Читать книгу House of Horrors - Nige Cawthorne - Страница 10

Elisabeth was the prettiest of Fritzl’s daughters when she fell prey to her monstrous father. With her picture-book Austrian good looks – high cheekbones, wide eyes and a rosebud smile – she was always the apple of his eye. Despite Rosemarie saying that Ulrike, the oldest girl, was Fritzl’s favourite, he himself insisted it was Elisabeth. Ulrike answered him back, Rosemarie said, and Fritzl respected that, but it was no good for his purpose: he needed someone he could intimidate.

During a crucial part of Ulrike’s development, Fritzl had been away in jail. Perhaps that’s what had made her so single-minded. But Elisabeth was still an infant when her father was in prison. By 1977, Ulrike was 19 and getting ready to slip from his grasp by leaving home, but Elisabeth was only 11 and had not begun the ‘youthful rebellion’ he complained of later. She still took care to hide the evidence of the beatings she suffered from her teachers and school friends. What began as a vicious over-indulgence in discipline and punishment developed into a sadistic fixation and Fritzl began to sexually assault his helpless daughter. This may have begun while her brother and sisters were enjoying a holiday with their mother. Having lost interest sexually in his wife, Fritzl began to go on vacation on his own. One holiday snap released to the press shows him on a trip to the Mediterranean in the late 1970s – at a time when it is thought he was already sexually abusing the ill-fated Elisabeth.

Elisabeth said that the abuse started when she was 11. Fritzl denies it, saying that it began much later, but there is circumstantial evidence to substantiate Elisabeth’s allegation. In 1977, Rosemarie took Ulrike, Rosi (then 16) and their brother Harald (13) to Italy. Family pictures show the sisters enjoying their two-week vacation. But Fritzl refused to let Elisabeth go and so she spent the fortnight at home with her depraved father. His perverted lust was the driving force behind his later crimes and, being at home alone for two weeks with the child he had already cowed, he had manufactured the perfect opportunity to inflict himself on her.

Family friend Paul Hoera joined the Fritzl family with his own children for the break. ‘I can’t bear to see them any more,’ he said, after discovering the secret of Fritzl’s House of Horrors. ‘While we enjoyed ourselves, he could have been putting Elisabeth through goodness knows what.’

Paul, now 69, added, ‘Elisabeth as a child was withdrawn and shy. I got the impression Josef didn’t like her much. He didn’t treat her as well as his other kids. He used to beat her a lot more. She used to get a slap for small things. I feel sick every time I think of her under the house when we were sitting in the garden laughing and joking.’

Denied the simple pleasures of a family holiday, Elisabeth was trapped at home with her tyrannical and sexually predatory father. That year, Fritzl had begun raping her, the police report says – although, even now, she can barely bring herself to speak of it and the details are yet to come out.

As a young girl, she could not understand her predicament. Although her father was a domineering man, as a child she had offered him total obedience, but somehow he was now treating her differently from her brothers and sisters. ‘I don’t know why it was so,’ she said, ‘but my father simply chose me for himself.’

She later told the police that Fritzl would rape her without warning, in his car and on walks through the forest – even in the cellar. He denied this, saying that he only began to have sexual contact with his daughter some time after he locked her in the dungeon. Elisabeth was terrified of the days when he came to her, when he would mercilessly abuse her because, in his eyes, she belonged to him. She was nothing beyond being his possession to do with as he pleased.

‘I am not a man who would molest children,’ he said. ‘I only had sex with her later, much later.’

However, it seems plain now that something was going on – the signs were all too obvious. Elisabeth, already an outsider at school, became more withdrawn. Her best friend at Amstetten High School, Christa Woldrich, said that she always had to be home half an hour after school finished.

‘I was never allowed to visit her,’ said Christa. ‘The only explanation she ever gave was that her father was very strict. I did not see him, but he was always there between us because of his influence over her, like an invisible presence you could always feel.’

Another school friend recalled how Elisabeth was ‘terrified of not being home on time’. ‘When we went to her home, we had to leave as soon as her father appeared,’ she said.

