Secrets in the Cellar

by John Glatt

  In another shot, he’s wearing a smart black-and-white shirt for dinner. He mugs for the camera, as he greedily stuffs a large knuckle of roast ham into his mouth.

  “Once we were at a market in Pattaya,” said Hoerer, “and he didn’t know that I was behind him when he bought an evening dress and underwear for a thin woman. It would not have fit his wife.”

  When Fritzl turned around and saw Hoerer filming him, he was furious. Later, when he had calmed down, Hoerer asked who the frilly underwear was for.

  “He then admitted he had a woman on the side,” said Hoerer, “and asked me to keep it secret and not to tell his wife.”

  Hoerer’s girlfriend Andrea remembers Fritzl spending much time on the trip buying children’s presents.

  “He had several carrier bags filled with things,” she said. “And I remember thinking, ‘What a lot of presents for just three children.’ ”

  Rainer Wieczorak, who was also on the trip, rarely saw Fritzl during the entire vacation.

  “I need to go there because the warm climate is much better for my health,” he said. “But Josef had other interests. While we would all sit around the hotel bar enjoying a few quiet drinks, he was off on his own.”

  Hoerer said his friend was very secretive about his nights in Pattaya, and whenever street girls approached Fritzl to offer sex, he “blocked” them, saying he was not interested.

  But his friends all knew he trawled the sex bars every night, though they never mentioned it for fear of making him angry.

  “He always went off on his own at night,” said Andrea. “I believe he went to some of the clubs.”

  And when he finally reappeared the next morning, he looked exhausted, spending the day recovering.

  “He was usually sleeping things off during the day,” said Wieczorak, “having a massage on the beach and a late breakfast.”

  Josef Fritzl also bought himself expensive gifts in Pattaya, including several pairs of flashy crocodile shoes and some handmade shirts.

  During the flight back, Fritzl told his friends it had been one of the greatest vacations of his life.

  “He enjoyed it so much,” said Schmitt, “that he said when he got back he was going to go on holiday again to Italy. That meant he would have been on holiday about six weeks in total.”

  On March 2, 1998—almost fourteen years after Josef Fritzl had first lured Elisabeth into the cellar—a 10--year-old girl named Natascha Kampusch disappeared on the way to her school. The troubled young girl from a broken home, who was the same age as Kerstin, was seen being dragged into a white minibus near her home in Vienna.

  After Natascha’s disappearance, a massive police hunt was launched to try to find her. Among the many hundreds of minivan owners questioned was a 35-year-old communications technician named Wolfgang Priklopil, who told police he’d been using his van to transport rubbish the morning of the kidnapping and was allowed to go.

  In fact, Priklopil had become obsessed with Natascha, fantasizing about kidnapping her and turning her into his sex slave. Just like Josef Fritzl, in the months leading up to the abduction, he had constructed an elaborate dungeon in the cellar of his family house in Strasshof an der Nordbahn in Lower Austria.

  The house had been built by his grandfather Oskar Priklopil, who had later converted the cellar into a nuclear bomb shelter during the Cold War. When Oskar died in 1984, his grandson Wolfgang inherited the house.

  Then, in the mid-1990s, Wolfgang, who lived with his mother, began constructing an underground “bunker” for his victim, as yet unselected.

  Like Josef Fritzl, Priklopil was a highly organized and meticulous man. The parallels between the two, who were living within a hundred miles of each other, were astonishing. As Fritzl had done years earlier, Priklopil spent years constructing a series of concrete-lined narrow tunnels and passageways. He installed a bathroom with a tiny sink and toilet, connecting the plumbing to the main house, as the electricity also was. He soundproofed his dungeon, which was only ventilated by an air system that he controlled from above.

  This tiny dungeon, measuring just 54 square feet, would be Natascha Kampusch’s world for more than eight years. It contained a bed, a ladder and little else. For the first six months of her captivity, the little girl was never allowed to leave, being told by her kidnapper that the door and windows were booby-trapped with high explosives, set to go off if she tried to escape.

