House of Horrors

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Others got a better impression. A friend at high school said, ‘He was a very positive influence on his younger colleagues, but he was also a bit of a loner. We all thought he’d do quite well for himself and he always came to class reunions with his wife. We were shocked to learn what he had done. That wasn’t the man we knew.’

  But some had already noticed a darker side. An old classmate of Fritzl painted a picture of a fiend obsessed with power and torture. Gertrude Haydn, now 73, said, ‘His family was very poor. People said he tortured his pets and killed cats and dogs inside his house. I was too afraid to ever go in there.’

  Leaving school at 16, Fritzl went on to study electrical engineering at a nearby polytechnic and took up an engineering apprenticeship where he excelled. Then he took a job with a local steel company, Voest. Working there, he managed to get out from under the thumb of his mother and began to take an interest in other women.

  ‘I became older and I managed to meet other women,’ he said.

  By all accounts, he was also something of a moustached charmer, although hardly in the David Niven mould. He was insufferably arrogant and self-absorbed. Known for his lecherous innuendoes, it was clear he was unnaturally obsessed with sex. ‘I had affairs with a few girls,’ he boasted, ‘and then a short while later I met Rosemarie.’

  It was 1956. He was 21 and Rosemarie was 17 when they married and started a family of seven. Of course, it was difficult for Rosemarie to live up to the standard of his mother, but for what Fritzl had in mind, his new wife fitted the bill perfectly.

  ‘Rosemarie was also a wonderful woman … is a wonderful woman,’ he said. ‘I chose her because I had a strong desire then to have lots of children.’

  And the reason Fritzl wanted lots of children lay in his own childhood. ‘I wanted children that did not grow up like me as single children,’ he said. ‘I wanted children that always had someone else at their side to play with and to support. The dream of a big family was with me from when I was very small, and Rosemarie seemed the perfect mother to realise that dream.’

  The other advantage was that she had little in common with his mother, the redoubtable Rosa. ‘She is just a lot more shy and weaker than my mother,’ he claimed. He could dominate her and she would not question him, although this was of particular concern to her family who distrusted him from the outset.

  From 1969–71, Fritzl worked for Zehetner, a construction materials firm in Amstetten, where he was described as ‘an intelligent worker and a good technician’. Yet even in those early years, he was demonstrating a tendency towards sexual deviancy. His first brush with the police came when he was 24 after a complaint that he had exposed himself. The police say he went on to rape at least two women in Linz, where he was working in the 1960s. Only one of the victims brought charges. In 1967, Fritzl was convicted of rape and sentenced to 18 months in jail.

  He still struggles to explain why he betrayed his wife and his, by then, four children, by breaking into a ground-floor flat and raping a young nurse. ‘I do not know what drove me to do that,’ he said. ‘It’s really true I do not know why I did it. I always wanted to be a good husband and a good father.’

  Despite his conviction for rape, his wife, the long-suffering Rosemarie, took him back. He later claimed he was grateful. ‘I always loved her and I will always love her,’ said Fritzl, even after confessing to the rape of their daughter. This can have been of little comfort to Rosemarie.

  Details of the 1967 rape case have now been expunged from the records. Under Austrian law, as part of the process of rehabilitation, details of previous convictions are destroyed after ten years. ‘When such a crime has been atoned for, it’s been atoned for,’ a senior police officer explained.

  However, another victim, who claimed that she had been too frightened to press charges at the time, came forward after Elisabeth had emerged from her dungeon, saying that she was ‘100 per cent sure’ it was Fritzl who had raped her in September 1967, when she was 20 years old. She recognised him as her attacker when she saw his photograph in the newspapers.

  ‘I was raped by Fritzl,’ the woman, who refused to disclose her identity, told the local Linz newspaper, Upper Austrian News, on 30 April 2008. ‘When I saw his picture yesterday, I knew, yes, that is him.’ There was no doubt in her mind. ‘I recognised him immediately,’ she said. ‘I will never forget those eyes.’

