House of Horrors

by Nigel Cawthorne

  District Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze was able to show reporters documents that proved that his council’s go-ahead for the adoption and fostering of three of Ms Fritzl’s children was perfectly legal. ‘I have inspected the adoption files and see absolutely no reason for an investigation,’ said Lenze. Defending the welfare staff who checked on the children, he said, ‘We hadn’t a clue anything was wrong. They had no reason to suspect.’

  He dismissed criticism of the authorities for giving custody of three children to Josef Fritzl, considering his criminal record. The records had been searched and no trace of his previous sex crimes could be found. Social welfare teams had seen Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl regularly after they took custody of the children and had visited the house 21 times. They insist they noticed nothing unusual during routine visits. True, they had never looked around the house, but Lenze had an explanation for that: ‘Herr Fritzl was a patriarch, very authoritarian, so certain areas within his house were exclusively for his use,’ he said. ‘But why would this lead to suspicions that there was a second family being kept down there? Who gets such an idea into their head? I ask you – it’s like the former tenants now talking … it’s all too easy to be wise after the event.’

  Of course there was good reason to be suspicious of the Fritzls. The family had, in the space of a decade, registered one missing person and made the claim that three babies had been dumped on the doorstep. These matters were on the record.

  ‘There was no reason not to believe their story,’ said Lenze.

  Josef Schloegl, the head of the Amstetten district court whose duty it was to oversee the children, agreed with Lenze. ‘There was no reason to suspect that something was wrong,’ he said. However, Schloegl admitted that rules had been broken because the youngsters had been formally handed over to Fritzl without the approval of their missing mother Elisabeth. He conceded there had been questions over the whole procedure at the time but it had been finally approved after they found no irregularities; it seemed the best alternative at the time.

  ‘The grandmother took loving care of the children,’ said Lenze. ‘Lisa, Monika and Alexander – these three children were very well brought up. They were doing very well at school. They were integrated into the community and the notes in the records about all the meetings with the grandmother, Frau Fritzl, suggest that the atmosphere was normal.’

  There was even sympathy for the elderly couple who had suddenly acquired a new young family. ‘Only the first child, Lisa, was adopted,’ said Lenze. ‘The other two were officially raised as foster children. This option was chosen as the State does not pay support for adopted children, whereas in the case of foster care, child support ranging from €397 to €410 is paid per child per month, depending on the age of the child. In hindsight, and to an outside observer, it is almost inconceivable that this man claimed support. It is a legal provision in Austria and citizens are entitled to it.’

  Although he vehemently defended himself and his town in public, in private Dr Lenze was distraught. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he admitted. ‘As a father, I can’t begin to imagine what that poor young family suffered. I’ve resorted to sleeping tablets – I just can’t get the suffering out of my head. I’m totally shocked.’

  Professor Max Friedrich also understood why the Fritzl family raised no suspicions. ‘In the world upstairs, and everyone who knew them said so, everything seemed right,’ he said. ‘The children went to school, they did their homework properly and were brought up strictly by this father. So, after some time, people would have said, “This is an honourable man.” He is strict – but, as we say in Austria, a little bit of strictness never hurt anybody, so all this certainly played a part.’

  But the signs were there for everyone to see, according to Hedwig Woelfl, the director of a child protection centre in Austria. ‘Elisabeth ran away from that house as a girl; police searched for her, brought her back and delivered her back into the violent embrace of her father,’ he said. ‘Running away from home was a clear sign of unhappiness, but nobody apparently showed any interest in the fate of this girl.’

  Questions about the conduct of the authorities were not just being asked by Austrian journalists; the international press corps had descended on Amstetten and the story quickly became such big news worldwide that the government in Vienna was forced to step in. ‘We are being confronted with an unfathomable crime,’ said Interior Minister Guenther Platter, seeking to divert criticism from the administration. Even the Austrian President, Alfred Gusenbauer, intervened, announcing a global PR campaign to save his country from being tarnished as the ‘land of the dungeons’. This was particularly apposite after the Natascha Kampusch case and the discovery, in February 2007, that a lawyer in Linz had locked up her daughters for three years in almost complete darkness.

