Secrets in the Cellar (15 page)

“I Could Have Killed Them All”

On Tuesday, May 6, Rudolf Mayer visited St. Polten jail to interview his client about what he had done and why. It would be Josef Fritzl’s version of
Mein Kampf
, to be released to the media as a public relations exercise to show his “human side.”

During the lengthy interview, Fritzl spoke of his strange relationship with his mother, admitting harboring sexual feelings toward her. He also talked of his pride in raising his downstairs family, his obsession with incest, and wanting to have a family with Elisabeth, who he called “my second wife.”

Later many would question if his jailhouse interview was merely a cynical attempt to influence the Austrian judicial system, which was about to take the first legal step to decide whether he would go to prison or a hospital for the criminally insane.

“I come from a small family and grew up in a tiny flat in Amstetten,” Fritzl began. “My father was somebody who was a waster, he never took responsibility and was just a loser that always cheated on my mother.

“My mother threw him out of the house when I was four, and she was quite right to do so. After that, it was only the two of us.

“My mother was a strong woman, she taught me discipline and control and the values of hard work. She sent me to a good school so that I could learn a good trade, and she worked really hard, and took a very difficult job to keep our heads above water.

“When I say she was hard on me, she was only as hard as was necessary. She was the best woman in the world. I suppose you could describe me as her man, sort of. She was the boss at home and I was the only man in the house.

“It’s complete rubbish to say my mother sexually abused me—my mother was respectable, extremely respectable. I loved her across all boundaries. I was totally in awe of her. Completely and totally in awe. That did not mean there was anything else between us, though. There never was and there never would have been.”

When Mayer asked if he had ever fantasized about having sex with his mother, Fritzl took a long pause before answering.

“Yes, probably,” he conceded. “But I was a very strong man, probably as strong as my mother. And as a result I was able to keep my desires under control.

“I became older, and that meant that when I went outside, I managed to meet other women. I had affairs with a few girls, and then a short while later I met Rosemarie.”

Mayer then asked if Rosemarie shared anything in common with his mother.

“Absolutely nothing,” he replied. “She had nothing in common with my mother . . . Well, perhaps there were a few similarities if I really think about it. I mean, Rosemarie was also a wonderful woman, is a wonderful woman. She is just a lot more shy, and weaker than my mother.

“I chose her because I had a strong desire then to have lots of children. I wanted children that did not grow up like me as [a single child], I wanted children that always had someone else at their side to play with and to support.

“The dream of a big family was with me from when I was very, very small. And Rosemarie seemed to be the perfect mother to realize that dream. This is not a good reason to marry, but it is also true to say that I loved her and I still love her.”

Mayer then asked about the circumstances of his 1967 rape conviction, for which he served an 18-month jail sentence.

“I do not know what drove me to do that,” he replied. “It’s really true I do not know why I did it, I always wanted to be a good husband and a good father.”

His attorney then questioned him about neighbors’ claims of him being a “brutal tyrant” at home.

“I always put a lot of value on good behavior and respect,” he explained, “I admit that. The reason for this is that I belong to an old school of thinking that just does not exist today.

“I grew up in the Nazi times and that meant there needed to be control and the respect of authority. I suppose I took on some of these old values with me into later life—all subconsciously, of course.

“Yet despite that, I am not the monster that I am portrayed as in the media . . . I could have killed them all . . . then nothing would have happened. No one would ever have known about it.”

Mayer asked how he would describe someone who kidnapped his own daughter, locking her up for twenty-four years in the cellar, repeatedly raping her and subjecting her to his brutal subjugation.

“On the face of it, probably as a beast or a monster,” he admitted.

The only time Fritzl became angry was when his attorney mentioned Elisabeth’s claims that he had begun molesting her as an 11-year-old child.

“That is not true,” he snapped. “I am not a man that has sex with little children. I only had sex with her later, much later. It was when she was in the cellar by then, when she had been in the cellar for a long time.”

