Secrets in the Cellar

by John Glatt

  “Since she was taken prisoner at the age of eighteen,” said Professor Max Friedrich, the head of the Medical University of Vienna’s Clinic for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. “The question is, how did she cope with her fear, and at what point was her will broken?”

  Professor Friedrich believes Elisabeth Fritzl is a textbook victim of Stockholm syndrome—a psychological condition where a hostage becomes sympathetic or loyal to their captors to survive. The syndrome was first identified in 1973, when a team of bank robbers took employees at the Kreditbanken in Stockholm, Sweden, hostage for six days. During that time the victims became emotionally attached to their captors, eventually resisting rescue attempts by the police, later refusing to even testify against the robbers. Two of the hostages eventually became engaged to their captors.

  The term was first used in a media interview by Swedish psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who had advised police during the incident.

  A year later, American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst went even further, after being kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army. She eventually joined the group, participating in several bank robberies, and subsequently serving a 2-year jail sentence, later commuted by President Jimmy Carter.

  “Psychologically,” said renowned forensic psychiatrist and bestselling author Keith Ablow, M.D., “you would expect a constriction of [Elisabeth’s] emotional world . . . to survive in circumstances like that. You need to deny a lot of suffering to focus on practical matters, like food and survival. You may well feel allied with your captor in a Stockholm way.

  “The general paradigm would be a psyche twisting itself into the grotesque pattern of daily existence and normalizing it, in order to not go insane. And at a certain point you imagine hope being extinguished.”

  Dr. Ablow compares Elisabeth’s psychological situation to anticipatory avoidance experiments with laboratory mice, where food would be placed on an electrified side of a cage. After repeatedly being shocked, the mice stop trying to retrieve the food, even after the electric current is turned off.

  “And at a certain point,” said Dr. Ablow, “the human mind shuts down too. ‘I’ll take my gains where they come. I didn’t get beaten as much today. I got food today. It was a good day, underground here.’ ”

  Kidnapped hostages, fearing for their lives, often start identifying with their captors as a psychological defense mechanism. Then even the smallest act of kindness is magnified, as there is little perspective in such a situation.

  Always the master manipulator, Josef Fritzl exploited this, by softening his domination. He now began arriving with clothes and blankets and other small presents, in some kind of bizarre courting ritual. He was no longer as violent during sex, and stopped using any contraception, appearing to want to get his daughter pregnant.

  In 2008, Fritzl would vehemently deny having any sexual relations with Elisabeth prior to that spring. Perhaps his denial revealed how his obsession had changed course, with him now viewing her as a beautiful new wife, instead of an unruly daughter.

  Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he would claim they’d first had sex in spring 1985, as he could no longer control himself.

  “The pressure to do the forbidden thing was just too big to withstand,” he would explain. “At some stage somewhere in the night, I went into the cellar and laid her down on the bed and had sex with her.”

  He said she did not resist his advances by “scratching, biting or beating,” just making “small whimpering noises,” as he had his way.

  Then after he’d finished raping her, he’d sit and chat as she hungrily ate her food. He would tell her news about her brothers and sisters, and how they were doing at school, as well as gossiping about life upstairs, what he had planted in his garden, or movies he had seen on television. And he’d tell her how upset her mother was since she had gone.

  On the way out, he would always start tinkering with a gadget by the sliding steel door, warning her it was booby-trapped, and if she ever tried to escape, deadly gas would be automatically released into the dungeon.

  Upstairs at Ybbsstrasse 40, Josef Fritzl ordered his family never to go into the cellar, saying it was his own private office with all his business files. His tenants were also banned from using his garden, keeping pets, or ever going into the backyard, with the threat of immediate eviction.

  Before he allowed a prospective tenant to rent one of his eight rooms, he would warn that the cellar was out-of-bounds, and never to go anywhere near it. He also stressed that no photographs could be taken of it, and he would only allow them to move in after agreeing to his terms.

  Any music or loud noises after 10:00 p.m., were also banned, on pain of eviction. Ironically, over the years, many tenants would hear mysterious sounds coming from the cellar. But they were far too scared of their landlord to ever investigate or complain.

  Fritzl found tenants by placing ads in the local newspaper, always preferring ones on social security, guaranteeing a monthly government rent check.

  In 1990, Josef Leitner, who now worked as a waiter, moved into Ybbsstrasse 40, even though he had once been told by a friend that his new landlord had raped his own daughter.

  “She told me what a monster Josef was,” recalled Leitner, who had studied with Elisabeth at a technical college before she disappeared. “But I did not want to get involved. I did not want to get kicked out of the room. I kept myself to myself.”

  Fritzl’s overbearing attitude and tough set of rules led to a revolving door of tenants, with more than one hundred moving in and out over the years.

  Soon after imprisoning Elisabeth, Josef Fritzl developed a regular routine, often spending entire nights in the cellar, telling Rosemarie he was busy on a new project that would make their fortune.

  “Every day at nine o’clock he would go down in the cellar,” remembered his sister-in-law Christine, “supposedly to develop plans for machines that he would sell to businesses. Often he would spend whole nights down there. Rosi wasn’t even allowed to bring him a coffee.”

