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| Man Imprisoned Daughter For 24 Years - Raped and Fathered Several Children with Her
I don't have any words. I cannot understand people. I cannot understand why some do this sort of horrific thing to each other. It sickens me to no end.
There are so many articles about this, I'm posting a few of them.
From here Quote:
What drove father who built the house of horror?
(CNN) -- Police, medical professionals and those who know Josef Fritzl are struggling to piece together how he led a double life for more than two decades in a small Austrian town.
Those who knew Fritzl describe him in such contrasting terms -- friendly, reclusive, arrogant, a kindly grandfather -- that it seems no one really knew him at all.
At his home on Ybbsstrasse in the quiet town of Amstetten, east of Vienna, the 73-year-old retired electrician lived with his wife, Rosemarie, and the three children he has admitted to fathering with his daughter.
In addition to those three children, Fritzl fathered four other children with the now 42-year-old daughter he kept imprisoned in the cellar, police said.
The children were products of years of sexual assault Fritzl inflicted on her, police said. Two boys and a teenage girl were locked up with their mother in a basement dungeon. A seventh child he fathered with his daughter died, and Fritzl burned the infant's body, police said.
The three children who were locked up had not ever seen the light of day, investigators said.
Fritzl had been lying to his wife for years, telling her his daughter had dropped off the three children at the house because she could not take care of them, police said. In reality, Fritzl had forced his imprisoned daughter to write letters that made it seem that way. Police say Fritzl's wife was unaware of the other children in the cellar.
It was a deception he maintained from 1984 until just days ago.
Rosemarie Fritzl was unaware of her husband's crimes, police spokesman Franz Polzer said.
"Let me also add that we know the suspect not only possessed an increased sexual potency, he's also very dynamic, imperious and quite authoritarian in his conduct and relationship to his existing family," Polzer said Monday.
Polzer added that Fritzl made clear to his wife and the children living with them that the basement area was out of bounds. He bought food for his captives and took it to them at night.
Medical professionals have also offered their interpretations of Fritzl.
"What is chilling about this case is the cold, sociopathic detachment that Josef F[ritzl] went through year after year, decades even, to hide his crimes," said clinical psychologist Dr. Kristina Downing-Orr.
"It was as if there was no remorse, no empathy for his daughter, for his grandchildren, for his wife. That's what's chilling."
She said Fritzl, who his daughter has said abused her beginning at the age of 11, possibly didn't want the relationship to end when she turned 18. So he imprisoned her.
"Perhaps she would go out and have boyfriends of her own," Downing-Orr said. "Perhaps he was a bit afraid he would be caught, that she would go out and tell people, and that led him to imprison her in this dungeon basement.
"It's that chilling sociopathic methodology, that kind of logic, that I find particularly chilling," she continued. "But fortunately, it's very rare; we rarely see that kind of behavior."
Verena Huber, 14, went to high school with one of the children raised by Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl. Alexander Fritzl, 12, seemed to have no clue about what was going on.
"He always told us his mother was dead," Huber said, describing the boy as happy and normal.
The fact that Josef Fritzl lived reclusively didn't alarm anyone, most people in the small town say.
Karl Dallinger is in the Amstetten fire brigade, in which Austrian youth learn the basics of first aid and other survival skills. He also said Monika and Alexander Fritzl seemed normal.
"They were both always willing to learn," he said. "They were good kids, they seemed to be happy kids."
Their grandmother often came to fire brigade events with her grandchildren to help cook spaghetti for everyone, he said.
"People here say this is difficult to understand or accept because [the Fritzls'] reputation in this community was as the kindly grandparents for taking in these children and raising them," said CNN's Phil Black, reporting from Amstetten.
A woman in Amstetten, identified only as Gabriele H., told Austria's Kurier newspaper that she thought Fritzl was a devoted grandfather doing his best to look after his abandoned grandchildren.
