Fritzl was still working at the time so there was some respite. ‘I am always happy when he is out of the house,’ Rosemarie confided, but she dreaded his return. ‘That swine beats me up – and the children,’ she said. ‘All the time he treats us like rubbish. I really hate the bastard. My marriage is made up of quarrels and arguments. We haven’t had sex for a very long time – though I’m very happy when he doesn’t touch me.’
It seemed to Elfriede that Rosemary had resigned herself to her fate. ‘I must stay for the sake of my children,’ she said. ‘Josef will find us if we all run away.’
Elfriede knew Rosemarie for many years and was in a position to assess how she and the children suffered. ‘Fritzl was a tyrant who terrorised his family,’ she said. ‘He bossed them around and brutalised them like an army officer. I saw him beating his children and Rosemarie told me how he beat her many, many times – too many times for me to remember.’
Elfriede said she also had regular talks with Fritzl’s daughter Elisabeth when, as a teenager, she spent three years working as a kitchen helper at a guesthouse they owned. Although Fritzl said Elisabeth was his favourite, this appeared to be belied by his brutal treatment of her. Elfriede recalled, ‘Josef did not like Elisabeth at all and she was a very shy, sad child – not happy at all. I never saw her laugh once and she seemed somehow disturbed.’
But Elfriede failed to find out what the root of the problem was. ‘I tried to get close to her but she never confided in me what was happening to her,’ she said. ‘I once asked her why she was so sad and she just said, “Papa is so dominant and strict.”’
It appeared to Elfriede that Fritzl only liked three of his children – his daughters Gabriele and Ulrike, and his son Josef. The other four – Rosemarie Jr, Doris, Harald and Elisabeth – routinely suffered the full fury of his hate-fuelled rages. ‘Josef was very cruel to them,’ Elfriede said. ‘Rosemarie told me it was common for him to attack them.’
Elfriede witnessed this for herself. ‘When I saw Josef hit his children with his open hand across the face they always burst out in tears,’ she said. ‘I felt so sorry for Rosemarie and her family.’
One day she saw Fritzl drag his daughter Rosemarie from a caravan by the hair before slapping the weeping youngster across the face for disobeying him. There was nothing discreet about his abuse. Elfriede told how she had witnessed Fritzl openly lash out at his children in public outside their home.
‘Josef was driving down the road one night and saw the kids running around,’ she recalled. ‘He stopped the car and got out in the middle of the street and started beating them. It was awful – I heard the screams.’ Elisabeth was also subject to these assaults and had bruises all over her body.
Elfriede, who now lives in Munich, across the border in Germany, said she often asked Rosemarie why Fritzl doted on some of his children while appearing to loathe the others. ‘Rosemarie said she did not know,’ Elfriede recalled. ‘But she once told me, “Ulrike is Josef’s favourite – she is the only one to answer him back.” He seemed to respect that.’
Elfriede even begged Rosemarie to take the kids and run away from the brute who had turned their home into a living hell.
‘I tried to convince her to go but she was helpless,’ she said. ‘She told me she wanted to leave Fritzl – but she knew she could not escape with all seven of her children. She knew Fritzl would hunt them down and drag them back. She stayed in the marriage because of the kids. Many times she told me how she was afraid to stand up to him for fear of being beaten up. And she feared for the safety of the youngsters because he beat them so brutally.’
Mother-of-two Elfriede lost touch with Rosemarie when her own marriage broke up. She and her husband Paul divorced in 1984, some months before Elisabeth’s dungeon ordeal began.
Elfriede later speculated that Rosemarie might have had some inkling that something was going on in the cellar. ‘Rosemarie once told me, “Josef is busy at home at the moment – he has lots of building work to do,”’ Elfriede said. ‘she did not know what he was doing.’
Elfriede is sure that Rosemarie did not know what her husband was up to, because she was too cowed by his brutality even to ask questions.
However, in 1973, Rosemarie plucked up the courage to leave her husband, although she was not allowed to take the children with her. It seems she simply made the excuse that she had to stay at a guesthouse at Mondsee to take care of business there. It was two hours from the family home. Fritzl insisted their seven children stay with him at Ybbsstrasse, although she was allowed to see them occasionally.
