House of Horrors

by Nigel Cawthorne

  After that, he intended to make a fortune building a block of flats, again out of keeping with the character of the town. But to raise the money, he would have to remortgage 40 Ybbsstrasse. He was thwarted in this because, under Austrian law, the children, including Elisabeth, had an automatic right to inherit the property. She was listed in the deeds even though she was also officially listed as missing and it was unlikely, if not impossible, to obtain her consent. Austrian bankers are reluctant to remortgage properties under these circumstances because it makes them difficult to sell if the creditor defaults. After decades of legal wrangling, Fritzl managed to have Elisabeth’s name removed from the deeds in 2006, but this project also failed because, by then, Austria’s property boom was over. He then tried to raise money to set up an Internet underwear business.

  Fritzl took out a loan of €1 million and had mortgages amounting to €2.2 million, even though he was now retired. According to one legal source, he was having some problems in making the repayments. Keeping a second family underground was not cheap. Perhaps it was now time for Elisabeth to return to the land of the living.

  There were other problems too. It seems that Fritzl was bored by the daily chores – the shopping, the rubbish burning, the upkeep of the dungeon cellar and the maintenance of his double life. At 73, he could no longer get around as he once did and he no longer found his daughter sexually attractive. The once-pretty Elisabeth was now anaemic, ailing and toothless. She resembled a woman the age of his wife, who he had gone off years before. Like Rosemarie, Elisabeth had had seven children, although with the meagre diet she was permitted in the dungeon she had not had the chance to fill out. However, there have been allegations that, by this time, Fritzl was now having sex with his sickly granddaughter Kerstin. Austrian police feared that he had turned the teenager into a second sex slave, though she, too, was pallid and practically toothless like her mother.

  However, the police later said there was no evidence to suggest Josef Fritzl sexually abused any of the six surviving children he fathered with his daughter Elisabeth, although Kerstin was only brought out of her seven-week coma in early June 2008 and, consequently, still has the opportunity officially to confirm or deny these allegations.

  ‘Only Elisabeth was abused sexually by her father,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer, although this seems still to be mere speculation as he had no chance to question her. It remains to be seen whether Fritzl sexually abused Kerstin or her siblings, and details of the extent of his psychological and physical abuse will no doubt emerge in time.

  At 73 years old, Fritzl had become aware that the situation could not go on for ever. He was an old man now, and it was becoming more and more difficult to keep up the double life. ‘I was not so agile any more,’ he said, ‘and I simply knew that in the near future I would not have been able to provide for my second family in the bunker.’

  In late 2007, Fritzl began preparing the end game. The following summer, he planned to stage-manage the release of Elisabeth and her children. People would be told that she had quit the obscure cult that had held her for the past quarter of a century and she would return to the house that she had, in reality, never left. Her shocking physical condition – and that of her children – would be blamed on the treatment inflicted on them by the religious cult.

  It is ludicrous to think that he could have got away with this. Had the appalling state of Elisabeth and the children been perpetrated by the actions of the putative cult, they would have been liable to prosecution. Efforts would have had to have been made to track them down and arrest their leaders. But then, the authorities made little effort to trace the non-existent cult before. Perhaps if the family said they were unwilling to press charges, the police would drop the matter. Even if they did proceed with the investigation, they could hardly find a cult that did not exist. Everything depended on the co-operation of Elisabeth and the children. As it was their only chance to get out of the dungeon, Fritzl hoped they would go along with his story. ‘Sure, that was my hope, however unbelievable it was at that time,’ he admitted. ‘There was always the risk that Elisabeth and the children would betray me.’

  Deluded Fritzl seemed to think that, after his unspeakable maltreatment of them, his daughter and their children owed him a debt of loyalty.

  Around Christmas 2007, Fritzl forced his daughter to write one last letter to prepare the ground for her liberation. In it, she said she wanted to leave the cult and return home, but that it was not possible yet. ‘If all goes well,’ she wrote, ‘I hope to be back within six months.’

  The letter was in the same hand as those delivered with the babies before. Later, DNA tests confirmed that Elisabeth had been the author. ‘It just shows how perfectly he planned everything,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer.

  But how Elisabeth’s heart must have soared. At last, there was light at the end of the tunnel. After nearly a quarter of a century, there was some prospect of escape. In just a few months, she could be free. She would see her mother again, and the children that her brutal father had taken from her at birth; she would breathe fresh air, see the sky and feel the sun and rain on her face. There was even a possibility that she could meet up with old friends. Then there were her brother and sisters to catch up with.

  Her underground children would also be free. They would see the outside world for the first time and have the chance to run and play outdoors. Little Felix would be able to go to school. All three of them would have the opportunity to make new friends. Their other brothers and sisters would surely help.

  Elisabeth may even have been willing to go along with her father’s plan, no matter how unworkable it was. After 24 years and all the suffering she and her imprisoned children had endured, surely she would have been willing to agree to anything to be free.

  But fate intervened. Before Fritzl could put his plan into action, Kerstin fell seriously ill.

