Elisabeth was also the prettiest of Fritzl’s daughters. From the age of eleven, he began abusing her after allowing her mother to take the other children on vacation. After that, his treatment of her grew worse. He was brutally strict with her in public and then, when they were alone, he would rape her without warning—in his car, on walks in the woods, even in the cellar, Elisabeth said.
Fritzl denied this.
“I am not a man who would molest children,” he said. “I only had sex with her later, much later.”
But Elisabeth asserts that it is true, and there is circumstantial evidence to support her accusations.
Elisabeth’s father required her to be home half an hour after school finished, and she was terrified of being late. Friends who accompanied her would disappear when her father showed up. She was not allowed out in the evening or to invite friends to the house.
As Elisabeth grew toward womanhood Fritzl grew increasingly possessive. He flew into a rage if she wore makeup, attempted to dress fashionably, or mentioned boys. As a result, she became sullen and withdrawn. She was easily pretty enough to have a boyfriend, but she kept to herself.
Elisabeth was just twelve in 1978, when Fritzl applied for planning permission to turn his basement into a nuclear shelter. This was not uncommon in Austria at the time. Fritzl worked on building the shelter single-handedly over the next six years, turning the bunker into an unbreachable fortress. However, in due course, he would need help to install the steel and concrete door, which weighed nearly a third of a ton.
In 1983, building inspectors came to look over the alterations and gave their seal of approval. Elisabeth was then fifteen. The following year, she ran away from home to escape her father’s predations. She found work as a waitress at a motorway truck stop and lived in a hostel. But Fritzl found out where she was and brought her back.
When she was seventeen, she tried again. She and a friend fled to Linz, then on to Vienna. But Fritzl tracked her down again and, with the assistance of the police, brought her home.
When Elisabeth was eighteen, she planned to run away again. At that age, she could not be forced to return home again. She even had a bag packed. So when she disappeared no one was surprised. Her friends were happy for her, thinking she had escaped at last. To the respectable older generation in Amstetten, she seemed like an ungrateful child who had now gone completely off the rails, while Fritzl pretended to be the concerned father.
“Ever since she entered puberty Elisabeth stopped doing what she was told. She just did not follow any of my rules any more,” he said. “She would go out all night in local bars, and come back stinking of alcohol and smoke. I tried to rescue her from the swamp, and I organized her a trainee job as a waitress.”
He also complained that she was “promiscuous.” Nothing could have been further from the truth.
“I admit I have always valued decency and good behavior,” he said. “I grew up in the Nazi era, and strictness and discipline were very important then.”
Fritzl didn’t touch Elisabeth during the first few weeks after she returned from Vienna, but then it started all over again. She entered a training program as a waitress at a highway rest stop at Strengberg on the autobahn that ran from Linz to Vienna. She and other girls in the program slept in a dormitory below the kitchen and Strengberg was little more than ten miles from Amstetten, so Fritzl could keep an eye on her.
Later she was sent to a catering college, where she lived on campus. While the sexes were strictly segregated there, she met an eighteen-year-old trainee chef named Andreas Kruzik, who described her as a “pretty, but serious and withdrawn girl.” He managed to talk to her and tried to make her laugh. They went for long walks in the woods together and, soon, fell in love. They even talked of running away together and getting married. However, when it came to sex, Elisabeth would always hold back at the last moment.
Elisabeth finally decided that she wanted to go through with it, but before they had a chance, Fritzl turned up to take her home. Andreas feared that Elisabeth’s father may have heard of their marriage plans. Before she left, she made him promise to keep their love a secret. This sounded reasonable enough. He knew that her father was a martinet.
The couple could not even say good-bye properly as her father barred her from talking to boys. They promised to write. Andreas kept his promise, but Elisabeth never replied to any of his letters. He was heartbroken at the time. It was not until twenty-four years later that he discovered why she had not written.
While Elisabeth was at college, she had been writing to another male friend. She had told him of a plan she had to move in with her sister and her boyfriend. She mentioned Andreas and was unhappy that she would be living far away from him. Nevertheless, she was determined to move and would send him her new address when she could. This other friend did not hear from her again either. Within days, she would begin her long incarceration.
Once the door was in place, the dungeon Fritzl had been planning for six long years was complete. Now Elisabeth was his alone, to do with as he pleased. At first he beat her to get his way. He was a big man, and she soon realized that there was no point in fighting her father. Then the beatings lessened, but there was no slackening in his demand for sex. Elisabeth was kept on the leash for the first nine months. She lost count of how many times he raped her during that time. There was no alternative. She had to endure the unendurable.
For four years, her father kept her in complete isolation. And he was unrepentant. “Why should I be sorry?” he said. “I took good care of her. I saved her falling into the drug scene… That is why I had to arrange a place where I gave her the chance—by force—to keep away from the bad influences of the outside world.”
There is no indication that she ever took drugs or was even interested in doing so.
The day after Elisabeth disappeared, Rosemarie Fritzl went to the police and reported her daughter as missing. Soon after, Fritzl gave police a letter he had forced Elisabeth to write. It was dated September 21, 1984, and was postmarked Braunau am Inn, Hitler’s birthplace. In the letter, Elisabeth said she had had enough of living at home and was staying with a friend. She warned her parents not to look for her, otherwise she would leave the country.
