The Mammoth Book of New Csi (15 page)

Elisabeth begged her father to take Kerstin to hospital. Eventually, Fritzl relented. Rosemarie was on holiday in Italy again, so Elisabeth and her father carried the unconscious Kerstin upstairs. She was now nineteen and it was the first time she had been out of the cellar. By then, Elisabeth was forty-two. She had spent more than half her life incarcerated in the basement. After a few brief moments above ground, she was forced to return to her dungeon.

At 7 a.m. on Saturday, 19 April 2008, Fritzl called an ambulance. They collected the ghostlike teenager from the Fritzl home at 40 Ybbsstrasse in Amstetten and took her to the Mostviertel Red Cross hospital. Kerstin was in a coma and no one could tell what was wrong with her. An hour later the seventy-three-yearold Fritzl turned up at the hospital. He explained that the girl was his granddaughter. She had been left unconscious outside his front door.

The girl was pallid and malnourished. She had convulsions and was bleeding from the mouth. According to the doctor that treated her: “She hung in a state between life and death.”

Fritzl handed the doctors a note, which he said he had found pinned to the unconscious child. It was, ostensibly, from her mother and said: “Wednesday, I gave her aspirin and cough medicine for the condition. Thursday, the cough worsened. Friday, the coughing gets even worse. She has been biting her lip as well as her tongue. Please, please help her! Kerstin is really terrified of other people, she was never in a hospital. If there are any problems please ask my father for help, he is the only person that she knows.” A postscript, addressed to the girl, said: “Kerstin – please stay strong, until we see each other again! We will come back to you soon!”

This made her physician, Dr Albert Reiter suspicious. Fritzl told his well-rehearsed story about his daughter running off to a religious cult and dumping her unwanted children on his doorstep. Dr Reiter did not swallow it.

“I could not believe that a mother who wrote such a note and seemed so concerned would just vanish,” he said.

Fritzl himself seemed unconcerned and, without even waiting for a diagnosis, he left. So Dr Reiter contacted the police. They visited 40 Ybbsstrasse where Fritzl repeated his bizarre story.

As Kerstin’s condition deteriorated, Reiter launched a TV appeal for Kerstin’s mother to get in touch. At the very least, he needed to know more about her medical history. Why, for example, had the teenager lost most of her teeth? She showed signs of severe neglect. Her body began to shut down. She was put on a respirator and a kidney dialysis machine. But without some idea of her medical history, Dr Reiter did not know what to do for the best.

After a week, Elisabeth re-emerged and she made her way to the hospital with her father. But the police had been tipped off. As Fritzl and his daughter reached the hospital grounds the police detained them. Elisabeth faced charges of criminal neglect.

They were taken to police headquarters in Amstetten, where they were questioned separately. At first, Elisabeth stuck to her story about running off to join a bizarre cult. But that did not explain Kerstin’s condition. Nor did it explain the state that Elisabeth herself was in. Although she was only in her early forties, she looked like a woman of sixty. Prematurely grey, like her daughter, she had lost most of her teeth and had a deathly pallor.

After two hours of questioning, Elisabeth began to break down. Once the police assured her that neither she, nor her children, would have to see Fritzl again, she told a shocking tale. Her father, a retired electrical engineer and a pillar of the community, had kept her locked in a cellar and used her as a sex toy for twenty-four years. Although her story beggared belief, it was clear, from the look of her, that she had been through an appalling ordeal.

The police put these allegations to Fritzl. He denied them. He even produced the letter Elisabeth had written, saying that she was with a religious sect but would be returning home soon. The only way the police could tell who was telling the truth and who was lying was to examine the crime scene – for some crime had been committed, whether it was simply child neglect or a monstrous case of rape, incest and incarceration.

