I'm No Monster Read online

  Josef had little use for the gun outside of the family home. But within 40 Ybbsstrasse he had often brandished it in front of his wife and children. There were other times when he beat Rosemarie so badly that her children could hear her being thrown from one end of a room to another: dull thumps from the other side of a wall or closed door, the sounds of whimpering and shouting. As a result of these attacks, once or twice she had ended up in the hospital, Elisabeth or one of her other daughters—never her husband—at her side. There would be bruises all over her body, open skin. Once, and this had happened in front of Elisabeth and her brother Harald, he had sent his wife flying across the room. He had fractured her femur, and Elisabeth had had to take her mother to the hospital. Yet even in the comparative safety of an emergency ward, Rosemarie would make up some excuse about falling down the stairs. Because she knew what would be waiting for her at home, knew that by the time she returned he would be even more worked up than when she’d left. A time bomb. He could be lethal then. There had been quite a few episodes between husband and wife where he had ended up threatening her with the gun. You never knew with him if he meant it as a joke. Often he’d laugh. Then he’d turn on her again. Throw crockery all over the floor. There would be food and broken plates everywhere and then he would say, “Where’s dinner?”

  So, in buying and brandishing the gun, Josef sought to protect himself against any threat to his own authority, real or perceived. With a gun in his hand he felt safer. The big man. Even at the best of times he had difficulty trusting people and always felt burdened by the feeling that he was on the verge of being betrayed: by his family, by the people he worked with, by just about anyone, unless they were firmly subordinated and under his thumb. It was always power games with Josef. Trusting no one, he liked to have one up on other people. He liked to know something they did not know, have something over them. He liked to keep secrets. Not that it was obvious from looking at him. “Helpful,” “energetic,” “entertaining,” “bright”: These were the words most often used to describe Josef Fritzl by the people he worked with and his neighbours. Amstetten’s police and social workers would always think of him as an easygoing, upstanding man, “one of us.” They were completely unaware of his watchfulness. They did not guess at the profound split inside him. Josef feared and distrusted other people all of his life. Other people were the threat. And the biggest threat of all was other men.

  Other men, according to Josef, had corrupted Elisabeth in her youth. The root of the problem that had resulted in his having had to lock Elisabeth in the cellar could be traced back to her childhood, he maintained. Many years later, under cross-examination by the police, he would claim that she had been molested by an “Uncle Franz.” He may or may not have existed. “Franz Fritzl,” a “Kindlerfummler,” or “kiddy fiddler,” had an unnatural interest in children, according to Josef Fritzl, and when she was just eight or nine he had turned his gaze on the fragile Elisabeth. Somewhere along the line, on some vacation, or in some secret place when her parents were busy doing something else, Franz had “done something” to Elisabeth. Josef wasn’t sure what. He had touched her, maybe more, in a sexual way and then paid her money not to say anything. And whatever Uncle Franz had “done” to Elisabeth had messed her up in the head, had made her sexually precocious. So by the time she was twelve or thirteen she was wild. She would “have sex with the builders” who occasionally came by the house. She would have “sexual experiences” with boys who came to visit. She was having “sexual experiences” with just about anyone who came near her. He had found letters once, addressed to Elisabeth from a married man. On another occasion he had caught her in bed with a boy. She was flagrant and out of control, if you believed Josef. Any father would have been concerned.

  And so when, at age sixteen, she had run away to Vienna, he had been beside himself with worry. He sent Harald to search for her, and when Harald failed, he called the police. Thank God they had found her. But he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to reassure himself and so resolved to find out exactly what had happened in Vienna, exactly what sort of trouble she was in. And he drove all the way back there to talk to the boys in the apartment she had been staying in, and discovered they belonged to a gang called Die Lederjacken, the Leather Jackets. And they were dangerous, this gang with which she had involved herself. More of a crime ring than a gang, they had intended to turn her into a prostitute. They were waiting until she had turned eighteen, and then they would pimp her out to whomever and live off her earnings. Already they had introduced her to glue-sniffing and illegal drugs. She was out of control already: hysterical, volatile, angry, a troublemaker with no respect for authority. She had gone off the rails. Tripped off the deep end. What kind of father wouldn’t have been worried? And the only reason he had put her down in the cellar in the first place was to teach her a lesson. He hadn’t intended it as a long-term arrangement; he had just wanted to talk some sense into her. It was only afterward that he, in his words, “began to see her as a woman.” If you believe Josef.

  Years later it would become clear that he had made it all up. There was no gang, no glue-sniffing, no imminent descent into prostitution. These were people and events that Josef had manufactured in his mind. They were things that he had gleaned from television and, in his paranoid imagination, they had calcified into fact. Elisabeth would remember him, in the early 1980s, getting very worked up about a government-sponsored antidrug campaign on television that featured two young girls getting high on cleaning products. And it is likely that the image became imprinted on his mind. When she came back from Vienna, he had pestered her for information: “Where did you stay? Who were those boys? Did you have sex? Whose bed did you sleep in?” For weeks he went on at her until her mother told her to tell him. And so, in the end, she told him, and off he went in the battered old Mercedes to Vienna. But the “information” he had come back with was all pure fiction, right down to the gang’s name. At that time young men everywhere were wearing leather bomber jackets, so he had called them Die Lederjacken. There was no gang, no plan to prostitute her.

