This gruesome crime committed by Josef Fritzl, an Austrian national, has reached the international headlines last month. CNN and BBC news covered stories on how he imprisoned his daughter, Elisabeth, in a cellar for 24 years where he raped her and fathered all her 7 children. Elisabeth, now 42 but looked older than her age, was declared missing in 1984 by Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie. They told the police that she joined a religious cult. It was only in the last week of April that Elisabeth was rescued by the authorities when she and her father, Fritzl, visited her 19-year-old daughter, Kerstin, in the hospital. Kerstin was brought to the hospital for kidney failure.
How this mind-boggling diabolical crime was hatched and took place for two decades was beyond human reason. Not even a laptop memory can store such horrid details nor Hollywood writers have a stomach for it. The sound-proof cellar beneath the 3-storey house Fritzl owns was built as living quarters. To obtain license to build, he filed it under the guise of a nuclear bunker. It can be accessed through 8 doors, two of which are password-protected by Fritzl. The passage leading through the cellar lacked oxygen that investigators access it for only an hour a day. This is where his daughter was abused, lived and gave birth to his 7 children.
The unfathomable evil deed of Fritzl is perhaps the worst in many of Austria’s related crimes. Check out others:
Natascha Kampusch was imprisoned in a cellar for eight years in Strasshof, Austria. She was kidnapped at the age of 10.
In 2007, it was revealed that a middle-aged middle-class lawyer in Linz, Austria had suffered a nervous breakdown after her divorce, and imprisoned her daughters Viktoria, Katherina and Elisabeth in a squalid cellar in almost total darkness from the ages of seven, 11, and 13 for seven years up to 2005. The girls’ symptoms after their release bear some similarity to the Fritzl children’s.
Maria K. A 23-year old mentally disabled woman, was locked up periodically for nine years in a coffin-like wooden chest by her parents in Vienna, Austria. She was released in 1996.
Lydia Gouardo, a French woman who was beaten, raped and burned (with both acid and scalding water) by her parents for 28 years and has six children by her stepfather. Although not imprisoned in a fashion similar to the Fritzl case, she was tied down during her first pregnancy to prevent her from seeking an abortion.
Kaspar Hauser, a mysterious foundling in 19th century Germany, is believed to have spent the first 16 years of his life imprisoned and in isolation, before he appeared on the streets of Nuremberg, Germany on 26 May 1828 following his apparent release from captivity. Kaspar Hauser Syndrome is an established term to describe the deficient statural, intellectual and social growth induced by child abuse, notably social isolation.
Fritzl is currently facing charges of incest and sexual abuse.
Related news:
Josef Fritzl ‘began building cellar six years before seizing daughter’
Profile: Josef Fritzl
