House of Horrors

by Nigel Cawthorne

  This was when his then wife Elfriede met Rosemarie, although the friendship between the two women came to an end when Paul and Elfriede split up, with their marriage ending in divorce in 1984. However, Paul and Josef remained friends.

  ‘Our friendship was so good we even went on holidays to Thailand,’ said Paul. ‘One was for almost a month, between 6 January and 3 February in 1998; the other was about three weeks. I went with my girlfriend and stepfather. He travelled alone, without his wife. He told me she had to look after the children.’

  Although they had travelled to Thailand together, Paul saw little of his friend Fritzl. ‘We planned to spend time together but Josef was always off on his own,’ said Hoera. ‘He wasn’t staying in his room and it was obvious what he was doing. We knew he liked having threesomes but didn’t give it any thought at the time.’

  Paul and his girlfriend were not into that, but in the Far East, Fritzl began to let his guard down. ‘The first time he really admitted to me he was not the perfect family father was in Thailand,’ said Hoera. ‘He obviously liked women – and good-looking women at that. But I know his wife was not his type.’

  Hoera did not consider this unusual. After all, they had been married for 40 years and, after giving birth to seven children, the slim 17-year-old Fritzl had married had turned into a shapeless hausfrau. Many men in late middle-age go searching for a younger model, especially when presented with the temptations of Thailand.

  However, Fritzl was a little cagey in front of his friends. ‘When girls in Thailand approached him to offer sex, he blocked them,’ Hoera said. Nevertheless, ‘he once had a very long massage from a young Thai girl at the beach – he really loved that, but normally he was more discreet. He always went off on his own at night.’

  This was symptomatic of his secretive nature. ‘He pulled the wool over all of our eyes,’ Hoera said. ‘Of course, looking back, there were things you can guess at – but he was really clever at hiding them.’

  His friend also noted how Fritzl was happy to blow a bundle on lavish presents for himself on his trips abroad while handing out the most meagre of allowances to Rosemarie. ‘He was two-faced,’ Hoera said. ‘He’d pay for hair transplants and buy crocodile shoes, but not give his wife enough money.’

  Rainer Wieczorak, now 62, also accompanied Fritzl on trips to Thailand that sometimes lasted up to six weeks. ‘I went to Thailand because the climate was good for my health but Fritzl had other interests,’ he said. ‘While we would all sit around the hotel bar, he was off on his own. We did not speak about where he went, but it was pretty obvious he had another agenda. We almost never saw him; he was usually sleeping things off during the day, having a massage on the beach and a late breakfast.’

  Pattaya is a well known destination for sex tourists, including paedophiles. Brothels and clubs offering erotic entertainments line many streets, while up to 50,000 bar girls, massage girls and prostitutes cater for foreign visitors. However, it seems that Fritzl’s tastes were not so conventional as his travelling companions supposed; he also appears to have spent time trawling the notorious gay haunt Boyztown at night.

  British holidaymaker Stephen Crickson of Huyton, Liverpool, said that once Fritzl was out on his own, he was flamboyant in his sexual tastes. ‘He was a disgusting pervert and all the ex-pats and regular holidaymakers knew what he was up to,’ he recalled. ‘Rent-boys, ladyboys … he would go with anything. At one point, he was spotted by one bar regular with a 16-year-old.’

  He was seen hand-in-hand with the young lad and was known to pay for sex with teenage rent-boys and transvestite hookers. British holidaymakers thought he was a German, rather than Austrian, because of his habit of reserving a sun lounger with his beach towel.

  ‘Fritzl would lord it around us at the beach and treated staff with contempt,’ said Crickson, who was holidaying in Pattaya with his girlfriend. ‘He was universally unpopular.’

  Pictures of Fritzl’s 1998 Thailand trip appear in a German newspaper, which deemed the excursion ‘a gentlemen’s holiday’. They show him smiling and tanned as he lazed bare-chested on the beach, paddled in the surf in tight-fitting Speedos, enjoyed the attentions of a Thai massage girl, dined in open-air restaurants and shopped in local markets at Pattaya, seemingly without a care in the world.

  Asked if the police were investigating his trips abroad, Chief Investigator Polzer said, ‘His holidays are none of our concern.’

