House of Horrors

by Nigel Cawthorne

  It was all the more unbelievable as, while such secretive sects are well known in the United States and Britain – more recently in Japan – they were few and far between in Austria, a traditional Catholic country. But Christa Woldrich was in no position to pursue the matter. She had never been allowed to visit the Fritzl house and she knew that Elisabeth’s father was an ogre who discouraged her friends. There was no reason to believe her mother would be any more forthcoming. She too, apparently, believed the story of Elisabeth running off to join a sect. If she didn’t, why wasn’t she doing anything about it? Whatever had happened to Elisabeth was clearly, first and foremost, a matter for the family.

  There were other people close to hand who might have been expected to know where Elisabeth was. Fritzl rented out rooms in 40 Ybbsstrasse. During Elisabeth’s incarceration, more than 100 tenants had lived in the ugly three-storey concrete bunker in the centre of Amstetten – directly above her prison, but none of them suspected anything.

  The signs were there though. Joseph Leitner moved into the house on Ybbsstrasse in 1994, despite knowing that Fritzl had raped his own daughter before she disappeared. Though Fritzl banned pets, Leitner kept a dog, a husky-Labrador-sheepdog mix named Sam. ‘The dog always used to bark when we walked past the cellar,’ he said. ‘I thought he was just excited about going outside.’

  Fritzl warned all his tenants that the cellar was strictly off-limits – and anyone going near it would be thrown out.

  Sam would often wake with a start in the middle of the night and was ‘hugely terrified’. He also used to bark suddenly in the small hours – but always slept peacefully once they had moved out. Leitner now believes his pet could hear noises from the cellar below, but even though he already had his suspicions concerning Fritzl and his daughter, he kept quiet.

  ‘I decided I did not want to get involved,’ he said. ‘I did not want to get kicked out of the flat – I did not want to lose it. I kept myself to myself.’

  There was another oddity about the bedsit Leitner rented from Fritzl that should have alerted him. He was baffled about the exorbitantly high electricity bill that Fritzl asked him to pay. A waiter who worked long hours, Leitner was barely ever there and never used the washing machine – yet his monthly electricity bill was more than €400 (£312). Leitner even asked a friend from a cable TV company to check the electricity in the house, but even when all the gadgets in his room were unplugged, the meter continued to click around at high speed.

  It was only much later that Leitner discovered the answer to the riddle. It lay just a metre or so beneath his feet. His bedsit was directly above the cellar where Fritzl had imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth and their growing family, and his landlord was siphoning off electricity from his tenants to power the lights and appliances in the dungeon below.

  Sam, the mongrel, may also have had his suspicions. Usually a friendly dog, he would growl menacingly whenever he saw the landlord. The antagonism was mutual and eventually, Sam was the reason Leitner had to leave.

  ‘Every time I walked up the stairs, the dog tried to run to the cellar door and barked,’ he said. ‘When Fritzl noticed, he kicked me out by changing the locks on my flat. He was furious.’

  Leitner’s summary eviction came 14 years before Elisabeth’s imprisonment was discovered. He now feels guilty that he did not pursue his suspicions or follow up on what his dog had been telling him. ‘If I had put more effort into finding out what was behind all that, maybe the dungeon would have been discovered much earlier,’ he said. ‘I’m now angry at myself that I failed to do that.’

  Another tenant who had his suspicions was Alfred Dubanovsky, who had known Elisabeth at school. He had also been aware of her harrowing home life and her sudden disappearance – though he assumed, reasonably enough, that she had simply run away again. However, when he got a job at a petrol station near Ybbsstrasse, he moved into number 40. ‘I lived there for 12 years and all the time that poor family was suffering so much down below. It is too awful to think about,’ he said when the cellar dungeon was discovered.

  The floor he lived on was split into a number of flats, let to as many as eight different tenants at a time. His 42-square-metre flat was just a few feet above the cellar where Elisabeth and her family were incarcerated.

