In 2008, there was a sensational case in Austria.
The 73-year-old beast father imprisoned and sexually abused his own daughter for 24 years and gave birth to 7 children with her. It wasn't until their first child was taken to hospital that Joseph Fritz's heinous crimes were exposed.
As soon as the incident came out, the neighbors were stunned. In their eyes, Joseph is a gentle, polite, helpful and good man, and even helped his daughter Elizabeth, who ran away from home, raised 3 children, and was a good father who was personally praised.
How did such a man become a demon who raped his daughter? As the police investigation deepens, Joseph's untold side is revealed...
Joseph Fritz was born in 1935 in Amstetten, Austria. At the age of 4, his father abandoned him and his mother. Since then, Joseph has never felt the warmth of family.
The battered mother, who poured all her resentment on her son, beat and scolded Joseph at every turn, and even forbade him to make friends.
Sometimes Joseph was beaten out of blood and lay on the ground unable to move, and he looked at his mother with pleading eyes, and the only response he received was an insult: "You are a Satan, a useless thing!" ”
Growing up in this environment, Joseph seemed calm and calm on the surface, but in fact his psychology had long been distorted.
As an adult, he made good progress in his career, working as an electrical engineer before serving as a director of a concrete manufacturing company and a representative of a Concrete Pipe Factory in Denmark.
In 1956, 21-year-old Joseph married 17-year-old Rosemary, and the two married with seven children, including Elizabeth.
In the eyes of outsiders, they are a model couple, and the family is very harmonious. In fact, Joseph often beat his wife and even beat her up when she was pregnant.
The children are also very afraid of this very controlling father, as soon as Joseph appears, they will stop playing, stay quietly in the room, and if they are not careful, they will be beaten by their father.
Later, when her daughter Elizabeth reached adolescence, she began to rebel against her father's authority.
In Joseph's view, Elizabeth mingled with some unscrupulous people all day, wandering in dirty bars at night, smoking and drinking, and was a completely problem girl.
Driven by an almost perverted desire for control, Joseph began to mull his evil plan: "I must create a place where Elizabeth can be kept away from the outside world, using force if necessary." ”
At the age of 15, Elizabeth enrolled in a training program at a highway rest station, working as a waiter during the day and living in a dormitory at night. One day, she confided in another girl: when she was 12 years old, her father violated her and she wanted to escape.
On 28 January 1983, Elizabeth and the girl ran away from home for Vienna. Three weeks later, police took her home. For the first few weeks, Joseph never touched Elizabeth again. But then the nightmare began.
Elizabeth felt helpless, and she did not dare to tell her mother about those things: "Endure it for another year and a half, and when the training is over, I will be free." ”
In the late summer of 1984, the training program came to an end and Elizabeth landed a job in the northern Austrian city of Linz. Just when she thought she could finally escape her father's clutches, an unexpected thing happened.
On August 28, 1984, Elizabeth will never forget that day.
Joseph was busy in the basement that day as usual, and he asked Elizabeth to help him move a door in, and Elizabeth went without much thought.
As soon as she entered the basement, Joseph, who was standing behind her, covered her face with a towel soaked in ether. When Elizabeth regained consciousness, her hands were firmly tied to the pillars of the basement by the belt, and Joseph raped her again.
As early as 1967, Joseph raped a woman in the city of Linz and spent a year and a half in prison for it.
Joseph when he was young
In fact, he had been looking for prey, a long-term catharsis tool that was not easy to detect and easy to manipulate, and he had already set his evil eyes on his own daughter until one day Elizabeth wanted to get rid of his control.
"The urge to finally taste the forbidden fruit was too strong. It's like being addictive. ”
The next day, Rose, a mother, called the police when she found her daughter missing. On September 21, Joseph handed a letter to police. The letter was written by Elizabeth and the postmark came from the nearby town of Braunau.
In the letter, Elizabeth said she had had enough of life at home and was now living with a friend, and warned her parents not to look for her or she would leave the country.
