Chief Inspector Leopold Etz, the head of Lower Austria’s murder commission, was the first officer to set eyes on the frightened, ashen-faced Fritzl boys, who had spent their whole lives underground.
‘They both looked terrified and were terribly pale,’ he said. ‘The two boys were taken upstairs from the underground bunker and appeared overawed by the daylight they had never experienced before. The real world was completely alien to them.’
Etz told a German newspaper he was ‘staggered’ to watch the siblings’ initial bewilderment and shock as they now found themselves in a world they had only known before on a television in their dungeon and from their mother’s descriptions about the life she had lived up until her own incarceration at the age of 18.
The boys were said to be able to communicate quite well in German, although their use of language and speech was far from normal. Pointing to the sky – having seen it for the first time – Felix asked a policeman, ‘Is God up there?’
Their mother had always told him that ‘heaven was “up there”’. This was a poignant thought from a woman who had spent most of her adult life in subterranean gloom but knew that a world of fresh air and freedom existed above their heads. It was all the more poignant when you think that her life above ground with her father had been anything but heavenly.
The older boy walked hunched over as the ceilings in the cellar were so low he could not stand upright. The other boy preferred to crawl, though he could walk with a strange, simian gait. Between themselves they babbled in their own coded tongue. However, they did understand German but spoke it in a unique accent gleaned from years of watching TV in the windowless bunker.
The police who liberated Stefan and Felix were the first strangers the boys had ever seen. ‘Everything was new,’ said Chief Inspector Etz. ‘The only idea they had of the real world was from the television.’
Although the two boys were strange and, in some ways, feral, it was plain that Elisabeth had done a good job in bringing them up. ‘We were very surprised at how well-mannered and educated they were,’ Chief Inspector Etz said. ‘We know that the mother did her best to give the children an education, given her limited resources. She was also the only one that could treat the children when they were ill.’
Once the children had been discovered, Fritzl was taken away. Elisabeth was then brought to the house to ease the boys’ daunting passage into the outside world. Now it was a question of getting the boys to a place of safety where they could begin to move on from their ordeal. They waited quietly with their mother to be transferred by car. When it turned up, five-year-old Felix grew alarmed.
‘He found it so strange that he clung to his mother in panic as the door opened, as if he was fearful of what would come out of it,’ said Etz.
The first stop was the hospital, where the boys were to be given a comprehensive check-up. They had never received any professional medical attention before, although Elisabeth had done her best from the medical books that Fritzl had brought her. As they were unused to sunlight, it was thought best to delay the trip until dusk.
‘Later on that evening, we had to drive them to hospital,’ said Chief Inspector Etz. The two boys had never been in a car and whooped with excitement as the vehicle set off, as if they were on a fairground ride. But it was also scary. ‘We had to drive very slowly with them because they cringed at every car light and every bump,’ said Etz. ‘It was as if we had just landed on the moon.’
But soon, they got to enjoy the thrills. ‘They were amazed at the speed and really excited,’ Etz said. ‘They had never known anything like it – they had only ever seen cars on TV in the dungeon. Little Felix was beside himself with excitement. He was shrieking with pleasure when he saw cars coming the other way. He and his brother braced themselves whenever a car went past. They kept thinking there was going to be a head-on crash.’
They had problems with distance perception, having never seen anything more than a few feet away. Their only other visual experience was of the two-dimensional world of television. Now all sorts of real-life, three-dimensional experiences awaited them, each of which the two cave-dwellers greeted with genuine pleasure.
‘Driving to the hospital, Felix made excited gurgling noises when he saw a cow,’ said Chief Inspector Etz. When he saw a stream, he asked what it was, but above all it was the mobile phones of the police officers that grabbed his attention. ‘The ringing tone flummoxed him at first, then later it made him curious,’ said Etz. ‘He was completely bowled over when one of the policemen spoke into his phone.’