  At the time of the rape, she was a recently married young mother. While her husband, an Austrian railway worker, was away on a night shift, Fritzl slipped through her ground-floor bedroom window. ‘I felt the bedclothes being pulled back,’ she told the newspaper. ‘At first I thought it was my husband coming home but then I felt this knife being pushed against my throat. He told me, “If you make a noise, I’ll kill you.” Then he raped me in my own bed.’

  At the time, she was too ashamed to report the rape, and neither did she want to risk alienating her husband. She kept the memory of her terrifying attack to herself for over 40 years. The woman admitted that she had had her suspicions about Fritzl from the start and feared she might not be the only victim of his sexual deviancy. She said she had seen Fritzl on a number of occasions in Linz before she was assaulted by him. He had attracted attention because he behaved like a peeping Tom. ‘He was a voyeur. He used to ride around on his bicycle and watch everyone,’ she said.

  Once Fritzl had been exposed as the dungeon rapist in the Austrian press and on television, it was then that the memory came flooding back and she realised that he was the same man who raped her more than 40 years before.

  A third woman from Linz also went to the police in April 2008 to complain of an attempted rape by Fritzl. She had been 24 at the time and a work colleague of his. On 2 May, officials said a rape file had been found and was being studied. However, the Austrian justice authorities say the offence is irrelevant because it happened more than 15 years ago and was beyond the statute of limitations.

  However, Fritzl was convicted and went to prison at the time. As a result, he lost his job. But he was such a good engineer, and such was his ability for inventing new devices that, in 1969, when he was released, he immediately found work, despite his record.

  ‘My father often said he was an absolute genius,’ said a daughter of his late boss, Karl Zehetner. ‘He was amazed at what he could do.’

  Fritzl’s ingenuity would later be put to sinister use when constructing the elaborate dungeon where he imprisoned the hapless Elisabeth and their children, complete with its electronically-controlled sliding steel door.

  When the sister-in-law of the company’s manager was told that Fritzl had been taken on, she spoke up. ‘I don’t want that,’ she protested. In her mind, Fritzl was a danger and she repeatedly warned her children to stay away from him.

  A spokeswoman for a company where Josef Fritzl was employed as an engineer and procurement manager during the 1970s also had misgivings. ‘He did an excellent job,’ she said, ‘but there was always something uneasy about him as it was widely known that he had served time in prison for a sexual offence.’

  Neighbours in Amstetten also knew of his record. ‘I was ten at the time,’ a 50-year-old resident now recalls, ‘but I remember how we children were afraid to play near Fritzl’s house because of the rumours that he had raped a woman and spent some time in jail for it.’

  Later, Fritzl became a travelling salesman for a German company and then worked as an electrical engineer at a company that made industrial drills. In 1973, he and his wife bought a summer guesthouse and camping ground at an idyllic tourist spot in the mountains on the shores of Lake Mondsee in the Vöcklabruck district of the Salzkammergut near Salzburg, which they ran until 1996. Then, in the 1980s, he decided to move into real estate, buying several buildings around Amstetten. He already owned the large grey town house at 40 Ybbsstrasse in Amstetten, which he extended into the back garden to provide accommodation for up to eight tenants at a time. The family lived on the floors above; below was the cellar.

  Ov
er the years, Fritzl bought a further five properties and started an underwear company. But his attempts at property development came to nothing and his businesses failed. It is now known that he had run up debts of more than €2m (£1.56m) as a result of his various endeavours, but in the eyes of the townsfolk, he became ‘a man of stature’, as the local police chief put it. He was a respected, well-connected figure in Amstetten, often seen at the wheel of a Mercedes. He dressed in fine clothes, with gold rings on his fingers and a gold chain round his neck. Even when running errands, locals said, he wore a natty jacket, crisp shirt and tie.

  Generally, Fritzl was known in Amstetten as a polite man who loved fishing, drinking beer and sharing a bawdy joke with his neighbours. But he was a private individual; he was not active in community or church groups. Even fellow members of his fishing club say he was something of a question mark. Fritzl made little attempt to socialise, but always paid his dues. ‘There was never a problem with him,’ said club treasurer Reinhard Kern. ‘Whether he actually went fishing or not, how am I to know? Maybe it was an alibi.’

