The report of the man who kept his daughter locked in a cellar for twenty-four years?
A 73-year-old Austrian electrical engineer has confessed to holding his daughter captive in a secret, windowless cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children by her, police said on Monday.
The case, centred on a nondescript two-storey building in the small industrial town of Amstetten, bears chilling similarities to that of Austrian Natascha Kampusch who spent eight years locked up in a basement before escaping in 2006.
Some parts of the 60 square metre basement in which the family were kept were no more than 1.70 metres (5 ft 6 in) high and officials said the basement even contained a padded cell.
“This is an appalling crime. I know of no comparable case in Austria,” Franz Prucher, head of security for Lower Austria told a news conference.
Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, says her father, Josef Fritzl, lured her into the basement of the block in 1984 and drugged and handcuffed her before imprisoning her.
Three of her children, aged 19, 18 and 5, had been locked up in the basement with her since birth and had never seen sunlight, police said, raising worries about their physical and mental state. The younger two were boys, the eldest a girl.
The victims are receiving medical treatment, said police.
Three other children — two girls and one boy — were brought up by Josef and his wife.
As well as confessing to locking up his daughter for 24 years and siring the seven children, Fritzl admitted to burning the body of the seventh child in the heating system when it died soon after birth, said Franz Polzer, head of criminal investigations in the state of Lower Austria.
So many questions here. Do we really believe that the wife didn’t know? How did the daughter manage to give birth to these children without medical assistance?
I can’t even tell you how sick I felt hearing this story. Those poor children.
This to me perfectly illustrates why daddy/daughter play books skeeve me out. Slippery slopes and all that. And don’t get me started on so-called romance books with incest themes. Blech.
I hope he gets what he deserves in prison. A great candidate for castration and other methods of torture, if you ask me. Sick f*ck.
Angela
April 29
9:24 am
My first question is, um, does this article imply that these children are the offspring of Elisabeth and her father?
MissKitty
April 29
10:09 am
Yes, they are. There are six, still living children, the youngest is 5 the oldest 19.
The case came to light, when the eldest daughter got extremely ill and he dropped her off at a hospital. The doctors didn´t know why she was sick and wanted to talk to the mother, they got suspicious at her behaviour and after police assured her she would never have to see her father again, she told them what was going on.
Right now, doctors think the girl might habe some incest related illness
Bernita
April 29
11:22 am
I think he should be taken out and shot, like one would a rabid animal.
Bonnie Dee
April 29
11:40 am
I think the wife has an equal part to play in this. Both parents were guilty here.
Shiloh Walker
April 29
11:59 am
Yeah, I heard about it. That woman and her poor kids.
🙁
The girl’s mom, I can’t help but think she had to know, somewhere inside her and she just closed her eyes to it.
jmc
April 29
1:00 pm
Where did the wife think the kids had come from, is what I want to know. Her daughter had disappeared, but these kids just showed up out of the blue?
No, I don’t believe that the wife knew nothing.
Shannon Dauphin
April 29
2:09 pm
Apparently the children were left on their doorstep, with a note from the daughter saying she couldn’t handle them. Her sudden absence at age eighteen — or seventeen? — was treated as a teenage runaway.
Given the way this man treated his daughter, wonder how he treated his wife? She truly might not have known. I can see a man like this beating or berating his wife into blind submission.
katiebabs
April 29
2:20 pm
SICK!! Cut his balls off and feed him to the wolves.
Eve Vaughn
April 29
2:35 pm
Vile.
Dawn
April 29
2:36 pm
I was horrified as well when I heard this. I really feel that the wife had to know something was going on. And that poor girl having her father force himself on her and father her children.
Just awful.
Fae Sutherland
April 29
2:38 pm
In regards to how she had the kids without medical assistance…in the majority of births medical assistance isn’t required, simply precautionary. People have kids without doctors of any kind every day.
AztecLady
April 29
2:49 pm
Apparently, the lack of medical assistance is the reason one of the twins didn’t survive.
What I am amazed the most amazed at is the fact that (if I’m reading correctly, and if the reporting is accurately, which are both iffy), all of this happened in the cellar of a building. Where, you know, other people lived, not just the sick bastard and his wife.
If this asshole was constantly expanding the cellar, and installed a lock, and took food to his daughter and ohyuckcrapsicktomystomach their children, and took out whatever trash and other debris they produced, and all that crap–how come no one else ever noticed anything weird through 24 years? Babies crying? Strange smells?
Where was everybody else in that building for 24 years?
Lori
April 29
2:56 pm
No words.