It is clear that the letter was written by Joseph forcing Elizabeth. Later, Joseph told police that his daughter had escaped because she had joined a mysterious sect. Given Elizabeth's previous experience of running away from home, the police quickly dropped the investigation into the case.
For the next 24 years, Elizabeth was trapped in a dark dungeon and tortured inhumanly.
Every two days, Joseph would come to see his daughter, bring her food, and rape her.
To prevent Elizabeth from escaping, Joseph threatened to gass her to death if she dared to do anything. Each time before leaving the basement, he would pretend to fiddle with a device so that Elizabeth would believe his lies.
"Actually, I want to have a baby with her." Not content with raping his daughter, Joseph wanted to start a second family in his underground kingdom.
In 1986, Eliza became pregnant for the first time, but miscarried after 10 weeks. In 1988, she became pregnant again. When she was about to give birth, Elizabeth was so frightened that Joseph brought her a medical book, towels, disinfectants, diapers, and so on.
Without any prenatal care, Elizabeth gave birth to her first child alone. Over the next 14 years, she had a total of 7 children.
There was a boy who had trouble breathing at birth, and the cruel Joseph did not take any life-saving measures, and the child died within a few days. After that, he directly threw the baby's body into the incinerator and burned it, and also scattered the ashes in his own garden.
Three of these children were "sent" upstairs because they were sick. Joseph instructed Elizabeth to write a letter in which she was unable to raise her children and asked her family to adopt them.
According to local Austrian law, although Joseph had a criminal record, the stain was automatically removed from the archives after 15 years. Therefore, Joseph adopted his "grandson" and "granddaughter" through the legal process.
"I'm happy for the kids. There was a second decent family in the cellar, as well as a wife and a couple of kids, which was great for me. ”
In the dungeon, he was the father of the children; at home, he became the grandfather of the children. In this way, Joseph lived his own two-sided life unscrupulously under the eyes of others.
Joseph's evil deeds are not known because he is very good at disguise.
Former colleagues described him as hardworking and courteous. It's just that he's kept a tight liar about his private life, no family photos on his desk, no personal phone calls, and even colleagues don't know if he has children.
The neighbors thought he was a good father, a good grandfather, and they always thought that Elizabeth had run away, and that Joseph was doing her best to help her raise the children.
His house had about 100 tenants in those years, but no one noticed anything strange in the basement. To avoid complications, Joseph repeatedly warned tenants that they were forbidden to go near the basement or else kick them out.
Pic 07 Joseph's house
There was a tenant named Leitner who lived in a room above the dungeon for 4 years. His pet dog barked wildly whenever he passed the basement or saw Joseph, and Leitner, though strange, didn't think much of it.
Even more bizarrely, Leitner doesn't use much of his appliances and is often away from home, but his monthly electricity bill is ridiculously high. Perhaps feeling that more was better than less, he did not pursue it.
Another tenant, Dubanowski, said he had rented Joseph's house for 12 years and occasionally heard strange noises from the basement, which Joseph claimed was caused by a heater and even told him: "This house will one day make history." ”
If it weren't for the serious illness of her first child, Elizabeth would probably have spent her life in the dungeon.
On April 19, 2008, 19-year-old Christine fell into a coma due to illness. Elizabeth begged Joseph to take her eldest daughter to the hospital. Whether it was out of pity or fear that Christine's dead body would be difficult to dispose of, Joseph actually agreed.
At 10:37 a.m., the police received a call from the hospital saying that an unidentified patient had been admitted to the hospital, that her physical condition was so bad that the hospital urgently needed information about her mother to confirm whether there was a genetic disease.
The hospital issued a search announcement
Faced with police questioning, Joseph had to make up the story again. He said he suddenly heard a noise in the stairwell and went out to see Christine leaning against the wall, carrying a note. The note was written by Elizabeth, saying that her daughter was critically ill and in urgent need of medical attention.
