RedHanded - Episode 176 - Josef Fritzl & His Cellar of Horror - Part 1

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

On 19th April 2008, the world discovered the nightmare world Josef Fritzl had created in the labyrinthian cellar of his home in Amstetten, Austria. It seemed like too much to believe. This week in part 1 of this 3 part series, the girls explore Fritzl's fraught childhood - that was peppered with violence, abandonment and spillover trauma from Nazi concentration camps.  Merch: www.redhandedshop.com  Sources: www.redhandedpodcast.com   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. So, get this. The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you her profile. Check out her place in the Hamptons. Huh, fancy. She's a big carbon tax supporter, yeah? Oh yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here.

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And welcome to Red Handed. Today's case is one that has been requested so many times. Probably one of our most requested ever cases. But we didn't want to do it until we felt like we could really do it justice. It's such a big, well-known case. But here goes. So because it's such a weird case, this is going to have to be a two-parter, guys. And this is part one on none other than Josef Fritzl. In 2006, when 18-year-old Natasha Kampusch escaped an underground dungeon where she had been imprisoned for 10 years by her abductor in Lower Austria. Everyone was horrified, but they thought what they were

seeing was just an anomaly, a freak case, the likes of which Austria would never see again, at least not in that lifetime. But then, just two years later, there was Josef Fritzl and the horrors of his cellar. In preparation for this case, like we always do, we went out, we watched all the usual documentaries, we read all the major articles out there on the Fritzl case, but it kind of just felt like none of them really offered an in-depth explanation as to not necessarily what had happened, but maybe more why. Like a real deep dive into Fritzl's childhood,

what shaped him to become the man that he was. And it wasn't really until we read the book, The Crimes of Josef Fritzl, Uncovering the Truth, written by Bohan Panseveski and Stephanie Marsh, that we felt we really got a serious understanding of this case. So I cannot recommend that book highly enough. We'll leave a link below to where you can purchase it. It's such a good book. Go read cannot recommend that book highly enough. We'll leave a link below to where you can purchase it. It's such a good book. Go read it. Go support those authors. It's

excellent. So saying all that, our story today begins not with Josef, but with his grandmother Anna in a place called Most Wiertel in Lower Austria. And this part of the country is like a typical fairy tale landscape. It's what you think of when you think of Austria. It's all rolling hills, woody meadows, cute little villages and babbling brooks. Fun fact about most of it all, it actually has over a million pear trees there. And apparently, you'd be hard pressed to find a shop that didn't sell pears, pear drinks, pear key rings, pear t-shirts. They just fucking love pears. I fucking love a pear. Who doesn't love a pear?

Who doesn't? I mean, the Austrians do, especially the people of this town. And it was in this pear-loving town that there stood No. 40 Yibstrasse, home to the Fritzl family. And the Fritzls had a daughter named Anna. And at some point, near the end of the 19th century, she married a rich mill owner. For a few months, the marriage was quite a happy one.

That is, until it became clear that the pair of them were unable to conceive a child. After this, the miller started to beat Anna mercilessly for not getting pregnant. Determined not to let rumours about his lack of virility begin circulating, the miller began raping one of his servants. And soon enough, this servant fell pregnant. And being the righteous, God-fearing gentleman that he was, the mill owner then threw the servant out and forced Anna to keep the baby and raise it as if it was her own. So he's just proven his point that it's not his fault, basically. Yeah. And I think it's also just like,

yeah, don't worry about us. We've got kids. We're not struggling to do that. And yeah, turn of the 19th century, I guess it's all the rage to make sure your wife has a baby. As the years passed, the Miller had two more babies, with two other maids who were both then promptly dismissed after giving birth. And his wife Anna was made to raise these children too, as if they were her own. All in all, they had two little girls and a boy, and the youngest girl was

called Maria. And you won't be surprised to find out that the violent Miller husband became an equally violent Miller father who terrorised his children. At one point, Maria thought she could escape. She married a man she'd met and fled, but when she failed to get pregnant, this man divorced her, and she had no choice but to return home. After her return, Maria's father became even more abusive. So in 1932, with Anna having inherited No. 40 Yibstrasse from her parents after they died, she decided to make a break for it, with Maria, and escape back to her childhood home. Despite their escape from the fists of the miller, things weren't going to be easy for Maria and Anna.

But then again, in the 1930s in Europe, no one was having an easy time, really. Not particularly super happy fun times for anybody. In case you need reminding, Hitler and his National Socialist Party were rising to power in Germany and the Fatherland Front had seized power in Austria. I think any political party with front in the title generally stay away.