Tracy
April 29
2:56 pm
I don’t know what prison is like in Austria, but here in the U.S. criminals have a pecking order and child molesters and wife beaters are the lowest of the low. Usually they are beat up quite regularly in jail. Ask me if I feel sorry for them. Not so much.
Ann Aguirre
April 29
2:57 pm
I’ve rarely been this horrified. My heart broke when I read this part: “Three of the children had never seen sunlight.” What will happen to them now? Are they in any fashion prepared for the outside world? Can they possibly rebound from this and live anything like normal lives?
I can’t comprehend the father’s actions; it’s beyond me. I don’t think there’s a punishment bad enough for him. Anything we could do to him would be over too soon; he has twenty-four years of tormenting seven human beings, who are his flesh and blood, plus an infant’s death, to atone for. No matter what happens to him now, it’s just not enough.
Kitteh
April 29
3:00 pm
Das just nasty. And how the heck could the wife not know that her hubby kidnapped their kid and was oofing her in the basement for years??
Bailey
April 29
3:05 pm
Unless the wife is mentally handicapped she had to know. I’d love to see him put in a cellar for the rest of his life, after castration!!
Amie Stuart
April 29
4:13 pm
I read about this yesterday and find it VERY Hard to believe that the wife/mom didn’t know
Jackie Kessler
April 29
4:47 pm
There is way too much evil in the world.
Nonny
April 29
4:59 pm
Some people deserve to die.
Slowly.
And painfully.
AztecLady
April 29
5:02 pm
Nonny: yes.
kirsten saell
April 29
5:11 pm
Just hope there’s a hell.
And in all honesty, the wife may have been so completely under his domination that she might not have known, or could not have come forward. If there’s any other reason for her inaction, I’d have to say she’s just as culpable.
Cherry
April 29
5:11 pm
The cellar was soundproof, which could explain why the wife and neighbors never heard the kids (or her screaming with labor pains, a thought that sends chills all over me), but still, I’m with AztecLady, did no one question all the work he did in the cellar to pull this off? I read that he’d installed an electronic security door. He could NOT have done this alone. And that boggles the mind even more.
sallahdog
April 29
5:53 pm
People tend to see and believe what they want to see and believe. There were people who lived close by to the Nazi concentration camps that insisted they never knew what was going on..
The human brain a lot of times simply refuses to comprehend something that doesn’t make sense to it…
So sad, though… I pray that those kids and the daughter get the help and get a chance to find a way to enjoy everything in life that they missed out on.
Bernita
April 29
6:13 pm
Cherry, he might have drugged them.
And I can think of about 17 ways he could have covered his tracks.
The police are checking out his other properties, btw.
AztecLady
April 29
6:40 pm
Bernita, I find it rather difficult to believe that a man who apparently is an electrical engineer could have bought and provided enough drugs to keep four people drugged for most of 24 yrs without anyone noticing this.
A pharmacist, a nurse, a doctor? Horrible to think about, but possible. Otherwise, he would have had to procure the drugs somehow, somewhere, and people being creatures of habit, it would have been noticeable by someone at some point. We are, after all, talking almost two and half decades here.
Those children–both the ones locked in the cellar and the ones living with their father/grandfather–are the ones who will be forever victims. It’s in their very genes. Damn that man to hell and back.
ostro
April 29
6:53 pm
Question:
Why Germans and Austrians have this particular subhuman taste for incest,torture and imprisonment?
e.g .Natasa Kampush,Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazi death camp,Hitler.
Bernita
April 29
6:54 pm
AL, I was commenting specifically on Cherry’s question about how he might have had the security door installed without workmen noticing anything ontoward.
AztecLady
April 29
7:03 pm
Ah Bernita, sorry, I misunderstood that part.
Ostro, the fact that we are now hearing about these things concentrated in a relatively small area of the globe definitely doesn’t mean they are not happening anywhere there are humans. Put enough people together anywhere, and you’ll start seeing the crazy rise up.
MissKitty
April 29
7:14 pm
Ostro?
Are you ok?
You sure you didn´t forget your medicine today?
Ann Bruce
April 29
7:29 pm
I don’t buy that the mother and the other children (not the grandkids) didn’t know. And someone besides the father did know because the authorities received a tip.
This made my jaw drop:
So I hope there’s a special place in hell for this man.
Ann Bruce
April 29
7:34 pm
From the same Globe and Mail article:
MissKitty
April 29
8:14 pm
The man might face life, if they find him guilty of murder by neglect (of the child), wrongful imprisonment would get him a sentence of 10 years, but in Austria those don´t stack.
Don´t ask… JUST DON`T ASK.
The punishment for sexual crimes are a constant source of outrage in Austria, as well as in Germany.
