One of the more disturbing crimes

[B. Elliott]

While I have access to Yankee news via cable, it would make no sense for me to watch it.

You and me both.

 

[Moonbear]

I haven't read anything that describes much about the wife. I knew a girl who was repeatedly molested by her father and brother and her mother really was clueless.

I can believe being clueless about abuse of a child, but I have a hard time believing one is clueless about the child still living in the house when everyone else believes she has run away. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the wife is also a victim though, and while she might have known what was going on, was too afraid to report it or do anything about it.

 

[rewebster]

I don't know, MB, ...I've met some really clueless people


(like a entire family that I've met)

 

[Moonbear]

I don't know, MB, ...I've met some really clueless people


(like a entire family that I've met)

Maybe, but that sure would require a very special kind of clueless.

 

[fourier jr]

Austrian house of horrors

I also can't understand how this sicko could have kept this under wraps for so long. The town he lives/lived in is only as small as a medium-sized university campus (24000 people), which must be a pretty tight-knit community. As if the Texas polygamist colony business isn't enough good news in the last week...

VIENNA, April 29 (RIA Novosti) - A 73-year-old Austrian electrical engineer who has confessed to keeping his daughter locked in a basement for 24 years and fathering seven children by her is to face intense police questioning over the coming days.

Police want to know how Josef Fritzl was able to dig a warren of rooms extending under his house and garden, and bring up three children who have never seen the light of day, without the rest of his family or the neighbors ever finding out.

The Austrian media, which has dubbed the family's dungeon a "House of Horrors", has also been asking why Fritzl, who had a previous rape conviction, was allowed by the authorities to legally adopt three of his grandchildren - also his children - when he brought them out of the cellar and claimed they had been left by their mother, who had been missing since 1984.

http://en.rian.ru/world/20080429/106170154.html

Incredulity is driving a judicial and public effort to understand how a man could have entombed his daughter under the noses of residents and authorities, and then kept three of the children he fathered with her underground their entire lives.

Austrian and German media reports have shown pictures and video clips of Fritzl contentedly holidaying without family members in Thailand and Cyprus.

Polzer said the cellar, which was sealed off behind a locked sliding concrete door, included separate sleeping, washing and cooking areas, and was equipped with a refrigerator, freezer and washing machine.

"This electrical equipment would have allowed the occupants of the dungeon to have survived for weeks," he said.

Two of the children who had lived in the cellar have now been reunited with three other siblings who were taken in as infants and raised by Josef and his wife Rosemarie.

"Yesterday we had a small improvised birthday celebration for the 12-year-old, with a birthday cake," Berthold Kepplinger, medical director of the provincial clinic of Lower Austria, told the same news conference..

CHILD IN HOSPITAL

The eldest child, aged 19, remains seriously ill in hospital, where she was taken last week -- the first time she had left the windowless cellar.

Josef Fritzl, who has admitted incarceration and incest, is now in detention and under investigation on suspicion of rape, incest and coercion. He is also being investigated for murder through neglect of a seventh child, which died shortly after birth, and whose remains he burnt in a furnace.

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL2727651520080430

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=231981

;-)

Edit:
Well now my post just doesn't make any sense. ;-p

 

[fourier jr]

How do you explain needing and having food for 7 people in one house in a house that is supposed to be two. What about toilets flushing in the basement or other noises made by them. This is very disturbing and I can't see how she wouldn't be in on it!

The dungeon wasn't in the basement of the main house; it under the garden shed & he was really weird about people going out to it. The dungeon was all concrete & there was a thick concrete door with a keyless electronic lock at the entrance that only he knew the combination to. Even if someone were "allowed" to go out to the shed they might not have heard screaming etc from the basement. That raises more questions for me though. How could he have excavated a 60 square metre (~645 sqft) suite underground without anyone noticing? Sure the ceiling was only ~5'6" or something but that would still be many cubic yards of dirt to dig out somehow. Someone must have noticed that. He bought clothes in other towns so as to not arouse suspicion in the small town he lived in. I haven't read anything about food though. I've read that this story reminded many Austrians about a similar case a couple years ago, except in that case the daughter managed to escape.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

How could he have excavated a 60 square metre (~645 sqft) suite underground without anyone noticing? Sure the ceiling was only ~5'6" or something but that would still be many cubic yards of dirt to dig out somehow. Someone must have noticed that.

I'm not sure about Austria but I've heard and read about people here in America that made rather elaborate fallout shelters. Perhaps that's what the basement started out as?

 

[russ_watters]

How could he have excavated a 60 square metre (~645 sqft) suite underground without anyone noticing?

People "noticed" - he had a building permit a and an inspection.

 

[fourier jr]

more details came out today:

Dungeon rapist threatened to gas family

AP
Thursday, 1 May 2008

The man who kept his daughter and their children imprisoned in a home-made dungeon warned them they would be gassed if they tried to escape, police revealed today.

Austrian Josef Fritzl ,73, who fathered seven children by raping his daughter Elisabeth, repeatedly told them they would die if they harmed him.

Police spokesman Helmut Greiner said Fritz warned gas would flow into the dingy, windowless cellar underneath his house in the town of Amstetten.

Fritzl told police about his threats during interviews and they were checking today to see if he had actually installed a device to carry them out.

They are also investigating another Fritzl claim that the reinforced door leading to the enclosure had a timer that let it be opened if he was gone for an unusually long time.

Police also said Fritzl forced his captive daughter to write a letter late last year indicating he may have been planning to release her from the cellar where she was held for 24 years.

They said DNA tests proved Elisabeth had written the letter to her family, who believed she had fled to a cult.

In it, the 42-year-old writes she wants to come home but "it's not possible yet."