Yeah, and father. And they put both of them together. Never good. Never a good combo I'm gonna say. Double bad news. Absolutely and I know we're speaking with the luxury of hindsight about how double bad news this was but it definitely was because the front was a far-right nationalistic political organisation and it was around this time that it was established as the only legally permitted party in the country of Austria. And I think the Fatherland Front is definitely not as well known as some of the other fascist parties running amok at that particular time. So you can

think of them as being along the same lines as what Mussolini was up to in Italy, except the Front was fully aligned with the Catholic Church. Fascism and God, my favourite. What a combo. So many combos here. Super deluxe combos. Fatherland front, Catholic Church, fascism, stick it all in. By 1934, the front had taken total control in Austria and any opponents of the regime were promptly sent to what were essentially concentration camps. These camps had been newly built, inspired by those being built in Dachau, Germany, by Heinrich Himmler. I thought Dachau was in Poland. That's what I thought. And then I googled it to make

double sure that I didn't sound like a fucking idiot. But no, Dachau was in Germany. Oh, there you go. I have checked. I have double checked. I re-watched The Pianist the other night because I was miserable and I was like, what can make it even worse? Re-watch The Pianist for the 17th time. Absolutely not. No, mate. Go watch Married at First Sight. I'm telling you, it'll change your life.

It's safe to say that this wasn't a grand time in Austrian history. Austrian civil society was on the brink. social discontent was through the roof, xenophobia was rife and the economy was in the toilet. And on top of that, a quarter of the population were unemployed and close to starvation. So among the unemployed in Hungary were Maria and her mother Anna, who begrudgingly decided that their only option for money was to rent out the empty rooms at number 40 Yibstrasse to drifters passing through the area. And all the while, despite all the problems she and her mother had, the humiliation of being divorced due to her

quote-unquote barren womb still haunted Maria, and she was determined to prove her womanhood. So Maria began a relationship with a man named Yosef, and apparently she was pretty open with him right from the start that she was only with him because she wanted to have a baby. And soon enough, much to her shock, Maria fell pregnant. So we know now that it wasn't her that was the one that couldn't conceive, even though her husband blamed her and divorced her. And so on the 9th of November 1935, Maria had a baby boy. And she gave this child his father's first name and her mother's

maiden name. And so, Josef Fritzl entered the world. However, it would be a gross understatement to say that Maria wasn't exactly the maternal type. She viewed the birth of her son as nothing more than a vindication of her womanhood. Yosef was what she called her alibi baby. Apparently this is like what women used to have back in the day to like prove that they weren't barren. Like just to have what they called quote unquote an alibi baby. Well, it's like, I can do it.

Don't want to. Shouldn't have. But I am capable of. It's like in Peep Show when they go quantocking or boondocking or whatever they meet that couple of their lives definitely quantocking quantocking whatever and he was like i feel like she could have had a baby if she just tried a bit harder oh my god speaking of reproductive systems i saw these tampons in tesco right that had a had a wrapper that said, on the front, it was like, silent wrapper. I'm like, it's my period.

I'm not invading fucking Poland by night. It's just a silent wrapper. Okay, good. Because no one can know. No one can possibly know. I know. I saw them. I was like, to hide my shame in the fucking toilet cubicle when I unwrap a tampon.

Just like, oh, yeah, good job. No, the other women in this fucking toilet cubicle when I unwrap a tampon. Just like, oh yeah, good job. No, the other women in this public toilet can't know. Also, did you see that Scotland has become the first country in the world to make period products free? Yes. That's amazing. I just feel like this is a show where we just love Scotland all the time. Well done, Scotland. I was going to talk about this in Under the Duvet, but never mind.

Apparently one of the countries in North County, sorry, in North Ayrshire, I think, in Scotland has been doing the free period product thing in public buildings for like years. So they're using their model across the country now. That's amazing. Good work. So Maria found herself completely disinterested in all of the needs of her crying baby Joseph. And by all accounts, she was a loveless and apathetic mother. That's my hinge profile. Baby Josef's father was no better, and he slowly disappeared from his son's life,

leaving him in the care of an indifferent mother in a nation on the brink of World War II. On the 12th of March 1938, at the age of just three, Josef watched as the Nazis entered his town, and the annexation of Austria into Greater Germany took place. There was no fighting, though. Hitler held a direct vote, and 99.7% of the Austrian population voted for the country to join the Third Reich. So just like that, overnight, Austria ceased to exist as an independent nation. And as shocking as that might sound now, the rest of the world didn't really seem that bothered at the time. The Times, of all publications in London, wrote, after all, Scotland also joined England. Sure. Sure.

Cool. I don't even know what to say about that. Yeah, forget about all of the bloodshed and like King James and everything. Yeah, it's fine. I don't know what to say because I feel like anything I say is just going to fucking fuel the flames of another referendum vote. Please don't leave Scotland. But although Austria didn't fight the Germans, little Josef's town of Amstetten served as a vital railway junction between Italy and Germany. And so it was bombed constantly by the Allied forces.

