Against Their Will

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Despite the extensive excavations, the labyrinthine complex was never more than five feet, six inches high. In some places, the ceiling was a good deal lower. Elisabeth and the children, as they grew, had to stoop. Living with such low ceilings was, by its very nature, oppressive. And now with a shower in the cellar, the atmosphere was damp.

  The neighbors spotted nothing. Even Fritzl’s son-in-law Juergen Helm, who lived in the house for three years, had no idea what was going on in the cellar.

  Elisabeth gave birth to a third daughter, Monika, on February 26, 1994. At that point, the extension of the cellar was far from complete and there was no room for the child. Fritzl repeated the same charade he had created with Lisa, and Monika turned up on the doorstep on December 16.

  However, this time to alert Rosemarie to the new arrival, a caller phoned, saying: “I just left her at your door.”

  This was a puzzle, as a call came through to her on a new, unlisted number. Rosemarie told the authorities that this was completely inexplicable. There was one obvious explanation, though. The call had been made by someone who knew the new number.

  The letter that came with the child said: “I am really sorry that I have 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 in the teat has to be a little bigger for her.”

  This time the Fritzls did not adopt the child. By fostering her, they received a state benefit of $535 per month.

  Monika’s arrival did not go unnoticed. A local journalist took an interest. He interviewed Fritzl, who repeated the old story that his daughter had run off to join a religious group.

  Two years later, Elisabeth was pregnant again, with twins. However, with no medical exam or ultrasound, she could not have known she was carrying two children. She would only have discovered this when the labor pains continued after she had delivered the first baby.

  One of the children was sickly. It had difficulty breathing, and when Fritzl returned to the cellar three days later it was dead. Fritzl burned the infant’s body in the furnace in the basement along with other household waste. The dead child has since been named Michael. It is not known if he would have survived if he had received medical attention.

  The surviving twin, Alexander, was taken upstairs and passed off as another foundling. Again, authorities failed to investigate; instead, they handed over another foster fee.

  Over the years, social services paid at least twenty-one visits to the Fritzls’ home and noted that the children were doing well. Fritzl was strict, but neighbors reported that the children were happy and well-adjusted. They did well at school. The children had just one fear—that their mother might return from her madcap sect and claim them.

  Fritzl was now short of money. There were two small fires in the house, each resulting in Fritzl filing an insurance claim. Despite the previous arson charges, the police performed only a cursory investigation. If one of these fires had gotten out of control, there would have been no hope for the prisoners in the basement.

  As Kerstin and Stefan grew to maturity, Fritzl found himself keeping three adults in the cellar, but their living conditions made them too weak to confront him. Even if they could have overpowered or incapacitated Fritzl, there was no escape. An electronic code was needed to open the door. Anyone who touched it without using the code would be electrocuted, Fritzl said. Fritzl also told his captives that poison gas would be pumping into the cellar in the event of a rebellion.

  Fritzl also claimed that there was a delayed-reaction mechanism that would open the door if he died on the outside or an accident prevented him returning, though there was no evidence of this. Meanwhile, Fritzl would leave his victims for extended periods, treating himself to long vacations in Thailand, where he indulged himself as a sex tourist.

  “He was a disgusting pervert and all the ex-pats and regular vacation makers knew what he was up to,” said a fellow traveler. “Rent-boys, lady-boys, he would go with anything. At one point, he was spotted by one bar regular with a sixteen-year-old.”

  Fritzl enjoyed the company of prostitutes closer to home too. He made regular visits to the Villa Ostende, in Linz, where he paid to have sex in the brothel’s dungeon. He punched one of the girls during sex, and most of them were frightened of him.

  “I was hired by him many times, and he was sick beyond imagination,” said one prostitute. “He chose me because he said he liked young, plump girls who were happy to submit to him.”

  Other girls were shocked by Fritzl’s sadistic demands and refused to have sex with him a second time.

  “Ninety-five percent of the clients are entirely normal; 3 percent are slightly ‘derailed,’ ” said the brothel’s former barman. “But Fritzl belonged to the last 2 percent of extreme perverts who are surely mentally deranged… None of the girls wanted to spend time in a room with him. Two of them even strictly refused to and did without the earnings. He loved inflicting pain and wanted some of the girls to play dead and act like a corpse. He was violent and into domination.”

  He was also seen in S&M clubs where he would pump himself up on Viagra and other drugs.

  Although Fritzl’s outside interests may have given Elisabeth an occasional break from her father’s rapacious sexual demands, the sexual abuse resumed whenever he returned to Ybbsstrasse. Even though Kerstin and Stefan were teenagers, Fritzl continued raping their mother in front of them. In 2003, she gave birth to her seventh child. This was Felix, and he was going to be left in the dungeon. Fritzl reasoned that, at sixty-three, Rosemarie could not cope with another child.

  While the upstairs children received a normal education, Elisabeth struggled to teach the children in the dungeon as best she could. Eventually, Fritzl provided a television so that they children could get some impression of what the real world outside was like. Elisabeth tried to impose some semblance of structure on their lives, which was difficult when it was impossible to tell day from night. She made decorations and made up fairy stories and lullabies. It is plain that she was a good mother doing her best in impossible circumstances.

