Fritzl planned incest dungeon years before, say police
AMSTETTEN, Austria (AFP) — Austrian police said Monday that Josef Fritzl had started planning a secret dungeon when his daughter was 12, years before he imprisoned her and started forcing her to bear seven children.
Fritzl, 73, built an extension to his house at number 40 Ybbsstrasse in Amstetten between 1978 -- when he received planning permission -- and 1983.
"We believe that, already in the planning phase, the intention must have been there to build... a secret area, a small dungeon," chief investigator Franz Polzer told journalists in Amstetten.
Fritzl, currently in custody, has admitted to police that he imprisoned and sexually abused his daughter Elisabeth, now 42, in a cramped bunker beneath the family home since 1984 when she was 18.
Initially, Elisabeth was held in a single room of 35 square metres (380 square feet), but when she became pregnant from the sexual abuse and gave birth to several children, Fritzl extended the dungeon, Polzer explained.
By 1993, after Fritzl had broken through walls into other unused cellar rooms beneath the older part of the house, the dungeon comprised three rooms measuring a total 55 square metres, the investigator said.
Polzer said they had found an earlier entrance to the dungeon, a half-tonne concrete door, that had clearly been used before the two reinforced steel doors initially discovered by investigators.
In all, "if you want to get into the dungeon, you have to go through eight locked doors" and electronic combinations were needed to open the last three, he said.
For the past week, around 30 investigators have been closely examining the cellar where Elisabeth Fritzl and three of her children were kept prisoner by their father.
A total of seven children were born from the abuse, three of whom were kept incarcerated in the dungeon.
Another three were legally adopted by Fritzl and lived with him in the house upstairs. The seventh child died shortly after birth and Fritzl told investigators he disposed of the body in a wood-fired boiler in the cellar.
Polzer suggested that Fritzl may have been trying to "recreate" his first family, but this time with a younger, prettier woman.
"His motive was to recreate once again the situation he had with his first family, the legal family, but this time with a good-looking young daughter," he said.
Fritzl had previously fathered seven children with his wife Rosemarie.
Doctors looking after the family since their release said their health and psychological state was gradually improving.
The eldest incest child, 19-year-old Kerstin, had "improved and stabilised slightly," said hospital chief Albert Reiter, although she remains in an artificial coma.
It was her hospitalisation on April 19 that eventually led to the discovery of Fritzl's unfathomable crime.
The other family members -- Elisabeth, her own 69-year-old mother Rosemarie and the five remaining children -- have been reunited and are living shielded away from the media and the outside world they barely know in the psychiatric clinic of Amstetten-Mauer.
"They're in a phase of family-finding and family-binding," said clinic head Berthold Kepplinger. "They're starting to organise their own daily lives with the mother and grandmother preparing breakfast and dinner."
The children had been given their stuffed toys from the dungeon and a replacement aquarium had also been set up in the clinic to resemble the one they had in the cellar.
Rosemarie, in a state of shock after learning about her husband Josef's horrifying double life, and Elisabeth were "doing better," Kepplinger said.
The youngest incest child, aged five, was "become ever livelier," he added.
Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, told AFP that his client would plead insanity.
"I believe that someone who is said to have committed such a crime is psychologically ill," he said.
"And if someone is psychologically ill, then they must be examined by an expert to determined whether the illness is so far progressed that they cannot be held responsible."
Mayer rejected suggestions that an insanity plea was a way for Fritzl to get himself off the hook.
"It's about finding out what really happened," he said.
