Josef Fritzl's imprisonment and abuse of his daughter went unnoticed for 24 years, as she raised his children in a secret cellar. How did he manage to hide in full view of the authorities?
ON A CHILLY Monday morning, a man pulls a huge vacuum cleaner down the spotless Wienerstrasse in Amstetten, hunting for dirt that isn't there. A sticker on the side of the machine boasts: "Amstetten: Reine Stadt, Feine Stadt" ("a clean town, a fine town"). And indeed it is. The Wienerstrasse's two-storey 19th-century buildings, with their pristine facades in pink, white or yellow, are the epitome of bourgeois respectability.
Across town, however, that respectability is in tatters. On the Ybsstrasse, a satellite transmission van, the tenth, pulls up outside a grey three-storey apartment block, number 40. Nobody is home: the owners, Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl, have quite a a few letters in their postbox, but they won't be picking them up.
In just a few hours, their street has become a media Tower of Babel. As a news helicopter swoops overhead, television journalists gabble to cameras in a dozen languages; the only familiar words are "Elisabeth Fritzl" and "Natascha Kampusch".
Kampusch was abducted aged 10 and spent eight years in a cellar before fleeing in August 2006. Elisabeth was 18 in 1984 when she disappeared - for three times as long.
Hours after Elisabeth reappeared a week ago, international television reporters arrived on the scene. With neither the time nor the German to speak to the locals or officials, many quickly delivered a damning verdict: this could only happen in Austria.
It's a leap that defies logic: Austria does not have a monopoly on kidnap, rape or incest. "I don't even want to know how many people are hidden in cellars around the world, waiting to be found," says Franz Prucher, a local official.
As the week wears on, though, a very Austrian subplot to this tragedy begins to emerge.This secondary tragedy began hours after Elisabeth Fritzl disappeared, when her tearful father Josef filed a missing persons report. It was the confident opening gambit in a high-stakes poker game that lasted a staggering 8,641 days. Like a seasoned poker pro, the moustachioed engineer with piercing blue eyes distracted local police with a bluff based on the Austrian love of the respectable facade.
"The perpetrator remained undiscovered for so long because he succeeded in presenting the facade of normality so esteemed and respected by our society," says Ernst Trost, columnist with Austria's bestselling Kronen Zeitung newspaper.
Josef Fritzl never stopped tending the facade he had worked hard to create, rising from humble beginnings to become first an electrician, then an engineer. A former employer remembers him as a "near-genius", able to create complex machines, and was sorry when he left to become self-employed in 1969. With his wife, Rosemarie, he bought a lakeside campsite and guest house - and torched it a decade later in the hope of collecting the insurance money. Instead, he picked up an arson conviction, allegedly his second conviction after a rape charge in 1967.
Despite his brushes with the law, Fritzl's self-belief never wavered and he ruled his home like a despot, keeping his wife and children - five sons and two daughters - in a state of fear.
"Elisabeth got rid of us whenever she heard her father was coming back," recalls a school friend. "She panicked at the idea of being late home."
In the late 1970s, Fritzl began investing in property, apparently with loans from bank managers impressed with his expensive suits and hand-made shoes. He had plans for his own property, too, applying in 1978 for planning permission to add a cellar and, in 1983 for a permit to add facilities to make it habitable: electricity lines, water and sewage pipes.
Today, local officials assume the cellar was intended to serve as a nuclear bunker, unusual but not unheard of at the time in Austria, in the shadow of the Iron Curtain.
"The regulations meant there was no need to inspect the finished cellar," said Hermann Gruber, spokesman for the municipality.
SOMETIME AROUND 1984, Fritzl's intellect, engineering skill and what police call his "high sexual potency" settled on his pretty brunette daughter, Elisabeth.
When her parents found her bed empty on the morning of August 29th, 1984, they alerted the police. The police remembered Elisabeth: she had run away twice before. Aged 16, she moved out of home to work and live in a motorway truck-stop but never managed to break free from her father. For nearly a quarter of a century, though, only he knew that. Fritzl told police that his daughter was "sadly a little unstable" and had probably ended up in the Vienna drug scene or in a cult.
A month later, he "found" a letter from Elisabeth in the postbox, revealing that she had indeed joined a cult: "Please don't look for me. I'm well where I am now. I want to begin a new life." The letter was in Elisabeth's hand, the postmark "Upper Austria". The cult story spread and neighbours shook their heads at the no-good Fritzl girl. Josef became distant. He spent hours driving around or in his cellar workshop.
The next contact from Elisabeth came in 1993, when Fritzl "found" a baby on the doorstep and a note from his daughter: she had two children already and was unable to care for a third.
Two more doorstep babies appeared in 1994 and 1997 and the three children - Lisa, Monika and Alexander - grew up apparently happy and popular at school, as neighbours looked on in admiration and pity.
"She saved her pennies to buy them all musical instruments," remarked one of Rosemarie.
Then, exactly two weeks ago, Josef "found" one final body on his doorstep: a pale, unconscious young woman, identified in a letter from Elisabeth as her eldest, Kerstin (19). She was rushed to hospital where doctors, finding no cause for the illness nor any medical history, made an appeal for her mother to come forward. Exactly a week later, she did: a bewildered, white-haired woman with rotten teeth and a hunched back.
Sensing something was wrong, hospital staff alerted the police. They picked up Elisabeth as her father hurried her home for a family "reunion" after her 24 years in the hands of a "cult". Only when investigators separated her from her father did Elisabeth open up.
Over two hours, in an unsteady voice, she told for the first time how Fritzl had woken her that night in 1984, whispering to her to come down to the cellar he forbade anyone else from entering. There he grabbed her from behind and knocked her out with ether.
