‘If there are any problems please ask my father for help,’ the note said. But Fritzl had been unco-operative and had fled the hospital at the first possible opportunity. Why would a loving mother trust her sick child to such an uncaring man? Then there was the touching postscript, ‘Kerstin – please stay strong, until we see each other again! We will come back to you soon!’ That was a clear indication that the mother loved her child very much indeed.
‘I could not believe that a mother who wrote such a note and seemed so concerned would just vanish,’ Dr Reiter said.
It is interesting to note that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was also a doctor. Holmes himself, Doyle said, was based on Dr Joseph Bell, who he had worked for as a clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. A lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh, Dr Bell emphasised the importance of close observation in making a diagnosis. Dr Reiter, as an experienced clinician, was similarly gifted. He paid attention to detail and realised that the style of the note did not tally with what Fritzl had told him about the mother and how she had simply abandoned the sick girl.
‘I could not believe that the mother of a seriously ill 19-year-old girl would simply drop her off and disappear,’ he said. ‘From the tone of the letter the mum had sent it was clear that she cared very deeply for her child.’ He knew that something was just not right.
As Kerstin’s condition worsened, her body shut down. She suffered from multiple organ failure and was put on a respirator and a kidney dialysis machine. Dr Reiter grew concerned and called in specialists from Vienna. They, too, were puzzled. If the girl was to survive, they needed more background information on which to build a diagnosis. The patient was unconscious, so they could not question her to find out what they needed to know. What was really required were full details of her medical history, but as the child had not been to hospital before, there would be none on record. Unless her GP could be found, the only person able to supply the information needed was the child’s mother. The woman may be under the control of some bizarre sect, but surely if she knew her child was likely to die without her help, she would get in touch.
So Dr Reiter pursued his hunch. In the face of Fritzl’s opposition, he used the hospital’s public relations department to launch a high-profile media campaign, urging Kerstin’s mother to come forward with ‘vital medical information’ about her gravely ill child. ‘I was certain of only one thing, that the mother was the only one that could help,’ he said. ‘I contacted the grandfather again, and told him we desperately needed to speak to the mother. I was convinced she had information that was the key to the mystery illness. I could not understand why he was so reluctant to help, but he did agree.’
Dr Reiter asked the hospital’s public relations department to put out an appeal to the local media and even got Fritzl to provide a photograph of Elisabeth that had been taken before she went missing. Reiter was so concerned about Kerstin’s condition that he even added the number of his own mobile phone at the bottom of the press release so that anyone with any information could get in touch.
Even though Fritzl had asked him not to, Dr Reiter again contacted the police, who saw where their duty lay. ‘The man who claimed to be this young woman’s grandfather said this was the fourth time his daughter, who had disappeared, had abandoned a child with him,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer, who took over the case. ‘We said to ourselves, it must finally be possible to find this woman. And that’s not the hospital’s job, it’s a job for the police.’
The case of Elisabeth Fritzl, who was still officially classified as missing, was reopened. This time the police launched an extensive investigation. They wanted to locate Kerstin’s mother, not just to aid Dr Reiter in his diagnosis and treatment of the sick girl, but also to find her and question her about what they thought might be a case of criminal neglect.
When questioned, Fritzl simply repeated his old story about Elisabeth running off to join a sect. Then he presented them with what was usually his usual trump card. It was another letter from his supposedly long-lost daughter, saying she was with a cult. In the letter, dated January 2008, she revealed that she had more children. She wrote that her son Felix had been very ill in September. He had suffered epileptic seizures and symptoms of paralysis, but had recovered. Kerstin, the letter said, had also had health problems, including stabbing chest pains and circulatory symptoms. However, she continued by saying that Elisabeth, Felix, Kerstin and another child, Stefan, would be coming home soon – perhaps they might even be home in time to celebrate Lisa and Kerstin’s birthdays.
The police seized on this red herring. If such a seemingly poor mother had more children in her care, they need to find her fast. To Fritzl, it seemed that the same old lie had worked once again. In truth, it had only bought him a little more time.
The letter carried the postmark of the town of Kematen an der Krems, which was about 30 miles from Amstetten. Judging from the postmarks, Elisabeth’s peripatetic sect never seemed to move more than a short drive from the Fritzls’ home. Investigators descended on Kematen. Naturally, none of the doctors they questioned in the area had any recollection of a woman named Kerstin. No one had seen anyone matching the girl’s ghostly appearance. There was no indication that Elisabeth Fritzl had ever been in the town, and no one knew anything about her mysterious sect either. The police became increasingly perplexed. Did this strange sect even exist?
On the morning of Monday, 21 April, the telephone rang in the office of Dr Manfred Wohlfahrt, the officer concerned with sects at the St Pölten diocese. Wohlfahrt was asked to come to the police headquarters in Amstetten immediately.
On arrival the police showed him the note that Fritzl had said Kerstin was carrying, along with the letter he said he had received from his daughter in January. Both were on blue notepaper. They asked Wohlfahrt whether the letters gave any clue as to which sect the woman who wrote them might belong to and where they might find her. Did the choice of words or phrasing, for example, suggest any sect he knew of?