  That March, Natascha Kampusch’s abduction was big news in Austria. And the chances are that Elisabeth and the children saw news reports on the television, flickering day and night in their prison, just 100 miles due west of hers.

  CHAPTER 14

  His Underground Kingdom

  In late 1999, two Amstetten fire inspectors arrived at Ybbsstrasse 40 for a routine fire inspection. An unfazed Josef Fritzl led them downstairs into the cellar heating room, only yards away from the secret dungeon entrance. The officials carefully inspected the boiler furnace, where, three years earlier, he had tossed baby Michael’s body. The inspectors found that it met official requirements, failing to notice the well-hidden cellar entrance behind some shelving.

  Fritzl must have breathed a sigh of relief as he led them back upstairs, knowing that his secret was safe for the time being.

  Though approaching 65, Josef Fritzl showed no signs of slowing down. He was now consumed with an ambitious plan to build a three-story apartment housing project, with offices and an underground garage in the Amstetten town center. He had already raised $1.5 million in loans, using his five rental properties as collateral.

  But he ran into problems, after listing Elisabeth on all the deeds as a tax dodge. His Austrian bankers now refused to re-mortgage the properties, as his missing daughter was technically a sitting tenant, making it impossible to sell if he defaulted on the loan.

  To get around this, he pretended to need the money for a new ladies’ underwear business, to be run from his home on the Internet. But, although he eventually got the loans, the project never materialized, after angry residents took legal action to prevent it, saying it would ruin the neighborhood.

  Most afternoons, Josef Fritzl visited the James Dean Club, which catered to an older clientele. Located at Waidhofner Strasse 56, just a short walk from his home, he would stroll into the club with a big grin, always greeting the pretty Slavic hostesses by their first names.

  “What’s new?” he’d ask, as he stood at the bar, ordering coffee with two milks. And for the next several hours he would hold court, chatting with old school friends and flirting with the waitresses. He also used the club for business meetings, never dancing with the miniskirted hostesses or drinking alcohol.

  But there were other types of clubs around Amstetten that he also patronized.

  Local builder Paul Stocker first met Fritzl in 1997, when he came to view a house Stocker was selling. Although the deal never materialized, the two men, both in their sixties, became friends. They occasionally met for a “boys’ night out” at the Caribik swingers’ club, a few miles outside Amstetten.

  The club’s website boasts of its “small dungeon and guestrooms for overnight stays.” The entrance fee is $115 for couples and $15 for women.

  “Fritzl told me someone of our age can have a lot of fun with sex,” recalled Stocker. “He said you needed to take three tablets—Viagra, Levitra and Cialis. The pills kick in one after the other and you can go for it like a bull.”

  A week later, Stocker was at the club when he claims Josef Fritzl walked in with his wife Rosemarie.

  “They looked just like an old pair that you might see sitting on a bench feeding pigeons,” he said. “I was speechless when I realized who it was.”

  According to Stocker, Fritzl sent Rosemarie to stand in a corner, before hooking up with a young woman. Then they had sex by the tree-lined pool, as his wife looked on.

  “He treated [Rosemarie] like a dog,” said Stocker. “She had to sit in a corner and watch, as he did stuff with a young woman. I think it’s fair t
o say he made a good job of it. Then he left with his totally humiliated and degraded wife and went home.”

  In 2000, the Fritzls celebrated their 44th wedding anniversary with a small family party. After so many years in such a turbulent marriage, Rosemarie still kept up the pretense of living an idyllic family life. She played the part of happy wife and mother to perfection, becoming her husband’s unwitting accomplice.

  She devoted herself to bringing up Lisa, now 8, Monika, 6, and Alexander, 4. Amstetten social workers, who regularly interviewed the children, were most impressed with their excellent upbringing.

  One report noted how the grandparents went to great pains “to encourage the children in many ways.” It lauded the Fritzls for providing the children with “books and cassettes from the city library,” as well as facilitating their “children’s gymnastics.”

