Fritzel trial

She was raped and tortured by her dad Josef Frtizl. Elisabeth had seven children , but one died - all of which were fathered by her evil captor. Fritzl, 85, is serving his life sentence in a special prison unit for the criminally insane in Austria's Krems-Stein prison. Her father lied to her mother and the police, telling them she was a runaway and had joined a cult. She even gave birth to seven children that resulted from the numerous instances of rape, one of whom died shortly after birth.

She was able to escape from the basement after one of her children fell unconscious and Josef agreed to get her medical care. It was here that the police were tipped off by medical staff and Elisabeth told them what had happened to her.

She then went on to provide cops the horrifying account of her 24 years in captivity and Fritzl was arrested and eventually jailed. Elisabeth was given a new name following the trial, with strict laws to prevent her identity being revealed.

As she turned to leave, a piece of cloth soaked in ether was held over her mouth and nose and her world went dark. Possibly forever. It was a deeply cruel start to an unbelievably cruel deed. How could Elisabeth have known that she was helping her own father install the final building block to his plans to lock her up as his sex slave? Fritzl had been planning what was effectively a dungeon for years, receiving official permission to construct his cellar complex as far back as the late s.

It was not difficult to get officials to approve underground constructions. It was at the height of the cold war and this, after all, was Lower Austria , which during those tense and heady days in world affairs found itself on the frontier with the Soviet Union.

Nuclear bunkers were seen as an even more normal and necessary addition to an Austrian home than a conservatory or a kitchen extension might be viewed in Britain.

The local council had even given him a grant of a couple of thousand pounds towards the building costs. Neighbours had observed with some intrigue as the electrical engineer hired a digger, which sat in his garden at Ybbsstrasse 40 in the tidy town of Amstetten for months.

They watched as he tossed tons of earth from beneath the house and shifted it in a wheelbarrow to make way for the rooms he planned to build. A precise planner, he had thought of every last detail, securing concrete and steel supplies through contacts at construction companies where he had previously worked.

There were initially two access points — a heavy hinged door and a metal door reinforced with concrete operable via a remote-control device. A total of eight doors had to be opened before reaching the purpose-built cellar. The final door before the darkness of the tomb-like cellar was the one that Elisabeth herself unwittingly helped him to install.

It was easy enough to instigate. Elisabeth had threatened to run away many times. More than once she had been hauled back to the family home by the police, or her father, once getting as far as the big city, Vienna, with a girlfriend. So when Elisabeth disappeared from one day to the next he told friends and family she had run off to join a sect. They all believed him. In reality, she was living under their feet — beneath the garden where he and the rest of the family enjoyed barbecues in the summer.

Years later, when he expanded the underground accommodation, he built a swimming pool upstairs, as a cover-up for the amount of earth he was having to drag up. Later when they splashed in the pool, the family did so above Elisabeth's prison. Over the next 24 years the horror for Elisabeth was unrelenting — the cold, the damp, the rats, which she was sometimes forced to catch with her bare hands, the water that ran off the walls in such large quantities she had to use towels to soak it up.

Summer, when the place turned into an intolerable sweaty sauna, was the worst time of year, she would later write in a calendar. During those years Mikhail Gorbachev called for perestroika and glasnost, Chernobyl's nuclear reactor blew up, DNA first came into use to convict criminals, the Berlin wall fell.

There was Tiananmen Square. The release of Nelson Mandela. The LA riots after the beating of Rodney King. OJ Simpson was arrested for murder. Diana, Princess of Wales died. The euro was introduced. Mad cow disease. Slobodan Milosevic went on trial. A tsunami devastated Asia. Not to mention all the inventions and technological developments — from the mobile phone to the internet. For everyone else, the world kept on spinning, while Elisabeth's stood still and stagnant. At first Fritzl strapped up her arms and then tied them behind her back with an iron chain, which he then secured to metal posts behind her bed.

She could only move approximately half a metre either side of the bed. After two days he gave her more freedom of movement by attaching the chain around her waist. Then, about six to nine months into her imprisonment, he removed the metal chain because "it was hindering his sexual activity with his daughter", according to the indictment.

He sexually abused and raped her sometimes several times a day, from the second day of her incarceration right up until her release in April Over the course of nearly a quarter of a century he would rape her at least 3, times, resulting in seven babies who themselves often had to watch the abuse as they grew older. Three of these children were to stay underground, never seeing daylight until their release in April last year.

Three others mysteriously appeared on the doorstep of Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, in their home in Amstetten, west of Vienna — abandoned, so Fritzl told the community, by Elisabeth, who had delivered them to him and Rosemarie from her sect, to be brought up as the Fritzls' own. And all without arousing Rosemarie's suspicions or those of the Austrian authorities. Fritzl dictated letters to her which she wrote from her prison, driving sometimes miles in his car to post them back to his wife Rosemarie.

In them, Elisabeth explained that she was well, but could not look after the children. In reality, she was torn at being separated from her children but happy that her "upstairs" offspring would at least have a better life than those languishing downstairs.

One of the children, a twin called Michael, died shortly after his birth in the cellar in He had severe breathing difficulties and expired in his mother's arms when he was just 66 hours old. Fritzl admitted he subsequently burned the baby's body in an incinerator, but — until his admission during his trial this week — always denied that he was responsible for murder through negligence.

I thought the little one would survive.