By using very small pieces of paper that she hid in different places in her underground prison, Elisabeth Fritzl managed to keep a diary with dates and times of almost every attack by her father Josef Fritzl, on her or the kids.
In one emotional entry she describes how she rocked her dying son in her arms until he turned blue and died from respiratory distress. He was Elizabeth’s 7th child sired by her sick father.
Josef Fritzl later burned the infants body in a furnace and spread the ashes in his garden. It is this little boy’s death that forms the basis for the murder plea against Mr. Fritzl.
In other diary entries, Elisabeth describes how she’d catch rats with her bare hands, and how fascinated her children were by every day items like a mirror or bathroom scales.
The diary explains how Elisabeth at first struggled against her father’s attacks, but once her first child had been born, she stopped struggling for the sake of her children.
This diary, which describes Elisabeth’s 8,642 days underground reveals how fickle Josef Fritzl’s decisions on who would live with him and his wife above ground were. One of the children accompanied him above ground as he had managed to wind a length of thread around his toe and would not stop crying. Josef Fritzl, worried that his neighbors would hear the crying and become suspicious, brought the child up into the house, but by the time he had discovered the thread, his wife had already come home. He therefore made up a story that Elisabeth had left the child outside their door and gone back to the cult with which he claimed she was living.
The diary also bears witness to how Josef Fritzl would torture the children stuck underground with pictures of their siblings playing in the garden or in a swimming pool.
I’m not an advocate of the death penalty, but I think this case could change my mind. This man does not deserve to breathe the same air we do. However, I think locking him in solitary confinement underground without access to daylight, for the rest of his miserable life, would be the best punishment for him.
