The Upstairs/Downstairs Double Life of Josef Fritzl
Monday, March 23rd, 2009Is there any story more terrifying than that of Josef Fritzl, the 73-year-old Austrian electrical engineer who imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth for 24 years in the family’s basement, fathered seven children with her, and murdered one of them? Fritzl lived a shadowy double life. Well respected in the sleepy community of Amstettten, Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie were, by all accounts, normal citizens raising their three grandchildren (ages 16, 14, and 12) abandoned periodically by Elisabeth, whom Fritzl claimed had joined a cult in 1984. But what friends and neighbors, and reportedly even Rosemarie herself and the three “upstairs children,” weren’t aware of was Fritzl’s downstairs life, where Elisabeth and three other children were kept with only an old television set and radio for contact with the outside world.
According to court reports, Fritzl drugged, handcuffed, and raped Elisabeth up to 3,000 times (sometimes on display of the children) during her imprisonment. When she resisted, he retaliated by harming the three children (now ages 19, 18, and 6) or by threatening to leave the four to perish in their 645-square-foot windowless, soundproof, electronically secured underground prison. Another child, a baby boy born in 1996, died days after birth due to Fritzl’s refusal to get medical assistance and was cremated in a domestic furnace. The captives endured lost teeth, damp and cold, malnourishment, physical decay, rats. Elisabeth suffered internal injuries from Fritzl’s sex toys and gave birth with only the most rudimentary trappings: a bucket for the blood, aspirin for the pain, a pair of rusty scissors to cut the umbilical cords. Only when the eldest daughter collapsed last April and Elisabeth was able to convince Fritzl to take her to the hospital were the children freed. Currently, the eldest daughter is in critical condition at a local hospital.
Many gaps still exist in the case and perhaps will never be explained, such as how Fritzl determined which children would be allowed to live upstairs, why social services didn’t uncover anything during their 21 visits to the family, to what degree Rosemarie may have been complicit in the imprisonment, and her tacit acceptance of the children. With Rosemarie, Fritzl fathered another seven children who appear to have had no involvement in the case, and it is unknown whether any of them had any knowledge of their sister’s disappearance.
During the trial, Fritzl covered his face with a blue binder, saying that he was “embarrassed” by the intense media coverage. Reports of Elisabeth’s attendance at the proceedings were never substantiated, but it is thought that her presence at the trial, as well as her 11 hours of videotaped testimony, was what finally shamed Fritzl into admitting his guilt in the depravity. Elisabeth is said to have emerged from the nightmare as a strong 42-year-old woman. In fact, it was her strength of character which may have drawn Fritzl to her in the first place. He desired to dominate his third daughter’s “obstinate” personality, much like his own, sensing that she was a greater challenge for him than Elisabeth’s siblings. Control was identified as a main theme in Fritzl’s life. The product of an over-domineering mother, Fritzl had been previously convicted of rape of another woman when Elisabeth was a toddler and had abused the girl well in advance of her imprisonment, which he said he sought as a way to protect her from the life of drinking and smoking that she pursued as she became a teenager.
Fritzl will spend the majority of his life sentence for rape, incest, murder, and enslavement at a psychiatric facility, where he could be eligible for release in as few as 15 years. Meanwhile, his broken family has been left with the arduous process of coming to terms with the ordeal. Elisabeth and the six children have been reunited and have been given new names and new lives in another town. They travel to regular sessions with psychotherapists. Rosemarie reportedly lives alone in a small apartment, where she is visited by the children, a concession that Elisabeth has made despite what must be a tense relationship with her mother. Published reports say that the initial union between the two sets of children and Elisabeth went better than expected, given the conditions of their meeting. But the “downstairs children” are developing at varying paces, struggling with stunted language, weak immune systems, and years without natural sunlight and vitamin D. The “upstairs children” have been forced to confront the lies scaffolding their existence and the existence of their new family members.
It’s easy, in hindsight, to point to the incongruities and attempt to lay blame on those who did not question Fritzl’s actions and intervene earlier. But perhaps the best course of action, now that Fritzl has been sentenced, is to give the family all the space, literally and figuratively, that it can tolerate until it mends. The healing process hopefully began the moment the four were freed last spring and accelerates with each day. Reports say that as the children emerged from the cellar last year, the youngest imprisoned child, the six-year-old boy, pointed to the sky and asked, “Is that God up there?”
