Lisa became so desperate to escape life under Fritzl’s roof that she begged him to let her go to a boarding school nearby – and he relented. She spent five happy years as a pupil at the private Kloster’s girls school in Amstetten, which was run by Catholic nuns. A family photo shows a smiling Lisa starting the school in 2002 at 11 – the same age that her mother had started to endure Fritzl’s sexual abuse. She left when she was 16, which was Elisabeth’s age when she first found it necessary to run away from home.
Short of money to prop up his ailing businesses, Fritzl seems to have attempted another insurance scam. In 2003, a small fire broke out in the house and he made a claim for £800. Two officers visited the house, but did not follow up their enquiries with a full search and no action was taken, even though Fritzl was charged with arson in 1982 after a blaze destroyed the guesthouse he owned at Lake Mondsee. That case also seems to have been dropped.
Despite the police inaction, there were suspicious circumstances surrounding the 2003 fire. ‘It was started in two places – a classic sign of arson,’ a police source said. ‘But despite all that, the officers only carried out a brief inspection. Senior police officials will be asking why. If a proper investigation had been carried out, the secret family Fritzl kept in his cellar would have been found.’
Neither did police act over two more fires the following year. In 2004, Fritzl claimed another £800 after a power meter somehow burst into flames and £2,300 when he claimed a TV had gone up in smoke. Police carried out no more than a cursory investigation of either incident. Again, they missed their chance to find Elisabeth and family in the dungeon; perhaps they were taken in by Fritzl’s outward display of respectability and wealth. Such a man would surely have no reason to attempt to swindle the insurance company out of such paltry sums? But Fritzl was a qualified electrical engineer who did most of the maintenance work around the house. Surely, his electrical wiring should have been sound?
As if Elisabeth and her downstairs children had not suffered enough hell, imagine what might have happened, had any of those fires had got out of hand. It would have been impossible for them to escape; they would have been burnt to death as the building collapsed on them, or – more likely and more mercifully – suffocated beforehand as the fire sucked the air out of the basement. Fritzl would hardly have come running to their aid; he would not have risked his life in the flames to go down into the cellar to let them out, only to expose his own crimes. Better to allow the flames to consume the evidence. Fire investigators may have looked through the embers for the cause of the conflagration, but they would not have been searching for bodies. Even if charred corpses had been found, it would have been impossible to identify them. The children had never been to the dentist and Elisabeth’s teeth had fallen out, so they could hardly be identified from dental records.
Neither would they have matched any missing person’s report. When Elisabeth disappeared 20 years before, she had had no children. Besides, her file was now inactive. There were no records at all of Kerstin and Stefan; no one would have reported them missing. Besides Fritzl, no one in the outside world knew they existed.
Fritzl was put under more financial stress in 2004 when Monika followed her older sister into the Kloster’s school and he had to stump up still more school fees. Again, Monika was happy in school and the other children were too tactful to bring up their mysterious provenance.
‘We knew Lisa and Monika were foundling children and had both been abandoned at the front door of the Fritzl home when they were born, almost like a Bible story,’ said a classmate. ‘But we never spoke to them about it. Lisa told us her story at the start of school but we never mentioned it again out of respect and politeness. The Fritzls were always “Mama” and “Papa” and Rosemarie was a devoted parent. Josef never came to parent evenings, and was never mentioned by her. It was always Rosemarie who encouraged her to play her flute in the school orchestra or go to sports events.’
Lisa did modestly well academically, learning English, maths and science in a class of 30 before leaving in June 2007. The end-of-school photograph showed her relaxed, apparently without a care in the world.
‘Lisa also travelled with the rest of her class on any trips or excursions,’ said her school friend. ‘She was just a normal, happy kid, not especially clever but very funny. Lisa would always make us laugh in class and was very popular.’
When her year finished school in 2007, they had a big party. ‘It was really good fun, and Lisa looked very pretty in her dress,’ said her friend. ‘But then we went off and I did not know her plans for the future.’ No one could have predicted the terrible truth about the circumstances of her birth, which everyone had been too polite to mention, would come out just nine months later.
Monika also showed promise as a musician and 20-year-old Karl Dating, a local volunteer fire-fighter, recalled that she received a perfect score on a fire-safety test he gave at their school. Alexander played the trumpet as well and townspeople remember him as a kind boy, always running errands for the woman he called ‘Mami’.
Downstairs in the dungeon, Fritzl showed Elisabeth pictures of Lisa, Monika and Alexander as they grew up and told her how well her children were doing at school. Cruelly, he also would tell his captive daughter about the trees outside and the garden in bloom while she remained confined to her small, dank cell.
As Kerstin and Stefan grew to maturity, Fritzl faced three adults imprisoned in the dungeon who could, conceivably, have overpowered him. But Elisabeth later explained that, because of the conditions they had been kept in, they were too weak to challenge Fritzl. Even 18-year-old Stefan was too feeble to subdue their ageing tormentor.
‘They never trusted themselves to have the strength to attack me,’ said Fritzl. But his mastery of the situation did not just come from the appalling conditions in which he had kept his children. Naturally, he had a more self-serving explanation. The secret was the power of his personality. ‘It wasn’t that difficult to prevent their escape,’ he said. ‘I was the leader and that was how it was going to be.’