  Like his fellow tenant Joseph Leitner, Alfred Dubanovsky found there were a great many puzzling aspects to life at 40 Ybbsstrasse. ‘There were many things I found strange but I never would have guessed what they represented,’ he said. ‘Herr Fritzl banned any of the tenants of the eight flats from going anywhere near the cellar or back yard. He told us the cellar was protected with a sophisticated electronic alarm, and whoever went there would have their contract cancelled without notice.’

  Plainly, he had something to hide, and there were other odd goings-on concerning the cellar in the household of Herr Fritzl. ‘He used to take food and shopping down there in a wheelbarrow – always at night,’ said Dubanovsky. There were a great many mouths to feed. Though Fritzl was careful enough to go to outlying supermarkets to do the shopping for his captives, all the food for both Fritzl’s second family in the basement and the remaining family upstairs had to be delivered to his home. There, the quantity could not be concealed. According to Dubanovsky, ‘The amount was far too much for Josef, his wife and the three kids still at home.’

  According to Elisabeth’s testimony, her mother knew nothing of her captivity, neither was she involved. It was only her father, Elisabeth said, who supplied her with food and clothing. Even before they questioned Rosemarie, the police had ruled out her involvement. ‘What woman would stay silent if she knew that her husband had seven children with his daughter and was holding her prisoner in the cellar?’ asked the Chief Investigator.

  Rosemarie’s younger sister Christine is convinced that, ‘She would never have believed him capable of it’.

  Her former colleague Anton Klammer said, ‘People ask how she could not have known, but she was living away from him for a long time’ – at least while Fritzl was developing his plans. ‘She was a loving mother – I’m sure she had no idea of what was going on. She was terrified of him.’

  Joseph Leitner did not mention Rosemarie’s involvement, but he recalled how Fritzl would ‘unload plastic bags full of shopping from his silver-grey Mercedes and bring them into the garden between 10.00 and 11.00 at night’.

  If that was not puzzling enough, there were other things that could have alerted the tenants. ‘At other times, I remember I could sometimes hear a knocking from the cellar that I couldn’t explain,’ said Alfred Dubanovsky. ‘Right below my room, I heard banging, bashing, knocking noises. One time, I asked Fritzl what it was and he said it was coming from the gas heating below.’

  Dubanovsky believed his landlord’s assurances when Fritzl told him that the cellar below was empty. He also noted, though, that Fritzl had established a routine. When he worked, he visited the cellar in the evening, but once he retired, he disappeared into the cellar at 9.00am each morning, ostensibly to work on electrical engineering plans. He remained there ‘at work’ long after his wife had gone to bed. She was told never to disturb him.

  Given his tyrannical demeanour, the family must have been grateful that Fritzl withdrew for hours on end into his cellar where he had his workshop and office, as well as the well hidden entrance to the dungeon. The entrance to the cellar itself was the back garden, which was obscured by a tall hedge. The back garden was Fritzl’s kingdom, one neighbour said, and intruders were not welcome.

  ‘Every day at nine every morning Sepp would go to the cellar, supposedly to produce blueprints for machines he had been commissioned to build,’ said his sister-in-law Christine. Often, he even stayed there overnight, she continued, telling his wife under no circumstances was he to be disturbed. ‘Rosi was not even allowed to bring him a cup of coffee,’ she said. ‘His word was law.’

  No one queried his behaviour – for good reason. ‘Questions about why he was down there so long were
banned,’ said Christine.

  Fritzl had acquired a reputation locally for being somewhat reclusive, so an obsession about some secret project in his basement did not seem out of character to his tenants. ‘Herr Fritzl spent every day in his cellar but I thought his behaviour was pretty normal,’ said Alfred Dubanovsky.

  Dubanovsky also said that Fritzl was enormously house-proud of the unattractive concrete building with its sheer featureless walls and small, cell-like windows on Ybbsstrasse. ‘Fritzl was strange,’ said Dubanovsky. ‘He told me, “One day, my house will go down in history.” Now I know what he meant by that. Only he was allowed to go into the cellar; he went there almost every day.’

