Speaking about incarcerating Elisabeth, he said, ‘Ever since she entered puberty she did not adhere to any rules any more … she would spend whole nights in dingy bars, drinking alcohol and smoking. I only tried to pull her out of that misery. I got her a job as a waitress but she would not go to work for days. She even escaped twice and hung out with bad people during this time and they were not good company for her. I would bring her back home each time, but she would try to escape again. That is why I had to do something; I had to create a place where I could keep Elisabeth, by force if necessary, away from the outside world.’
He denied keeping his daughter in handcuffs, in chains or on a dog leash as she alleged. ‘That would not have been necessary,’ he said. ‘My daughter had no chance of escape. It was a vicious circle, a circle from which there was no exit – not only for Elisabeth, but also for myself. With every passing week in which I kept my daughter captive, my situation was getting crazier. I really was thinking about whether I should let her go or not, but I was not able to make that decision, although – or maybe exactly because of that – I knew that with every passing day what I had done would be more severely judged. But I was afraid of being arrested and of having my family and everyone out there find out about my crime – and so I postponed my decision again and again. Until, one day, it was really too late to free Elisabeth and take her upstairs.’
It was only when Elisabeth was locked away in the cellar that he began to compare his daughter to his mother, he said. Gradually, he started to have sexual fantasies about her, which he claimed he tried to suppress. ‘But the urge to have sex with Elisabeth was growing stronger and stronger,’ he said. ‘I knew that Elisabeth did not want the things I did to her; I knew that I was hurting her, but the urge to finally be able to taste the forbidden fruit was too strong. It was like an addiction.’
Not only did he want to have sex with his daughter, he wanted to have a second family with her. ‘In reality, I wanted to have children with her,’ he told the prosecutors. ‘Elisabeth naturally had a fear of giving birth, but I brought her medical books to the cellar, so she could prepare for the Day X. I brought her towels, disinfectants and nappies.
‘I was looking forward to the offspring. It was a beautiful idea for me, to have a proper family, also down in the cellar, with a good wife and a couple of children. I made preparations for all possibilities. Every time I left the bunker, I would activate a time-lock, which would make sure that the doors to the dungeon would open if I would not return after a certain period of time. Had I died, Elisabeth and the children would have been freed.’
Fritzl also boasted of acts of generosity. ‘After Felix was born at the end of 2002, I even gave Elisabeth a washing machine so that she could wash the clothes and bed sheets of the children and not have to handwash them in the basin,’ he said. ‘I always knew during the whole 24 years that what I was doing was not right, that I must have been crazy to do such a thing, but still it became a normal occurrence to lead a second life in the cellar of my house.’
Asked whether he saw his captives as a second family, he said that that was exactly how he viewed them. He also said that Elisabeth never told the children that they were a product of her father’s imposed incestuous relations with her. The children in the dungeon always had to call him ‘Grandpa’, even though they saw him raping her.
‘Elisabeth has always taken care of things for the sake of the family,’ he said. ‘I have tried to provide for my family in the cellar as best as possible. Whenever I went to the bunker, I would bring my daughter flowers and cuddly toys as well as books for the children. I would watch an adventure film on video with them while Elisabeth would prepare our favourite food and then we would all sit together at the kitchen table and eat together.’
He also admitted the children were often suffering from infections, coughing attacks, chest pains and epileptic attacks – though he took no effective action to relieve their suffering. When Kerstin became ill, he said, ‘She tore the clothes from her body and threw them in the toilet.’ It was then that he realised that he must get her proper medical attention, he said.
Fritzl claimed he was already planning to free his secret family and integrate them into his upstairs family. ‘I wanted to take Elisabeth and the children to my home,’ he said. ‘I have grown old in the meantime, I was not so agile any more and I simply knew that, in the near future, I would not have been able to provide for my second family in the bunker. Elisabeth and the children were supposed to tell the story that they had been at a secret location with a cult until they were set free.’
