In his own twisted, depraved, chilling words...

I'm contemplating. Should I copy and paste the article I just read - about the psycho Fritzl - or should I just summarize and write about my two pence. I'd have done the latter, but I have enough literature dissection and plot analysis to do that will last me for a good few days, so I guess I'll copy and paste the article here. If I have time, I'll write bout my thoughts later on. But right now, here's something I wanna share.

Josef Fritzl: In his own twisted, depraved, chilling words
by Allan Hall in Berlin
Published date: May 9, 2008 [link to the original article]

Man who had seven children with captive daughter speaks out. THE twisted mind of Josef Fritzl has been laid bare in a prison interview in which he defends the 24-year imprisonment and rape of his daughter Elisabeth.

Fritzl maintains he acted out of love in imprisoning Elisabeth when she was 18 and keeping her in his cellar dungeon, where she was tortured and raped, giving birth to seven children.

The 73-year-old, who authorised his lawyer to give his side of the story to the Austrian magazine News, will today be arraigned before magistrates – the first step in a legal process that will determine whether he goes to jail or a psychiatric hospital for the rest of his life.

But if the interview was an attempt to win sympathy for Fritzl – he is known as "Satan" among the other inmates of the remand jail where he is being held – then he has deeply deluded himself.

Despite claims from neighbours in Amstetten that he was a brutal tyrant at home, he told his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer: "I always put a lot of value on good behaviour and respect, I admit that. The reason for this is I belong to an old school of thinking that just does not exist today.

"I grew up in the Nazi times, and that meant the need to be controlled and respect authority. Yet, despite that, I am not the monster that I am portrayed as in the media."

Asked how he would describe someone who kidnapped his own daughter, locked her in a cellar for 24 years and subjected her to a brutal regime and repeated rape, he said: "On the face of it, probably as a monster."

He disagrees with his daughter that he had assaulted her as a child, saying: "That is not true. I am not a man that has sex with little children. I only had sex with her later, much later. It was when she was in the cellar by then, when she had been in the cellar for a long time."

Asked if much planning had gone into the crime, he said: "Two, three years beforehand, that is true. I guess it must have been around 1981 or 1982 when I began to build a room in my cellar as the cell for her. I got a really heavy concrete and steel door, that worked with an electric motor and a remote control that I used to get into the cellar. It needed a number code to open and close. I then plastered the walls, added something to wash in and a small toilet, a bed and a cooking ring, as well as the fridge, electricity and lights.

"Perhaps some people did notice what I was doing, but they really did not care. Why should they? The cellar of my house, at the end of the day, is my house. It belongs to me, it is my kingdom – only I can enter."

Explaining how he came to imprison his daughter, he said: "Ever since she entered puberty, Elisabeth stopped doing what she was told. She just did not follow any of my rules any more. She would go out all night in local bars and come back stinking of alcohol and smoke.

"She even ran away twice and hung around with persons of questionable moral standards, who were certainly not a good influence on her. I always had to bring her home, but she always ran away again. That is why I had to arrange a place where I gave her the chance – by force – to keep away from the bad influences of the outside world."

On the 28 August, 1984, he locked her in the cellar. Her indescribable pain, suffering, humiliation and degradation would last 8,516 days.

Fritzl denies handcuffing Elisabeth and keeping her on a lead in the early days of her incarceration. "That was not necessary; my daughter had no chance to get away anyway." On that much, at least, they agree: Elisabeth has said she screamed and banged on the walls, but nobody came. Gradually, she had to accept nobody other than him could help.

On her father's orders, she wrote letters to her family, telling them of a new life and saying she had no desire to return. She asked them not to look for her. Her mother, her siblings and officials believed the letters, and the search for missing Elisabeth was wound down. The master of the cellar knew he was safe.

"I guess after the kidnap I got myself in a vicious circle, a vicious circle not just for Elisabeth but also for me from which there was no way out," he said.

"With every week that I kept my daughter prisoner, my situation just got more crazy, and, really, it is true, I often thought of whether I should let her out or not. But I just was not capable of making a decision, even though, and probably because, I knew that every day that passed made my crime that much worse.

"My desire to have sex with Elisabeth also got much stronger as time went by. We first had sex in spring 1985. I could not control myself any more."

Every two or three days, he went into the cellar to take her food, clothes and blankets and tell her of his life outside, his work with property and of her mother, who was so sad about the daughter that had run away.

He told her how the garden was going, about films on the television and trips he had made, and how well her brothers and sisters were doing in school.

She became pregnant for the first time in 1988. "Elisabeth was, of course, very worried about the future, but I bought her medical books in the cellar, so that she would know when the day came what she had to do, and I arranged towels and disinfectants and nappies."

In 1988, Elisabeth gave birth to Kirsten alone in the cellar; in 1990, again alone and unaided, Stefan was born.

Fritzl said: "I was delighted about the children. It was great for me to have a second proper family in the cellar, with a wife and a few children."

Asked what would have happened if he had been killed in a car accident, he said: "I prepared well in this eventuality. Every time I left the bunker, I switched on a timer that would definitely have opened the door to the cellar after a set time. If I had died, Elisabeth and the children would have been free."

In 1992, Lisa was born, and she screamed so much and was so ill so often that Fritzl arranged for her to be released into the outside world. On 18 May, 1993, Elisabeth wrote a letter to introduce Lisa to her family, and Fritzl produced the little girl upstairs, saying she had been left on the doorstep. He said: "Elisabeth and I planned everything together, because we both knew that Lisa, because of her poor health condition and the circumstances in the cellar, had no chance to live had she remained there."

Fritzl used the same ploy with Monica, born in 1994, and Alexander, in 1996. He said there were "complications" caused by their arrival that he did not want to deal with – and, in any case, they would be safe upstairs with his wife, Rosemarie, "the best mother in the world".