  It was clear, at the very least, that whatever was going on in the cellar was of dubious legality. The seemingly respectable Fritzl was paranoid about the police. ‘He would fly into a panic at the merest mention of the police or the law,’ said Dubanovsky. ‘When I moved out, there was a dispute over who should pay for repairs to a door. I threatened to sue. He went pale and caved in immediately.’

  But who could have imagined what was really going on under the house? ‘I never in my wildest dreams thought he was behind anything like this,’ said Dubanovsky. Nevertheless, he admits, ‘there were so many clues – the noises at night, the amount of food that he used to load into a wheelbarrow and push to the cellar … I wish to God that I could turn back the clock. The signs were all there but it was impossible for me to recognise them. Who would ever believe something so terrible was going on right under my feet? It is a regret I will have to live with for the rest of my life.’

  Another tenant, 32-year-old Anita Lachinger, a neighbour who briefly rented the flat above Dubanovsky’s, had no suspicions at all. ‘The Fritzl family made a very nice impression,’ she said after her brief stay. ‘I felt good in the house. They were a perfectly normal family to me. The only thing that was odd was that the grandparents were fostering their grandchildren. When I heard the news about Herr Fritzl, I was genuinely shocked. It is incomprehensible to me. He seemed, whenever you saw him, like such a harmless old man. No one would have guessed the truth. It’s incredible.’ However, she, too, was warned to steer clear of the cellar. It was out of bounds.

  There were other telltale signs that something untoward was going on. Joseph Leitner said food often went missing from his kitchen and that of fellow tenants. Sausage, fresh milk and cheese, for example, would disappear overnight from the fridges. It was as if the little people from The Borrowers were foraging for titbits. The real reason things were going missing was that Herr Fritzl would use his master key to slip into the tenants’ flats to pilfer provisions for Elisabeth and their children on the days when he did not have time for a shopping expedition.

  ‘I took care of them all,’ Fritzl told police during his first interrogation. ‘I meant well.’

  With Elisabeth and two growing children in the tiny cellar, things were becoming terribly cramped. Only a small, 20-square-metre room had been approved by planning officials as a nuclear-attack shelter. All three lived in one room until the sickly Kerstin was five and Stefan was three, and were present when Fritzl continued raping their mother. To be seen by her growing children being sexually humiliated in this fashion by her father can only have increased Elisabeth’s distress.

  As the children grew, the overcrowding grew worse and, when Lisa was born in 1992 – the year Prince Charles and Diana separated – there was no room for her. She cried a lot, possibly because of a heart defect that may derive from the genetic composition of her parentage. Fearful that someone might hear the child, Fritzl decided that she should be brought up above ground by his obedient wife. That way, the child could receive proper medical attention. The infant was ill so often that it was not difficult to persuade Elisabeth to go along with his plan.

  ‘Elisabeth and I planned everything together, because we both knew that Lisa, because of her poor health condition and the circumstances in the cellar, had no chance to live had she remained there,’ Fritzl said. Elisabeth was easily coerced into writing a letter saying she had abandoned the baby because she could not cope. She may not have wanted to give up the child, but if she loved it and wanted it to survive, again, she had no choice.

  On 19 May 1993, a cardboard box containing baby Lisa was found on the doorstep of the Fritzls. She was nine months old, and weighed only 12lb (5.5kg) and measured 24in (61cm).

  It was the luckiest day in little Lisa’s life because it was the first time she had ever seen the light of day. The only light she had experienced since birth was the harsh glare of an underworld, the never-changing, cold, artificial light of a basement. It was the only light that her mother, Elisabeth, had seen in the six years leading up to Lisa’s birth and it was also the only light Lisa’s brother, Michael, would ever see as he died in the basement only a few days after his birth.

  There is no doubt that her move to the world above ground saved Lisa’s life. She would live a life of relative normality for 15 years, but then the secrets of the House of Horrors would be revealed and that world would come crashing down.

  Along with the baby in the box was a letter; there was no envelope and no return address. The only thing that identified it was the signature ‘Elisabeth’, the Fritzls’ daughter, who had apparently disappeared nine years before.

  ‘Dear parents,’ she wrote in a clear, feminine hand, ‘You will probably be shocked to hear from me after all these years, and with a real-life surprise, no less … I am leaving you my little daughter Lisa. Take good care of my little girl.’