  There was no child abuse at the hands of an uncle; no married man, builders, or boys in her room. Most likely these were all projections of his own desires. Josef the trusted relative, molesting his young daughter. Josef the married man, making sexual overtures to Elisabeth. Josef the builder, having sex with her all over the house. Other men: that old threat. Different versions of himself from which he wanted to distance himself. She always had the feeling he wanted to project things onto her that had nothing to do with the truth. At some point in her midteens she had written letters to her brother Harald about what her father was doing to her. And from the Tyrolean Alps, where Harald was then working as a cook, he had sent a ten-page reply to his sister in which he made clear his anger with their father. The letter still exists; it was found by police in April 2008 among many other letters that had been sent to Elisabeth but which she had never received. They had been intercepted by her father. He had always needed to make up reasons and justifications for his behavior. It was because of what he had allegedly found out in Vienna—a criminal gang—that he had needed to buy a gun. “Protection.” He had no real use for a gun. But he was a man obsessed with his own virility, and a gun was a symbol of that.

  Elisabeth later said she never took drugs but believed he might have liked it to have been true—then at least he would have had reason for his actions.

  On August 30, 1988, a child is born in the cellar of 40 Ybbsstrasse. It is born in the dark, without medical assistance and without complications. But because the mother is alone and lacks experience in such matters or recourse should something go wrong, the labor is a terrifying ordeal.

  She is quite unequipped for the birth; she has at her disposal one pair of scissors, one blanket, and a package of diapers. It was Josef who gave Elisabeth the scissors and the extra blanket. And it was he who had traveled several miles out of Amstetten to buy diapers at a supermarket in Linz where nobody would rec
ognize him. In response to her repeated panicked entreaties he had even, seven months into her pregnancy, bought her a book on childbirth. It was from studying its contents that the young, terrified mother-to-be had gathered the basics of birth and child rearing. She had read all about what it might feel like when her water broke, and she had known what to do. She had taught herself how to breathe and push once the contractions started.

  She has never done this before; does not know where it will end. Then, after it is over, she must cut the umbilical cord herself, and for this purpose she has been given a pair of kitchen scissors. She has read that severing an umbilical cord appears a straightforward procedure but may have deadly consequences. In days gone by, thousands of new mothers before her died of puerperal fever, a form of septicemia, through lack of basic hygiene. The cellar is filthy. The scissors may be filthy, too. Exhausted and blinded by the darkness, she boils up some water on the portable stove and douses the scissors in the pan. Once the water has evaporated from the scissors—she dares not dry them on one of the unwashed bedsheets—she cuts the cord. Once it is over she can’t quite believe that she has managed it. At the foot of her bed lies, gasping and shouting for breath, a tiny baby girl. The mother looks at her with ambivalence.

  Then she swaddles her newborn child in a blanket, and for a little while the baby sleeps. The heavy, late-summer air has somehow per colated down into the cellar. Elisabeth is twenty-two years old. Four years ago, almost to the day, she woke up for the first time in this dank and forgotten place. Now it is her infant daughter’s turn. What will become of them, mother and child? For ten days they sit in the dark and wait.

  The child’s father is also her grandfather. This fifty-three-year-old man has lived in the house in Ybbsstrasse since his own childhood, and his solid marriage, his brood of seven children, and his career—first as a mechanical engineer and more recently as the Austrian representative of a Danish concrete firm and owner of his very own B&B—has earned him considerable respect in the local community. He is the kind of man about whom it is often said, Er hat alles im Griff: “He has everything under control.” A man to be counted on: meticulous, punctual, diligent, capable. A “doer.” The child who has just been born in the cellar is his eighth.

  Yet despite his reputation for dependability, he has been conspicuously absent from the birth of this child. Normally he is down in the cellar every single day. But he hasn’t shown his face during the birth, nor will he show his face for the next ten days. We may never know why he chooses to disappear from the cellar at this time and for so long, but it seems likely that, wishing to shield himself from responsibility for the death of mother or child, or both—should these have occurred—he simply absents himself. He is a man allergic to being morally implicated in any unpleasant scene. And so, for ten days, he happily potters about in the world above, no more or less preoccupied than usual, no more or less agitated, or short-tempered, or lost in thought. Nothing about his behavior suggests that there is anything unusual or untoward going on in some secret part of his life. And such is his capacity for shutting himself off from unwanted thoughts that he spends these pleasantly warm days of late August and early September busying himself with building projects, ordering cement, updating his accounts, collecting rent from his tenants, and making little trips to the local nursery to buy plants for his garden while, beneath his feet, his daughter heaves and struggles with the agony of birth. As with the mother—who whipped him and beat him without apparent remorse—so it is with the son. Something is missing from his personality, not there where it should be. When he breaks the law, or crosses a moral boundary, or inflicts on another person some mental or physical torment, it does not make him feel wicked or depraved—although he is more than aware of what the law would say. It makes him feel courageous and unique. Indestructible and above the common man. Divine, almost, for he is always quick to condemn the villainy of others. When rapes or abductions are reported on television, or when he reads about them in the newspapers, he shakes his head in disgust. It makes him very nervous to think that such people exist in the world.