And in fact, in the first six months, over 12,000 bombs were dropped there. The bomb sirens were perpetually blaring, and now eight-year-old Josef, along with the other people of the town, found themselves spending days upon days trapped in underground bunkers. That is except Maria. Maria's mind had become more and more warped, and she'd become obsessed with the number 40 Yibstrasza to the point that she refused to leave it even when the bombs were dropping. She'd just sit there stubbornly in her kitchen on her own. She didn't care about the terrified screams

of young Yosef or even consider accompanying her terrified eight-year-old son to one of the bunkers. It really is like the perfect horrific childhood setup that's going on. He's like literally born into World War II into an area that's constantly being bombed, and his mum just doesn't care. She just cannot connect with him in a maternal way at all. And the chaos that Josef was living through cannot be overstated. During the war, anyone who owned a home was required by law to provide a place to stay for scores of refugees and evacuees who were pouring into the countryside daily. And number 40 Yibstrasza, the house that Maria had inherited and they were

living in, was actually quite a big house and so it became a prime target for people to be sort of sent there to stay and it was packed to the brim. And eventually all this became too much for Maria to handle. Like Hannah said she was obsessed with this house and with securing it and keeping it safe and so she flatly refused to take in any more people. But for this disobedience Maria was arrested by Nazi officers and dragged off to a concentration camp. After Maria's arrest Josef was sent to an orphanage and told that his mother was dead. But Maria wasn't dead. She was in Mauthausen-Gusen, a camp in Upper Austria,

nicknamed, I'm going to try my very best German accent or German pronunciation, Kockenmühl. Kockenmühl? Yeah. Basically, that translates to the bone grinder. Wow. And it was not only one of the largest Nazi concentration camps at the time, Yeah, basically that translates to the bone grinder. Wow. And it was not only one of the largest Nazi concentration camps at the time,

but also one of the few to be classed as grade three, meaning that it was one of the worst. Now, we can only speculate on what actually happened to Maria during her time here, but based on the stories told by survivors such as atrocities like what the Nazis called the parachute wall and essentially this was where Nazi officers would throw children from the top of a quarry. The joke being that they didn't have a parachute. So yeah it's safe to assume that Maria didn't have a great time here. It's highly likely that she would have been tortured, beaten, starved and raped during her time in Mauthausen. But Maria survived and on the 5th of May 1945 the camp was liberated by US troops and soon after a young Josef Fritzl was reunited with his mother who he had spent years thinking was dead. And the pair returned home to number 40 Yipstrasza. But the house hadn't held up well in the midst of all the bombings. But Maria didn't

care. She wasn't going to leave her home again. Now, Maria had never been the most approachable woman. But after her time in Mauthausen, she became even more withdrawn and even less maternal than ever. After she returned, most days she barely even spoke. And Maria had also returned from Malthausen with a newfound sense of sadism. She wouldn't think twice about beating Josef. Once, she repeatedly kicked her son in the face until he was lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood. She terrorised the poor boy, often making him sleep outside in the freezing cold or tying him up for days at a time. One of her favourite punishments was schlettelklein. This was where she would make

Josef kneel on the sharp edge of a piece of wood for hours. And this is really, I know, how am I going to say this? Yes. Like Jose Kellinger, who we're looking into at the moment for something we can't talk about. He was adopted by Austrian migrants and exactly the same shit. I'm not saying that all Austrian people abuse their children. But like similar time period and super similar punishments. He was like made to kneel on like sandpaper and stuff for days. I think it's like, I don't know, I did read this somewhere that apparently this Scheitelknein, where you have to like kneel on a sharp piece of wood, is still practiced in places in Austria and Germany today as like punishments that are doled out to kids.

I don't know if that's true. I read it somewhere. Is it true, guys? Let us know. I don't know. But that's what I read. So maybe Josef was the subject of so much rage because he'd served as a constant reminder to Maria of her hatred of pretty much all of the men in her life who'd done nothing but abuse her. Maria would also regularly remind her 11 year old son that she only gave birth to him to quote prove a point and their relationship was of course an abusive and toxic one but it had a dynamic weirdly a bit more fitting to a couple than of a mother and son. There was a mania in the way Maria treated her son. One moment she was chastising him violently, but the next she was pulling him back to her with open arms.

This is really interesting. So I've been reading about rat brains. Child brains are difficult to study because of the ethics of getting hold of a child and also getting one to sit still for very long. All that red tape of securing a child to dissect. Exactly. So rats, when they are abused by their parent rat,

their ability to remember the danger is switched off in their brain, like neurologically, biologically. So that's why, well, there's a theory that why abused children will defend their abusive parents is because when you're little, usually if you're in a dangerous situation you learn like oh that's hot I won't do that again or if I go there I'll fall over or falling out of a tree hurts whatever but when it's your parent that's hurting you your brain doesn't record the information that is one of the reasons why relationships between abusive parents and children are even more interesting and why often children will defend abusive parents because your brain just is incapable of like

the danger response definitely because it must be such a weird meshing together of this person who's meant to provide me with the most warmth and the most care is also the one physically causing me harm how does your brain come to terms with that as a child? It's really interesting. Rat brains. I can't wait to tell you guys what we're actually working on. It'll come soon. Give us a few months. Yeah, if I'm still here, if I haven't emigrated to Nepal, where I intend to live as a goat. It'll find you still. I'll still keep emailing you. Sorry, I'm going off the grid. So Maria seemed to simultaneously loathe the sight of Josef

while also being completely consumed with terror at the thought of him leaving her. There's a book about borderline personality disorder that's called I Hate You, Please Don't Leave Me. And also another thing I've been reading about rat brains, it's the reward for these children is this like overwhelming, unhealthy love, which is the opposite of their abuse.

