Fritzl’s wife Rosemarie was unquestioning when children kept turning up on her doorstep. But on the one occasion she did try to leave her tyrannical husband, he burnt down the guest house they owned where she was staying, forcing her to return home. The social services did not even ask themselves why Elisabeth would foist her own children on her parents, who she found so unbearable that she had run away from them. Over the years, social workers paid at least twenty-one visits to the Fritzls’ house and reported nothing unusual about the family. Josef and Rosemarie, they said, were “really loving and warm with their children”.
Fritzl was even allowed to adopt, though he had a conviction for rape. However, under Austrian law, the conviction had long since been expunged from his record. After adopting Lisa, the Fritzls went on to foster Elisabeth’s other two children who were allowed upstairs because it brought them a higher state benefit of h400 a month. Neighbours were sympathetic. Even the local press carried the story about the apparently uncaring mother who kept dropping off her unwanted kids on her parents’ doorstep. They even interviewed Fritzl, who repeated the old story about his daughter being in the hands of some religious group.
After the third child arrived, Fritzl’s sister-in-law Christine began to harbour some suspicions. She suggested to Fritzl that, maybe, he should try to find out about the sect that held such sway over Elisabeth. He said that there was “no point”. Everyone was afraid of Fritzl and the matter was taken no further.
Short of money, Fritzl began an insurance scam, setting small fires around the house. The insurance company paid up. Loss adjusters did little more than a superficial assessment of the damage. A proper investigation would have unearthed the secret of the cellar.
Andrea Schmitt, who, as the girlfriend of Fritzl’s friend Paul Hoera, once accompanied them to Thailand, noticed that Fritzl bought an awful lot of toys for the three children he had above-ground at home in Austria. Paul also noticed that the Fritzl children were never allowed downstairs near the cellar.
Fritzl’s son-in-law Jürgen Helm had been down to the cellar, but had no reason to suspect there was a hidden doorway behind the shelves in the workshop. Fritzl’s son by Rosemarie, Josef Jr, also had access to the cellar, but was rather slow on the uptake and was completely under the thumb of his father. Otherwise, the entire cellar area was strictly off-limits to members of the Fritzl family, friends and the tenants who lived upstairs.
It was only the suspicions of Dr Reiter that paid dividends. Fritzl’s story of his daughter running off to join a bizarre sect, then dumping her sick daughter on her father’s doorstep, did not ring true.
“I did not like his tone and something did not seem right,” said Dr Reiter. “What made me particularly suspicious was that he did not seem to think it important to answer any of my questions, simply demanding we make Kerstin better so that he could take her away again.”
In his effort to contact his patient’s mother, he called the police. The case of Elisabeth Fritzl, who was still classified as missing, was reopened. The letter from Elisabeth, saying that she was coming home soon, was examined. In it, she mentioned Kerstin’s illness, but also wrote that a second child, Felix, had also been ill and she had a third child with her, named Stefan. If these children were in the care of such a neglectful mother, they too were in danger. They had to be found – and fast.
The letter carried the postmark of the town of Kematen an der Krems, which is about 30 miles (48 km) from Amstetten. The police descended. None of the local doctors recalled a patient called Kerstin and no one remembered seeing a girl of her strange, ghostly appearance. No one knew anything about Elisabeth Fritzl and there was no indication that a bizarre sect had ever been in town.
The police then got on to the local diocese to find out what religious sects were at large in the area. The bishopric’s expert on sects, Dr Manfred Wohlfahrt, said that there were none in the diocese or in any of the other dioceses of Lower Austria. He also examined the notes that had been found with the children and the letter Elisabeth had written, saying she was planning to come home. He noted that they had been written in a very deliberate hand, using formulated phrases, and concluded that they had been dictated.
Meanwhile, Dr Reiter made his television appeal, urging Elisabeth Fritzl to come forward. Journalists besieged 40 Ybbsstrasse. Instead of welcoming their help in finding his daughter, Fritzl was hostile and told them to clear off.
Enquiries were made at schools and social security offices, but nowhere was there any record of Elisabeth Fritzl or her children. She had not applied for a passport or a driver’s licence and the births of Kerstin, Stefan and Felix had not been registered.
