Secrets in the Cellar (12 page)

“It’s unbelievable,” said Lenze. “Until the very last minute he was carrying on his double life. The next day I went to see him in jail and was astonished to see it was him, because I hadn’t associated him with the name.

“I said, ‘It was you, Herr Fritzl—I’m appalled by you. How can anyone do such a thing?’

“To which he replied, ‘I’m very, very sorry for my family, but it cannot be undone.’

“I replied, ‘Why have you waited over twenty-four years to feel pity for them? How do you think your family will ever overcome this trauma?’

“And he said, ‘I do not think it will be in this town, or even with a change of identity, as has been rumored.’

“Those were his last words before I left and the cell doors closed again.”

A Reunion

On Sunday morning, Rosemarie Fritzl arrived at the Amstetten-Mauer psychiatric clinic for a family reunion, in a special closed-off area. Even before receiving the results of the DNA tests, psychiatrists had decided to bring the “upstairs” and “downstairs” Fritzl children together as soon as possible, as the first step in the long healing process.

No one was underestimating the problems both sets of children now faced. Some nervously pondered all the suffering endured by the Fritzl family, and whether Elisabeth’s two sets of children would shun each other. The human-scale implications of this epic meeting were in completely uncharted territory.

What could 69-year-old Rosemarie Fritzl say to her daughter, who she thought had joined a cult and abandoned three children for her to bring up? How could Alexander greet his brothers Stefan and Felix, who he didn’t even know existed before yesterday? Then, on top of that, to discover they had been imprisoned their entire lives in a dungeon by their grandfather, who also happened to be their father?

This was totally off the map, and everyone was concerned about the repercussions. But the most worried of all were the various family members.

“They were all very distressed and extremely worried about meeting each other for the first time,” said Amstetten-Mauer clinic director Dr. Berthold Kepplinger. “It was a very emotional scene.”

When Rosemarie and Elisabeth saw each other again, they fell into each other’s arms.

“I can’t believe I’m free,” sobbed Elisabeth, when she finally let go of her mother. “Is it really you? I didn’t think I would ever see you again.”

Then Rosemarie apologized, saying she loved her dearly and they would never be parted again.

“I’m so sorry—I had no idea,” she sobbed over and over again.

Then Elisabeth declared she never wanted to see her father’s face again, after the unspeakable things he had done to her and her children.

“I can’t believe I’m out,” she said. “It’s all too much for me.”

Doctors then brought in Lisa, Monika and Alexander, who Fritzl had snatched away to live upstairs.

“My babies!” cried Elisabeth, as she hugged them and stroked their faces. “You are so beautiful.”

Then Stefan and Felix came in to meet their upstairs siblings, and grandmother Rosemarie for the first time. The little boy, who had spent his entire life underground, seemed the “most distressed,” clinging to his mother the entire time.

“He would jump and start at the slightest disturbance,” said Dr. Kepplinger. “Now that the novelty of being free from the cellar has worn off, he needs some peace. After all, in his whole life he had only seen four other people.”

Also present were many of Elisabeth’s brothers and sisters, including Harald and Gabrielle, who were joining the rest of the family in therapy.

“None of us can believe how normal Elisabeth seems,” Gabrielle, 35, later told the London
Daily Mail
. “She is healthy and very chatty and doing very well.”

Gabrielle, who lived just outside Amstetten with her partner, said the family was totally devastated by what their father had done.

“I can’t say what the family is going through,” she said. “It’s more than anyone can believe. We are working together to support Elisabeth. She is overjoyed to see her children . . . and she is spending all the time getting to know them.”

Clinic Director Dr. Kepplinger, who witnessed the moving reunion, later described it as “a genuinely happy occasion [without being] forced.” And from what he’d seen, he was now convinced Rosemarie Fritzl had known nothing of her daughter’s imprisonment.

“It was a very moving meeting between Rosemarie and Elisabeth,” said Dr. Kepplinger. “[They] said they loved each other and pledged never to be separated again.”

The clinic director said things had gone better than anyone dared hope.

