Secrets in the Cellar

by John Glatt

  “Yeah, sure,” he admitted. “Elisabeth stayed strong, she caused me almost no problems, she never, ever complained, even when her teeth slowly went rotten and fell out of her mouth one after the other, and she suffered day and night with unbearable pain and could not sleep. She stayed strong for the children. But I saw the children were constantly getting weaker.”

  Why had he finally decided to release them at the beginning of 2008 as their health worsened? Mayer asked.

  “I wanted to free Elisabeth, Kerstin, Stefan and Felix,” he replied, “and to bring them back home. That was my next step. The reason is that I was getting older. I was finding it harder to move, and I knew that in the future I would no longer be able to care for my second family in the cellar. The plan was that Elisabeth and the children would explain that they were kept by a sect in a secret place.”

  The lawyer wondered if he believed this to be realistic that they wouldn’t betray him.

  “Sure, that was my hope, however unbelievable at that time,” he said. “Despite that, there was always the risk that Elisabeth and the children would betray me. That did happen rather sooner than I expected, as the problem with Kerstin escalated.”

  Then, speaking of Kerstin’s illness, which had led to the dungeon’s demise, he said angrily, “She tore the clothes from her body and threw them in the toilet. Kerstin would not be alive today if it wasn’t for me. I made sure that she got to the hospital.”

  He was then asked how he had prevented any escape attempts.

  “It was not difficult,” he replied. “I certainly did not need any physical violence. Elisabeth, Kerstin, Stefan and Felix accepted me as the head of the family completely, and they never trusted themselves to have the strength to attack me.

  “And in any case, only I knew the number code of the remote control that would open the door to the cellar and to close it.”

  Fritzl denied threatening to gas them, but admitted, “I am sorry to say that I did tell them that they would never get past the door, because they would be electrocuted and they would die.”

  Mayer finally asked if he wanted to die now that he had been caught.

  “No,” he said, “I only want redemption. I always knew during those twenty-four years that what I was doing was wrong. I must have been mad to do something like that, but nevertheless I was not able to escape my double life. When I was upstairs, I was totally normal. I functioned well, I made money, took care of my family and only consciously thought about downstairs when I had to run errands for my second family.

  “But at some point it became a matter of course for me that I led a double life in the basement of my house, and that I had to take care of a second wife and our children down there.”

  On Wednesday morning, State Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser interrogated Josef Fritzl for two hours in his cell. The first interview was only about his personal circumstances, career and family background, and nothing else for the time being.

  “He has proven to be remarkably cooperative,” a St. Polten prosecutor’s office spokesman told Spiegel Online. “We are waiting for the police to carry out further investigations before questioning him again.”

  A few hours later, the Fritzl case was raised in the Austrian Parliament during a motion debate on whether to introduce tougher penalties for rapists (including an idea from the far right to introduce physical or chemical castration), as well as not erasing criminal files for sex offenses after fifteen years.

  The urgent call for the change in law came after the disclosure that Fritzl had been allowed to officially adopt and foster three of Elisabeth’s children despite being a convicted rapist.

  Hours before the debate, Justice Minister Maria Berger finally admitted that Amstetten officials had been “gullible” in accepting Josef Fritzl’s stories over the years. In an interview with Austria’s Der Standard newspaper, she vowed it would never happen again.

  “Looking at everything we know up to now,” she said, “I can see a certain gullibility—especially when it comes to that tale that she had joined a sect, with which the suspect explained the disappearance of his daughter. Today, one would certainly pursue this more precisely.”

  The minister pledged to tighten Austrian adoption procedures to prevent another Josef Fritzl from manipulating the system.

  “In general, adoptive parents are checked up thoroughly,” she said. “One way to do this is to check the criminal record. Now we also want to make this compulsory when it comes to privileged adoptions by family members.”

  Reacting to this, Elisabeth’s lawyer Christoph Herbst said he was examining the possibility of claiming compensation from debt-ridden Fritzl, who still had five properties in his name.

  Late Wednesday night, five hundred people descended on Amstetten’s town square for a further show of support for the Fritzl family. They unfurled a large banner made by schoolchildren, bearing the messages “Wishing You Strength on Your Path Through Life,” “It Was Hell For You, Now We Wish You Lots of Sunshine” and, “We’re With You.”

  But there were other signs displayed by citizens, pleading with the world’s media to leave them alone.

  “The town is ready to move on,” said demonstration organizer Margarete Reisinger. “I’m here because this was one man, and it now reflects on all of us. I’m proud to be from Amstetten.”

  City official Hermann Gruber addressed the crowd, saying that the good people here today represented the real Amstetten, and not the evil of Josef Fritzl.

  CHAPTER 24

  “We, the Whole Family”

  On Thursday, Josef Fritzl’s bizarre mea culpa ran in the Austrian publication News Magazin, and was immediately picked up by the international press. But far from generating sympathy for him, it had the opposite effect, and was widely seen as cynical and delusional.

