#Elisabeth fritzl now 2023 windows#

'He would stop by windows that were open and listen to people having sex,' says Kastner. He was taking evening classes and would walk home late at night. 'One of these women turned around and confronted him and he never did it again.' Instead, he moved on to other acts. 'He never tried to touch them,' says Kastner. Fritzl would follow women in the park, walking behind them, his hand in his trousers, masturbating. What Kastner calls his 'criminal career' began when he was a young man. 'He had a predisposition to act but he could have acted otherwise and you can't explain everything.' That he was in control the whole time, she says, with meticulous attention to details, signals that he was not mentally ill. What was it about Fritzl that made him do that? 'To me, is part of the explanation but you can't explain it to the last drop,' says Kastner. There are plenty of people who have abusive childhoods who don't go on to imprison and rape their children. He told me that whenever they needed something - money or something - it was always Rosemarie who went to ask, because she would never give him anything.' He always suffered from the feeling she never liked him. He couldn't connect his childhood experience with what he did afterwards.' There were reports that when Fritzl and Rosemarie were married, they went to live in her house with his mother, whom he kept prisoner, bricking her into a room in the attic - Kastner says this wasn't true. He didn't say he acted the way he did because of his childhood. Isn't it a cliche to blame the mother? 'It's a cliche, but he did not fit that cliche,' she says.

It isn't hard to see that in forcing his wife, Rosemarie, to adopt three of his children with Elisabeth, claiming they had been abandoned on their doorstep, Fritzl was repeating his family history, but Kastner says he never made that connection.įritzl described a childhood that was unhappy and abusive. What I learned was astonishing.' His mother's father, a domineering man, was married to a woman who could not have children he had affairs with other women, then forced his wife to adopt his children (Josef Fritzl's mother was one such child). 'I don't know why I did that but it turned out to be a good decision. When she interviews a criminal, she usually starts with their childhood, but with Fritzl she started with his mother's. She lists the other ways: her friends, her dog, her garden.

I look around her office in a psychiatric hospital in Linz, 47km (30 miles) from Amstetten, and notice the Prada handbag, the fur coat, patent shoes, perfect dark-painted nails, a cigarette habit and a stack of Bach and Mozart CDs, which she says, are one way of dealing with the horrors of interviewing some of Austria's most disturbed criminals in her 11 years as a forensic psychiatrist. She is fiercely clever, and quick with a wry laugh. If you were to create the character of Kastner in a crime novel, I doubt you could come up with anything better than Kastner in real life. He said he wanted a clean slate.' What was he like? 'He was very. 'I was relieved when I met him because he was very polite and he told me that he had decided he would tell me everything. 'I was wondering whether he would talk to me,' she says. She had to interview him alone six times before producing her report, in which she concluded he was sane enough to stand trial. It could have been part of it.' She refuses to say if she has met Elisabeth.Īs expert witness for the prosecution, Kastner first met Fritzl last May, in prison. Was that why he changed his plea, I ask Kastner. He did this after watching his daughter's harrowing video testimony, and after Elisabeth, who is now 42, had attended the courtroom in person. At first he denied this last charge, but on Wednesday he changed his plea. Over just three and a half days this week, Fritzl was tried and found guilty on all counts of a crime that went on for 24 years - imprisoning his daughter in a bunker under his house in the town of Amstetten in Austria, repeatedly raping her and fathering her seven children, and of causing the death of one of the children, Michael, soon after he was born by failing to get him medical help. As crimes go, few can be as horrific as Fritzl's. 'He told me that for someone who was 'born to rape' he controlled himself for a long time. 'He said that it was hard to control,' says Dr Heidi Kastner, the forensic psychiatrist who interviewed him at length. It feels too simplistic to talk of 'evil', but Josef Fritzl said he always knew there was an 'evil streak' inside him.

Elisabeth fritzl now 2023