"He may have had plans to end the captivity at some point," a spokesman said.

Fritzl's crimes came to light after one of Elisabeth's daughters, 19-year-old Kerstin, was admitted to hospital on April 19 suffering from an illness linked to an unidentified infection.

Doctors then appealed on TV for Kerstin's mother to come forward because they needed information from her about her daughter's medical history. Fritzl then allowed Elisabeth to go to hospital, and her story emerged.

Days before Elisabeth told police of her 24 years in captivity, police had become suspicious and started investigating Fritzl, according to a police statement.

It said police decided to compare DNA samples of the hospitalised Kerstin and of Fritzl, along with family members living with him in late April, about 10 days before revealing the ordeal to the public.

Fritzl and Elisabeth were held on 26 April near the hospital where Kerstin was being treated and Elisabeth then told her story to interrogators.

Police in Upper Austria are also examining whether Fritzl was also responsible for an unsolved murder in a nearby lakeside village where his wife owned an inn and camping ground.

The bound body of 17-year-old Martina Posch was found on a shore of the Upper Austrian lake of Mondsee in 1986. Fritzl's wife owned part of an inn and camping ground on the other side of the lake at that time and he could have been in the area at the time.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/europe/dungeon-rapist-threatened-to-gas-family-819265.html

AMSTETTEN, Austria (Reuters) - An Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar and fathered her seven children pretended to be the young woman in a phone call to his wife in 1994, a police official said on Thursday.

At the time, Elisabeth Fritzl had been locked in the windowless cellar of her parents' house for 10 years, without her mother's knowledge.

Faking his daughter's voice, Josef Fritzl called his wife and asked her to look after Elisabeth's baby who had been left on the doorstep.

"Rosemarie Fritzl made a report about it at Amstetten police station in 1994. This report was passed on to the prosecutors' office," Reinhard Nosofsky, regional police department official, told Reuters.

"She could not explain the call and had not recorded it. We now know it was Fritzl."

The prosecutors' office, which is responsible for missing and abandoned children, tried to get in touch with Elisabeth, who is now 42.

"They had no reason to search the house or to think she was in the cellar," Nosofsky said.

He pointed out authorities also had a letter from Elisabeth asking her parents to look after her baby and not to look for her. Police now know Fritzl forced her to write the letter.

"They had no reason to search the house or to think she was in the cellar," Nosofsky said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL019159320080501

 

[fourier jr]

well if he meant well I guess that makes it all ok:

Austrian police spokesman Helmut Greiner said: “We are trying to ascertain whether there really was a mechanism that would allow the gas to be pumped in or whether it was to intimidate them.”

Fritzl would often sleep overnight with his captives in the cellar and hadn’t had sex with his wife Rosemarie, 68, upstairs for 20 years.

Fritzl and Rosemarie had seven grown up children. Three other children he fathered with Elisabeth – Lisa, 16, Monika, 14, and Alex, 12 – lived upstairs in the house.

According to Rosemarie’s sister Christine, 56, Fritzl treated his family like a “military dictator” and spent more time in the cellar than above ground.

She said: “He would go down there at 9am and often spend the night there. He said he was developing blueprints for machines he was selling. Noone was allowed down there. Rosie wasn’t even allowed to bring him a cup of coffee.

“He always put Rosie down and called her fat. He would say `Fat women are below my standard.’”

Fritzl was also so vain about going bald that he had hair transplants.

Christine said: “He was a tyrant and despot. I have always hated him. He treated his children like a drill instructor. It was like they were in the army.”

Fritzl told detectives he had become tired of his bizarre double life and had been planning to let his secret family out this summer.

He forced Elisabeth to write a letter home last Christmas which said she was part of a mysterious cult but would return home soon. The letter said: “If all goes well I hope to be back within six months.”

Fritzl hoped the cover story would explain her long absence and why her children were pale and malnourished and communicated using animalistic growling noises.

He told police: “Why should I feel sorry? I cared well for them. I meant well with Elisabeth.”

*snip*

Meanwhile Alfred Dubanovsky, a lodger at the house for 12 years, claimed that he saw another man - who was introduced as a plumber - go to the cellar where the abuse happened.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1918124/Austria-Josef-Fritzl-%27told-children-he-could-gas-them%27.html

 

[fourier jr]

"My Job Is to Show Josef Fritzl as a Human Being," says the guy's lawyer
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,551049,00.html
(including links to other stuff at the bottom)

Kerstin Fritzl, 19, who lived her entire life as a prisoner of her father in a subterranean dungeon, has suffered multiple organ failure and is in a coma from which medical experts now say she will not recover.

If she dies prosecutors will bring a charge of murder against her father Josef Fritzl who kept her locked up in the cellar under his home in the town of Amstetten.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1920005/Austria-Fritzl's-dungeon-child-'likely-to-die'.html

 

[kasse]

God doesn't own Jesus, yet they are one and the same.

That's OT, but I must correct you when you claim such nonsense. The doctrine of the Trinity was imposed by Constantine on the early church in 325 A.D.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Trinity arguments are definitely over the line. What's more, you are responding to someone who has clearly been banned.

 

[wolram]

There is an illness in society, an illness i wish that could be detected in ones early life, but it seems it can not, mainly because we do not interact enough, one does not have to be a busy body to know their neighbor.
It is weird that in this age one does not know the person living next to them.

 

[OmCheeto]

There is an illness in society, an illness i wish that could be detected in ones early life, but it seems it can not, mainly because we do not interact enough, one does not have to be a busy body to know their neighbor.
It is weird that in this age one does not know the person living next to them.

The neighbors to my west are crackheads.
The neighbors to my east do not speak English.
I'd rather talk to you.