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  Josef found himself drawn back to the house again and again. He familiarized himself with the young woman’s habits: when she returned home from work, when she fed her child, when she went to bed, and how long after she had gone to bed she was most likely to turn off the lamp that stood on her bedside table. Eventually, one evening, he waited until he saw the light in her bedroom go out, then waited for another half hour, tinkering with his bicycle. Then he walked up to the young woman’s open window and climbed in.

  What happened next was reported in the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten on October 27, 1967. Having crept into her bedroom, Josef stood there in the darkness, observing the sleeping woman. Next he went into the kitchen, where he fetched a long-handled carving knife. He returned to the bedroom, and while she continued to sleep he removed his shoes, his trousers, and his underwear. From the waist down he was naked except for his socks. From the waist up he might have been on his way to work: He wore an ironed shirt and his tie was neatly knotted.

  Waking her, he held the knife to her throat and said, “If you don’t do what I say, I’ll kill you.” He had not needed the knife, or indeed the threat. He was a strong man, used to lifting heavy machinery in his job, and his weight alone would have been sufficient to overwhelm a woman struggling into consciousness. He raped the young woman while her child slept in its cot.

  When it was over, he lingered for a while, slipping calmly back into his clothes and leaving as he had entered. Minutes later he was cycling home.

  And that might have been the last of it had the nurse not telephoned the police. Josefwas arrested, confessed, and appeared in Linz county court to plead guilty to the charge. “Police Expose Family Father as Monstrous Sex Fiend,” the local papers said, but Josef Fritzl was sentenced to just eighteen months in prison. It was more of a ticking-off than a punishment, a verdict that would have cemented Josef’s idea of himself as the infallible patriarch, a real man, a hardworking, reliable provider who would never leave his children in the lurch, as his own father had done. There was plenty of evidence to suggest that the rape of a woman at knifepoint was the culmination of a string of sex offenses, that his behavior was compulsive, and that once he got started he could not stop. But here was a man who had worked his way up from nothing to become an engineer, a most respectable profession, and in conservative Austria this would have carried a lot of weight. Unlike the hippies and the drug-takers, who were regarded with great suspicion and unease, Josef Fritzl was considered a valuable member of society. There were mitigating circumstances for a family of four.

  Josef Fritzl, dedicated family man: an image that he cultivated and that was now reinforced by the law. A violent rapist and a good father. The lenient sentence said that he could be both.

  When Rosemarie visited him in prison she never once mentioned the rape. It wasn’t her way to embarrass her husband. And so they never talked about what had happened in Linz, or why, or how often, or whether it was ever likely to happen again. To have brought it up—and it was difficult enough for Rosemarie to even think about what had happened in Linz—would have called into question her role as a wife, a role which certainly did not give her the right to put her husband on the spot in any way, or question his authority by highlighting his weaknesses. Besides, she was afraid of him. “If you don’t do what I say, it will only get worse.” Afraid, too, of imagining her life without him. And so she invested all her energy into trying not to think about what had happened in Linz, hoping, in so doing, that the facts would magically rearrange themselves into something she could cope with, and that he might change. The prison sentence was a turning point for Rosemarie, too; she had had to find work in a bakery. She wanted to see the best in her husband and tried to close her eyes to the rest.

  She made sure their conversations were pleasant, and they talked about the children and their future together almost as they had done in the early years. They made plans. Once he was out of prison Josef would move back to Amstetten. He had been an absent father, he conceded; the family needed him at home. They even looked forward to trying for a fifth child. As far as she was concerned, she couldn’t have enough children; when she had first met her husband she had told him she wanted “at least ten.”

  They never talked about the incident in Linz, and it was amazing what not talking about it could do. When Josef returned home in 1969, the past had simply gone away.