He was, in his own words, their Führer – leader – and, like the original Führer he had grown up under, he was to lead them to disaster on the pretext that he was saving those he purported to love from a worse fate. However, he added,
‘They also needed a code to release the door and none of them had it. They were unable to get out.’ They were also warned that poisonous gas would be pumped into the dungeon if they tried to overpower him or attempted to escape. The door was connected to a high-voltage electricity supply so that anyone who touched it would be electrocuted. And he continually tormented them with the hopelessness of their captivity. ‘In any case, only I knew the number code of the remote control that would open the door to the cellar and to close it,’ he said. ‘I did tell them that they would never get past the door because they would be electrocuted and they would die.’
However, Fritzl was a humane man – in his own eyes at least. He claimed that every time he left the cellar, he activated a delayed reaction mechanism that would release the door in case he died or had an accident that prevented his return to feed his second family. No evidence of this device has been found. Fritzl had also installed a generator in the cellar so his secret family would have electricity, even if the supply to the main house failed, but the oxygen supply was so limited down there in the dungeon that, even if the exhaust was vented, it is very difficult to see how the occupants would not have suffocated, had they attempted to use it.
And still the sexual abuse did not stop. Even though Kerstin and Stefan were teenagers, Fritzl continued raping their mother in front of them. For Elisabeth, this can only have made the degradation harder to bear. In 2003, she gave birth to her seventh child – Felix – by her then 68-year-old father.
There are hints that, for once, Fritzl helped his daughter give birth this time, but it was the one time when she would not have needed him. Before, she had always been alone when she gave birth, or had a
young child in tow who could hardly have been expected to help. In fact, they were more likely to have been a hindrance as they would have been frightened by the ordeal their mother was going through. But when Elisabeth gave birth to Felix, she had two sympathetic helpers on hand in the shape of her 14-year-old daughter Kerstin and 10-year-old son Stefan, who would have witnessed their mother giving birth before and would have known what was going on.
By the time Felix was born, Rosemarie was 63 and too old to be expected to bring up another child. Besides, she had her hands full with the three youngsters her husband had already brought upstairs. ‘Rosemarie couldn’t have handled another child,’ Fritzl told authorities during his interrogation. So Felix was doomed to be confined in the dungeon with his older brother and sister and would never know the sunlight and relative freedom of the three siblings his father had taken above ground.
But fortune eventually smiled on Felix. Although he suffered with his subterranean family, he was not to have his entire childhood stolen from him in his father’s dungeon. He would see the light in good time to learn to adjust to it.
While the three ‘foundlings’ were enjoying a normal education, Elisabeth did her best to teach her imprisoned family the basics of reading and writing. They had proper lessons for two or three hours a day and Elisabeth taught them grammar, language and mathematics. However, there were few books in the dungeon, only those Elisabeth had begged Fritzl to bring her. This left their vocabulary severely limited – they would stumble and search for words. Their main source of education, over the years, was the television. This provided flickering images of the outside world they were denied access to by their heartless captor.
Under seemingly impossible circumstances, Elisabeth tried to rear her children with a degree of normality. She strove to give them some sort of structure in the lives and as good a life as possible in the dungeon. By all accounts, the children have been raised very well and have turned out to be very polite and well behaved. And she claims never to have told them that they were actually imprisoned by their own father. Elisabeth was, Fritzl said, ‘just as good a housewife and mother’ as Rosemarie. There was no higher compliment in his eyes.
In an effort to brighten their drab environment, Elisabeth made rudimentary decorations and hand-crafted toys. She would entertain the kids by making up fairy tales about pirates and princesses, and sang them lullabies. They liked to watch adventures on television together. This was Elisabeth’s only reminder of the world outside. For the children, it presented a two-dimensional image of a fantasy world as alien as life on another planet. Elisabeth would also try to pass the terrible hours of boredom by making models with the children out of cardboard and glue. However, the stifling atmosphere in the cellar imbued them with inertia. They spent most of their time sitting nor lying down. There was not the space nor the air for much activity.
Fritzl did provide a fridge and a deep freeze to store food – so he could skip off on holiday to Thailand and elsewhere. Again, he believed he was being generous. ‘I even gave Elisabeth a washing machine in 2002, so that she wouldn’t have to wash all the clothes by hand,’ he said.
He was also ‘generous’ with his time and his affections. ‘It just became a matter of course that I lived my second life in the cellar,’ he said. ‘I was delighted about the children. It was great for me to have a second proper family in the cellar, with a wife and a few children.’
On top of the necessities of life, he brought treats and presents. ‘I tried really as hard as possible to look after my family in the cellar,’ he said. ‘When I went there, I bought my daughter flowers and the children books and cuddly toys. We celebrated birthdays and Christmas down there. I even smuggled a Christmas tree secretly into the cellar with cakes and presents.’
The birthday and Christmas parties he staged for the three youngsters he had imprisoned from birth mirrored those he held for his family above ground. In a twisted attempt to be even-handed, the decorations in the windows of the children’s bedrooms upstairs were replicated in the dungeon bathroom below.