  The girls’ ordeal started when they were 7, 11 and 13. Their parents had divorced and the mother won custody of the children, but subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown. She took them out of school, saying she wanted to teach them at home, but instead kept them hidden away in rooms lit by a single lightbulb. All they had to play with were mice.

  When finally freed, they could not cope with sunlight. They had been isolated for so long that they developed a language of their own. It was said their mother escaped child welfare visits because she was a lawyer. When their father tried to see the children, his ex-wife told him they were either ill or visiting their grandparents. The three – Viktoria, Katharina and Elisabeth – were only freed when the authorities acted on a neighbour’s suspicions.

  ‘How can the authorities be duped so easily?’ a reader asked Austria’s daily Wiener Zeitung. ‘One can only hope that these poor creatures get adequate psychiatric help.’

  The daily Kurier came up with another ‘dungeon’ case where a Viennese couple kept their adopted daughter, who had learning difficulties, caged in a cold room like an animal. The apparent frequency of these cases was as damning an indictment of Austrian society as you could get and the headlines were unambiguous: ‘THESE CASES SHOCKED THE NATION’.

  But the Fritzl story plumbed new depths. ‘After this latest case, it will be impossible to carry on with business as usual,’ wrote leading columnist Petra Stuiber in Austria’s daily Der Standard. ‘An entire nation must ask itself what is going fundamentally wrong.’

  The front-page headline in Austria’s Kronen Zeitung referred to the Fritzl case as ‘MARTYRDOM IN THE HOUSE OF HORROR’.

  ‘HOW CAN IT HAPPEN HERE?’ asked Austria’s Die Presse daily, while readers of Austria’s Wiener Zeitung wanted to know, ‘How is such a thing still possible today and how many people may be still living in such circumstances?’

  Neighbours quoted by Die Presse said the family shut itself off so much that some people who had lived in the same street for a long time thought the ‘old man’ might even have died. Such a lifestyle was unusual in a community where most neighbours knew each other, the paper reported.

  But President Gusenbauer wanted to keep the focus on the Fritzl case. ‘We will not allow our country to be held hostage by one man,’ he said. ‘Austria is not the perpetrator. This is an unfathomable criminal case, but also an isolated case.’

  However, the local politicians in Amstetten were not so sanguine. ‘What happened in that cellar is now inextricably part of the history of this town,’ the town spokesman, Hermann Gruber, said.

  When Natascha Kampusch heard of the Fritzl case, she issued a statement saying she wanted to contact Elisabeth Fritzl to offer emotional and financial help. ‘I can imagine that it is very difficult both for the mother of the children as well as for the wife of the perpetrator to get through this,’ she said.

  The two cases are now inextricably linked in the public imagination. Asked whether he thought there might be other men like Fritzl and Priklopil who imprisoned children in secret bunkers, Chief Investigator Polzer said, ‘It is a real possibility.’

  Not only were the inhabitants of the picturesque town of Amstetten shock
ed to discover that they had a depraved monster in their midst, the community also became the centre of world media attention, with journalists from all over the world stalking the streets, asking anyone who would speak to them how this outrage could have happened right under their noses.

  ‘Fritzl was always friendly – that’s why this is so unbelievable,’ said 56-year-old Franz Redl, who owned a shop across the street. ‘I’m sure the authorities did all they could. He planned everything so perfectly.’

  Another neighbour in Ybbsstrasse, an elderly woman named Maria, said, ‘I just don’t believe it. They were nice people. I used to watch them taking their three children to school.’

  Certainly Fritzl seemed to tick all the boxes of the good, upstanding family man. ‘You would see him two or three years ago with the children and they would play in the garden,’ said another resident. ‘Sometimes you would see Josef’s grown-up children there, too.’

