I'm No Monster

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE - Beginnings

  CHAPTER TWO - “A Respectable Engineer”

  CHAPTER THREE - Master of the House

  CHAPTER FOUR - Elisabeth

  CHAPTER FIVE - “Think of Me”

  Part Two

  CHAPTER SIX - The Cellar

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Birth

  CHAPTER EIGHT - The Darkness

  CHAPTER NINE - The Doorstep

  Part Three

  CHAPTER TEN - Into the Light

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - “Mostly Resolved”

  CHAPTER TWELVE - The Trial

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - A Kind of Closure

  Acknowledgements

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Copyright © 2009 by Stefanie Marsh and Bojan Pancevski.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15113-6

  1. Fritzl, Josef, 1935- 2. Incest—Austria—Amstetten. 3. Abduction—Austria—

  Amstetten. 4. Child molesters—Austria—Amstetten—Biography. 5. Child sexual

  abuse—Austria—Amstetten. 6. Fathers and daughters—Austria—Amstetten. 7. Fritzl,

  Josef, 1935—Family. I. Pancevski, Bojan. II. Title.

  HV6570.9.A9M37 2009

  364.15’3—dc22

  [B]

  2009029387

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  FOREWORD

  It is difficult to write a book on a subject as complex as Josef FritzI. And certainly many Austrians would prefer that such a book not be published. In Austria there is little appetite to understand his crimes, and even less inclination to uncover the many factors that may have allowed for them to happen.

  When the Fritzl case first came to light in April 2008, Austria became the unwilling focus of massive media scrutiny. Not only were the gravity and range of his crimes against his children unparalleled in recent history, but the case had emerged only two years after a strikingly similar one, also in Austria: In 2006, eighteen-year-old Natascha Kampusch had escaped another purpose-built dungeon where she had been forced to live since age ten by an electrical engineer who had abducted her. When the Kampusch case came to light, it was regarded by most people as a unique case. But suddenly there was Josef Fritzl, and another cellar, and yet another story of prolonged incarceration and sexual abuse.

  And although the police and social services in Amstetten have always declared themselves satisfied that the crimes of Josef Fritzl were unpreventable, his sentencing to life imprisonment in March 2009 left many important questions unanswered regarding the role of the authorities. His trial lasted less than four days, and neither the court nor the Austrian media seemed inclined to get to the bottom of how Fritzl could have committed such terrible deeds for so long. There was no investigation into the role of the authorities, there has not been a single resignation, and it was never determined whether there might have been any possible negligence on behalf of the officials who had come to know the Fritzls over the years. Experts from Scotland Yard expressed astonishment that many of Fritzl’s family members were never questioned by police in detail or in a manner fit for cases of such complexity. Many observers strongly suspected that this crime could have been stopped in its tracks many times. The feeling was that justice had not been served. Meanwhile, not only the Amstetten authorities but also those high up in the Austrian government would continue to hold that they bore no responsibility for what happened for so many years to Elisabeth Fritzl and her children.

  But there is another side of this story, one that has been equally neglected and one to which we hope to give justice in this book. Most people who have read about the Fritzl case have asked themselves how Elisabeth Fritzl survived her twenty-four-year incarceration. And yet she has emerged from a lifetime of unimaginable deprivation and terror as a heroic figure—a woman who, though her means were few and the fear in the cellar was great, protected her children against their father. Often, in so doing, she acted against her own interests. Over the years, Elisabeth Fritzl did everything she could to ensure the safety of her children and strove to give them some semblance of comfort and normality in the cellar: She educated them, she often persuaded her father to bring down sufficient food to ensure their survival, and she emerged from the cellar undiminished by the many years of imprisonment. Indeed, the most extraordinary aspect of this case is not the fact that Josef Fritzl was able to incarcerate his daughter for almost two and a half decades; it is Elisabeth Fritzl herself. In this book, we hope to shed some light on her astonishing courage and the incredible ability of the human spirit to overcome seemingly impossible conditions.

  In the course of researching this book we have spoken to many people who knew Josef Fritzl personally or were friends of the Fritzl family, as well as many of those who were directly involved in the case when it came to light: police, psychiatrists, doctors, and lawyers. Many of them expressed to us their wish that the intricate facts of the case be laid bare in a way that they will never be in Austria. Although we have endeavoured to name our sources where possible, several of the interviews that we were granted by those involved in the case had to be conducted under conditions of anonymity. We are grateful to the people who chose to speak out about this case and to explain to us its intricacies, despite, in some instances, considerable pressure from above.