Wohlfahrt studied the letters. He noted they were written in a very deliberate handwriting that looked almost like calligraphy. They had been composed in a deliberate, businesslike fashion rather than having been dashed off in the casual manner one would normally adopt when writing to a relative or acquaintance. He also noted that the words were assembled into ‘oddly smooth, constructed and not very authentic’ sentences. The letters, he concluded, were ‘dictated’. There was no evidence of a sect, he said. Nor was there any indication that one had taken residence in the diocese or any of the other dioceses of Lower Austria. It was an assessment that might have been made 24 years earlier, had the police consulted him then.
Dr Reiter appeared on a news bulletin on ORF, Austria’s public service broadcaster. ‘What do you hope to achieve through our interview?’ asked the presenter.
‘I would like the mother to contact us,’ said Dr Reiter. ‘We will treat the contact with high discretion. And we will probably get a step further in our diagnosis and treatment.’
He feared Kerstin’s mother might be afraid to come forward if she knew the police were involved – hence the ‘high discretion’.
The appeal struck a chord. Journalists flocked to Fritzl’s house, expecting his co-operation in the hunt for his daughter and they were surprised to be turned away. Reporters who knocked on his door were stunned when the retired electrical engineer reacted with anger at their questions. He flew off the handle when they mentioned Dr Reiter’s attempt to trace his daughter.
‘I was shocked,’ said one journalist. ‘Instead of being the concerned father I expected, he told me to clear off. He was shouting and swearing and really furious. He said he had wanted nothing to do with the appeal, but that the “bloody doctor” had forced him into it.’
Fritzl was getting rattled. For years, he had kept his hideous secret locked in the basement. The last thing he wanted was a gaggle of prying journalists looking into his affairs.
> Other efforts were made to trace Elisabeth Fritzl. Dr Reiter stepped up the TV campaign with a direct appeal to Kerstin’s mother begging her to get in touch, while police officers were dispatched to Vienna to comb through the records in an attempt to locate her. In the age of computerised bureaucracy, it is almost impossible to disappear completely.
‘All the schools were written to,’ said the District Governor of Amstetten, Hans-Heinz Lenze, who also had jurisdiction in the case. ‘The central registry data base was searched; enquiries were made at the social security office. Every avenue was explored. There was not a shred of information about Elisabeth.’
They were hampered by the fact that, since her disappearance, no driving licence, passport or any other official document had been issued in her name. There were no photographs of her since she had been at school and no social welfare files in her name. And the births of Kerstin or the other children, Felix and Stefan, mentioned in the letter, had not been registered.
Having failed to find Kerstin’s mother by the conventional bureaucratic route, the police changed tack. They went back to the family home and started to take DNA samples from the Fritzls, including the children whom Fritzl said had previously been abandoned by their mother.
‘We wanted to have everyone’s DNA samples in order to trace a possible father or fathers,’ said Chief Investigator Franz Polzer. ‘We always thought that a woman with so many children may have had more than one partner. One of them might have had a criminal record.’
Once they found the father, they reasoned, they would then have a possible link to the whereabouts of the mother.
The easiest way to isolate the father’s part of the children’s DNA was to screen out the maternal component, which they could deduce from the grandparents’ samples. But, again, Fritzl was less than helpful. ‘Herr Fritzl did not have time to give a DNA sample,’ said Polzer. ‘He kept postponing it because he had so much to do.’
While the police, the press and the public combed Austria for Elisabeth Fritzl, she was where she always had been – in her dungeon watching the TV. She saw Dr Reiter’s appeal on the evening news, which he delivered with affecting sympathy. ‘I can’t simply look on,’ he said. ‘I am deeply distressed about this case. I have never seen anything like it.’
His evident concern touched Elisabeth and gave her the courage to beg her father to release her – ‘temporarily’, she said. He agreed only on the condition that she did not betray him to the authorities. She was put on an oath to maintain the fiction that she had been away with a religious sect, just as they had planned for her summer release. She promised. By then, she would have promised anything.
On Saturday, 26 April, Josef Fritzl decided that there was only one way to save Kerstin and preserve his cover. He allowed his daughter and her children out of the cellar, this time, perhaps, for good. Elisabeth, Stefan and Felix were to resurface as planned, only the schedule had been advanced.
In a way, Kerstin’s illness and the broadcast appeal might have seemed like a blessing. It provided the perfect excuse for Elisabeth to leave her fictional sect and return home. What mother would put her religious views before the life of her child? It made the story of her return all the more convincing.
When Rosemarie and the other children were out of the house, Fritzl brought Elisabeth, Stefan and Felix out of the dungeon, and the two boys saw daylight for the first time in their lives. The police are unsure of what happened in the house during the next few hours. It seems that Fritzl briefed his daughter once again on how she was to explain the last 24 years, as he was still worried that his evil secret would be revealed. There are indications that he and Elisabeth visited the hospital several times, but Dr Reiter was not there.