  This seemingly model, middle-class Austrian family often used to go for a lunchtime pizza at their favourite Italian restaurant, the Casa Verona in Amstetten, just a short walk from 40 Ybbsstrasse. ‘They just seemed so very normal,’ said the owner, Wael Sahan. ‘The two teenage girls and their younger brother were smartly dressed and really polite, unlike some kids we serve. And there was lots of laughter from their table, particularly when the father cracked a joke.’

  Generally, the population looked on in stunned disbelief as the investigation unfolded. Neighbours who milled around the three-storey Fritzl house were disgusted and wondered how such an atrocity could have occurred in their own community, while others reacted with a mixture of bewilderment and horror. ‘It’s a catastrophe,’ said one. ‘It makes my hair stand on end.’

  Neighbours said that Fritzl and his wife’s five other children were all respected members of the community and had families of their own. ‘One cannot comprehend the dimension of this,’ said 34-year-old Doris Bichler, a neighbour who was walking down Ybbsstrasse with her own daughter two days after the secrets of the cellar had come to light. ‘Natascha Kampusch was bad, but this is of a totally different scale.’

  While Natascha Kampusch’s captivity was possible because of the anonymity of the suburbs, Elisabeth Fritzl and her children were prisoners in a small, close-knit community of grape-growers. Neighbours talked of how Fritzl’s wife Rosemarie used to take her three grandchildren for walks and how Josef always gave a cheery greeting. ‘I would see the old lady almost every day, taking the children to school,’ said another neighbour. ‘They seemed a lovely family.’

  ‘Amstetten is a close community,’ added resident Sabine Ilk, ‘and it’s just unbelievable nobody knew what was happening for all that time.’

  Günther Pramreiter, who ran a bakery next door to the Fritzls’ building, said, ‘You’re amazed that something like this could happen in your neighbourhood.’ He said the couple, or their adopted children, would come in every other day to buy rolls.

  Among those in the Fritzls’ neighbourhood, there was a disquieting sense that more could have been done. ‘I think the authorities are overworked and weren’t able to follow up every lead,’ said 50-year-old Franz Jandl, who owned a shop across the street from the apartment. ‘For a little country to have this kind of thing happen a second time is a catastrophe. It’s just very sad.’

  Joachim Wasser, 75, added, ‘This is like the Kampusch case but much worse. It must never happen again.’

  Matthias Sonnleitner, who managed a hardware store on Ybbsstrasse, said his children had taken martial arts classes with the Fritzl children. Rosemarie Fritzl occasionally came to his store to buy curtains, he said. He suspected nothing.

  And while some Amstetten residents speculated on the perfectly normal, unremarkable behaviour of the Fritzl family, others were puzzled as to how Fritzl’s dungeon could go undetected for so long. ‘How is it possible that no one knew anything for 24 years?’ asked Anita Fabian, a local teacher. ‘This was not possible without accomplices.’ The police were confident that Fritzl had acted alone, however.

  Forty-two-year-old Guenter Haller, who worked across the road from the Fritzls, was also stunned. ‘It’s a complete shock,’ he said. ‘This is the friendliest town I’ve ever lived in. How the other tenants did not see anything escapes me.’

  But someone must have suspected something and the police began their investigation with those closest to the scene of the crime. ‘In the past 24 years, around 100 people have lived in the house,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer. ‘We want to talk to all of them – possibly one of them observed something out of the ordinary, or something that may not have seemed too important at the time, but could be of relevance knowing what we do today.’

  The police began to track down all the tenants who had rented rooms in the house since 1984. Sabine Kirschbichler, who recently lived in the house for two years, told reporters that she frequently saw Herr Fritzl carrying heavy bags of shopping into the cellar after dark. ‘Now, I realise why we weren’t allowed to rent cellar space,’ she said.

  Kirschbichler, who is now in her mid-twenties, lived in a second-floor apartment with her brother Thomas for two years until 2003. They thought something was a little strange at the time, but Fritzl’s odd behaviour failed to spark any significant suspicions. ‘Mostly, you only saw him in the evening, often with shopping bags,’ said Sabine. ‘I thought, “Something’s not right in his marriage if he’s always doing the shopping.”’