However, it was plain that the two boys were bewildered by the world they were seeing for the first time. They hardly spoke at all – except when little Felix said that it was wonderful.
‘What was wonderful?’ Etz asked.
‘Everything,’ Felix replied.
At the hospital where their older sister lay comatose, the two boys were given a full medical check-up and their state of health was said to be surprisingly good under the circumstances. However, they were extremely pale and suffering vitamin D deficiency – vitamin D is made in the skin by the action of sunlight. As in their mother and older sister, this had led to the loss of their teeth. All four were anaemic, too. Damage had also been done to their immune systems and doctors found that young Felix’s joints and muscles had not developed properly in the cramped bunker, possibly due to malnutrition. It seems that in latter years, when Fritzl did not find his daughter so beguiling and sought his sexual outlet elsewhere, he no longer visited so regularly with food supplies. As a result, the little lad walked like a monkey.
When the boys came out of the hospital after their check-up, it was dark. ‘They were fascinated by the headlights and were shouting and hiding behind the seats,’ said Chief Inspector Etz. ‘Everything was new and amazing. But the best bit was when they saw the moon. They were just open-mouthed with awe and nudged each other and pointed. I’ve seen a lot, but nothing like this.’
Felix repeatedly hummed an unknown melody which gave him some comfort. The police believe it was a tune his mother used when putting him to sleep.
‘It can’t be called a good-night song really as there was never any night in the cellar,’ said Etz. In the gloom of the cellar, artificial days and nights were created by a timer switching the lights on and off so the hours of relative darkness could be called a ‘night’ of sorts, but there were certainly never any good nights in the cellar.
Now that Elisabeth was on hand to supply the vital medical information needed by the doctors, Kerstin’s treatment could be started in earnest and it was decided to keep her in an induced coma until her condition could stabilise. Her breathing was controlled by a respirator. The doctors feared that a lack of oxygen caused by her severe cramps might have led to brain damage. The teenager’s immune system had collapsed and she suffered kidney failure. The doctors hoped that keeping her in a coma would help her body recover; they intended to give her time to regain her physical strength before they tried to wake her.
The hero of the moment was Dr Reiter. Not only was he looking after Kerstin, but it was his gut feeling for something that simply didn’t make sense that set off the chain of events that had freed Elisabeth and the children from their dungeon. But no one was more surprised about how things turned out than him.
‘I am amazed this all finally came out,’ he told the press later. ‘I obviously had no idea this would be the end result – who could have predicted that? – but I’m glad I followed my instincts.’
He was just as shocked by the story his suspicions had uncovered as anyone else, although his main concern, as always, was for his patient.
‘It’s a horrible story,’ he said. ‘Although Kerstin is stable, we don’t know if the prognosis is good. She’s in a severely life-threatening condition which we can’t explain. All we know is that she had a headache, took aspirin, then started suffering convulsions every hour. Her immune system may be hit. In addition to nearly 20 years underground with no sunligh
t and 20 years of psychological stress come factors such as infection. We’re just happy that she and her family are free at last.’
Psychologically, it was Elisabeth Fritzl who had suffered the worst. The children’s mother had known life outside the cellar and therefore had something with which to compare their life below ground. She had seen the possibility of good in the world and knew that others did not have to live as they did; she had also endured life as a captive and victim of sexual and psychological abuse longer than any of the others – at first in darkness, chained, then for four long years on her own. She had been raped by her father thousands of times and sexually humiliated in front of her own children. For 8,516 days of her life, the comforting cycle of dawn and dusk had been replaced by the switching on and off of an artificial light. One day was indistinguishable from the next or the day before, the passing of time only recognisable by the transient nature of life – her children growing older, her pallor deepening and her own hair turning grey until, on the day of her liberation, it was completely white.
Little is known about the aching hours of boredom the family suffered below ground as the police declined to reveal details of their everyday life in the cellar. ‘These unfortunate people deserve a right to privacy about the intimate details of their life,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer.
