House of Horrors

by Nigel Cawthorne

  The other residents of Amstetten were also struggling to deal with the enormity of the crime as more details of the so-called ‘House of Horrors’ unfolded. As the world’s media filled the streets, a vigil was planned in the town as a show of solidarity towards Elisabeth and her children. On the night of 29 April – three days after Elisabeth and her two boys had been freed – some 200 people gathered in the quaint market square in Amstetten in the rain, holding candles and umbrellas. Flowers were laid outside 40 Ybbsstrasse by sympathisers. Many were shocked. Until the previous weekend, the pretty Austrian town’s main claim to fame was its apple wine; now it would for ever be associated with the Fritzl family. The supporters were angry with the authorities for not having noticed that something was going terribly wrong; they also felt guilty because they had not spotted anything themselves.

  In the town square, they unfurled banners, carrying message of sympathy for everything Elisabeth and her children had suffered. A speaker at the vigil expressed the ‘bewilderment, shock, paralysis and speechlessness’ of the people of Amstetten, who asked ‘to be informed and look for answers’.

  A young mother named Stefanie explained why they were there. ‘We need to show the world we are not bad,’ she said. ‘We do care about each other.’

  When the Fritzl family, recovering in the nearby Mauer clinic, heard of the town’s sympathetic response, they showed their gratitude for the support with a large hand-made poster, which was exhibited in a shop window in the centre of town. The central message read, ‘We, the whole family, would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your sympathy for our fate. Your compassion is really helping us get through this difficult time and shows us that there are good and honest people out there who care for us. We hope that the time will soon come when we can find our way back to a normal life.’

  The thank-you message was encircled by outlines of their hands. Each had an individual message inside expressing what they wished for and what they missed.

  Stefan wrote, ‘I miss my sister. I am enjoying freedom and my family. I like the sun, fresh air and nature.’

  His younger brother Felix simply listed some of the things he was enjoying in the outside world – ‘Sleigh rides, driving in a car, playing ball, swimming … Playing with other children, friendship, running in the meadows.’

  Lisa wrote, ‘Wishes – health, that everything turns out well again, love, happiness. Misses – Kerstin, school, friends, fresh air, Class 1C.’ Monika wrote, ‘Wishes – that Kerstin gets better, lots of love, that everything is soon past. Misses – fire brigade [an Austrian youth group], music school, friends, school, Kerstin.’

  And Alexander’s wishes and misses read, ‘I wish for freedom, power and strength, and the sun. I miss fire brigade, school and my sister Kerstin.’

  The adults also made a contribution. Rosemarie – grandma – wrote, ‘I wish to live with my children in peace with the help of God. I miss my kind friends and my freedom.’

  Elisabeth said, ‘Wishes – my daughter Kerstin’s recovery, my children’s love, protection for my family, people with warm hearts and understanding.’

  The poster was completed with a heart-shape to represent Kerstin.

  Family lawyer Christoph Herbst explained, ‘The initiative for the public address in a form of a poster came from the family themselves. It is their wish to thank the community for the support.’

  Although the people of Amstetten were touched, the poster did nothing to stop their relentless self-examination. On the May Day bank holiday, the day the town traditionally set aside to celebrate the beginning of summer, families stayed inside, haunted by the shadow of Josef Fritzl.

  A neighbour watching as forensic scientists removed boxes of belongings from the underground prison told reporters that the community was gripped by guilt at having let Elisabeth languish in an airless cell for so long. But what could they have done? ‘Had we noticed anything, we’d have said something,’ he said, refusing to give his name.

  One neighbour recalled Fritzl’s ‘immaculate cravat’, another his ‘decent posture’. But the discovery of the crimes of retired grandfather Josef Fritzl – until then the epitome of upright Austrian life – had shattered every illusion. A painted sign left on Fritzl’s garden fence said it all: ‘WARUM? Hat es keiner gemerkt?’ – ‘WHY? Did nobody notice?’

