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MORE DETAILS ON THE SEXIEST STORY IN THE WORLD
Elisabeth Fritzl was forced to help build the dungeon where she was kept by her sadistic father Josef, it emerged yesterday. For the first nine months of her 24 years in captivity, she was also tethered with a 5ft dog leash around her neck to prevent her escape. Elisabeth, now 42, had been sexually abused by her father since the age of 11. She ran away from home at the age of 16 but was dragged back by Fritzl and locked up when he suspected she was planning to leave again.
For the first nine years, he imprisoned her in a grim 15ft by 15ft box room which had a makeshift toilet in one corner.
She told police that Fritzl forced her to help drag a 600lb concrete and steel door into position to seal the dungeon.
It was only when it was in place that she discovered she had helped to build her own prison.
Fritzl finally agreed to expand the cellar - again with Elisabeth's help - after she had given birth to two of his children. He forced her to dig out the chambers by hand, working for hours at a time. The process took nearly a decade.
One of the new rooms was used as a punishment area and Fritzl would take his daughter there and rape her.
He also used it to chastise the three of their children - Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and six-year- old Felix - who lived underground with her. Their siblings Lisa, 16, Monika, 14 and 12-year-old Alexander lived a 'normal' life upstairs.
Franz Polzer, who is leading the police investigation, said: "She said that there was only one single room at first between 1984 and 1993. The dungeon was expanded as the children were getting born.
"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.
"Areas of the dungeon appear to have been under construction and it is possible Fritzl may have been planning to expand it even further." The grim details emerged as police revealed that Fritzl, now 73, could escape justice by pleading insanity. A team of psychiatrists are due to examine him today at St Poelten Prison, after which he is expected to be officially sectioned.
Police want to see him die in prison but under the country's law the maximum sentence - even for double murder - is 15 years. That can be reduced to ten for good behaviour.
So far Fritzl is facing charges of rape, incest and kidnap. Fritzl is said to be obsessively watching TV reports about the incarceration and abuse of his daughter from his isolated cell.
He receives up to four bags of hate mail a day - but is said to remain unrepentant. His wife Rosemarie, who police believe was completely unaware of his double life, has also received hate mail.
One letter read: "You must have known when he went on holiday to Thailand that he was messing around with children. Your sick paedophile husband should kill himself."
Mrs Fritzl is living in a specialist unit in a psychiatric clinic with her daughter and five of her grandchildren. Doctors have installed an aquarium for Stefan, who is having difficulties speaking and moving due to his years of captivity.
Elisabeth has been making secret visits to Kerstin's hospital bedside, praying she will recover.
But local priest Franz Halbartschlager, who was called in to perform the last rites on the sick teenager soon after she arrived in hospital, said Kerstin was "pale and thin".
"She was in a coma between life and death," he said after his visit last month. "I prayed for her."
Rosemarie's sister Christine said that the family was struggling to comprehend what had happened.
She added: "My sister is doing very badly and Elisabeth is not in the best shape either.
"I know my sister and when something is wrong with her children the world collapses. For sure, the world has collapsed for her."
She said she was sure her sister did not know what was going on in the cellar of the family's house.
"We spoke about it often when we met. And I would say, 'Rosemarie, where can Elisabeth be?' I even told her myself, she is definitely in a cult."
In police interviews, Elisabeth said that at the start she had fought against the imprisonment, banging on the walls and screaming until she could no longer speak, but no one had come as the weeks turned into months, and the years into decades.
She said she had eventually stopped arguing with her father who in turn had stopped beating her as frequently.
Eventually she had become pregnant with Kerstin, now 19, and she had informed her father - fearing that he would be furious because he would now have to release her to go to hospital.
He had reportedly replied: "Do not think you are getting away from me so easily."
Details of the birth have not been spoken about by Elisabeth but afterwards Fritzl had continued to return frequently for more sex, at least once every three days. Elisabeth had to carry Kerstin, who weighed 50 kilos, upstairs to the car. It was the first time she had seen sunlight that reportedly temporarily blinded her.
As her eyesight slowly adjusted she noticed the way the house had changed, a swimming pool - and what seemed to be a conservatory and another garage had been added.
But just two minutes later she was back in the cellar and the door closed.
Kerstin's two brothers were reportedly both distressed at the sudden disappearance of their sister and had both asked where she was and what was happening to her "outside the door".
Records show the Fritzl then rang the emergency services saying: "This is an emergency, I have just found my niece unconscious."
On the 26 of April, Elisabeth was listening to the local television on the small TV she had in the cellar and saw a report from a doctor that she was being sought because the condition of her daughter had worsened.
For the first time in years she stood up to her father and demanded to be taken to the hospital - where she was found by police.
When Elisabeth spoke to police after she was rescued at the hospital on the 26 April, the information she gave was so shocking officers said they just sat and listened.
They described how she spoke fast, with long pauses as she seemed to struggle to gather her thoughts and look for the right words.
The interview lasted two hours, and produced notes that covered eight sides of A4 paper.
Elisabeth who is in a secure ward with her mother Rosemarie, 69, and five of her six children told investigators her father had acted alone in providing food and clothing for them.
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 meager rations, scuttled around the low-ceilinged labyrinth on all fours. 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. 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. 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." Police, firefighters and a private security company officers with dogs are guarding the hospital around the clock following several violent incidents when photographers and TV crews tried to force their way into the building where the family are being treated.
Mr Herbst said: "The children who grew up in the cellar and had never daylight are incredibly curious about everything and would like to go out and experience the outside world. They have never felt rain or fresh air. But they are forced to stay in their ward because of the many paparazzi that have literally besieged the hospital." "The children took some items from the cellar with them, for example toys. In the clinic area, the children can shout, play and get to know their siblings from outside of the cellar. Physically, they are in quite good condition. And they love the clinic food."
Dr Kepplinger revealed he and his staff had created a container that resembles the dungeon so the children could adjust gradually to their new surroundings.
It was reported today that Stefan has problems with balance and co-ordination, having been brought up in rooms no more than 5ft 6in in height.
Felix, who spent the least time underground, is given the best chance of making as full a recovery as possible.
It is claimed both boys have been panicked by the hospital lifts, fearful that when the doors close they will remain trapped inside, while Felix is said to be confused by mobile phone ringtones.
Never in modern Europe has there been a case of such sustained sensory deprivation.
The treatment of the children has produced a stark warning from Natascha Kampusch, who was kidnapped at the age of 10 in 1998 and held for eight years by her captor in Vienna.
She fears the children may have been pulled out of their environment too quickly and will fail to cope with the stress.
Speaking on television, Ms Kampusch said: "Although they are now in a secret location,I believe it might have been better to leave them where they were - although that was probably impossible - because that was, of course, their environment. Pulling them abruptly out of there without any transition and isolating them cannot be good for them."
She added: "I can imagine that there is a strong attachment to that place."
10:43 AM
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