For most people, any inkling of such feelings would have been a good reason to release her, but Fritzl had no such qualms about turning the full force of his libido on his unfortunate daughter. Friends said that, by this time, Rosemarie’s 27-year marriage was a sham. In 1984, with his new sex slave installed in the basement, Fritzl stopped even sleeping with his wife. He told his wife brutally, ‘You’re too fat for sex.’ And he told family and friends in her hearing, ‘Fat women are below my standard.’
According to Roswita Zmug, who later took over a restaurant and guesthouse from the Fritzls in the nearby village of Aschbach, ‘The marriage was over.’
Although Rosemarie put on a brave face, Roswita sensed her stoicism was illusory. ‘There was a coldness between them and they didn’t even talk to each other,’ she said. ‘Fritzl would just sit in the bar all day, ogling the women customers and grinning as if he had no care in the world, while she ran around doing all the hard work.’
Fritzl’s friend Paul Hoera also thought there was something amiss with the marriage, though he thought it was partly his wife’s fault. ‘I thought she was a cold person,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what their relationship was like – but I know that she was not his type. He told me he liked thin women and that he had a girlfriend. I never guessed it was his daughter.’
Fritzl admitted he did not even bother to use contraception while raping Elisabeth. ‘In reality, I wanted to have children with her,’ he said. ‘I was looking forward to the offspring. It was a beautiful idea for me, to have a proper family also down in the cellar.’
There seemed no depth to which his depravity would not stoop. He already had his daughter confined to one small room as his sex slave, to be beaten for his sadistic pleasure or penetrated on a whim. For the first four years of her incarceration, he kept her utterly alone. According to her own account, the only visitor she had was her captor, who raped her every few days. During those years, she must have sunk into utter despair. He could not have failed to inform her that everyone had swallowed his tissue of lies. The letters she had written had worked; no one had come to find her and no one was going to come – not her mother, not her brothers and sisters, not her friends, not the social services, not the police. An arrogant man, he would have crowed about it. How clever he was; they were not even looking. As far as they were concerned, she was having a wonderful time in some hippie commune. And if they had been looking for her, the last place they would have searched was in 40 Ybbsstrasse, her home, just metres below their feet. She had been buried alive.
Then, just when it seemed things could not get any worse, the luckless Elisabeth fell pregnant.
‘If we want to discuss when things deteriorated for Elisabeth, then certainly there was the moment that she realised she was pregnant for the first time, and then the worry throughout the pregnancy whether the child would be healthy,’ said Professor Max Friedrich, head of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic, Medical University, Vienna. ‘And the births themselves would have taken their toll, especially given there was no help on hand, like a midwife or a doctor.’
Her situation was hopeless. He was in total control. She was helpless – just a captive to be beaten for pleasure, raped at will and now carrying her own father’s child.
Parallels have been drawn with the case of Natascha Kampusch. Kidnapped from a Viennese street while she was on her way to school at the age of 10, she was held for eight years in a cellar before escaping in 2006. Professor Friedrich was the psychiatrist in the Kampusch case. He said that, like Natascha, Elisabeth Fritzl would have had to reach some sort of compromise with her captor simply to survive.
‘Since she was taken prisoner at the age of 18, and kept imprisoned, she must have been extremely scared,’ said Professor Friedrich ‘The question is, how did she cope with this fear and at what point was her will broken – because that’s a thing we would expect to happen. And then you see something called Stockholm Syndrome, which is when the victim becomes resigned to their abuse.’
Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological response often seen in people taken hostage, where the victim shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of what they have suffered or the danger the hostage has faced. There are reports that hostages have even fallen in love with their captors. The syndrome was first identified after the robbery of the Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm, Sweden, in 1973. The robbers held the bank employees hostage from 23 August to 28 August. In this case, the victims became strongly emotionally attached to their captors and even defended them after they were freed from their six-day ordeal.
