I'm No Monster Read online

  Up until then she had been keeping a record of sorts on scraps of paper, old receipts he had left in the cellar, strips of cloth torn from bedsheets, anything she could get her hands on: roughly scribbled secret notes that she would wad up into little balls and secrete in corners of the room. In time she would begin to commit her thoughts to the diary instead. And she would later say that she started to think of the diary as a kind of historical “document.” A chronicle of her life underground. Something that she hoped, one day, to be able to pass on to her children. Many years later the prosecution would use what Elisabeth had written in the diary as evidence against her father. But she would always maintain that it had never been her intention to incriminate him. That hadn’t been the point. By the time she started scribbling little entries into the diary she had given up all hope of escape.

  When, in April 2008, the police would finally raid the cellar of number 40, they would find a total of fifteen diaries stacked neatly on a bookshelf covering the period between 1988 and 2008, with some years missing. The diaries dating from 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992 would be improvised notepads. The rest were of the corporate variety that Josef had taken to picking up for free at the bank. And it would be clear to the police from the contents of these diaries that not only had Elisabeth been aware of how life was unfolding for her mother and siblings aboveground, but that the things that were happening in their lives had become terribly important to her. Aboveground, many of the people who had known her as a teenager would eventually write her off and come to think of her as a lost cause. Hardly any of them had bothered to look for her. But downstairs in the cellar, they had always been on her mind. During her years in the cellar they had existed for her more vividly than it was possible to imagine.

  Most of her entries are mundane, no more than a sentence long—annotations, really—with exclamation marks if she had been particularly pleased about whatever had come into her head that day. No mention of rapes, nor of beatings. No references to “Josef,” only of “Him” or “He” and latterly “Papo.” Short and discreet. Nothing too emotional or descriptive. Nothing that was likely to bring on one of his rages. And it was to become something of a ritual between the two of them: his gift every year around Christmastime of a free notepad or diary, and her hiding it under the dirty clothes, where he seemed unlikely to look but would always end up finding it. Many diaries filled up over the years with the tiny events of her life: her brother’s birthday; milk running out; Josef buying them ice cream, sausages, and liver dumplings.

  With cheap gifts and news from above, Josef kept her alive. With stories of his life outside the cellar, he thrilled as well as tortured her. He would tell her when one of her sisters was expecting a baby, or how fast her little nieces and nephews were growing up. He would talk to her in particular about his construction work, his many plans, the pool with a sauna he had recently started to build on the terrace to replace the plastic one that used to be there. He also told her about how he had built a second, all-weather pool in the garden and had decided to fill it with salt water. In summer it had become his habit to go for a swim in the downstairs pool, then stretch out in the garden to get a tan. He was terribly proud of the pool and described it in great detail to Elisabeth. In summer, temperatures in the cellar often exceeded 30 degrees centigrade (86°F).

  Elisabeth, his confidante. Toward the fifth year of her imprisonment, this would become another of her roles. “My wife,” as he now began to think of her. By the early nineties, with the approach of Josef and Rosemarie’s fortieth wedding anniversary, the couple were still on “friendly terms,” he would later say, but their interactions had become practical and distant. He would show up only for meals, working the rest of the time or disappearing on “business trips” that were often, unknown to the rest of his family, spent overnight in the cellar.

  It was one of the defining characteristics of his personality that Josef would never have a problem with holding two contradictory ideas in his head and accepting them both as true. He could be a caring father who beat up his children. A stalker of women who found himself peeping through their windows “by chance.” A control freak who tended to think of himself as a victim of circumstance whenever his sexually delinquent behavior came to light. A philanderer and convicted rapist who, when he was eventually interrogated by the police in late spring 2008, would claim that “one woman was enough for me.” The more Josef had alienated himself from his wife during this period, the closer he felt to his daughter. It was to Elisabeth that he started to open his heart, sharing all his hopes and fears, discussing with her his many plans for the future: property empires, more work on the house—it was impossible to tell whether he meant it. This transfer of “wifely duties” from Rosemarie to his daughter started to happen after the birth of Kerstin in the autumn of 1988. He was raping Elisabeth and pouring out his heart. He was entrusting her with all of his secrets. In time there was hardly anything she didn’t know about her father.

  Her awareness of what was going on above her head was to have a very specific effect on Elisabeth. The desired effect, as far as her father was concerned; she began to live vicariously through him. It is not difficult to understand how the stories he told her about the world above made her existence more tolerable; how, furthermore, she began to crave these stories; and how life as she imagined it upstairs felt in many ways truer than her own. Downstairs in the darkness was her body, upstairs in the light was her mind. And through this process of storytelling, of opening himself up to her, of throwing her scraps of information about the life upstairs—her alternative life—he was assimilating her. Breaking down the boundaries between himself and his daughter, drawing her into the double life. A secret is only powerful so long as it isn’t shared. And Josef’s secrets had made him feel very powerful indeed. But he had been lonely in his secret life, existing on two levels at once. He had longed for a person with whom to share both his lives, and he made his daughter an accomplice.