“The reunion went incredibly well,” he said. “It was astonishing how easily it happened. They got along very well and it was far more successful than anticipated.”

But Dr. Kepplinger was circumspect about the huge differences between the well-cared-for family upstairs, and their siblings downstairs, who had had none of their advantages.

“The children who grew up in the cellar are as you’d expect, considering what they’ve been through,” said Dr. Kepplinger. “They can speak and make themselves understood, but they’re far from being in a normal state. We are going very slowly.”

Late Sunday night, police finally entered the cellar at Ybbsstrasse 40, with the help of Josef Fritzl, who had been brought back to reveal the complex electronic codes needed to access the dungeon. The police were highly cautious, fearing the cellar had been booby-trapped with explosives or gas.

Fritzl led them through five different rooms in the cellar, to his workshop. He then pointed out the false shelf, containing paint cans and other containers, behind which lay a 660-pound three-foot-high reinforced concrete door on steel rails. Finally, before being taken away, he revealed the electronic codes that opened it, as well as the ones for the other six, leading to the dungeon.

Chief Inspector Franz Polzer and his team of detectives then entered, negotiating their way along the rat-infested, uneven-floored passageway, unlocking the doors one by one. Finally, they entered the dungeon through a four-foot door, discovering a maze of tiny rooms, connected by narrow stone-lined corridors, just 5 feet, 5 inches tall.

They paused for a couple of minutes, allowing their eyes to adapt to the dingy, almost airless cellar, that had housed Elisabeth Fritzl and her three children for so many years.

Inside they found a well-equipped kitchen and two bedrooms, one with a television and shower, with the children’s colorful painted posters adorning the plaster walls. They also discovered a cell padded top to bottom with rubber, coming off one of the rooms.

There was also a small bathroom and toilet, with tiles and wood trim, crudely decorated with starfish and other marine animals, and brightly colored paper stars on all four rotting walls and the ceiling.

“I went to see this dungeon, this prison for myself,” said Chief Inspector Polzer. “I went through it and was very glad to be able to leave.”

Another detective likened it to a scene from a horror movie.

“There are things that you just don’t want to see,” he said. “The fewer pictures you have in your head, the better.”

A few hours later, as teams of forensic scientists began combing through the cellar and the surrounding grounds for evidence, a calm Josef Fritzl arrived at St. Polten jail, 44 miles east of Amstetten. After being fingerprinted and photographed, he was put under suicide watch.

Late Sunday night, the Lower Austrian police released a statement to the press. It stated that they had found a 42-year-old woman, only referred to as Elisabeth F., who had been missing since August 29, 1984, after an anonymous tip-off. A month after her disappearance, Elisabeth F. had been forced by her father to write a letter to her parents asking them not to search for her. The statement went on to outline how Josef F. and his wife Rosemarie had alerted authorities, after finding three babies left outside their home in 1993, 1994 and 1997, each accompanied by a note from the mother.

The statement said police had brought Elisabeth and her father to police headquarters on Saturday night. During questioning, Elisabeth had revealed that her father had first begun molesting her when she was 11. Then, in August 1984, he’d sedated and handcuffed her, locking her into the cellar for the next twenty-four years.

During her incarceration, said the statement, she had given birth to seven of his children, one dying soon after being born. Three of the younger children had been found on his doorstep, along with letters from his kidnapped daughter Elisabeth. So they were brought up by Josef and his wife Rosemarie as adopted or foster children.

As Austrian reporters converged on Ybbsstrasse 40, Chief Inspector Polzer gave an impromptu press conference.

“It is one of
the
most remarkable criminal cases in Austria,” stated the white-haired veteran policeman.

He then outlined the chronology of events leading to the discovery of the cellar, emphasizing that Rosemarie Fritzl had not known about her daughter’s imprisonment, believing that Elisabeth had run away and joined a cult.

“The father seems to be very authoritarian,” he told TV news reporters, “and decided what happened and what was supposed to happen in the family—and today we know why he very closely guarded the basement.”