  “I Could Have Killed Them All,” was the headline in Germany’s Bild-Zeitung, and “Dungeon Dad’s Sick Defense,” was the New York Post’s offering. The London Sun ran a front-page color picture of Fritzl sunbathing in a pair of red Speedos, with the headline, “I Lusted After My Mother.”

  The next morning, Josef Fritzl, wearing casual clothes, was brought, under heavy armed guard, though without handcuffs, to St. Polten court. There he joined his attorney, Rudolf Mayer, for a fifteen-minute hearing behind closed doors.

  The judge remanded Fritzl for another month in custody while the investigation proceeded. During the hearing, Fritzl was told that he would most likely face a murder charge, putting him behind bars for the rest of his life.

  “In Austria he could be charged with murder through negligence,” explained Gerhard Sedlacek, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office. “It needs to be proved that the baby would have survived had he [gotten] proper medical attention. That carries a life sentence—and life means life.”

  Sedlacek told reporters that police were running down every single lead, forecasting that the investigation could take six months to complete.

  “The investigation continues,” said Sedlacek. “The charges against him will probably be filed this fall, when we expect the trial to begin.”

  Outside the court, defender Mayer said Fritzl wondered why none of his family had visited him and was missing his wife Rosemarie.

  “Psychologically,” Mayer told reporters, “my client is in a very bad way. But he does not complain. His biggest fear is how his children are faring without him. He wants to know how they’re coping with it all.”

  A few hours later, Chief Inspector Franz Polzer held another press conference, announcing that investigators had discovered two new rooms in the cellar, sealed off with concrete. They had entered the rubble-filled rooms, thought to have been used as storage space during the cellar’s construction.

  “This prison was so complex, so extensive,” said Polzer, “that it exhausted Mr. Fritzl’s capabilities.”

  He said the investigation into the cellar and nearby grounds was almost complete, and they were now concentrating the search for human rema
ins in the grounds outside.

  “We have been using sniffer-dogs and ground radar,” he said, “in order not to have to dig up the whole area.”

  Sunday was Austrian Mother’s Day, and Elisabeth, her mother and her children celebrated together at the Amstetten-Mauer clinic. They all sat down for a special lunch, and during the meal the children gave Elisabeth and Rosemarie flowers from the clinic gardens as presents.

  It had now been two weeks since the family had reunited, and everybody appeared to be bonding well. The closed-off clinic wing had been divided into areas, with the children sharing bedrooms. Lisa and Monika slept together in one space, while the older brothers Stefan and Alexander slept together in another. Elisabeth shared her bed with Felix, who needed constant reassurance.

  Since gaining her freedom, Elisabeth had surprised everyone by her sheer strength and determination to heal her family.

  “Elisabeth is really an impressive person,” said family lawyer Christoph Herbst at a press conference that day. “She is very strong . . . a tower of strength [and] happy now for the first time. Her biggest wish now is to have the family together and to have the best for her children. They need time to heal and grow together. Everything else is secondary to her. She tells her family that all she longs for is a normal life. That’s her only wish.”

  The attorney dispelled media reports about the toll all the years of imprisonment had taken on Elisabeth’s physical appearance.

  “Some people who hear the story think Elisabeth is like something from a horror film,” he said. “But rumors that she had no teeth and cannot talk are not true. If you met her, you wouldn’t realize what she has been through . . . Elisabeth is an attractive woman, and does not look old or drawn in some way, like it is speculated in the media.”

  He ridiculed other rumors circulating in the press about the family.

  “If a family member were sitting here next to us,” he said, “you would not find a difference. One does not notice any of the things that were implied or believed by people outside.”

  Herbst also revealed that, during their time in the cellar, Elisabeth had scrupulously recorded the dates of birth for all her children on scraps of paper. And next week, Kerstin, Stefan and Felix would all be receiving birth certificates and Austrian passports, so they would now legally exist.

  Updating reporters on the family’s progress, Herbst said that little Felix was making exceptional progress, recently seeing rain for the first time through the clinic window.

  “Unfortunately he was unable to go out,” said Herbst. “He didn’t know what rain was, and was fascinated by it. He is a lively and lovely little fellow, and delights in every new discovery.”

  As the youngest of the cellar children, Felix would probably have the best chance of leading a normal life one day, but his older brother Stefan was having a much tougher time. While the little boy was now learning to run, as well as riding a new bicycle—things he could never do in the dungeon—Stefan had trouble even standing up, lacking basic motor skills and coordination. He spent his days staring at the fish in his aquarium, just as he had done in the cellar.

  Their upstairs siblings were also having their own set of difficulties. Lisa, Monika and Alexander all missed their friends at school, angry that their normal life had been turned upside down.

  “They cannot go out,” explained Herbst, as their psychiatrists had advised against them going back to school for the foreseeable future, “so for them, life is completely different. They don’t have the freedom they had before. They cannot see their friends, they cannot meet their classmates. This is very hard for them. And they are asking, when they can meet them again? When can they go to school again? And we all hope that this will happen pretty soon.”