"One who looks after their grandchildren whilst their mother just ran away. We were all asking ourselves, what kind of mother would do that to their children?" she said.
"Mr. Fritzl and I grew up together," Erika Manhalter, who lives a few meters from the Fritzl home, told Kurier. "We thought this would be a family just like others, but you cannot look through people."
| From here Quote:
'House of horror' children never saw daylight
AMSTETTEN, Austria (CNN) -- Three children freed from a cellar in which their mother had been imprisoned and raped by her own father for 24 years had never seen daylight, police in Austria have confirmed.
Police spokesman Franz Polzer told CNN that 73-year-old Josef Fritzl admitted holding his daughter, Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, hostage in the windowless cell and fathering seven children by her.
"The mother had memories [of the outside world] and got used to the situation," Polzer told a press conference Monday afternoon. "The others knew nothing else."
The main question reverberating from the small Austrian town: How could a man keep his daughter locked in his basement for 24 years, where she gave birth to seven of his children while her mother and three of those children lived upstairs without an inkling of the horrors in the cellar?
Fritzl explained Elisabeth's disappearance by saying she had run away from home, a story backed up by letters he forced Elisabeth to write, including one that begged her parents not to look for her.
Other letters made it seem the missing daughter had left the three children on the parents' doorstep -- when in fact they had been born in captivity in the family's basement.
Elisabeth told police that she and her three children Kerstin, 19; Stefan, 18; and Felix, 5, did not see the light of day during their entire time in captivity underneath the building in Amstetten, a rural town about 150 km (93 miles) west of Vienna.
Elisabeth is described as "very disturbed" and having trouble talking to police about her ordeal, reports CNN correspondent Fred Pleitgen. She went missing in 1984, when she was 18 years old, police have said.
More details also emerged at the news conference about the basement dungeon in which the daughter and her children were kept -- and how her father managed to keep them captive for more than two decades.
The authorities have revealed that the prison, constructed in the basement of the 1960s building, ran underneath both the building itself and the garden outside.
The entrance was via a small door, hidden behind cupboards in the basement, controlled by an electronic keyless-entry system. Polzer said that the prison was hard to find, even if someone was looking for it, and had been soundproofed.
"Even though they shouted and called they were not in a position to let anyone hear them," Polzer told the press conference.
Polzer said that Fritzl made clear to his wife and other children that the area was out of bounds and they were not to go into the basement. He bought food and took it to his captives in the evening.
Detectives made the grim discovery about the cellar earlier this month after Kerstin was hospitalized in Amstetten after falling unconscious and taken to a hospital in Amstetten by her grandfather with a SOS note from her mother hidden on her.
A DNA test was later carried out which revealed her grandfather, Josef Fritzl, was also her father, according to ORF, Austria's state-run news agency.
That sparked a police investigation, which revealed that Fritzl fathered at least six children with his daughter, forcing her and three of the surviving children to live in the cellar of his house, according to ORF's Peter Schmitzberger.
On Sunday, police searched the hidden rooms where Fritzl admitted he kept his daughter and their children, including sleeping quarters, a kitchen and a bathroom, which Fritzl told police he built, Polzer said.
Amstetten police say they were put on Fritzl's trail following an anonymous tip off. They apprehended the pair on Saturday near the hospital and once police assured the daughter that she would never have contact with her father again, "she was able to tell the whole story," Schmitzberger said.
Elisabeth said her father began sexually abusing her at age 11. On August 8, 1984 -- weeks before she was reported missing -- her father enticed her into the basement, where he drugged her, put her in handcuffs and locked her in a room, she told police.
For the next 24 years, she was constantly raped by her father, resulting in the six surviving children, she said, according to the police statement.
She also told police she gave birth to twins in 1996, but one of the babies died a few days later as a result of neglect, and Fritzl removed the infant's body and burned it in an oven.