Rosemarie’s former colleague Anton Klammer said, ‘Josef beat her and she was petrified of him. She loved her kids but the guest house they owned was a good excuse to leave him. She thought that if she didn’t leave, he may kill her. Rosemarie was happy and normal but when he was around she used to shrink away. You could tell she was terrified of him. The children stayed with Josef because they had to go to school but sometimes he would come up and drop the children off with Rosemarie for a few nights. She was a loving mother.’
Rosemarie had to move back into 40 Ybbsstrasse nine years later when the guesthouse was burnt down. Soon after Fritzl was arrested for arson. A local newspaper published a picture of Fritzl taken at a court hearing in 1982. However, he was released due to lack of evidence.
Beate Schmidinger, the owner of a nearby café, said, ‘Everyone thought he set fire to the place because we knew he had money trouble.’
Despite the appearance of prosperity, it is clear that Fritzl was already badly in debt, but the real motivation for the fire might have been to force Rosemarie to return to Ybbsstrasse, where he could control her.
Paul Ruhdorfer, who took over the guesthouse after it had been restored, said, ‘There were two Rosemaries. One was the owner and competent businesswoman who was happy and carefree. The other was a timid victim, controlled by her overbearing husband.’
While Fritzl was a tyrant, that did not mean he could not enjoy life as well. A friend, who went on holiday with him to Thailand, filmed him having a massage on a beach and cheerfully tucking into a knuckle of roast ham. A home video from this Thailand trip, shown widely on Austrian television, showed Fritzl and a friend from Munich riding on an elephant. The off-camera commentary says, ‘Hey, Sepp, you had better show this to your wife to convince her that we’re on safari, not hunting for humans.’ The police do not believe this was significant. It may simply have been a reference to his predilection for seeking out young Thai prostitutes. However, the remark now appears chilling.
It is clear that Fritzl had, indeed, once hunted humans – his rape victims. Even before his daughter disappeared into the cellar, he could have feasibly perpetrated a series of ghoulish crimes. Despite the removal of his 1967 rape conviction from the record, the Linz police now believe he was a suspect in two other sex attacks, in 1974 and 1982. He was also investigated for arson and insurance fraud on more than one occasion and there are indications that he had at least one other conviction. However, once again, the records have been expunged and the authorities said they were unable to give further details of the crime.
‘I don’t know what happened then,’ said District Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze. ‘It happened too long ago. It’s beyond the statute of limitations and it’s therefore no longer of relevance to the authorities.’
Along with Austria’s laws governing the lapsing of criminal records for the purpose of rehabilitating criminals, Fritzl has also been the beneficiary of an informal ‘Masonic’ network that has brought ‘good chaps’ with murky pasts back into main-stream respectability. Without a de-Nazification programme, a large number of former Nazis – some of whom were involved in the concentration camps or implicated in the Holocaust or other atrocities – managed to find their way back into society. As a result, it was usually best not to ask too many personal questions. Austrian diplomat Kurt Waldheim, for example, had served two terms as Secretary General of the United Nations and was standing for elect
ion for the Austrian presidency when it was revealed that he had not been studying law at the University of Vienna during the war as he claimed. Instead, he had been with a German unit in the Balkans that took brutal reprisals against Yugoslav partisans and shot civilians, and was responsible for the deportation of the Jews from Salonika in Greece to the death camps in 1943. Nevertheless, he won the election and served for six years as President.
In Fritzl’s case, the Austrian unwillingness to ask questions may have covered up some more recent crimes. On 22 November 1986, 17-year-old Martina Posch was found dead on the southern shore of Mondsee Lake, opposite the Fritzls’ guesthouse and camping ground near Salzburg. Two divers found Martina’s naked body, bound and wrapped in two green plastic sheets, ten days after she had gone missing from her home. She was thought to have been raped and murdered before her body was dumped in the lake.
No one was arrested. Fritzl’s best friend, Paul Hoera, who first met him at Mondsee on a camping holiday with his wife, Rosemarie’s friend Elfriede, in 1973, said he made regular trips to the lake and could have been in the area when Martina went missing. Since Fritzl hit the headlines, the police made the connection between the two cases and Martina Posch’s 22-year-old murder file has been re-opened. A pretty 17-year-old, Martina bore a striking resemblance to Elisabeth who, by then, had already been in captivity for over two years.
