IT IS five years since Dr Albert Reiter was asked to examine a young woman
brought into the hospital intensive care ward in Amstetten, Austria.
She was a teenager but she resembled a wizened old woman – bleeding gums,
missing teeth, skin so white he later remarked that he needed sunglasses to
look at it.
The patient was 19-year-old Kerstin Fritzl, who, until she was carried
unconscious into the hospital, had never spent a second outside the stinking
underground dungeon that her father, Josef Fritzl, had made her home.
Kerstin was the first of seven incest children born in the darkness, one of
whom died after their tormentor refused to get him medical help.
A week after Kerstin entered hospital her family’s terrible secret – how
Fritzl had fathered the children by his own daughter Elisabeth, unbeknown to
his wife Rosemarie – finally exploded across the world. The Sun’s ALLAN HALL
chronicled the family’s story in his best-selling book, Monster.
Five years on, this is his update on Elisabeth, Rosemarie – and the monster
known worldwide simply as Fritzl.
Elisabeth
ELISABETH gathered her six children in the house guarded by CCTV cameras in
“Village X” in rural Austria shortly after moving into it in 2009.
Their father, Josef, then 74 — who was also Elisabeth’s father — had just been
jailed for life for the rape, incest and enslavement of his own children.
The 42-year-old told them: “This is home now, for all of us. You have to get
to know each other, I have to get to know three of you. But we are a family.
Nothing will come between us.”
Today the Fritzls have all been given new identities by an Austrian state
seeking to atone for failing Elisabeth during the years she seemingly
vanished from the face of the earth.
In the first months of freedom the adjustments were enormous. Seeing a cloud
in the sky was an event in itself for Kerstin, now 24, Stefan, 23, and
ten-year-old Felix — the children who had lived all their lives underground.
In the new house they were reunited with Monika, now 19, Lisa, 20, and
Alexander, 16, who had all lived upstairs in the main house with Fritzl and
Rosemarie.
One of the carers who helped in the writing of Monster said: “Initially there
was conflict between the cellar children and the upstairs family raised by
their grandparents.
“The day the upstairs children started calling Elisabeth ‘Mama’ was the day
she knew she had won their hearts.”
The house has no internal doors and, most importantly, no cellar. It also has
three bathrooms — cleanliness was a constant problem in the cellar, which
was awash with sewage. When first in the house Elisabeth showered up to ten
times a day. That is now down to two.
Kerstin, who loves music and clothes, has a boyfriend and spends her days with
a private tutor who teaches her and Stefan.
Stefan, a gentle, introspective soul, dreams of becoming a ship’s captain,
seeing a world that just a few short years ago was confined to a single,
stinking room.
Felix has since virtually forgotten his time in the cellar. He attends a local
school, among children who know nothing of his terrible past.
Monika is preparing to go to university next year, Lisa is working on
finishing her high school exams and Alexander wants to become a mechanical
engineering apprentice.
Elisabeth was given the house, worth £680,000, by the state, a £50,000 lump
sum and a pension in the region of £3,400 a month.
She has been badgered by publishers to write a book of her ordeal that would
earn millions.
She does not want to know. She wants her family and nothing more.
Fritzl
NOW 78, prisoner 4546765 sits alone in his cell, staring at shopping channels
on TV. Occasionally the door rattles when a passing con hits it and shouts
an insult.
But reality is leaving the old man’s mind daily, as he slides into the grip of
dementia in Austria’s Stein prison for mentally abnormal criminals.
When he was jailed in 2009, Fritzl was obsessed with getting his family back
on his side. For a year he bombarded Elisabeth with pathetic letters, sent
via his lawyer, asking for sympathy, understanding… and even money.
At one stage — and it is still unclear how — he obtained the phone number of
the house where Elisabeth lives and rang it. It was changed within 24 hours.
Fritzl even tried dissuading his wife Rosemarie from divorcing him, but
failed. Also using his lawyers, the property developer with a
multimillion-pound empire audaciously tried to obtain planning permission
for a dozen or so flats, an underground garage and an office block on land
he bought before he was brought to justice.
It was at first approved, then banned.
The letter writing and phone calls have now dried up as Fritzl becomes
increasingly detached from reality, segregated from other prisoners who
abuse him, languid for most of the day due to drugs.
A prison source said: “He is going nowhere fast but to the grave. He will
never be freed.”
Rosemarie
FRITZL’S wife Rosemarie wept as she sat slumped in the gloom of the cellar
where her own daughter had been imprisoned for so many years.
“Why?” she cried out out in the darkness. “Why?”
It was May 2008, a month after the family’s nightmare had come to light. She
too was a victim of this tragedy.
Her daughter Elisabeth was devastated when she later learned her mother had
accepted her father’s lies — that she had run off to join a cult and had
kept dumping children on their doorstep.
The carer who helped with the book Monster said: “They are reunited but things
sometimes remain tense between them.
“Rosemarie is a weak character who was as much a victim of Fritzl as everyone
else.”
Even so, she did find the courage to divorce her husband and now lives alone
in a tiny flat in Linz. She has a small pension, which she tries to bolster
by selling home-made handbags and paper flowers.
Her former husband’s multimillion-pound property empire was seized by the
state and she received nothing from it. She was upset that she couldn’t even
take any furniture from the family home.
Instead, everything was impounded to pay off the debts of Fritzl, who she has
never visited in jail and insists she never will.
Meanwhile, reconciliation with Elisabeth is everything to her, and there is a
kind of truce.
Rosemarie, now 74, visits the family once a week and is adored by all the
children, who know that whatever else she may have been, she was no willing
conspirator with Fritzl but, like them, a bullied victim.
The house of horrors
YBBSSTRASSE 4 stands as the mute reminder of the horrors that played out
beneath its floors for a quarter of a century.
It is earmarked for destruction, with orders for builders to fill in the
basement to prevent it becoming a ghoulish tourist attraction. The plan also
involves putting up barriers designed to stop the demolition being filmed by
the media.
Amstetten, like its former resident Elisabeth Fritzl, is doing its best to try
to forget what made the town infamous.
Otto Popp, a pensioner who lives near the house, said: “Fritzl is utterly
despised here for what he did and the name he gave to us. We will spend many
years living down his legacy.”
Herbert Katzengruber, Amstetten’s mayor, said: “A dark chapter has turned in
the history of our town.
“Many painted us in a harsh light. But these were the crimes of a single man,
not a society. This is a town of good people who support the family as best
we can.
“Like them, we can only move on now.”