She told police that only her father supplied her and her children with food and clothing, and that she did not think his wife knew anything about their situation
Fritzl lived upstairs with his wife, Rosemarie, who police said had no idea about her husband's other family living in the cellar. The couple adopted three of the children that Fritzl had with his daughter, according to police. He told his wife that his missing daughter had dropped the unwanted children off at the house because she could not take care of them, police said.
When Kerstin fell ill, Fritzl apparently told his wife and the hospital that his "missing" daughter had dropped off the sick girl on his doorstep.
In an effort to find out about Kerstin's condition, the hospital and police asked the media to put out a bulletin requesting any information about the girl or her missing mother, attorney general Gerhard Sedlacek told NTV.
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Sometime later, Fritzl brought Elisabeth out of the cellar, telling his wife that she had returned home with her two children after a 24-year absence, police said.
He took Elisabeth to the hospital to talk with doctors about Kerstin's condition, and at that point, authorities became aware of her situation, Sedlacek said.
| From here Quote:
Evil dad Josef Fritzl's dungeon victim is dying
Doctors yesterday said the critically-ill daughter of Josef Fritzl is expected to die.
Kerstin, 19, who lived her entire life locked in Fritzl's underground bunker with her mother Elisabeth and two brothers, is suffering from multiple organ failure.
A hospital spokesman in Amstetten, Austria, said: "Her chances for survival are very low."
Kerstin is the eldest of the seven children Fritzl had by daughter Elisabeth after repeatedly raping her during her 24 years in captivity.
The 73-year-old ex-engineer could face a murder charge if Kerstin dies. A prosecutor said: "We'll look at bringing charges for murder through negligence."
Kerstin's illness lead to the discovery of the grim cellar beneath Fritzl's house two weeks ago.
Elisabeth, 42, had begged him to release Kerstin for medical treatment - and when he did, doctors became so suspicious they alerted police.
| From here Quote:
Dungeon monster Josef Fritzl schemed to cheat justice
May 2 2008 Emily Miller In Austria
EVIL dungeon dad Josef Fritzl threatened to kill his sex slave daughter and her children with gas if they tried to escape.
Fritzl repeatedly told daughter Elisabeth that he had built a machine to pump deadly fumes into the cellar where he held her prisoner for 24 years.
And he vowed that if she or her children ever attempted to overpower him, he would use the device to kill them all.
Austrian police spokesman Helmut Greiner confirmed: "He said during his questioning that he threatened the children held in the cellar with gas if anything ever happened."
A team of six police specialists were yesterday searching the cellar beneath Fritzl's home in Amstetten for evidence of gas pipes and pumps.
Greiner said: "We are checking to see if it is true or whether it was simply a threat he made to the children."
Fritzl, now 73, terrorised, raped and beat Elisabeth for nearly a quarter of a century after caging her in a specially built prison in his cellar when she was just 18.
He fathered seven children with his daughter. He left three in the cellar, took three upstairs to live with him and threw the body of the seventh into a heating furnace when he died in infancy.
Despite the enormity of his crimes, Fritzl believed he could go to his grave without anyone ever finding out about them.
The police revealed yesterday that he hatched a bizarre plot to cheat justice.
He believed he could simply resurrect Elisabeth - and cellar children Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix, five - and terrify them into keeping quiet about their ordeal.
Chief Inspector Franz Polzer said Fritzl, 73, dreamed up his plan more than a year ago. He added: "It seems that he wanted to free himself from his responsibilities and return his victims to some sort of normal life."
It's also believed Fritzl had lost interest in raping Elisabeth, now 42, who had been left grey-haired, toothless and haggard by the hell she had suffered.
When he locked Elisabeth in the cellar, Fritzl told wife Rosemarie she had run away to join a religious cult.
He relied on the same cover story to explain the arrival at the family home of the kids he took from the cellar as babies - Lisa, now 16, Monica, 14, and Alex, 12.
Fritzl put the tots on the doorstep of his home, with letters from Elisabeth saying she was giving them up because she could not look after them.