The term Stockholm Syndrome was coined by the criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police during the robbery. Famous cases include that of Patty Hearst, the heiress to the US newspaper empire of William Randolph Hearst, who was kidnapped by left-wing radicals calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. After two months in captivity, she was filmed taking part in a robbery with her captors and issued statements condemning the capitalist ‘crimes’ of her parents, using the name ‘Tania’ – the nom de guerre of Tamara Bunka, the comrade-in-arms and lover of Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara. The rest of the SLA were killed in a shoot-out in May 1974, but Patty Hearst remained at large until September 1975, when she was captured by the FBI. She was charged with bank robbery and firearms offences.
In her defence, she claimed that she suffered from Stockholm Syndrome and had been coerced into aiding the SLA. She was convicted and imprisoned for her actions in the robbery, though her sentence was commuted in February 1979 by President Jimmy Carter, and she later received a Presidential pardon from Bill Clinton.
Another case that more closely mirrors that of Elisabeth Fritzl was Colleen Stan. She was held captive under the name Carol Smith from 1977 until 1984, by Cameron and Janice Hooker in northern California. Colleen was kept in locked wooden containers, sleeping in a coffin-like box under the bed Hooker shared with his wife. Throughout her captivity, she was consistently tortured and sexually assaulted to the point of complete physical and mental subservience. However, when given the opportunity to escape, she stayed – even signing a ‘slavery agreement’ and writing letters saying she was falling in love with Hooker.
Eventually, Janice Hooker grew tired of the attention her husband lavished on Colleen and arranged for her to leave. Even then, Colleen did not go to the authorities; neither did she tell her family the whole story and repeatedly telephoned Hooker, although she refused to return to him. Eventually, Janice Hooker left her husband. She began to reveal what had gone on and Cameron Hooker was arrested and charged with kidnap, rape and other sexual offences. His defence was that Colleen had become his slave voluntarily and that the sex was consensual, citing her letters and phone calls. But the jury did not believe him. He was convicted of ten felony counts and sentenced to 104 years’ imprisonment.
Plainly, Elisabeth Fritzl was not broken to this extent. In her 24 years in the cellar, she was never presented with any opportunity to escape. When one came – and she was assured that it really was a cast-iron bid for freedom – she took it.
But the most interesting parallels occur between the Kampusch and Fritzl cases, of course – firstly, because they both took place in Austria. Natascha Kampusch had been much younger than Elisabeth at the time of her kidnap, and was been abducted by a stranger, although the allegation has now been made that her mother was involved in the kidnapping or the cover-up. However, her captor Wolfgang Priklopil was, like Fritzl, a technician, having worked for some time at the German engineering giant Siemens. She was held in a small nuclear bunker under Priklopil’s garage. The entrance was hidden behind a cupboard and had a steel door. The cellar had no windows and was soundproofed. It had a floor space of just 5 square metres – approximately 54 square feet – smaller than the padded cell where Elisabeth Fritzl was first held. Natascha also attempted to make a noise to attract attention by throwing bottles of water against the walls.
However, she was only confined to the dungeon for the first six months. After that, she spent increasing amounts of time upstairs in the rest of the house, but each night was sent back to the chamber to sleep and was also locked up there while Priklopil was at work. Natascha said that she and Priklopil would get up early each morning to have breakfast together. Priklopil gave her newspapers and books, so she could educate herself. Stacks of school books were found in her cell. He also encouraged her to listen to classical music and educational programmes on the radio, and she taught herself to knit. So, in some ways, she had an easier time than Elisabeth Fritzl. But there was no escape. Priklopil had warned her that the doors and windows of the house were booby-trapped with high explosives. He also claimed to be carrying a gun, and warned that he would kill her and anyone she spoke to if she attempted to escape. Natascha said she fantasised about chopping his head off with an axe, although she dismissed the idea.