  Twenty-six-year-old Edison Rafael said, ‘It’s essential these questions are asked. How on earth can a man carry out such a complex, harmful operation for so many years without anybody in a tight-knit neighbourhood having a clue? We have to start talking about it and stop brushing things under the carpet.’

  But Wolf Gruber, one of Fritzl’s neighbours, struck back at any implied criticism. ‘Much has been made of the neighbours failing to notice anything funny going on,’ he said, ‘but the fact is that you can’t see anything that’s going on in the Fritzl house from the outside. Everything is concealed.’

  It seems that Fritzl was lucky in his choice of immediate neighbours. On one side there was an elderly lady who eventually went into care, leaving the house empty. Beyond that lived a couple who spent their weekdays in Vienna. Fritzl’s nearest neighbours were Herbert and Regina Penz, who lived three doors away and they saw nothing.

  ‘Nobody in this street noticed anything at all,’ said Herbert Penz.

  ‘What are you meant to spot around here?’ said his wife Regina. ‘All the gardens are open, while Herr Fritzl’s is all concealed, built up and the few open spaces are covered by trees and bushes. You can’t see anything.’

  And Fritzl guarded his privacy.

  ‘A neighbour wanted to prune the hedge last year,’ said Regina Penz, ‘but Herr Fritzl said, “No, leave it.” And if someone doesn’t want people seeing into their garden, you have to accept it. Other than that, you can’t see anything.’

  The Fritzls kept themselves to themselves.

  ‘The Fritzl family never came to any of the garden parties we used to have around here,’ said Herbert Penz. ‘They never came. So, in the end, basically, people stopped inviting them because everyone knew that the Fritzls would never come to any kind of party.’

  It was known that Josef Fritzl had been a successful and respected engineer and that DIY was his hobby. ‘Herr Fritzl was always hard-working,’ said Herbert Penz. ‘We often heard the noise of the cement mixer. I think that Herr Fritzl did most of the building work himself. We thought he was adding on an extra room to rent out, or something like that.’

  The neighbours also knew of his reputation as a disciplinarian. ‘I did hear talk among the neighbours that Herr Fritzl was very firm with his children,’ said Herbert Penz. ‘And that absolute obedience to Herr Fritzl prevailed. His wife, too, was very submissive towards him; we all knew it. He was very domineering with his family.’

  His wife Regina concurred, ‘He was very strict.’

  ‘He was strict and people discussed it and knew about it,’ said Herbert Penz.

  Even though Fritzl’s harsh behaviour was widely known, he was not condemned for it. At the time, in the eyes of the neighbours, Elisabeth herself was to blame. ‘Apparently, Elisabeth had already caused trouble before,’ said Regina Penz. ‘She had disappeared once before and then turned up again. But if there are seven children, one of them is bound to be trouble. You have to accept that these things happen. It doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong as a parent.’

  Number 40 Ybbsstrasse is now an attraction for ghoulish sightseers. Hordes of tourists from across Austria, Germany and Hungary have turned up outside the property, with some posing for pictures. Locals complained to police about the numbers arriving but officers said they were powerless to act.

  ‘It is bad enough that journalists and TV crews have beleaguered our town,’ said one Amstetten resident, ‘but now there is this ghoulish tourism with people coming to Amstetten just to see the house in Ybbsstrasse. It is appalling … we just want to be left in peace.’

  The three-storey Fritzl home facing one of
Amstetten’s main roads has also been put on the route of a sightseeing bus tour which now routinely stops in front of it. One tour operator was said to be handing out mock business cards with Josef Fritzl’s address and work details as a sick souvenir.

  ‘There are more and more tourists turning up to have their picture taken in front of the house,’ said the police. ‘It has become a sort of pilgrimage site.’

  Even one of Monika Fritzl’s teachers turned up with Monika’s classmates to see the goings-on around the dungeon. ‘The children are desperate to see it for themselves,’ she explained. ‘There’s no point keeping it from them, that will only make it worse, and they’ll find out anyway because it’s all anyone’s talking about.’