  However, his absence on holiday for several weeks at a time raised questions about whether he had an accomplice to look after his underground family. But police believe he was so well organised that it would not have been necessary. ‘Based on evidence, we know that this prison had a very restricted living area which was equipped with everything necessary to keep alive – for example, large quantities of food in freezers and fridges,’ said Chief Inspector Polzer. ‘There was the facility to do laundry – there was a washing machine as well and an electric cooking ring for preparing meals.’

  Even so, it is clear that a huge amount of organisation would need to be done before he went away. There would have been extra trips to outlying supermarkets and more late-night work with the wheelbarrow to get the provisions downstairs.

  For his captives, his absences must have been a mixed blessing. Elisabeth would not have had to put up with his hideous and rapacious sexual demands and the children would be freed from his admonishments. On the other hand, he was their only lifeline. After several weeks, as the stocks in the fridge and freezers dwindled, they must have worried whether he was ever coming back. The only outcome then would have been facing slow starvation. They must have been both overjoyed and devastated when he returned home.

  Despite their different holiday interests, Paul Hoera and Fritzl remained friends and even stayed at each other’s homes. ‘I was at his home in Amstetten at least three times … the last time in 2005,’ he said. ‘I always thought it was a wonderful family.’

  When he visited Fritzl at home, the two of them would relax on the roof terrace or watch cartoons on the TV and laugh uproariously – while Hoera, at least, was completely unaware of the sobbing sex slave cowering in the cellar just feet away. ‘I did know the cellar was out of bounds but never gave it a second thought,’ he said. ‘When I think about what was there, I feel ill.’

  However, Paul Hoera’s girlfriend Andrea Schmitt was a little more circumspect. ‘In Thailand, I never noticed anything unusual about him, although he seemed to be spending a lot of time buying things for the children,’ she said. ‘He had several carrier bags filled with things and I remember thinking what a lot of presents for just three children.’

  It was Hoera who caught Fritzl buying clothes for Elisabeth. ‘We were at a market and he did not know I was behind him when he bought an evening dress and underwear for a thin woman,’ Hoera said. ‘It would not have fitted his wife. He was really annoyed when he saw I had been watching him. He then admitted he had a woman on the side and asked me to keep it secret.’

  Hoera was shocked when he eventually found out the identity of the recipient. He remembered Fritzl’s daughter Elisabeth as a child; she was introverted and distant. He said Fritzl used to beat her more than his other children. Otherwise, he said there was never a hint of Fritzl’s sinister side – in fact, he had quite the opposite impression. ‘When we first met Josef, he was a really kind, outgoing and open-minded person who laughed a lot,’ he said. ‘Josef, Rosemarie, Andrea and I always had so much fun – we laughed all the time.’

  Given Fritzl’s penchant for humiliating his wife, he must have made off-colour remarks about his activities in Thailand. This would alost certainly have produced embarrassed smiles from Paul and Andrea, but Rosemarie, no doubt, did not share the joke.

  While Fritzl was ‘a good laugh’ when they were out, Hoera described him as ‘the master and a bit of a dictator’ at home. But it seemed to produce results. ‘The children were well mannered and well behaved,’ Hoera said, though he admitted that Fritzl probably carri
ed his iron discipline with the children a bit far. ‘They were all scared stiff in the presence of their dad. They were never allowed downstairs into the cellar, but we never thought anything of it.’

  Like others, he believed what Fritzl told him. There was no point in questioning him. Fritzl had a temper and did not like to be contradicted or crossed. ‘He could get really furious and would become another person,’ Hoera said. ‘His wife always listened to him but always did what he said. Whenever we started to talk about Elisabeth, I noticed Rosemarie would leave the table but I never saw her cry. I thought she was a bit of a cold woman.’

  Andrea Schmitt stayed with Paul Hoera at Fritzl’s house and brought her own kids. ‘My three children always played with his children,’ she said.

  She first visited the Fritzls’ house before Elisabeth disappeared, and she, too, found the child withdrawn and solitary, but this did not seem significant at the time. ‘I never thought anything was wrong because we always had such a good time together,’ she said. ‘Josef loved cartoons and used to laugh his head off. It was such a shock when we found out about him on the news. We got goose-bumps. I’ve been in total shock since and haven’t slept for days.’