  She would go about the cellar in “a trance,” he would later complain. It was her way of coping. And in her trancelike state, after the birth of Kerstin, a strange thing began to happen to her way of thinking. She had started to settle in. She had started to accept all the privations of the cellar as a normal part of her life: partly because she had given up hope—“You haven’t got a chance,” he had told her often enough for her to believe him—and partly because of the new responsibilities that came with motherhood. With the birth of her children, Elisabeth’s priorities had changed: not to fall apart, not to commit suicide, this now became the aim. And, seeing this change in his daughter, he had at last presented her with the gift of an alarm clock, which she took to setting each day for 6:30 A.M. Up at dawn. In bed by 10 P.M. The everyday routines of domesticated life. The cellar, which by 1994 had begun to hum with the rhythms of everyday life. There were good days and bad days, petty annoyances, just as in any household. The day the colour in the television stopped working. Mold had infested the electronics. For a while it stuttered on in black and white, but eventually Josef was persuaded to replace it. More proof that “I was a good father,” he would later claim. “I provided for my family.”

  There were food shortages; there were times when all they had to eat was stale bread and Elisabeth would have to chew it up with water to feed it to her babies. When there was water. One exceptionally cold winter the pipes had frozen and the water hadn’t come out of the taps at all. And as much as they hated him there, they were also afraid in case he never came back. Always there was the fear that something would happen to him or that he’d leave them there and they’d never be discovered or they’d suffocate; the air was stifling at the best of times, and they relied on an electric fan. Of course, when he’d punished them by cutting off the power supply, the fan would stop and they would be afraid that they wouldn’t be able to breathe at all.

  There were other gifts besides the alarm clock, at five- or six-month intervals but gifts nonetheless, her only possessions. One of
these was a weighing scale. Her weight had teetered at just over 80 pounds in her teens but was now stable at around 140. And he would bring pictures of the rest of the family, doing whatever they were doing, upstairs in the house, in the garden, or at Mondsee. The lives of Elisabeth’s siblings were documented in photographs by her father from one month to the next, from year to year—information upon which she became dependent. When the police raided the cellar in April 2008, they would find its walls covered with photographs. Among other things—sex toys, pornographic videos, handcuffs, a whip—they would confiscate from Josef a total of five cameras, as well as a photograph album that he had given to Elisabeth. Of all the evidence the police and lawyers would have to sift through before Josef Fritzl’s trial, the contents of the photograph album proved to be the most difficult to look at. In the front of the album were pictures from upstairs: brightly coloured snapshots of a normal family. At the back were some very different photographs: badly lit pictures of the family Josef had made live in the cellar, their faces bone white, their expressions uncanny. Two very different existences lived practically side by side for twenty-four years. The only thing connecting them was Josef.

  In the cellar Elisabeth often found herself worrying about becoming pregnant. Then these concerns were dashed when she discovered once again the worst had happened.

  And toward the middle of 1989, a few weeks before Kerstin’s first birthday, Elisabeth conceived for a third time. Stefan, her second child, was born in the cellar of number 40. Another child born in darkness without assistance or even the presence of the father. Another miraculous survival. It was even more astonishing that Kerstin and Stefan grew up and developed into relatively healthy children as, despite the obvious hazards of living in the cellar, the children and their mother had no access to any medical help.

  Two years after Stefan, there was another child, another girl. Lisa was born in August 1992: Like that of her sister Kerstin, her birth happened to coincide with the anniversary of her mother’s abduction. Little Lisa was born a healthy baby but became inexplicably distressed by the time she was eight months old. She wouldn’t stop crying no matter how often her mother carried her in her arms to and fro between the walls of the cellar. A screaming baby didn’t do much for “Papo‘s” temper: He feared that the noise of the child might be heard upstairs, just as the noise of the lodgers playing their music too loud traveled all over the house. Before he kidnapped Elisabeth he had tested the cellar for soundproofing by bringing down a radio and playing it loud, then going upstairs to check if he could hear it. But now he was always worried about the noises of the children. He had already hit two-year-old Stefan in the face and split his lip because he was crying. But no matter what her mother did, Lisa wouldn’t stop crying. It soon became clear that she wasn’t at all well, although the cause of her distress remained a mystery to both her parents. Only after her father had laid Lisa in a cardboard box, taken her upstairs, and made a convincing show of having discovered the “abandoned” child on his doorstep, would she be rushed to a hospital to undergo emergency heart surgery. Belowground, it was a torment for her mother, who felt she would go mad with worry.

  The year 1993 was to be a period of frantic activity in Josef’s life, aboveground and below. The apartment block was full of tenants: drifters, students, and unemployed people mainly, people who lived at life’s margins, a ragtag bunch of builders and waiters drifting from job to job, distributed among the five ground-floor apartments and the four smaller apartments on the second floor. Among them were two couples, the Seiberts and the Swobodas, about whom nothing much was known; three female students who shared an apartment; Ludwig Jedlinek, a Slovak truck driver; and Sepp Leitner, a waiter and part-time builder who had moved into one of the apartments with his Romanian wife in 1990. Leitner’s marriage collapsed not long after his arrival at Ybbsstrasse, but he would continue to live in the apartment for four years, eventually giving up his restaurant job for a more lucrative living as the manager of a strip club in the nearby town of Haus Menning. Although spiraling debts would eventually finish off that business in 2007, to this day he is affectionately greeted in the streets by the girls who once depended on him to earn their living.

