Fritzl Case

After viewing his daughter's harrowing account of her 24 years of being imprisoned and raped, Josef Fritzl has decided to admit guilt to the circumstances surrounding the death of one of his children, and then throwing the corpse into an incinerator, in short, murder.

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“I regret it,” the retired building engineer told Judge Andrea Humer. “Only yesterday did I realise how cruel I was to Elisabeth.” His daughter, now 42, was locked up for 24 years in an improvised dungeon in the family home, where she was raped up to 3,000 times and bore seven children – one of whom died soon after birth.

Fritzl’s words yesterday were as close to remorse as he has come. Only two days ago he was choking back tears in his opening courtroom testimony – but they were tears of self-pity as he spoke of his difficult childhood and his unloving mother.

Seeing Elisabeth, he told the judge, had made him think again. After watching 11 hours of her evidence on television, he was shattered and had sought out his assigned therapist, Pattrick Frottier, for counselling. It was then, he said, that he had decided to make a clean breast of matters.

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