Secrets in the Cellar

by John Glatt

  A few months after Lisa’s birth, Josef Fritzl decided to bring her upstairs to live with the rest of the family. It was becoming more and more expensive to support his two families, and he had discovered that under Austrian law, he would be eligible for a generous state grant if he were to adopt her.

  But his dilemma was how to account for the baby’s sudden appearance in the outside world. Once again, in his cold and calculating way, he conceived of a monstrous plan to fool everyone.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Foundlings

  On May 19, 1993, Josef Fritzl came down into the cellar, announcing that he was taking Lisa upstairs, so he and Rosemarie could bring her up. Then he gave Elisabeth a pen and paper, and began dictating a new note.

  Elisabeth was heartbroken at the prospect of losing her new baby daughter, who weighed just 12 pounds. She had breast-fed her and formed a close bond, as she had with her other two children. But her father was adamant, giving her no choice.

  “Dear parents,” he made her write, in her soft, flowing handwriting.

  I hope that you are all healthy. You will probably be shocked to hear from me after all these years, and with a real live surprise, no less. I am leaving you my little daughter Lisa. Take good care of my little girl.

  She wrote that she was still living in the cult with a daughter, Kerstin, and a son, Stefan. But unfortunately they did not approve of her having any more children.

  “I breast-fed her for about six-and-a-half-months,” her father dictated.

  And she now drinks her milk from the bottle. She is a good girl, and she eats everything else from the spoon.

  I will contact you again later, and I beg you not to look for me, because I am doing well. It would be useless, and would only increase my suffering and that of my children. Neither are too many children or education desired there.

  Elisabeth

  Then, after allowing Elisabeth, Kerstin and Stefan to kiss Lisa good-bye, Josef Fritzl packed the baby in a small cardboard box, bringing her out of the cellar and into the daylight for the first time.

  It was the luckiest day of Lisa Fritzl’s life.

  Later that morning Josef Fritzl brought the cardboard box containing Lisa into the house. He carried it into the living room to show Rosemarie, saying he had just discovered it on the doorstep. Then he read the letter to her, saying that Elisabeth must have abandoned the baby during the night before driving off.

  Fritzl then took the letter to Amstetten police headquarters, along with a couple of Elisabeth’s old school exercise books, suggesting they be compared by a handwriting expert. He requested a DNA test, explaining that as the baby’s grandparents, he and Rosemarie intended to adopt her, but first needed to be certain the baby really was Elisabeth’s.

  On May 24, five days after Josef Fritzl had brought Lisa up from the cellar, the Amstetten youth welfare office granted him and Rosemarie temporary custody of her during the lengthy adoption process.

  Wrote a welfare officer in a report: Mr. and Mrs. Fritzl have recovered from the initial shock. The Fritzl family is taking loving care of Lisa and wishes to continue caring for her.

  Over the next few years, Amstetten social workers would visit the Fritzl home more than twenty times, reporting “nothing suspicious” about the family, although it was noted that Josef Fritzl was rarely there for the inspections.

  On May 20, 1994, a year and a day after bringing Lisa upstairs, the middle-aged couple officially adopted her.

  Amstetten welfare officers were so impressed with the caring grandfather that they never bothered with a background check to see if he had a criminal record. Even if they had, it would not have mattered, as all records of his 18-month rape sentence had been officially erased from the records, to protect his privacy.

  Now Josef Fritzl began collecting $23 a day in child-care benefits, as well as $230 a month in family benefits. But he would soon learn that it was far more lucrative to foster children than to adopt them, and if he had only fostered Lisa, he would have been entitled to $1,500 a month.

  The always-savvy businessman would not make the same mistake again.

  Rosemarie Fritzl was delighted to have a new granddaughter to look after, lavishing love on the pale, undernourished baby, who soon put on weight and got stronger. She began taking the little girl out in a stroller around Amstetten, proudly announcing how she and Josef were now bringing up their granddaughter, after Elisabeth had abandoned her.