When he decided to close down his dungeon, Fritzl used the cult story again and ordered Elisabeth to write another bogus letter. This time, he told her to say she was ready to return home.
Elisabeth wrote: "If all goes well, I hope to be back within six months."
Fritzl took the letter upstairs last Christmas and gave it to his wife.
Polzer said: "It was supposed to appear as though the bad mother had finally come home with her three children."
Fritzl planned to explain the pitiful condition of Elisabeth and the children by claiming the cult had mistreated them. But his scheme was thrown into chaos last month after Kerstin fell seriously ill.
She began suffering agonising cramps on April 19 and quickly deteriorated.
Fearing that Kerstin would die on him, Fritzl gave in to her mum's desperate pleas to get her to a hospital. But first, he took Elisabeth upstairs and told his astonished wife that she had come home.
Fritzl told the cult story to the doctors when he went with Kerstin and Elisabeth to the hospital.
But the medics were suspicious because of Elisabeth's condition and because Fritzl asked them not to call the police.
Fritzl had also failed to spot a note that Elisabeth had hidden in Kerstin's clothes.
It read: "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."
At the foot of the message to the doctors, Elisabeth had added: "Kerstin, please stay strong, until we see each other again! We will come back to you soon!"
After leaving Kerstin at the hospital, Elisabeth returned to the house, where Stefan and Felix were still in the cellar.
But the doctors could not believe that such a caring mum would willingly abandon her desperately ill daughter.
They alerted police and appealed on TV for Elisabeth to get back in touch. She saw the plea and begged Fritzl to take her back to the hospital.
Police were waiting when they arrived. Elisabeth told her story and Fritzl was arrested.
Elisabeth is being cared for in a psychiatric unit with Stefan, Felix, Monica, Lisa and Alex. Kerstin is still fighting for life on a ventilator.
Fritzl is in prison awaiting trial and now refuses to talk to police. He has complained about conditions in the jail.
| He has complained about conditions in the jail?????
From here Quote:
Sex slave dungeon: As dramatic family snaps emerge, the question is asked - how could NONE of Josef Fritzl's family known his horrific secret
A few weeks ago, Josef Fritzl treated his wife, Rosemarie, and their three 'above stairs' children to a pizza lunch at their favourite Italian restaurant - a regular Saturday ritual.
According to Wael Sahan, owner of the Casa Verona in Amstetten, they appeared to be the model, middle-class Austrian family, as always.
"They just seemed so very normal," he told me. "The two teenage girls and their younger brother were smartly dressed and really polite, unlike some kids we serve. And there was lots of laughter from their table, particularly when the father cracked a joke."
Compare this uplifting everyday scene to the grotesque indignities being suffered at that very moment, a short walk from the restaurant, by Josef Fritzl's secret 'below stairs' family.
As their three siblings enjoyed their weekend outing, Kerstin Fritzl, 19, and her brothers Stefan, 18, and Felix, five, were locked away in a dank cellar where they subsisted like Neanderthal cave-dwellers.
Condemned to a life without daylight or fresh air, they survived on meagre rations, scuttled around the low-ceilinged labyrinth on all fours, and communicated in an eerie dialect of growls and grunts.
As the world learned this week to its revulsion, Fritzl, 73, sired all six of these incestuous children (plus a seventh who died at birth and was hurled into a furnace) by his own daughter, Elisabeth, whom he kept as his sex-slave for an incredible 24 years.
The contrasting manner in which he treated his incestuous offspring - adopting and raising three with apparent normality, while damning the others to live in a subterranean nether world - is among the many conundrums of a story so nightmarish it beggars belief.
Among Amstetten's older generation, Fritzl's ability to enjoy a perfectly ordinary, and indeed successful, life while inflicting such terrible torment, evokes uncomfortable echoes of a chapter in their history they would prefer to forget.
During the War, the ruling Nazis built an extension of the notorious Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in this town, and its officers indulged themselves in Austrian beer and women while starving and torturing thousands of prisoners.
