AUSTRIA:Only one person ever passed through the door to the hidden chamber where Elisabeth Fritzl was held - her father and tormentor, writes, writes Derek Scally
ELISABETH FRITZL'S hell began on August 28th, 1984. The Los Angeles Olympics had just ended and a young singer named Madonna had just notched up her first chart hit.
From one day to the next, the 18-year-old Elisabeth - Sissy to her family and friends - vanished from the face of the earth.
On August 29th, her worried parents went to the police to file a missing person's report. Around the same time, their daughter woke up in a daze in a cellar, handcuffed, with a vague memory of being attacked and drugged. It was her own cellar, her assailant her own father. She began to scream.
"After a while she came to the conclusion that cries and shouts were not enough to alert someone to open the door," noted an investigator yesterday.
For nearly a quarter of a century, only one person passed through the door to the hidden chamber, her father and tormentor, Josef Fritzl.
"Papa brought clothes and food" - with those words, the shaken, white-haired woman, aged beyond her 42 years, began her shocking testimony to Austrian police on Saturday night.
Over the next two hours, she told of 24 years of sexual assault, incestuous children in a two-year rhythm, a dead baby flung into the furnace. "I haven't slept very well since Saturday," admitted one senior investigator outside the Fritzl home, an unremarkable three-storey apartment block in the town of Amstetten, 130km (81mls) west of Vienna.
The Fritzls lived in the top floor apartment, with a roof garden and pool, and rented out three apartments below. Around the back, forensic police officers in plastic white jumpsuits emerged into the garden with drawn faces. They were the first to inspect the 60sq m claustrophobic prison under the house, a cramped space of sloping floors beneath a ceiling just 1m 70cm high (5ft 7in).
Through a tiny door, investigators squeezed through a narrow corridor into a living space with a television, a kitchen nook and a fully-stocked bathroom. "The suspect tortured them and, at the same time, used his DIY knack to make the place more homely, bit by bit," said one investigator who had been inside the chamber.
The house was built in 1895 and Josef Fritzl applied for planning permission to add a cellar to the building in 1978, a year after he allegedly began abusing Elisabeth.
Files at Amstetten town hall show that, in 1983, he was given "usage permission" to install running water and other facilities.
Amstetten police were unable to say whether the Fritzl house was searched after Elisabeth vanished in 1984, or whether the cellar construction plans on file at city hall were consulted.
Apart from Fritzl, it's probable that only one other man entered the open part of the cellar: the local chimney sweep from one street over, obliged under Austrian law to inspect all flues and heating pipes.
"I was down there twice a year," said Gottfried Reitbauer to The Irish Times. "I inspected the gas central heating and the furnace. Every so often there was ash to clear up, but I never saw anything unusual. Fritzl was perfectly normal, we chatted about the usual things, sport and the weather."
Locals in Amstetten slowed as they passed the house yesterday.
"It makes my skin crawl to think what he did there," said Maria, a neighbour, swapping vague, contradictory recollections of Fritzl with other locals: elegant, domineering, polite, helpful, withdrawn.
Rosemarie Fritzl was recalled as a "wonderful woman" who saved her pennies to buy musical instruments for the three children, Lisa (16), Monica (14) and Alexander (11). Josef Fritzl's other six children, all married with children and living in Austria, were on their way home yesterday to Amstetten last night.
Local official Hans-Heinz Lenze, who met two family members, said: "They are all deeply shocked that, alongside the seven of them, he had another seven children in secret, with their sister."