David Canter: Fritzl, like Fred West, believed he was a good man

Sunday, 11 May 2008

Josef Fritzl's complaint, through his lawyer, that he is being portrayed as a monster shows the profound depths to which self-deception can reach. Without doubt he does not recognise the horrors to which he subjected his daughter over 24 years and the children he fathered with her in the dungeon he built to keep them. His protestations are like those of many other violent offenders who cast themselves in the role of misunderstood hero rather than villainous monster.

Fritzl may be tried for murder over baby son's death

Saturday, 10 May 2008

Josef Fritzl, the Austrian rapist who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered her seven children, may face a murder charge over the death of one of his newborn sons whose corpse he admitted "getting rid of" in a boiler furnace.

Confessions from the cellar: 'It was great for me to have a second proper family in the cellar with a wife and a few children'

Friday, 9 May 2008

In his first interview since it emerged that Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth in a cellar beneath his home in August 1984 and forced to her to suffer a nightmare of incest, multiple rape and untreated births that lasted 24 years, the 73-year-old explained from his prison cell that, after the kidnapping, he saw no way out because he had become caught up in a "vicious circle" from which he could not escape.

I am a victim, not a monster, says Josef Fritzl

Thursday, 8 May 2008

Josef Fritzl, the self-confessed Austrian rapist who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered her seven children, insisted that he was "not a monster" yesterday and claimed that he was the victim of a one-sided media campaign to discredit him.

Fritzl began bunker plan when his daughter was 12

Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Austrian police have revealed that Josef Fritzl spent years planning the labyrinthine bunker in which he imprisoned and raped his daughter, and that eight doors including two massive electrically operated steel hatchways separated the complex from the outside world.

Catastrophe tourists descend on Austrian 'House of Horrors'

Monday, 5 May 2008

The Austrian authorities have complained that "catastrophe tourists" are descending on the house where Elisabeth Fritzl was imprisoned in a cellar for 24 years – while new evidence revealed that her father raped her in front of their first two children when they were toddlers.

Andreas Whittam Smith: This Austrian shame is compounded by history

Monday, 5 May 2008

How the Austrians come to terms with Josef Fritzl's terrible crimes will be conditioned by their history as much as by the facts of the case. What is striking about the Austrians is that they have the weakest sense of their own identity of any people in Europe. Whenever they decide who they are, something comes along to show them that it was an illusion.

The Family Man of Amstetten: Double life of a pillar of Austrian society

Sunday, 4 May 2008

He was a very good family man, was Josef Fritzl. In his home town of Amstetten just eight days ago, they'd have been adamant about that. Hadn't he brought his seven children up to be good boys and girls? Always so polite; just like their father. And when that silly daughter of his ran off to join this religious cult, had he bothered people with lots of questions about who she'd been seen with recently? No. Even when the little hussy had three children and just dumped them on his doorstep, did he complain? No. He just took them in and raised them as if they were his own. And he was always so smart. He had pride, did Fritzl. He really was a very good family man.

Melanie McDonagh: A darkness where only the human spirit can survive

Sunday, 4 May 2008

Europe didn't sleep easily, did it, that night last week after we learned about the horrors of the cellar in Amstetten? It was the stuff of claustrophobic nightmares, those sunless corridoors where Elisabeth Fritzl could not walk upright for 24 years, the padded cell where she was raped by her father, the steel door that could only be operated by remote control with a code which only Josef Fritzl knew. Day by day, we heard more about that cellar and the four subterranean lives that were lived out within it: Elisabeth and her three children, one of whom, Kerstin, may die at any time. The darkest corner in the European imagination is no longer Bluebeard's chamber but the sealed cellar. In both cases, the woman of the house was forbidden to enter, and in the case of Rosemarie Fritzl, Elisabeth's mother, she obeyed.

What next for the Fritzl case?

Sunday, 4 May 2008