There is nothing new about familial child sex abuse, of course. According to Harvard Professor Judith Lewis Herman, author of an authoritative study Father-Daughter Incest, this most reviled taboo is more common than we care to imagine.
Yet, for all this, the Austrian House of Horrors saga is uniquely abhorrent. Never in modern times has there been a case quite as harrowing and repugnant as this. That much is clear from scenes inside the Mauer Clinic, near Amstetten, where Elisabeth and the children are being treated.
They are so utterly disoriented by life above ground that doctors have had a mock cellar built, complete with a 5ft 6in ceiling and impossibly narrow corridors, like the one that was for years their entire world.
And the Mail has been told how Elisabeth - whose white hair, emaciated frame and haggard features are those of an old woman, though she is only 42 - huddles forlornly inside it for hours, with the keening Felix clinging to her for comfort.
Meanwhile, last night, Kerstin - whose urgent need for hospital treatment finally persuaded Fritzl to release his captives last Saturday - clings to life by a thread.
Doctors refuse to disclose the precise nature of her illness, but she is suffering some form of auto-immune failure believed to result from her inbreeding. She has suffered multiple organ failure and is not expected to survive. If she dies, Fritzl could be charged with murder, on the grounds of negligence. He faces a similar charge over the baby whose body he incinerated.
As beleaguered Lower Austrian police chief Colonel Frank Polzer admits, the case raises 'a million and one unanswered questions'.
Faced with an international outcry, Polzer promises they will all be resolved, a task which will involve piecing together every detail of Fritzl's tortuous past, including the dreadful day in August 1984, when he drugged and handcuffed the then 18-year-old Elisabeth and bundled her into the cellar.
Yesterday, evidence was mounting that his daughter was by no means the only victim of his sick lust. A woman came forward to say she is '100 per cent sure' it was he who raped her in September 1967, when she was 20 years old; an attack she was then too humiliated to report.
Another woman is convinced Fritzl was the sex attacker whom she fought off around the same time. He was subsequently jailed for breaking into a nurse's ground-floor flat and raping her.
Meanwhile, police are reviewing 64 missing person cases. Yesterday, they ruled out fears that he may have committed the brutal murder of 17-year-old Martina Posch, who bore an 'uncanny' resemblance to Elisabeth.
Her body was found in Mondsee, a scenic lakeside resort where Fritzl then owned a holiday lodge. He claims to have an alibi for the day in November 1986 when she was killed and dumped in the lake. However, his close friend Andrea Schmitt told me her husband was staying there at the time - and she believes Fritzl was there too.
No doubt this will interest the Austrian police.
Worryingly, however, one question they have decided not to pursue is whether Rosemarie Fritzl - who bore the monster six more children during their 51-year marriage - might have known all along what was going on in the cellar.
Asked why, Polzer blithely opined that it 'defies logic' that any wife could have remained silent while her husband created another family with their own daughter.
One hopes he is proved right, and that there is nothing of her namesake, Rosemary West (who was jailed for life for joining her husband Fred in a murder spree at their Gloucester home), about 68-year-old Rosemarie.
Given that the Austrian police are facing unprecedented criticism following serious blunders in the Natascha Kampusch case, however, it was a bold and worryingly premature assertion.
Particularly if there is any truth in the sensational claim made yesterday by one of Fritzl's neighbours, Alfred Dubanovsky. He says he witnessed Rosemarie helping her husband to stash wheelbarrows laden with food inside the cellar.
Yet if Josef Fritzl really did keep the dungeon's dark secrets hidden from his wife, what possessed him to keep his daughter locked up for a quarter of a century - and how did he get away with it?
This week, talking to those who knew the many sides of this chillingly enigmatic man, the full truth began to emerge.
We may care to imagine Josef Fritzl as some freakish character of low intelligence, but despite that cruelly arched right eyebrow and menacing smirk, the reality is very different.