  “[The Fritzls] are very loving with their children,” the report concluded.

  “To the outside world they seemed like a great family,” said neighbor Anita Lachinger. “She cooked and cleaned for them . . . she loved them.”

  Most days Rosemarie Fritzl, now in her mid-sixties, drove the children to their ice hockey league games or classical music lessons. Lisa played flute in the school orchestra, while Monika and Alexander studied trumpet. Rosemarie would also take various classes, including one on the art of napkin folding, at a nearby crafts shop.

  Rosemarie brought the three children up to believe that their mother Elisabeth had abandoned them, after running away to join a religious sect. Little Alexander became so terrified that his mother would come and kidnap him from his bed, he almost stopped talking.

  “Rosemarie was desperate to give the children a normal start in life, with a proper mom and dad,” said a family friend. “She was deeply hurt and embarrassed about Elisabeth supposedly running off.”

  One of the children’s music teachers was “amazed” at her strength, only once seeing her break down and cry, when she told him how her daughter had run away and joined a cult.

  When Lisa started school, her teachers were so alarmed when she referred to the elderly Fritzls as “Mama and Papa,” that the couple was summoned to school.

  “The teachers told Rosemarie she had to come clean,” said the friend, “or the children would be totally messed up when they discovered the truth later.”

  So in summer 2000, Rosemarie hired a child psychologist to counsel the children.

  “Then she threw a party to make them feel positive about the new family setup,” said the friend. “From then on she and [Josef] were ‘Omi and Opi’ ” (Grandma and Grandpa).

  Rosemarie also determined that the children should have a religious upbringing, organizing their first communions.

  But behind closed doors, Josef Fritzl was the same bullying dictator he had always been. Once Rosemarie confided to her friend that Josef was so domineering that he terrified Lisa and Alexander, making their lives miserable.

  At the age of 11, Lisa, who bore an uncanny resemblance to her mother Elisabeth, persuaded Fritzl to send her to the prestigious Kloster’s private girls’ school, run by Catholic nuns.

  The two younger children went to local schools, where they became well-behaved model students, always getting good grades. Their proud grandmother became an active member of the parent–teacher association.

  Soon after starting Kloster’s, just outside Amstetten, Lisa told her new classmates how her mother had left her on her grandparents’ doorstep when she was a baby.

  “We know Lisa and Monika were foundling children,” a former classmate told the London Mirror newspaper, “and had both been abandoned at the front door of the Fritzl home when they were born, almost like a Bible story. Lisa told us her story at the start of school, but we never mentioned it again out of respect and politeness.”

  But several years later, when Alexander started high school, he told his classmates a different story.

  “He always told us his mother was dead,” remembered classmate Verena Huber.

  That summer, Josef Fritzl hosted twenty-five members of his family at his favorite Linz restaurant, Bratwurstglockerl. After enjoying a hearty meal of traditional Austrian cuisine, Fritzl, who was in an unusually good mood that day, took an official family photograph outside the restaurant.

  In the photograph Rosemarie is all smiles, sitting next to her grandson Alexander. Lisa and Monika stand to her right, surrounded by the other members of the extended Fritzl family.

  In February 2002, Elisabeth became pregnant for the seventh time. She had been down in the cellar for eighteen years, and was suffering from serious vitamin deficiency, malnourishment and acute emotional stress. Although she was only in her mid-thirties, her teeth were falling out because of gum disease, and her once flame red hair had turned grey.

  But for Kerstin and Stefan’s sake, she never complained, realizing that she had to be strong for the family to survive. Even her father grudgingly admired his daughter’s fortitude in some kind of twisted way. He would later talk of her strength, and how she had caused him “almost no problems” during this time, never complaining even as her teeth fell out one by one.

  After she became pregnant for the last time, her father no longer demanded sex, as he was no longer attracted to her. Investigators believe he may have turned his attention to 13-year-old Kerstin, and started grooming the frail, sickly girl to take over her mother’s duties.