  And no one in the family ever dared ask why he was now spending so much time down in the cellar.

  “His word was law,” explained Christine.

  After Elisabeth’s disappearance, her mother sank into a depression and began gaining more weight, causing her husband to humiliate her in public. It was common knowledge amongst their friends and family that they never had sex.

  “He always put Rosi down and called her fat,” recalled her sister. “[He said] ‘chubby women are below my standard.’ ”

  In September 1986, Elisabeth became pregnant with her father’s child and fell into a deep depression. And when she miscarried alone at ten weeks, she contemplated suicide.

  Her father showed no sympathy whatsoever, as he coldly disposed of the fetus, turning the lights off in the dungeon to punish her.

  On November 12, 1986, two skin-divers found the bound body of 17-year-old Martina Posch on the shores of Lake Mondsee, near Josef Fritzl’s boarding house. Later a friend would claim Fritzl had been staying there the day she disappeared.

  The young girl, who closely resembled Elisabeth, had disappeared ten days earlier. Police said she had been raped and then wrapped in two green plastic covers, before being dumped by the picturesque lake. Her clothes and personal belongings have never been found.

  It would be another twenty-two years before Austrian police would begin investigating Josef Fritzl for her murder.

  By now, Josef Fritzl had become a pillar of the Amstetten community, considered a successful businessman, an upright citizen and a good family man. He dressed well, favoring expensive blazers, silk cravats and Italian patent leather shoes. Now in his early fifties and starting to lose his hair, he secretly went to Vienna for an expensive hair transplant.

  “He is a very vain man,” remembered his friend Gerda Schmidt. “His shoes were always glistening, his tie was never askew, he could have been a diplomat.”

  And he would often talk about how Elisabeth
had run away to join a cult, and broken his and his wife’s hearts.

  “He often talked about his family,” his friend Leopold Styetz told the London Times. “He was very strict with his children, a strict but fair father, I would say. It was enough for him to snap his fingers and the youngsters would be in bed already. He always stressed that, for him, education and career were the most important things.”

  By 1987, Josef Fritzl left with a friend for the first of several lengthy trips to Pattaya, the notorious Thailand sex resort. Before leaving, he packed the cellar’s refrigerator with frozen food so his prisoner could feed herself while he was away. But she knew that if anything happened to him 5,000 miles away in Thailand, she would be doomed.

  Later he would claim to have installed a mechanism to open the doors to the cellar and free his prisoner after a certain period of time. But that was a lie.

  During his vacation, Fritzl played tourist during the day, riding elephants and sunbathing. His habit of using his beach towel to reserve sun loungers upset the other tourists at his hotel.

  “Fritzl would lord it around us at the beach,” recalled Briton Stephen Crickson, who was vacationing there with his girlfriend. “He treated staff with contempt. He was universally unpopular.”

  Later, Crickson would tell the London Sun how he’d once seen Fritzl walking hand in hand with a 16-year--old rent boy on the beach. And there was much gossip regarding the Austrian’s nightly visits to the town’s infamous “Boys Town” red-light area.

  “He was a disgusting pervert,” said Crickson, “and all the ex-pats and regular holidaymakers knew what he was up to. Rent boys, ladyboys, he would go with anything.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Children of the Cellar

  In 1988, four years after her father lured her into the basement, Elisabeth Fritzl became pregnant again. Now 22, she was terrified of her father’s reaction, waiting as long as possible before informing him. But if she thought this would force him to set her free to go to a hospital for an abortion, she was sadly mistaken.

  “Do not think you are getting away from me so easily,” he told her, bringing in medical books to help her cope with her condition alone.

  During the long months of her pregnancy, Elisabeth must have agonized over whether the incestuous baby would be healthy. From then on her relationship with Fritzl subtly changed from one of jailor and prisoner to husband and wife.

  “If we want to discuss when things deteriorated for Elisabeth,” said Professor Friedrich, “then certainly there was the moment when she realized that she was pregnant for the first time.”

  The professor says that at this point in her captivity, Josef Fritzl became less violent.

  “There was a change,” he explained. “She said herself that even before she was incarcerated, she’d been abused by her father. After being taken prisoner, [she] had endured brutal physical violence in some shape or form. And then she told us that this had lessened.”

  When his daughter became too visibly pregnant with his child, Fritzl stopped demanding sex, apparently no longer attracted to her. Then he abandoned her altogether, leaving her alone to deliver her baby in the unhygienic dungeon.

  Later Fritzl would give his version of his daughter’s first pregnancy, casting himself as her responsible benefactor who arranged “towels, disinfectants and nappies.”

  New York physician Dr. Laszlo Retsagi, M.D., who specializes in internal medicine, said that although historically babies have been delivered at home, there was always a chance of infection.

  “Obviously there was a higher mortality rate during delivery,” said Dr. Retsagi. “Those who are the fittest survived. There is extra pain during the delivery, creating an uncomfortable sensation and some chances for infection or other things without antibiotics.”

