Freedom
After Elisabeth Fritzl walked into the Mostviertel Amstetten-Mauer state hospital announcing that she was Kerstin’s mother and offering her help, she was brought into Dr. Albert Reiter’s office. Outside on the hospital grounds her father nervously waited for her in his Mercedes.
“She appeared very strange,” the doctor later told
Stern
magazine. “Of course I wanted to ask her where she had been for the last twenty-four years, but that was not my job at this moment.”
So Dr. Reiter limited his questioning to Kerstin’s illness and how it had started. Elisabeth told him about Kerstin’s symptoms, and what little she had been able to do to help her, without mentioning their cellar imprisonment. Then she said she had to go.
As soon as Elisabeth left his office, Dr. Reiter alerted Amstetten police.
A few minutes later, Josef and Elisabeth Fritzl were picked up at the hospital gates and brought to police headquarters, where they were placed in separate rooms for questioning. Detectives were far more concerned with Elisabeth than her father, as they still believed she was a bad mother who had abandoned her children.
“The questioning focused on [her],” said Colonel Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian police criminal investigation unit, who would lead the investigation. “Where she had been and why she had neglected her children.”
The “extremely psychologically disturbed,” ashen-haired woman refused to speak, just staring blankly at the wall in front of her. But after several hours of gentle coaxing and assurances she would never have to see her father again, and that she and her children would be protected against him, she finally broke down and told her story.
“It was quite late, around midnight,” recalled Colonel Polzer, “that she revealed that she hadn’t abandoned her children. She had been incarcerated for twenty-four years.”
For the next two hours, shocked investigators took notes, as Elisabeth told her incredible story. She spoke very fast, without a break, often taking lengthy pauses to compose herself, trying to summon up the right words.
She told how, from the age of 11, she had been “continuously abused” by her father. He had raped her in the cellar, in his car and during walks in the woods, and she had been too ashamed to tell anyone.
Then as detectives listened in disbelief, Elisabeth recounted how her nightmare had started on August 28, 1984, when her father asked her for help to move a door into the cellar. He had then taken her by surprise, drugging her with ether. Later she had awoken to find herself handcuffed to a post in a dark dungeon.
Then he had brutally raped her again and again, before leaving her “shackled like an animal,” until he returned several days later. This time he had attached a thick cable leash around her waist, tethering her to a pole in the middle of the tiny dungeon.
“The only thing I could do,” she told the amazed investigators, “was to go to the toilet.”
She had tried to fight back, banging on the concrete walls and screaming until she was hoarse. But she had finally given up, realizing it was useless and no one could hear her.
After she stopped fighting him, her father had stopped his savage beatings, although he still demanded sex when he visited the dungeon every two or three days to feed her.
“I faced the choice,” she explained, “of either being left to starve or being raped.”
Eventually, after nine months in captivity, he had let her off the leash, allowing her to move around the cramped dungeon, warning her that if she ever tried to escape, a deadly gas would be released.
Four years into her imprisonment, she had become pregnant, as he was not using any contraception. Initially she feared he would be furious, thinking he would now have to take her to a hospital to have the baby. But he had only sneered, saying she wouldn’t get away so easily. She had miscarried, but soon became pregnant again.
In the weeks leading up to the birth, he had stopped demanding sex. He had brought in a medical book to guide her through childbirth. She would have to deliver the baby on her own, as he wanted no part of it.
Soon after Kerstin was born in 1988, he demanded sex again. And soon she became pregnant, giving birth to Stefan a year later.
Over the next few years, she related, her father had gradually relaxed his strict control, as she had given birth to Lisa and Monika, who he had then snatched away and taken upstairs, after forcing her to write notes explaining their sudden appearance.
Then Elisabeth became highly emotional, telling investigators how she had delivered twins, Alexander and Michael, who had severe respiratory problems. She had nursed Michael for three days without any medicine, before he died in her arms after he had refused to take the baby to the hospital.