She woke up, handcuffed, in a room she had never seen before, as terrified of seeing her father again as of never being seen again. For four years, he kept her in complete isolation, appearing only to feed her and rape her.
In his spare time, Fritzl used his DIY skills to make the windowless, soundproofed prison more homely for his new partner.
"I took good care of her," he told police, according to the Austrian magazine, News. "I saved her falling into the drug scene."
The first baby came in 1988; six more followed in a two-year rhythm. When one baby, a twin, died shortly after birth in 1994, Fritzl says he tossed it into a furnace.
With the cellar filling up, Fritzl took three children upstairs to Rosemarie. Three "downstairs children" - Kerstin, Stephan (18) and Felix (five) - grew up pale and anaemic under naked lightbulbs, stooping under ceilings less than six feet high.
No one but Fritzl knew that, behind a concealed trapdoor in the regular cellar, was a soundproofed corridor and a steel door with an electronic combination lock. Behind that was a tiled kitchen and bathroom, gaily decorated with stickers of a sun the children had never seen. Through a corridor just 60cm wide are two spartan bedrooms. In the gloom, the children grew up speaking their own language, mixing German with feral grunts and coos.
Elisabeth tried to teach them to read and write, to sing songs and rhymes, anything to make their world more normal. She cooked meals with the food - tinned, occasionally fresh - that Josef Fritzl bought in faraway supermarkets. A pantry contained enough provisions to see them through long periods when Fritzl was absent. The painkillers in the bathroom cabinet were enough to see the children through sick spells - until two weeks ago when Kerstin began having painful cramps and fainting fits.
After years of humiliation of the most horrific kind, Elisabeth begged her father to allow Kerstin outside to a hospital.
What made him agree? A paternal sense of responsibility, or the arrogance of a man who has fooled everyone for so long that he had become careless?
"Fritzl is no way crazy or mentally ill, otherwise he would have made mistakes," said Austrian psychiatrist Reinhard Haller. "He is a technician who very carefully carried out one step after another. He must have unbelievable self-confidence."
A week on, the 22,000 residents of Amstetten, on the border of Upper and Lower Austria, are still in shock. Although the locals are friendly to strangers and familiar with each other, that familiarity has its limits.
"It breaks my heart for Frau Fritzl - we've known each other for 30 years," says one portly woman from the Ybbstrasse.
And what is Frau Fritzl's first name? "Frau Fritzl," comes the bewildered reply.
In this part of the world, a respectable facade is everything and what goes on behind closed doors is ignored.
"People are very friendly, but they never tell the truth in public, they're very uptight and very Catholic," says Lukas, a student born in a town near Amstetten who now lives in Vienna. "The town is typical for a region that stretches from southern Bavaria across Austria to northern Italy. It's like one of those Hitchcock films set in the American Midwest."
The local police could also be compared to characters from the film world: the Keystone Cops. Hours after Amstetten hit the headlines, they marched into a hotel room for a makeshift press conference. Waving a photo of Josef Fritzl, police chief Franz Polzer announced that the case was "by and large, solved".
"Fritzl deceived everyone for 24 years: his wife, the authorities," said Polzer, announcing that Fritzl had confessed to "everything".
All this before Fritzl had seen a lawyer, before any evidence had been examined and before one witness had been properly interviewed. Journalists asked Polzer why he was so sure that this so-called master of deception was suddenly telling the whole truth. "There can be no doubt," was the enigmatic reply.
How was he sure that Rosemarie Fritzl knew nothing, when she had not yet been questioned? "Let me ask you a question: how can you be sure she knew?" demanded Polzer, apparently prickling with irritation that a lady's honour had been impugned. "Mrs Fritzl's world has imploded."
It is inconceivable that she could have known, he argued, therefore she didn't know.
THERE WAS MORE to come. Senior official Hans-Heinz Lenze was asked why adoption authorities were not suspicious when Fritzl "discovered" three babies on his doorstep within five years. And how could they be sure the babies were Elisabeth's and not stolen?
"There was no reason not to believe the story," said Lenze. A day later he dismissed queries about giving custody of three children to Josef Fritzl considering his criminal record. "I have inspected the adoption files and see absolutely no reason for an investigation," said Lenze, puffing out his chest.
Perhaps the oddest twist in a very odd week was the reaction of the Amstetten authorities and the Austrian media to this tragedy.
"I'd like to welcome everyone to Austria," said security director Franz Prucher in English at the first press conference. His satisfied smile gave the impression that the upcoming Euro 2008 soccer tournament, hosted by Austraia and Switzerland, had started early.
The media reaction carried echoes of the Kampusch case. The second or third item on every news broadcast this week began in a similar way: "The entire world is watching Austria . . ." It all smacked of perverse pride where one would expect squirming or angry denial.
The denial came on Thursday, when Austrian chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer attacked attempts to hold his people collectively responsible for the horrific deeds of one man.
He is completely right. But perhaps there is, nevertheless, a uniquely Austrian element to this tragedy: the quarter-century gap between crime and punishment. Fritzl's real stroke of disturbing genius was not the secret cellar, but his idea to hide in full view, behind Austria's social mores. He created the facade of a self-made man, and used his domineering personality to command unquestioning respect and servility from neighbours and officials.
As one Viennese journalist put it: "Many Austrians assume that 'nice, respectable' people like Fritzl don't do things like this, and that it's impolite to even consider it."
By the end of the week, some Austrian media outlets began to understand that not all the world's media have it in for them.
"It would make sense to start looking for answers instead of a patriotic knee-jerk reaction," wrote the daily Kurier in a scorching editorial. "Many of these answers are slumbering deep in ourselves."