‘As far as I can remember, they even went to the hospital twice as the main doctor was not there,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer.
That evening, they were going to try again. This time, Fritzl called ahead to Dr Reiter and said, ‘Elisabeth has returned. I am bringing her to the hospital and she wants to see her daughter.’ Then he added something even more disturbing. ‘We do not want any trouble,’ he said. ‘Do not call the police.’
But the police were already involved. Naturally, Dr Reiter called them immediately and alerted them to his suspicions. When Fritzl led the disoriented Elisabeth into the hospital to see Kerstin, they were already waiting for him.
‘When they got there later on, the police had already heard they were coming,’ said Polzer.
In a dramatic scene, officers swooped on the couple. It was Elisabeth they wanted to question, but Fritzl seems to have put up some kind of fight. He could simply have been seen to have been defending his daughter. The police handcuffed him and forced him into a police car. The two of them were then taken to the police station, where they were separated. But it was not Fritzl that the police were interested in.
For there was no indication that he had committed any crime, although he might have known more than he was saying. Their investigation concerned Elisabeth Fritzl’s criminal neglect of her daughter. With her obstreperous father safely out of the way, they began their interrogation.
‘The questioning focused on this woman, where she had actually been and why she had neglected her children like that,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer. But, like her father, Elisabeth Fritzl was unhelpful.
‘It was not all that easy for the police as Elisabeth did not want to talk,’ said District Governor Lenze, who was now overseeing in the case.
Naturally, Elisabeth was more interested in being with her sick daughter than talking to the police, but they were insistent. This woman, they thought, had cruelly abandoned three children on their grandparents’ doorstep, and neglected and mistreated another to the point where she might very well die. And they knew from the letter that Fritzl had already showed them that she had two more children who might be similarly in danger.
At first, Elisabeth stuck to the story that she had run off to join a bizarre religious sect that had little time for children, but that did not explain her appearance – or the terrible condition of her daughter. Although she had initially been arrested on suspicion of maltreating her own child, it seemed evident to the police interviewing her that she had suffered the same ill-treatment herself. Like her daughter, she had no teeth and a deathly pallor. As the questioning continued, Elisabeth became ‘greatly disturbed’, the police said. But they took it slowly and, after two hours of careful persuasion – and repeated assurances that neither she nor her children would ever have to see her father again – she began to tell them her incredible story.
‘She was given this assurance,’ said District Governor Lenze. ‘It was quite late, around midnight, that she revealed that she had not abandoned her children, but had been incarcerated for 24 years. And then, without a break, in a mere two hours, she gave an account of the 24 years she had spent in the cellar.’
At 12.15am, when the officers completed the first three full pages of notes from the interrogation, they knew that the enigma they had been working on so far had suddenly evolved into the highest-profile case of their careers.
At first, it was difficult to comprehend, but then, over the next two hours, Elisabeth spilt out the entire story of her 24 years in captivity. She told the police that her own father had imprisoned her from the age of 18 in a purpose-built cellar; he had raped her repeatedly and she had given birth to seven children. It seemed utterly incomprehensible, but the evidence was there, sitting right in front of them.
‘The first detective was presented with a strange picture,’ said Polzer. ‘He looked at this woman, at her physical appearance. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but looking at this woman you could believe that she had been imprisoned for many, many years.’
It was all too clear that the young woman had gone through some appalling ordeal and it became more and more plausible that the terrible story of imprisonment, rape and incest Elisabeth Fritzl had told them was true.
‘It still sen
ds shivers down my spine,’ admitted Lenze.
This was all the more uncomfortable for the District Governor as he had had contact with Fritzl whom, until then, he had believed to be an upstanding citizen. ‘For me, personally, it was an experience,’ said Lenze, ‘especially because the perpetrator telephoned me 24 hours before the crime was discovered and he thanked me profusely for, during the week that Kerstin was in hospital, assigning a crisis intervention team to support the family.’
9
‘IS GOD UP THERE?’
The police were shocked by the story Elisabeth Fritzl told them; they could hardly believe it. Until she spoke out, there had been no indication that Herr Fritzl was anything but an upstanding pillar of the community. At the time, the authorities did not know that he had a background of violent sexual assaults, which had been expunged from the record.
‘We knew nothing and I can’t investigate matters of which I know nothing,’ said District Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze. ‘In Austrian law, there is a statute of limitations.’
Even without that vital piece of information, Elisabeth’s extraordinary allegations had to be investigated. The following day, police frogmarched Fritzl to his house, where he was forced to show them the cellar. The secret dungeon was so well hidden that, when the police searched the property, they failed to find it. Eventually, Fritzl gave in and showed them where it was. After passing through five different rooms in the cellar – including a room containing a furnace and a small office – and eight locked doors, they reached Fritzl’s workshop. There, hidden behind a shelving unit in the workshop, he showed them a 1 metre-high reinforced concrete door. It was so small the building inspectors had failed to spot it. Fritzl then handed over the remote control and the code that opened the dungeon door, and they squeezed through.
House of Horrors Page 13