They took Fritzl back to 40 Ybbsstrasse. At the front, it was a typical Austrian townhouse on an ordinary street. But at the back it was an imposing concrete structure, not unlike a wartime bunker hidden behind high hedges. The police searched the house but failed to find the dungeon of which Elisabeth had talked. Then, sensing the game was up, Fritzl led them down the cellar stairs. He took them through five rooms, including his office and the boiler room containing the furnace where Michael’s body had been burnt, before they reached his workshop. Behind a shelving unit stacked with tins of paint, there was a reinforced concrete door, so well concealed that the building inspectors had failed to notice it. It had an electronic lock. Fritzl handed over the remote control and, after some prompting, gave the police the code. The steel frame of the door had been sprayed with concrete and it was so heavy that it took four firemen to shift it. Fritzl moved it with the aid of an electric motor. If that had failed, the cellar family would have been trapped, sealed in their tomb for ever.

Fritzl had long taunted his daughter and their children that only he knew how to open the door. If they tried to kill him, they would be locked in their dungeon for ever and starve to death. He also told them that it was rigged so, if they tried to tamper with the door, it would release toxic gas. Fritzl told the police that the lock had a timer, so that, if he died or was otherwise incapacitated, it would open automatically. The police found no such mechanism.

The door was just 3 ft 3 in. (1 m) high. Beyond was a narrow corridor. At the end was a padded cell. Just 215 ft
²
(20 m
²
), this was where Fritzl had held his daughter for the first nine years. It was soundproofed so that no scream, cry or sob could be heard in any other part of the building. A corridor just a foot (30 cm) wide – so narrow that you had to turn sideways to negotiate it – led on to a living area, where the police found eighteen-year-old Stefan and five-year-old Felix. They were pale and terrified by the intruders. The police were the only strangers they had ever seen. Stefan was stooped because there was nowhere he could stand upright. The maximum height of the ceilings was 5 ft 6 in. (1.7 m). Felix preferred to crawl, though he could walk with a strange apelike gait that he had copied from his fellow captives. The police took them upstairs into an alien world. They had never seen daylight before. The only things they knew from the world outside their prison was what they had seen on the TV, their only window on the world above.

In the living area of the dungeon, there was a rudimentary kitchen and bathroom. On the white tiled walls of the tiny shower cubicle, the inmates had painted a snail, a butterfly, an octopus and a flower in an attempt to brighten their lives. A toy elephant was perched on a mirrored medicine cabinet and there were scraps of paper and glue that the children had used to make toys. There were also pitiful drawings the children had made, portraying life as they knew it.

Along with the TV and video recorder there was a washing machine, a fridge and a freezer that Fritzl packed with food when he went off on extended sex tours of Thailand while they were left to fend for themselves. Among Elisabeth’s clothing were skimpy clothes and sexy lingerie that Fritzl brought from Pattaya. A friend who accompanied him on his trips assumed he was buying the outfits for a mistress who Fritzl kept hidden away. So did Fritzl. In his mind, Elisabeth was no longer his daughter, but the mother of his second family.

Beyond the living area were two small bedrooms with two beds in each. They were lit by dim electric light bulbs. Elisabeth had begged Fritzl to provide vitamin D tablets and an ultraviolet light to prevent her children growing up deformed from being deprived of natural light. The dungeon was hermetically sealed. The only air came in through a small ventilation shaft. It did not provide enough oxygen for four people if they undertook any sort of activity. The place was also damp. The whole basement was just 376 ft
²
(35 m
²
) – a tiny area in which four people had to live out all of their daily lives.

Confronted with the evidence, Fritzl confessed that he had imprisoned his daughter.

“Yes,” he told the police. “I locked her up, but only to protect her from drugs. She was a difficult child.”

While admitting to repeatedly raping Elisabeth, Fritzl rejected his daughter’s claims that he had chained her to the cellar wall and kept her “like an animal”. He claimed that he had been kind to the second family he kept in the cellar. He admitted that the children were his own, the offspring of his incest with his own daughter. DNA tests confirmed Fritzl was their father. They also confirmed that he was the only other person who had been in the cellar. He had no accomplice and was solely responsible for the imprisonment of his daughter and their offspring.

What staggered the police, given the extent of the crime scene, was that no one else knew. During the time Elisabeth was incarcerated, Fritzl had let rooms out in 40 Ybbsstrasse to over a hundred tenants. They had lived in the ugly three-storey extension to the house that Fritzl had built – directly above the cellar. One of them was a waiter named Joseph Leitner. He had been to the Amstetten Institute of Technology with a friend of Elisabeth’s and knew that Elisabeth had been raped by her father before she had disappeared. But he still moved in.