Fritzl took some care with the clothes he bought Elisabeth. She was sometimes allowed to choose them out of a catalogue and they would then have had to be delivered. The question remains whether Rosemarie ever signed for them. On other occasions, Fritzl would choose them himself. Friends he holidayed with in Thailand saw him picking out a glittering evening dress and lingerie at a market – they were clearly much too small for his ageing, rotund wife. When he realised that he had been spotted, he joked about ‘having a bit on the side’. Not for one minute did they suspect this could be his own daughter.
But it is clear that he wanted his Liesel to dress up and parade around for him in the squalid, miserable cell he forced her to call home. Then, after raping her, he would settle down at the table while she prepared a meal and they would discuss the children’s upbringing.
He bought a video player and would spend hours in the cellar watching videos with the children while Elisabeth cooked his dinner. In a painful parody of normal domestic life, they would have meals together as family, although this would hardly be a cordon bleu affair. Elisabeth did her best, but she was starved of fresh ingredients. His cellar family ate only ready-cooked meals with long sell-by dates so he did not arouse suspicions by making frequent trips to the supermarket to buy fresh fruit or vegetables. The tiny electric rings and the utensils Fritzl provided were barely adequate to cook for a growing family. Elisabeth had no recipe books, no spare food to experiment with and the air in the dank cellar was stale. It would have been impossible to escape from the smell of cooking. These were hardly the best conditions under which to appreciate their meagre diet. The subterranean children would never even get to enjoy an oven-cooked pizza, like those the other Fritzl children enjoyed on lunchtime treats at the nearby Casa Verona.
After dinner, they would sit down as a family to watch the TV. Fritzl was a fan of Formula 1. He watched motor racing on television with his children and, in a bizarre attempt at playing the normal father, would buy toys for the children and play with them. However, he insisted the children should say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ for every small thing he did for them. ‘Elisabeth, Kerstin, Stefan and Felix accepted me as the head of the family completely,’ he boasted.
Despite his pretence of normalcy and even-handedness, the world above ground and below could not have been more different. While the children upstairs were restrained only by his strictures, below ground they were confined by walls. And because of the stifling conditions, Elisabeth and the children had to spend long spells moving as little as possible, or simply succumbing to exhaustion caused by the lack of oxygen.
‘We know today from the doctors that those who were imprisoned do things at a totally different pace,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer, who visited the children after their release. ‘The way they talk, the way they now choose to spend their time in freedom – it is simply impossible to imagine what it must have been like to establish a daily routine in this prison and to live with the constant reminder of the world outside, watching the television, seeing pictures and hearing stories from their father telling them what it was like out there.’
While the ‘foundlings’ were oblivious of their siblings in the bunker, those beneath the ground knew all too well that they had brothers and sisters living above them. Fritzl even brought videos of the ‘released’ children down to the dungeon so the imprisoned youngsters could see for themselves the way of life they could have lived, had he chosen to set them free. It must have been reassuring for Elisabeth to see that her children above ground were flourishing, although it would also have been a torture to know what she and her subterranean family were being deprived of. The cellar children could be more sanguine; they had never known any life outside their dungeon, so the videos were just more flickering images like others they saw on the TV.
Despite the great play Fritzl made of his ‘generosity’ towards his second family – particularly buying that washin
g machine – he admitted that decades underground without daylight, or medical and dental care severely affected his prisoners. They suffered a series of infections and heart and circulation problems, but ‘Elisabeth stayed strong,’ he said. ‘She caused me almost no problems. She never complained, even when her teeth slowly went rotten and fell out of her mouth, one by one, and she suffered day and night with unbearable pain and could not sleep. She stayed strong for the children, but the children – I saw they were constantly getting weaker.’
The children suffered from a range of ordinary illnesses, but in those conditions even a common cold or the ’flu could be life-threatening. Any respiratory condition would have been exacerbated by the damp and fetid air. Fritzl provided nothing but rudimentary store-bought medicines – cough mixture and the like – and there was little Elisabeth could do without proper medical assistance. As far as the children’s health was concerned, she was fighting a losing battle.
On top of the normal coughs and colds, Kerstin and Felix suffered from coughing fits and strange, uncontrollable convulsions. Rather than seek medical help, Fritzl dosed them with aspirin. However, the two children appeared to have inherited an allergy to the drug from their grandmother. Felix would shake uncontrollably for hours while Kerstin screamed hysterically. Despite their pitiful condition, it was the only medicine he would allow them. These children had never seen a doctor; they had none of the normal inoculations routinely given to infants. It is a miracle they survived at all.
7
HOLIDAYS FROM HELL
While Elisabeth and the children were languishing in the dark cellar, Fritzl treated himself to sun-and-sex holidays in Thailand. He made a number of these trips, usually with a group of friends. One of them was his friend Paul Hoera, who twice travelled to the beach resort of Pattaya with him. ‘I have known him since 1973,’ Hoera said. ‘We met on a camping holiday in Salzburg and we spent a lot of time together after that.’
House of Horrors Page 10