  He was sacked from VOEST, of course. But he had no problem finding another job almost immediately, at Zehetner, a family-run business of two hundred workers based, conveniently enough, in Ybbsstrasse. The company manufactured building materials and was by far the most respected in Amstetten. Its owner, Mr. Zehetner, knew about the rape—Josef himself brought it up in his job interview—but hired him anyway because he felt sorry for him and knew him to be an excellent engineer. “Let’s give the man a chance,” he told his wife, Sieghilde, who was against the idea. “He’s a good worker.” Despite Sieghilde’s objections, Josef was put in charge of the company’s studio, where he designed the machines that made concrete pipes. He found the work interesting because it broadened his horizons. Having learned almost everything there was to know about electrics during his two-year technical engineering course in Linz, now he taught himself new skills: how to lay floors and pipes; sealing and plastering; insulation against noise, cold, or damp; the installation of doors, windows, and air shafts. Concrete, cement, bricks, and mortar: He was excited by the many possibilities of these materials and the things he could build, and very proud to be given his own secretary.

  It was fitting for a family man such as Josef Fritzl to have moved back to Amstetten to spend more time with his wife and children. Although some people in the town kept their distance—Sieghilde Zehetner, for one, avoided him as much as possible and warned her two young daughters to stay out of his way—his return to his hometown was not the scandal it might have been. The crime of which he had been convicted was regarded as largely a private matter by local people, and his sentence was not regarded as overly lenient. A 1968 editorial in the Niederösterreichische Nachrichten considered the five-year sentence of a man convicted of robbery and rape “draconian,” and his job at Zehetner lent Josef a certain dignity. More than twenty years after the war, engineers were still in great demand for building projects, and Josef was particularly respected for what he had achieved. People would greet him in the street courteously, “Guten Morgen, Herr Ingenieur.” Life carried on much as it had done before. Josef was delighted when, in the summer of 1970, less than a year after he had completed his prison sentence and moved back to Amstetten, Rosemarie became pregnant again. This time she was carrying a boy and a girl. Josef and Gabriele were born on January 5, 1971, the same year he was poached from Zehetner by a Danish concrete-producing company, Rimas, to head up their Austrian division. He had more than eighty clients, traveled, developed the company’s business strategy, knew the market well. Just under two years later, on December 28, 1972, the couple’s seventh and final child, Doris, was born. A large family, a well-paid job in a prestigious firm, and respectability: Pepperl had made it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Master of the House

  To apologize—if only implicitly—to Rosemarie for what had happened in Linz, Josef Fritzl bought her a house. It was the family’s first holiday home. Officially the Seestern (the Starfish) was a bed-and-breakfast, but really it was more of a hotel: an enormous, three-story converted barn with forty bedrooms, three terraces, a restaurant, and a bar. It stood beside Mondsee (Moon Lake) in the area known as the Salzkammergut, a network of lakes that stretches from Salzburg to the foot of the Dachstein mountain in the High Alps, one of the most magnificent regions in Austria. The last great Emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph I, liked to spend his summers here, swimming in the clear, blue waters of the lakes and taking the pristine air that sweeps down off the surrounding mountainsides.

  The Salzkammergut had lost none of its charm by the time the Fritzls came into possession of the Se
estern in 1973. An hour and a half’s drive due west from Amstetten, Mondsee is accessed by turning off the Westautobahn just before Salzburg. There follows a glorious, winding drive alongside birch, pine, and chestnut woods; past many roadside shrines of saints and the Virgin Mary; and through clusters of whitewashed, wooden-roofed Alpine houses whose window boxes are always spilling over with red geraniums. Like most of Austria’s countryside, the Salzkammergut is both litter-free and immaculately kept, the water of its smaller lakes still pure enough to drink. And the region owes its flawless appearance to the importance that the Austrians have always attached to presentation, both as individuals and as a nation. One of the reasons why the local farmers keep their little farms so neat and tidy is that they are paid handsome subsidies by the state to do so. As a result their prettily cultivated meadows are as if copied out of a picture book: dotted, here and there, with a grazing Pinzgauer cow and framed with hedges so neat they might have been trimmed by a surgeon.