  After the initial shock, other people who knew Fritzl in Amstetten spoke up about their suspicions. Franz Haider, now 58, who worked under Fritzl for three months in 1969 at a local cement and building supply company, Zehetner Baustoffhandel und Betonwerk, was unsurprised. He believed he was the sort of man capable of keeping a secret for years, even a monstrous one. ‘It’s the kind of thing he would do,’ he said.

  Although Haider insisted that he would never have believed a crime like Fritzl’s to be possible in Amstetten, now that it had occurred, he said, he cannot imagine anyone more capable of concealing such a secret for 24 years. As well as being secretive, Fritzl had all the necessary technical expertise. ‘Concrete technology was Fritzl’s specialty,’ said Haider. ‘He could have built anything himself.’

  When Haider worked with Fritzl, their department was developing a machine to pour concrete pipes, such as those used in sewage systems. Fritzl was the technical director of the project and spent months developing a large and complicated machine, 5 metres tall, 3 metres wide and 3 metres deep to do the job. Haider joined the project later as an assistant. He said that, in the time he worked with him, all that he learned from Fritzl, other than matters concerning the machine, was that his boss was married. Other than that, Fritzl remained tight-lipped about his private life. He never had any personal phone calls and there were no family photos on his desk. He did not even tell Haider that he had children.

  Gertrud Ramharter, a neighbour who lived across the street on Ybbsstrasse, said that she repeatedly heard hammering and construction noise coming from the Fritzl property. She did wonder what was going on, she admits today. ‘What’s he building? And how big is it going to be?’ she would ask herself. Unfortunately, she did not ask anyone else, or complain about the noise or the building work.

  Others who have come forward to say they knew 73-year-old Fritzl were also being questioned. ‘We’re casting a wide net. It’s a lot of work,’ Chief Inspector Etz said.

  But the police remained puzzled by the case. ‘We still find it hard to believe that no one – no neighbour, family member or acquaintance – noticed anything,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer, who headed up the police investigation. Meanwhile, around the world, people were saying exactly the same thing.

  13

  BACK IN THE CELLAR

  As Fritzl refused to answer any further questions and neither the family, tenants nor the neighbours knew anything more, the police had to turn to forensics to piece together the story of what had happened below ground for the past 24 years. Their job was gruelling. Doing forensic work in the cramped cellar was ‘oppressive’, admitted Chief Investigator Polzer. Officers could only work one hour at a time below ground because of the lack of oxygen in the windowless dungeon.

  ‘There is so little oxygen that the victims would have had to spend nearly all their time lying or sitting down,’ one officer stated.

  The forensics team said that the atmosphere underground was so lacking in oxygen that if any more than four officers were admitted to the bunker at any one time, they had great difficulty in breathing.

  Other investigators stayed away but, as head of the investigation, Colonel Polzer had to visit the scene of the crime. ‘I went to see this dungeon – this prison – for myself once,’ said Polzer. ‘I went through it and was very glad to be able to leave. The environment in this room where the ceiling was kept very low, less than 6 feet at the highest point, was anything but pleasant. Everyday living, personal hygiene, etc., must have kept the level of humidity high.’

  Visiting the cellar played tricks with the imagination – it was all too easy to visualise the horror of being locked in, and not knowing if you would ever see daylight again. If police forensics experts could only work down there for an hour at a time, what must it have been like to live down there for days, weeks, months and years on end?

  ‘If we sat down and attempted to capture those years in a few lines, or a brief report, or even a documentary, we would not succeed,’ said Polzer, ‘because I believe that, in those 24 years, life must had felt as if it lasted ten times as long as real time.’

  There can be no doubt that for the captives being sealed in this airless vault, barely able to move, time must have hung heavy on their hands.

  Investigators found two heavily-reinforced concrete doors that could only be opened by remote control. When closed, they were hermetically sealed and the only air came in through a small ventilation shaft. But even when they were opened, the air inside remained fetid and the investigators looked for some other way to ventilate the bunker.