It is a miracle that Elisabeth did not lose her mind during those interminable days of captivity underground. Many victims suffering lesser fates have succumbed to the unravelling of their sanity, something she had somehow managed to avoid. ‘I have rarely seen such a strong woman,’ said Dr Reiter. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she had superhuman powers.’
Although Dr Reiter’s actions had essentially solved the case, there was plenty more for the police to do. Chief Investigator Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, was put in charge of the investigation. As his enquiries began, he called a press conference and told the assembled journalists, ‘This is one of the worst cases in Austrian criminal history. We’ve never seen anything like it before; it’s beyond comprehension. The suspect was very authoritarian and in control of those around him. Nobody dared go against his word; there was no escape. He deceived everyone, including his wife. Nobody knew what was going on. It’s impossible even to begin to imagine what the mother and children have gone through. The cellar is so small there was only just enough room to survive. The mother is extremely weak; the children were born into a jail – they knew nothing else.’
Polzer outlined the lengths that Fritzl had gone to in order to dig out much of the low basement with his bare hands, making regular trips to suppliers for materials, and described the basic facilities and layout. He also pointed out that there was foam insulation throughout to sound-proof any noise made by the captives and that the basement labyrinth also contained a padded cell. ‘We’re not talking about a prison designed to hurt its prisoners,’ he continued, ‘but something built to fulfil their basic human needs. He got planning permission and gradually built the various rooms in which the children were born and lived. Fritzl went out at night to buy groceries for the cellar-dwellers and banned his wife and the other children from entering the basement. He then passed the food through a hatch to be cooked on small hot plates.’
Chief Investigator Polzer then revealed to a shocked press conference the full horror of Fritzl’s crimes: ‘He admitted that he locked his daughter in the cellar, that he repeatedly had sex with her, and that he is the father of her seven children.’ He added that three of the children had ‘never seen sunlight’.
Fritzl, Polzer said, had a ‘very high sex drive and libido’ which saw him father seven children with his wife Rosemarie, as well as the seven with Elisabeth, who, he said, had not just endured rape at his hands but ‘sexual abuse at a completely different level’. But a high sex drive was not enough to explain – and certainly not excuse – Fritzl’s depraved actions. ‘He was driven somehow to this behaviour,’ Polzer added, ‘but we don’t know why or how. He hasn’t given a motive.’ Nevertheless, the case was ‘by and large, solved’ as Fritzl had confessed to ‘everything’, Polzer said.
But he made this announcement before Fritzl had seen a lawyer, before any evidence had been examined and before other witnesses had been properly interviewed. Journalists asked Polzer why he was so sure that Fritzl, who had lied and dissembled for years, was suddenly telling the whole truth.
‘There can be no doubt,’ came Polzer’s inscrutable reply.
Clearly, a man who had deliberately manufactured a series of elaborate lies to conceal his crimes from the authorities, his children, his neighbours and even his own wife for nearly a quarter of a century might have more cards up his sleeve.
‘This man led a double life for 24 years,’ admitted Polzer. ‘But now he was a pathetic figure, a broken, aged man in his declining years, and far from the tyrannical despot he was described as being for so many years. ‘Fritzl was an extraordinarily sexually potent man,’ said Polzer. ‘If you look at him today, you would hardly believe he was capable of doing these things.’
He even gave Fritzl credit for finally allowing his secret to be uncovered after Dr Reiter had appealed on television for Elisabeth Fritzl to come forward and help her daughter. ‘Josef Fritzl then, for once, showed he had a human side and allowed his daughter Elisabeth out of the cellar to join his daughter Kerstin,’ Chief Investigator Polzer said. ‘Perhaps he was aware that he couldn’t keep the thing going for ever. Maybe he sensed that his strength was waning,’ something that Fritzl himself had also admitted.
Polzer also maintained that Fritzl had worked alone. ‘We are not conducting an investigation into a crime involving accomplices,’ he told the press. Strangely, though, he mentioned that the Fritzl case had come to police attention due to an anonymous tip-off. ‘Knowing about a crime is not the same as being an accomplice,’ he said. ‘The informant asked for anonymity and we will respect that.’
