Josef Fritzl had locked his daughter into a specially prepared dungeon in his cellar. We now know what in fact happened on that August afternoon in 1984. On her return to Amstetten, however, they had chosen to discuss the matter only with her father, though Elisabeth was in the room at the time.Īdditionally, some of her friends suspected Elisabeth of self-harming - another obvious outward sign of abuse - but social workers simply accepted Josef Fritzl's account. It was also known to social workers that Elisabeth had run away from home two years previously. His arrests for arson were still on record but he nevertheless legally owned two guns: a Bernadelli pistol and a rifle. Notwithstanding the fact that there are no cults to speak of in Austria, either now or at the time, there were other factors that might have alerted the police's suspicions.Īlthough Fritzl's conviction for rape had by this stage been wiped from his criminal record (by Austrian law sex offences were then automatically deleted from police files after a period of 10 to 15 years), it was commonly known in the tight-knit community that he was a convicted rapist. It was Josef Fritzl who, the next day, would report Elisabeth's disappearance to the police, hinting, without a shred of evidence to back up his claim, that she had joined "a cult". Her mother and one of her sisters were out shopping, another sister had been sent out by Fritzl for a walk.īy the time they returned, Elisabeth was gone. She was living at the family home in Amstetten at the time and, except for her father, the house was empty. She vanished at some point around lunch-time. In August 1984, four months after her 18th birthday, Elisabeth disappeared. He is ruthless, and an accomplished liar, but he is also a clumsy operator, a man who, by the time he had reached his mid-40s, had been arrested twice for arson, twice more for sex offences, and jailed once for the rape of a woman at knifepoint.Īnd though the Austrian authorities have always insisted that they bear no responsibility for Josef Fritzl's 24-year incarceration of his daughter, Elisabeth, evidence I have seen suggests that this often flagrant criminal left a staggering number of clues in his wake - clues that were repeatedly ignored by social workers, the police and the judiciary. But, having spent the past year researching the case, I have found that the opposite is true. There is a theory, popular in Austria, that Josef Fritzl was a cunning and extremely stealthy criminal. Elisabeth Fritzl and her children could have been freed years earlier if Austrian authorities had not missed dozens of clues, writes Stefanie Marsh, author of a new book on the man who held his daughter in a dungeon for a quarter of a century.
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