For Paul Hörer, who first met Josef Fritzl 35 years ago, the Austrian was a ”decent, outgoing and, above all, amusing bloke”.
He remembered how Fritzl came to stay with him in Munich, and how he and his family spent happy evenings with Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, on the terrace of their ”tip top” house in Amstetten where there was ”white marble everywhere”.
In those days, this decent, outgoing and amusing bloke had yet to lock up the third of his four daughters so he could rape her at will in a windowless dungeon.
Doctors say she and the three of their children that he kept in the basement now have difficulties with space and distance, not to mention light. Medical staff at the clinic where they are being treated have constructed a ”dark chamber” to which they can retreat.
In photographs as a teenager, Elisabeth was beautiful. ”She was so quiet and nice to everyone,” said Franz Hochwallner, a 46-year-old cook who worked with Elisabeth when she was an apprentice waitress at the service station on the motorway near Amstetten.
Hörer, too, remembers her as ”reticent and shy”. But he added: ”I had the impression Josef didn’t like her as much as his other children. He hit her more. Every little thing meant she got dealt a few.”
Amstetten is an unremarkable place — the market town for an area of rolling green hills famous for its cider and perry. It has a pretty town hall, painted yellow and white. The clock tower is surmounted by a golden spread eagle that looks out over a main square that is smart and clean, but not chocolate-box pretty. Were it not for the signs that say ”Penny Markt” rather than ”Tesco”, you might be anywhere in modern, rural England.
Ybbsstrasse, where the Fritzls lived, starts at a roundabout a few hundred yards from the centre. Across the road from number 40 is a double-glazing outlet. Next door is a business that specialises in plaster mouldings. Josef — ”a genius” at DIY, said his friend — had everything to hand.
The Fritzls’ late 19th- or early 20th-century house stands one home away from a side street, Dammstrasse. From there, you can see the whole of the huge, three-storey concrete extension he built on the back of his home. Fritzl created flats in the extension then let them out. Yet the other use of the extension was that it allowed him to build underneath the cellar that became a prison.
His indulgence of what police call his ”enlarged sexual capacity” had already got him into trouble. A retired nurse who lives in Linz, 64km away, still remembers vividly what happened one night in October 1967 when she was 24.
”I woke up and realised someone was pulling the cover off the bed. I thought at first my husband had come back,” she said. Then she saw that the hand stripping away her bedclothes was not that of her husband. Fritzl, who was already married, had got in through the kitchen window. In his other hand, he had a kitchen knife.
”He said: ‘If you scream, I’ll do for you,”’ the woman recalled. She did not scream. But she did report the attack and identify her attacker. Fritzl got just 18 months, though he already had convictions for attempted rape and indecent exposure.
Following the events of this week, police have reopened an investigation into the killing of a young woman found dead near his former home.
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the whole affair is his careful and patient planning over the years. The official paperwork shows that Fritzl secured permission for an extension of the cellar beneath number 40 Ybbsstrasse in 1978, when Elisabeth was 12.
It was not until 1984, on the night of August 27 to 28, that he came for her. Her mother and three brothers and three sisters who still lived at home were asleep. He drugged her, handcuffed her and led her below ground. Elisabeth has claimed — and her father has denied — that at the beginning she was shackled to the wall.
On August 29, she was reported as missing. Fritzl later forced her to write a letter urging her mother not to look for her. He explained to his wife that Elisabeth had joined a sect.
She seems to have believed him — or, at least, not to have questioned him. In rural Roman Catholic Austria wives of Rosemarie’s generation, brought up with a minimum of education, do not just love and honour their husbands. They obey them, especially if they are as strong and violent as Fritzl.
The disclosures by police and doctors since Elisabeth’s release have offered little more than glimpses into the horror and squalor that was to be her lot for the next 24 years. For the first five years, she was completely alone, other than when her father came down to have sex with her.
Five years in a cell with no natural light or fresh air, knowing that her youth was inexorably slipping away? Just the initial stage of her captivity is enough to explain why her doctors say Elisabeth today is ”psychologically extremely damaged”.