‘We have found no sign of a concrete link up to now,’ said Alois Lissl, Chief of Police of Upper Austria province, but he said Fritzl would be questioned about the murder as he could have been in the area when Martina was killed.
Although Fritzl was no longer co-operating with the police, he had claimed earlier that he had an alibi for the day Martina Posch was killed and dumped in the lake. This has yet to be tested in court, but his close friend Andrea Schmitt said that her husband was staying at Lake Mondsee at the time – and she believes Fritzl was there, too.
The police were also hoping to find a DNA match, and they searched Fritzl’s house for the murdered girl’s missing possessions, which include a blue jacket, a grey purse and a pair of black ankle boots.
‘The perpetrator could have kept these items as a kind of trophy,’ said Police Chief Lissl, adding, ‘What really stands out is that, without her permanent wave, Martina looks similar to Fritzl’s daughter Elisabeth. When we put the portrait photographs next to each other, it was unbelievable.’
The artist’s drawing of Elisabeth published so far bears little similarity to the only photographs of Martina released to date. Observers say Elisabeth now looks more like the sister of her mother, Rosemarie, who is 69. However, a black-and-white snap of Elisabeth as a smiling teenager and a colour picture of her as a 14-year-old secondary school pupil are said to bear an uncanny resemblance.
Austrian police are also investigating the possibility that Fritzl was involved in another unsolved sexually-motivated murder of a teenager in the 1960s. In 1966, prior to Fritzl’s first conviction for rape, the body of 17-year-old Anna Neumauer was found in a cornfield near her home in Pfaffstaett bei Mattinghofen in Lower Austria, 65 miles from Amstetten. She had been killed with a captive bolt pistol, the type used for slaughtering livestock.
The police are reviewing the case of 16-year-old Julia Kuehrer, who disappeared from Pulkau, 60 miles from Amstetten, in June 2006, and they are also looking for any possible connection between Fritzl and the murder of Gabriele Supekova, a 42-year-old prostitute, whose body was found in August 2007 near the Austrian border, where Fritzl is said to have spent time on holiday.
It may be that the police are just trying to write off their unsolved cases. On the other hand, Fritzl might have been conducting a parallel career as a serial killer. It is not unknown for criminals to progress from minor crimes such as flashing or theft, via rape to murder – and, in this case, possibly, to incest, imprisonment and enslavery.
After his arrest, Fritzl condemned the media coverage of his case, saying that he could have killed the family he kept in the cellar, but he didn’t. For those who have not killed before, surely this is a daunting prospect – particularly if the victim is your own flesh and blood. Perhaps he knew that he really could kill his dungeon captives because he had already killed elsewhere. He was plainly a man who placed little value on the lives of others – whether they were strangers or his own flesh and blood.
3
THE APPLE OF HIS EYE
Elisabeth was the prettiest of Fritzl’s daughters when she fell prey to her monstrous father. With her picture-book Austrian good looks – high cheekbones, wide eyes and a rosebud smile – she was always the apple of his eye. Despite Rosemarie saying that Ulrike, the oldest girl, was Fritzl’s favourite, he himself insisted it was Elisabeth. Ulrike answered him back, Rosemarie said, and Fritzl respected that, but it was no good for his purpose: he needed someone he could intimidate.
During a crucial part of Ulrike’s development, Fritzl had been away in jail. Perhaps that’s what had made her so single-minded. But Elisabeth was still an infant when her father was in prison. By 1977, Ulrike was 19 and getting ready to slip from his grasp by leaving home, but Elisabeth was only 11 and had not begun the ‘youthful rebellion’ he complained of later. She still took care to hide the evidence of the beatings she suffered from her teachers and school friends. What began as a vicious over-indulgence in discipline and punishment developed into a sadistic fixation and Fritzl began to sexually assault his helpless daughter. This may have begun while her brother and sisters were enjoying a holiday with their mother. Having lost interest sexually in his wife, Fritzl began to go on vacation on his own. One holiday snap released to the press shows him on a trip to the Mediterranean in the late 1970s – at a time when it is thought he was already sexually abusing the ill-fated Elisabeth.