Fritzl confirmed that an unknown side-effect of the children was that, with every new baby, he gained more control over his daughter. Her own life had no longer become important to her, but she had every reason to do everything he wanted, for the sake of her children.

He said: "I tried really as hard as possible to look after my family in the cellar. When I went there, I bought my daughter flowers and the children books and cuddly toys. I used to watch videos and adventure stories with them, while Elisabeth used to cook for me and the children. We used to sit at the table with each other. We celebrated birthdays and Christmas in the cellar – I even took a Christmas tree secretly into the cellar, and cakes and presents."

Despite his surface affections, Fritzl admits the cellar environment impacted badly on the health of his incest brood.

The emotional stress of being locked up – even though they did not know they were locked up – the poor-quality air in the badly ventilated cellar and the mould on the walls affected all three children.

They suffered from infections including flu, coughing fits and heart and circulation problems. There were also epileptic attacks. He brought medicine, but none of it was prescription medicine – they were all things he could get over the counter of an ordinary chemist's without any questions being asked. The most common "cure-all" was aspirin, but it did not help – the children had inherited from their grandmother an allergy to it. Felix and Kirsten seemed to suffer most, the little boy shaking for hours all over his body and the girl sometimes screaming uncontrollably.

In January this year, Elisabeth finally arranged with her father to act as the fits worsened, and she wrote the letter to the hospital that started the final trip to freedom.

Asked if he wanted finally to release them, he said: "I wanted to free Elisabeth, Kirsten, Stefan and Felix and to bring them back home. That was my next step.

"The reason is that I was getting older, I was finding it harder to move and I knew that in the future I would no longer be able to care for my second family in the cellar. The plan was that Elisabeth and the children would explain that they were kept by a sect in a secret place."

Did he think this was realistic – would they not betray him? He said: "That was my hope, however unbelievable at that time. Despite that, there was always the risk that Elisabeth and the children would betray me. That did happen rather sooner than I expected, as the problem with Kirsten escalated."

He denied having threatened the children with gas if they tried to escape, but admitted: "I am sorry to say I did tell them that they would never get past the door because they would be electrocuted and they would die."

Asked if he wanted to die, he said: "No. I only want one thing now – to pay for what I did."

'Fairytale' world on tv

JOSEF Fritzl told how he extended the bunker into another two rooms in 1993. He put in a television and radio, as well as a video recorder, table, chairs, carpets, cupboards, plates, tables and pots. He also bought more kitchen utensils and coloured pictures to put on the wall.

He said: "After the birth of Felix at the end of 2002, I even gave Elisabeth a washing machine as a present so she did not have to wash her own clothes and that of the children by hand.

"I always knew over 24 years what I did was not correct, and that I must be mad to do something like this. Yet despite that, at the same time, it just became a matter of course that I lived my second life in the cellar."

Upstairs, the three children he had with Elisabeth called him daddy, even though they knew he was their grandfather, whereas downstairs his three children used to call him grandfather, as their mother never told them anything different.

She taught her children, showing them how to write and read using books Fritzl provided. She cared for them even when she was ill, reading fairy stories of princesses and knights but saying the cellar world they lived in was the only reality and that the fairy stories she read, like the pictures on the TV, were just a fantasy.

And she never spoke to her children about how much she was suffering.

Interview reveals an only child whose best friend was his mother

THE interview reveals Fritzl's mother-fixation, every bit as strong as that which gripped Norman Bates, the fictional motel-keeping killer from Alfred Hitchcock's murder thriller Psycho.

"I come from a small family and grew up in a tiny flat in Amstetten," he said. "My father was somebody who was a waster. He never took responsibility and was just a loser that always cheated on my mother.

"When I was four she quite rightly threw him out the house.

"After that my mother and I had no contact with this man; he did not interest us. Suddenly there was only us two.

"My mother was a strong woman; she taught me discipline and control and the values of hard work. She sent me to a good school so that I could learn a good trade and she worked really hard and took a very difficult job to keep our heads above water.

"When I say she was hard on me, she was only as hard as was necessary. She was the best woman in the world. I suppose you could describe me as her man, sort of. She was the boss at home and I was the only man in the house.

"It's complete rubbish to say my mother sexually abused me. My mother was respectable, extremely respectable. I loved her over across all boundaries. I was in awe of her. Completely and totally in awe.

"That did not mean there was anything else between us, though. There never was and there never would have been."

Asked by his lawyer if he had ever fantasised about a relationship with his mother, he pauses in the dialogue and thinks for a long time for answering.

"Yes, probably. But I was a very strong man, probably as strong as my mother, and as a result I was capable to keep my desires under control.

"I became older and that meant that when I went outside I managed to meet other women. I had affairs with a few girls and then a short while later I met Rosemarie."

Asked if his wife, Rosemarie, had anything in common with his mother, he said: "Absolutely nothing. She had nothing in common with my mother – well, perhaps there were a few similarities.

"I mean Rosemarie was also a wonderful woman, is a wonderful woman. She is just a lot more shy and weaker than my mother.

"I chose her because I had a strong desire then to have lots of children. I wanted children that did not grow up like me as single children. I wanted children that always had someone else at their side to play with and to support."

"The dream of a big family was with me from when I was very, very small. And Rosemarie seemed to be the perfect mother to realise that dream. But it is also true to say that I loved her and I still love her."

Asked how it happened that in 1967, after having four children with his wife whom he loved, he had then betrayed her by climbing into a flat and raping a young nurse, he said: "I do not know what drove me to do that."

After 18 months in jail he went back to his wife and had three other children with her. He said: "It's really true I do not know why I did it. I always wanted to be a good husband and a good father."