In 1989, she gave birth to Kerstin, the first of her seven children. This raises one of the many unanswered questions surrounding the case.
Her father could have taken precautions. Why did he not do so? Why did Josef Fritzl, for all his presumed arrogance, want his most persecuted daughter to be the mother of his children?
He had already fathered seven, and the arrival of more would mean nothing but trouble. He would have to deliver them himself. He would have to find a way of paying for their keep, and for the extension of the dungeon to the point at which it was the size of a small, one-bedroomed flat. Above all, he would have to expose himself to far greater risks.
A waiter who rented a studio flat above the cellar in the early 1990s said on Friday that he had begun to see his experiences there in a new light. Sepp Leitner told the Austrian daily Die Presse that he had rowed repeatedly with Fritzl over his electricity bill, which one quarter soared to more than £300. Even when all the electricity was turned off, the meter continued to run.
”If only I had tried to get to the bottom of it, instead of letting it go, maybe the dungeon would have been discovered much earlier. I’m now angry at myself that I failed to do that,” he said.
Leitner got a dog. Sam, a husky-Labrador-sheepdog mix would often wake with a start in the middle of the night and was ”hugely terrified”, he said. Whenever it saw Fritzl, the usually friendly dog would growl menacingly.
Leitner said food often went missing from his kitchen and that of fellow tenants, and he recalled how Fritzl would ”unload plastic bags full of shopping from his silver grey Mercedes and bring them into the garden between 10 and 11 at night”.
Elisabeth, living just feet away, was allowed to keep her first child and her second, Stefan. But then, in 1993, along came Lisa, and she was taken upstairs. Fritzl invented an absurdly improbable story — that his daughter had left the child on the doorstep before returning to the sect.
Yet it was believed, not just by his intimidated wife and children, not just by his neighbours, but by the authorities who let him adopt Lisa.
Nor, it seems, did they turn a hair the following year or in 1997 when he told them that, first Monika, then Alexander, had been ”found” on the doorstep. Both were assigned to his care.
Alexander’s birth had highlighted the problems Fritzl was accumulating. He was a twin. His sibling died soon after birth. Fritzl popped him in the household incinerator.
The horror of his botched delivery and the three days he was alive can only be guessed at.
The last of Elisabeth’s children, Felix, was born in December 2002. Like Kerstin and Stefan, he was kept in the three-room underground complex that lay beyond Fritzl’s office, on the other side of two remote-controlled steel doors. None of the children had any medical or dental attention, so Kerstin lost most of her teeth, one by one, probably in agony offset only by aspirin.
Their sole view of the outside world came from a television set. Fritzl created a sort of inverted reality show. In Big Brother, the inhabitants of the real world look in at people locked in an artificial one. For Elisabeth and her children, the process was the reverse.
What little has come out about them mostly concerns Felix. And some of it is quaint, even amusing. When he first saw the sky, the police reported, he asked: ”Is God up there?”
The rest is less cute. He and his brother communicate mainly by animal-like grunts. Inspector Leopold Etz said Felix prefers to crawl. But why? The height of the rooms in the cellar was 1,70m and Felix is much shorter. Was he imitating the others? Did they all crawl?
As they grapple with these and the many other horrendous puzzles surrounding the case, the people of Amstetten are acutely conscious they risk being blamed; blamed for not detecting the signs of a crime that defies belief in a society where people notice, and comment, if you fail to sort your rubbish.
Not many local people were talking to reporters by the end of the week, and those who did were refusing to give their names. In an effort to send a message to the world, about 400 of the town’s inhabitants gathered on Tuesday night for a candle-lit vigil in the square. Some expressed solidarity, others disbelief.
But it was left to a woman holding a lantern to exactly define the mood, reaching for that eloquence people sometimes find when confronted with events. She said: ”The way out of speechlessness to faith and trust will be a long one.” – guardian.co.uk Â