As the bureaucratic route seemed to be a blind alley, the police tried another tack. If they took DNA samples from Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl and the children Elisabeth had apparently left with them, they should be able to get a DNA profile of the children’s father that might, perhaps, show up on the national database. But Fritzl proved less than helpful. He made several appointments to give a DNA sample, and then cancelled them, saying he had too much to do.
In her basement prison, Elisabeth saw Dr Reiter’s appeal on the television. She managed to persuade her father to let her go to the hospital, promising to back his story that she had been with a religious sect for the past twenty-four years.
It seems they visited the hospital a couple of times, but Dr Reiter was not there. On the third occasion, Fritzl called ahead, saying that Elisabeth had returned home and wanted to see her daughter.
“We do not want any trouble,” Fritzl said. “Do not call the police.”
But the police were already involved and Dr Reiter called them anyway.
When father and daughter reached the hospital, they were arrested. Fritzl resisted and had to be handcuffed.
When Stefan and Felix were discovered, still imprisoned, they were suffering from vitamin D deficiency and anaemia, like their mother and older sister. Prolonged captivity had damaged their immune systems.
Neighbours looked on amazed as crime scene investigators removed boxes of belongings from the underground prison. With Fritzl refusing to answer any further questions, it was the forensic scientists’ job to piece together what had gone on in the cell over the previous quarter of a century. It was gruelling task and the atmosphere in the cramped cellar was described as “oppressive”.
Lower Austria’s top criminal investigator, Colonel Franz Polzer, visited the dungeon.
“I went through it and was very glad to be able to leave,” he said. “The environment in this room where the ceilings were kept very low, less than six foot at the highest point, was anything but pleasant. Everyday living, personal hygiene, etc., must have kept the level of humidity high.”
Investigators found that even when the doors were opened, the air inside remained fetid and the crime scene investigators looked for another way to ventilate the bunker. Officers with years of experience on crime scenes found the working conditions intolerable. Polzer compared it to going down in a submarine. No fresh air could get in and no stale air or moisture could get out. Due to the damp, everything was covered in mildew. Consequently, Elisabeth and the children were found to be suffering from fungal infections and respiratory diseases. But for the crime scene investigators, it was not just the physical conditions that were unpleasant. They were also affected psychologically. Most affecting were the pitiful drawings made by the three children kept in this tiny space since their birth.
The cellar was lit only by dim electric bulbs. These were on a timer to give the illusion of night and day. The walls ran with condensation and water dripped from exposed pipes. From the very first room containing the kitchen and bathroom, investigators were overcome with nausea. The toilet was in a “catastrophic” state, investigators said, and the shower was covered in mould. The small bathroom contained a tiny bath. On the other side of a short partition was a hand basin. A cupboard above contained a toothbrush and other toiletry items. Beside it hung a hand towel and a hot-water bottle. Elisabeth’s white bathrobe hung from a peg on the wall. Next to it was a small table covered with a plastic tablecloth and small hot plates for cooking.
A corridor led to two bedrooms, separated by a thin partition. Each contained two beds. No door or curtain separated the bedrooms – or any other room – which meant that Fritzl’s sexual assaults on his daughter were in clear sight of their children. All other bodily functions also had to be performed in full view of the rest of the occupants.
The first part of the dungeon was padded and the whole vault soundproofed. But the basement was deep underground. No sound from the outside could be heard and no scream, however loud, could penetrate the thick concrete walls. The ventilation shaft was of the type designed for nuclear bunkers. It had filters to prevent fallout passing down it and baffles to deaden the blast. Consequently, the dungeon was an enclosed and silent world, completely isolated from anything outside it.
The filtration system would have restricted the air flow through it, reducing the supply of oxygen. But nuclear shelters were only designed to be occupied for a couple of weeks, not years on end. It would also have been unbearably hot. With little airflow and insulated walls, there would have been no escape from the heat generated by cooking, hot water, electrical appliances and four human bodies. The humidity produced by bathing, washing, cooking and breathing would have turned it into a sauna. The stench was almost unbearable, according to the police. However, Elisabeth had kept the place neat and tidy.
