Fritzl denies two other charges: that he enslaved his daughter and that, through his own negligence, he was guilty of murder of one baby that developed breathing difficulties shortly after birth in He has denied part of the rape charge. The uncontested charges carry terms of up to 15 years, the two contested charges of enslavement and murder carry terms of 20 and life respectively.
Particular concern is how the jury has managed to complete the viewing of 11 hours of testimony from Elisabeth by tomorrow morning. If the crime is not scrupulously clarified, the end effect will be to protect Josef Fritzl.
Please update your payment details to keep enjoying your Irish Times subscription. Daughter tells of Fritzl first sexual advances at age 11 Wed, Mar 18, , Derek Scally. Most Viewed. Watch More Videos. Coronavirus Explore our guides to help you through the pandemic. Elisabeth and her children are living somewhere in Austria and undergoing therapy. Josef Fritzl began molesting his daughter Elisabeth when she was 11 years old.
Elisabeth had six other siblings - four sisters and two brothers, although it is unknown whether Fritzl sexually abused his other children from wife Rosemarie. When she was 15, Elisabeth completed her standard education in Austria and prepared to become a waitress. She ran away from home in and stayed at the home of a friend to get away from her father.
Three weeks later, the police found her and brought her back home. Elisabeth was only 18 when her father lured her into his secret basement. Unbeknownst to anyone else in the family, Fritzl had spent several years building a small section of the basement into living quarters for his teen daughter. He got a permit for the space, which Austrian officials had inspected and approved. The excavated space had narrow hallways that connected several rooms. He even added a small bathroom, as well as a refrigerator, a hot plate, and a bed.
The basement was not temperature-controlled. There were only two ways to access the covert area, and Fritzl hid both in his workshop - which he secured with a series of five locked doors. Elisabeth spent the first months of her imprisonment bound to the walls. Fritzl first chained her arms to the metal bedposts in one of the rooms in the basement.
He then moved the chains around her waist to function like a leash. This allowed her to use the nearby lavatory but not escape. After a time - she believes either six or nine months - he removed all of the constraints because they were in the way. He reportedly raped her daily. When he came into the secret compound, he brought Elisabeth food and other necessities.
He also forced himself on her. After she bore his children - three of whom stayed with her in the basement - he allegedly sexually assaulted Elisabeth in their presence.
Over the 24 years Fritzl held Elisabeth captive in the basement, he impregnated her eight times. The first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. She gave birth to seven children. The second-to-last pregnancy consisted of twins, one of which did not survive. Fritzl took three of the six surviving children - Alexander, Lisa, and Monika - upstairs to live with him and wife Rosemarie. He claimed Elisabeth had run away to a cult and later abandoned the children on his doorstep. He convinced both his wife and social services of this lie and raised the three children in his Austrian home.
But that does not answer the question as to whether he was checked for a criminal record in when his daughter went missing. If police did check, what did they find? An Austrian paper has published a picture purportedly taken of Fritzl at a court hearing in , which would have been well within the statute of limitations in Authorities appear to have taken Fritzl's explanation that his daughter had dumped her grandchildren on the doorstep of the family home at face value.
The defence of the authorities and police so far has been that they had no reason to suspect the abandoned children were not his grandchildren. In the absence of suspicion, they say there was no reason to carry out DNA tests.
Furthermore, they argue that, at the time, DNA technology was not advanced enough to have yielded any useful results. As for criminal convictions, Hans-Heinz Lenze, the Amstetten mayor, said that when the first child was adopted in , neither Fritzl nor his wife apparently had any conviction. If other offences did not register due to the statute of limitations, it poses the question of how appropriate it is that past misdemeanours cannot be discovered when something as sensitive as fostering children is at stake.
Fritzl reportedly told police he feared the crying of Lisa, Monika and Alexander would lead to their discovery underground. However, one would expect that Kerstin, Stefan and Felix would also have cried a lot as babies. The 60 square metre square foot cellar had full plumbing, a fridge, freezer and washing machine, prompting questions as to how he could have decked out the dungeon without raising the suspicions of his wife and other tenants in the building.
Simply getting the furnishings and equipment in would have been difficult through the narrow passages in to the cellar. Construction work also appears to have been undertaken to expand the cellar area, again raising questions as to how it went unnoticed.
This is fuelling speculation he must have been helped. The case started unfolding on April 19 when Kerstin was found unconscious and was taken to a hospital.
After receiving a tip, police picked up Elisabeth and her father on Saturday. Fritzl freed the captive children the same day. Authorities have declined to comment on who tipped off the police, but an Austrian newspaper said it was a senior doctor at the hospital who sensed something strange about the family.
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