  Somehow, Elisabeth managed to successfully deliver a baby girl, cutting the umbilical cord herself. She named the baby Kerstin, and from that point, assumed the role of devoted mother, having a new, even stronger reason to survive.

  And although Kerstin did not officially exist, her mother secretly recorded her date of birth on a scrap of paper and hid it away.

  Ten days after the birth, Josef Fritzl returned to the cellar to see his new daughter/granddaughter. He told Elisabeth it was the beginning of their new family, and that as his new wife, he was expecting more children from her.

  Later he would speak of his pride in being a father again, describing his joy at starting a “second proper family.”

  For he reigned over his subterranean kingdom like a god—and like the ancient Greek deities, he felt it was perfectly permissible to sire children with his daughter.

  Kerstin was a sickly baby, suffering cramps and later epilepsy and screaming fits. She would grow up in the claustrophobic, dimly lit one-room dungeon nursed by her mother.

  Soon after she was born, Josef Fritzl resumed sexual relations with Elisabeth, in front of their new baby. Growing up, she became used to seeing him in her mother’s bed.

  “All he cared about was satisfying his lust,” a police investigator would later relate, “and keeping the terrible secret of his hidden family.”

  After Kerstin’s birth, Fritzl allowed Elisabeth slightly more freedom within the confines of the dungeon. But he repeatedly warned that any attempt to escape with their baby would turn the dungeon into a deadly gas chamber.

  Upstairs, life continued as usual with Rosemarie Fritzl having no idea that she was now a grandmother. The extra demands of a young baby meant her husband was now driving long distances to purchase formula and diapers, so as not to arouse any suspicion in Amstetten.

  A couple of months after Kerstin’s birth, Elisabeth became pregnant again. Once again, her father would not be there for her, letting her go into labor alone. In late 1989, she delivered a baby boy she named Stefan, carefully noting down his birthday on another piece of paper.

  As the 1990s dawned, Austria and the rest of the world were changing fast, as Elisabeth and her two babies languished deep underground in the dark, dank, rat-infested cellar. She had no idea about the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, and German unification. And she knew nothing of what was happening in the world, except what her father told her.

  In the six years since her disappearance, she had almost been forgotten by her friends, who believed her father’s story that she had joined some kind of cult. At their regular Amstetten school reunions, old classmates would sadly reminisce about her before moving on to the next subject.

  “Everyone used to chat about what might have happened to Elisabeth,” said Gabrielle Heiner, whose brother was in her class. “She suddenly vanished, and no one knew where.”

  Josef Fritzl was very busy, spending more and more time juggling his two families. But he also found time to regularly visit the Villa Ostende brothel in Linz.

  He was well-known in Amstetten, and although not belonging to any church or community group, was a paid-up member of the local fishing group.

  “There was never a problem with him,” recalled fishing club treasurer Reinhard Kern. “Whether he went fishing or not, how am I to know?”

  Since the early 1970s, when Fritzl had rented land from Anton Graf for his vacation campground, the two men had become friends. Graf would occasionally socialize with Fritzl both at the lake and in Amstetten.

  “At home he was clearly the lord of the manor,” said Graf. “Even at his campground, he was very strict, and his rules had to be followed.”

  And Fritzl would not accept any excuses for his tenants who broke his rules, evicting them onto the street without a second thought.

  “He was inflexible and had no sensitivity,” said Graf. “You were sick, something happened, he didn’t care . . . there was a rule . . . and that was it.”

  Fritzl also loved telling dirty jokes over a beer, and was always the first to laugh.

  “He told jokes,” remembered Graf. “And not always the cleanest. He laughed loud. A real boom.”

  Every single par
t of Josef Fritzl’s life was strictly regulated by his obsessive need to be in control. And one by one, as soon as they were old enough, his grown-up children left home to get away from him. Eventually the only one left was his youngest son Josef Jr., who had learning difficulties.

  Fritzl put him to work as a houseboy and personal servant, only allowing him to leave the house once a week.

  “He had to wait on his father hand and foot,” said Chief Inspector Franz Polzer, “and serve him.”

  In late 1991, Elisabeth became pregnant for the fourth time, the following August giving birth to her second daughter Lisa. With his growing underground family, it was becoming increasingly cramped in the small dungeon, and Josef Fritzl was finding it harder and harder to move around.

  Now Elisabeth begged her father for more room for her two toddlers and new baby, so they would not have to witness her being continually raped.

  So in 1993, he embarked on an ambitious program to dig a new passageway, connecting the dungeon with the long-forgotten original basement, providing far more space for his subterranean family. He would ultimately create what police would later call a “sophisticated” warren of chambers for sleeping, cooking and washing, and even a rubber-padded cell to rape his daughter in.

  But he had no intention of doing the hard work himself, ordering Elisabeth, and later the children when they were old enough, to dig it out with their bare hands. It would take them almost ten years to complete.

  From then on, Elisabeth passed much of her time, scooping out the passageway with her hands. Every few nights her father would come and remove the soil, disposing of it in the garden. It was backbreaking work, as there was little air in the dungeon, and it was often unbearably hot in the summer. But somehow Elisabeth carried on for the sake of her children.