Rape is rape, no matter how many times you rape someone.
As I said… just don´t ask.
Fiordiligi
April 29
8:54 pm
As an Austrian, currently living abroad, I feel hugely disgusted and revolted by this whole episode. Someone here mentioned Natasha Kampusch, and I could only think of the same. GAD, the Kampusch case looks positively harmless compared to this perversion. I don’t know about the length of the prison sentence, but the “pecking order” is, indeed, that child molesters and rapists are at the very bottom of the hierarchy. This man is over 70, so I doubt he will survive very long, not that I care one way or another.
What really frustrates me is that my small, adorable and beautiful country is only mentioned in the media when such a thing happens. While it is quite common for us to read in newspapers about amok running pupils and other bits and pieces of “over the pond criminal life”, it is my impression that small countries are only mentioned when the perversion is extra large.
Fiordiligi
April 29
9:02 pm
Ostro. Hitler was, indeed, one of a kind in the worst way possible, and I still can’t believe that I had the stomach to dedicate a large part of my studies to his regime, however, show me one country in the world that is free of ugly, cruel and abhorrent history. There have been more than enough villains who can be in the same breath.
EvasDaddy
April 29
9:07 pm
I’ve read extensively about this case, and see no reason to believe anyone but the man was involved. He bought supplies on his own, and delivered the babies himself.
He molested his daughter from age 11, built the cellar in advance of her 18th birthday, and imprisoned her to “protect her from drugs.”. His words.
Accept his lunacy, people. It’s hard to believe, but there are plenty of people just like him roaming around. It’s only unusual that he happens to be good at building dungeons. The place was so well disguised that the police couldn’t find it even after they knew it was there. Fritzl had to show them the door.
Bernita
April 29
9:50 pm
Criteria differ according to jurisdiction, of course; but in mine he would likely be found to be legally sane,
kirsten saell
April 29
10:15 pm
Let’s hope so, Bernita. I’d hate for him to be able to weasel his way out of a prison sentence with an insanity defense.
KS Augustin
April 30
2:01 am
A good friend of mine worked in a Sexual Abuse Unit, counselling the imprisoned fathers of abused children. (Yeah, it was hell and I was very happy when she got out of that line of work.) One thing she told me that always stuck with me was that the wife always knew. They may have been intimidated into silence, or they may have been secretly happy that *they* didn’t have to put up with their husbands’ behaviour and so was happy to let the incest slide, but my friend, who used to speak with all the family members as part of the process, refused to let the wives off the hook, and she was most unhappy with a justice system that punished the man while letting the culpable woman off the hook.
EC Sheedy
April 30
6:27 am
I think they should lock this evil creature in a dungeon and have him visited everyday by an equally evil creature eager to subjugate him and use him for his pleasure.
I can’t find words in our vocabulary to describe this kind of inhumanity.
Dawn
April 30
8:38 am
The reason that the police found out was the when the eldest child was taken and left at the hospital, the authorities put out a television appeal for any relatives to come forward. Apparently, the man’s daughter in the cellar saw the appeal on TV and pleaded with the father to go to the police – and surprisingly, he did.
KS Augustin – I agree with you that if the mother knows – whether she’s blithly ignoring it or so subjugated that she doesn’t feel able to do anything – she should be held accountable. I really don’t understand how any mother could let this happen to her child.
BTW I heard on the news today that the two sets of children – upstairs and downstairs – met for the first time yesterday. That must have been some emotional meeting.
ostro – This kind of thing doesn’t just happen in Germany and Austria, so that’s a really unfair statement to make. This is going on to some degree all over the world.
I’ve always had the belief that we’re not hearing all these paedophiles/serial killers/kidnappers because there are more of them today. We’re finding out about them because modern technology is catching them out and the media is telling us. There’s always been evil people throughout time, now we’re finding out about them. If that makes any sense.
AztecLady
April 30
1:46 pm
Dawn, it does make sense, and I agree completely. Evil is not new.
Emma Petersen
April 30
1:55 pm
Le sigh. I read this and instantly regretted it. That has to be the greatest betrayal ever. You’re father is supposed protect you from the monsters, not become one of them himself.
Is it wrong that I’d like to slap the wife into next week? Twenty-four blankin years and she had no clue? Yeah, I believe that. Just like I believe Clinton didn’t inhale.
Aline de Chevigny
May 2
7:18 pm
I don’t comment much here, I’m a lurker by habit. But I’m shocked that no one commented on the fact that his sentence for doing all of this to the poor girl (15 years?) is half what she suffered through. (24 years?)
Why should his sentence be shorter than hers? He basically asked to be locked up by commiting these crimes, she never did.
Aline