He was then asked how much planning had gone into constructing the dungeon.

“Two, three years beforehand,” he said. “That is true. I guess it must have been around 1981 or 1982 when I began to build a room in my cellar as the cell for her.”

Then he proudly described how he had installed “a really heavy concrete-and-steel door,” that operated electronically by keying in a numbered code by remote control. He had then plastered the walls to soundproof the dungeon, bringing in a small toilet, a bed and a cooking ring, as well as the fridge, electricity and lights.

He viewed the cellar as his “kingdom,” which no one else could ever enter.

“I made it clear that this was my office, with various files and folders stored,” he said. “And that was enough—everybody obeyed my rules.”

His lawyer then asked why he had imprisoned Elisabeth in the first place.

“Ever since she entered puberty,” he explained, “Elisabeth stopped doing what she was told. She just did not follow any of my rules anymore. She would go out all night in local bars, and come back stinking of alcohol and smoke.

“I tried to rescue her from the swamp, and I organized her a trainee job as a waitress, but sometimes there were days when she would not go to work.

“She even ran away twice and hung around with persons of questionable moral standards, who were certainly not a good influence on her. I always had to bring her home, but she always ran away again. That is why I had to arrange a place where I gave her the chance—by force—to keep away from the bad influences of the outside world.”

And Fritzl denied Elisabeth’s claims to police that he had handcuffed her and kept her on a leash during the first few months of her twenty-four-year imprisonment.

“That was not necessary,” he said. “My daughter had no chance to get away anyway. I guess after the kidnap, I got myself in a vicious circle, a vicious circle not just for Elisabeth, but also for me, from which there was no way out.

“With every week that I kept my daughter prisoner, my situation just got more crazy, and really, it is true, I often thought of if I should let her free or not. But I just was not capable of making a decision, even though, and probably because, I knew that every day made my crime that much worse.

“I was scared of being arrested, and that my family and everybody that knew me would know my crime. That was why I kept putting off the day I should make a decision, putting it off again and again. Eventually, after a time, it was just too late to bring Elisabeth back into the world.

“My desire to have sex with Elisabeth also got much stronger as time went by. We first had sex in spring 1985. I could not control myself anymore. At some stage somewhere in the night, I went into the cellar and laid her down on the bed and had sex with her. I knew that Elisabeth did not want it, what I did with her. The pressure to do the forbidden thing was just too big to withstand. It was an obsession with me.”

Mayer then questioned him about what had happened after his daughter became pregnant.

“Elisabeth was, of course, very worried about the future,” he said. “But I brought her medical books in the cellar, so that she would know when the day came what she had to do, and I arranged towels and disinfectants and nappies.”

The attorney asked how he had felt after she gave birth to Kerstin and Stefan.

“I was delighted about the children,” he replied. “It was great for me to have a second proper family in the cellar, with a good wife, and a few children.”

Mayer then asked what would have happened to his captives if he had been killed during one of his lengthy vacations.

“I prepared well in this eventuality,” he replied. “Every time I left the bunker, I switched on a timer that would definitely have opened the door to the cellar after a set time. If I had died, Elisabeth and the children would have been free.”

Why, asked his lawyer, had he taken Lisa upstairs in May 1993, to bring her up there with Rosemarie?

“Elisabeth and I planned everything together,” he claimed. “Because we both knew that Lisa, because of her poor health condition and the circumstances in the cellar, had no chance to live had she remained there.”

He said he had brought the next two children—Monika and Alexander, born in 1994 and 1996—upstairs because they were “weak, difficult and often ill.” Also, he said, there were “complications” caused by their births.

He then compared his two wives, saying Rosemarie was “the best mother in the world,” while Elisabeth “was just as good a housewife and mother.”

Fritzl then admitted that each new baby increased his control over his daughter, as she no longer cared about her own life, doing everything he wanted for the children’s sake.