  “Rosemarie told me all about her daughter going off to join the cult,” recalled her friend Roswita Zmug. “It seemed incredible to me, but not to her.”

  The Fritzls’ old friend Paul Hoerer says that whenever he visited, Rosemarie seemed “quiet and withdrawn,” if her husband was in the same room.

  “She didn’t tend to say what she was thinking,” he remembered. “But whenever Elisabeth was mentioned, she would get up and leave the table.”

  Elisabeth had been in the damp, dimly lit basement for ten years, and was suffering from a serious anemia and vitamin deficiency herself, and her teeth were starting to rot. She was highly concerned about the effects being locked up was having on 6-year-old Kerstin and 5--year-old Stefan, who had never seen the sun. She asked her father for vitamin D supplement tablets and an ultraviolet lamp, to stop them from contracting rickets through sunlight deprivation.

  After hearing her arguments, Fritzl agreed to bring in the lamp and the vitamins.

  “Primarily, [sensory deprivation] acts on the central nervous system,” explained Dr. Laszlo Retsagi. “The lack of daylight causes loss of sense of time, creating inappropriate sleep patterns. This leads to a lack of proper sleep, fatigue, headaches, tiredness, dizziness and inappropriate coordination.”

  There was also so little oxygen from the single ventilation shaft that the prisoners spent most of their time lying down or sitting.

  “Lack of fresh oxygen creates problems with clear thinking,” explained Dr. Retsagi. “Which in turn creates problems with clear comprehension and obvious emotional problems.”

  Elisabeth and her children lived on the packaged food Fritzl bought on his weekly shopping expeditions to supermarkets many miles from Amstetten, to avoid suspicion. Then, under the cover of darkness, he would smuggle food, clothes and toiletries into the cellar.

  Elisabeth and the children had no fresh fruit or vegetables to eat, existing solely on frozen or canned products.

  “Inappropriate nutrition causes anemia,” said Dr. Retsagi. “They were not properly given fresh fruit and vegetables, and all the other nutrients and vitamins young children need, growing up. The lack of appropriate blood cells increases the chance of infection. And when coupled with the lack of sunshine, things become even more complicated.”

  The only medical care Josef Fritzl did provide were bottles of aspirin, which did nothing to fight the increasing infections they were now contracting.

  In 1993, Elisabeth and the children completed the narrow passageway connecting the dungeon to two further rooms. Now Fritzl brought a double bed into the cellar to make things more comfortable for him to rape his daughter.

  Later he would bring in a television, so he could then watch soccer games with the children while their mother was preparing a meal. He also built a rubber-padded punishment cell, used for beatings or having sex with Elisabeth.

  As soon as her children were old enough, Elisabeth taught them to walk and talk, and later reading and writing. Although she had left school at the first opportunity and was never a great scholar, Elisabeth was determined to give her children the best education possible under the horrific circumstances.

  To try to relieve the cellar’s interminable boredom, Elisabeth entertained them by making models from cardboard and glue. She also read them fairy stories about princesses and pirates, singing them gentle lullabies to help put them to sleep.

  For her children’s survival, she carefully maintained the illusion that their life in the cellar was totally normal. She never told them they were prisoners,
although she would talk about the world upstairs.

  She would explain the difference between day and night, describing the sun, moon and nature. She would try to describe the sound of rain striking the ground during a storm, and the wondrous smell of a green meadow on a summer day.

  To little Kerstin and Stefan, the world upstairs seemed like a wondrous fairy-tale heaven compared to the dark lifeless subterranean prison they languished in.

  That June, after Elisabeth became pregnant for the fifth time, her father left for another three-week Pattaya pleasure trip. In preparation he had spent weeks stocking the refrigerator with frozen food, and carefully planning every detail of what they would need while he was enjoying himself, thousands of miles away.

  But while Josef Fritzl was soaking up the sun on the beach, and indulging himself in prostitutes of both sexes, his pregnant daughter was terrified that if something happened to him, she and the children would be trapped forever.