In later years, she was seen outside in the garden alone, and one of Priklopil’s business partners also said that he met Natascha at his home nearby when her kidnapper came to borrow a trailer. Natascha, he said, looked ‘cheerful’. After she turned 18, she was allowed to go on shopping trips with Priklopil. He threatened to kill her if she made a noise, although she did make vain attempts to attract attention. He even took her on a skiing trip to an Alpine resort near Vienna. She initially denied that they had made the trip, but eventually admitted that it was true, although she said she had had no chance to escape during the excursion.
On 23 August 2006, the 18-year-old was cleaning and vacuuming Priklopil’s BMW in the garden when, at 12.53pm, someone called him on his mobile phone. Priklopil walked away from the car because of the noise of the vacuuming. Seeing her chance to escape, Natascha left the vacuum cleaner running and ran away, unseen by Priklopil, who completed the call without noticing she had gone. Natascha ran for some 200m through gardens and a street, jumping fences, and asking passers-by to call the police, but they took no notice. After about five minutes, she knocked on the window of a 71-year-old neighbour and said, ‘I am Natascha Kampusch.’ The neighbour called the police.
Unlike Elisabeth Fritzl, when Natascha escaped she was found to be in good physical health, although she looked pale and shaken and weighed only 48kg – approximately 7st – almost the same weight she had been eight years earlier when she disappeared. She had grown only 15cm – about 6in – and was identified by a scar on her body, DNA samples and her passport, which was found in the room where she had been held. Sabine Freudenberger, the first police officer to speak to her after her ordeal, said that she was astonished by Natascha’s ‘intelligence and her vocabulary’.
Unable to recapture Natascha, Priklopil realised that the police would soon be after him and he killed himself by jumping in front of a suburban train near the Wien Nord station in Vienna. It seems he had planned to commit suicide rather than be arrested, having previously told Natascha that ‘they would not catch him alive’. She said she had not cried when she learned of his suicide, but she admitted that, in some way, his death had affected her. ‘He was part of my life,’ she said. ‘That is why, in a certain way, I did mourn him.’
They had had a close relationship. In interviews, she referred to him only by his first name, Wolfgang, rather than Priklopil. She said he rarely worked and they would talk while she did the cooking and housework for him. ‘He was not my master … I was equally strong,’ she said.
Natascha now owns Priklopil’s house, which was given to her as compensation. She has no plans to have it demolished like the homes of American cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer or Fred and Rosemary West. And, since her release, she has visited the cell where she was held captive.
Some sentiments expressed in the official statement Natascha issued after her escape eerily echo the justifications of Josef Fritzl. She said that her captivity spared her many things. ‘I did not start smoking or drinking,’ she said, ‘and I did not hang out in bad company.’
Like Elisabeth Fritzl, Natascha Kampusch is a remarkably strong and resilient young woman. She said that, in general, she did not feel she had missed out on anything during her imprisonment and somehow gained strength from the hopelessness of her situation. ‘I always had the thought, “Surely I didn’t come into the world so I could be locked up and have my life completely ruined,”’ she said. ‘I gave up in despair about this unfairness. I always felt like a poor chicken in a hen house. You saw my dungeon on television and in the media, thus you know how small it was. It was a place for despair.’
Natascha Kampusch seems to have made a full recovery. She has managed to exploit the media interest in her, gaining some recompense for her suffering by charging for interviews. She also published a book giving an account of her imprisonment and has begun a well-deserved career as a TV chat-show host.
However, it seems that she prefers to put on a brave face and tends to minimise the abuse she suffered. According to her media adviser, Priklopil ‘would beat her so badly she could hardly walk. When she was beaten black and blue, he tried to smarten her up. Then he would take his camera and photograph her.’
She has also refused to give any details of how her captor might have sexually abused her over the years. ‘Everyone always wants to ask intimate questions that are nobody’s business,’ she said. ‘Maybe I will tell my counsellor some day, or someone else when I feel the need to, or maybe never. The intimacy is mine alone.’
