an impression of someone focused on the future.” He can take courses in foreign languages, computers and media design, as well as icon painting. Otto Muehl served his seven-year sentence in the same prison. Surrounded by woodland and next to the picturesque town of Krems, Stein is located where the Danube River meanders into the fertile Wachau Valley, a beautiful wine region and a protected natural resource. In a car it is possible to get to Ybbsstrasse in less than one hour.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Kind of Closure

  With the sentencing of Josef Fritzl to life imprisonment, the Austrian authorities finally put behind them one of the most unpleasant episodes in the country’s recent history. The verdict had satisfied not only the Fritzl family, but also the general public and the media, who had expressed both relief at the outcome of the trial and satisfaction with the fact that, so late in his life, Josef Fritzl had come to understand and regret the gravity of his actions.

  His lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, would later claim that Fritzl had been reduced to tears when, behind closed doors, he had watched his daughter’s testimony on the second day of the trial. Her unexpected appearance in court that day had convinced her father that he should change his plea. “Fritzl cried as he watched the tape and then he turned around and saw his daughter sitting in the public gallery,” Mayer said. “At that point it was all over. It was obviously the effect the court hoped to induce. He was shattered and broken inside.” And for several weeks in the buildup to the trial, there had been concerns for Josef Fritzl’s well-being. His cellmate in St. Pölten Prison had been asked to keep a close eye on him and to sound the alarm if he noticed any marked changes in his behavior. Fritzl was then put under suicide watch; a psychiatrist and expert in the suicidal behavior of especially sex offenders, Patrick Frottier, had be
en engaged to observe him closely throughout the trial. According to his lawyer, Fritzl had been particularly upset when, on videotape, his daughter said that she had “screamed many times during all those years but nobody ever heard me.” Afterward Fritzl had apparently turned to Mayer and said, “What I saw there was truly devastating.” According to his lawyer, Fritzl had not pleaded guilty from the start, because “that would have meant he didn’t have any power.”

  But although Fritzl’s “epiphany” was accepted as genuine by almost everyone who had attended the proceedings, very little evidence in his behavior before the trial and after the trial suggested that Fritzl had meant it at all. Even while in prison on remand, Fritzl had spent his time scanning the business pages of the newspapers and communicating regularly with business acquaintances. At the time of his arrest Fritzl owed several banks a total of around three million euros in loans. When he was subsequently declared insolvent, the state had engaged a lawyer to liquidate the properties and to pay off his creditors; in the process, the lawyer in question had taken the unusual step of offering to the media for a fee an interview with Fritzl in prison as well as a tour of the dungeon in Ybbsstrasse. The money would go toward Fritzl’s family. Fritzl had also let it be known, through Mayer, that “I would like to be examined by as many profilers, psychologists, psychiatrists as possible, preferably the most renowned in the world.”

  It was completely out of character for a man who had shown no compunction about subjecting his family to a lifetime of horrific abuse to find himself suddenly plunged into the depths of remorse. And it is well worth bearing in mind what Christiane Burkheiser had warned the jury in her address: “As always, never believe a word he says.”

  Fritzl’s character reveals a meticulous, controlling, emotionally cut-off man who behaved throughout his entire life with a profound lack of concern for the well-being of others. He was callous and often sadistic, and, except for that one day in the courtroom in St. Pölten, never exhibited the remotest trace of remorse. He was an extremely dangerous man whose sexual preoccupations were always somehow in the foreground and served to maintain his fantasies of power and control. Elisabeth was firmly convinced that he would not change, because for him it was a reason for living.... If he didn’t have that, he didn’t feel like a man, and he needed it for his self confidence. Although her father had claimed in court that he had never realized that his infant son Michael was ill, Elisabeth had interpreted his behavior differently. She believed that he hadn’t saved Michael’s life because he could not deal with such emotional things. Life in the cellar meant always having to be careful not to make him feel guilty, because otherwise he would take it out on them in some way. He had threatened Elisabeth often, especially in the early years of her imprisonment. She was afraid and often the children would be at a loss as to how to behave, because they were afraid of him all of the time. All he needed to do was raise his voice or look at them and they would know what was going on, and that was worse than being beaten, because there was a constant state of fear and a feeling that they were at his mercy.