I'm No Monster Page 12
To comprehend the intricacy of the cellar, one must imagine a maze of chambers and passageways, some dimly lit by overhead strip lights, others not lit at all. At its very heart lies the room he made for Elisabeth, separated from everything that went on above it by several feet of concrete and many doors, including the hole in the wall of the workshop, which Josef would soon make into a door more impenetrable than every other door in the cellar, than every other door in Amstetten. And it’s not difficult to see what many psychiatrists would later make of this construction, the effort he put into its assembly, the thought he invested in the configuration of this warren of rooms with its doors, keys, and locks; its underground location; and its almost mythological resonance: Hades abducting Persephone into the underworld, the many-doored castle of the murderer Bluebeard, the Minotaur trapped in his labyrinth. The dual nature of both man and house, part revealed and part hidden: a metaphor that underpins the psychoanalytical theory of Freud, of Jung, and the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard; and, before them, the stories of Poe, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the poetry of the Greek philosophers. For Freud and Jung the cellar represented the unconscious, the darkest and most mysterious entity of the mind. Aboveground, in the airy light of day, our fears are easily rationalized; the experiences of our waking life release us from the fears of night. But downstairs in the cellar, darkness reigns. Its walls are buried, encased in earth, the air is heavy, and we feel we are in the grip of subterranean forces. In the cellar there is no sunlight, and therefore no measurable passage of time, and even with a candle we are afraid of what we might encounter in the shadows. The creatures that live here do not scamper away, as they might in the light; they move mysteriously, retreating to their holes only reluctantly.
Unheimlich was the word Freud used to describe both the cellar and the unconscious. Strange and yet familiar. Uncanny. Powerful, too, because of its secrecy. From the outside it is impossible to tell whether there is a cellar at all, and how deep and dark it is.
He has brought a plastic salad bowl in case, as he delicately puts it, she needs to “answer a call of nature.” And he unties her wrists. But not before he has wrapped a longer, equally heavy chain around her waist—this so that she can reach the toilet and the washbasin and the stove. He unties her wrists, but not before he has slapped her and punched her and kicked her many times. He is not afraid to use his booted feet in order to penetrate that dreaminess of hers, to break her down. Breaking her down and building her back up again into something that better suits his purpose. Setting fire to the house at Mondsee and building it back up again. As he was with the things he owned, so he behaved with his children. “He thought of her as his property and used her as if she was his possession,” Elisabeth’s attorney would say of the relationship between father and daughter in a courtroom in St. Pöllen many years in the future.
The physical attack on his daughter on the second day of her imprisonment lasts about forty minutes. He’s hitting her in the face and chest; she’s crying and struggling. He’s putting his hands over her mouth and nose, gagging her with his thick builder’s fingers. Suffocating her. She’s trying to shake him off but it’s almost impossible with the chains and the weight of him. And she’s frightened. She knows very well what he’s capable of. “One day that pig will kill us all,” Harald, her favourite brother, once said of their father. The level of fear in that household, always very high, had become a kind of terror in recent years. Josef would come at his children like a bull. Out of the blue he would turn. Punch Harald in the face. Hold him by the scruff of his neck up against the wall so his feet dangled off the floor. Smash things up. Use his belt, use his shoe, use any old thing, whatever happened to be lying around. It wasn’t beneath him to threaten to kill members of his family when he was on one of his rampages.
Very little noise penetrates the cellar from above, and the reverse is also true. Flatly, factually, he tells her, “They can’t hear you. So there’s no point.” Still, she tries to defend herself. This goes on until she’s left defeated, bleeding, and cowering on the bed. Trembling uncontrollably as if she’s been in an accident. Only then does he remove the chains from her upper arms and wrists to tie the larger chain around her waist.
He feels no need for explanations and gives none. He says, “If you don’t do what I say it will only get worse.”
“You can’t get out of here anyway.” These are words that he will repeat many times over the course of her imprisonment, until they become a sort of mantra: reassuring himself as much as he is threatening her. And, of course, he is right. She cannot leave. Nor can she be discovered. She is undiscoverable, given the circumstances aboveground: Her mother is an incurious woman, naive, afraid of her husband, getting through life by putting one foot in front of the other.
Equally incurious or naive are the Amstetten authorities. They feel no impulse to conduct a rigorous examination of this girl’s disappearance, the second in two years; to explore in greater depth the clues that are laid out before them. Clues that are predominantly to be found in Josef’s criminal record: the rape in 1967; two further sexual offenses in the same year; a suspected arson in 1982. Clues that will before long disappear altogether. Time is against her. For the crimes of Josef Fritzl will remain on the police files for just three more years. After that they will be automatically deleted. Some of them have already been deleted as a matter of course because, despite any evidence to support their view, Austrian lawmakers are of the opinion that sexual offenders rehabilitate themselves of their own accord. They just get better. Time heals, so goes the thinking. And it is on the basis of this view that the law has decreed that any conviction for a sexual crime is to be held on record for exactly ten years, after which the ugly blot is simply erased. It is 1984. For a while the suspected arson attempt case will remain on file. But the record of sexual assaults has already vanished from police files. Most of the traces of Josef’s criminal past now exist only in newspaper archives in dusty old libraries.