So it's extremes all of the time, which makes brains do weird stuff, especially in rats. And Maria, like most of the people in Amstetten at the time, was also a devout Catholic. And on Sundays at church, she would tell Joseph, quote, you're a criminal that needs to be watched. She also said that she could see Satan in his eyes. Very few people are going to turn out totally normal. That's said to them every week. No, I mean, she's not doing little Yosef at this point any favours whatsoever. And

with Maria, obviously, we've started so far back in time with Anna and then with Maria and then coming on to Yosef because we wanted to show the way in which the trauma was kind of inherited and passed down through the families. But when it comes to Maria, we obviously don't have any sort of psychological assessment of her. We only know that she went through some incredibly traumatic things. I mean, she fucking spent time in a Nazi concentration camp, you know, she's not okay. She's not okay. But we don't know exactly what it is psychologically that was going on with her. It could be any number of things. But after all this, the war was finally over. And at this point, Austria was essentially divided into four occupation zones, with Upper Austria being controlled by America, UK and France, while Lower Austria, where Josef and Maria lived, was under Soviet control.

And in the early days of the occupation, this was a very dark time for both the people of Austria and Germany. Life in the Soviet zone, so Lower Austria, was particularly very difficult. People were starving in the streets, and rationing continued in this zone until around 1950, whilst those living in the American zone in Upper Austria enjoyed luxuries like chocolate and American food imports. And in the Soviet zone especially, the Allied occupation soldiers terrorised the local populations, committing murder and rape without a second thought.

There were estimated to be up to 2 million rapes committed during the occupation, with the majority of offences committed in the Soviet occupation zone. Female deaths in connection with rapes in Germany during this time are estimated to be around 240,000. And British military historian Anthony Beaver described it as, quote, the greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history. It seems that the soldiers, especially those of the Red Army, felt a sense of entitlement to these women,

something like they were their spoils of war. Now, again, much like her psychological state, we don't know if Maria was a victim to these horrors, but it's definitely safe to say that she and Yosef would hardly have felt safe. Things did eventually start to improve and by the autumn of 1947 one of Amstetten's schools finally reopened and at the age of 12 Josef Fritzl began his education. In his class of 32 Josef was the oldest and quite evidently the poorest. It became normal for the parents of even some of the other less well-off students to slip in pieces

of bread to take home. He accepted the food, but he felt humiliated by it. And slowly, his resentment towards his mum began to grow. He never let any of his friends set foot in No. 40 Yibstrasse or even catch sight of Maria. During the first couple of years, Josef was at school, he was pretty withdrawn, and nobody really expected him to make anything of himself. But the school's head teacher, Mr. Freinhammer, saw something in 15-year-old Josef. He saw that Josef Fritzl, although being behind due to deprivation, was naturally incredibly intelligent.

So Mr Freinhammer took it upon himself to regularly give Josef motivational talks on working hard and making something of himself. And this gave Josef the boost he needed, and soon he began to show a remarkable prowess in maths. Josef applied himself to his schoolwork, even drifting away from his friends, who by this age were more interested in trying to get drunk and party. But apart from his newfound love of learning, Josef was also getting taller and stronger. And Maria loathed the idea of her son maturing and growing up. And as much as she

tried to limit his freedoms, she couldn't do much in the way of stopping him from studying. She was also all too aware his academic pursuits would lead to a good career, which in turn would earn Yosef his independence. She was also becoming very aware that her days of being able to assert herself physically over her son were numbered. And one afternoon, when she went to raise a hand to Yosef the way she had done all his life, he lashed out and punched his mother so hard in the side of the head that she was left sprawled out on the kitchen floor. Needless to say, the mother-son dynamic changed completely after that moment. And now Maria feared her son much like he had feared her all of his life. And it's at this point you really start to see like a turning point in Yosef because one day soon after this incident,

he found himself crouching underneath the windowsill of the ground floor bedroom of his neighbour's house, a recently married young couple. He could hear them having sex. Anyone who's lived in a shared house knows how fucking annoying that is. I know. It shouldn't be a factor in anyone's life i don't think but it is in so many people in mine included i'm just like great i have to listen to this for the next eight minutes and something though interesting to point

out at this point as well before we talk about his peeping tommory is that joseph fritzl a lot of the time when he like goes out and does things like this that's crossing a line, he kind of frames it in a way of like, I just found myself there. I just found myself doing this thing. This thing was just happening. He always kind of frames it as if it's like a passive thing that's happening to him. And even after reading this book and sitting with this case for as long as we have, I still don't know whether that's really how he found himself in these situations or if he just says it that way to kind of remove responsibility from himself but we'll come back to this again later it's super common for like people with sort of either schizoid personalities

or psychopathic tendencies just be like oh and then like she just got dead yeah yeah there's one like Dennisis nielsen quote where like one of his victims was eating an omelette while dennis nielsen strangled him to death and in his confession dennis nielsen's like well i don't remember doing it but either i killed him or he choked to death on the omelette but omelettes don't leave red marks on people's necks so it must have been me and that is referred to as the omelette death. Not joking, that's seriously what it is in the transcripts. Pretty soon after Josef had started to listen in on this couple, he made it his new hobby and he became quite a talented peeping Tom.

