Life behind bars for Josef Fritzl
Evil Joseph Fritzl will spend the rest of his life locked up for the crimes that shocked the world.
A jury today gave him the maximum punishment allowed under Austrian law for the enslavement, imprisonment and rape of his daughter over 24 years and allowing one of the seven children he fathered by her to die.
Fritzl, 73, sat calmly and bowed his head as the verdicts were read in court. He said he accepted the outcome and waived his right to appeal.
He will be put in a secure psychiatric hospital for deranged criminals.
Meanwhile his daughter Elisabeth,42, is free to bring a separate civil case against him to seek damages for the ordeal which began when she was 18 in the dungeon he built underneath the family home.
Fritzl had originally pleaded not guilty to the homicide charge but changed his mind yesterday after he watched viewed 11 hours of emotional videotaped testimony by Elisabeth and had to confront her in person across the courtroom.
“I regret it with all my heart ... I can’t make it right anymore,” Fritzl told the court today hours before he was sentenced.
Officials said Fritzl would not be eligible for parole for at least 15 years, and judges and psychiatric experts would have to agree with any decision to free him.
Erich Huber-Guensthofer, deputy head of the prison where Fritzl has been held, said he would remain under a suicide watch.
Fritzl will remain in jail in St Poelten until he is transferred to Vienna’s Mittersteig prison for assessment. There, experts will determine how dangerous Fritzl is and whether therapy might help ease the threat he poses.
Fritzl will undergo yearly assessments. If he is deemed cured, he would be transferred to the general prison population to serve the remainder of his sentence.
In a surprise move Elisabeth appeared in the court as it viewed her evidence on Monday and Tuesday. Fritzl’s lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said he decided to stop contesting the homicide and enslavement counts after seeing her in the courtroom and watching the heart-wrenching videotape.
Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser had called for the maximum punishment in her closing arguments, urging the jury to think about Elisabeth’s nearly quarter-century ordeal as it considered a sentence.
“Don’t be duped like Elisabeth was 24 years ago,” she said, referring to when Fritzl locked her in the cramped, rat-infested dungeon in Amstetten.
Elisabeth and her six surviving children, who range in age from six to 20, have spent months recovering in a psychiatric clinic and at a secret location. Prosecutors described her as a “broken” woman after enduring constant rapes - some in front of her children.
The homicide charge stemmed from the 1996 death of her baby son. The three-day-old twin called Michael might have survived if Fritzl had arranged for medical care.
“Any amateur could have determined that the child was in the throes of death for 66 hours,” Ms Burkheiser said, arguing that Fritzl should be locked up for the rest of his life for refusing to intervene and save the baby’s life.
Three of the children never saw daylight until the crime was exposed 11 months ago.
The three others were brought upstairs to be raised by Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie who was led to believe they were abandoned by Elisabeth when she ran off to join a cult.
Eva Plaz, a lawyer for Elisabeth and the other victims, urged the jury not to lessen Fritzl’s sentence just because he pleaded guilty.
Fritzl’s pleas “were not a confession,” she said, adding that Elisabeth’s main reason for testifying was that she believed she “owed it to her child, Michael”.
His lawyer did not argue that Fritzl was innocent – even admitting in court that Fritzl had raped his daughter 3,000 times. But he said Fritzl had been plagued with guilt for the past 24 years, and asked the jurors to take a hard look at the homicide charge.
“The life sentence was a consequence of his confession,” Mr Mayer told reporters after the jury’s decision.