  8

  INTO THE LIGHT

  It is hard to fathom whether Fritzl really believed that he could get away with re-introducing his underground family to the world. However, he may well have been enjoying a growing sense of omnipotence. His cellar family were totally in his thrall. After all, they ‘accepted me as the head of the family completely’. For them to have told anyone that they had been in the cellar, rather than with a mysterious religious cult, would have been a ‘betrayal’ of their ‘Führer’. They should be grateful. After all, he had given them clothes, food and shelter all these years. He had been generous with treats, gifts and appliances He had protected Elisabeth from drugs and spent his valuable time with their children. Now, out of the goodness of his heart, he was releasing them into the outside world – asking nothing in return, except their silence.

  Rosemarie could be relied on to be completely compliant. She would just be delighted to have her daughter back, and there would be new grandchildren for her to enjoy. No one else in the family dared question or cross him. Friends and acquaintances had swallowed the lie about the sect before, they would again. And there was no reason to believe that the authorities would be any less cursory in their investigations than they had been before. In Catholic Austria, he might even have believed that God was on his side.

  But Fritzl was suffering from hubris; he was about to play out the last act of an oddly inverted Greek tragedy. The truth was, he was not a god, or even a hero; he could not control everything. One thing he certainly could not control was the health of the children languishing in the cellar, the children whose health he himself had done so much to undermine. There were just months to go before he could relieve himself of the burden of his secret family when Kerstin fell seriously ill. It was about to spoil everything.

  Again, Fritzl initially chose to treat her with aspirin and cough mixture. It did no good. He had no medical training and as, like the other bunker children, she had never seen a doctor, he had no medical history to go on. She had always been sickly, but she had previously pulled through. Now she was having cramps and biting her lips
until they bled.

  Fritzl must have known that, by siring children by his daughter, he was risking them being infected with genetic abnormalities. But Kerstin’s illness was not something that he had encountered before; it was not obviously a hereditary condition – it seemed more like an infection. She was deathly ill, nonetheless. Her fits got worse, blood spewed from her mouth and she fell into a coma.

  Now, with the prospect of release hanging tantalisingly before her, Elisabeth begged her father to take Kerstin to the hospital. She must have been full of foreboding. This could well postpone her father’s plan to release her and the children that summer, if not finish it off completely. But what else could she do? Her daughter would die if she did not get proper medical attention quickly.

  In the face of Elisabeth’s pleas, Fritzl eventually relented. Was he exhibiting pity or compassion after so many years of cruelty? Or were there more practical reasons? As his plan to release his subterranean family that summer relied on his daughter’s co-operation, he could hardly let another of her children die – Elisabeth would never have complied with his demands under those circumstances.

  On the other hand, he might have been panicked at the thought of having to dispose of the dead body of a grown woman. To fit it in the furnace, he would have had to cut her up – a harrowing business for both him and her children, who would have had no choice but to be onlookers. And there would be some older people in Amstetten who already would be familiar with the smell of burning human flesh.

  Taking Kerstin to the hospital involved considerable risk, but it was a risk Fritzl seemed prepared to take. While the 19-year-old was still unconscious, she was no threat. Once she came round, she might try and tell the hospital staff of her ordeal. However, her vocabulary was limited. She had no experience of the world beyond the cellar and would find it difficult to explain her plight. Even if she could put what she had suffered into words that the hospital staff could understand, who would believe her? The story would sound too fantastic. Perhaps Fritzl thought he could explain away anything she said by dismissing them as the ravings of a slightly backward child who had been kept in seclusion for her own good. It certainly seems that he planned to spirit her from the hospital the moment she was well enough to return to the cellar.

  Another concern was not wanting to run the risk of his wife becoming aware of another of Elisabeth’s children, especially a sick one. This time, she might not be so credulous – or so compliant. She would be bound to turn up at the hospital. Seeing her grandchild at death’s door, she might unwittingly arouse the suspicions of the staff. Rosemarie would be another element that this time, perhaps, he could not control.

  Although Kerstin was critically ill, Fritzl waited until his wife was away on a planned holiday to Lake Maggiore. Once Rosemarie was safely out of the way, he opened the door of the dungeon to let Kerstin out for the first time in 19 years. Now 73, Fritzl was unable to carry the unconscious teenager out on his own and Elisabeth had to help. So in the early hours of 19 April, a 42-year-old woman who had spent half of her life underground saw the outside world for the first time in 24 years. It was only for a few moments. Once they had got the comatose Kerstin above ground, Elisabeth was forced to return to her dungeon. She would only spend another week of captivity there, but when she went back downstairs, she did not know that it would not be for the rest of her life. Just at that moment, though, her primary concern was for her daughter – Kerstin’s life must come first.

  Ironically, although Kerstin, upstairs in the house, was out of the cellar for the first time in the 19 years of her life, she could not enjoy the fresh air or daylight. Deep in her coma, she could appreciate nothing of the outside world. She could not be roused and Fritzl called an ambulance.