Christa Woldrich said the teenage Elisabeth was noticeably reserved when speaking of life outside the classroom. ‘I did get the impression that she felt more comfortable at school than at home,’ said Christa. ‘And sometimes she went quiet when it was time to go home again. It was the same for both of us – it was like a silence descending.’

It was clear that Elisabeth was being physically abused by her father. Other school friends said that she had sometimes avoided gym classes for fear that the teacher would ask about the bruises all over her body. Classmate Christa Gotzinger, who also had a violent father, said, ‘We learnt to take the beatings … We learnt how to pull ourselves together when the pain was unbearable.’

Another friend, who refused to be identified, said that Fritzl punched his children. ‘He didn’t slap or spank them,’ she said. ‘He hit them with his fists. Her brother once told me, “The pig will beat us to death one day”.’

As Elisabeth grew older and began to show the first signs of becoming a woman, Fritzl grew frighteningly possessive over his daughter. He flew into a tempestuous rage if she attempted to dress fashionably, wore make-up or mentioned boys. Christa Woldrich noted the effect these furious outbursts had on her. ‘Elisabeth became very sullen and withdrawn,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t allowed out in the evenings or to invite friends to the house. I think she was comfortable only at school, though she wasn’t very good at anything.’

It was clear that she was not developing along the lines of other girls. There was no chance that she could get close to a boy, or even develop a crush. ‘She was so pretty she could have had boyfriends, but she never did,’ said Christa. ‘She just sat quietly and no one noticed her. When I think about it, I wonder why the teachers never realised something was wrong.’

Though it was widely known at school that Fritzl was violent towards his daughter, not even Elisabeth’s best friend Christa knew about the sexual abuse at the time. ‘The abuse at 11?’ said Christa, after it eventually came out. ‘I have thought about it a lot recently, whether I noticed anything when we were back at school. Now it is easier to understand why she didn’t talk about boys or about sex. Now, with hindsight, I understand why she didn’t talk about certain things or why she was distant and quiet, but we didn’t realise it back then. You just think, oh, you’re having a bad day.’

In 1978, when Elisabeth was just 12, Josef Fritzl applied for planning permission to turn his basement into a nuclear shelter. This was not unusual during the Cold War years. Austria was on the front line in the confrontation between the Soviet Bloc and the West. At the end of the Second World War, much of the country was in Russian hands and the Red Army stayed on as an occupying force in the Soviet zone for ten years. When they withdrew in 1955, eastern Austria was left surrounded on three sides by the Iron Curtain with Communist Czechoslovakia to the north, Hungary to the east and Yugoslavia to the south. Amstetten was barely 30 miles from the heavily guarded border that divided East from West. Both sides of the frontier bristled with nuclear weapons. The situation remained that way until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Fritzl worked single-handedly on building the shelter over the next five years. However, in due course, he would need help to install the steel-and-concrete door which weighed nearly a third of a ton.

He was anything but discreet about the building work. On one occasion, he fixed an industrial winch to the roof of the house. The heavy-duty lifting device was installed directly above the entrance to the cellar. Fritzl brought it in to raise massive concrete blocks as he turned the bunker into an unbreachable fortress. It may have also been used to help shift the dungeon’s heavy concrete-filled steel door that could only be opened by an electric motor operated by a remote control.

In 1983, local officials came to inspect his handiwork and gave their approval. Building inspectors checked out the underground bunker and fire safety officers checked the incinerator that was later used to burn his child’s body, metres away from the hidden dungeon. The inspection team pronounced the ventilation shaft safe, gave Fritzl the appropriate stamp and left. They even advanced him State funds towards the construction shelter and later gave him permission to extend the basement and put in running water. In the eyes of the authorities, he was simply a good family man, trying to protect his wife and children in the event of a nuclear attack. This now looks like paranoia, but fear was running high at the time. Given the chilly political climate, nobody gave it a second thought. It is now apparent that Fritzl was actually building a prison where he had planned all along to incarcerate Elisabeth.

Elisabeth left school at 15 and, while her older siblings escaped by marrying, she remained under her father’s constant gaze and was put to work full time at his lakeside guesthouse and campsite.

