The suffering and sexual depravity of the ‘concrete kingdom’ Josef Fritzl created in an underground dungeon for his daughter were described to a court today. Jurors listened in horror as the state prosecutor, Mrs. Burkheiser, described in sickening detail the level of abuse that Elisabeth was forced to endure for more than 20 years.
The court listened in silence as they heard how when the children were born Elisabeth was left alone with nothing but an old book on childbirth, dirty scissors and a dirty mattress.
‘Josef Fritzl used his daughter like his property,’ said Mrs Burkheiser.
The 73-year-old raped his daughter without saying a word to her for the first nine years of her 24-year imprisonment, it was revealed.
Mrs Burkheiser used a laser pen to outline how low the cellar’s ceiling was, about five feet, and to detail the dimensions of the last door leading into it, which could only be accessed by crawling through on the hands and knees.
‘I have been to the cellar twice,’ she told jurors as Fritzl stared ahead at Judge Andrea Humer, his back to the press and public. ‘It smells, it is incredibly damp. It has a morbid atmosphere that hits you as you crawl through the 83 square centimetre entrance hole. The damp creeps in within minutes. .’
Fritzl showed little emotion throughout the proceedings, seeming to squirm only once when Mrs. Burkheiser leaned in close to him and said: ‘Mr. Fritzl, how could you do this to your own flesh and blood?’
Mrs Burkheiser said that in the first three years of Elisabeth’s incarceration there was no hot water, shower or heating.She alleged that Fritzl once punished the young woman by shutting off electricity to the dungeon, and forced her to spend the first part of her captivity in a tiny space that didn’t even have a shower.
She added that among the worst aspects of Elisabeth’s ordeal was ‘the uncertainty as to when he would come down again, and rape before the eyes of the children.
Fritzl arrived in court this morning amid bizarre scenes as he shielded his face with a blue ring binder.TV cameras were allowed in for the first few minutes of the trial, but he kept his face buried in the folder as journalists asked questions which he refused to answer.
Shame? I don’t think so. This man does, after all, feel that he was the victim in all this. His mommy didn’t love him. Pathetic loser.