He learned his neighbours' schedules in extreme detail, to the point that he knew when they'd be undressing, having a bath or going to bed, and he always made sure that he had a good view. The windows of young women were of course his favourite, and it wasn't long before this behaviour escalated. At the age of 16, he began to hide in the woods and follow women who were out alone, sometimes exposing himself. Sexual deviant by night and student by day, that same year Yosef finished school with exceptional grades, and was actually one of the few people in his class

who went on to further education. Without telling his mum Maria, Joseph secretly enrolled himself into a two-year engineering evening course and found work at a metal yard to pay his bills. And finally, in 1951, Joseph Fritzl left Amstetten and moved to Linz in Upper Austria. Linz was a much wealthier and prosperous part of Austria than Amstetten was. And in fact, it was one of the few parts of Austria that didn't experience economic disaster after the war. Unlike Amstetten, where people were rationing food and barely making a living, Linz was an industrial heartland full of factories and chemical plants. And people even had chocolate and American cigarettes, which seems bananas. I remember when we were in Cuba.

Obviously, Cuba has a trade embargo with the United States, so there aren't any American cigarettes. Cuban cigarettes are called Hollywoods. That is fucking hilarious. That is so funny. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about.

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Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. So in 1956, Fritzl earned himself a job at the prestigious metal engineering firm Volstapin, something that he was incredibly proud of. And I think that this is something that is quite different with Fritzl and other sort of people with psychopathic tendencies that we've covered in the past, is he is such an academic high achiever.

Because a lot of other psychopaths we see, they fall out of education quite early. They get quite bored. Their brains aren't really wired to learn in that way. But he really goes full force and he becomes incredibly successful in many ways, career wise. So by this time, his professional life was going exceptionally well. However, his personal life still left a lot to be desired. This was the 50s. And so of course, it was commonplace for men at the time to be married in their 20s and so Josef Fritzl felt you know like he was not quite achieving his best in this area because he was 19 years old and he had never so much as even kissed a girl. But all this was about to change when a

colleague invited him to a party where he met a 16-year-old girl named Rosemary. She asked him to dance, they shared a kiss, and just a few months later, the two were married. Love in the 50s for you. Yeah, a simpler time. Let's go to a party. Found a husband. Bing bang, baby.

And Rosemary, it does seem like she did really love Yosef. She seems really to have been drawn to his intelligence and his ambition, and she was also happy to accept him as the head of the household. They both shared the same dream of having a large family and Rosemary even promised Josef to bear him many children and assume the role of a traditional 50s housewife. So the couple moved into one of the ground floor flats in number 40 Yibstrasse and Josef Rosemarie's parents in Linz during the week while he worked, then returned to Amstetten to be with his wife on weekends. On the 17th of June 1957, Josef and Rosemarie welcomed their first baby into the world, a baby girl who they named Ulrike, and just three years later, they had another baby, and again, it was a girl, and they

named her Rosemarie. The couple's first son, Har Harold Gunther, was born five years later, on the 7th of September, 1963. And all the while, Josef's career was progressing extremely well. By 1958, he'd grown into an impressive, respectable-looking family man. Bolesteprin, the company that he worked for, had also expanded globally, and much to Fritzl's delight he was chosen in 1962 to oversee a project in Ghana for 18 months. He jumped at the opportunity and his salary was doubled. With the growing family he had he needed every penny he could get but this trip was a bit of a turning point for the Fritzl family. Over the course of the 18 months Josef didn't return at

all to visit his family. They didn't even speak on the phone once. Fritzl, instead, was indulging in the local brothels of Ghana, and when he did finally come home in 1965, the cracks in his once-happy marriage had started to show. His three children were now eight, five and two. They didn't really remember their father and they kept their distance. Fritzl was furious. He was the one earning all of the money. The least that these children could do was love and respect him.

And unsurprisingly, this fury expressed itself in the same kind of violence his mother Maria had subjected him to as a child. Rosemary, while now pregnant with their fourth baby, didn't have much time to pay attention to her husband either. Slowly, feelings of rage and self-pity began to take over Josef Fritzl, and he became something of a tyrant in his own house. He would beat his children and scream at his wife, and it was into this volatile home that Fritzl's fourth child,

Elisabeth, was born on the 8th of April 1966. By this stage, Josef and Rosemary were drifting further and further away from each other. Rosemary even suspected her husband of having an affair in Linz where he lived and worked during the week. And while there were other women involved, there was nothing like what Rosemary imagined. Because Joseph had picked up where he'd left off as a teenager, wandering parks late at night, exposing himself to lone women.

One actually reported him to the police for this, but he got off with a warning. Shortly after this, Joseph actually got off with a warning. Shortly after this, Josef actually attempted to rape a woman, and again, shockingly, he only received a caution from the police. In 1967, Fritzl, now aged 32, had become obsessed with a young nurse, and he started stalking her relentlessly. He soon learned that she lived in a ground-floor flat and slept with the window open even when her husband worked a late shift.

So one night, Fritzl climbed through the woman's window and raped her while her child slept in the cot next to the bed. After he was finished, he left through the same window and just cycled home. The young woman reported him to the police and Fritzl was arrested. He confessed and was sentenced to 18 months in jail. He even made the front page of the local paper with the headline reading, Police expose family father as monstrous sex fiend.