Elisabeth said that the abuse started when she was 11. Fritzl denies it, saying that it began much later, but there is circumstantial evidence to substantiate Elisabeth’s allegation. In 1977, Rosemarie took Ulrike, Rosi (then 16) and their brother Harald (13) to Italy. Family pictures show the sisters enjoying their two-week vacation. But Fritzl refused to let Elisabeth go and so she spent the fortnight at home with her depraved father. His perverted lust was the driving force behind his later crimes and, being at home alone for two weeks with the child he had already cowed, he had manufactured the perfect opportunity to inflict himself on her.
Family friend Paul Hoera joined the Fritzl family with his own children for the break. ‘I can’t bear to see them any more,’ he said, after discovering the secret of Fritzl’s House of Horrors. ‘While we enjoyed ourselves, he could have been putting Elisabeth through goodness knows what.’
Paul, now 69, added, ‘Elisabeth as a child was withdrawn and shy. I got the impression Josef didn’t like her much. He didn’t treat her as well as his other kids. He used to beat her a lot more. She used to get a slap for small things. I feel sick every time I think of her under the house when we were sitting in the garden laughing and joking.’
Denied the simple pleasures of a family holiday, Elisabeth was trapped at home with her tyrannical and sexually predatory father. That year, Fritzl had begun raping her, the police report says – although, even now, she can barely bring herself to speak of it and the details are yet to come out.
As a young girl, she could not understand her predicament. Although her father was a domineering man, as a child she had offered him total obedience, but somehow he was now treating her differently from her brothers and sisters. ‘I don’t know why it was so,’ she said, ‘but my father simply chose me for himself.’
She later told the police that Fritzl would rape her without warning, in his car and on walks through the forest – even in the cellar. He denied this, saying that he only began to have sexual contact with his daughter some time after he locked her in the dungeon. Elisabeth was terrified of the days when he came to her, when he would mercilessly abuse her because, in his eyes, she belonged to him. She was nothing beyond being his possession to do with a
s he pleased.
‘I am not a man who would molest children,’ he said. ‘I only had sex with her later, much later.’
However, it seems plain now that something was going on – the signs were all too obvious. Elisabeth, already an outsider at school, became more withdrawn. Her best friend at Amstetten High School, Christa Woldrich, said that she always had to be home half an hour after school finished.
‘I was never allowed to visit her,’ said Christa. ‘The only explanation she ever gave was that her father was very strict. I did not see him, but he was always there between us because of his influence over her, like an invisible presence you could always feel.’
Another school friend recalled how Elisabeth was ‘terrified of not being home on time’. ‘When we went to her home, we had to leave as soon as her father appeared,’ she said.
Christa Woldrich said the teenage Elisabeth was noticeably reserved when speaking of life outside the classroom. ‘I did get the impression that she felt more comfortable at school than at home,’ said Christa. ‘And sometimes she went quiet when it was time to go home again. It was the same for both of us – it was like a silence descending.’
It was clear that Elisabeth was being physically abused by her father. Other school friends said that she had sometimes avoided gym classes for fear that the teacher would ask about the bruises all over her body. Classmate Christa Gotzinger, who also had a violent father, said, ‘We learnt to take the beatings … We learnt how to pull ourselves together when the pain was unbearable.’
Another friend, who refused to be identified, said that Fritzl punched his children. ‘He didn’t slap or spank them,’ she said. ‘He hit them with his fists. Her brother once told me, “The pig will beat us to death one day”.’
As Elisabeth grew older and began to show the first signs of becoming a woman, Fritzl grew frighteningly possessive over his daughter. He flew into a tempestuous rage if she attempted to dress fashionably, wore make-up or mentioned boys. Christa Woldrich noted the effect these furious outbursts had on her. ‘Elisabeth became very sullen and withdrawn,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t allowed out in the evenings or to invite friends to the house. I think she was comfortable only at school, though she wasn’t very good at anything.’
House of Horrors Page 4