KALEIDOSCOPE: JOSEF FRITZL

The Fritzl case emerged in April 2008 when a 42-year-old woman, Elisabeth Fritzl (born 6 April 1966), stated to police in the town of Amstetten, Austria that she had been held captive for 24 years in a concealed part of the basement of the family home by her father, Josef Fritzl (born 9 April 1935), and that he had physically assaulted, sexually abused, and raped her numerous times during her imprisonment. The incestuous relationship forced upon her by her father had resulted in the birth of seven children and one miscarriage.

Three of the children had been imprisoned along with their mother for the whole of their lives: daughter Kerstin, aged 19, and sons Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5. One child, named Michael, had died of respiratory problems three days after birth, having been deprived of all medical help; his body was incinerated by Josef Fritzl on his property. The three other children were raised by Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie in the upstairs home. Fritzl had engineered the appearance of these children as foundlings discovered outside his house: Lisa at nine months in 1993, Monika at ten months in 1994, and Alexander at 15 months in 1997. When the eldest daughter, Kerstin, became seriously ill, Josef acceded to Elisabeth's pleas to take her to a hospital, triggering a series of events that eventually led to discovery.

Josef Fritzl was arrested on 26 April 2008, aged 73, on suspicion of serious crimes against family members and went on trial in Sankt Pölten, Austria on 16 March 2009. He was charged with incest, rape, coercion, false imprisonment, enslavement and the negligent homicide of the infant Michael.After a four day trial from which the public and the media were largely excluded, he was sentenced to life imprisonment

The monster from Austria and Elisabeth when she was a teenager

His lawyer Rudolf Mayer said he was a man who had always to be "powerful", while he was described in court as emotionally deficient by psychiatrist Dr Adelheid Kastner.

In October, a court-ordered psychiatric assessment found he was aware of his actions during the 24-year period, despite suffering a "profound personality disorder".

When his daughter was still a toddler, Fritzl was convicted of raping a woman in Linz in 1967 and was sentenced to a term in prison.

However, under Austrian law, unless the crime carries a life sentence, a conviction must be removed from a person's criminal record after no more than 15 years.

Fritzl initially maintained his sexual relationship with his daughter was "consensual", though she told police that she was chained to a wall while he raped her.

Neighbours and acquaintances initially expressed shock at the case and said that Fritzl had treated his grandchildren affectionately and appeared to be a good grandfather. Former colleagues described him as hard-working and polite.

Former tenants who rented apartments in the Fritzl house also described him as a strict father, and said his wife deferred to him in any decision-making.

....he had tried to care for his family in the cellar as best as he could, taking them flowers, books and toys.

He also spoke about how he would watch videos with his children while his daughter cooked them their favourite meals.

WHY DID HE DO IT?

Mr Mayer had earlier said his client had claimed he locked up his daughter in order to protect her from the outside world.

"She did not obey any rules, she hung around in dodgy bars all night and drank and smoked," Fritzl was quoted as saying.

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The face of the devil

Police say Fritzl also told his daughter and the three children held captive with her that the cellar was rigged to release toxic gas in case they attempted to overpower him in a bid to escape.

Graf said he sometimes met Fritzl for business dealings, and the pair would share a beer. "He told jokes, not always the cleanest," Graf said. "He laughed loud, a real boom."

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The respectable society man with his not-so-clever wife

WAS THE WIFE SO NAIVE?

Yet one can't help wondering: was Rosemarie Fritzl really so naïve that she trusted her husband all that time, never suspecting his deceptions, or at least wondering what he was doing in his basement hideaway? Was she unaware of the initial abuse? And how did Fritzl treat their other children? Was she so gullible, or was she so cowed herself that she could not stand up to this man, or even think for herself? While the investigation shows that Fritzl acted alone in holding his daughter and their children captive, surely Elisabeth Fritzl must find it hard to avoid asking herself how it is that her mother was blind to her torture.

DESCENT INTO HELL

Elisabeth helped her father to position the hulking steel-and-concrete door that would hold her for years. For much of her first year there, she was tied up like a dog. Then Fritzl let her off the leash—to roam "freely" in the 15' x 15' cell that was her sunless home.

Soon they would need more room; Fritzl's unending incestuous abuse of his captive daughter would produce seven children. After the first two were born, he started to further expand the cellar. Or, rather, Elisabeth did, as he made her do the work herself. Her reward for this ten-year project? He would rape her in one of the new rooms, rather than right in front of their children.

