#Elisabeth fritzl now 2021 age tv#

“He lived a normal life and blended in well. “His neighbours were totally shocked,” says Perry. They couldn’t believe her at first.”īut the evidence-the cellar prison, the children-would soon bear out the unthinkable truth. “I spoke to the police officer who first interviewed Elisabeth and she said she was a nice woman with grey hair and a sort of blank expression-like wax. I don’t want anything to do with Elisabeth.’ Then he slammed the phone down. “This was a few days before the police took him in,” recalls Perry, 59. He called Fritzl wanting to quiz him on the apparent return of his long-lost daughter. “It was a huge shock when Elisabeth appeared,” says Perry, who was on holiday at the time and rushed back in his car to Amstetten. Though it had been 24 years, Perry recognised Elisabeth’s name in reports.

#Elisabeth fritzl now 2021 age tv#

“She was in the cellar watching TV and she begged Fritzl to let her and her other children out,” says Perry. When doctors were unable to diagnose the cause of Kerstin’s illness they put out a public plea in the media for Elisabeth to come forward. Sticking to his story of 1984, he said he did not know the whereabouts of Kerstin’s mother, Elisabeth.

Elisabeth, then 42, “begged her dad to let her daughter go to the hospital,” says Perry.įritzl complied, taking Kerstin to the hospital and telling staff she was his granddaughter. The foundations of the depraved under-ground world that Fritzl had kept secret for more than two decades began to crumble on April 19, 2008, when Elisabeth’s first-born, Kerstin, then 19, fell ill with breathing problems. “I don’t know why it was so,” Elisabeth would later tell police. Three other children-Kerstin, Stefan, and Felix-remained in the cellar, which was accessible by a small, hidden door that could only be opened by a secret code, in Fritzl’s cellar workshop. Three children-Lisa, Monika and Alexander-were taken upstairs to live with Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie, who was told by her husband that Elisabeth had joined a cult and had dropped the children on the doorstep. Throughout that period he raped her and she gave birth to seven children in the home prison, one of whom died. Yet beneath their feet, a nightmare was unfolding.Įlisabeth had not fled her family at all-she was locked in the windowless cellar of the Fritzl home where her father would hold her captive for 24 years. They never once got a sense that anything was wrong.” “They had a biscuit and a cup of coffee and they took notes. Perry interviewed father-of-seven Fritzl and detectives “went to the house a couple of times,” says Perry. Would you mind putting it in the newspaper?’ ” recalls Perry. We’ve spoken to her father, Josef, and he’s given us her picture. “He said, ‘We’ve got a missing girl called Elisabeth Fritzl. It was 1984 and he received a call from the chief detective of police in Amstetten, a town in northern Austria. Perry was a 25-year-old journalist for the Austrian newspaper, Kronen Zeitung, when he first heard the name Josef Fritzl. You would have to be a psychopath to do what he’s done.” “He visited him a fortnight ago and Fritzl said, ‘It’s normal to have a family in the cellar.’ There’s no remorse. Elisabeth, who was raped by her father in the cellar and bore six children to him, now lives with those children-now aged from 15 to 29-in upper Austria, in a small village less than an hour from Amstetten, says Mark Perry, the British journalist who first broke the story of Josef Fritzl’s sensational crimes of captivity, rape and incest to the world.Įlisabeth is also married and one of her children work for the local council.įritzl, now 83 and serving a life prison term, “is showing no regret at all,” says Perry, who in March spoke to Fritzl’s lawyer, Walter Anzböck.