This is the last known photograph of Elisabeth Fritzl before she disappeared into her long captivity underground. She appears momentarily happy: she has a boyfriend and has found another friend she can rely on, and she now faces the tantalising prospect that she may soon be able to escape the family home and her father’s abusive tyranny.
Her second letter to E, dated 29 May 1984, was written on notepaper decorated with a cartoon girl dancing in a yellow dress. It read, ‘Hello E. It is now already half-past ten and I’m lying in bed. Of course, I went out on Saturday. Can you imagine how hammered I was? At first we went to a couple of clubs. At about 5.00am we all went to my place to get a coffee because we’d had so much fun, and they all slept at my place. That was a mess. It took me half a day to clean up the flat.’
Her father could hardly have been pleased. She went on to talk about her waitressing job, saying, ‘Most of the time, I’m off two days a week. That’s when I go swimming, play tennis or even football. I like listening to music and daydreaming. But if life consists just of dreams – well, I don’t really know about that.’
But, in a dungeon, all you can do is dream.
She called the friends with whom she went clubbing her ‘crew’ and said, ‘They are really cool.’ She urged her friend to ‘keep your promise that you’ll visit me as soon as you get your driving licence,’ adding, ‘I have six siblings, four of them are girls and two brothers. My brother H is 21 years young. He is the one I like most.’
She signed off as ‘S’ and told her friend, ‘Stay safe, keep being a good boy. Don’t drink too much.’
In the third letter, posted from Amstetten on 3 August, less than a month before she disappeared below ground, Elisabeth revealed her plans to move in with one of her sisters. She told E she was ‘living fully in stress’ due to an upcoming exam, but she had been to a fair with work pals, saying, ‘It was something.’ And she talked again of leaving home. ‘As soon as I’ve moved, I will send you my new address,’ she said. ‘You could come and visit me with your friends if you want to.’ She added, chillingly, ‘Cross your fingers for me – when you get this letter, it will all be over.’
But her impending ordeal was just about to begin.
In all other respects, her tone was blithe and even apologetic for not writing a longer note. ‘Now I’m very tired because it’s very late and also the evening movie (Duel) is so exciting. I can’t write while watching this.’ She concluded, ‘Bye, see you soon, S. Write back soon and don’t get drunk for no reason!’
In the letters, Elisabeth Fritzl seems a completely normal, happy girl – totally unaware of the terrible fate that hung over her.
Her boyfriend Andreas Kruzik had been writing, too. ‘I wrote two letters to Elisabeth, telling her how much I loved her,’ he said, ‘and I was heartbroken when she did not write back.’
Unaware of the evil machinations of her depraved father, Andreas naturally jumped to the conclusion that he had been dumped. ‘I thought she had gone off me, despite the fact that we had talked about the future and getting married,’ he said. ‘She had spoken of running away with me and getting married, but he must have known of her plans.’
But he never saw or heard from her again and was horrified to learn of her fate through the media, more than two decades later. He now fears it was his secret love letters that led to her incarceration. ‘Now I fear he must have flown into a rage,’ said Andreas. ‘It’s horrific he would act like that.’
When Elisabeth completed her training programme in the late summer of 1984, she figured that she would soon be free. Her bags were packed, she had money saved and a job prospect in Linz. It seemed she was on the verge of getting away from her abusive father. The long nightmare of her home life finally seemed to be over and freedom, love and happiness beckoned, but that life was to be snatched away and she would enter a longer and darker nightmare.
4
INTO THE ABYSS
On 28 August 1984, Elisabeth’s underground nightmare began. Her father woke her that night and whispered to her to come down to the cellar that he normally stopped anyone else from entering. He asked her to help him fit the steel door, the final section of the prison he had built beneath the family home in Amstetten. This must have seemed a strange request, but he often worked downstairs in the cellar at night and absolute obedience had been drilled into her.
After the two of them had grappled the heavy door into place, Elisabeth said that her father grabbed her from behind and knocked her out with ether. When she came to, she found she was handcuffed to a metal pole, where she remained for the next two days. Then she said he put her on a five-foot dog leash which allowed her to reach the makeshift lavatory in the corner but otherwise restricted her movement. Already the bunker had been transformed into a prison: the heavy steel door was electronically controlled and the small room insulated and soundproofed.
For the first few weeks, the terrified teenager was held there in total darkness.
Elisabeth tried to fight back. She banged on the walls and screamed until she could no longer speak, but nobody responded and eventually she gave up. When she stopped battling her father, the beatings lessened, although he kept demanding sex and she was kept on the leash for the next nine months. Her father only visited her to rape her, or give her food to keep her alive. This presented her with a vicious dilemma.
‘I faced the choice of being left to starve or being raped,’ she said. It was a stark choice – but, in the end, it was no choice at all.
She said she could not remember how many times her father raped her while she was on the leash, or how many times he had raped her before, or how many times he raped her in all the years she was in the dungeon. In the end, her only alternatives were to endure the unendurable, or struggle and add to her suffering with another beating. There was no way out.