There were other loose ends to tie up. Fritzl told Elisabeth’s boss at the Rosenberger restaurant in Strenberg that she had run away from home and would not be coming back to work.
As days turned into weeks, Fritzl ordered Elisabeth to write other letters to her mother. She was to pretend that she had run away to join a religious sect and asked the police not to look for her. These letters must have been agonizing to write. With each one, she was digging herself a deeper grave, further reducing the chance that anyone would come looking for her. No one questioned the validity of the letters. No one asked who or what sect she had joined, or asked whether such organizations operated in Austria—they don’t. Sects that isolate members from their family and friends are practically unknown outside Japan and the English-speaking world, where their strange antics often generate massive publicity. Once Elisabeth turned nineteen, her disappearance was no longer a police concern. The police then stopped searching for her, and the authorities forgot that Elisabeth Fritzl had ever existed.
Rosemarie was browbeaten. Other members of the family dared not question Fritzl. To acquaintances, he made a show of being a concerned parent and said that Interpol was still looking for her, while Andreas Kruzik nursed his broken heart and concluded that he had been unceremoniously dumped.
Fritzl himself was surprised that he had gotten away with it and was terrified that he was going to be arrested. He kept meaning to release Elisabeth, he said, but as everyone would then discover what a vile monster he was, he kept putting off the day.
As her weeks below ground stretched into months, Fritzl kept up a sickening pretence of normality with his daughter. He would tell her how work on the garden above her was progressing. Fritzl would also chat about films he had seen on TV, describe
trips he had made, and even keep her updated on the progress of her brothers and sisters. He did not hesitate to inform her that everyone had fallen for the lies he had told. For her, there was no hope of rescue or release. After all, the very last place anyone would have looked for her was in her own home.
While Elisabeth maintains that Fritzl had been abusing her sexually since she was eleven, Fritzl claimed that it only began some time after he had imprisoned her. Once she was completely in his power, he said, his desire to have her grew until it became irresistible.
“We first had sex in spring 1985”—nine months after he imprisoned her, he claimed. “I could not control myself anymore. I wanted to have children with her. It was my dream to have another normal family, in the cellar, with her as a good wife and several children…At some stage, somewhere in the night, I went into the cellar. I knew that Elisabeth did not want it, what I did with her. The pressure to do the forbidden thing was just too big to withstand.”
According to Fritzl, Elisabeth did not fight him. She cried quietly afterwards, he said. After that, every two or three days when he went into the cellar to bring her food and a change of clothes, he would have sex with her. He also beat her for the sadistic pleasure of it. Increasingly, he said, sex with his daughter became “an obsession.”
Elisabeth had to cope with the full force of Fritzl’s libido as he had stopped sleeping with Rosemarie.
“You’re too fat for sex,” he told his wife within the hearing of family and friends. “Fat women are below my standard.”
To a friend, he said he liked thin women and boasted of having a girlfriend. No one ever guessed that he was talking about his own daughter.
After four years, Elisabeth became pregnant. She may have thought for a moment that he would have to release her so that she could have a baby with the help of an obstetrician, a midwife, or even her mother. Instead, Fritzl bought her a medical book. She must have been worried that a child produced by such a close degree of incest might be born with some genetic impairment. Fritz feigned concern.
“Elisabeth was, of course, very worried about the future,” he said. “But I bought her medical books for the cellar, so that she would know when the day came what she had to do. I also arranged towels and disinfectants and nappies [diapers].”
When Elisabeth was about to give birth, Fritzl drove hundreds of miles to buy baby food, clothes, and diapers at shops where nobody would recognize him. Then he left his terrified twenty-two-year-old daughter to give birth in the cellar alone. It seems that he had lost interest in her sexually since she became pregnant. Nevertheless, in 1989, Elisabeth Fritzl gave birth to her daughter Kerstin. Both mother and child survived. At last Elisabeth would not be alone. On the other hand, the child was one more reason why her father could not let her go. Here was living, breathing proof of what he had done.
Kerstin was sickly from the time she was born. She suffered from cramps, which were eventually diagnosed as a form of epilepsy that is linked to incest.
However, after she had given birth, Elisabeth Fritzl’s life did begin to improve. There were fewer beatings, though the rapes resumed. Fritzl would dress up for his visits, and he brought his daughter lingerie and sexy outfits—for his own benefit, of course. And the following year she gave birth to a son, Stefan.
All the time, Elisabeth was only a few feet from the lodgers who were living upstairs. One of them, Joseph Leitner, had known Elisabeth when she was a girl and even knew that her father had raped her. But he believed the story that she had run off to join a sect. Besides, he was afraid of her father.
Though Fritzl had banned pets, Leitner kept a dog, a husky-Labrador-sheepdog mix named Sam, who barked every time he walked passed the cellar. Fritzl warned all his tenants that the cellar was strictly off-limits. Anyone going near it would be thrown out.