He also spoke of bringing Elisabeth photographs and news about her children’s life upstairs and their progress at school.

“After the birth of Felix at the end of 2002,” he told Mayer, “I even gave Elisabeth a washing machine as a present, so that she did not have to wash her own clothes and that of the children by hand.”

He said his upstairs children always called him “Daddy,” although they knew he was their grandfather, whereas the ones downstairs referred to him as “Grandfather,” as Elisabeth had never told them the truth.

Asked if his daughter had ever resisted his sexual advances, Fritzl said she had never screamed or tried to fight him off. And he seemed proud that she had taught their children to always be nice to Grandfather.

“I tried really hard, as much as possible, to look after my family in the cellar,” he told Mayer. “When I went there I brought my daughter flowers, [the] children books and cuddly toys. I used to watch videos and adventure movies with the children, while Elisabeth used to cook for us. Then we used to sit at the table . . . with each other.

“We celebrated birthdays and Christmas in the cellar. I even brought a Christmas tree secretly into the cellar, and cakes and presents.”

Mayer then asked if conditions in the cellar had adversely affected his captives’ health.

“Yeah, sure,” he admitted. “Elisabeth stayed strong, she caused me almost no problems, she never, ever complained, even when her teeth slowly went rotten and fell out of her mouth one after the other, and she suffered day and night with unbearable pain and could not sleep. She stayed strong for the children. But I saw the children were constantly getting weaker.”

Why had he finally decided to release them at the beginning of 2008 as their health worsened? Mayer asked.

“I wanted to free Elisabeth, Kerstin, Stefan and Felix,” he replied, “and to bring them back home. That was my next step. The reason is that I was getting older. I was finding it harder to move, and I knew that in the future I would no longer be able to care for my second family in the cellar. The plan was that Elisabeth and the children would explain that they were kept by a sect in a secret place.”

The lawyer wondered if he believed this to be realistic that they wouldn’t betray him.

“Sure, that was my hope, however unbelievable at that time,” he said. “Despite that, there was always the risk that Elisabeth and the children would betray me. That did happen rather sooner than I expected, as the problem with Kerstin escalated.”

Then, speaking of Kerstin’s illness, which had led to the dungeon’s demise, he said angrily, “She tore the clothes from her body and threw them in the toilet. Kerstin would not be alive today if it wasn’t for me. I made sure that she got to the hospital.”

He was then asked how he had prevented any escape attempts.

“It was not difficult,” he replied. “I certainly did not need any physical violence. Elisabeth, Kerstin, Stefan and Felix accepted me as the head of the family completely, and they never trusted themselves to have the strength to attack me.

“And in any case, only I knew the number code of the remote control that would open the door to the cellar and to close it.”

Fritzl denied threatening to gas them, but admitted, “I am sorry to say that I did tell them that they would never get past the door, because they would be electrocuted and they would die.”

Mayer finally asked if he wanted to die now that he had been caught.

“No,” he said, “I only want redemption. I always knew during those twenty-four years that what I was doing was wrong. I must have been mad to do something like that, but nevertheless I was not able to escape my double life. When I was upstairs, I was totally normal. I functioned well, I made money, took care of my family and only consciously thought about downstairs when I had to run errands for my second family.

“But at some point it became a matter of course for me that I led a double life in the basement of my house, and that I had to take care of a second wife and our children down there.”

On Wednesday morning, State Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser interrogated Josef Fritzl for two hours in his cell. The first interview was only about his personal circumstances, career and family background, and nothing else for the time being.

“He has proven to be remarkably cooperative,” a St. Polten prosecutor’s office spokesman told
Spiegel
Online. “We are waiting for the police to carry out further investigations before questioning him again.”

A few hours later, the Fritzl case was raised in the Austrian Parliament during a motion debate on whether to introduce tougher penalties for rapists (including an idea from the far right to introduce physical or chemical castration), as well as not erasing criminal files for sex offenses after fifteen years.