House of Horrors by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne [Nigel Cawthorne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781857826456
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2011-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

9

‘IS GOD UP THERE?’

The police were shocked by the story Elisabeth Fritzl told them; they could hardly believe it. Until she spoke out, there had been no indication that Herr Fritzl was anything but an upstanding pillar of the community. At the time, the authorities did not know that he had a background of violent sexual assaults, which had been expunged from the record.

‘We knew nothing and I can’t investigate matters of which I know nothing,’ said District Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze. ‘In Austrian law, there is a statute of limitations.’

Even without that vital piece of information, Elisabeth’s extraordinary allegations had to be investigated. The following day, police frogmarched Fritzl to his house, where he was forced to show them the cellar. The secret dungeon was so well hidden that, when the police searched the property, they failed to find it. Eventually, Fritzl gave in and showed them where it was. After passing through five different rooms in the cellar – including a room containing a furnace and a small office – and eight locked doors, they reached Fritzl’s workshop. There, hidden behind a shelving unit in the workshop, he showed them a 1 metre-high reinforced concrete door. It was so small the building inspectors had failed to spot it. Fritzl then handed over the remote control and the code that opened the dungeon door, and they squeezed through.

Chief Inspector Leopold Etz, the head of Lower Austria’s murder commission, was the first officer to set eyes on the frightened, ashen-faced Fritzl boys, who had spent their whole lives underground.

‘They both looked terrified and were terribly pale,’ he said. ‘The two boys were taken upstairs from the underground bunker and appeared overawed by the daylight they had never experienced before. The real world was completely alien to them.’

Etz told a German newspaper he was ‘staggered’ to watch the siblings’ initial bewilderment and shock as they now found themselves in a world they had only known before on a television in their dungeon and from their mother’s descriptions about the life she had lived up until her own incarceration at the age of 18.

The boys were said to be able to communicate quite well in German, although their use of language and speech was far from normal. Pointing to the sky – having seen it for the first time – Felix asked a policeman, ‘Is God up there?’

Their mother had always told him that ‘heaven was “up there”’. This was a poignant thought from a woman who had spent most of her adult life in subterranean gloom but knew that a world of fresh air and freedom existed above their heads. It was all the more poignant when you think that her life above ground with her father had been anything but heavenly.

The older boy walked hunched over as the ceilings in the cellar were so low he could not stand upright. The other boy preferred to crawl, though he could walk with a strange, simian gait. Between themselves they babbled in their own coded tongue.

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