And, of course, in the memories of some of the citizens of Amstetten. Friedrich Leimlehner will not forget. Nor will Karl Dunkl. Both of them will, many years in the future, feel uneasy at school reunions about the things they once read in the paper about Josef. It’s not their job to investigate the vanishing of young women. That is the police’s job, and yet within days of Elisabeth’s disappearance the police will accept the hypothesis—Josef’s hypothesis—that she has run away to join a cult, although you can count all the sects and cults in Austria on one hand. There is Otto Mühl’s cult in Burgenland and there are the various international groups who are well known to the authorities and whose presence in Austria is negligible: the Scientologists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Hare Krishna, the Moonies. None of them has a history of making people disappear. It is a country of just eight million people.
Elisabeth is gone, and the police seem not to have made a serious effort to find her. They do not cross-examine her father; they commiserate with him. They do not speculate about why a young girl would want to run away from home. And perhaps the reason they do not do these things is lack of experience. Amstetten is a small town, after all; its citizens are obedient, and its police force seldom encounters serious crime. They imagine hardened criminals to be easily identifiable figures, outsiders, foreigners maybe, drawn from Austria’s burgeoning Turkish and Yugoslavian populations who have been invited into the country to carry out its menial work. Or perhaps they do not do these things because they are unwilling to look beneath the surface of things. A horror of looking for which the officers at Amstetten police station cannot wholly be blamed. For it is a habit endemic in the culture they live in, this aversion to connecting the past with the present. It is a trait for which the whole nation is well known. Especially where it concerns a man as decent, as responsible, as well turned out as Josef Fritzl, an Amstettner born and bred. “Give him a chance,” says the head of the construction firm Zehetner when, in 1968, fresh from prison, Josef returns home looking for a
job. At Zehetner he learns to mix and lay concrete, techniques he later uses to build the cellar. “Give him a chance,” says the law a decade later when, just at that point where he begins work underground, his criminal files are destroyed.
On the second day, he rapes Elisabeth. He has untied the chain from around her wrists so that she can reach the toilet and basin, but also so that he can more easily force her to have sex with him. We know from what she told her lawyers that the rape goes on for hours. Then he rapes her again. The first rape goes on for hours. And so does the second. Perhaps there is a gap in between when he returns upstairs to the house to wash; he always paid fastidious attention to his personal hygiene. Perhaps he needs to check on his building work, make a telephone call or two. Tidying up some business. Placing some orders. There is nothing about his behavior that day that alludes to his guilt. He rapes her once, and just as his shadow disappears from the wall, there he is again, to rape her a second time. He doesn’t speak to her at all because, she will later say, he now knows “he could do whatever he wanted.... He was acting out sexually everything that had built up in him,” ever since she had come back from Vienna when, for fear that she would tell someone, he had reined himself in for two years. And these protracted desecrations of his daughter’s body, her will, are a blueprint for how things are going to be from now on. The same thing happens the next day, and the day after that, and the week and the month after that. “If you don’t do what I say, it will only get worse.” But it gets worse no matter what she does. Whether she screams or scratches his face or flies at him in her rage and hatred, whether she shuts her eyes to shut him out, it makes no difference. Over and over it happens. Twice-daily rapes of a daughter by her father. A routine. A system.
After a while he shows her what the television is for. He has bought the television and the video recorder with a specific purpose in mind. And to this end he has also spent some time in the little shop with blacked-out windows on an industrial estate not far from Amstetten. There he has bought several videotapes. And along with the videos he has bought props that he has seen women use in pornographic films. Next to where he has neatly arranged the plastic cutlery he has placed a vibrator and a whip. The knives and forks are for eating and the vibrator is for sex. Mixing things up: mixing the banally domestic with the overtly sexual, the acceptable with the forbidden; jumbling up his life aboveground with what went on below in the cellar, where there were doors but no boundaries. Mixing them all up in the way he mixed cement, gravel, and water to make concrete, a process that had always fascinated him. The television is for watching pornographic videos, and the props are there to help. Not long into her imprisonment he starts making Elisabeth watch the videos with him. She must use the props—the tools—the way the actors do. Right from the start he is there in the cellar for hours at a time. Mornings and evenings he sits down with Rosemarie for meals as if nothing has happened. What do they talk about, this couple who have grown so alienated from each other, during those first few months of their daughter’s disappearance? “Where is Elisabeth?” They have many conversations about that. She has always been willful. Oh, she was willful. Typical of her to have run away.