For so many years, Elizabeth had never appeared, what the hell was going on with the child? Is it related to the occult sect? The police decided to reopen the investigation into the "Disappearance of Elizabeth".
Joseph panicked, and he repeated the trick, forcing Elizabeth to write a letter and hand it over to the police.
In the letter, Elizabeth said that her son had had seizures and paralysis symptoms but had recovered, and Christine may have the same problem. In addition, she said that she would soon return home with her two sons.
The letter's postmark came from the small town of Amsteten, 70 km away. Police immediately went to the town to investigate, but curiously, no one there knew or met Elizabeth and her children.
Portrait of Elizabeth
On 26 April, joseph, seeing that the matter was about to be revealed, took the lead and took Elizabeth and her two sons from the dungeon while his wife and other children were not at home, and announced that his daughter, who had run away from home, had finally returned.
He then takes Elizabeth to the hospital to visit Christine. The hospital felt that the two were suspicious and immediately called the police. The police arrived and took the two back for separate interrogation.
It wasn't until Elizabeth was sure she would never see her father again and that both her children and her mother would be protected by the police that she made public the inhuman torture she had endured for 24 years.
To get in from the basement of Joseph's house, you have to walk through 5 rooms to reach the entrance to the dungeon hidden behind the storage shelves.
A reinforced concrete door 90 cm high and 60 cm wide separates the two worlds. There is a combination lock on the door and can only be opened from the outside.
The dungeon is 55 square meters, has no windows, and has 4 cabins: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a storage room, each with an average height of only 1.6 meters, and all the facilities for sleeping, cooking, washing and so on.
The walls of the storage room are made of rubber, to which the police revealed: "There is a special room where Joseph can do whatever he wants. ”
During the 8,516 days she was imprisoned in the dungeon, Elizabeth suffered thousands of violations. There, time is an endless river, and dawn and dusk are replaced by artificial lights.
The child grows up day by day, and her hair turns white. By the day she was rescued, Elizabeth, 42, was full of silver hair and looked like an old man in her 60s.
The three children she lived with had never walked out of the dungeon, all of them were in good shape, suffering from anemia, and their knowledge of the outside world was all based on a small television set.
The other three children, raised by Joseph, lived normal lives but also suffered psychological trauma: Joseph said that Elizabeth had abandoned them, and that he had abused them from time to time.
Elizabeth's mother, Rosemary, although she knew nothing about everything, did not get forgiveness from her daughter because she credulously believed Joseph's lies.
In 2009, Joseph was sentenced to life in prison for rape, incest, murder and slavery.
At first he did not plead guilty until he saw a video of Elizabeth's testimony. It was an 11-hour video that was so horrific that the eight jurors in the courtroom couldn't watch it and had to arrange for four alternate jurors to rotate the watch.
This is true for bystanders, let alone personal experience? When the loved ones around you become the demons that destroy your life, the world is undoubtedly hell. But Elizabeth's tenacious survival and her ability to maintain her sanity is a miracle.
The local sheriff once said of Elizabeth's children: "We were amazed at their good upbringing and how their mother used limited resources to try to give to her children. ”
She never gave up the hope of survival and tried her best to take on the responsibilities of a mother. Because she knew that she had no choice but to be strong.
After the trial, Elizabeth and her six children were transferred to an unknown village in northern Austria to start a new life with a new identity.
Elizabeth and daughter
Nietzsche once said in his autobiography that what does not kill them will eventually make them stronger.
We were shocked by the bestiality of our father Joseph and the strength of our daughter Elizabeth. During the half of her captivity, love for her children was the driving force for her survival. It is with great maternal love that Elizabeth constructs a small world for her children in the dungeon.
After experiencing suffering and trauma, it is more important to say goodbye to the past, although this step is really difficult, but it is always worth the effort. After escaping from the visible cage, how can we escape the shackles of the soul? Only love and hope are the real antidote.
Perhaps one day, those stolen years, hurt lives, imprisoned souls, will finally be redeemed by hope and kindness.