Fritzl denied handcuffing his daughter or keeping her on a dog leash, as she had told police. ‘That would not have been necessary,’ he said callously. ‘My daughter had no chance of escape.’
Nevertheless, at first the frantic Elisabeth spent hours screaming and banging her bruised body against the walls of her prison in the slim hope that she might attract help, but the dungeon was so deep below the main house and so well soundproofed that no one came. For four years, Fritzl kept her in complete isolation. Her only human contact was with her vile jailer, her only pastime counting the hours until he would return to brutally beat and rape her again.
Fritzl justified the captivity of his daughter, saying, ‘Why should I be sorry? I took good care of her. I saved her falling into the drug scene.’
There are no indications that she was on drugs. Her boyfriend certainly knew nothing of it. ‘What her father has said was not true at all,’ said Andreas Kruzik. ‘In no way whatsoever, that she went off the rails, that she took drugs … It is not true at all.’
Even today, there is only a minimal drug scene in Vienna, centred on the Karlsplatz. Elisabeth ran away to Vienna, she stayed in Brigittenau, which is over 3km away. The drugs of choice for Austrian teenagers seem to be alcohol and cigarettes, a fact confirmed by Elisabeth’s own letters.
Her father complained that, even though he had found her a job, there were days when she would not go to work. But then, she was a teenager.‘She even ran away twice and hung around with persons of questionable moral standards, who were not a good influence on her,’ he said. It is hard to imagine that any she met had more ‘questionable moral standards’ than Josef Fritzl himself.
‘I had to bring her home,’ he said, ‘but she always ran away again. That is why I had to arrange a place where I gave her the chance – by force – to keep away from the bad influences of the outside world.’
But the bad influences were much closer to home.
While Elisabeth was safely restrained in her subterranean dungeon, there were loose ends to be tied up. It was two years since she had started as a trainee at the Rosenberger restaurant in Strenberg. Then, her boss Franz Perner said, El
isabeth ‘suddenly vanished’. Fritzl told him that she had run away from home and would not be coming back to work.
The day after Elisabeth disappeared, Rosemarie Fritzl promptly – and properly – reported her daughter as ‘missing’. A short time later, Fritzl handed over a letter to the police, the first that Elisabeth was forced to write in captivity. It was dated 21 September 1984 and carried the postmark of the nearby town of Braunau am Inn, Hitler’s birthplace. According to the letter, Elisabeth had had enough of living at home and was staying with a friend. She warned her parents not to look for her, otherwise she would leave the country.
According to the German news magazine Der Spiegel, ‘The letter was practically made-to-order for a quick decision by the relevant bureaucracies. Nowadays, perhaps, even officials at Austrian youth agencies would ask themselves why a girl who was considered well-adjusted and shy would run away from home twice. But, at the time, the letter conformed perfectly to the standard prejudice that runaways are little more than ungrateful brats who ought to be thinking about what they are doing to their poor, suffering parents.’
As days turned into weeks, Fritzl ordered Elisabeth to write other letters to her mother. In them, she was to pretend that she had run away to join a religious sect and asked the police not to look for her. These letters must have been agonising to write. With each, she was robbing herself of any chance that someone would come looking for her; she was adding a new lock to her dungeon door, digging herself deeper into her grave. She must have been tempted to litter them with clues that would alert the reader to her terrible plight. But they were dictated and read by her father. However callous he may have been, he was not stupid. Nothing would get past him – no hint, no clue, not the slightest indication that anything was wrong. Besides, her browbeaten mother and the compliant authorities seemed to believe anything they were told. Any hope she might have had in these communications with the outside world must have soon been extinguished. No one, it seemed, was interested.
The letters duped the police searching for her into winding down the hunt. Meanwhile the local authorities simply did what was expected of them. They forwarded the missing-child report to the Austrian Interior Ministry, the State financial authority and all State educational authorities in case the name of Elisabeth Fritzl appeared in their records, but that was where their interest in the case ended.
‘Josef Fritzl had merely helped provide the authorities with an excuse for dropping the case when he told police that his daughter must have run off to join a sect,’ said Der Spiegel. It seemed plausible enough at first glance. No one even bothered to check with Dr Manfred Wohlfahrt, the officer concerned with sects at the St Pölten diocese; he would have seen through it in a moment. Sects that isolate members from their family and friends are practically unknown outside Japan and the English-speaking world, where their strange antics often generate massive publicity.
It was only a matter of weeks before investigators apparently gave up on Elisabeth Fritzl. And after she turned 19, her disappearance was no longer of police concern. ‘This is something the police see time and time again. As we all know, every child leaves the family home at some point,’ said Chief Investigator Franz Polzer. ‘Then her 19th birthday arrived. The Austrian police aren’t allowed to search for missing persons over the age of 19 because, from this age onwards, an Austria citizen can go anywhere in the world they want to.’
