I'm No Monster Read online

  Paul had been to Thailand before, “by accident,” on the way back from a vacation in Malaysia in 1977 when he had become very ill on the second day. He felt so unwell—he suspected malaria—that he canceled his hotel reservation and jumped on the first plane back, which happened to refuel in Bangkok. By the time the plane touched down in Thailand, however—or at least by the time Paul had had the chance to stretch his legs and take a look around—he was feeling much better. He decided to stay. Thailand was a lovely place, he thought, much nicer than Malaysia, and unbelievably cheap. Paul, who always had an eye for a bargain, could not believe the prices: fifty American cents a night for a hotel room.

  So impressed was Paul by Thailand that he persuaded Josef to join him the following year and even lent him five hundred Deutschmarks to cover the costs. In January 1978 they took the cheapest flight they could find: Vienna to Bangkok via Moscow with Aeroflot. Their final destination, they had decided, was to be a simple fishing village on the east coast of the Gulf of Thailand: Pattaya. Well, a little more than just a simple fishing village. Even Paul concedes that.

  In late 1959 five hundred GIs stationed in the neighbouring province, in the buildup to the Vietnam War, were driven to Pattaya for a weekend of “rest and recreation,” after which Pattaya became well known among all the American troops in the region. Hundreds of them, many very disturbed by their experiences of war, would stop off there to use the area’s brothels. Back home, free love might have been booming in far-out hippie enclaves, but Pattaya was something else: a place of extremes where soldiers could find, so the joke went, not just R&R but I&I, “intoxication and intercourse,” in every conceivable form. When the war ended in 1975 and the soldiers returned home, Pattaya was saved from almost total economic collapse by the influx of tourists. Thousands of single men, mainly from Asia and the Soviet Union, were drawn to the town by its reputation as a no-holds-barred center of prostitution where things for which a man would face a prison sentence in his home country were in plentiful supply. Visitors couldn’t walk down a beach without being solicited: by women, by men, by men who looked like women, and by children. All in tropical surroundings that had been hastily modified to suit Western tastes: go-go bars, strip joints—whatever you wanted, it was here. And it was mind-blowingly cheap. But, Paul says, it was pure coincidence that they booked their flight just at the time when Pattaya’s reputation had started to spread to Europe.

  His version of that first vacation is this: They spent the whole three weeks at the Ocean View Hotel, where to save money they shared a twin bedroom but didn’t get on each other’s nerves. They were typical tourists. Paul was impressed by how enthusiastically Josef soaked up the local culture; he seemed to much prefer it to his own, which was unusual, as his compatriots tend to be a defensively patriotic bunch. “Josef must be the only Austrian on the planet who wasn’t proud of his country and would avoid the other Austrian tourists if he came across them on the beach. He acted more as a German would do, as if he were above them: Austrians were ‘stupid’ and ’backward.‘ ” “People from Austria,” he would often tell Paul, “are generally all idiots.” Mainly the two men sunbathed, did the temple tours, and went shopping. It was a very cultural trip. And they ate: Josef had nothing against the local cuisine as long as he could avoid tipping. Before they left Paul bought himself a gold necklace encrusted with precious stones, in the shape of his star sign, Libra, which he wears around his neck to this day. But Josef, either because he was averse to spending money or because he was worried about paying customs duty on the way back, bought nothing for himself or his family.

  On their way back they missed their connecting flight to Vienna and somehow ended up in Moscow for eight days in the freezing cold without a visa, which “basically meant living in a Russian airport for a week, in winter, wearing our holiday clothes. For some stupid reason they’re like that, the Russians: We had our suitcases confiscated.” Paul’s teeth chattered as he waddled around in his shorts and sandals, Josef behind him, asking, “Pauli, why are you walking like a geisha?” The unfriendly treatment by the Russians—Paul says that Josef was privileged because he could speak English and talk to some of their guards—caused a tension that led to the first and only fight the two men had in their thirty-five-year friendship. When they finally boarded the plane—they now had to take a flight to Munich rather than Vienna—they exacted their revenge. Four Russians sitting in a neighbouring aisle spent the whole flight poring over a map of the Ruhr area in Germany, “which is an industrial area famous for its coal mines. So, not that we had any real suspicions, [but] when we arrived in Munich I told the border police that these four guys were spies, and what do you know? They were taken in for questioning!” Josef had highly commended Paul for that particular practical joke.