Professor Friedrich, her psychologist, said that the language she uses is clear and powerfully expresses the complex relationship she developed with her captor.
In the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, there can be no doubt about the sexual abuse she suffered. Her father admits it and the DNA evidence is there. Indeed, unlike Natascha’s experience, Elisabeth’s life in her underground bunker included no visits to neighbours, no shopping trips, no visits to ski resorts, no glimpse of the outside world and no cause for hope. And now with her pregnancy, she could simply have given up.
Perhaps for some brief moment she might have thought that her father would have had to take her to hospital for the birth. She must have been terrified, too, that a child produced by incest would suffer from some genetic impairment. Fritzl, of course, feigned concern. ‘Elisabeth was, of course, very worried about the future,’ he said. ‘But I bought her medical books for the cellar, so that she would know when the day came what she had to do. I also arranged towels and disinfectants and nappies.’
When Elisabeth was about to give birth, Fritzl drove hundreds of miles to stock up on baby food, clothes and disposable nappies at shops where no one would recognise him. When he returned, it must have been plain to her that he was not going to allow her out of the cellar for the birth. With the medical books to hand, it was clear that he was not going to provide her with any medical assistance. What doctor or nurse could possibly have visited her in her tiny cellar to help her give birth and then left without asking questions? The poor girl was clearly going to have to suffer the ordeal unaided.
In 1989 – the year the Berlin Wall came down – Elisabeth gave birth to her first daughter, Kerstin, whose life-threatening condition caused by a lifetime starved of light and fresh air eventually led to their release. Her terrified 22-year-old mother gave birth to her firstborn entirely alone. The only possible midwife could have been her abusive father and he had no incentive to be around.
‘We think he went off sex with Elisabeth when she was heavily pregnant and left her alone to have her babies underground,’ said a police spokesman. ‘All he cared about was satisfying his lust and keeping the terrible secret of his hidden family. The more we learn about him, the more his actions defy belief. He is morally sub-human.’
However, with the help of the medical books Fritzl had brought, Elisabeth and her baby survived the ordeal. They were lucky; aside from having no professional assistance, the risk to her newborn child was also substantially increased by the lack of proper facilities, said Patrick O’Brien, a spokesman for the Royal Colle
ge of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Elisabeth herself was also at massive risk during the birth.
‘Most babies will be delivered absolutely fine, even without medical assistance,’ he said, ‘but there is a huge rise in the chance of serious complications for both mother and baby when there is a lack of care during pregnancy, and particularly around the time of birth.’
Kerstin was sickly from the moment she was born. She suffered from cramps, now diagnosed as a form of epilepsy that is linked to incest. However, there was an up-side. To have a child – despite its paternity – would have given Elisabeth something to live for. Now she would have someone to love and she would not have to live alone in the cellar. On the other hand, her poor child would have to suffer the same life of captivity that her mother endured.
Indeed, after Kerstin’s birth, Elisabeth’s life did improve. ‘There was a change,’ said Chief Investigator Franz Polzer. ‘She said herself that even before she was incarcerated, she had been abused by her father. And after being taken prisoner, she had endured brutal physical violence in some shape or form. And then she told us this had lessened.’
The beatings may have become less brutal, but the rapes did not stop. In Fritzl’s warped mind, his daughter was now his mistress and he bought her skimpy outfits and lingerie which no one, bar him and their children, would ever see her wear. He also dressed smartly for his nocturnal visits to the cellar and, the following year, she gave birth to a son, Stefan, now 18. Margaret Thatcher had just resigned and Elisabeth Fritzl had already been entombed for five years.
5
WHO KNEW?
Although the police and Elisabeth’s mother Rosemarie had long since given up looking for the girl, not everyone believed Fritzl’s story that she had run off to join some secret religious sect. At school reunions, when the talk turned to how Elisabeth had left to become part of a cult, her close friend Christa Woldrich would always say, ‘Don’t be crazy … she would never do such a thing.’
House of Horrors Page 7