At the age of 16, Elisabeth ran away. She found work as a waitress at a motorway truck stop and lived in a hostel, but Fritzl caught up with her and brought her back. Elisabeth’s attempts to escape her father were common knowledge, according to Alfred Dubanovsky, who knew her when she was at school. ‘After she vanished, we all talked about it,’ he said. ‘We knew she had run away before and thought she had done it again because she had told someone in our group that she had had enough, couldn’t stand it any more at home and that her father had beat her, and had hurt her. She said she was scared of him.’

Even before her captivity, Elisabeth had spent most of her time indoors, he said, as her father did not let her out. However, as she got older, she began to come out of herself, even though her father tried to prevent it. ‘She was a great girl, but very shy and pretty nervous,’ said Dubanovsky. ‘You needed to know her before she would trust you, but we got on really well. We used to spend a lot of time together, we were in the same class and we were friends. We had even danced together a couple of times. We all used to go the Belami disco at the bottom of her road, but she was rarely allowed out to see us.’

Joseph Leitner, now a waiter who lives in Neustadt near Amstetten, had also heard about the abuse. He attended the Amstetten Institute of Technology with a friend of Elisabeth’s who knew her by the nickname ‘Sissi’. Later, he became a lodger who rented a room from Fritzl, even though he had been warned by a friend about his behaviour before he moved in.

‘I knew Sissi was being raped by her father before she disappeared,’ he said. ‘I had a good friend from school who was really close to Elisabeth. I would say they were best friends; they spent a lot of time together. She confided in me, and she told me what a monster Josef was – and what he had done to Sissi.’

Elisabeth made another attempt to escape, this time with their mutual friend. ‘They came up with a plan to run away together,’ said Leitner. ‘It was in 1983. Elisabeth packed her bags and left the house. She and my friend were 17, and the two went to Linz but also spent some time in Vienna. Josef was furious and eventually found Elisabeth and dragged her home. Sissi was banned from having anything to do with my friend again. Her mother also made sure of that. She banned Elisabeth from seeing her – and watched her carefully to make sure they were kept apart.’

Leitner also knew of Elisabeth’s earlier attempt to flee when she was 16. ‘She could not take it living at home any more and tried to escape,’ he said.

There were also indications around this time that Elisabeth was suicidal. However, the authorities unaccountably took no notice of her plight and aided Fritzl in getting her back. ‘She had taken sleeping pills and went to Vienna,’ said Leitner. ‘But the police found her and they, or her father, brought her back home.’

Again, Leitner and his friend were not surprised when Sissi disappeared for a third time, nor was Leitner surprised that her friend kept quiet about what she knew. ‘When Elisabeth vanished again just a year later, my friend thought she had run off again,’ he said. ‘She never said anything because she was scared. It wasn’t only Elisabeth that was terrified of Fritzl, my friends were, too. They never went to the police because they were too scared of what Fritzl would do. That was why my friend kept quiet for so long.’

Leitner himself was also frightened of Fritzl, but now regrets taking no action. ‘I feared he would take revenge,’ he admitted. ‘I have been tormented by nightmares ever since.’

Others knew of Elisabeth’s distress and her plans to flee the family home. Classmate Susanne Parb, now into her forties, said, ‘Elisabeth used to say, “It would be great if only I could escape. I can’t wait for the day when I’ll be free of him.” When she was 16, she ran away to Vienna but he tracked her down. I wish he had never found her because all this may never have happened. She then got a job in a motorway restaurant and was saving money. Her plan was to leave when she was 18 because then he couldn’t force her to come back home. She had her bag packed and was bracing herself to say goodbye to her mother when she vanished. It made sense that she had run off to a cult because everyone knew she lived in fear of her father.’

The reason she wanted to leave was clear enough. ‘Before she vanished, Elisabeth told me she was beaten very badly at home,’ said Susanne. ‘Her father was clever, though, to make sure he didn’t hit her where anyone could see the bruises and that’s why the teachers didn’t know. But Elisabeth never spoke about the rape. I think she must have been very ashamed.’