  It went on to maintain the fiction that she was still with the sect and had no time for children. This, in itself, was suspicious as secretive sects are usually keen to nurture and indoctrinate the next generation. As she could not bring the child up in those circumstances, she begged her parents to raise Lisa for her. Nevertheless, the note was full of tender detail: ‘I breast-fed her for about 6½ months, and now she drinks her milk from the bottle,’ it said. ‘She is a good girl, and she eats everything else from the spoon.’

  The letter was also filled with an air of normality: ‘I hope that you are all healthy,’ it read. ‘I will contact you again later, and I beg you not to look for me, because I am doing well.’

  In the supposed circumstances, it seemed only natural that Elisabeth would politely ask her parents not even to attempt to find her. It was as if she was asking them to respect and tolerate her alternative lifestyle – even though it necessitated her thrusting an unwarranted child on them.

  Rosemarie seems to have been sceptical, but then she received a phone call purportedly from her daughter, in which she was begged, once again, to look after the child. It is unclear who made this call. According to some sources, it was Fritzl faking his daughter’s voice on the telephone. But even Rosemarie would surely have seen through her husband putting on a high-pitched woman’s voice. A mother would have known her daughter’s voice even after a separation of nine years and it is rare to find a man who can sound convincingly like a woman. Subsequently, Fritzl resorted to using the taped messages that he had coerced Elisabeth into making.

  The phone call – however it was contrived – stilled her qualms and Rosemarie then took in the child without further investigation. Friends were told the same story. Mondsee neighbour Anton Graf said Fritzl told him how he had ‘discovered’ one of Elisabeth’s children on his doorstep and Graf said he never doubted the tale. ‘He was so convincing of the sorrow he felt and the suffering of his family,’ he recalled. ‘Nobody had any clue.’

  However, some had their doubts. One such was Roswita Zmug, who knew Rosemarie from the guesthouse. ‘Once, after a child had mysteriously appeared on their doorstep, I asked how it could possibly have happened,’ she said. ‘Rosemarie told me all about her daughter going off to join the cult. It seemed incredible to me, but not to her. Still, I’m convinced she didn’t then know anything about her husband’s life below stairs.’

  To Roswita Zmug, Fritzl’s story that her w
ayward daughter had simply dumped the children on the doorstep before scuttling back to her non-existent sect was ludicrous. Elisabeth may have had a reputation for being a little unruly as a teenager – a reputation hardly borne out by the fact – but what mother would do that? It could only have been someone on drugs or who otherwise seriously needed help. It was odd, too, that when Rosemarie expressed the slightest misgivings, she received a mysterious phone call that, apparently, convinced her. Something here needed further investigation.

  Not only was the credulous Rosemarie taken in, but so too were the authorities, once again. The social services did not even ask themselves why Elisabeth would entrust her daughter to parents from whom she herself had run away. Instead, five days after Lisa’s appearance on the Fritzls’ doorstep, Amstetten’s youth welfare office wrote, ‘Herr and Frau Fritzl have recovered from the initial shock. The Fritzl family is taking loving care of Lisa and wishes to continue caring for her.’

  To ward off even the slightest hint of suspicion, Fritzl showed the letter that had come with Lisa to the police along with a few of his daughter Elisabeth’s old school notebooks that he happened to have. He said that he wanted the notebooks and the letter given to a handwriting expert so that he and his wife, as the grandparents, could be completely certain that the child they planned to adopt was indeed their flesh and blood. It worked. Despite everything, Josef and Rosemarie were allowed to keep Lisa and, within a year, they were permitted to adopt her.

  Asked why social services allowed Herr Fritzl to adopt the child despite his alleged criminal record, the District Governor, Hans-Heinz Lenze, said that in 1994 when the first child, Lisa, was adopted, neither Fritzl nor his wife apparently had any conviction – at least there were none on the record. ‘In such cases, giving the child to members of the family is always preferred to committing it to a foster home,’ said Lenze, insisting that the social services had not broken with the standard procedures.