  After Attersee, a twelve-mile-long lake popular with sailors and water-skiers, past the town of Unterach, you come to Mondsee. Smaller than Attersee, it is considered the most romantic of the lakes. It appears around a curve in the road quite unexpectedly, a sedate retreat waiting to be discovered. On clear days, of which there are many in summer, the Seestern has a view of the magnificent Schafberg with its sawn-off, snow-dusted peak which is reflected, almost as perfect as the original, in the silky surface of the lake.

  It is in every way an idyllic setting for a holiday home. But Josef bought it for purely practical reasons.

  As a tourist destination the house had a lot of potential. In summer, the grassy beaches around the lake were full of Austrians on holiday. And Josef endeavoured to accommodate even those travelers whose budgets did not stretch to a hotel room by persuading a local farmer to rent him the piece of land that separates the Seestern from the water, a campsite with space for twenty trailers. So, although it was ostensibly a present for Rosemarie, the Seestern was more of a business venture, the first of several properties that Josef would invest in over the next thirty years. Rosemarie, he told her, was in charge of managing the place; that meant cooking and cleaning all the rooms, on top of looking after the couple’s children. Despite the extra work it entailed, however, the Seestern represented a significant step up from the Fritzls’ lower-middle-class origins. From then on the family would spend the majority of their summers at their “country house” at Mondsee.

  No sooner had he come into the possession of the Seestern than Josef set about hiring out its rooms and camping spaces to vacationers. Among them was Paul Höra, a stout man with a bushy mustache who spent most of his vacation, indeed all of his free time, in a soccer jersey, shorts, and a pair of sandals. Paul was untypical of the tourists who regularly stayed in the area, in that he was German. He lived in Bavaria, where he ran a cleaning business in Munich. Every summer since 1969, four years before Josef bought the Seestern, Paul, his wife, Elfriede, and the couple’s three young children had driven to Mondsee in their white camper van and occupied one of the spaces at the campsite. While he was out walking on the shore one day in 1973 with his children, Paul met the new proprietor for the first time. The month was August, one of those perfectly languid Austrian summer afternoons when the intense heat that makes other parts of Europe unbearable at this time of year is cut through by pleasant, conifer-scented mountain breezes. Somehow the two men got talking, and although appearances suggested they had little in common—Paul overweight and laid-back, Josef fastidious and energetic—something, says Paul, “just clicked.” The two of them shared a similar sense of humor and called each other by their nicknames. Josef was “Sepp,” Paul was “Pauli.” Soon they fell into the habit of spending their afternoons together, sailing in Paul’s British-built catamaran or sitting on the makeshift veranda in front of his camper, a pleasant enough spot with a view of the lake. Like all the other camping places, it had many personal little touches that gave it the feeling of home; a miniature wooden fence and gate separated Paul from his neighbours, while a neat, round bed of daisies and hollyhocks did its best to disguise the ugliness of the camper, its assortment of garden gnomes keeping it colourful even in winter.

  Over time Paul came to know the basic facts of his new friend’s life: Josef was a married engineer, the father of seven children, the two eldest of whom, Ulrike and Rosemarie, were already teenagers by the time he met them. Harald was clearly the more intelligent of the two sons, but Josef detected in the younger boy, a slow, shambling character he had named Josef, after himself, signs of unusual intelligence, and he was always urging Paul to eavesdrop on their conversations for proof of this hidden brilliance. Of all the children, Josef seemed to love Ulrike the most, for she was intelligent as well as confident, the only one to stand up to him. As for the rest of the brood they were so numerous that to Paul they all seemed to merge into one.