  Finally, much has been written in the press about the effect on Josef Fritzl of his wartime childhood. And although Fritzl himself has sought to blame the evolution of his double life on the Nazi Austria of the late 1930s and early 1940s, this claim cannot be taken seriously. What is undoubtable, however, is that still now, Austria itself has yet to face its past or analyse with any seriousness its impact on the present. As a result there continues to exist in Austria a culture of looking away, a squeamishness about examining in any depth the harsh truths about its society, and a distaste fo
r self-analysis. We believe that Josef Fritzl’s crimes were largely preventable, had the authorities been prepared to acknowledge the many clues laid before them over the years, and that Elisabeth’s fate in her father’s cellar was not inevitable, as at least one member of the Austrian government has suggested. We hope that this book, in addressing the circumstances of the Fritzl case; by examining his behavior and descent into inhumanity, piece by piece; and by flagging the signs—both subtle and blatant—of his extreme cruelty, will in some way help illustrate how important it is to look.

  PROLOGUE

  Dr. Albert Reiter’s habit was to check on his patients for a couple of hours on a Saturday morning. So by 7:15 A.M. on Saturday, April 19, 2008, he was already making the seven-minute drive to Amstetten Hospital. He’d had a coffee instead of breakfast at home, and now he lit a cigarette.

  At 7:30 A.M. he was in the elevator up to the second floor: the intensive care unit of which he was the head.

  As usual he stopped off in the staff room to discuss any problems that might have occurred among the patients overnight. There had been none, and Reiter was soon making his way through the series of noiseless, code-accessed automatic doors, past the calm and well-administered horseshoe-shaped reception area—the department’s nucleus—and to each of the unit’s eight beds, distributed among two single and three double rooms. To help make the patients’ experience as comfortable as possible, framed photographs of trees and flowing streams had been hung on the walls, and a sign, hand-painted on a door panel by some of the nurses, read “Waking-up Room” in cheerful rainbow colours. Reiter moved from bed to bed, each one flanked by its vast panel of elaborate, lifesaving equipment on one side and a large window on the other. On Reiter’s instructions, every bed space had been designed to have access to plenty of natural light from the south-facing windows that looked onto the hospital parking lot below. Beyond the parking lot, Reiter saw that it was becoming a magnificent spring day.

  It was getting toward 8:30 A.M. when a call came through from the hospital’s accident and emergency room: Paramedics had just brought in a critically ill young woman. Reiter sent down a junior doctor to look at the case. Five minutes later he joined him.

  The girl was unconscious.

  Laid out on a stretcher, she looked no more than twenty and was clearly terribly sick. Even Reiter’s first glance told him that she was very close to death. Her name, Reiter was told, was Kerstin.

  The emergency team had judged Kerstin’s condition to be so grave they had immediately induced an artificial coma, a procedure that is nar cotically generated and carried out only in extreme situations, such as when a patient experiences multiple organ failure. By decreasing brain activity and therefore oxygen requirements and blood flow, it can reduce life-threatening swelling in the brain. Her lungs, kidney, and liver were failing. Reiter’s first thought was that she might have been poisoned. He also suspected either an accidental drug overdose or a suicide attempt.

  By sheer chance, one of the paramedics in the ambulance carrying Kerstin happened to be Reiter’s son. He now quickly summarized the events of the morning for his father. He told him that the girl had been picked up from a home in Ybbsstrasse in central Amstetten. The call had come in at around eight that morning from the girl’s grandfather. He had found her collapsed in front of his house; almost tripped over her, he’d said, going out to buy bread rolls. It had been a tremendous shock to the grandfather.

  The sight of a teenage girl unconscious on a doorstep would have come as a shock to anyone first thing in the morning, but particularly to the old man, who’d never seen the girl before in his life. Apparently Kerstin had grown up away from home with her mother in some kind of sect; her grandfather didn’t know much more than that. By the time the ambulance arrived, his son told Reiter, her grandfather had carried her into the house and laid her on a bed. Reiter’s son had then helped lift her into an ambulance.

  Reiter’s son didn’t know what to make of the girl’s illness; there were so few clues that it was impossible to even hazard a diagnosis. The grandfather hadn’t been able to tell him much and was probably too shocked to think straight anyway. One other thing had occurred to Reiter’s son, however, and now he passed this information on to his father. He’d had a funny feeling about the house in Ybbsstrasse. Something about the room Kerstin had been lying in. Apart from the bed, it contained no furniture. Nothing earth-shattering, he said, just a little strange. “Write that down,” Albert Reiter told him. “Make sure to write it all down.”