  Behind the garden of number 40, old Frau Danielzyck was often seen planting or picking fruit in the plot of land that she had been renting there since 1979. She had moved to Amstetten back in the 1950s with her husband, a former hatmaker who had fled communist Poland to make a new life for himself as a manager with the local concrete producer Umdasch. You could hardly call the patch of land attached to their own tiny house a garden, so Frau Danielzyck had rented one here, in Ybbsstrasse, from the woman who owned the house next door to the Fritzls but who spent most of her time in Linz. She had told Frau Danielzyck that she didn’t like to stay overnight in Amstetten, mainly because of stories she had heard in the town concerning Josef Fritzl’s criminal past. She had been equally ambivalent about the Fritzl’s son Josef junior, who seemed to her to be “ein Sonderling,” an “oddball,” and “not all there.” Frau Danielzyck herself had once caught sight of the boy, when he was still a young teenager, stuffing red and brown ants into a plastic bottle and watching them kill one another. When she had asked him what he was doing he had replied, “I like to watch them fight.” There had been other incidents: the time, for example, Josef junior had stolen a moped and driven, hopelessly lost, to Bruck an der Mur, a good forty miles south of Amstetten. Frau Danielzyck had heard that the boy had spent much of his young life in trouble with the police; they had arrested him once after some sort of car-wrecking spree, suspecting him of taking a hatchet to some cars and starting four fires—all on the same day, police would later reveal. This had been near Mondsee, where his own father had himself twice been arrested and charged with arson, but never convicted. When he was arrested the authorities had taken the view that the boy was not mentally competent to be held responsible for his actions, and there had even been a suggestion, never followed up, that his compulsive fire starting might have been the acting out of some kind of trauma. “A cry for help?” one of the officers investigating the case had scribbled in his notebook. Many years later, in 2008, the same year his father was finally arrested for the rape and enslavement of Elisabeth, Josef junior would be put into care. Until then he would live in the house in Ybbsstrasse, the only one of the siblings who remained at home, carrying out odd jobs for his father on the many houses that Josef would come to possess.

  Like many of her neighbours, Frau Danielzyck had over the years pieced together the bare facts of Herr Fritzl’s own criminal past. She knew about the rape conviction and had heard from a friend about an earlier offense during which, in her friend’s words, he had become “excited” in the presence of a young pregnant woman and “done something indecent.” Not that there was much evidence of this sexual delinquency in his actual behavior. Indeed, it was only with great difficulty that Frau Danielzyck had been able to square the image she had in her head of what a convicted rapist might look like with the capable, well turned-out, often helpful man she would see pottering about with a wheelbarrow in his garden. “Hello, Frau Danielzyck,” he would call over to her with a wave. “How are those strawberries coming along?”

  In truth it was hard to fault him as a neighbour. He’d fixed Frau Danielzyck’s lawn mower once. Another time, when her elderly husband had collapsed in a faint, it had been Herr Fritzl who had immediately rushed over and not only lifted him to his feet—quite a task in itself, considering what a large man Herr Danielzyck had been—but practically carried him into the house. Herr Fritzl chaotically planting tulips; Herr Fritzl bedding down an apricot tree in one of his many attempts to persuade his wife to cut costs by making her own jam rather than buying it. He had dug a pond in the garden, more of a ditch, and filled it with goldfish. He had built a greenhouse—“a touch of sophistication,” he said—next to the pool on the terrace and was building a second pool out in the middle of the lawn. A very powerful man, always in motion
, who seemed to run on thin air. “I don’t need much to eat,” he had once told Frau Danielzyck. “A vegetable soup and an aspirin will do me.”

  If there was one thing Frau Danielzyck disliked about Josef, it was his tendency to put himself on display: lounging about in the garden half-naked every summer in a pair of tight red swimming trunks. He was vain, that was obvious, the kind of man one could imagine admiring himself at great length in the mirror. A middle-aged Narcissus, always “immaculately” turned out. Frau Danielzyck didn’t know how very self-conscious Josef had been about the bald spot that had appeared on the crown of his head in the late 1970s, but she wouldn’t have been surprised. And in fact Josef had been so anxious about his thinning hair that his friend Paul Höra had persuaded him to drive over to Munich to try out some “miracle” hair-regenerating cream that had recently come onto the market in Germany. And when that hadn’t worked, he had traveled all the way to Hungary to have a hair transplant, where the procedure, although just as painful, was cheaper than in Austria: Josef’s “Zweite Frühling,” his “second spring” or “midlife crisis.” He’d undergone the hair transplant in the early 1980s, around the time that Elisabeth had disappeared, although, of course, neither Frau Danielzyck nor Paul Höra could have guessed at the deep connection between these apparently two unconnected events.