Fritzl warned his tenants that the basement was strictly off limits. Anyone caught down there would be given their notice instantly. Although Fritzl also banned pets, Leitner kept a mongrel named Sam who barked every time he went past the door to the cellar.

“I thought he was just excited about going outside,” said Leitner.

The dog would also wake in the middle of the night and start barking and getting agitated, though he slept soundly once they had moved out. Leitner believed that Sam could hear noises from the cellar below.

There was another curious thing about the bedsit that Leitner rented from Fritzl – the huge electricity bill. Each month he paid more than h400 although, as a waiter, he worked long hours and was barely ever there. He even got a friend from a cable TV company to check out the electrical system in the house. Even with everything unplugged, the electricity meter went round at a dizzying lick. He later learnt that the electricity used to run the lights, TV and other appliances in Elisabeth’s dungeon just centimetres below his feet was being siphoned off from his apartment.

Eventually, Fritzl noticed that Sam was taking an inordinate interest in the door to the cellar and kicked Leitner out. That was fourteen years before Elisabeth’s eventual release. Leitner later kicked himself for not following up on his suspicions.

Another tenant who had his suspicions was Alfred Dubanovsky, who lived there for twelve years. He had known Elisabeth at school and had known of her abuse. When she disappeared, he assumed, reasonably enough, that she had run away again.

Like Leitner, he was puzzled by Fritzl’s blanket ban on anyone going near the cellar. Fritzl said that it was protected by a state-of-the-art electronic alarm. Both Leitner and Dubanovky also noticed Fritzl taking large amounts of food down there, usually at night. Tenants also noticed food went missing. If Fritzl had not had time to go on a shopping expedition – he bought provisions from supermarkets well away from Amstetten to allay suspicion – he would use his pass key to slip into his tenant’s rooms and take food for Elisabeth and the children.

Dubanovsky also heard banging noises from the cellar below. He asked Fritzl about this, only to be told that the strange sounds came from the gas central heating. The cellar below was empty, Fritzl said. However, when Fritzl was still at work, he would go down to the cellar each evening. After he retired, Fritzl would go down there at 9 a.m. in the morning, ostensibly to work on some engineering plans, only to emerge long after his wife had gone to bed. Sometimes he stayed down there overnight. His wife was not even allowed to bring him a cup of coffee. He was not to be disturbed. A domestic tyrant, Fritzl banned questions about why he spent so long down there. However, he panicked at the merest mention of the police.

No one appeared to notice that, in order to extend the dungeon to accommodate Elisabeth’s growing family, Fritzl had to remove an estimated 116 m
²
of earth – some 200 tons of it or the equivalent of seventeen truckloads without his tenants, the neighbours or his upstairs family noticing. The authorities did not notice that he was excavating a dungeon seven times the size of the nuclear shelter he had been given permission for, as well as violating all manner of building codes. The one thing he had not done was extend the ventilation system to provide Elisabeth and the children with an adequate supply of oxygen, as this would have risked noise from the cellar reaching the outside.

At the same time, he managed to smuggle tiles, bricks, wooden wall panels, a washing machine, a kitchen sink, beds and pipework into the underground cellar without anybody being any the wiser. He even installed a generator so that they had power if the electricity went off in the house. Although, even if it was vented, it is difficult to see how they could have used the generator without suffocating.

Fritzl was an electrical engineer so he could install the lighting and the power, but he needed help with the plumbing. Dubanovsky said that Fritzl once introduced him to a plumber who had come to fit a lavatory. The man was not thought to have been an accomplice, though he has never come forward or been identified.

Fritzl’s various subterfuges worked so well that his son-in-law Jürgen Helm lived in the house for three years without noticing anything awry. To him, the cellar was just a place that Fritzl stored a lot of building materials and other junk.

Neighbours noticed nothing amiss either. They found Fritzl a little reclusive but he appeared to be the perfect family man, bringing up the children of his wayward daughter. They even talked to him about Elisabeth’s disappearance, but had not the slightest inkling of what had really happened.