![]() Last month, the near perpetual news blackout imposed by Elisabeth on herself and her family was broken by Josef Fritzl's sister-in-law, a woman who chooses to identify herself only as Christine R. The three "upstairs" children's contacts with her and their "downstairs" brothers and sister have also gradually increased. "Thomas has become a big brother to the children," she added.Įlisabeth is reported to have radically scaled back the therapy she undergoes for post-traumatic stress disorders as her relationship with Wagner has progressed. ![]() "It may seem remarkable but they are still together," said a source close to the medical team that monitors the family. Wagner was assigned to the family shortly after the move to ensure their safety. He is now held in a special facility for "mentally abnormal criminals" at Austria's Stein prison.įor the outside world, the first tangible signs of a return to something approaching a normal life occurred in late 2008 after Elisabeth and her children were deemed sufficiently recovered to be given a new home in "Village X".īy July last year Elisabeth had struck up a relationship with Thomas Wagner, a security guard with the Austrian firm A&T securities. The court sentenced Fritzl to life imprisonment. That "somebody" turned out to be his daughter Elisabeth whom he kidnapped and imprisoned in a cellar and began raping when she was 18, although the abuse started when she was just 11. Dr Adelheid Kstner, the psychiatrist who interviewed Fritzl extensively before the trial, concluded that his terrible experiences as a child at the hands of a brutal and unloving mother had driven him to want to "control somebody completely". Two years ago she finally managed to escape the underground prison where, for almost a quarter of a century, she had lived alone and then shared with her three "cellar children", Kerstin, Stefan and Felix, then aged 19, 17 and five.Ī year ago last week, Josef Fritzl, then 73, was tried in a court in the Austrian city of Sankt Plten where a jury found him guilty of mass rape, incest, wrongful imprisonment, coercion and murder by negligence. He burned the infant's body in a wood-burning stove.Įlisabeth Fritzl's ordeal defies adequate description. One of them, a baby boy, suffered severe breathing problems after birth, so Fritzl let the child die rather than call a doctor because he was afraid of being found out. ![]() But the other four children Fritzl fathered through his incestuous relationship were never allowed to leave the cellar. Incredible as it seems, the Austrian social services believed the story. She had been duped into thinking that Elisabeth had run away from home to join a religious sect and had only returned to dump her newly born children on her mother's doorstep. ![]() Three of them were sent "upstairs" as small children and lived comparatively normal lives being looked after by Fritzl's unwitting wife, Rosemarie. In that dank subterranean warren, Elisabeth bore Fritzl seven children without any medical help whatsoever. It was at Amstetten's Ybbsstrasse number 4 that Elisabeth Fritzl spent 24 years of her life being held like a caged animal in an underground cellar where she was raped an estimated 3,000 times by her father, "Incest Monster" Josef Fritzl. "Village X" is only a few kilometres away from the almost inadequately named "House of Horror" across the Danube in the nearby Lower Austrian town of Amstetten. She is 44, but the only photographs of her ever published show her aged 16 and under. "I was quickly surrounded by people who told me: they don't want to talk to you, they don't want to see you - please get out of here," he said.Ī family fortress in a village whose name can never be mentioned is the home Elisabeth's Fritzl today shares with her children. "There are only a few villagers and they are all in with the police," recalled a photographer who was unfortunate enough to be sent on a mission to "Village X" last month. In addition to security guards, the citizens of "Village X" have formed a sort of Dad's Army to keep journalists and other sensation seekers at bay. The concern about security, above all the fear of an all-pervasive, ruthlessly prying media does not end there. The two-storey family home is kept under constant CCTV surveillance, and any strangers caught lurking nearby can expect to be picked up by the police within minutes. She lives in a brightly painted house in a tiny hamlet which the Austrian media, when they mention it at all, refer to as "Village X". A 2008 artist’s impression of Elisabeth Fritzl on the cover of the magazine 'Osterreich'.
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