Josef Fritzl, 73, declared he is “not a monster” despite repeatedly raping his captive daughter, Elisabeth, since she was a teenager. She’s now 42.
His story horrified the world only because the international press was “completely one sided,” he said.
“I could have killed all of them, and nothing would have ever been known about it. No one would have ever found about it,” he said in a statement released by his lawyer, the German newspaper Bild reported.
Fritzl patted himself on the back for saving the life of the eldest child born of the sickening relationship by getting the 19-year-old to a hospital when she fell gravely ill.
“Kerstin would not be alive today if it wasn’t for me,” he bragged. “I have made sure that she gets to a hospital.
“I am not a monster.”
The retired engineer was exposed in mid-April when Fritzl brought Kerstin out of the cellar, where she had spent every moment of her entire life, to be treated for multiple organ failure. Doctors put her in an induced coma.
Her brothers, Stefan, 18, and Felix, 5, who like their sister had never seen the sun, are with their mother, Elisabeth, at a clinic.
The three have been “reborn,” London’s Sun quoted doctors saying. They’ve lost their lifelong pallor and finally have color in their cheeks.
Fritzl’s other three children by his daughter were not kept in the buried, windowless, bunker. He allowed them to live upstairs with himself and his wife Rosemarie, who knew nothing about what was happening beneath her feet in the cellar.
He’d told Rosemarie that Elisabeth disappeared after joining a sect and left the three kids, Lisa, Monika and Alexander, on his doorstep. They are now 16, 15 and 12.
The seventh baby died.
Fritzl and his wife also have seven of their own children.
The ogre, who is in prison, confessed to keeping Elisabeth and their children captive. He has not yet been charged.
Fritzl, who has a TV in his cell and is avidly following coverage of his case, complained through his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, that the coverage is “completely one-sided” and “unfair.”
The lawyer said he and his client have both been the target of death threats.
Fritzl has been keeping to his cell and not taking advantage of his right to walk for an hour in the prison courtyard, because he fears his fellow inmates might lynch him, the Times of London said.
Mayer described his client as a “broken man” and says he hopes to have him declared mentally unfit to stand trial.
“My client doesn’t belong in a prison; he belongs in a psychiatric ward,” he told the Times.
But prison authorities maintain that Fritzl, who is sharing a cell with a violent offender, is a “quiet inmate” who seems “normal” and “composed,” the newspaper said.
Austrian forensic psychiatrist Reinhard Haller scoffed at the claim that Fritzl is not responsible because of mental problems.
His “main motivation was the exercise of power. It is not a sign of mental illness, but rather of an extreme personality disorder,” he told the Times.
Prosecutors first talked to Fritzl yesterday and he is expected to be in court tomorrow for a closed hearing.
There were also reports that while keeping his daughter and their kids locked up, Fritzl visited a brothel and paid to have sex in its own dark dungeon – but that some hookers didn’t want to have anything to do with him because his demands were too perverted.
Christoph Flugel, a bartender at the Villa Ostende brothel in Linz, said, “If he liked a girl he would order champagne for her. But he loved inflicting pain and wanted some girls to act like a corpse,” according to the London Sun.
“He was violent and into domination,” Flugel said. “Two of the girls said, ‘Never again with that guy!’ That’s rare in this business.”
The Sun quoted one hooker as saying Fritzl tied her up on a makeshift cross in an the underground room, punched her and ordered her to call him “Teacher.”
“To think he was keeping his daughter and her children in a similar place a few kilometers away and abusing them sickens me now,” the newspaper quoted the 36-year-old as saying.
“I once asked him about his family and he told me, ‘I have none.’ I thought he was a lonely man – now I know he is a beast. He belongs in the very depths of hell,” she told The Sun. With Post Wire Services