  Fritzl claimed that he did his best for his second family in the basement. He provided a range and a freezer so that they would have fresh food while he was away in Thailand. In 2002, he bought Elisabeth a washing machine, so she did not have to wash all of their clothes by hand. They celebrated birthdays, and he smuggled a tree down to them at Christmas. But he still deprived them of light, air, and freedom. As the children grew older, the air grew so stale that they had to spend most of their time sitting down.

  He bought a video player so that he could watch movies with the children while Elisabeth cooked dinner in a grotesque parody of home life. Worse, he brought videos he had shot of the children upstairs, so that the prisoners downstairs could see what they were missing. But Fritzl saw nothing wrong in this.

  “It was lovely to have a family in the cellar,” he said. “Elisabeth, Kerstin, Stefan, and Felix accepted me as the head of the family completely.”

  However, the health of his underground “family” was suffering due to the lack of daylight and the dank and fetid air.

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

  But he did nothing about it.

  On top of ordinary colds and flu, the children suffered from respiratory problems from the poor air. Fritzl provided no medication other than store-bought medicines, aspirin, cough mixture, and the like. Without proper medical assistance, Elisabeth found she was fighting a losing battle. Both Kerstin and Felix suffered from coughing fits and strange, violent convulsions. Kerstin would scream hysterically
while Felix would shake uncontrollably for hours on end. The children had never seen a doctor, and had received none of the inoculations that infants are normally given. It is a wonder that they survived at all.

  The children were almost within earshot of Fritzl’s seventieth birthday party at 40 Ybbsstrasse in 2005 and, the following year, the town of Amstetten honored the Fritzls on their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a celebration hosted by the mayor.

  In his seventies, Fritzl found the strain of maintaining his underground family was becoming too much for him. He still found Elisabeth sexually attractive, and there have even been allegations that he also turned his attentions on Kerstin. But it was clear the situation could not go on.

  Toward the close of 2007, Fritzl began preparing the endgame. The following summer, he planned to stage-manage the release of Elisabeth and her children. People would be told that she had quit the obscure sect that had held her for the past quarter century and she would return to the house that she had, in reality, never left. Her shocking physical condition—and that of her children—would be blamed on the treatment inflicted on them by the religious cult. Fritzl thought he could get away with this. After all, no one had questioned the existence of the cult before.

  At Christmas, Fritzl forced Elisabeth to write another letter preparing the ground. It said that she was going to leave the sect and return home.

  “If all goes well,” she wrote. “I hope to be back in six months.”

  However, before Fritzl could put his plan into action, Kerstin fell dangerously ill. Again, he treated her with cough syrup and aspirin, but it did no good. Her convulsions grew worse. She spewed blood from her mouth and she lapsed into a coma.

  Elisabeth begged her father to seek medical attention for their daughter. Eventually, Fritzl relented. Rosemarie was taking one of her periodic vacations in Italy. Once she was safely out of the way, Fritzl and Elisabeth carried the unconscious nineteen-year-old out of the cellar and up into the house above. After this one fleeting, nighttime visit to the world above ground, Elisabeth was forced to return to her dungeon. Two of her boys were still prisoners down there, and she could not leave them.

  At 7 a.m. on Saturday, April 19, 2008, Josef Fritzl called an ambulance. It delivered the wan, ghostlike Kerstin Fritzl to a hospital where the staff did not know what to make of her. An hour later, Fritzl turned up in the emergency room and related his tried and tested story. His daughter had run off to join some mysterious religious sect and had dumped another of her children on his doorstep.

  Again, the child had come with a note. It said: “Wednesday, I gave her aspirin and cough medicine for the condition. Thursday, the cough worsened. Friday, the coughing gets even worse. She has been biting her lip as well as her tongue. Please, please help her! Kerstin is really terrified of other people, she was never in a hospital. If there are any problems please ask my father for help, he is the only person that she knows.”

  It came with a postscript addressed to the stricken girl herself.

  “Kerstin—please stay strong, until we see each other again! We will come back to you soon!”

  On duty at Amstetten’s Mostviertel State Hospital was Dr. Albert Reiter. He did not believe that a mother who had written such a letter would simply abandon her daughter as Fritzl had claimed. Nor did he think that the child’s deathly pallor had anything to do with the disease she was suffering from. It was also puzzling that such a young person should have lost all their teeth. Something more sinister was afoot.

  Also, strangely, Fritzl had not waited around for a diagnosis—or even for his granddaughter’s condition to stabilize. He’d rushed away, adding, curiously, that they should not call the police. Dr. Reiter concluded that Josef Fritzl’s story was a pack of lies. So, naturally, he called the police, who went to 40 Ybbsstrasse and interviewed Fritzl. He told them that he had heard noises outside early that morning. When he had gone to investigate, he had found Kerstin.