By this patently transparent device, he said that he hoped he would have been able to get away with his crime, but he knew the risks. ‘Of course this is what I hoped for, even if that hope was weak,’ he said. ‘There was always the danger that Elisabeth and the children could have betrayed me but I accepted that risk and I have done that as the tragedy [with Kerstin] escalated.’
When asked how he had managed to prevent his daughter and her children from escaping, he said, ‘It was not difficult. I did not need to use physical violence. Elisabeth and the children fully accepted me as the supreme head of the family … they would never have dared to attack me.
‘Apart from that, they also knew that I was the only one who had the numeric code for the remote control that could open and close the doors to the dungeon.’
The prosecutors asked Fritzl whether he had threatened them with gas poisoning if they attempted to escape. He denied it. ‘I have only explained to them that they should not fiddle with the dungeon door or else they could receive an electrical shock and die,’ he said.
When asked why he had taken three of his children upstairs to be brought up relatively normally by his wife, Fritzl said it was because they were ‘cry-babies’. They got on his nerves in the confined cellar and he was afraid the noise they made would lead to the dungeon being discovered.
However, the police now believe that that may not have been the reason at all. While Lisa was formally adopted, the other two were registered as foster children – entitling Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl to child support which helped supplement the family income. He racked up over £2,000 a month in various State benefits – €600 (£480) a month for Lisa after she was adopted and €1,000 (£800) each for their foster children, Monika and Alexander. As Fritzl’s businesses were in financial difficulties, this income helped pay for his lavish lifestyle – his clothes, his flashy car, his brothel visits and the holidays in Thailand. The police have suggested that this was the real motive for him to bring the children upstairs. After examining his financial records, they found that Fritzl was in constant need of cash to service his debts.
‘They were cash cows for him,’ said an investigator in Amstetten. ‘Everything he did was not out of concern for them, but to get money.’
When asked whether he was now looking forward to death he said, ‘No, I only want redemption.’
In the meantime, Fritzl faced public contempt. In jail, he constantly watched coverage of his case. Despite everything he has owned up to, he sought to complain about his treatment by the media. His attorney Rudolph Mayer said that his client felt that he was being unfairly treated. ‘He feels the reporting on his case is unfair,’ said Mayer. ‘It is totally one-sided.’
Fritzl protested that he was being portrayed as an ogre. ‘I’m no monster,’ he told Mayer. ‘I could have killed them all, then nothing would have happened to me. No one would ever have known about it. I would never have been caught.’
Instead, he had saved the life of Kerstin, he claimed, while putting himself at risk in the bargain. ‘Without me, she would not be alive any more,’ he said. ‘I was the one who made sure that she was taken to a hospital.’
He even claimed he was kind to the family he kept imprisoned underground and that he’d been sorely misunderstood. ‘He is very depressed … It is certainly hard for him in jail,’ said Mayer.
Given the facts surrounding Fritzl’s decades
of planning and executing his demented strategy, as well as the sexual, physical and psychological abuse meted out by him on his own family members, it is hard to sympathise. Prison guards have revealed that his fellow inmates constantly yelled at him and made threats. ‘Satan, come on out,’ they shouted. ‘We’re going to kill you.’
A recently released inmate said, ‘At night, the other cons shout out, “We’re going to get you, Satan, come out and play,” and they bang on the door when they walk past his cell.’
Mayer said that Fritzl was ‘very quiet and humbled’ – not the arrogant egomaniac the police said they had to deal with. His client, he said, understood the ‘anger of the people outside’ and was prepared to accept his punishment. ‘I only want one thing now,’ Fritzl said, ‘and that is to pay for what I did.’
But it is plain that he is building up to an insanity plea. ‘I knew I must be mad for doing such a thing,’ he said. He claims that he was driven by addiction that ‘got out of control’.
His lawyer concurs. Speaking from his office opposite Vienna’s Central Criminal Court, Mayer said, ‘My client is psychologically ill and, as a result, is not responsible for his actions. He is not a monster … he is just a human being. Locking him up in jail is not the right thing to do. He needs proper psychological care.’