  Josef Fritzl was not burying his feelings when, in late August and early September 1988, he went about the garden of 40 Ybbsstrasse, digging up the earth to plant raspberry canes and blackberry bushes. There were no feelings there to be buried. There was no guilt. No remorse. There he is contentedly forking the soil with the sun on his back, a watchful, controlling, paranoid man who is quite able, when he so chooses, to exist in a state of deliberate obliviousness.

  Two years after Kerstin is born there is another child, a boy. Stefan comes into the world in February 1990. And then, two years later, Lisa is born, in August 1992. Monika, the fourth child, arrives in February 1994. A conveyor belt of children. Twins, Alexander and Michael, are born in April 1996. Finally, in December 2003, Felix. Seven children in total. Born, one after another, over a period of fifteen years. At some of these births the father will be present, at others not. He won’t remember which. Some of these children will be more fortunate than others. But whether they will become ill and die, or be happy, be destined to live down in the cellar or aboveground in the light, will depend entirely on the whims of their father.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Darkness

  Sometime around the birth of her first child in August 1988, when Elisabeth was twenty-two, Josef gave her a notepad. He hadn’t paid for it, of course. It was the kind of notepad banks give away free to their customers. The Raffeisen Bank, in this case, which has a branch in the center of Amstetten, around the corner from Wienerstrasse, where, in the early, cash-struck days of their marriage, while her husband climbed the corporate ladder at VOEST, Rosie had once worked in a bakery. Josef had been a loyal and valued customer of Raffeisen for more than two decades. And although the notepad was nothing more than a flimsy giveaway, he presented it to his daughter, in one of the generous moods he was apt to fall into more and more frequently as his double life evolved, as a favour and a gift.

  Elisabeth had been terribly grateful, of course, because the arrival of the notepad in the cellar was to be a life-changing event. She had been living beneath 40 Ybbsstrasse for four years now, chronically disoriented. Her father liked her best when she was helpless, she would later say, and one of the many things he had done to keep her in a position of complete subordination and vulnerability was to refuse her requests for a watch or a clock. Often he would stage weeklong blackouts in the cellar, but even with the lights on she had existed in that murky place with no real sense of time, wholly detached from the rhythms of ordinary life, dependent on her father for much of her information. She had the television, but for many months she had been unable to watch it at all. She had always considered it an alienating presence, telling her very little about her friends, her family, or the small-town life she had been forced to leave behind. And, except for the rising and falling temperature of the cellar and whatever Josef chose to tell her, the years had gone by, marked not by times and dates, but by the physical and mental events of her imprisonment. Moods and phases: cycles of illness and comparative good health; long, empty stretches of loneliness and anxiety; blank periods of numbness, violent episodes of confusion. She had no idea how long each phase or mood had lasted.

  “Four years”: The phrase was almost meaningless. There was summer, when it was swampy and hot in the cellar, and winter, when it was cold. In between there were the things that had happened, the significant events of the cellar: the first pregnancy, then a miscarriage; a second pregnancy, the miraculous birth of a child. And the less significant and yet memorable occurrences she would store up in her head for years to come: a toothache for which Josef had been persuaded to buy her a bottle of chamomile mouthwash from the local pharmacy; the tick that she had found on Kerstin’s belly and had eventually managed to remove with a pair of tweezers. He had gone on vacation once and left her alone for two weeks, and she had panicked when the electricity had cut out. It had been very cold, and she and the infant K
erstin had spent ten days in complete darkness, under a moldy blanket, with Elisabeth trying to warm up the bottle of formula milk with the heat of her body. All of this set against a background, when he was there, of casual violence, frequent rape, and pornographic videos. Four years that in many ways didn’t feel like four years. Time expanded in the cellar. It could just as easily have been ten.

  But the notepad changed all that; she had decided to use it as a diary, dividing it up, on both sides of every one of its pages, into months and weeks and days. And her diary put her back in step with the world above. With the diary, which had Raffeisen’s yellow and black slogan, Wir machen den Weg frei, “We Pave the Way,” stamped on all of its pages, Josef had granted his daughter a degree of autonomy. His gift. Her reward for having given in. Nineteen eighty-eight: the year the then-president of the former USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, initiated perestroika, an overall reform of the Soviet communist system; the year that Kurt Waldheim, former secretary-general of the UN and the then-president of Austria, was implicated in the Second World War deportation of Jews to death camps. Irrelevant events to a young woman scratching out an existence underground. And the first thing Elisabeth had done with the diary was to write in the birthdays of all her brothers and sisters. Innocuous little reminders to herself to which Josef was unlikely to object. But still she was careful. And she kept the diary hidden under a pile of dirty laundry.