  Several pictures of Josef Fritzl survive this, the first of two vacations the men took together in Thailand. Most of the photographs were taken by Paul. In one Josef is splayed out, tanned, and asleep in a deck chair in tight, zebra-print swimming briefs, a heavily built man of just above average height with sturdy legs and butcher’s arms, Pattaya’s crescent-shape beach behind him in the distance. In another picture he is standing at a market stall holding a pineapple. He is smiling broadly because he knows that being photographed in a tropical vacation resort holding a pineapple is a cliché. He is wearing khaki shorts with a matching fisherman’s hat and is, except for the chain that dangles from his neck, bare-chested. His hair and eyebrows have retained the dark-brown colour of his youth, but his face has lost some of its discipline. At forty-eight he has grown jowly and wolfish, his open mouth cavelike and leering. He looks exactly what one would expect a single man on vacation in Pattaya to look like: mirthful, vigorous, and middle-aged.

  Paul says that nothing of a sexual nature happened in Pattaya, explaining, “The clap, it’s just everywhere in Thailand.” But, knowing Josef as they did, many of their fellow camper owners in Mondsee took the view that he would not have traveled all the way to one of the world’s most notorious fleshpots for no reason. He went there, it became a running joke, “Um die Sau rauss zu lassen,” to use the crass German expression. “To let out his inner pig.”

  Several years passed. Paul’s crumbling marriage finally fell apart. He spent some time pleading poverty, in a moderately successful attempt to avoid paying his ex-wife child support. There were girl-friends, some steadier than others, but, when he looked back on it, the one solid thing throughout his life had been his admiration for Josef. Over time he had come to think of him simply as a very funny man—a true character—who had achieved a great deal in his life.

  If he had ever stopped to think about it properly, Paul would have said that Josef might have been a violent man behind closed doors. But personally he had seen him fly into a rage only once, during a disagreement with his wife in a supermarket. “But you could tell the way that his wife and the children would do anything he said.” It was just understood: If the children misbehaved they’d get a beating. That kind of behavior wasn’t unusual among men of their generation. Austria was still a devoutly Catholic place, and patriarchy was alive and well. Ulrike, the eldest, stood up for herself, Paul remembers, and somehow she would get away with it. When they were at Mondsee Josef would ban all the children from going to discos, but Ulli would say, “I don’t care. I’m going to the disco and will stay late.” Not like the rest of the family, who just crept around him. Including Rosemarie—she was always in the background making cakes or some such. Or looking after the children. Being a mother of seven children—not to mention her work at the Seestern—kept her busy, that was for sure.

  Paul never knew about the rape conviction. The case had never been reported in the German papers. And there were other facts about himself that Josef took pains to conceal from his friend. The indiscretions in Ghana: Paul never knew about them, either. Or his friend’s considerable wealth, amassed over the years but kept secret from those who thought they knew him. There was no reason for Paul to suspect
that his best friend—the joker, the coolheaded raconteur with an astonishing arsenal of smutty stories—was a snoop, a stalker, an exhibitionist, and a voyeur, let alone a convicted rapist.

