Officials earlier said they knew of no record of such a conviction, and that one of such age would have been expunged long ago by laws designed to rehabilitate criminals but which are also part of an informal masonry that has sped 'good chaps' with murky pasts back into respectability.īut, by Wednesday, a woman told reporters: 'I was raped by Fritzl. There is, for instance, his reported conviction for rape: either of a woman in Linz in 1967, or, around the same time, of a nurse in her flat.

From 1969 to 1971, he worked for Zehetner, a construction materials firm in Amstetten, where he was described as 'an intelligent worker and a good technician'. From that point, the facts of his business life become patchy. It was in his early days there, in 1956, when he was 21, that he married 17-year-old Rosemarie and started a family of seven children with her. First, he studied electrical engineering at a polytechnic school, then took a job with steel company, Voest. The fleeting certainty in his biography begins when he finished his schooling. Fully five days after Fritzl was arrested, Colonel Franz Polzer, the chief investigator for the Austrian police, said: 'I don't even know who his parents were.' That lack of knowledge, even a seeming reluctance to thoroughly seek it, is a theme that echoes and echoes through the Josef Fritzl story. Most of his first 10 years were spent under the Third Reich, and a Franz Fritzl is listed on Amstetten's war memorial, but the town council refused last week to say if this was Josef's father. The history of Josef Fritzl begins on 9 April 1935 with his birth in the town he was to make notorious. And the only person they had seen was their jailer, the man who would alternately play with them and terrorise them, who told them if they tried to escape they would be gassed in their chamber, who raped their mother and yet, with his boxes of groceries and meals shoved through a hatch, was their only lifeline: the good family man of Amstetten. They knew neither freedom, nor the rest of society. The children had never seen the outside world or breathed its air. For nearly a quarter of a century, she and three of the seven children that were the result of those rapes, had lived in a windowless netherworld. When she was 18, he had drugged her, dragged her to a concealed cellar in his house, raped her, and gone on doing so for the next 24 years. Instead, her father had been beating her since she was old enough to walk and sexually assaulting her since she was 11. And then she told them a story that even now, eight days after its telling, beggars belief.Įlisabeth had not run away to join a cult. She was nervous, too, and suddenly asked if they could guarantee she and her children would never again have to see Fritzl, this helpful, polite man who had brought his daughter's note and then his daughter to the hospital. Apparently only 42, she looked, with her grey hair and almost white complexion, like an institutionalised woman in her sixties. Right from the start, there was something very odd about her. They took her to a room and began to talk. After all, he had his own family to look after. This said that the girl, Kerstin, had suffered headaches, taken an aspirin, and then begun suffering convulsions, hence the bleeding tongue. He told him that the girl's mother, his daughter Elisabeth, was unable and unwilling to look after her and had dumped her at his house. Then, an hour after her admission, Fritzl arrived and saw Dr Albert Reiter. She was taken to Amstetten hospital, where doctors saw she was very pale and bleeding from her tongue.

As luck would have it, this was Josef Fritzl's house.

On Saturday 19 April, a girl of 19 had been taken seriously ill at 40 Ybbstrasse. He really was a very good family man.Īnd then, everything began to change. He just took them in and raised them as if they were his own. Even when the little hussy had three children and just dumped them on his doorstep, did he complain? No. And when that silly daughter of his ran off to join this religious cult, had he bothered people with lots of questions about who she'd been seen with recently? No. Hadn't he brought his seven children up to be good boys and girls? Always so polite just like their father. In his home town of Amstetten just eight days ago, they'd have been adamant about that. He was a very good family man, was Josef Fritzl.

Family elisabeth fritzl now photo