Her father had then dumped his tiny body in the incinerator, taking his twin brother Alexander upstairs, nine months later. By this time he had forced Elisabeth to dig a passageway to enlarge the cellar, adding an extra two rooms.
In 2002, after giving birth to Felix, her seventh and last child, her father had stopped demanding sex.
Then she told the stunned investigators how Kerstin’s illness had launched the chain of events that led to their freedom that morning. She said her father had acted alone, and her mother had known nothing about her imprisonment.
When Elisabeth finally finished her statement in the early hours of Sunday morning, it filled eight large sheets of notepaper.
“In a mere two hours she gave an account of the twenty-four years she’d spent in the cellar,” said District Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze. “Well, it still sends shivers down my spine.”
The detectives then turned their attention to Josef Fritzl, waiting in a nearby interview room. At first he refused to discuss the matter, saying he was sorry, and wanted to be left in peace. But eventually he confessed to building the dungeon and then locking up Elisabeth for twenty-four years. Although vague on details, he readily admitted incest, maintaining that there was no force involved. He also admitted threatening Elisabeth and the children with poison gas if they ever tried to escape.
He arrogantly insisted he had done it for Elisabeth’s own good, to save her from drugs and bad company.
“I locked up Elisabeth,” he declared. “She was a difficult child.”
When investigators probed further into his incestuous relationship with Elisabeth, producing seven children, Josef Fritzl was unfazed.
“Yes, I did have sex with her,” he replied casually. “But I haven’t for many months now.”
He also said the reason he had taken three of the children upstairs to be brought up by his wife Rosemarie, was that “They were sickly, and cried too much for my liking,” and he feared their bawling would attract unwelcome attention.
He was asked what would have happened if he had been taken sick or died during one of his extended vacations to Thailand. Fritzl said he had taken that into account, installing a sophisticated timer device to open the concrete doors and free his hostages after a certain length of time.
He also claimed to have been in the final stages of preparing to release Elisabeth and the three children, as he was finding it harder and harder to keep up the dungeon as he got older.
Finally, he was asked if he now regretted what he had done.
“Why should I be sorry?” he replied. “I always cared for them. I meant it well. I saved Elisabeth from drugs.”
Then Josef Fritzl signed a confession and submitted to a DNA test, before being arrested for incest and keeping his children in captivity.
“He has showed no remorse for his victims,” said a police investigator who was present. “He is so arrogant that I don’t actually think that he thinks that he has done anything wrong.”
Late Saturday night, as Josef Fritzl was being interrogated, Chief Inspector Leopold Etz, the head of Lower Austria’s murder squad, arrived at Ybbsstrasse 40 to bring Stefan and Felix to the hospital for a medical examination. Apart from Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth and Kerstin, Etz and his officers were the first human beings the two boys had ever seen.
“They both looked terrified and were terribly pale,” Etz remembered. “We did not know what to expect, and were very surprised at how well-mannered and educated they were.”
It was the first time the boys had been exposed to natural light in their entire lives, and they had trouble adjusting to it. Everything was new. The only idea they had of the world outside the cellar was from years of watching television.
“The real world was completely alien to them,” said the chief inspector. “They appeared overawed by the daylight they had never experienced before.”
When 5-year-old Felix stepped outside and saw the moon for the first time, he screamed with delight, asking if that was God up there and they were in heaven.
“They were just open-mouthed with awe,” said Etz. “And nudging each other and pointing.”
Although it was only a short drive to Amstetten police headquarters, to the boys it was
the
biggest adventure of their lives, like going to the moon. They had only seen cars on television shows, and the exhilarating experience of actually riding in one had them both in rapturous excitement.
Felix shrieked with pleasure as the vehicle took off down the main road, the driver going very slowly, so as not to scare them.
“They were amazed at the speed, and really excited,” said Etz. “They had never known anything like it [as] they had only seen cars from the TV.”