Born into an Austria just before the Anschluss (union) with Hitler's Germany, he was, in fact, a very bright, resourceful boy who gained high qualifications in both electrics and engineering.
By all accounts, he was also something of a moustached charmer, though hardly in the David Niven mould. He was insufferably arrogant and self-absorbed, and from his lecherous innuendoes it was clear he was unnaturally obsessed with sex.
During the late Fifties, when he was 22, he married Rosemarie, then just 17, but her family distrusted him from the outset. Their view was confirmed years later, when he was jailed for raping the nurse.
"Josef is a despot," explains her 56-year-old sister, Christina. "I was 16 when he was locked up and I found the crime simply disgusting, not least because he already had four children with my sister.
"He treated the children as if they were in the army. When he entered a room, everyone went quiet. You could sense the fear of punishment."
At the time of the nurse's rape, Fritzl was working as an electrical engineer at a steel plant in Linz. When he was imprisoned he lost his job, but such was his penchant for inventing new devices that in 1969, after his release, he was immediately re-employed.
"My father often said he was an absolute genius," says a daughter of his late boss, Karl Zehetner. "He was amazed at what he could do."
Fritzl's ingenuity would later be put to use when constructing the elaborate dungeon, with its electronically-controlled sliding steel door, and a sound-proofed cell where he could rape the hapless Elisabeth just a few feet away from their muted children.
He had five daughters by Rosemarie (plus two sons) but with her picture-book Austrian good looks - high cheekbones, wide eyes and a rosebud smile - Elisabeth was always the apple of his eye. By 1977, when she was 11, what began as over-indulgence developed into a fixation, and he began abusing her.
He also became frighteningly possessive and flew into furious rages if she attempted to dress fashionably, wore make-up, or mentioned boys.
As she grew into a teenager, Elisabeth's best friend at Amstetten High School, Christa Woldrich, saw the effect this had on her.
"Elisabeth became very sullen and withdrawn," she told me. "She wasn't allowed out in the evenings or to invite friends to the house. I think she was comfortable only at school, though she wasn't very good at anything.
"She was so pretty she could have had boyfriends, but she never did. She just sat quietly and no one noticed her. When I think about it, I wonder why the teachers never realised something was wrong." Elisabeth left school at 15 and, unsurprisingly, was put to work under her father's constant gaze.
By now, Fritzl was an entrepreneur and small-time property owner, and - while her siblings escaped by marrying - she was ordered to help him run his lakeside campsite and restaurant.
Since the delicate process of debriefing Elisabeth has yet to begin (she has thus far managed just one, two-hour interview) and Fritzl's lawyer has instructed him to add nothing to his initial confession, no one yet knows what prompted him to drug his daughter and cast her into the cellar.
But it seems clear that by her 18th birthday he had recreated her in his warped mind's-eye as his 'mistress'. His sister-in-law, Christina, says he had by then ceased to have sex with his wife, whom he constantly criticised for being overweight and considered unworthy of him.
And later, after Elisabeth was installed in her prison, he bought her skimpy outfits and lingerie which no one, bar him, would ever see her wear.
On one of his holidays in the tacky fleshpots of Thailand, Fritzl's best friend, Paul Hoerer, surprised him as he was buying a dress that was far too small for his wife. "I have to admit I've got a young bit on the side," he said sheepishly.
To impress Elisabeth, her father also dressed smartly for his nocturnal visits to the cellar, and - ludicrously - covered his bald pate with an expensive Viennese hairpiece.
We now know that after Elisabeth vanished, Fritzl invented the story that she had gone off to join a religious sect - a story that might just be plausible in the United States, but is preposterous in Austria, where there are none.
He embellished the ruse by sending himself and Rosemarie letters, purportedly written by Elisabeth.
When she bore his children - alone and unaided in the cellar - he allowed her to keep the first two, Kerstin and Stefan, and the last, Felix.