He said police were awaiting the results of DNA tests, to definitely determine the paternity of Elisabeth’s six surviving children.

“They all apparently share the same father,” he said.

In the days to come, the incredible story—by far eclipsing the Natascha Kampusch kidnapping—would capture the imagination of the world and plunge Austria into a national scandal.

When Amstetten residents awoke the next morning, learning the full horror of the crime Josef Fritzl had perpetrated in their midst, there was stunned disbelief. Ybbsstrasse was a main shopping street, and every one of the town’s 23,000 residents had walked past his house at one time or another.

And while Elisabeth and the children had been held captive, more than one hundred tenants had lived there, just a few feet over the cellar dungeon. Finally all the late-night banging and other strange occurrences started making sense. Within hours of the story breaking, someone placed a sign outside the house, reading, “Why did nobody notice?”

The Austrian press immediately dubbed Josef Fritzl “Das Inzest-Monster,” branding his actions “The Worst Crime in History.” Many were now looking back at Austria’s role in the Second World War, asking if this was just the latest and worst example yet of a national malaise.

Now the troubled country, only just coming to terms with the horrific eight-year kidnapping of Natascha Kampusch, had a new and far lower benchmark for depravity.

“The community of Amstetten should drown in shame,” declared a Monday morning editorial in the
Osterreich
. “The neighbors are turning a blind eye.”

In the wake of the story, onlookers milled around the drab three-story Fritzl house, watching the forensic teams of investigators go in and out.

“I only have a small pension,” Gertrude Baumgarten, who once worked with Fritzl, told CNN, “but I would spend my money to see him hang on a rope.”

She described him as “arrogant” and someone she deliberately avoided, saying she felt sorry for his wife, who had often spoken of Elisabeth running away.

Like many in Amstetten, Herbert Schneider had considered Josef Fritzl to be the soul of respectability, regularly seeing him breezing around town in his Mercedes-Benz.

“He did not seem to have much to do with many people here,” Schneider recalled. “But he was always very friendly.”

Erika Manhalter, who grew up near Josef Fritzl’s house, remembered him as aloof, never getting close to anyone.

“It certainly seemed as if they were a perfect family unit,” she said. “It just goes to show you cannot really ever see what is happening behind closed doors. I am truly shocked.”

And Gunther Pramreiter, who owned the bakery next door to the Fritzls’ house, said the old couple or their adopted grandchildren came in every day to buy bread.

“You’re amazed that something like this can happen in your neighborhood,” he said.

When Josef Fritzl’s best friend Paul Hoerer, saw Fritzl’s mugshot, accompanying news reports of his arrest, he was speechless.

“I thought there must be some mistake,” he said. “A mix-up.”

Hoerer and his girlfriend Andrea Schmitt, who had often vacationed with Fritzl, last visiting his home three years earlier, could not believe it possible.

“Now I think of the dungeon down there,” he said. “I feel sick. I am ashamed to be linked to him.”

The only member of the Fritzl family willing to give an interview was Jurgen Helm, who was married to Elisabeth’s younger sister Gabrielle. He told the
Austrian Times
that he and his wife had once spent three years living at Ybbsstrasse 40, even going down into the cellar on several occasions.

“I had no idea that a few meters away, this family [was] living,” he said.

As hundreds of reporters converged on Amstetten from all over the world, all the grown-up Fritzl children went into hiding. Hours after her husband’s brief interview, Gabrielle Helm had placed a sign on her chalet-style home just outside Amstetten, reading, “Reporters not welcome.” And in the coming weeks, her brothers and sisters refused to talk to the press during their frequent trips to the Amstetten-Mauer psychiatric hospital for counseling.

Elisabeth’s older brother Harald, 44, who she had always been closest to growing up, would be particularly important in her recovery. He and their sister Doris would also help detectives build a case against their father.

Later, when reporters tracked Harald Fritzl down to a little cottage in Mitterkirchen im Machland, fifteen miles from Amstetten near the River Danube, his wife came out, screaming, “Leave us alone!”