  An hour and a half since she had been discovered on a doorstep in Ybbsstrasse, forty-five minutes since she’d been put into an artificial coma in the hospital’s emergency room, Kerstin was wheeled into intensive care. As you look up from the reception area, it is the room second from the left.

  At 10:11 Dr. Reiter got another call from downstairs. The girl’s grandfather had arrived: a respectable type, a man in his early seven-ties, kindly, worried but trying not to show it—like any other anxious relative. He was sensibly but not expensively dressed: an ironed shirt tucked into high-waisted trousers, the laces of his practical thick-soled black boots neatly tied. His hair was combed back over a bald patch and his mustache was trimmed in the traditional style favoured among men of his generation in Austria. A father of seven and a respectable former engineer, Reiter learned.

  The doctor led him into the unit and showed him Kerstin. The girl was terribly ill, motionless, pale, and wired up to several drips. Reiter explained that despite the hospital’s best efforts, her condition was extremely fragile. “The difficulty I have,” he said, “is that we have no medical records—a doctor can only deduce so much from a patient’s symptoms.” Without more information about the causes of her illness, he explained, he was battling with an invisible problem. At about 10:30 he did what he always did with his patients’ relatives and invited Kerstin’s grandfather to talk to him privately in his office.

  Reiter’s office was a ramshackle affair, a comforting place in which he liked to think that relatives felt more comfortable talking. A blue sofa hugged the left corner, and a desk was wedged in on the right; the walls were lined with bookshelves containing medical texts. Various odds and ends had found their way into the room over the years: a decorative, not fully operational water fountain; an espresso machine; a small wooden crucifix left over from his predecessor; a can of air fresh ener ; an ashtray or two; four or five stray bones plucked from a synthetic skeleton; and assorted stacks of papers. In the center of the room were a coffee table and three chairs, where Reiter invited Josef Fritzl to take a seat. What he wanted, he explained, was for Herr Fritzl to tell him everything he knew; no detail could be too small to mention.

  Josef Fritzl repeated what he’d told paramedics: Kerstin was his granddaughter but had grown up away from home with her mother, whom he hadn’t seen for more than twenty years, ever since she’d run away to live in a sect. The first and only time he’d seen Kerstin had been that morning when he discovered the girl on his doorstep, passed out. He assumed she must have been left there by her mother because over the years she had abandoned various other children in the same way: three babies in all, left on his doorstep throughout the 1990s. He and his wife, Rosemarie, with the agreement of the council, had taken in the children to raise as their own.

  And the thing was, Fritzl explained, she always left a note. She had done so again this morning. Fritzl now produced from his pocket a folded-up sheet of plain letter paper and laid it out on the table for Reiter to see. In a girlish hand, it read:Wednesday night: Kerstin had fits and took cough syrup and aspirin.

  Thursday: Cough getting worse.

  Friday: Fits getting worse. Kerstin is biting her lip and tongue. Please help her! Kerstin is so afraid of other people, she’s never been in a hospital. Please ask my father for help, he’s the only one she knows. Kerstin) please hold on until we see each other again! We’ll be there soon!

  Cough medicine and aspirin. The only clues Reiter had. He
called a nurse in to make a photocopy of the letter and asked Fritzl to continue with his story.

  His daughter Elisabeth, always an unpredictable girl, had disappeared in the mid-1980s when she was eighteen. It hadn’t been the first time she had run away from home. She’d done so before when she was sixteen and, to his great embarrassment, had eventually been picked up by the police in Vienna.

  So when she disappeared for the second time, her father never believed it would be forever. He told Reiter that he had alerted the police right away, but they had been worse than useless. It was the only moment in the interview in which Josef Fritzl became animated, the only time that his frustration got the better of him. They’d found no trace. Fritzl then spent several minutes complaining bitterly to Reiter about the failure of the authorities to track down his daughter. It was clearly a source of huge frustration and disappointment to him that, despite his best efforts, Elisabeth remained missing. He then added that Elisabeth had two other children in her care and, judging by the state of Kerstin, they were also at risk.

  One thing was certain: Wherever she was, she was not coping, as every few years she’d have a baby and leave it on her father’s doorstep with one of her desperate notes. How was it possible, Fritzl asked the doctor, not to find a girl in a small, well-behaved country like Austria?

  It was a very sad and distressing story, but Reiter found that Josef Fritzl was an excellent witness, conducting himself with great self-control during what must have been a very distressing experience. He laid out the facts with meticulous clarity and described his daughter vividly. Reiter pictured a troubled, confused, and possibly dangerous soul who, having become entangled in a murky underground scene, had become a liability to her family. In his line of work he’d come across such cases before.