The two brothers were completely mesmerized by headlights, bracing themselves whenever a car came in the other direction, afraid they would have a head-on collision. And Felix, who was petrified, started to hum a melody to himself for reassurance.
“They were shouting and hiding behind the seats,” said Etz. “They had seen none of it before. Everything was new—a maze. In all my years as a policeman I have seen a lot, but I have never seen anything that comes even close to this—the way this family has suffered.”
When they reached the hospital, Stefan and Felix were reunited with their mother, who had recently arrived from the police station. Then doctors began examining them all to ascertain their medical and psychological conditions and to decide on the best course of treatment. Doctors also hoped that Elisabeth could provide the key to treating Kerstin, now lying in a medically induced coma a few floors below.
Elisabeth was very weak and traumatized, her twenty-four years underground having taken a terrible toll. She had gone down into the cellar a beautiful teenager, but now reentered the world looking like a haggard old woman.
She was badly malnourished, with prematurely white hair, her deathly pale white skin lined with age. She had lost all her teeth, and her gums were black from disease. Her bones were brittle, due to a lack of sunlight. She also walked with a limp and was hunched over, and her speech had also been affected by her ordeal.
Like their mother, Stefan and Felix both had complex medical problems, with defective immune systems, papery white skin, acute vitamin D deficiency and anemia. Stefan, now a grown-up 18-year-old, had a pronounced stoop and trouble with spatial awareness, having never been able to stand up in the low-ceilinged cellar. He was also found to be suffering from serious motor neuron problems, making walking very difficult. Like his sister Kerstin, he had also lost teeth.
Little Felix was the least unhealthy one, with the best chance of a complete recovery. The boy crawled “monkey-style,” darting from one end of the room to the other without warning, but he could also walk upright on his two legs, when he wanted to.
All of their eyes had been affected, and doctors gave them dark protective goggles to wear, until they could adapt to normal light. They were also prescribed the strongest available sun cream, to protect their pale skin from sunlight.
When Rosemarie Fritzl discovered the truth about what her husband had done, she reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized with severe heart problems. It would be several weeks before she could be interviewed by police, to see if she had known anything about her daughter’s abduction.
The next morning, Chief Inspector Etz drove Elisabeth and the two children to the Amstetten-Mauer psychiatric clinic, where they would convalesce.
Ironically, it was the same building the Nazis had used during the war to exterminate hundreds under Adolf Hitler’s euthanasia laws. Josef Fritzl had been well-acquainted with it during his formative years.
On the way down to the hospital parking lot, the boys were taken on an elevator. Little Felix was terrified, grabbing on to his mother, as the floor moved beneath him.
Then coming outside into the bright sunlight, Stefan and Felix were almost blinded, seeing the sun for the first time. They shielded their eyes with their hands, before being told not to look into it directly.
“The sun fascinated [Felix] even more than the moon,” said Chief Inspector Etz. “When the sunbeams struck his face, he squealed loudly.”
On the drive to the clinic, they passed a cow grazing in a field, and the brothers howled with delight, whispering excitedly to each other. They were also delighted to see a stream, asking what it could possibly be.
But the boys were particularly fascinated by the police officers’ cell phones, and when Felix first heard a ring tone, he got very excited.
“It made him curious,” said Etz. “He was completely bowled over when one of the policemen spoke into his phone.”
Over the next few days, the seasoned homicide chief befriended Felix and Stefan, feeling genuinely moved by their plight. He observed how they had invented their own language to communicate in, mainly consisting of “mumbles and grunts,” to supplement the basic German they had picked up from their mother and from watching television.
“When they want to articulate themselves,” said Etz, “they do try to speak so that others can understand them. But it’s clear it takes them an immense amount of effort to do so.”
Later that morning, Amstetten District Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze visited Josef Fritzl in his police cell. He was stunned to realize that this was the same man who had telephoned him two days before to thank him.