Later, he admitted, ‘We think Fritzl acted alone but cannot exclude the possibility that someone else was aware of what was going on downstairs.’
He then refused to elaborate as he was bombarded with questions from the media. How could he be sure that Fritzl’s wife Rosemarie knew nothing, when she had not yet been questioned?
‘Do you think any wife in the world would be able to accept that kind of behaviour?’ he asked. He suggested that it simply ‘defies logic’ that anyone could have remained silent under those circumstances. ‘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?’ he asked.
When journalists balked at this, Polzer said, ‘Let me ask you a question: how can you be sure she knew?’ He was apparently irritated that a lady’s honour had been brought into question. ‘Frau Fritzl’s world has imploded.’ It is inconceivable that she could have known, he argued, therefore she did not know.
However, Elisabeth’s school friend, Christa Woldrich, believes that at the very least Rosemarie Fritzl is guilty of negligence by not making more of an effort to discover what had happened to her daughter. ‘I don’t understand why she did not take the opportunity at some point – maybe while he was away on one of his four-week holidays – to take action and say, this is my child and I want to know where my child is,’ said Christa. ‘“Why did my child leave one baby, or even three babies, on my doorstep?” She did not take action as a mother. I don’t understand either the authorities or the mother.’
Local journalist Mark Perry, who covered the case early on, thinks that Rosemarie, as a loving grandmother, sought to present a picture of the perfect family, a strategy that, ultimately, proved counter-productive. ‘If Rosemarie Fritzl had not kept the family together for so long, it might have come out much earlier,’ he said. ‘But she tried, on the outside, to present the idyllic family with three lovely children, and adopted them and was the perfect grandparent, and gave them the love their own mother couldn’t give. So actually, unwittingly, s
he was an accomplice in her husband’s tyranny. But who could blame her? All she wanted to do was to give their grandchildren – who had apparently been dumped on their doorstep – a nice childhood.’
While maintaining that Rosemarie was not a suspect in the case, the police announced that she was not in a fit state to be questioned. She had been sent to a psychiatric hospital – along with Elisabeth and her grandchildren – where they were undergoing therapy as a family. Then Polzer began to hedge his bets. ‘Up until now, no one has been ruled out as a suspect,’ he said. ‘We always categorically stated that our investigations have, so far, given us no reason to suspect anyone else. It may be hard to comprehend, but we must accept that a woman bringing up seven children can’t take care of everything or pay the amount of attention to her husband [that] she would, if she had a smaller family.’
DNA samples taken from the dungeon indicate that no one else was present in the sound-proof cellar, except for Josef Fritzl and his captives – although that did not rule out someone else knowing about what had gone on underground. But Fritzl was a meticulous and secretive man who could have run his second life in the cellar without anyone being any the wiser.
‘Up to now, we are only looking at a single suspect and I have to add that there is a certain logic to the fact that his man did not tell anyone else about his affairs,’ said Polzer. ‘Because it was the only way, through secrecy and iron self-discipline, that he was able to keep it hidden from everyone for such an incredibly long time.’
On 2 June, the prosecutor Gerhard Sedlacek ruled out the possibility of Fritzl having any accomplices. However, beleaguered Chief Investigator Franz Polzer was forced to admit that the case raised ‘a million-and-one unanswered questions’. Faced with the international outcry, Polzer promised they would all be resolved, a task which would involve piecing together every detail of Fritzl’s depraved past.
With the case against Fritzl apparently tied up, journalists then began to ask a whole stream of questions about the conduct of the Austrian police in cases involving missing persons. Above all, why had the police, social services, doctors and teachers at the schools attended by the Fritzl children failed to detect anything was amiss for nearly a quarter of a century? The local authorities also had to fend off criticism that they ignored suspicious signs from the house.
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