There was outrage in the Austrian press when it appeared that Mayer was angling for a lighter sentence by claiming his client was mentally ill, but he remains unconcerned. ‘Every case that has a psychological background is interesting,’ he said. ‘We defence lawyers believe that there are good souls.’
Rudolf Mayer considers himself both a ‘therapist and lawyer’. Throughout his career, he has been attracted to cases with a ‘psychological-psychiatric background,’ he says. Indeed, his plush offices are just around the corner from where Sigmund Freud used to practice.
‘Josef Fritzl is being portrayed as a horrific monster and sexual tyrant,’ said Mayer. ‘My job is to show him as a human being.’ Obviously, he is going to have his work cut out.
Mayer went on to explain his methods: he said he always uses his first ten-minute meeting with a client to get a feeling for the individual. ‘I turn off my rational brain, switch on my gut instinct and concentrate on the person’s eyes,’ said the lawyer. ‘It’s a tried-and-tested tactic – the eyes reveal 90 per cent of a person’s psyche.’
To most people, the pale eyes they have seen in photographs of Josef Fritzl appear faintly satanic, but that may be because anyone who knows anything about what he has admitted to doing already has a biased opinion. Even his lawyer admits Fritzl has a ‘Jack Nicholson look’ – that of the murderous madman the actor plays in The Shining presumably.
Putting aside his gut instinct and what he read in his client’s eyes, Mayer thought he got through to Fritzl when they first met. ‘The first 30 seconds of a meeting is crucial for establishing psychological contact,’ he said. ‘I believe that, in this time, I succeeded in bonding with Herr Fritzl.’
His overall impression was that his client was ‘a paterfamilias, a patriarch, with good but also bad sides’. While Mayer claimed Fritzl was ‘very seriously affected and emotionally broken’, in interrogations he was found to be ‘unresponsive’.
Throughout their second meeting, Mayer said, ‘I just let him talk and I listened to him.’ Fritzl spent two hours speaking about his life and giving his version of things, but Mayer refused to reveal any details of the conversation and he has also asked his client to be more circumspect in future. ‘He has already said too much,’ said Mayer, aware that Fritzl’s detailed confession is going to tie his hands in this case. He need not have worried, though. When prosecutors threatened to charge him with murder over the death of Michael, Fritzl withdrew his co-operation.
Mayer said he knew little about Fritzl’s early life or why he destroyed the life of his child in such a hideous way. ‘That is exactly where my task begins,’ said Mayer. ‘Who is Josef Fritzl? Why is he the way he is?’
Those are the questions he was seeking to answer as he got to know his client better, and he believed he would discover why Fritzl decided to imprison his own daughter. ‘After three decades’ professional experience as a defence lawyer, I am convinced of one thing,’ he said. ‘There is an explanation for every deed, for every criminal act.’
Like the police, Mayer was convinced there were no accomplices in this case and he did not know if his client was going to be charged with more rapes or other crimes, such as the unsolved murder of Martina Posch in 1986. ‘I am waiting for the coming conversations with my client to see if he mentions anything,’ he said.
He also said that he was not put off by the severity of the crimes that Fritzl has committed – by his own admission – or the circumstances of the offences. ‘I wasn’t shocked,’ he said. Indeed, he was pleased to have been appointed to the case. ‘Herr Fritzl was asked if he wanted me as his defence lawyer,’ said Mayer, ‘and he said, “Yes, I know him from the TV!”’
Mayer first hit the headlines in 1996 when he defended two neo-Nazis accused of sending a series of letter bombs and succeeded in securing an acquittal for them. His chances of negotiating any kind of light sentence for Josef Fritzl look slim, but that did not seem to deter him. Indeed, he revelled in the limelight. ‘Even a Colombian radio station has asked me if I am prepared to do a live interview,’ he said.
