Man 'kept daughter in dungeon for 24 years'

By Andreas Sam in Amstetten
Last Updated: 11:20pm BST 27/04/2008

An Austrian woman has told police how she was held captive in a cellar for 24 years and abused by her father, falling pregnant six times.


A young Elisabeth F: her father claimed she had left home and rarely contacted him

The 42-year-old - named yesterday only as Elisabeth F - said she was drugged, handcuffed and dragged into the adapted cellar beneath the family home in 1984 and there since.

Her 73-year-old father, "Josef F", has been arrested on suspicion of incest and keeping his daughter in captivity.

Of her six children, a 19-year-old woman and two sons, aged five and 18, were said to have been kept with her in the cellar and to have never seen daylight until rescued. Three others - a boy and two girls aged 12 to 16 - were allowed to attend school after being "adopted" by Miss F's father and his wife who live in Amstetten, central Austria.

Miss F told police that she gave birth to twins in 1996, but one died days later because it was not properly cared for. Police said her father took the corpse and burned it.

Miss F's father told friends and family that his daughter had disappeared and only contacted him occasionally by mail. He also claimed that she had entrusted the three school children to him by leaving them on his doorstep with a note saying she was unable to care for them. Police said the existence of the others was apparently unknown even to the man's 66-year-old wife.

"They are all in psychological care in a secure institution in a clinic here in this area," a spokesman said. "They are being cared for individually - those between 12 and 16 years of age who grew up with their grandparents, and two boys who, when they came out yesterday with their mother, saw the daylight for the first time in their lives."

Last night, police began to search the family's three-storey house. A series of locks and trapdoors had kept the underground dungeon from being discovered, and they said the father has provided the entry code to the electronic lock on the entrance.

"There is not only one, but a number of rooms: one room to sleep in, one to cook, and there are also sanitation facilities," said Franz Polzer, head of the criminal investigations unit in Lower Austria. Miss F, who was badly malnourished, pale and deeply disturbed, was being treated at a psychiatric hospital.

The police issued a statement giving details of the alleged abuses Miss F had recounted, including being sexually abused by her father since age 11. She provided the day and date that her father lured her into the cellar.

The shocking case resembles that of Natascha Kampusch, 20, who was snatched from her way to school and spent eight years in a subterranean bunker near Vienna until she managed to free herself in August 2006.

Miss F's ordeal unravelled after her father took her 19-year-old daughter to hospital earlier this month with an unknown condition.

Doctors could not determine her illness and put the woman into an artificial coma. They called police for help to find the mother, Miss F, so she could provide a medical history. Police visited the family's home, where Miss F was last registered as living. After questioning the family, officers obtained a search warrant and discovered the cellar. DNA tests will be done on the children to determine their parentage.

A neighbour, who did not wish to be named, said: "This is a horrible shock. I've known the family for two decades and their children go to the same school as mine.

"There was never anything suspicious about them. They are a respectable family and the children always looked well-cared for."

A spokesman at the school that the "adopted" children attended said: "They are well behaved and have always had good notes in school."

It is suspected that the father wanted to create an impression that his daughter had joined a cult-like community, as he gave authorities a letter allegedly written by Miss F that read: "Do not try to find me, because it is futile and it could only increase my suffering and the suffering of my children."

Miss F reportedly has four siblings, all of whom have families of their own and are well-respected in the local community.

Yeah, well, my father didn't give me a Corvette for my 16th birthday.

I feel your pain...

wow that is fucked up.. :blink:

Yeah, it even got me saying that's fucked up, and I don't get disturbed that easily.

:huh: DAMN

It's alway "well respected" people that you have to look out for.

Lies

How's fuck you sound? Good? Good.

Get 'em Mod!

:wacko:

That guy should be tortured and allowed to die while being tortured.

Tortured and not allowed to die would be my response. HFS!

How about tortured, allowed to die, resuscitated, and tortured some more.

I'm game.

h6534y

Here ye, Here ye give this man the floor.

'Astonishing' reunion for Austrian suspect's family

AMSTETTEN, Austria: Members of the Austrian family victimized by a man who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her had an "astonishing" reunion at the clinic where they are getting psychiatric counseling, officials said Tuesday.

The authorities said the daughter, Elisabeth Fritzl, most of her children and her mother met one another Sunday morning at a clinic where they have been receiving psychiatric treatment and counseling.

"It was astonishing how easily it happened - how the mother and grandmother came together," the clinic's director, Berthold Kepplinger, told reporters Tuesday.

Kepplinger said the family members interacted very naturally - even though the three children who lived with their grandparents never met their siblings in the windowless cell.

Officials said one of the children, who is receiving medical treatment at another hospital, was not part of the reunion.

The police announced Tuesday that DNA tests had confirmed that Josef Fritzl was the biological father of all his daughter's six surviving children.

The police also said they had combed through Fritzl's other properties but had found no other hidden windowless cells like the one where he had held his daughter - now 42 - captive since she was 18.

Forensics experts on Tuesday carted boxes of belongings out of the cell Fritzl constructed beneath his apartment in Amstetten, a working-class town 120 kilometers, or 75 miles, west of Vienna.

The police said Fritzl confessed Monday to holding his daughter captive, sexually abusing her, fathering her children and tossing into a furnace the body of one child who died in infancy.

Officials had said Fritzl would face up to 15 years in prison if charged, tried and convicted on rape charges, the most grave of his alleged offenses under Austrian law.

But prosecutors in Lower Austria said Tuesday they were looking into the possibility of charging Fritzl with "murder through failure to act" in connection with the infant's death. Murder in Austria is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, would neither confirm nor deny Austrian media reports that Fritzl, 73, had had past run-ins with the law. "If there was an offense outside of the statute of limitations, I can't comment on this," he said, refusing to elaborate.

Investigators say they think Fritzl's wife, with whom he had seven other children, had believed her daughter had run away to join a religious cult in 1984 and had been unaware that she was living as a prisoner beneath her feet.

Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said his client was also under psychiatric care. Asked whether he showed any remorse, Mayer said only: "I cannot say at this point."

Fritzl "is really hit by this. He is very serious, but he is emotionally broken," Mayer said Tuesday.

But a prosecutor, Gerhard Sedlacek, said Fritzl was "completely calm, completely without emotion" when he was formally placed in pretrial detention Tuesday.

Austria is still scandalized by a 2006 case involving a girl who was kidnapped and imprisoned in a basement outside Vienna for more than eight years, and residents of Amstetten were puzzled about how the Fritzl case could go undetected for so long.

"How is it possible that no one knew anything for 24 years?" asked Anita Fabian, a teacher in Amstetten. "This was not possible without accomplices."

I'm calling shenanigans AND bullshit. You'd HAVE to know, or be dumber than a stump and deaf to boot, not to notice something.

The People Under The Stairs, anyone?

Uh, I don't think any person cares or is sympathetic with him in any way. I say a public hanging is in order.

Too quick, crucification.

This appears to be a pattern in Austria. They may want to start checking a few more basements.