There was no love lost between Fritzl and Elisabeth’s friend Susanne. ‘I went to her house a few times to play but never when the father was there,’ she said. ‘He didn’t like me because I asked questions about why Elisabeth could not leave and come to mine for dinner. Soon, he banned me from meeting her. Elisabeth didn’t seem sad at school but was just very quiet. She had a good relationship with her brother Harald and her younger sister Doris.’

Susanne also knew that Elisabeth was not the only one in the family who suffered abuse. ‘After Elisabeth disappeared, I spoke to Harald a few times and when he had been drinking he told me how his father beat him,’ she recalled. ‘He used to say, “I’m very afraid that one day he will kill me.”’

In 1982, Elisabeth spent three weeks in hiding in Brigittenau, Vienna’s 20th district. The police picked her up and returned her to her parents. By making repeated attempts to escape and failing, Elisabeth unwittingly helped to provide her father with the cover story he would later use when he took her down to his basement and kept her imprisoned there. When he said that she had run off again, people naturally believed him; she had a track record. After all, she was a proven runaway, a rascal, a troublesome child. She was just the sort of delinquent who would end up in the hands of some strange sect. In the eyes of the good people of Amstetten, she had finally gone completely off the rails, leaving her parents distraught. She was an ungrateful child. Consequently, no one really cared where she had gone or what had happened to her.

It seems only natural that a teenager who was suffering extreme physical and sexual abuse at home would want to run away, but Fritzl still claims Elisabeth was in the throes of ‘teenage rebellion’ that had to be curbed at all costs. ‘Ever since she entered puberty, Elisabeth stopped doing what she was told; she just did not follow any of my rules any more,’ he said. ‘She would go out all night in local bars, and come back stinking of alcohol and smoke. I tried to rescue her from the swamp and I organised her a trainee job as a waitress.’

He also accused her of ‘promiscuity’. ‘I have always had high regard for decency and uprightness,’ he said. ‘I was growing up in Nazi times, when hard discipline was a very important thing. I belong to an old school of thinking that just does not exist today.’

After Elisabeth was returned from Vienna, her father didn’t touch her during the first few weeks, but then, she says, it started all over again. She decided to stick it out until she was 19. At that age, the Austrian police would have no further jurisdiction over her; youngsters of 19 upwards could leave home and go where they pleased, and the police would have no authority to pursue them. In the meantime, she had entered a training programme as a waitress at the Rosenberger highway rest stop near Strengberg on the A1 autobahn that ran from Linz to Vienna. She and other girls in the programme slept in a dormitory below the kitchen. After the years of abuse, it must have felt liberating to get away. For the first time, she felt safe from her father. However, Strengberg was little more than ten miles from Amstetten, so he could still keep an eye on her.

Later, she was sent to a catering college, where she lodged. The sexes were strictly segregated there, but she managed to meet an apprentice chef named Andreas Kruzik. The 18-year-old trainee was struck by Elisabeth, whom he described as a ‘pretty, but serious and withdrawn girl’. Twenty-four years later, the 42-year-old divorced father-of-one recalled, ‘My heart jumped into my mouth when we first met and I saw how beautiful she was. I struck up a conversation with her, talking about school and exams and trying to make her laugh. I knew then that I had fallen in love with her.’

It seems that his feelings were reciprocated. ‘I noticed that she was slowly opening up and started to show interest in me,’ he said. ‘It was not so simple to be intimate because such things were not allowed in the school and there were only few opportunities to make out. The girls’ dormitory was a strict taboo and any boy caught there would have been expelled from the school.’

During their busy two months at catering college, they used to go for long walks in the woods and spend time together. ‘We became inseparable,’ said Andreas.

It is plain that Elisabeth had found a soul-mate, someone she could unburden herself to – up to a point, at least. ‘She really confided in me,’ said Andreas. ‘I knew that she was under pressure from her parents and that she ran away from home when she was 14 or 15 and that she was closer to some of her other siblings. There was a trusted sister whom she stayed with often.’

Although they were physically intimate, the couple never had full sex because Elisabeth ‘would suddenly pull back’, Andreas said. ‘She told me that she couldn’t have sex with me. At the time, I thought it was because she didn’t feel ready, but I know now that she must have been traumatised by what her father had done to her.’