  In the meantime, the three upstairs children were being privately tutored, ensuring that they didn’t fall behind in their schoolwork. They also spent time watching Disney DVDs and reading the hundreds of letters of support pouring into the clinic from all over the world.

  Elisabeth was so moved by all this good will towards the family, she decided a response was required. So, after discussing it with doctors, she called everyone together to initiate a moving family project.

  For the next two days in collective therapy, Elisabeth, Rosemarie and the children all worked hard, preparing a huge colorful thank-you poster, full of rainbows, hearts and smiling faces, to be displayed in a store window in Amstetten town square for the world to see.

  Elisabeth wrote across the top of the poster:

  We, the whole family, would like to use this opportunity to thank you all for sympathizing with our fate. Your empathy is helping us to go through these difficult times, and it shows us that there also are good and honest people. We hope that there will be a time when we can return to normal life.

  Then, one by one, they each traced different colored crayons around their hands and fingers, writing individual messages inside their outlined palms. A large heart at the bottom was drawn for Kerstin, who remained unconscious in Amstetten hospital.

  Elisabeth’s message, written inside her green hand outlines, said:

  I wish for—the recovery of my daughter Kerstin, the love of my children, the protection of my family, for people with a big heart and compassion.

  Then Lisa, 16, took a red crayon and wrote:

  Wishes: health, that everything goes well, love, happiness.

  Misses: Kerstin, school, friends, fresh air, Class 1C.

  Stefan’s message was in purple:

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

  Then in green crayon, 12-year-old Alexander wrote:

  I desire freedom, strength and power and the sun. I miss the fire brigade and sister Kerstin.

  His 14-year-old sister Monika took a purple crayon, writing inside her palm prints, besides a smiley face:

  Wishes: that Kerstin gets better, lots of love, that everything is soon past.

  Misses: fire brigade, music school, friends, school, Kerstin.

  Little Felix did his in green:

  I dream of playing with the other children, running in the meadows, riding in cars, playing ball, swimming, sleigh rides, and playing with other children.

  Finally, Rosemarie Fritzl wrote her message in red and purple crayon, signing it “Oma”:

  I wish to be able to live in peace with my children, with much strength and with God’s help I miss my dear friends and my freedom.

  Rosemarie was still coming to terms with what had happened. As detectives prepared to interview her again, it was revealed that on discovering the truth, she had suffered a nervous breakdown. She was now being treated for severe heart problems, believed to have been caused by all her years of stressful living with her husband.

  “With new details emerging daily of what was going on under her own house,” said a police source, “she’s been unable to take it in.”

  Chief Inspector Franz Polzer confirmed that Rosemarie would soon be questioned again, emphasizing that she was not under suspicion.

  “What woman would stay silent,” he asked, “if she knew that her husband had seven children with his daughter, and was holding her in the cellar?”

  On Monday, May 12, doctors decided to slowly reduce Kerstin’s medication, to ease her out of the coma. After her condition had stabilized a few days earlier, she had started getting stronger and stronger. Now her doctors were hopeful that she might make a full recovery. But their big fear was whether she had suffered any brain damage, as severe cramping brought on by her infection might have starved her brain of oxygen.

  “The medication keeping her in an artificial coma is being slowly reduced,” explained Dr. Albert Reiter. “This is the first phase in the process of eventually waking her up. How long this will take is something we cannot say.”

  Doctors viewed her mother as being crucial to her recovery. So every day, Elisabeth would be disguised as a nurse in a red wig with a ponytail, walking out thr
ough the front gates and past news photographers, who never recognized her. Then an ambulance would drive her to the hospital, where she would spend hours gently talking to her daughter, who was still catheterized and hooked up to various breathing and nutrition tubes.

  “During this period,” said Dr. Reiter, “it was extremely important that Kerstin’s mother was coming to the bed on a regular basis to motivate her.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Frankenstein

  On Monday, May 12, as police allowed tenants to briefly return to Ybbsstrasse 40 to move out their stuff, a team of court-appointed psychiatrists started examining Josef Fritzl, to see if he was truly insane. It would be the beginning of weeks of testing to establish if he was aware of the horror he had inflicted on his family. Then they would have to decide where he would spend the rest of his life.

  Dr. Adelheid Kastner, the 46-year-old head of the forensic department of the Linz psychiatric clinic, had been selected to lead a team of experts to interview Fritzl in depth about all areas of his life and behavior. Her team would also conduct special tests to determine if he was suffering from any psychiatric disorder and try to explain his abhorrent behavior.

  Before the first round of testing began, Dr. Kastner, who has studied an estimated five hundred murderers, told reporters that she would not be “pressured” into making a diagnosis.

  “What is special about this case is the worldwide media interest,” she said. “And the case itself is without precedent. But I will treat it like any other, and if my results do not conform to public expectation, that is not my concern. I always go into an assessment interview neutral and professional. It is not up to me to condemn.”