Josef Fritzl Is The Monster of Amstetten

Elisabeth’s Suffering

From the time Elisabeth is young, Josef Fritzl has an unnatural obsession with his daughter. We now know that Fritzl actually started sexually assaulting Elisabeth in 1977 when she was just 11 years old. He wanted to control her and detested her behaviour during her rebellious teenage years. His reign of terror over her threatened to end in 1984 when Elisabeth announced she was moving to another town to live with her sister. This set Fritzl’s plan into motion, and on August 29, 1984, he lured Elisabeth into the basement, drugged her with ether and handcuffed her inside the chamber.

Not long after she disappeared, Elisabeth’s mother filed a missing person’s report with the police. A month later, Josef Fritzl goes to the police with a letter he has supposedly received from Elisabeth. It claimed that she was sick of living with her family and run away. Fritzl said he believed she had joined a cult. In reality, Fritzl had made her write the letter, and then driven 100 miles from his house to post it.

Meanwhile, in the dungeon where Elisabeth is imprisoned, her life is hard. Her father beats her, tortures her and rapes her on a regular basis. He visits her in the cellar every three days on average to bring food and supplies, and establish his dominance. It is almost guaranteed that Elisabeth would fall pregnant, which she does in 1986 (suffering a miscarriage at around 10 weeks) and 1989. Fritzl isn’t present for the 1989 birth, and all he provides Elisabeth with is a book on pregnancy and birth, a towel, a pair of scissors and some nappies. She gives birth to a daughter, and calls her Kerstin.

In 1990, Stefan follows Kerstin, and then in 1992, another child, Lisa, is born. Josef Fritzl removes Lisa from the ‘bunker’ when she is nine months old and leaves her in a cardboard box on his own doorstep. Along with the baby is a note from Elisabeth asking for the child to be looked after. In the trial, it is uncovered that Lisa had a heart defect and Fritzl may have been worried about the constant crying of the baby, testing the soundproofing. Another child, Monika, is born in 1994 and at this time, Josef allows Elisabeth and the children to enlarge the basement. They spend years digging at the soil with their hands, increasing the size of the basement from 380 square feet to 600 square feet.

Josef removes Monika in December of 1994 when she was 10 months old. He leaves her in a stroller outside the house, and then stages a recorded phone call using Elisabeth’s voice a few days later. When Fritzl’s wife, Rosemarie reports the call to police she expresses her surprise that Elisabeth was able to find their new and unlisted phone number. Elisabeth gives birth to twin boys in May of 1996. One boy is in need of immediate medical attention, and without it, he died at just three days old. Fritzl incinerates his body in the house’s furnace. The surviving twin Alexander is kept with Elisabeth for 15 months before being taken upstairs and discovered in similar circumstances. The last child, Felix, is born at the end of 2002. Josef does not remove him as he feels that his wife already has enough children to look after. Along with Kerstin and Stefan, Felix will not experience the outside world until 2008.