By then, she had already been sexually abused by Fritzl for over seven years, according to what she told police, but she was reticent about her home life. ‘She spoke of her parents and her home only once, and said that she had a very strict father,’ Andreas said. ‘She said he got her a waitress apprenticeship at a tank station, but that she would have preferred to become a cosmetician.’ They even talked of running away together and getting married, although Andreas now fears that Fritzl may have learnt of their plans.

The couple finally decided to sleep together at his house but, before they had the chance, Fritzl turned up at the college gates, forced Elisabeth into his car and took her home. ‘That night, she said she wanted to sleep with me and planned to stay at mine, but her father arrived to take her home,’ Andreas said. While Fritzl waited outside, they snatched a passionate farewell. ‘I kissed her goodbye and said I would be down at Amstetten to visit her, but she was worried about her dad. He was waiting in the car and she feared that if he found out about me she would be punished. She was very depressed and worried. She had failed part of the exam – the theory part – but I was cracking jokes and trying to cheer her up. I said, “Don’t worry, you can repeat the exams.” But it seemed like there was something else bothering her.’

Before she left, Elisabeth made Andreas promise to keep their love secret. Under the circumstances, it seemed a reasonable precaution. He knew that her father was a strict disciplinarian, but it would have been impossible for Andreas or anyone else to appreciate the lengths this tyrannical, self-centred beast would go to in order to dominate his own child. ‘She told me her dad was strict but I had no idea he would do anything like this. Who would? We were madly in love and said we would write,’ he said.

Andreas was not allowed to say goodbye to Elisabeth as she climbed into her father’s grey Mercedes because she was banned from talking to boys. He remembers their hurried, secret farewell. ‘As we kissed goodbye, we promised each other to write as often as possible,’ he said. But when he received no reply, he thought she had lost interest in him. ‘Now I realise she was no longer able to answer my letters.’

Elisabeth plainly did not get his letters, as she would have replied. Before she disappeared underground, she was already in correspondence with another male friend who lived Wiener Neustadt, a small town south of Vienna, 70 miles from Amstetten. During her last month of freedom, she wrote three letters to him. The first was dated ‘9 May 1984’ and the recipient was named only as ‘E’. Her letter was clearly a reply to another from him as she said that she was very happy to receive a ‘nice long’ message from him. ‘Basically, I’m doing pretty fine,’ she wrote. ‘Sometimes, I still feel some pain and feel sick. I’m still in contact with …’ When the letter was released to the press, the name had been blanked out, but this was plainly Andreas. ‘He went into the next hospitality class for cooks and waiters. I’ve been dating him since the course. Sometimes there are problems because he is from Enzesfeld-Lindabrunn [just a few miles north of Wiener Neustadt]. This is very far from my place and this is why I’m very sad.’

She confided her plans to leave home. ‘After the exams … I’m moving in with my sister and her boyfriend,’ she wrote. ‘As soon as I’ve moved, I will send you my new address. You could come and visit me with your friends if you want to.’

She also talked about applying for a job in a nearby town and told E, ‘Keep your fingers crossed for me.’

Her letter was also full of delightful, girlish trivia. ‘I had my hair cut – layered on the sides and on the fringe,’ she wrote. ‘At the back, I want to let it grow long.’ Then she asked, ‘Do you have parties when your parents are at home, too? You are a crazy guy.’

E was plainly living a family life completely alien to Elisabeth. He seemed to be a normal, everyday teenager, whose parents tolerated a certain amount of youthful high spirits and disorder – out of love for their children. The idea that such a life was possible must have been a comfort. In E, Elisabeth had clearly found someone she could depend on for friendship and support, someone she did not want to lose contact with.

‘I have a sensitive question I want to ask,’ she wrote. ‘I’d like to know if we’re going to stay friends when you have a girlfriend? Most of the time friendships break up because of that. And it is very important to me. If you can believe it, I deal with boys much better than girls.’

She then explained why it was much easier to unburden herself to him than to her girlfriends at school. ‘Girls are not as trustworthy as boys,’ she wrote. ‘Probably that’s because I was around my brother from when I was a little child. I’m very proud of my brother who is now 21 years old. I know his problems and he knows mine, and I wouldn’t say anything bad about him.’ And she signed off the letter by saying, ‘I hope we see each other soon. Best regards.’