It seemed as if an insanity plea was Mayer’s only option, given Fritzl’s confession and the charges that the prosecutors were preparing against him. ‘They want him jailed for the rest of his natural life,’ said Mayer. As Fritzl is already 73, he is hardly likely to suffer anything like the length of imprisonment he subjected his daughter to.
Mayer was particularly concerned with the possibility that Fritzl might be charged with murder over the death of baby Michael. ‘He has admitted Elisabeth had the twins on her own in the cellar and that he did not see her until three days after the birth,’ continued the lawyer. ‘He told me that when he found one of the babies was dead, he put its body into his furnace. Elisabeth says her baby developed breathing difficulties and Fritzl failed to get medical attention that could have saved its life. Police now say he is guilty of first-degree murder because he did not allow the child to be treated and it died as a direct result.’
Mayer said Fritzl had stopped talking to police after they accused him of murdering the child by neglect and that Fritzl will not say another word to authorities. He also told his attorney that he will now never reveal why he imprisoned his daughter. A second murder charge hung over him if Kerstin did not recover.
‘The maximum sentence for murder in Austria is 15 years, but everything possible is being done to maximise my client’s sentence,’ Mayer complained.
Elisabeth’s school friend Christa Woldrich voiced what she considered a more fitting retribution for Fritzl. ‘If I had to decide what happened to him, I would fling him into the same hole Elisabeth and the children were in,’ she said.
But his lawyer pleads in mitigation, ‘Herr Fritzl admits he raped and imprisoned his daughter, but he does regret what he did … he is emotionally destroyed. He thought he was protecting his family and said that was his job as the patriarch.’ Mayer even hinted he would ask a judge to free Fritzl at his next court hearing.
Despite Mayer’s insistence that his client may be insane, the police insisted that Fritzl was ‘composed and rational’ and in a good mental and physical condition. But Mayer said Fritzl has been examined by prison doctors who have diagnosed him as suffering from schizophrenia.
The court appointed Austria’s leading forensic psychiatrist, 46-year-old Dr Adelheid Kastner, to determine whether Fritzl was fit to stand trial. ‘I am conducting exploratory conversations to get to know every possible part of the defendant’s personality,’ she said. ‘The court wants me to probe several questions and has given me a deadline but if I need longer, then the court will have to wait.’
Mayer said that Fritzl had told him, ‘I had a breakdown
from which there was no escape, not only for me, but also for Elisabeth. The longer I kept her prisoner, the more insane my situation became, the worse it seemed to get. The desire for her became stronger and stronger. I’ve known for 24 years that what I was doing was wrong, that I must be insane to do such a thing. But I was driven by these forbidden desires. They were just too great for me.’
Mayer said his client was under psychiatric care, but he refused to say if he showed any remorse. In what appears to be an indication that he did not, Mayer replied only, ‘I cannot say at this point.’
When District Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze visited, he found Fritzl unrepentant. ‘When I met him again in his cell, I said, “It was you, Herr Fritzl. I am appalled by you. How can anyone do such a thing?” To which he replied, “I am very, very sorry for my family, but it can’t be undone.” I replied, “You should have thought of that earlier.”’
Like his client, Mayer is furious about the coverage of the case. He put out Fritzl’s statement saying that he was not a monster on the grounds that he could have killed Elisabeth and the children, but didn’t. But what he didn’t do hardly mitigates what he did.
Nevertheless, Rudolf Mayer agrees with Fritzl. ‘The media coverage is completely over the top,’ he said. ‘So part of my job is to move it away from the monster, back to the human being. Because it is a human being on trial, not a monster.’
But the question put to the court will not be whether Fritzl is a monster or not. More likely it will be whether or not he is sane. In his confession, he said, ‘I always knew … that what I was doing was not right.’ He said he had a strong sense of ‘decency’ inculcated into him by the Nazis and the strictness of his mother. Indeed, he even claimed that he initially imprisoned his daughter to keep her away from the wickedness of the world. Knowing right from wrong is the standard legal test for sanity. It was only later that Fritzl said, ‘I knew I must be mad …’
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