  In the emergency ward, Dr. Reiter’s patient was not getting any better. Her immune system had collapsed. She had to be put on a ventilator and a kidney-dialysis machine. Specialists called in from Vienna were of little help. Dr. Reiter felt that he did not have any chance of saving Kerstin unless he could discover something of her medical history, so appealed for her mother to come forward.

  Meanwhile the police were searching for Kerstin’s general practitioner to see if he or she could be of any help. They also wanted to interview the patient’s mother, Elisabeth, concerning possible neglect of the girl. Fritzl then produced another letter, dated January 2008. It spoke of her two other children, who also had medical problems. They too would be returning home soon.

  The letter was postmarked Kematen an der Krems, just thirty miles from Amstetten. The police descended on the town, but local doctors knew nothing of Kerstin. No one had seen anyone answering her description. Nor did they know of any sect that, according to the postmarks on the letters, had never been very far from Amstetten. Eventually, the police called Dr. Manfred Wohlfahrt at the diocesan office in St. Pölten and asked him what he knew about the sect. Dr. Wohlfahrt said that there were, to his knowledge, no odd sects working in the diocese or any of the dioceses in lower Austria. When the police showed him the letters that had ostensibly come from Elisabeth, he noted that they had been written in a very measured hand, not the sort you would use to dash off in a note to a relative or friend. Grammatically, they were very deliberately constructed and he concluded that they had been dictated.

  Meanwhile government officials were combing public records for any mention of Elisabeth Fritzl, Kerstin, Stefan, or Felix. Curiously, the three children’s births had not been registered, and there was no record of them having attended school. And they could not have left the country; no passports had been issued. Nor did Elisabeth have a driver’s license. There were no records of her existence for the past twenty-four years.

  The police then took another track. They wanted samples of DNA from Kerstin and the three other children who had turned up on the Fritzl’s doorstep. If they could screen out the maternal component of the DNA, they might discover who the father was. However, Fritzl refused to give a sample.

  When Kerstin’s mother did not come forward after his appeal, Dr. Reiter grew desperate. He appeared on a news bulletin on ORF, Austria’s public service broadcaster. Fearing that Kerstin’s mother might be afraid to come forward if she thought the police were involved, he emphasized that any contact would be treated with “high discretion.”

  Journalists flocked to 40 Ybbsstrasse, but rather than using this opportunity to make his own appeal for Elisabeth to come forward, Fritzl grew angry. He shouted and swore, and cursed that “bloody doctor.”

  However, Elisabeth had seen Dr. Reiter’s appeal on TV. Kerstin was dying, and she begged her father to let her go to the hospital, promising not to give him away and maintain the fiction that she had been with a religious sect—just as she had promised to do that coming summer.

  On Saturday, April 26—one week after Kerstin had arrived in the hospital—Elisabeth was let out of the cellar again. Fritzl called the hospital to talk to Dr. Reiter.

  “Elisabeth has returned,” he said. “I am bringing her to the hospital, and she wants to see her daughter.” Then he added: “We do not want any trouble. Do not call the police.”

  But the police were already involved. When Elisabeth and Josef Fritzl arrived at the hospital, the police pounced. They had no interest in Josef. There was no indication that he had committed any crime. But he put up a fight—to protect his daughter, the police thought at first—so he was arrested too.

  At the police station, they were separated. Elisabeth Fritzl was interrogated about the criminal neglect of her daughter. The police could see immediately that there was something very odd about her. Although she was only forty-two, she had grey hair, no teeth, and a morbidly pallid complexion. She looked like a woman in her sixties who had been locked up in an institution. And plainly she was terrified.


  At first she refused to answer their questions. She was, naturally, more concerned about her sick daughter. But the police were insistent. According to the letter of January 2008 that her father had shown them, she had two more children who might be in danger.

  She stuck to her story. She said she had run away to join a religious sect that did not allow children. That’s why she had sent three of her children to her parents. But none of that explained her appearance, or the terrible condition of her daughter.

  As the questioning continued, Elisabeth grew agitated. Then she demanded repeated assurances that neither she nor her children would ever have to see her father again. After the police gave this assurance, she told them the incredible story of her twenty-four-year ordeal. They could hardly believe their ears. Herr Fritzl was a respectable family man, the backbone of the community. However, her own appearance and the shocking condition of her daughter served as material evidence that what she was saying was true.

  They put Elisabeth’s allegations to Fritzl. Initially, he refused to talk; then he protested that the letters he had received over the years proved that Elisabeth had been with a cult. Later, he had the audacity to say that he was disappointed that she had betrayed him so quickly.

  There was one way to prove what Elisabeth was saying. The police took Fritzl back to the house and searched it. But the dungeon was so well hidden that they could not find it. However, sensing that the game was up, Fritzl led them through five rooms in the basement, including his office and a room containing the furnace where Michael’s body had been burned. Along the way, there were eight locked doors. Eventually, they reached Fritzl’s workshop. Behind a shelving unit in his basement workshop was a heavy steel door just three feet high with a remote-control locking device. After some convincing, Fritzl gave the police the code to open it and they squeezed through.