  So it was a terrible, almost implausible surprise when, in April 2008, Paul turned on his television and saw Josef’s face on the screen. “Josef F,” as he was referred to in the Austrian press for reasons of confidentiality, had been arrested. In a voice that betrayed her own feelings on the matter, the newscaster remarked that once Josef F had stood trial it was unlikely that a criminal of this level of cunning and depravity would ever leave his cell. Paul did not sleep that night. In the morning he made his decision. “That man is dead to me,” he said to himself. And that same day, the day after the story broke, thirty-five years after he had first encountered Josef Fritzl walking on the beach at Mondsee with his children, Paul sold all his pictures to the highest bidder. “There are no mates when it comes to money,” he said. “Especially not after what he did.”

  Because the laws governing rent control prevented Josef from kicking out the tenants of 40 Ybbsstrasse, he refused to do anything at all to the house until they either died or moved out. He was a practical man: no electricity, no hot water—only cold water ran out of the taps. He refused point-blank to fix anything except one or two windows, which he eventually replaced. And right up to the 1970s, while all the other houses in the street were being done up and modernized, number 40 remained both dilapidated and chaotic.

  Well into the second decade of their marriage, the Fritzls continued to live in their two-room apartment on the second floor, next door to Josef’s mother and two other dwellings: the single room occupied by old Mrs. Klammer and the two-room apartment rented by Hans and Herta Kaiser and their three daughters. When Mrs. Klammer died some time in the mid-1960s—just after Elisabeth was born, when Ulrike was eight, little Rosemarie five, and Harald two—Josef had finally been able to convert her room into a bedroom for his children. He wanted to take over the entire second floor, but this was made impossible by the fact that the Kaisers could not afford to live anywhere else. This and the refusal of Friedrich Setz and the Bergers to move out of the two ground-floor apartments led Josef to conclude that it would be a waste of money to renovate the house in any way, so he left it to sink into almost grotesque disrepair. Except for the new children’s bedroom, the only thing that he changed in the first twenty years of his marriage was the upstairs toilet—the hole in the floor—which he fitted with an enamel “English toilet seat.” The waste was still flushed down as it always had been, with a bucket of water. The garden, however, was a different story. In the garden he’d built himself a tool shed and was in the process of excavating a small area toward the back of the house, which he wanted to convert into a garage.

  He had to wait until the mid-1970s for his tenants to finally drift off. In the end a tragedy would precipitate the departure of the Kaisers from their two-room apartment on the second floor. Hans had been spending his weeks in Linz, where he worked at VOEST, and one night the coal-fired heating system in his room malfunctioned and he died in his sleep from carbon-monoxide poisoning. For a while Josef worried that Hans’s widow might continue to live in the apartment indefinitely, but any fears he had on that count were assuaged when Herta entered into a relationship with Rupert Wenger, the son of her downstairs neighbour, Frau Berger. After accepting Rupert’s offer of marriage she eventually moved with him to another part of Amstetten, leaving the apartment free for the first time in more than two decades.

  For the first time in his life, the whole house finally became Josef’s to do with what he liked: a paradise for a man whose identity was rooted in notions of control and ownership. He had left his job at Zehetner two years earlier, when, impressed by his now considerable knowledge of construction, the owner of a Danish concrete firm had approached him to help sell its products on the Austrian market. And, with the second floor rid of tenants, he could put to good use the many skills he had learned during his career. It became Josef’s “project.” His friend Paul saw the transformation in Josef, teasing him for being a “Bastelfreak,” a DIY fanatic: Josef was always building something or tearing something down.

  In his overwhelmingly practical, deeply repressed mind Josef Fritzl could only conceive of the house—as he conceived of most things—as a resource to be shaped to his will and exploited. And he began to make up for years of treating the house appallingly by making great plans for its future. Now he turned his focus to property development.

  The following year, on November 6, 1978, a few months after returning from his first vacation in Thailand, he applied for and received planning permission from the Amstetten Council to make major alterations to the house. He had managed to turn a profit with the bed-and-breakfast at Mondsee, and, buoyed by this success, he made plans to exploit the commercial potential of the house. The planners allowed him to make the three major changes he had requested: to construct a roof terrace, to build a colossal extension to the back of the house that would function as an apartment block containing nine near-identical apartments to be let to tenants, and to add a cellar to number 40. Work began almost immediately.