  Paul Hoera was equally horrified; he had known Fritzl for 35 years and never suspected a thing. ‘When I saw his picture on TV, I thought there must be a mistake, a mix-up,’ he said. ‘I last visited his house in 2005 – we sat out on the terrace and had a really nice evening. Now I think of the dungeon down there and I feel sick. I am ashamed to be linked to him.’

  When Fritzl returned from his sex holidays in the Far East with bags full of goodies for his captives, any attempt to ameliorate their plight with colourful clothing would have been painfully belied by the contrast between his sun-browned skin and their deathly pallor. To Elisabeth, this would have been particularly apparent when he raped her.

  While Rosemarie tolerated her husband’s high-jinks in the Far East, she also enjoyed holidays without him. ‘She went on day trips with other older women and she used to go on holiday to Greece without him,’ said the lodger Alfred Dubanovsky. ‘Rosemarie was pretty quiet when he was around, true, but she knew how to enjoy herself when she was on her own.’

  She also took an annual holiday in Italy, while Fritzl stayed at home in Austria. This created suspicion in Dubanovsky’s mind. During the 12 years that Dubanovsky lived in the house, they were never both away at the same time. ‘In all that time, they never once went on holiday together,’ he said.

  Again, though, the police believe that Fritzl was such a meticulous man that he was perfectly capable of providing for his cellar family while he was away and see no reason to suspect Rosemarie of being an accomplice. Chief Investigator Polzer was adamant that it ‘defies logic’ that she had anything to do with it.

  Besides Fritzl’s sex holidays in Thailand, it seems that he also enjoyed the company of prostitutes closer to home. Sex workers at the Villa Ostende, a brothel in Linz, just 30 miles from Fritzl’s home, confirmed he was a regular customer there for years. They said that he paid prostitutes to have sex with him in the brothel’s dungeon. One of the girls said he tied her up on a makeshift cross in an underground room not dissimilar from the windowless cellar where he imprisoned his secret family. The 36-year-old blonde said that he ordered her to call him ‘teacher’ and punched her while having sex with her. He frightened her by losing his temper and staring at her with ice-cold eyes. Like the other girls, she came to dread catching his leering gaze as he entered the downstairs bar.

  ‘I had to call him “teacher” and was not allowed to engage in conversation with him,’ the girl said. ‘I once asked him about his family and he told me, “I have none.” He would pay to have sex inside the brothel dungeon, which I hated. But it was dark and sinister – his favourite place. I was hired by him many times and he was sick beyond imagination,’ she said. ‘He chose me because he said he liked young, plump girls who were happy to submit to him.’

  It is hard not to imagine that Fritzl meted out similar brutal treatment – or worse – to Elisabeth who was completely in his power.

  The Villa Ostende’s owner, 60-year-old Peter Stolz, said, ‘He was a strange character. He liked trips to the dungeon with young girls he had selected personally.’

  When the identity of the girl’s client came out in the newspapers, she told a reporter, ‘To think he was keeping his daughter and her children in a similar place a few kilometres away and abusing them sickens me now … He belongs in the very depths of hell.’

  According to the local press, the Villa Ostende is an old establishment and boasts Adolf Hitler among its former clients. Prostitution is legal in Austria, and the Villa Ostende charges customers €150 (£120) an hour. Most of the prostitutes come from Eastern Europe and the majority are aged between 18 and 25. Fritzl is said to have started going there in 1970, eight years before he began abusing daughter Elisabeth. He continued his visits even after locking her in his own, purpose-built dungeon and making her his personal sex slave.

  Some of the brothel’s other prostitutes were shocked by Fritzl’s sadistic demands and refused to have sex with him again. ‘95 per cent of the clients are entirely normal; 3 per cent are slightly “derailed”,’ said the brothel’s former barman 38-year-old Christoph Flugel. ‘But Fritzl belonged to the last 2 per cent of extreme perverts who are surely mentally deranged … None of the girls wanted to spend time in a room with him. Two of them even strictly refused to and did without the earnings. He was violent and into domination.’