  However, most neighbours or townsfolk remember only an affable, if unremarkable, fellow who liked to keep himself to himself. In fact, he was part of a well-heeled coterie of businessmen who were not short of friends in all the right places.

  With all record of the rape conviction eradicated after ten years under Austria’s statute of limitations, Fritzl was at liberty to present himself as the strong, wholesome family man. In a devoutly Catholic country like Austria, it is necessary for a ‘paterfamilias’ to sire a large brood and Fritzl fathered five girls and two boys. Ulrike was born in 1958; Rosemarie followed in 1961; Harald in 1964; Elisabeth in 1966; the twins Josef Jnr and Gabriele in 1971; and Doris in 1973.

  Outwardly, all was well. Josef Fritzl was the smartly dressed engineer who drove a nice car and had such well behaved children. True, he was an autocratic task-master behind closed doors, but that was not an unknown characteristic among provincial Austrian men of his generation.

  Fritzl said that his favourite daughter was Elisabeth, the fourth of his seven children with Rosemarie, but that did not mean that she was given an easy time. Because she was pretty, it appears that he was harder on her than the others and beat her mercilessly. Fritzl had no time for spoiling children. At home, in this traditional Austrian family, father ruled the roost – though, even in the eyes of others who shared his background, he was inordinately strict.

  ‘For me, I always had the impression that Sepp was an intelligent and successful man,’ said Leopold Stütz, deputy mayor of Lasberg, a town 30 miles from Amstetten. Stütz was a close friend of the Fritzls and even went on joint holidays with the family. ‘He often talked about his perfect family. He was very strict with his children, a strict but fair father, I would say. It was enough for him to snap his fingers and the youngsters would be in bed. He always stressed that, for him, education and career were the most important things.’

  Others were not so sanguine. Fritzl’s sister-in-law Christine told the Austrian newspaper Österreich that her brother-in-law was a ‘disgusting despot’, who cleverly covered up his excesses. ‘Every person that looked in his eyes was fooled by him,’ she said.

  The family lived in fear of his outbursts. ‘He tolerated no dissent,’ said Christine. ‘When he said it was black, it was black, even when it was ten times white.’ She loathed the way he was so harsh on the kids. ‘I always hated him,’ she said. ‘He was like an army drill instructor with his children. They had to stop whatever they were doing and stand still when he entered the room. Silence fell over everyone immediately – even when they were in the middle of playing a game. You could sense their constant fear of being punished.’

  The children were required to remain silent while their father was in a room. If they failed to comply, or if they forgot to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, he would hit them until they toed the line. They were very rarely allowed to have friends round. If they did, the children’s friends had to leave the house immediately when he came home from work.

  Christine believed that Fritzl’s tyrannical behaviour towards the seven children he had with her elder sister Rosemarie was the main reason why most of them had married young. ‘The only chance for the children to escape this atmosphere was to marry,’ she said. ‘And that’s what they all did as soon as they were old enough.’

  When Elisabeth finally escaped the House of Horrors and the police eventually took an interest, they confirmed what Christine was saying. ‘We have spoken at length to Elisabeth’s brothers and sisters,’ said the detective in charge of the case, Chief Investigator Polzer. ‘All of them said their father wasn’t just very strict, aggressive, dominant and power-mad, he was a “real tyrant”. They weren’t ever allowed to address him or ask him anything. That was why every child except one son left the house as soon as they could.’

  However, none of them moved very far. Their eldest daughter Rosemarie married at 21 and now lives with her husband, Horst Herlbauer, in an apartment in the Linz suburb of Traun, 30 miles from the family home. With his wife, Harald moved into an orange-painted cottage in the village of Mitterkirchen im Machland, eight miles from Amstetten. Doris left home when she married a man named Henikl and set up home with her husband in a villa in the Alpine province of Styria, not far to the south. However, she and her family would join her parents at family reunions and sometimes go on holiday with her mother.