Elisabeth sent the letter with Polaroid snap of herself attached. It shows her wearing a checked blouse, sitting on the steps of her parent’s roof-terrace swimming pool on a balmy summer’s evening in 1984. The sun has caught her bobbed red hair and a smile is starting to emerge on her lips. She wrote at the bottom of the letter, ‘PS: the picture is a little bit dark but I will send you better ones soon, OK?’ And on the back of the picture, she scrawled, ‘Think of me!!! Sissy.’

This is the last known photograph of Elisabeth Fritzl before she disappeared into her long captivity underground. She appears momentarily happy: she has a boyfriend and has found another friend she can rely on, and she now faces the tantalising prospect that she may soon be able to escape the family home and her father’s abusive tyranny.

Her second letter to E, dated 29 May 1984, was written on notepaper decorated with a cartoon girl dancing in a yellow dress. It read, ‘Hello E. It is now already half-past ten and I’m lying in bed. Of course, I went out on Saturday. Can you imagine how hammered I was? At first we went to a couple of clubs. At about 5.00am we all went to my place to get a coffee because we’d had so much fun, and they all slept at my place. That was a mess. It took me half a day to clean up the flat.’

Her father could hardly have been pleased. She went on to talk about her waitressing job, saying, ‘Most of the time, I’m off two days a week. That’s when I go swimming, play tennis or even football. I like listening to music and daydreaming. But if life consists just of dreams – well, I don’t really know about that.’

But, in a dungeon, all you can do is dream.

She called the friends with whom she went clubbing her ‘crew’ and said, ‘They are really cool.’ She urged her friend to ‘keep your promise that you’ll visit me as soon as you get your driving licence,’ adding, ‘I have six siblings, four of them are girls and two brothers. My brother H is 21 years young. He is the one I like most.’

She signed off as ‘S’ and told her friend, ‘Stay safe, keep being a good boy. Don’t drink too much.’

In the third letter, posted from Amstetten on 3 August, less than a month before she disappeared below ground, Elisabeth revealed her plans to move in with one of her sisters. She told E she was ‘living fully in stress’ due to an upcoming exam, but she had been to a fair with work pals, saying, ‘It was something.’ And she talked again of leaving home. ‘As soon as I’ve moved, I will send you my new address,’ she said. ‘You could come and visit me with your friends if you want to.’ She added, chillingly, ‘Cross your fingers for me – when you get this letter, it will all be over.’

But her impending ordeal was just about to begin.

In all other respects, her tone was blithe and even apologetic for not writing a longer note. ‘Now I’m very tired because it’s very late and also the evening movie (Duel) is so exciting. I can’t write while watching this.’ She concluded, ‘Bye, see you soon, S. Write back soon and don’t get drunk for no reason!’

In the letters, Elisabeth Fritzl seems a completely normal, happy girl – totally unaware of the terrible fate that hung over her.

Her boyfriend Andreas Kruzik had been writing, too. ‘I wrote two letters to Elisabeth, telling her how much I loved her,’ he said, ‘and I was heartbroken when she did not write back.’

Unaware of the evil machinations of her depraved father, Andreas naturally jumped to the conclusion that he had been dumped. ‘I thought she had gone off me, despite the fact that we had talked about the future and getting married,’ he said. ‘She had spoken of running away with me and getting married, but he must have known of her plans.’

But he never saw or heard from her again and was horrified to learn of her fate through the media, more than two decades later. He now fears it was his secret love letters that led to her incarceration. ‘Now I fear he must have flown into a rage,’ said Andreas. ‘It’s horrific he would act like that.’

When Elisabeth completed her training programme in the late summer of 1984, she figured that she would soon be free. Her bags were packed, she had money saved and a job prospect in Linz. It seemed she was on the verge of getting away from her abusive father. The long nightmare of her home life finally seemed to be over and freedom, love and happiness beckoned, but that life was to be snatched away and she would enter a longer and darker nightmare.