THE ROOTS OF EVIL

Josef Fritzl was born in Amstetten in 1935, on the eve of the Nazi-orchestrated Anschluss—unification with the Third Reich. His father abandoned the family, and his mother raised him on her own and with an iron fist. She beat him until he bruised, according to family members. And beyond her own strictness was was the social context of the entrenched authoritarianism of the fallen Austro-Hungarian empire, the militaristic aggression and totalitarian discipline of the Nazi regime and the austerity and struggle of Europe at war.

Fritzl has told forensic psychiatrist Kastner that his mother regularly severely beat him as a child, kicking him even when he collapsed to the floor, bleeding. She never hugged or kissed him or told him she loved him, Fritzl claims, and she brought him into this world only to prove to his father that she wasn't infertile. The couple went through a bitter divorce, and she raised Fritzl alone, working as a servant and diligently taking him to church. Whether she was an astute judge of character or this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, his mother called young Josef a devil and a criminal.

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The man lived life to the full as Elisabeth and her children lay in the cellar

Elisabeth sustained injuries from her father's sex toys, and she lost several of her teeth going without medical or dental care all those years. The cellar was infested with rats year after year. Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser stated that Fritzl barely spoke to his daughter during Elisabeth's first few years of imprisonment; he descended into the cellar silently, only to rape her. Burkheiser, just 32 and in office only 11 months before taking on this high profile case, vividly described the cellar's dark, damp conditions, passing dank items of clothing from the family's captivity around so that jurors could smell what the living conditions had been like.

Locals expect authorities to bulldoze Fritzl's Amstetten house and its infamous dungeon.

Josef Fritzl as a young man

Christiane Burkheiser, prosecuting her first case since being appointed Chief Prosecutor, pressed for life imprisonment in an institution for the criminally insane. She demonstrated for jurors the low height of the ceiling in the cellar dungeon by making a mark on the door to the courtroom at 1m 74 cm (5 ft 8.5in), and described the cellar as "damp and mouldy," passing around a box of musty objects taken from the cellar, whose smell made jurors flinch.

On the first day of testimony, jurors watched an 11-hour testimony recorded by Elisabeth in sessions with police and psychologists in July 2008. The tape is said to have been so "harrowing" that the eight jurors did not watch more than two hours at a time. Four replacement jurors were on standby to replace any of the regular jurors in case they could not bear to hear any more of the evidence.

WHAT HAPPENED TO ELISABETH AND HER CHILDREN AFTER FREEDOM?

Owing to their lack of exposure to sunlight, the former captives were extremely pale and could not endure natural light. They were reported to have vitamin D deficiencies and were anemic. They were expected to have underdeveloped immune systems. The clinic head, Berthold Kepplinger, said that the family members needed to stay at the clinic for several months, and that Elisabeth and the two children held captive in the cellar required further therapy to help them adjust to the light after years in semi-darkness. They also needed treatment to help them cope with all the extra space that they now had in which to move about.

It was revealed that Elisabeth and her children were more traumatized than previously thought. During captivity, Kerstin would tear out her hair in clumps, and was reported to have shredded her dresses before stuffing them in the toilet. Stefan was unable to walk properly, due to his height of 173 cm, forced to stoop in the 168 cm-high cellar. It has also been revealed that normal everyday occurrences, such as the dimming of lights or the closing of doors, plunge Kerstin and Stefan into anxiety and panic attacks. The other three of Elisabeth's children who were raised by their father are being treated for anger and resentment at the events.

After the trial, Elisabeth and her six children were moved to an unnamed village in northern Austria, where they are living in a fortress-like house. All of the children require ongoing therapy — the "upstairs" children who learned the truth about the lies that their father told them about their mother abandoning them and the abuse they received from their father/grandfather during their childhood, the fact that their siblings were imprisoned in the cellar which none of them knew about at first, and the "downstairs children" for their deprivation from normal development and lack of fresh air and sunshine and the abuse that they also received, as their mother Elisabeth had, from their father/grandfather when he visited them in the basement. All of the children might possibly have genetic problems common to children born of an incestuous relationship

Although Elisabeth is said to be estranged from her mother, Rosemarie — who accepted Fritzl's story about Elisabeth joining a cult and did not pursue the matter further — Elisabeth allows her three children who grew up in Josef and Rosemarie's house to visit their grandmother regularly. Rosemarie lives alone in a small apartment.

In June 2009, an Austrian newspaper reported that Elisabeth Fritzl had begun a relationship with one of her bodyguards, identified only as Thomas W. The couple are living together.