  ‘We are trying to find another way out of this room because the working conditions in this prison are so exceptional,’ said Polzer, going on to compare entering the cellar to climbing into an old submarine and then submerging. He said that officers with years of experience of crime scenes have been shocked to the core on entering one of the tiny rooms and being confronted by the reality of what it must have been like to live under those conditions. ‘What the officers had to look at down there was terrible,’ said Polzer.

  The police said the cellar was damp and covered in mildew and that, as a result, its inhabitants were suffering from fungal infections. But what most affected the investigators was finding the pitiful drawings made by the three children kept in the tiny, dark space since their birth.

  The dungeon where Elisabeth and the kids lived was impossibly remote from the world outside. It lay deep below ground at the end of a labyrinth – you had passed through the five different rooms in the cellar and eight locked doors even to reach its entrance. Fritzl had installed a number of complex electronic locks. It was the sort of security you would expect to see on a bank vault.

  On reaching Fritzl’s subterranean workshop, the entrance to the dungeon was not immediately obvious. It was hidden behind a shelving unit stacked with tins of paint. This had to be moved to one side to reveal the entrance to the dungeon, a one-metre-high reinforced concrete door. The steel frame of the door had been sprayed with concrete, making it so heavy that it took four firemen to shift it. Fritzl only moved it with the aid of an electric motor. If that had failed, the cellar family would have been trapped, sealed in their tomb for ever.

  No casual visitor would even have got as far as the workshop; it was out of bounds. Fritzl’s son-in-law Juergen Helm admitted he had been down to the cellar, but he had no reason to suspect that there was a hidden doorway behind the shelves. Fritzl’s son also had access to the cellar, but – according to all reports – he was rather slow on the uptake and, anyway, he was completely under the thumb of his father. Otherwise, the entire cellar area and workshop was strictly off limits to Fritzl family members, friends and the tenants who lived upstairs.

  ‘Whoever enters it will be given immediate notice,’ one former tenant was told.

  This was also made clear to Joseph Leitner, Alfred Dubanovsky and Sabine and Thomas Kirschbichler, who had all lived in the house.

  The secret door was electronically locked and could only be opened with a special code and a remote control, which Fritzl carried with him at all times. To get through the tiny entrance, you had to bend double. From the doorway, there was a narrow passageway leading into a series of rooms with an area of approximately 650 square feet (60 square met
res). The floor was bumpy and uneven. Nowhere was the ceiling more than 5 feet 6 inches (1.7 metres) high. A narrow corridor, barely a foot (30 centimetres) wide and 16 feet (5 metres) long, led to an area where there were cooking facilities and a small bathroom with a shower. A tube connected to the living area provided some barely adequate ventilation for the four people living 24 hours a day, seven days a week down there.

  The entire cellar was small, stifling and dark, lit only by dim electric bulbs. Exposed pipes lined the moisture-drenched walls. There were scant furnishings and possessions apart from the television, video player, a radio and the children’s paintings and posters were hung on the walls. From the very first room containing the kitchen and bathroom, investigators were left feeling sick. The shower was covered in mould, and the toilet was in a ‘catastrophic’ state, investigators said. With the doors hermetically sealed, no fresh air could get in and no stale air or moisture could not escape.

  The small bathroom contained a tiny hip bath with a shower decorated with pictures of an octopus and a flower. On the other side of a short partition was a hand basin, with a cupboard above holding a toothbrush and other toiletry items. Next to it was a hand towel. A red hot-water bottle also hung there. There was a peg on the wall where Elisabeth hung a white bathrobe, and a small table that she covered with a bright orange plastic tablecloth. Nearby were small hot plates for cooking.

  A further corridor led to two bedrooms, separated by a thin partition; each contained two beds. The Austrian police have refused to release pictures of the victims’ sleeping areas or possessions to the press, saying they wished to protect their privacy. However, it is known that no door or curtain separated the bedrooms – or any other room – which confirmed that Fritzl sexually assaulted his daughter Elisabeth in clear view of their children. He was totally without shame. With no door or screen around the bathroom and lavatory, all other bodily functions had to be conducted in full view of the other occupants.