  Ulrike married a man named Pramesberger and became a teacher. She moved to Bad Goisern in the foothills of the Alps, some 65 miles from Amstetten, to an impressive chalet-style property set in extensive grounds. Gabriele lives with her partner and child near Amstetten in a small chalet. Only Josef Jnr, Gabriele’s twin brother, continued to live in the family home, although he is now in his late thirties. Very much under his father’s thrall, he remained a virtual slave.

  ‘One son wasn’t allowed to leave,’ said Polzer, ‘just like Elisabeth. He is very slow and has a few problems and difficulties. Josef kept him, using this son as his slave and house-boy. I believe it was Josef’s youngest son. He had to wait on his father hand and foot, and skivvy for him.’

  Christine described how Fritzl expected his wife to play a subservient role from the start of their married life. ‘When Rosemarie married Sepp she was 17, and had no professional qualifications, so she was always dependent on him – and for 51 years he exploited that,’ she said.

  Rosemarie was poorly educated and had trained as a kitchen help. Fritzl’s pride in his own intelligence and resourcefulness prevented him from taking his wife seriously, Christine said. He was completely in control in their marriage.

  ‘Listen, if I myself was scared of him at a family party, and I did not feel confident to say anything in any form that could possibly offend him,’ she said, ‘then you can imagine how it must have been for a woman that spent so many years with him. He was a tyrant. What he said was good and the others had to shut up. He was a despot and I hated him.’

  Asked what would have happened had Rosemarie challenged Fritzl, Christine said, ‘We don’t know what he would have done to her. Maybe he would have slapped her.’

  It never happened. Fritzl had intimidated her far too much for it to come to that. He frequently mocked his wife, put her down and took a sadistic delight in humiliating her in public. ‘He was relaxed and sociable with everyone in the family apart from Rosi,’ said Christine. ‘He used to tell her off in front of the others. The worst things were his crude, dirty jokes, which he used to laugh loudly about. This was embarrassing for everyone, because we all knew they hadn’t had sex with each other for years.’

  Rosemarie secretly confided this to friends, but Fritzl was quite open about it. ‘He would always say, “My wife is much too fat for me,”’ said Christine. It was a comment he made regularly to others, often within Rosemarie’s earshot.

  She also said the narcissistic Fritzl spent a fortune on a hair transplant after she said he was bald. ‘Josef would b
e spiteful about my weight, but I would say, “Better to be chubby than bald,”’ Christine said. ‘He is so vain he went to Vienna for a hair transplant.’

  The most difficult time for the family came in 1967, when Fritzl was convicted of rape and went to prison for 18 months. Christine is 12 years younger than her sister, and was young and impressionable at the time. ‘I was 16 when he was locked up for rape and I found that crime truly disgusting – all the more so seeing as he already had four children with my sister,’ she said. ‘I have always hated him. He was born a criminal and will die a criminal.’ She could not understand how her sister could take him back.

  Despite his protestations of love for Rosemarie, Christine said that Fritzl showed no gratitude for his wife’s tolerance and understanding. Prison had not chastened him and his conviction taught him no humility. Instead, he began to batter and brutalise his family. Rosemarie and their seven children were subjected to regular vicious beatings as he unleashed a relentless reign of terror against his cowering victims. According to a friend, Rosemarie was so desperate that she plotted to flee the monster with her two boys and five girls at least 20 times, but she told her friend that she feared, ‘Josef will hunt us down and drag us back’.

  Details of the harrowing home life of Rosemarie and the children were provided by Elfriede Hoera, now 69, who became close to Rosemarie after she and her husband Paul met the Fritzls on a camping trip in 1973. Elfriede said Rosemarie lived in total fear of her husband, whose ‘father was a Nazi stormtrooper who died fighting for Adolf Hitler’. Elfriede said her best friend had told her, ‘We must escape – he has hit me many times and beats the children. He slaps me hard in the face if I don’t do what he wants and he makes the children cry. I can’t stand it any longer – I want to run away from him.’