So none of this is, like, not known. He doesn't just, like, sort of get away with it. He goes to jail for 18 months in his early 30s for rape. Like, this happens. He's on the fucking front page of the paper being called a monstrous sex fiend. But Rose Marie stayed with him, even visiting Josef in prison regularly throughout his 18-month stint.

But they never once discussed the rape. After getting out of prison, Josef lost his job in Linz and returned to No. 40 Yibstrasse. Life continued very much as normal. In 1970, just a year after his return from jail, Fritzl had a new job with a huge Danish concrete company, and Rosemarie and he had twins, Josef and Gabrielle. Two years later, in December 1972,

the couple had their seventh and final child, Doris. It was at this point that Fritzl pulled an odd move. He purchased the Seastern, a three-storey, 40-room hotel complete with bar and restaurant located near Moonsea or Moon Lake in Upper Austria. This guy's already got seven kids. Yep, seven kids.

Like, how much money is he earning? I think he's basically doing very well. It's like those couples you see on Grand Designs where you're like, really? Are you really going to put five years of your life to- I watched a heartbreaking one the other day where they bought this like fucking outrageously expensive plot

on the side of a cliff and they had to build another property to like finance the building of the main one and they never finished it and they got divorced. Oh no, that's really sad. I haven't seen that one. I hope I don't see it. Fucking hell, that's miserable. Yeah, really bums you out. Yosef fancied himself a grand designer and he worked on the hotel and his family home. In November 1978, he began work on three major renovation projects. He built a roof terrace at

the hotel. He constructed an enormous extension to the back of number 40 Yibstrasse to use as an apartment block that he could rent out to tenants. And finally, he built a cellar under his house. And when we say he built, we really mean it. This is like him with like cinder blocks strapped to his back. Fritzl was obviously an engineer and he was very skilled at DIY. So he did it all himself in his very eclectic and strange style. Yeah, because the apartment block that he built was weird and disorientating to say the least. According to

tenants who stayed there, apparently there were just like staircases placed in the middle of rooms. The ceilings of different rooms were like varying heights. So you would like walk from one room into another and the ceiling height would like completely change. And he also created like these long and narrow, unnecessary corridors everywhere that felt like suffocatingly claustrophobic. I don't know if he meant to build it in such a disorientating way or it's because he knew enough to build, but he's not actually an architect. So he doesn't really know what he's doing properly. I don't know. It also took Fritzl four years to finish this apartment block and during this time he became more and more abusive to his wife and his children. And despite her family begging her to, Rosemary never left.

She just kept herself busy with running the hotel and raising the children. But once the apartment block was done, Rosemary was quietly thrilled because Fritzl informed her that he had built himself an entire floor in the building, which he was going to use as his private living quarters that nobody else was allowed to enter. Rosemary was happy because she thought if he stayed there more often, then she and the kids could escape his violent rages. But, very big red flag, very big bad sign, if there's even a room in your house that you can't enter because

your husband tells you, there is an entire floor of that apartment he now says that she can't enter. That's never good news. That's bad news bears right there. But Rosemary stays quiet through all of this and that is like quite a big feature to her involvement with this entire case. But like their mother, the Fritzl children knew that the best course of action was to keep your head down and just stay quiet. They all knew that they needed to just grow up as fast as possible and move out. And so in quick succession, the three eldest all left. And at this point, only four children remained at home. The eldest now being 11-year-old Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a fairly quiet girl. She was never

quick to express her feelings or give an opinion, which until now served her remarkably well by making her somewhat invisible amongst her seven brothers and sisters. But now Yosef began to notice Elizabeth more and more. He noticed her introverted manner, her lack of confidence, and he recognised parts of his younger self in her. And he mistook this for a special connection between the two of them. By the time he was 43, Fritzl had developed what one might call an unhealthy preoccupation with his daughter. He began playing what he called practical jokes on her. And what he means by that is he'd regularly snoop around Elizabeth's bedroom and leave pornographic magazines under her pillow when she's 11. Hilarious. Hilarious joke.

Yeah. Hilarious joke, dad. Oh, hideous. Soon, Fritzl was entering Elizabeth's room every night and touching her and masturbating in front of her. He terrorised his daughter by using every opportunity they were alone together to sexually violate her. And he'd always tell her that the police were idiots who'd never believe her anyway, so she better just keep it to herself or he would have to kill her. No matter how far he took the sexual attacks on his daughter, Yosef never felt satisfied. He described it as an itch that he couldn't seem to scratch, no matter how hard he tried. Poor you. How terrible is it to be itchy?

This is what I mean. He constantly makes it a thing that seems somewhat out of his control. He makes it seem like I just couldn't stop. I couldn't stop what I was doing. He claimed that he found it impossible to leave Elizabeth alone. He watched her, he followed her and he secretly collected all of her mail and kept it in a special folder. He completely dominated young Elizabeth's life, but she kept completely silent about what was happening to her. After Elizabeth finished secondary school, Yosef decided to enrol her on a two-year course in gastronomy and tourism.