  At 7.00am, the local ambulance station received a call from a man who said that a young woman named Kerstin Fritzl was seriously ill. An ambulance and crew were despatched to 40 Ybbsstrasse to collect her. They rushed the ghost-like teenager to hospital, where the staff did not know what to make of her.

  Fritzl did not accompany Kerstin in the ambulance. He stayed at home and took a little time to rehearse his cover story, but this time it would not be enough to save his skin. The wall that he had so meticulously constructed between the normal world above ground and the secret underworld below had been fatally breached. No matter how hard he tried, he could no longer prevent the inevitable. That wall would come tumbling down, exposing both his quarter-century of lies and his hideous crime to the world. Later that morning, he made his way fatefully to the hospital.

  When Fritzl arrived in the emergency room, he recited the tried-and-tested formula. He said his daughter had run off to join a strange religious sect and, for the fourth time, she had dumped one of her children on her grandparents’ doorstep. But this time, he came up against a professional who was not prepared to swallow his story quite so readily. His strange version of events roused suspicions, when confronted by a sceptical doctor.

  On the morning of Saturday, 10 April 2008, Dr Albert Reiter received the emergency phone call that would spark the beginning of the end for Fritzl. He was told that a critically ill teenage girl had been brought unconscious into the hospital. Also on hand was her grandfather. The physician rushed to the emergency room to examine the child.

  ‘When Kerstin first came in to us, she was very pale,’ said Dr Reiter, ‘and she was bleeding from her tongue due to convulsions. Fritzl told us she’d taken some pills for a headache, nothing more. He seemed very correct. At the time, we had no idea what had happened to her. He claimed her mother was away, had left her at his house and asked him to look after her. That was his version.’

  But on closer examination, Dr Reiter noted that her deathly pallor was caused not just by her illness; rather it suggested something more sinister. Then he noticed that the teenager had almost no healthy teeth left, which was most unusual for a girl of her young age. With no one else to turn to, he interviewed the patient’s grandfather and quickly concluded that he was being told a pack of lies. ‘Her grandfather came up with the story that he had found the girl on his doorstep,’ said Dr Reiter. ‘He said that she had been abandoned by the mother, who was part of a bizarre sect.’

  This strange story set off alarm bells. ‘I did not like his tone and something did not seem right,’ said Dr Reiter. ‘What made me particularly suspicious was that he did not seem to think it important to answer any of my questions, simply demanding we make Kerstin better so that he could take her away again.’

  Fritzl produced a note which he said that his 42-year-old daughter had left with the child. It showed the depth of the mother’s concern for her stricken daughter. But, although the child was plainly very ill, the note revealed she had only given her ‘aspirin and cough medicine’. There was something wrong here.

  At 10.37 that morning, the police received a call from the Mostviertel-Amstetten State Hospital to report the admission of a mysterious ‘female person’. The patient was unresponsive and in a critical condition, and her symptoms suggested she had been severely neglected. A man had accompanied the woman, they were told. He was one Josef Fritzl of 40 Ybbsstrasse.

  Naturally, the police had to follow this up and went to the house. During their subsequent interview, Fritzl told them that he had heard noises in the stairwell of his home. When he went to investigate, he had found a young woman leaning, apathetically, against the wall on the ground floor. She had been carrying a note, he told police. It was from his estranged daughter, Elisabeth, who wrote that the girl was her daughter Kerstin and that she urgently needed medical attention. For the time being, the investigation went no further, but questions remained.

  The note itself was full of contradictions. ‘Wednesday, I gave her aspirin and cough medicine for the condition,’ it said. ‘Thursday, the cough worsened. Friday, the coughing gets even worse. She has been biting her lip as well as her tongue. Please, please help her! Kerstin is really terrified of other people, she was never in a hospital. If there a
re any problems please ask my father for help … he is the only person that she knows.’ Then came the codicil, ‘Kerstin – please stay strong, until we see each other again! We will come back to you soon!’

  The note plainly came from a mother who was deeply concerned for the well-being of her child. But even someone with no medical training at all could see that the child was critically ill and, without prompt medical intervention, was likely to die. Why had the mother waited the four days from Wednesday to Saturday before she sought medical assistance? And if she was as concerned as she sounded, why had the mother herself not come in to the emergency room with the child to explain how her daughter had got into her wretched state?

  Nevertheless, the note begged the medical staff to help Kerstin. Why could the mother not have requested their help in person? What kind of parent would simply dump her sick child – who was plainly at death’s door – on her grandparents and then not stick around to find out what happened? If she had the transport to get the comatose teenager to her grandparents’ place, why could she not have brought the child direct to the hospital? Or even called an ambulance herself? It did not add up.

  The child, the note said, had never been in a hospital. This, again, was unusual. In developed countries, most youngsters turn up at a hospital or clinic so that staff can check on their medical history and give them standard inoculations. The note also stated that she was ‘terrified of other people’ and that ‘my father … is the only person she knows’. This spoke of some psychological condition that might be relevant to the diagnosis Reiter was now seeking to make.