In planning Elisabeth’s imprisonment, Fritzl was clearly meticulous. He was widely known to be highly organised, a quality appreciated by those he did business with. He had dealings with Anton Graf, a neighbour of the summer guesthouse the Fritzl family ran in the mountains, who rented land to Fritzl. ‘We had a business relationship,’ said Graf. ‘He was correct. If he gave you his word, you could count on it. If he borrowed a tool and said he would return it two days later, then two days later it was back. What he said, he did. You could always count on it.’
However, sometimes Graf found Fritzl difficult to get along with. ‘He was inflexible and had no sensitivity,’ said Graf. ‘You were sick, something happened, he didn’t care … there was a rule – and that was it.’
Anton Graf saw the Fritzls every summer and knew Elisabeth throughout her childhood. So when she ‘disappeared’, Fritzl was sure to let him know all about it. ‘One day he came to see us in a right old state,’ said Graf. ‘And he told us, “Lizzy won’t be coming home. She is involved in a sect and has disappeared.”’
The letters Elisabeth had written from captivity were used to reinforce the idea that she had fallen into the hands of some crazy cult and to deflect any further questions. ‘A bit later on, he told us a letter had arrived,’ said Graf. ‘The letter said that it was pointless to search for her. She was deeply involved in a sect and she was so happy there that she was not coming home.’ He added that Fritzl delivered the story with such aplomb that no one was suspicious.
Other acquaintances, such as Fritzl’s friend, the deputy mayor of Lasberg, Leopold Stütz, also assumed the tale that his daughter Elisabeth – or Liesel, as he called her – had run away to join a religious sect was true. ‘Whenever we asked him about Liesel, he used to say that Interpol was looking for her,’ Stütz said. ‘He said that he was so worried that he even went to a fortune teller to try and learn what had happened to her.’
None of them questioned him, or checked any further. Even some of her school friends were duped by Fritzl’s cover story. ‘I remember how afraid Elisabeth was of her father and how she panicked about being home on time,’ said one former school friend. ‘When I heard she’d run away to a cult, it seemed like the logical consequence of trying to free herself from home and her domineering father.’
Nobody asked any questions.
Elisabeth’s boyfriend, Andreas Kruzik, did not believe her father’s story, however. ‘That she joined a sect? It is not true at all,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t the type to be influenced by a sect. She knew exactly what she did and what she wanted to do.’
The lie was transparent. But, sadly, Kruzik was only wise after the event. He did not hear Fritzl’s fabrication at the time. He thought he had simply been unceremoniously dumped and was heartbroken. ‘We were a couple. We wrote to each other, we saw each other,’ Andreas said. ‘But all of a sudden, all contact ended. When I called, I was palmed off. It was over and I didn’t hear from her again.’
What lovesick youth would enquire further, especially when he was sworn to kept his love a secret from his beloved’s tyrant of a father?
While Fritzl went to great lengths to keep the imprisonment of his daughter a secret, he claimed that he longed to confide in a sympathetic soul – perhaps similarly to master criminals who risk being discovered purely so that others can see how clever they have been. ‘With every week that I kept my daughter prisoner, my situation became more crazy,’ he said. ‘I often thought about telling a friend, but I was scared of being arrested.’
Full of self-pity, Fritzl considered that it was he who was ensnared, rather than his daughter. ‘I got myself into a vicious circle from which there was no escape,’ he said. ‘I just kept putting off a decision … Really, it is true, I often thought if I should set her free or not, but I just was not capable of making a decision, even though, and probably because, I knew that every day was making my crime that much worse. I was scared of being arrested, and that my family and everybody that knew me would know about my crime. That was why I kept putting off the day I would make a decision, putting it off again and again. Eventually – after a time – it was just too late to bring Elisabeth back into the world.’
As the weeks below ground stretched into months, Fritzl kept up a sickening pretence of normality with his daughter. He would tell her how work on the garden above her was progressing, and would also chat about films he had seen on TV, describe trips he had made and even kept her updated on the progress of her brothers and sisters. Unable to see any of these things for herself, this must have been an additional torture for her.
‘We first had sex in spring 1985 – nine months after I imprisoned her,’ he claimed. ‘I could not control myself any more. I wanted to have children with her. It was my dream to have another normal family, in the cellar, with her as a good wife and several children … At some stage, somewhere in the night, I went into the cellar. I knew that Elisabeth did not want it, what I did with her. The pressure to do the forbidden thing was just too big to withstand.’
Elisabeth did not fight him, he said, but she cried quietly afterwards, making small whimpering noises. Then, every two or three days when he went into the cellar to bring her food and a change of clothes, he had sex with her. ‘It was an obsession with me,’ he said.
For Elisabeth, the choice was always brutally simple – ‘It was either starve or be raped.’ And it was not her recollection that her father held off his sexual attacks for nine months. They began straight away, while she was in chains. Her father’s lust for her was not a consequence of her incarceration, but the cause of it.
While Fritzl might be planning to enter an insanity plea, he had already admitted that when he was raping his daughter in the cellar he knew right from wrong. ‘I knew what I was doing was wrong and that it was hurting her,’ he said. ‘But I was driven and, in the end, that desire was just too great for me.’
House of Horrors Page 6