Elizabeth says that she never wanted this, but she wasn't in a position at this point to stand up to her father at all. And the only good thing to come out of this was she discovered that this course meant that she was going to have to go away to study for two months. Obviously, Yosef wouldn't have wanted Elizabeth out of his sight. But the thing is, he wanted the entire family working at the Seastone, so the hotel that he had bought, because he didn't want to pay anyone else any wages. So that's why obviously gastronomy and tourism. And I think he also felt like he had Elizabeth under enough control that he could send her away from home for two months

and that she wouldn't try anything. But whilst away, Elizabeth became particularly close to another girl she met on this work placement called Brigitte Wanderer. And one day, Elizabeth built up the courage to tell her new friend about everything her father had been doing to her since she was 11 years old. This was the first time in Elizabeth's life that she had spoken a word of the abuse that she had endured, and it was a pivotal moment for her. But pretty soon, the work placement came to an end, and Elizabeth found herself back in No. 40 Yibstrasza. And it wasn't long after her return that her father's unwanted late night visits to her bedroom began all over again. But Elisabeth and Brigitte had kept in touch and the pair decided

that they weren't going to live like this anymore. Because we don't know that much about Brigitte, but what we do know is that she also came from quite a troubled background. So I think both of them were just like, fuck this, let's start a new life. So they began to devise a plan, a plan which involved them boarding a train to Vienna in the middle of the night and disappearing forever. Meanwhile, her father, Josef Fritzl, was still working away on his cellar. He'd completed the apartment years ago, and just as he'd planned, it had become quite the moneymaker. Josef chose tenants who had their rent paid for them by the state, so he knew it was guaranteed money. And also, these people often had so many problems of their own to deal with that they never really noticed much else going on around them,

and they never asked too many questions. By the time Elizabeth had gone off to her work placement, Fritzl had built seven rooms in the vast labyrinth-like cellar underneath the apartment block. There was an L-shaped antechamber. You've probably seen this on the news. I remember this happening and there being like a virtual tour of just how massive it was. So there's an L-shape and it leads to three doors, which I can picture it in my head. The first door led to a furnace room, the second to a storage room, and the third to a spare parts room. Walking through the spare parts room, one would enter a second storage room and then enter into the heart of the cellar where Josef's workshop was. Nobody except Josef was allowed down there. So now he had two separate hidden secret hideaways

in number 40 Yibstrasse, the flat in the apartment block and the cellar beneath it. He felt exhilarated when he was working there in the cellar, as if he was building up something huge, but Fritzl couldn't quite put his finger on what it was. He just said that he felt compelled to work on it. And finally, in late January 1983, Yosef felt at long last he'd finished his beloved cellar. And he was elated, but this good mood did not last very long. Just as he was finishing up, Rosemary ran into the garden to tell him that 16-year-old Elizabeth hadn't come home from the night before. And that was because the night before, Elizabeth and Brigitte had boarded a train to Vienna.

And during their first few days in Vienna, the girls reveled in their newfound freedom and enjoyed all the things that you might expect a 16-year-old to enjoy. They drank, they smoked cigarettes, and they smoked some weed. Josef was furious and suspecting because we know that he took a lot of Elisabeth's mail and read it. So if she was communicating with Brigitte, they didn't have phones, so she was probably writing to her.

And I think she probably made a mistake in there and revealed that they were going to Vienna. And so Josef had his eldest son, Harald, go to Vienna and search the city looking for his little sister. But after five days with no sign of her, Josef called the police. And pretty soon, Elisabeth's photo was printed in every newspaper with the words, Have you seen me? above it. Elisabeth and Bridget were staying with a friend in Vienna and they tried to lay low. But one night during one of their many parties the music was a little too loud and after one too

many noise complaints the police came knocking. And this is such like a horrible point of this story because if only these policemen who had turned up that night hadn't been quite so dutiful as to follow the rules to the T then then maybe Elisabeth and Brigitte would never have been found. And we wouldn't even be doing this episode, and the world wouldn't know who Josef Fritzl was. But sadly, the police shut down the party, and carefully, one by one, checked the identification papers of every single person in the apartment.

They had found the missing girl, Elisabeth Fritzl. On hearing the news, Josef wasted no time. He jumped in his car and drove the 130 kilometres to Vienna to get her. They drove back to No. 40 Yibstrasse in silence. By that summer, Josef had fitted all of the dark, windowless basement rooms with fluorescent lights and each door was now secured with a lock to which only Josef had a set of keys. Josef refused to waste money on heating and in any case he'd found that the cellar was proving impossible to damp proof because there was no ventilation. So during the winter the walls would become slimy with condensation.

But even after all he'd completed down there something still didn't feel right to Josef. Something about the cellar still felt incomplete and so for reasons still not clear to him, he felt compelled to add an additional two rooms to the underground structure. This nagging feeling had begun around the same time that Elisabeth had run away to Vienna. It was now two years since Elisabeth had run away. The first few weeks she'd been back were awful, but weirdly things had slightly improved afterwards. Although she knew that her father read all of her mail and that he would follow her around and spy on her, since she came back from Vienna, he hadn't actually touched her once. If she had the nerve to run away, Fritzl was now afraid that Elizabeth would tell someone. And with a newfound sense of power, Elizabeth had grown more confident and assertive. She had even started to answer back to her father.

