Subscribe"Forensic scientists were searching the cellar yesterday, while others combed the grounds of the house. 'There are things that you just don't want to see,' a policeman at the house said. 'The fewer pictures you have in your head, the better.'"
"Asked why the children had not tried to over power their father, the police chief said: 'These children were born into jail … they knew nothing else.'
He described the oldest boy as 'small and weak,' saying Fritzl was 'authoritarian and domineering.' He added that Elisabeth "realized that was useless to battle against incarceration.'"
Professor Jay Belsky, an expert in the field of child development and family studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, says the fact that the children were with their mother - a source of security - and with each other, could have mitigated against the amount of trauma they suffered.
"Potentially, the children could have led tolerably rich social lives - there were four people there, at least three of them for a long period of time. This isn't a story about a child being locked in a closet all by himself," he told the BBC News website.
He said that in terms of the five-year-old, he would have been unlikely to have known what he was missing.
"As a youngster, your immediate environment is your whole world," he says.
Three of the children lived upstairs with the grandparents.
"If there were books, games and a TV, there were things for all the children to make a psychological life around. It need not be as atrocious as it might first appear," he says.
However, Professor Belsky stressed that much of this would be dependent on the mother's mental state.
"It's hard to imagine that her own mental well-being was not compromised, and this would have undermined her ability to support and nurture her children," he says.
"A tenant who lived above the cellar where Elisabeth Fritzl was imprisoned by her father for 24 years described today how he heard strange noises in the night - and saw Josef Fritzl ferrying wheelbarrows of food under cover of darkness.
Alfred Dubanovsky, 42, who lived in the building in the Austrian town of Amstetten for 12 years, said Josef Fritzl spent his days in the cellar but banned anyone from going near it.
It never occurred to him anything was unusual about his landlord's behaviour but he now says he will regret doing nothing for the rest of his life.
Mr Dubanovsky said: 'I wish to God that I could turn back the clock. The signs were all there but it was impossible for me to recognise them.
"Who would ever believe something so terrible was going on right under my feet? It is a regret I will have to live with for the rest of my life.'"
"It also emerged today that Fritzl, 73, first applied for planning permission for a cellar in 1978, saying it was to protect his family in case of nuclear attack.
Elisabeth would have been 12 at the time - making it about a year after she says her father started abusing her.
In 1983 he was allowed to extend it to proper living quarters with rooms and running water. It was a year later that Elisabeth - now 42 - says her father lured her into the cellar, drugged and handcuffed her before imprisoning her.
An investigator told The Sun: 'Not only did Fritzl build a torture den to rape and assault his daughter - he went through official channels to do it.'
'What kind of man follows council building laws to the letter only then to commit such a horrific crime? It shows how methodical and detached he is.'
The picture we are getting is that Fritzl planned his entrapment for years, maybe as soon as he started raping his daughter.
'We understand that Elisabeth was his favourite child because she was so pretty. He didn't want to lose her when she turned 18 so he spent six years building the dungeon to keep her for himself forever.'
'It wasn't just a sudden idea to throw his daughter in the cellar - it was plotted for years.'"
“Casual acquaintances knew Josef Fritzl as a jovial fellow who liked to drink beer and enjoyed a bawdy joke.
But former neighbors say the man accused of imprisoning his daughter and fathering her seven children ran his household like a dictator. Piece by piece, a picture is emerging of a shrewd liar and an obsessive tyrant.
…The mosaic of Fritzl now taking shape also points to an astonishingly agile criminal mind: He allegedly forged letters, concocted an elaborate but consistent cover story that his daughter Elisabeth had joined a cult, and even impersonated her in a phone call to his wife.
Fritzl apparently complemented trickery with authoritarianism: To keep family and tenants from the windowless, soundproofed rooms where he confined Elisabeth for 24 years along with three of the children, he menacingly banned them from the basement.
…Police say Fritzl also told his daughter and the three children held captive with her that the cellar was rigged to release toxic gas in case they attempted to overpower him in a bid to escape.”
"Austrian Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered her seven children, said he was no 'monster' and he could have killed her and her children had he wanted to, according to his lawyer.Um, okay, whatever you say.
'I am not a monster,' Austrian daily Oesterreich quoted Fritzl as saying in comments relayed by his lawyer Rudolf Mayer. Fritzl also criticized media coverage of his case as 'totally one-sided.'"
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posted by everichon at 8:34 AM on April 28, 2008