Fritzl Case.

One of the questions that is being asked repeatedly about this horrific case is how Rosemarie, Josef's wife, didn't know about her daughter and three of her grandchildren being held in the basement. Many people see her as an accomplice of some sort.

Sociopaths like Fritzl are very adept at keeping up with their deceptions. Ted Bundy was also good at that, and when he was connected to all of those murders in the mid-seventies, his family and friends couldn't believe it. It was impossible he could have done such things. After all, at one point he was an aide to the governor of Washington State! He was a master at compartmentalizing his life. Many sociopaths/psychopaths are. That's what is so terrifying about them. They can appear so "normal."

Rosemarie Fritzl could have been in denial, but considering how absolutely authoritarian and abusive this guy was and is, she probably didn't DARE question him. Who knows what the family above ground went through, whether there were beatings and the like?

So if the police don't have reason to charge Rosemarie Fritzl as an accomplice, they must have good reason not to.

One needs to ask, though, about the door installation. No doubt Fritzl had help, and when he put that door in years ago, he probably was still involved in the electrical engineering business. If he was self-employed, he may have had his employees help install the door without any of them knowing about the captives in the basement (or captive, if the door was put in many, many years ago and not later on).

Reading this piece, I too have problems with Fritzl's explanation as to why he took three of the children from the cellar and not the others. He said the ones he took were too noisy, but wouldn't all of them be? And since the area was soundproof, nobody would have heard them anyway.

BBC News

has a diagram of what the chamber of horrors looks like, as the authorities have found it:




The mystery is that as the second family grew, how Fritzl was able to expand the cellar in secret. The area is about 650 square feet (60 square meters), about the size of a small apartment but downright claustrophobic for four people. It is somewhat larger than my apartment, which is 500 square feet.

It has been noted Fritzl was granted the right to build a cellar in 1978, and it was examined in 1983, the year before Elisabeth was abducted. However, no one noted anything suspicious.

Fritzl Case.

Austrian police are looking at other properties Josef Fritzl owned for clues. The children and Elisabeth Fritzl have been offered new lives and identities because their surname has been tarnished beyond rehabilitation.

According to some reports, Fritzl was pretty prosperous, having owned a number of properties, a Mercedes, and was known to wear nice clothes:

In addition to his electrical engineering business, Mr Fritzl also dabbled in property management. He is known to have owned at least one other house in Amstetten, where he spent weekends with his wife and the three adopted children.
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Mr Fritzl had planned to tear down the house and erect a block of flats and offices with an underground garage, but his neighbours had taken legal action to prevent the project.

Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, said today that it was "more than unlikely" that Mr Fritzl maintained other secret prisons, but police had to check as a precaution. "We believe he was so busy with his crime that he wouldn’t have time for anything else," Mr Polzer said.

He built the cellar in 1983, a year before he abducted Elisabeth.


A school friend of Elisabeth's recalls how strict her father was.


Fritzl is supposed to appear in court today.

The victims were reunited at a psychiatric clinic, according to this report.


This news just came in that Josef Fritzl is indeed the father of the six surviving children of Elisabeth Fritzl, according to DNA tests.