Oddly, however, he decided to care for Lisa, now 16, Monika, 15, and Alexander, 12, above stairs at number 40 Ybstrasse, a three-storey house with daunting, sheer concrete walls and small, cell-like windows.
Having staged their Moses-like appearance on his doorstep shortly after their birth, he persuaded the breathtakingly gullible local social services department to allow him to adopt them.
The ploy was made easier by the fact that his rape conviction, and another, for burning down one of his own properties in an apparent insurance scam, were, unbelievably, expunged from the records under Austrian law.
The only small mercy is that these adopted children appear remarkably well-adjusted.
According to his sister-in-law, Christine, while he was raising them, Fritzl's life followed a regular pattern. "Every day, at 9pm, he'd go down to the cellar, allegedly to draw plans of machines that he sold to companies.
"Often he would stay down there for the whole night and Rosemarie was not even allowed to bring him a cup of coffee."
Whatever did his wife think he was doing for all those hours? In 24 years did she never once hear a plaintive female cry?
If Rosemary Fritzl did know something, then a series of photographs exclusively obtained by the Mail reveal her to have been incredibly sanguine about her role as the wife of a man who was both father and grandfather to six children.
Taken on a day trip with friends in 1994, they show the frumpy frau in a crimson dress, tending to her 'vanished' daughter's third child, Lisa, then aged two.
However, by then, the Fritzls ran a restaurant and guesthouse in Aschbach, a village near Amstetten, and according to Roswita Zmug, who later took over the business from them, her happiness was illusory.
"The marriage was over," she told me. "There was a coldness between them and they didn't even talk to each other.
"Fritzl would just sit in the bar all day, ogling the women customers and grinning as if he had no care in the world, while she ran around doing all the hard work.
"Once, after a child had mysteriously appeared on their doorstep, I asked how it could possibly have happened. Rosemarie told me all about her daughter going off to join the cult.
"It seemed incredible to me, but not to her. Still, I'm convinced she didn't then know anything about her husband's life below stairs."
Perhaps not, though many Amstetten residents remain sceptical that he could have preserved the grim secret for a further 14 years.
Whatever the truth, why ever did Fritzl allow his daughter to escape last Saturday after keeping her for so long in his clutches?
If we believe his own explanation, he was suddenly stricken with compassion after Kerstin collapsed, so took her to hospital accompanied by her mother.
It now seems, however, that there is a more predictable reason. For according to the police, this abominably vain man was no longer attracted to his prematurely aged daughter, and was making plans for her dramatic 'return' from the cult which had supposedly spirited her away.
Additionally, I am told, Elisabeth had become increasingly confident as she grew older, and her septuagenarian father began to buckle under her demands for improved conditions for herself and her children.
So what does the future hold for all the players in this dark tale?
Though Josef Fritzl will make an audacious appeal for bail when he appears in court in a fortnight's time, he seems sure to see out his days in captivity, albeit considerably more spacious and comfortable than the labyrinth where he kept his twilight family.
His wife and daughter, who were emotionally reunited in the clinic this week, face many months of therapy, and it is difficult to countenance how Elisabeth, in particular, can ever live normally, much less find peace of mind.
And what of her children, who, as one psychologist put it starkly this week, were effectively 'captive-bred like laboratory animals'?
For Kerstin, racked by some untold genetically mutated ailment, death might come as a mercy. For Stefan, a young man now but barely able to speak, physically weak and cursed with a prehistoric gait, the future also appears bleak.
The real hope lies with Felix who, at five years old, might just be young enough to recover. This week, when not clinging to his mother, he has experienced the thrill of riding in a car and marvelled at his first sighting of the Moon.
'Is that God up there?' he asked his doctors poignantly. We can only pray that as this poor little boy attempts to come to terms with the horrors of his creation, the heavens will look kindly on him.
| __________________ Nikki Heat made my Icon |
Have a happy holiday & prosperous new year! 
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