The forensic team had to comb the scene for weeks on end as their work rate was slow due to the lack of oxygen. They worked one-hour shifts and, if there were any more than four officers in the cellar at any one time, they found they could not breathe.
“Investigators wearing special clothes and masks can work there only one hour,” said Polzer, “and during this hour they try, one team after the other, to gather everything available in this living space and search particularly for DNA traces to establish if the alleged criminal really committed this on his own. Not until then can we start with technical investigations like sonar probes, cavity and sound measurements, and also to comprehend all the electric and electronic systems.”
DNA analysis of samples taken from the cellar confirmed that Fritzl worked alone. No traces of DNA belonging to anyone except Fritzl and his captive family were found, and Elisabeth said she never saw anyone else in the cellar. There was still the mystery of the plumber Alfred Dubanovsky had seen. Other experts were called in to examine the electrical, plumbing and security features of the dungeon to see whether Fritzl could have built it all himself.
Even a week after its discovery, Polzer said: “There are still areas we haven’t found inside the dungeon and I expect it to take at least two weeks before we have answered all the questions we need to about how Fritzl controlled the areas and imprisoned the children.”
It appeared that Fritzl had intended to extend the dungeon even further and crime scene investigators had to search further rooms filled with earth and rubble beyond the windowless living quarters they already knew about. Three weeks into the investigation, officers were breaking through walls to reach the hidden rooms.
Due to the death of Michael, Fritzl was the subject of a murder investigation and sniffer dogs were used to search the site for human remains. Forensic archaeologists were also brought in. They used ground-penetrating radar and sonar to scan the area around the house in case bodies or body parts were buried there.
The police concluded that Fritzl had worked alone and that he had begun his plan to imprison Elisabeth as early as 1978, soon after he began sexually abusing her. Rosemarie was living at the guest house they own at the time, so he could begin work on the bunker unhindered. It was no accident that Fritzl finally imprisoned Elisabeth at the time she met her first serious boyfriend.
“Today, we know for certain that part of the old cellar and the old house was kept back as a reserve, so to speak,” said Colonel Polzer, “and that this new house suddenly gained a small space of 30 to 35 m
2
[320 to 375 ft
2
] without anyone noticing. We are now proceeding on the assumption that he had already settled on the plan to build his own personal
Reich
as early as 1978 and start a relationship with his pretty daughter Elisabeth in the cellar.”
To begin with, she had no cooking area and no facilities for storing food, so she was completely dependent on her father’s visits. The cooking area and the bedrooms were only added later. Before that, Elisabeth and the children would have had to eat, sleep and live in a single room with a low ceiling and a floor space of just 14 ft 6 in. by 14 ft 6 in. (4.5 4.5 m).
Extending the dungeon with Elisabeth and the children captive inside would have made their nightmare even worse. Their tiny living area would have been filled with dust and rubble. The work would have been rendered almost impossible due to the lack of oxygen and took years.
Fritzl was charged with incest, rape, false imprisonment, enslavement, grievous assault for threatening to gas his captives if they disobeyed him and negligent homicide of the infant Michael. At his trial in Sankt Pölten in Austria, he pleaded guilty to all the charges except grievous assault and murder. On the second day of the trial, Elisabeth appeared in court in disguise. Fritzl recognized her, broke down and changed his plea to guilty on all charges. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole for fifteen years. He accepted the sentence and said he would not appeal. He would serve out his sentence in a former abbey converted into a prison, in the section for the criminally insane.
A
T
4
P.M. OF
the afternoon of 12 August 1995, thirty-year-old part-time waitress and mother of two Vikki Thompson, who planned to study maths and computing at Oxford Brookes University, decided to take her dog, a collie named Daisy, for a walk near the picturesque village of Ascott-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire. When the dog returned home without her mistress, Vikki’s husband Jonathan put their children Matthew and Jenny, then aged eight and six, in the car and went out looking for her. Neighbours who joined the search found her lying on rocks at the bottom of an embankment near the Cotswold Railway line between 7.15 and 7.30 p.m. near where a farmer and three local residents had heard screams some hours earlier.