New details have emerged in the case of the father who held his daughter captive in the dungeon-like cellar of their Austrian home for 24 years and “fathered” seven children with her. How a note and a television in the secret dungeon may have played a key part in ending the daughter and her children’s captivity.

Josef Fritzl, The Sins of the Father

Seventy three-year-old Josef Fritzl has been remanded into police custody for two weeks while DNA tests have confirmed that he’s the father of all seven of his daughter’s children: Kerstin, 19, Stefann, 18, Lisa, 16, Monika, 14, Alexander, 12, and Felix, age 5. Another child, a twin boy born the same time as Monika, purportedly died shortly after childbirth and whose body Josef allegedly burned in the garden behind the Friztl’s concrete villa.

Elisabeth Fritzl, age 15, before she was locked
away by her father at age 19 in 1984

Elisabeth was reported missing in August of 1984 at age 19. It was then that her father drugged, handcuffed her, then locked her away in a dungeon-like cellar he had built under the family villa in Amstetten. Elisabeth was to spend the next 24 years in the series of rooms built by Josef, hidden behind a secret door in the basement of the family home with an electronic code only known by her father.

Front of the Fritzl House of Horrors in Amstetten, Austria

When Elisabeth “disappeared” in 1984 her mother reported her missing. A few weeks later a note arrived from Elisabeth–already locked away in her father’s prison beneath the home–which stated that she wished to live her own life and to be left alone.

Scenes from the Fritzl Family Dungeon

Elisabeth gave birth to the first baby fathered by Josef, a girl, Kerstin, in 1989, followed by a son, Steffan in 1990. When a third child was born, Lisa, Josef played King Solomon and allowed the nine month baby to be placed on the Fritzl’s doorstep with a note from Elisabeth in 1993. Elisabeth “wrote” that she couldn’t care for the baby, that she already had a “daughter and a son and no place for a third child”.

The next child to be born, Monika, was also chosen to leave the confines of the basement at age 10 months in 1994, then another in 1997, a 15-month-old boy, Alex. Again, both babies were left on the stoop with notes from Elisabeth asking her parents to take in the child. Josef and his wife Rosemarie adopted those three children while the last child to be born, Felix, in 2000, was left to languish with Elisabeth, Kerstin, and Steffan in the confines of their dungeon home. Josef purportedly picked which babies would be allowed to go upstairs on whether or not they were “crybabies”.

Josef, a retired electrical engineer, had warned Elisabeth and the children that he had “booby trapped” the secret door with explosives. He had also fashioned several rooms beneath the family villa, a washroom with a toilet, sink, and tub, a stove to cook on, another room lined with rubber, and amazingly, a television and radio. No one knew about the secret prison constructed by Josef, not even his wife, nor Josef’s other four children and their families.

It was the television and the note writing that may have been Josef’s undoing. When 19-yr-old Kerstin became critically ill, Josef took the unconscious girl upstairs and then pretended she had been deposited on the doorstep by the phantom Elisabeth. When Josef took Kerstin to the local hospital on April 19, doctors found a note from Elisabeth secreted in one of Kerstin’s pockets, “asking them to do everything they could to help her daughter”.

Doctors turned the letter over to the police whose suspicions were raised as the last known siting of Elisabeth was back in 1984. She was still reported missing on Interpol.

The Television in the Dungeon

The doctors issued a televised plea for Elisabeth to come forward to supply information about her gravely ill daughter. Purportedly Elisabeth saw the plea by the doctors on the television left in the dungeon by her father and then somehow convinced him to let her go to the hospital. Josef let Elisabeth, Stefann, and Felix leave the dungeon and go upstairs, telling his wife that his daughter and her children had decided to come home. Meanwhile an anonymous tip lead police to Josef and Elisabeth outside the hospital. Elisabeth, given assurances that she would never have to be near her father again, gave a statement. It was then that Josef was arrested.

Kerstin remains in critical condition and has been placed in an artificially induced coma. Doctors have stated that she suffers from a “lack of oxygen sometime between Wednesday and Friday when she admitted”.

Elisabeth and her children, Stefann and Felix, have been reunited with her mother, Rosemarie, and the three children who were raised upstairs by her parents.

In the end, it was a note secreted away in Kerstin’s clothing, that alerted doctors and then the authorities to Elisabeth’s existence. It was the television in the basement that allowed Elisabeth to see the doctor’s televised plea for her, the mother of Kerstin, to come forward. We’re not sure why Josef decided in the end to allow Elisabeth to leave the makeshift dungeon, thus facing exposure of his massive sins against his daughter and her children. Perhaps he feared that Kerstin might eventually be healthy enough to alert the authorities to her and her family’s plight of being held captive beneath the floors of Josef Fritzl’s villa.

By LBG

Image – Austria
Source - Austrian Times – Captive woman discovered after note found in daughter’s pocket
Source – Daily Mail – Incest Dungeon daughter in emotional reunion with mother 24 years after she was locked away
Source – Daily Mail – Incest Dad insists he acted alone as DNA proves he fathered seven children

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