Fritzl Josef - Monster

PENGUIN BOOKS

Allan Hall is a foreign correspondent based in Berlin working for various publications around the world, including the Daily Mail in London, the Age in Melbourne, Australia, the Scotsman in Edinburgh and the New York Post in the USA. Formerly the bureau chief for Britains biggest-selling newspapers the Sun and then the Daily Mirror in New York, he has been based in Germany, covering central Europe, for the past decade.

He is also the author of twenty books on crime and history.

ALLAN HALL

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published 2008

Copyright Allan Hall and Central European News Ltd, 2008

All rights reserved

Picture credits: Europics for pictures .

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-141-96337-2

For Mary Imrie Hall, 19282008

And for my wife, Pamela

OPEN IT ! The voice was harsh and the old man flinched. He was used to giving the orders, not taking them.

Two stern-faced policemen stood either side of him, the dull metallic sheen of their handguns glinting in the tepid yellow light. They meant business and in the split second it took him to punch the six-digit code into the box which served as an electronic key, Josef Fritzl knew his rule of this macabre underworld had ended for ever.

A rumbling concrete door, something one of the policemen thought looked like a prop from an Indiana Jones movie, slid back and fetid, warm, musty air ripe with the smell of mould, of sweat and of fear washed past Fritzl and his unwanted guests. Fritzl was used to it, the policemen not. They gagged, reaching for handkerchiefs, sickened by the aroma. It seemed as if a corruption had occurred here and, now freed, it was leaching into their clothes and their skin, tainting them, embracing them, making them feel a part of the hideous conspiracy that had taken place within.

It was the early hours of Sunday, 27 April, 2008. The policemen had followed behind dungeon master Fritzl as he led them past seven locked doors, before the secret code had opened the eighth and final door to a hidden cavern, a dungeon where he had kept his own daughter as a sex slave for 24 long years. In this stinking, clandestine prison, he had fathered seven incestuous children with her, three of whom were brought up in the gloom for their entire lives; hunched, sallow-skinned, their gait uneven through lack of exercise, without a friend in the world save each other and their mother. Their courageous mother, Elisabeth, with whom unlike other children they had shared every single second of their lives.

A short while earlier, the last two dwellers of this underworld had been rescued and taken into care at a local clinic, where they had been reunited with their mother; Felix, 5, and Stefan, 18. Released into the arms of their grandmother on Friday evening after a lifetime hidden below her feet, they were pale and sick, distrustful and frightened, but also grateful grateful beyond words, in any tongue that they had escaped at last from their cement tomb.

The fact that only Elisabeth existed in official records, added to the appalling physical condition of the cellar dwellers, proved to police the story, she had begun to relate was true. But even knowing the dungeon must exist, they could find no trace of it. The only hope for a quick solution was Fritzl himself. He was taken from his interrogation room at Amstetten police station and brought to the scene of his crime, leading the officers to his secret world, hidden behind a cupboard that was strewn with old paint tins, trays of nails and screws, discarded drill bits, wiring, rolls of insulating tape, brushes, transformers and plastic plant pots.

One later said that his first impression of what lay beyond the door, and his encounter just hours earlier with the inhabitants of this underground world, reminded him of a forced labour camp. During the Second World War there were two sub-camps of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Amstetten, part of a complex where between 122,766 and 320,000 people died. The officer had seen pictures of slave labourers from the local gulag kept in appalling conditions, away from sunlight. But the war had finished 65 years ago and he never expected to see something like it on his beat. Things like this were part of history. Werent they? Just what had happened here?

There could so easily have been other, more tragic endings. Kerstin, the desperately ill daughter who had been released from the cellar to get medical attention days earlier, and who was the catalyst for his downfall, could have died before Fritzl decided to let her go free. He could have stopped Elisabeth, the daughter he kept imprisoned as his personal breeding machine, from visiting her. But finally Fritzl the jailer the controller, the supreme arbiter of light and darkness had slipped up, and his grotesque tyranny was over. Within 24 hours the 23,000-strong population of the small Austrian town of Amstetten had swollen by nearly 1,000: these were the journalists and TV technicians who swarmed into the shell-shocked community to camp outside Fritzls house and report on a saga of mind-numbing depravity.

There is a heroine in this tale of good and evil. Elisabeth, molested by her evil father and then forced to bring up the results of his uncontrollable urges, lavished love and attention on her six surviving children: a seventh who died in infancy was burned like he was so much rubbish in the heating incinerator of the house. Three lived with her, entombed, and never played with another child, never saw the stars or stood in the rain. Their entire existence was encased in a 55 -square-metre windowless cellar carved out of the earth beneath the home of their jailer. In an even more bizarre twist, three children were allowed to live in the outside world a world the cellar-dwellers knew simply as beyond the door unaware of the torment that their siblings and birth mother were undergoing every day beneath their feet, unheard and unknown.

This book examines the torture, the rapes, the suffering and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit when Elisabeths anguished story was finally heard by a doctor. With her daughter dying, the spell was broken and she was able to relate a tale so diabolical it has no parallel in modern times. The world so far has seen an abstract picture of evil. In this book Fritzl the man what motivated him, what pleased him, what warped him is examined in detail. His complex finances are exposed alongside his equally complex sexual deviations. People who knew him, really knew him, as well as casual acquaintances, give revealing interviews.