Josef Fritzl Trial Starts This Week, Court Cleared for Imprisoned Daughter’s Evidence

UPDATE (18 MARCH 2009): Dungeon trial: Fritzl pleads guilty to all charges

From The Guardian:

Josef Fritzl, the Austrian engineer accused of imprisoning his daughter beneath the family home for more than two decades and fathering her seven children, appeared in court this morning for the second day of his trial.

The 73-year-old again covered his face with a blue folder as he entered the courtroom in St Pölten, about 40 miles east of the town of Amstetten, where he held his daughter Elisabeth, now 42, in a purpose-built dungeon for 24 years.

Yesterday, Fritzl pleaded guilty to charges of rape, incest, false imprisonment and coercion. But he denied one charge of murder over the death of a twin boy born to his daughter, for whom Fritzl failed to seek medical help. He also denied a charge of slavery, which has been on the Austrian statute book since the 1960s, but has never been tried in court. Fritzl faces a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison, and a maximum of life.

As soon as the court opened at 9am (8am GMT), the judge, Andrea Hummer, cleared the room of press and public. Today’s hearing will be in private to protect the identity of Elisabeth, whose evidence will continue to be heard.

The recorded testimony of the electrical engineer’s daughter was due to be played on a large screen inside the courtroom.

The evidence is said in part to be so harrowing that it will “only be viewed in small portions”, the vice-president of the court, Franz Cutka, told the Guardian.

Four additional jurors are on hand in case the eight main jurors are unable to cope.

The courtroom was scoured by sniffer dogs earlier today to ensure no bugging devices or secret cameras had been planted in the courtroom to capture the proceedings, which are expected to be held in camera for most of the week. Journalists have been warned they face a prison sentence of up to six months if they report any of the court proceedings from the in-camera sessions.

Some media waited outside in a beer tent to hear when they might be allowed back into the courtroom.

Yesterday, Fritzlwas questioned by the judge about his childhood. He told the court he had had a miserable childhood with a mother who had not wanted him, and a father who was barely visible in his life. He said his mother had forbidden him to have any friends and had beaten him until he was 12, when he threatened to hit her back.

The court also heard an emotional 25-minute statement by the state prosecutor, Christiane Burkheiser, who detailed how Elisabeth had been lured into the cellar by her father at the age of 18 on the pretence of helping him fix a door. He locked her in the cellar and kept her there for the next 24 years. He raped her repeatedly and for the first few years did not even talk to her, Burkheiser said.

She detailed the births of Elisabeth’s seven children in the cellar and described how three of them had been chosen by Fritzl to live upstairs with him and his wife, Rosemarie.

Kate Connolly reports from the first day of the trial Link to this audio

 

 

Burkheiser said the horror and monotony of Elisabeth’s incarceration in the damp and stifling prison was best encapsulated in one sentence: “Light out. Rape. Light on. Mouldy walls. Rape. Light out.” She repeated it like a mantra several times to emphasise her point.

Fritzl’s lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, urged the jurors not to see Fritzl as “a monster”, saying: “You need to keep emotion out of this”.

Referring to Fritzl’s “regular family” and his “cellar family”, Mayer said: “A man who put so much effort into keeping two families cannot be called a monster. If I only want a daughter as a sex slave, I don’t let her bring children into the world. You’d let them starve.”

Elisabeth is expected to be the only witness, though prosecutors have collected evidence from four experts to be read during the trial – a psychiatrist, a neo-natologist, a general technician and an electrical mechanic, the last of whom can comment on the locks and doors Fritzl installed in the cellar.

The trial is scheduled to last until Friday.

Also see:  Incest Dad, Josef Fritzl, Charged with Murder, Austrian Horror Dad: I Locked My Mom Up Until She Died, A forensic pychiatrist, Dr. Adelheid Kastner, blames Josef Fritzl’s incest & rape on his mother, claiming she was abusive