Leitner now believes that Sam may have heard people moving around in the cellar below, since he would suddenly start to bark for no apparent reason. He also noticed that his electricity bill was exorbitant, even though he worked long hours and was rarely home. He got a friend from a cable TV company to check it out. They unplugged all the appliances in his room, but still the electricity meters rose very high. It now seems that Fritzl fed electricity from Leitner’s one-room apartment into the cellar below. But before Leitner could make a complaint, Fritzl spotted the dog and evicted him.
Another tenant who had his suspicions was Alfred Dubanovsky, who had known Elisabeth at school and had also known of her abusive home life. He lived a few feet above her head for twelve years. Fritzl told him that the cellar was protected by a sensitive electronic security system. Dubanovsky also saw Fritzl taking food down to the cellar in a wheelbarrow at night. Leitner had seen this too, but neither of them imagined that anyone was living down there.
Fritzl would disappear into the basement at nine each morning, ostensibly to work on some electrical engineering plans. Sometimes he would also go down there after Rosemarie had gone to bed. She had been told never to disturb him while he was at work, not even to take him a cup of coffee. But neighbors would not have noticed anything suspicious. The entrance to the cellar was in the back garden, which was itself hidden by a tall hedge.
There were other clues. Fritzl once boasted to Dubanovsky: “One day my house will go down in history.” And he was terrified by any mention of the police.
Another tenant noticed that food would go missing from their fridge. It seems that, when Fritzl had failed to make a shopping trip, he borrowed his lodgers’ food to feed his captives.
Initially, the dungeon was just 215 square feet. There were now three people living in that confined space, and Fritzl was having sex with his daughter in front of their two children, which can only have added to her distress. In 1992, Elisabeth gave birth to a second daughter, Lisa. The baby cried a lot, possibly because she had a heart defect caused by her incestuous parentage. Fearful that someone might hear her, Fritzl decided that the child should be brought up upstairs by his cowed wife. That way Lisa could receive proper medical attention. He persuaded Elisabeth to go along with his plan. All she had to do was write another of her letters. This one said: “Dear parents, You will probably be shocked to hear from me after all these years, and with a real-life surprise, no less… I am leaving you my little daughter Lisa. Take good care of my little girl.” The sect, she said, did not allow children, and she begged her parents to bring her up for her.
“I breast-fed her for about six-and-a-half months, and now she drinks her milk from the bottle,” she added. “She is a good girl, and she eats everything else from the spoon… I hope that you are all healthy. I will contact you again later, and I beg you not to look for me, because I am doing well.” Again she asked her parents not to make any attempt to find her.
On May 19, 1993, Lisa appeared on the Fritzls’ front doorstep in a cardboard box. The letter was stuck to it. It seems that Rosemarie was skeptical, but then she received a phone call that purportedly came from her daughter. Fritzl, it seems, had also coerced his daughter into making taped messages. However this was contrived, Rosemarie bought it, and so did the authorities, apparently. Social services representatives did not even ask why a woman would entrust her child to a parent who she, herself, had run away from. Five days after Lisa’s appearance on the Fritzls’ doorstep, Amstetten’s youth welfare office wrote: “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.”
Fritzl even asked the police to get a handwriting expert to confirm that the letter came from Elisabeth, giving them some of his daughter’s exercise books to compare it to. When the graphologist confirmed that the letter had come from their daughter and, consequently, that Lisa was their grandchild, they were allowed to adopt her. This was permitted even though Fritzl had been convicted of rape. However, in Austria, criminal records are expunged after ten years.
Even with Lisa enjoying the light and fresh air upstairs, there wa
s still the problem of space downstairs. Kerstin and Stefan were growing and as Fritzl used no protection, it was highly likely that Elisabeth would become pregnant again. So Fritzl decided to extend the cellar. He had Elisabeth set about digging out more than four thousand cubic feet of earth—two hundred tons of it—by hand. Over the next few years, Fritzl managed to move the equivalent of seven truckloads of earth and rubble out of his cellar without anyone noticing. At the same time, he smuggled tiles, bricks, wooden wall panels, a washing machine, a kitchen sink, beds, and pipe into the underground cellar without anybody being any the wiser. Fritzl and Elisabeth excavated a dungeon seven times the size of the nuclear bunker he had permission to construct. On top of everything else, he was violating all manner of building codes, but the authorities took no notice. And while all this was going on Elisabeth, Kerstin, and Stefan had to survive amid the dirt and confusion.
Fritzl was an electrical engineer, so he knew how to rig up the lights and power. However, he was not a plumber. Dubanovsky said that Fritzl introduced him to a man he said was a plumber who must have installed a lavatory and some primitive plumbing in the cellar while, somehow, not noticing the inhabitants. The man has never come forward or been found.
Even though the cellar could be extended and more facilities added, there would still be no more light or ventilation. Elisabeth persuaded Fritzl to install a UV light and supply vitamin D tablets to compensate partially for the lack of sunlight. But he would not extend the ventilation system, as it would risk sound escaping, and the last thing he wanted was Elisabeth summoning help.
Against Their Will Page 4