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Austrian monster 'well-liked'
28/04/2008 17:22 - (SA)
Vienna - The 73-year-old Austrian accused of holding his daughter captive in a cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children with her was popular and polite according to neighbours, newspapers reported Monday.
But preliminary evidence from investigations suggest Josef Fritzl planned his diabolical crime in the minutest detail to be able to conceal it for so long.
"While his daughter and three of her children were suffering a never-ending martyrdom in a dungeon, the 'monster Fritzl' was playing the respectable grandfather in the same house," wrote the tabloid daily Kronen-Zeitung.
"A grandad who touchingly looked after three of his grandchildren, who were in reality his own incest children."
Newspapers quoted Fritzl's neighbours in the town of Amstetten, 100km west of Vienna, as a likeable, polite man, always ready to help others and very attentive to his children.
But in a partial confession on Monday, he admitted to having built a dungeon where he incarcerated his daughter and three children. He has not yet admitted to incest.
Josef Fritzl has seven children of his own, now all adults, with his wife Rosemarie. And the inhabitants of Amstetten noted how active he always seemed to be.
Little did they suspect that one of his daughters, Elisabeth, was held captive in three cramped underground rooms, measuring just 50-60 square metres with a ceiling just 1.70 metres high, in a cellar of the family home.
Created a legend
Elisabeth told police that she was abused by her father from the age of 11 and she accused him of holding her captive since she was 18 and of giving birth to seven children by him, one of whom died at birth.
Neither the neighbours or the authorities suspected anything was wrong or could begin to imagine that Fritzl, a keen fisher and popular customer in his local bar, was in fact leading a horrific double life.
"He managed to create a legend, one which everyone believed," Austrian Interior Minister Guenther Platter told ORF public television.
An electrician by training who worked in a building materials firm, Fritzl's explanation for the disappearance of his daughter Elisabeth was readily believed by everyone.
He told police at the time that she had gone to join a religious sect. And he forced Elisabeth to write a letter to her parents, asking them to stop looking for her.
No-one talked about it
An authoritarian father, he strictly forbad anyone from entering the cellar, insisting it was his workshop. He spent most evenings there, bringing food and clothing to his captives.
When Elisabeth became pregnant by him, he claimed that she had deposited three babies on his doorstep, each time with a letter asking her parents to take care of them.
Fritzl forced Elisabeth to write the letters, such as the one that accompanied one of the babies in 1993: "The baby is nine months old. She will have a better life with grandma and grandpa than with me."
That enabled Fritzl to persuade the authorities to make him the children's guardian.
The three children adopted by Fritzl, two girls and a boy, attend the local school where they are described as good pupils.
A classmate told ORF television that everyone knew the mother had disappeared, but no-one talked about it. Indeed, the grandmother "had insisted that it shouldn't be talked about."
- AFP
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