  Josef joked to Paul that he had saved himself the expense of hiring staff at the Seestern by putting his family to work. As soon as they were old enough the children waited on tables, while his wife, Rosemarie, was kept busy running the kitchen. This left him free to play the affable host with his guests or to sit with Paul during those long summer evenings swapping tall tales and cracking jokes. Gradually Paul gathered that, besides himself, Josef had no close friends, certainly no one he could really confide in, having let time and his work come between him and his former schoolmates. When Josef had returned to Amstetten after some years of working in Linz, he had felt no great desire to rekindle old friendships, having come to regard what Josef called the “provincial Austrians” as a little too straitlaced. Paul, flattered to have been singled out for friendship by a charismatic man such as Josef Fritzl, spent most of his time in his presence oscillating between admiration and gratitude. Wistfully he now says—for their friendship is over—“I had so much fun with that man.”

  Paul thought of Josef as a true man of the world: calm, authoritative, with a deep voice, cynical, but also possessed of a terrific sense of humor, “always making jokes, always in a good mood.” “He loved Tom & Jerry cartoons,” Paul remembers. “He would cry with laughter at the parts, you know, when Jerry chops up Tom’s tail with a cleaver or stuffs it into an electrical wall socket.” Dirty jokes, too. Undeniably, Josef had a grubby mind, making lewd comments under his breath, devilishly raising one of his arched, mismatching eyebrows when a woman walked by. But to Paul it was just man’s talk, nothing he hadn’t seen or heard before. Dirty jokes and slapstick and practical jokes, too. He would hide in Paul’s camper from Rosemarie’s sister Christine, a hefty woman with cropped, peroxide-blond hair, whose relationship with her brother-in-law had, for reasons unknown to Paul, deteriorated over the years into one of mutual hatred. “ ‘The fat pig,’ Josef called her: ‘Hide me, Paul. The fat pig’s coming,’ or ‘That fat pig’s here again!’ ” Josef’s laugh was so infectious that sometimes the other vacationers would crowd around to find out what was so funny. He had that kind of magnetism.

  Late one evening, while Paul’s wife and children were away somewhere and Paul and Josef were sitting around having one of their chats, two women from a neighbouring camper, both in their midfifties, turned up at his caravan in their negligees. One of them, it was obvious, wasn’t wearing any underwear and so was putting her cards on the table. Paul didn’t mind, but Josef screwed up his face. “Frightening,” he said coolly, as if he had just witnessed an unpleasant scene in a horror movie. It was a joke, but he meant it, too. He didn’t like fat women, and he didn’t like old women, either. If they crossed his path when Paul was there he would grimace and, for his friend’s benefit, affect a violent shudder.

  Another thing Paul liked about Josef besides his sense of humor was his generosity. Sometimes Josef would invite him to eat or drink at the Seestern for free. Living more than three hundred miles apart as they did, their friendship evolved in intense bursts during Paul’s annual summer vacations at Mondsee, with periods of months in between w
hen they didn’t see or talk to each other. But over the years a pattern established itself: To thank Josef for the free meals, Paul would supply food for his restaurant, as he could buy certain items much more cheaply in Germany. He would pack the camper van full of cans of whipping cream and other things that Rosemarie needed to run the kitchen of the Seestern and drive them illegally over the border. “Not that I ever got caught.” One year, after Paul bought a new bungalow in Bavaria, Josef made the four-hour drive from Amstetten to install an electrical circuit. “He was extremely clever with things like that. A genius at electrics. A genius full stop.” Another time Josef needed to move some wooden beams into the house from the hardware shop where he had bought them, and Paul drove over from Germany in his camper van to help. It was one good turn deserves another.

  Paul had never in his life met a man who could make him laugh so much. He and Josef became like brothers. They went together to the Oktoberfest, the Munich Beer Festival, a hilarious five-day escapade even though, Paul says, not much alcohol was consumed. And there were vacations; in 1975 Paul and his family traveled with the Fritzls to Lake Garda in northern Italy, and the two men got on so well that they decided to do it again, only this time without their wives and children. Rosemarie had her hands full with the kids anyway, and with Paul’s marriage on the rocks by this stage the two friends decided to go off on their own.