A month into her imprisonment. It is September, the temperature has dropped, and outside, on the hills surrounding Amstetten, the leaves of the pear trees have already started to lose their colour. Autumn is on its way. Down in the cellar, where there are no seasons, he gives Elisabeth a pen and a piece of paper and dictates a letter. Addressed to her parents, it implies—and hadn’t he predicted as much to his wife and the police?—that she has joined a cult. Dort wo ich bin, geht es mir gut, the letter concludes. I am happy where I am. Elisabeth’s handwriting but Josef’s words. And it’s true, he is happy here. To him the cellar, like no other place he’s ever been, feels right. Twenty-four years later the press will call this room a dungeon. But to Josef it was always a “bunker,” that is to say, a shelter. And it is quite possible, considering his wartime experiences as a child, that he does not think of the cellar as a frightening place at all. As a nine-year-old he had spent much time feeling safe and protected in the bunkers, the bomb shelters, that were set into the hills around Amstetten; burrowed deep in the earth like a woodland animal. Safe. And it is quite possible that although the cellar is, by almost anybody’s standards, a repellent place, Josef feels calmer and more comfortable here than he does anywhere else. Unlike the house, which he would keep tinkering with and refurbishing in an attempt—always a failed attempt—to make it feel like home. The house was never right, no matter what he did to it. But the cellar was something else. It felt right. Even though the things that now went on inside it were all upside down and the wrong way around.
After she has finished writing out the letter—and it takes a whole week of threats and violence, of leaving her alone in the dark, of starving her, to get her to do it—he tucks it into his pocket and drives a hundred miles to Braunau am Inn, Hitler’s birthplace as it happens, and drops it into a mailbox. Why he chose to send it from there is unclear; possibly he was there on business. When the letter arrives the next day at 40 Ybbsstrasse, Josef immediately shows it to his wife and then to the police. Many times they pore over it, searching for clues.
Autumn turns to winter. It grows cold in the cellar. Outside the temperature sinks to 10 degrees centigrade. Snow creaks underfoot; it lies thick on the roofs of houses; when the wind rattles through the town it drops in soft clumps from the branches of trees. One of their children has built a snowman with a potato for a nose in the Fritzls’ garden. Winter makes even the region’s uglier factories dainty and picturesque. Even the plainest front door bears an Advent wreath. Inside the cellar the only thing that has changed is the temperature. It is much colder—still there is no heating or warm water, and often there is no light. Already he has proved himself to be a resourceful jailer. And he punishes her for her willfulness, for her repulsion of him, by starving her and leaving her in the dark for long periods of time. Not hours but days. We know from what Elisabeth later told her lawyers that it gets so cold in the cellar that she is forced to improvise an extra layer of clothing. At first he took away her clothes and would just leave her there naked, for weeks. So having any clothes at all is a comfort. Christmas she spends alone and chained up in darkness wearing a smock made out of bed linens. Not many metres away her family is gathered together. Rosemarie and some of her other children have attended mass, and together they now share a family meal. The first Christmas without Elisabeth. Her brothers and sisters are resentful. She hasn’t even bothered to call.
In spring 1985 he acknowledges that the chain around her waist is becoming a problem. When he rapes her he often gets entangled in it, so he decides that the time has come to remove the chain altogether. But this thought throws up questions about security. He is afraid that she will escape through the door, bolted from the outside though it is. So for many weeks before he removes the chain he wrestles with the problem of how to make the cellar more secure. And, having spent a great deal of time reading all the latest literature on the subject and spending several hours in hardware and electronics shops, finally he finds a solution that makes use of his skills as an engineer. In an electronics shop one day he finds himself drawn to the new technology they’re using for garage doors: remote-control devices. He sees no reason not to apply this to the cellar. He buys two hollow steel doors and reinforces them with poured concrete. They are the same kind of impenetrable, soundproof doors used in nuclear bunkers. The first door is for the hole in the wall of his workshop, and the second is for the entrance to Elisabeth’s room. To these doors he adds locks and bolts operated by remote-control pads that he fixes to the wall. On the same principle as the doors of a bank vault.
But just to make sure she won’t even attempt to escape, he tells Elisabeth that the doors of the cellar have been fitted with photosensitive alarms; if she opens the door from inside she will be electrocuted and gassed. He’s lying, of course; there is no such mechanism. But
that doesn’t stop her from believing that any attempt to escape from the cellar is suicide. He tells her there’s no point in even trying to get out; she will be dead in the cellar and nobody will be any the wiser.
What else do we know? We know what he told the court and his psychiatrist. That he had never intended to keep her there. That what he claims started out as a temporary measure—a “solution” for the many worrying behavioral changes he thought he had seen in her—would eventually drag itself out over twenty-four years. He had totally convinced himself that she was on drugs, and he had used this as a reason to keep her there. “If she hadn’t been taking drugs I wouldn’t have needed to lock her up,” he said when, twenty-four years later, he was arrested and tried. There was no way out for Elisabeth. And no way out for her father, either. The first lie—that his daughter had run off and joined a cult—had now been compounded by so many lies that it was impossible to backtrack. There was nothing he could think of except to carry on, to get in deeper. His answer had been to keep her there.