  When he finally returned from Thailand, looking rested and sunburned, he brought gifts for Elisabeth and the children, showing them his vacation photographs.

  In early March 1994, Elisabeth delivered a little girl, aided by Kerstin and Stefan. It was a painful birth with only aspirin for medication. And once again she had to cut the umbilical cord herself.

  She named the beautiful baby Monika, and Kerstin and Stefan were delighted to have a new baby sister, during the brief time she remained with them.

  As landlord, Josef Fritzl had a master key to all the rented apartments. On the days he was unable to go out shopping for his secret family, he let himself into his tenants’ apartments and stole food.

  Tenant Josef Leitner, who worked construction, said he first noticed how fresh milk, bread, sausages and pasta had gone missing from his fridge while he was out at work. When he mentioned it to the other tenants, they too had similar stories.

  Another mystery was their enormous electricity bills, which no one could account for. To save money, their frugal landlord was now diverting their electricity into the cellar.

  After receiving one huge quarterly electricity bill, Leitner asked an electrician friend of his for help. But even after all the electrical appliances in his apartment were turned off, his electricity meter continued running.

  Although Josef Fritzl banned dogs from the house, Leitner smuggled in an 18-month-old Labrador/husky called Sam. He soon noticed Sam’s strange behavior whenever he was near the cellar, as if he sensed something fearful.

  “Every time I went on the stairs, the dog tried to run to the cellar and barked,” said Leitner. “I was surprised about that, but thought he was just excited about going outside.”

  Eventually, Fritzl discovered the dog and evicted Leitner.

  “He was furious,” remembered Leitner. “I came home from work and I couldn’t enter my flat. Fritzl had the lock changed. That was enough for me. I called the police.”

  Leitner finally managed to get his possessions and left forever, but he would never forget Sam’s angry reaction to Fritzl, when they came face to face.

  “Sam growled at him,” he said. “Sam never growled at anybody else.”

  Just after midnight on Friday, December 16, Josef Fritzl came into the cellar, dictating a third note for Elisabeth to write. This was how she learned for the first time that he was taking Monika upstairs.

  I’m really sorry that I had to turn to you again. I hope Lisa is doing well. She must have grown a bit by now. Monika is now nine-and-a-half-months old. She was breast-fed for seven-and-a-half-months. She now eats almost anything but she still likes the bottle best. The hole at the teat has to be a little bigger for her.

  He then heartlessly snatched the baby away from her mother, bringing her out of the cellar. Once upstairs, he dropped Monika inside Lisa’s stroller at the entrance-way to the house.

  Then he went outside to a nearby phone box to make a call.

  A few minutes later, the phone rang at Ybbsstrasse 40, and Rosemarie answered.

  “It’s me, don’t be angry,” whispered Josef Fritzl, disguising his voice into a high whisper, pretending to be Elisabeth. “I just left her at your door. I can’t tell you where I’m at.”

  The call was short and to the point, asking her to take care of the baby, as she could not. Then the line went dead.

  Rosemarie was shocked. It was the first contact she had had with her daughter in ten years.

  A few hours later, a visibly shaken Rosemarie arrived at Amstetten police headquarters, reporting finding the new baby and Elisabeth’s strange phone call. And although she was convinced it had been Elisabeth, she said it was “completely inexplicable” how her daughter could possibly have known their unlisted number, which had been changed since Elisabeth had lived there. An officer duly noted her comments in an official report.

  The Amstetten prosecutor’s office, the agency responsible for abandoned children, then attempted to find Elisabeth again. But there were no new leads, and unfortunately investigators never bothered to search Josef Fritzl’s house, as he was never considered a suspect.

  Within weeks, Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl had legally been appointed Monika’s foster parents, becoming entitled to a further $1,500 in monthly state benefits.

  Just after Christmas, the Austrian media carried the first of many stories about runaway mother Elisabeth Fritzl abandoning her second baby on her parents’ doorstep. The baby’s grandfather was interviewed by Mark Perry, a reporter for the Kronen Zeitung newspaper.