  He ripped up the house completely. He knocked down walls and made new rooms and connected them all with awkward winding corridors. He wired it, installed proper plumbing and electricity, and filled it with mismatching discount furniture and appliances. No two rooms were the same size or shape. The corridors that ran through the house would also connect it with the apartment block, once it was built: a massive, strikingly ugly construction designed by Josef himself. Although from the outside it would look as if they were two separate buildings, inside there were corridors all over the place, which meant you could walk from one building right into the other. Josef moved the entrance from the center of the old house to the right and painted it black. This was the main entrance to both the old house and the apartment block, and behind the front door was a passageway that led into a courtyard from which a central staircase led either up into the two buildings or, beyond a locked door, down into the cellar. The tenants who would come to live at number 40 in the future would describe how easy it was to get lost or feel disoriented there, especially because the floors of the apartment block had been built at a slightly different level from those of the house. You would come into a room and there would be stairs in the middle of it. There would be little nooks and crannies that would give you the feeling that you never knew what was around the next corner. The whole thing felt like a rabbit warren. It would feel claustrophobic and you would want to go and sit in the garden. But that wasn’t allowed. The garden was off-limits because Herr Fritzl’s mother had a vegetable patch there and didn’t trust the tenants not to steal from it.

  Various factors combined to make number 40 a complicated place for a young person to exist. The previous tenants’ departure made it more isolated. And because it would take four years for the new apartment block to be completed, there would be no lodgers in or around the house until the early 1980s. And Josef was changing. He had become domineering with his family, a bully who would intimidate his wife and children with a vile, often violent, temper and threats.

  The main casualty of his mood swings was Rosemarie. He had been a good husband to her for many years, but by the time he started building the extension he was lashing out all the time, often in front of the children. He was pushing her about and he was punching her. He was keeping her in check with his rages. Any small thing could set him off. Rosemarie had never been a particularly assertive woman, and this dismayed her sister Christine, who saw how her brother-in-law had begun to control with his fists the movements of his entire family. As far as Christine was concerned, her sister “should just pack up and leave.” But Rosemarie hadn’t been strong enough. She didn’t want to. Perhaps it was for religious reasons: Rosemarie still attended mass every Sunday.

  It was difficult for Christine to watch the deterioration of her sister’s marriage even if from the outside they see
med to be happy enough. She had been on the telephone once to Rosemarie and heard him smashing a plate of food against the wall. Once he began the work on the house, the violence was always threatening to erupt, with the result that Rosemarie was sinking into herself, busying herself as best she could with her household chores, the Seestern, and her children. And when her husband decided to include in his design of the apartment block his very own private apartment on the second floor, Rosemarie was glad. He wanted the apartment so that he could shut himself away from the rest of the family whenever he felt the urge to be alone. It meant he was out of her way for longer.

  He was also violent with the children. He would be in a fine mood and then he’d just turn. Slaps, punches, kicks, death threats even. He could be terribly frightening. He couldn’t bear to be disobeyed. A funny expression would come over his face and he would just let rip. Being a possessive man, he also watched them. He was always there somehow, even though he was forever traveling on business trips. The children always felt he was behind them, watching. It was creepy and very overbearing. They weren’t allowed many visitors. And their father would check their mail or confiscate their letters for no reason. He would make detailed inspections of their rooms when they were out and he would find out all sorts of personal things that weren’t really any of his business. “If you don’t do what I say, it will only get worse,” was one of his favourite expressions. As a mark of his authority, as well as a demonstration of his view of underage drinking, he had punched his eldest son, fifteen-year-old Harald, in the face after he had “caught” him sipping from a glass of sparkling wine at a party. His treatment of Harald, in particular, was very cruel. But it was impossible to reason with him. It was always easier to give in. The best way to cope with it was to grow up as quickly as possible and move out.