MIRROR
Elisabeth Fritzl had to start her life again after spending the majority of her adult years hidden underground in the family’s basement as her evil father Joseph Fritzl’s sex slave.
After spending 24 years of her adult life locked inside a cellar by her own depraved father, Elisabeth Fritzl finally found freedom as her father Joseph lost his.
From the age of 18 to 42, his daughter, now 57, endured almost daily rapes by her father Josef Fritzl in the purpose-built lair below the family home in Austria where she lived with the three children sired through his incest.
Without sunlight, fresh air, and other human interaction, Elisabeth lived a horrendous solitude for nearly a quarter of a century until she was finally able to escape, with her ordeal stunning people across the globe in horror. Monster Fritzl, who fathered seven of Elisabeth’s children, was finally exposed when one of their children had to go to hospital and the alarm was raised.
He was put behind bars for life in a high-security prison for mentally disturbed offenders, Stein Prison, in 2009 after he was found guilty of enslaving his daughter. But now aged 88 and nearing 15 years of his sentence, he is soon eligible to apply for parole and has been granted conditional release.
The serial rapist has been ruled as no longer posing a threat to public safety, according to the latest psychiatric report. Heidi Kastner, one of Austria’s leading forensic psychiatric experts from Linz University, spent a year preparing her study of Fritzl and argued he should be transferred through the normal prison system at the Krems-Stein jail, as part of a first step towards freedom.