Slowly, it seemed to Elizabeth that her father was losing interest in her. He seemed totally preoccupied with his cellar these days. Whatever he was doing down there, Elizabeth didn't care as long as he wasn't bothering her. She had no idea of the horrors that were yet to come. In the cellar, Joseph's secret rooms were taking shape. He had even knocked a small hole through the wall of his office, which made it just big enough for him to crawl through the tiny passageway which led to the main room.

When anyone asked what the cellar was for, Fritzl told them that it was a nuclear bunker. And this wasn't weird at all at the time, what with the Cold War and all. The Austrian government were actually subsidising anyone who was building one. But according to Fritzl, he maintains that he didn't really know why he was building it. That's just what he told people. And this, again, it's like whether Fritzl really didn't know why he was doing it or whether he just uses it as like a way to disconnect himself from his behavior. I don't know. I really don't know.

But according to him, that realisation suddenly hit him one day in May 1984. He said that that day he was stood in an electronics store looking at electric garage doors when all of a sudden a light went off in his head and suddenly it became very clear to him exactly what he was going to use his secret rooms in the cellar for. So he rushed home and began working night and day on the cellar to finish it. Now he knew what its true purpose was. Josef even concealed the tiny entrance to the passageway that he had built in his office with a shelf on hinges so that it would swing open like a door.

And into the cellar he carried a bed, a mattress, plastic plates and cutlery, preparing it, getting it ready for the big day. On the 9th of August, Elisabeth wrote her last letter to a friend of hers. She talked about going out, getting drunk, her job at the restaurant and how she was planning on moving to Linz to live with her older sister.

From the outside at this point, Elisabeth Fritzl looked like a normal middle-class young woman from a loving family, working a decent job. The world was her oyster. So this was why, when on the 28th of August 1984, when Elisabeth Fritzl disappeared without a trace, nobody could understand why. The following morning,

Josef went straight to the local police station and reported his daughter missing. But the officer told him that Elisabeth was 18 and therefore an adult who was legally allowed to do whatever she wanted, including leave. However, seeing how distraught Fritzl was, the officer assured him that they would do their best to find his daughter,

just as they had done two years before. He asked Josef if Elizabeth had seemed troubled recently and Josef told the officer how she'd been acting quite strangely and he'd suspected her of mixing with the wrong crowd, abusing drugs. She'd certainly not been listening to her loving parents at home and she'd also been talking quite a lot about alternative religions. So Josef Fritzl told the police that he was worried his daughter may have joined a cult and the police reassured him that she'd probably show up very soon. And to find out what happens next, even though you all know what happens next you're gonna have to wait till next week yeah guys there was just so much information about fritzl we had to put it

into two parts so next week we're gonna head into the cellar and talk about what horrors happened down there so join us next week when we'll go into all of that if you can't get enough of your red-handed content until then you can hop on over to patreon.com slash red-handed slash red-handed. My God, it's been a long talk. And it is Saturday afternoon. I'm struggling. You can head on over to patreon.com slash red-handed where you can sign up. If you become a $5 and up patron, you get under the duvets every single week.

You also get loads more stuff. You get in the news once a month. This month, we talked about the Korean Twitter killer, the Russian sausage king. There was a lot going on this month. This month we talked about the Korean Twitter killer, the Russian sausage king. There was a lot going on this month. And we also did a $20 plus live stream this month on the case of Maura Murray. If you become a $10 and up patron, you can also watch the recording of that. Head on over to check out the tiers and all of the extra content you get. Also, merch is still up. So if you'd like to get your hands on that, the time for that is really getting into crunch time if you want to order anything for Christmasmas presents etc so head on over to

redhandedshop.com to get your merch and let's end as we usually do with a long list of thank yous to all the wonderful people who have become patrons so let's do it thank you so much alison stapleton shrivShrivastra. Becky Berry. Alivra Norden. Hannah. Amy Vaughan. Sarah Patrick.

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I'm sorry. Carolyn Bracken. Elise Jackson, JW Caroline, Catherine Moore, Christina Fjord, Ford. Come on, Hannah. I'm just like gagging for a like Norwegian name. Veronica Bennett, Tiff Shin. Gagging for a Norwegian over here. I can see one coming up. Definitely going to fuck it up. Tiff Shin, Paige Percy, Average, not normal. Lauren Jiggins, Tamsin Bartlett, Christina Gilruth, Kate Green,

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You nailed it Honestly it's the CrossFit documentaries man Like every CrossFit champion is Icelandic And they've all got names like that Angela DiBole Callie Kaylee Cool Whip

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I'm just not into the whole, like, it becoming a lifestyle. That's it. That's my only thing. Like an identity. Like it seems to have become on Instagram. Whose identity is an avocado? Oh, mate. People.

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Thank you. And we'll also keep doing it, please. Absolutely. All the promises. Good work, guys. doing it, please. Absolutely. All the promises. Good work, guys. Good work, everybody. So yes, listen to this. Probably stay inside because that's the rule now.

And stay safe. Goodbye. Bye. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most

haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime,

The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.