  Fritzl was much the same, apparently, when he was outside the dungeon. ‘He acted despotically at the bar,’ said Flugel. ‘As soon as he liked a particular girl, he would order a glass of champagne for her. But after a short while he would start behaving like a headmaster with pupils and he’d shout things like “Don’t slouch”, “Sit up straight” or “Don’t talk such shit”. Such behaviour is unusual in sex clubs – you go there to have a good time.’

  There were other allegations. ‘Upstairs, in the bedrooms, he got completely off the track,’ said Flugel ‘He was perverted. He wanted extreme sex and pain and told the girls to pretend to be corpses. No girls wanted to go to a room with him. They were disgusted. I heard about that when talking to the girls. Two of the girls said, “Never again with that guy.” Such a thing is very rare in this business. It has to do with excrement, or with pain, or with a game where a girl is asked to play a corpse.’

  Apart from his depraved demands, Fritzl was also known for being tight-fisted. ‘I worked there for six years and Fritzl was a regular,’ said Flugel. ‘He was well known for being stingy. If he had a bill for €97 and paid with a €100 note, he’d always want the change and never think of tipping you. Mind you, he wasn’t our oldest client. We had one who was 88.’

  The barman’s tale was printed in the Österreich newspaper, but according to the Sunday Times, ‘It turned out that newspaper accounts of Fritzl brutalising prostitutes in a brothel cellar in Linz were just as much fantasy.’ However, the Austrian police confirmed it was true that Fritzl used local brothels and indulged in perverted practices there. His sexual appetite, it was said, was ‘voracious’.

  ‘His sex life can definitely not be classified as normal,’ said District Governor Lenze. ‘My information is that, on numerous occasions, he visited brothels where he indulged in various perverted activities.’

  Another story emerged that Fritzl had dragged his wife Rosemarie to a swingers’ club, dosed himself up on a cocktail of pills and forced her to watch him having sex with other women. ‘Fritzl said men of our age could have fun with sex,’ builder Paul Stocker, now 65, told the newspapers. ‘He said you needed to take three pills – Viagra, Levitra and Cialis. The pills kicked in one after another and you can go for it like a bull.’

  A week after this conversation, Stocker said that another friend invited him to the Caribik swingers’ club, near Amstetten, in 1977. ‘An elderly couple came in,’ said Stocker. ‘They looked just like
an old pair you might see in a park feeding the pigeons. I was speechless when I realised it was Fritzl with his wife.’

  Stocker would have been 44 back then, while Fritzl would have been 52 and Rosemarie 48. The couple may have looked as if they were better suited to the park, but it was plain that Fritzl was in his element – although Rosemarie was thoroughly out of place. ‘He obviously knew his way around,’ said Stocker. ‘Without a word, she went to stand in the corner. He treated her like a dog. She had to sit in a corner and watch as he did stuff with a young woman. He started on another visitor who was obviously not having a good time … He made a good job of it. Then he left with his totally humiliated and degraded wife and went home.’

  In all other respects, Fritzl seemingly lived the life of a respectable burgher. He enjoyed the annual get-together of his upstairs family, which often took place in his favourite restaurant, Bratwurstglockerl, in Linz. Then, in 2005, he threw a big 70th birthday party for himself at 40 Ybbsstrasse. Only feet away from the noisy gathering, Elisabeth and the subterranean children were none the wiser, the pleasure of human interaction with friends and family denied them.

  In 2006, Amstetten honoured Fritzl and his wife on their 50th wedding anniversary. In the eyes of the town, he was still an upstanding family man. Amstetten Mayor Herbert Katzengrueber attended the celebration of their golden wedding; he said that Fritzl was well liked and that the discovery of what he had done came as a huge surprise. ‘If you put 50 men in a line, he would be one of the last who could ever be suspected of committing such a crime,’ said Herr Katzengrueber. However, Katzengrueber was aware that Fritzl had been trying to change the character of the town.

  Amstetten was a small picturesque town of 23,000 in a region of daisy-filled meadows. It was mainly known for its local apple wine. The surrounding hills could be the setting for The Sound of Music. In the distance, medieval castles perch on craggy mountain tops. But Fritzl had planned to change all that by cashing in on the property boom that was sweeping Austria. He had bought several properties in Amstetten and planned to demolish them and build office blocks. That project also failed when planning permission was refused.