  On December 16, 2002, Elisabeth delivered a little boy she named Felix. Soon after his birth, his father came into the dungeon, announcing that this time the baby boy would remain underground, as Rosemarie could not handle another baby.

  Then he magnanimously brought a washing machine into the cellar, so Elizabeth would no longer have to wash her and the children’s clothes by hand.

  A few months later, Josef Fritzl dictated another letter for Elisabeth to write, announcing that she had given birth to a baby boy the previous December. Once again Fritzl mailed the letter from a postbox far away from Amstetten, providing no further clues of his daughter’s whereabouts.

  CHAPTER 15

  Losing Control

  In summer 2003, Josef Fritzl’s meticulously constructed world began to come apart at the seams. When his much-vaunted Amstetten housing complex fell apart, he was left owing banks more than $1 million. Now facing bankruptcy, he was having difficulty maintaining his extravagant lifestyle and supporting two separate families.

  Once again, investigators believe, he resorted to arson, just as he was suspected of having done twenty-one years earlier at Mondsee Lake.

  Late at night on August 22, a suspicious fire broke out in one of his first-floor rental apartments. Police and firefighters arrived at the house to discover Fritzl and his son Josef Jr., fighting the fire together. A female tenant, who had been in the apartment when the fire started, was taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation.

  A few days later, after Fritzl claimed $15,000 from his insurance company for the damage, two police officers were sent to investigate for suspected arson.

  “It was started in two places—a classic sign of arson,” a source close to the investigation later said. “But despite that, the officers only carried out a brief investigation.”

  Once again, Josef Fritzl’s secret dungeon went unnoticed.

  That Christmas, another mysterious fire broke out at the house—this time in the Fritzl family’s third-floor apartment. A television in the children’s room burst into flames, Fritzl later informed authorities, before claiming $4,500 from his insurance company.

  Several months later, he claimed a further $1,500, reporting that one of his electric meters had caught fire.

  Neither of these two fires were investigated, and the insurance company paid him a total of almost $20,000, without any further questions.

  On Saturday, April 9, 2005, Josef Fritzl turned 70, and Rosemarie threw a big birthday party on the roof garden in his honor. Several of his friends attended, including Paul Hoerer and Andrea Schmitt. Of his th
irteen surviving children, ten came, including all the grown-up ones who had left home, as well as Lisa, Monika and Alexander. But downstairs Elisabeth and his three captive children heard nothing, remaining unaware of the festivities.

  “We sat on the terrace,” said Paul Hoerer, “and had a really nice evening.”

  Three weeks later, Sunday, August 28, marked the 21st anniversary of Elisabeth’s imprisonment. That day, like so many thousands of others, came and went in the dark, decaying underground bunker.

  Elisabeth and her three children’s lives had no measurable landmarks. There was no perceivable day and night to mark time, or routines to follow. The only punctuations in their shadow lives were rotten teeth falling out, or their never-ending infections, for which the only medication available was aspirin.

  They were getting weaker by the day, having nothing to look forward to. Even a murderer serving a life sentence can mark off the days on a prison wall until parole, but these four captives—who had done nothing except to be sired by Josef Fritzl—did not even have that to anticipate.

  Now officially retired and collecting his state pension, Josef Fritzl was showing signs of slowing down. Although Viagra and other drugs still powered his out-of-control libido, he was no longer as menacing to Elisabeth as he had once seemed. And she was slowly beginning to assert herself, constantly pressing him for better conditions for her and the children.

  Escape had never been an option. Elisabeth had always believed his threats of booby-trapping the cellar with poisonous gas. And her children never realized they were prisoners, or that their lives were anything but normal.

  At 15, Stefan had grown into a handsome young man, but the terrible conditions in the cellar had stunted his normal development. He was too tall to stand erect without scraping his head on the ceiling, often finding it easier to crawl around on his hands and knees.