  Her brother Thomas added, ‘At least now we know why we couldn’t rent a storage room in the cellar.’

  Others think this is being wise after the event. ‘In hindsight, you can always claim that you heard something like knocking,’ said tenant Georg Friedrich. ‘But that simply isn’t the case. I can’t ever recall hearing knocking or anything at all. And if I had heard something, what could I have done? It could have been children playing, you don’t know.’

  The police also interviewed the rest of the family to see what they knew. What emerged was a portrait of a man who was brutal, not just to the family he kept locked in the cellar and his other incestuous offspring that he kept upstairs, but to his original family as well.

  ‘We have spoken at length to Elisabeth’s brothers and sisters,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer. ‘All said their father wasn’t just very strict, aggressive, dominant and power-mad, he was a “real tyrant”. They weren’t ever allowed to address him or ask him anything. That was why every child except one son left the house as soon as they could. But one son wasn’t allowed to leave, just like Elisabeth. He is very slow and has a few problems and difficulties. Josef kept him, using this son as his slave and house-boy. I believe it was Josef’s youngest son. He had to wait on his father hand and foot, and skivvy for him.’

  There have been some questions about how much Josef Jr knew. Sabine Kirschbichler said he had a key to Fritzl’s cellar, where the door to the dungeon was concealed behind a cupboard. Elisabeth’s brother was fat and usually drunk, she said. ‘He was the caretaker and if anything was broken he would go straight to the cellar to fetch a replacement,’ she said.

  The other Fritzl siblings, Elisabeth’s brothers and sisters, were traumatised when the secret of the House of Horrors came out. ‘They are trying to take in the terrible truth about their father while dealing with media,’ a relative said. Even Elisabeth’s doting big brother Harald, now in his 40s, who left home when his sister vanished, believed his father’s lie that she had joined a religious cult.

  Horst Herlbauer, the husband of Elisabeth’s older sister Rosemarie, now nearly 50, said his wife was stunned by the revelations about her father. Herlbauer and Rosemarie were frequent visitors to Fritzl’s home in Amstetten, while sister Elisabeth was being held captive in the cellar. ‘Although Rosemarie left home with me more than 25 years ago, we went back for family occasions,’ he said. ‘But we never suspected anything was wrong and never had any reason to think anything had happened to Elisabeth.’

  They, too, had fallen for the lie that E
lisabeth had run off to join a cult. ‘Nobody could have imagined what had really taken place,’ said Herlbauer. ‘Josef seemed to be a normal dad and family man. He was always working hard in his job or on the house and there never appeared to be any problems at home. He was outgoing, friendly and popular with the neighbours. We always believed Elisabeth had run away and not come back – everybody did. We didn’t question it, even when some of her children appeared and were adopted into the family.’

  The family were completely unprepared for the revelations that followed. ‘We were shocked to learn what he had done,’ said Herlbauer. ‘That wasn’t the man we knew.’

  But their thoughts were with Elisabeth. ‘It’s impossible to describe the mental torture and anguish she’s been through,’ Herlbauer continued. ‘It’s a terrible ordeal beyond words. It’s unreal.’

  The family were trying to keep themselves out of the public eye. Since the disclosure of her sister’s abuse, Herlbauer’s wife has left their home in Traun. Meanwhile, the small chalet-style home in Amstetten where Elisabeth’s younger sister Gabrielle lives with her husband Juergen Helm and their child has a sign outside that reads, ‘Reporter nicht erwunscht’ – ‘Reporters not welcome’. Similar signs went up outside houses around Amstetten as the small Austrian town tried to cope with the media’s insatiable demand for details of one of the most extraordinary and shocking crimes in the country’s history.

  10

  A FAMILY REUNITED

  No one, it seems, was more surprised to discover what was going on in the House of Horrors than Rosemarie Fritzl – who, some argue, should have known all along. She was on holiday when the terrible truth began to come out.