  “Our daughter has been [missing] since 1984,” Josef Fritzl told him. “And we think she’s in the hands of some religious group.”

  Once again there was great sympathy in Amstetten for the Fritzls, for selflessly raising their grandchildren, after their irresponsible daughter had run away.

  “I thought the grandfather was the perfect head of the family,” recalled neighbor Gabrielle Heiner. “Somebody that cared about his children. We used to say how terrible the mother probably was.”

  Regina Penz, who lived just two houses away, said the abandoned Fritzl babies were the talk of Amstetten.

  “Everyone condemned Elisabeth for being an irresponsible bad mother.” she said.

  CHAPTER 12

  Pillar of the Community

  In 1995, Josef Fritzl turned 60 years old and was living the good life. He had recently bought a new silver-gray Mercedes-Benz sports car and dressed in expensive tailor-made Italian suits, favoring shiny crocodile shoes.

  Most mornings at 5:30 a.m., after spending the night in the dungeon, he would drive through Amstetten to have a close shave and his mustache trimmed at his favorite barber shop in Waidhofner Strasse.

  “He was always well-dressed,” said a bakery owner in Ybbsstrasse, where Fritzl bought his bread. “When he came into the shop we talked about the news, the weather. He seemed like a normal person.”

  He was now taking several vacations to Thailand and the Far East each year, as well as spending freely on hookers at his favorite brothels nearer home. But in Amstetten he and his wife were considered well-respected citizens.

  He was now assiduously cultivating influential friends in high places, to help oil the wheels of his increasingly ambitious real estate deals. One of them was Leopold Styetz, the vice mayor of Lasberg, a small town near Amstetten, who he occasionally socialized with.

  “For me,” recalled Styetz, “Sepp seemed an intelligent and successful man.”

  Apart from the two houses in Amstetten, Fritzl also owned properties in St. Polten and Waidhofen an der Ybbs, which were also rented out to tenants. These provided the cover necessary for his twice-weekly long-distance shopping trips, buying food, diapers and furniture for his dungeon family.

  Although he appeared to be a successful property entrepreneur, investigators would later discover he had fraudulently re-mortgaged his five rental properties several times over. For a time, he would keep one step ahead of the banks, but eventually they would catch up with him.

  That year Alfred Dubanovs
ky, who had been in Elisabeth Fritzl’s class at school, moved into Ybbsstrasse 40. For the next twelve years he rented a small room just a few feet above the dungeon.

  Before he was allowed to move in, his new landlord read him a strict set of house rules that had to be observed.

  “Such a strange guy,” recalled Dubanovsky, who worked at a local gas station. “Only he alone was allowed to go into the cellar. He told us that the cellar was protected with a sophisticated alarm system, and that whoever went there would have their contract cancelled without notice. He was very strict about that.”

  Josef Fritzl had divided the first floor of the large house into eight apartments, which he rented out. He and his family occupied the top two storys.

  Over the years he lived there, Dubanovsky tried to avoid his landlord whenever possible, but noticed his frequent visits to the cellar.

  “He went there almost every day,” he said. “I thought it was a bit strange, but I didn’t find it suspicious.”

  Dubanovsky’s bedroom window looked out onto the back garden, and some nights he watched Fritzl ferrying food and other supplies from his car into the cellar with a wheelbarrow.

  “But I never saw him bring any out,” he said. “And it was always at night.”

  Another tenant, who moved into the house several years later, told Der Spiegel magazine that Fritzl’s youngest son Josef Jr. also had a key to the cellar.

  “He acted as though he was the building’s superintendent,” said the tenant, only identified as Christian B, “but he never did very much. He had a key to the cellar.”

  Sabine Kirschbichler, 25, who lived on the second floor with her brother Thomas in a $675-a-month apartment from 2001 to 2003, confirmed that Josef Jr. had a key, and frequently went down to the cellar.