Lawyer: Austrian suspect Fritzl has mental disorder
Lawyer for Austrian suspect in incest-imprisonment case prepares insanity defense
By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press

AMSTETTEN, Austria

The lawyer for the Austrian man who allegedly imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her has said he is preparing an insanity defense.

In an interview broadcast late Sunday, attorney Rudolf Mayer said he believes Josef Fritzl has a serious mental disorder and that anyone with that kind of psychological illness "didn't choose" to do what police allege he did.

Mayer said experts will have to determine Fritzl's mental state and decide whether the suspect can be considered certifiably insane. If that is the case, and Fritzl is convicted, he would be confined to a psychiatric institution rather than a prison, he said.

Investigators have said Fritzl, 73, confessed last week that he held his daughter captive in a windowless cell, fathered her seven children, and tossed the body of one who died in infancy into a furnace.

"I believe that the trigger was a mental disorder, because I can't imagine that someone has sex with his own daughter without having a mental disorder," Mayer said.

Fritzl will make his first appearance before prosecutors Monday, and police planned to brief reporters on the status of their investigation into a case that has stunned Austria and the world.

Fritzl has not yet been charged, but remains in pretrial detention. His family is receiving psychiatric care and counseling.

Authorities first began to unravel the complex story April 19, when a 19-year-old girl who Fritzl fathered with his daughter, Elisabeth, was admitted to a hospital suffering from an unidentified infection.

Doctors, unable to find any medical records for the girl, appealed on television for her mother to come forward. Fritzl then accompanied Elisabeth to the hospital on April 26 and opened up to police.

The 19-year-old remained hospitalized Monday in critical but stable condition, although clinic spokesman Klaus Schwertner said her situation "has stabilized somewhat in recent days."

Investigators have said they believe Fritzl concealed his crimes from his wife, Rosemarie, and her sister said Rosemarie believed her husband's cover story that Elisabeth had run away from home to join a cult.

Associated Press writer William J. Kole contributed to this report.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

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Cops: 'Horror Father' Warned He Would Gas Victims If They Harmed Him

Thursday , May 01, 2008

AMSTETTEN, Austria '”
Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who held his daughter and children captive in a windowless cellar under his house, had told his victims that they would be gassed to death if anything happened to him, investigators say.

Police experts on Thursday were examining Fritzl's house in the small town of Amstetten to investigate his claim that gas would be pumped into the dank cellar, said Helmut Greiner, a spokesman for Austria's Federal Bureau of Investigations.

"It may have just been an empty threat to intimidate the captive woman and her children into not trying to overpower him," Greiner said.

Fritzl, a 73-year-old retired electrical engineer, has already admitted that he imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth, now 42, in the cellar of the family home for 24 years, fathering seven children by her. Three of those children grew up with her in the windowless dungeon.

But in a separate development, the officer leading the investigation, Col. Franz Polzer, said that Fritzl had forced Elisabeth to write a letter last year indicating that he may have been planning to release her from the cellar.

Polzer said DNA results prove that Elisabeth had written the letter to her family -- who had been told by Josef that she had fled to a cult. In it, she wrote that she wanted to come home, but "it's not possible yet."

"He may have had plans to end the captivity at some point," the officer said.

Greiner said that the police technicians were trying to work out whether Fritzl had indeed installed some kind of device to pump poison gas into the cellar.

Experts were also examining another claim by Fritzl that the heavy concrete-reinforced door to the underground rooms where he imprisoned and sexually abused his daughter would have sprung open automatically were he absent for an inordinate length of time.

"That also may be simply an empty claim," Greiner said. Either claim could have possible implications for sentencing when the case comes to trial because, depending on their veracity, the victims would either have been able to escape or could have perished, he noted.

In the first interview by a member of Fritzl's extended family, his sister-in-law revealed that the engineer often spent the whole night with his daughter and their children in the dungeon under the house.

The woman, named only as Christine R., 56, said that Fritzl made daily visits to his cellar on the pretext that he had work to do and would tell other family members, including his wife, Rosemarie, not to disturb him.

"Sepp [Josef's nickname] would go to the cellar every day at 9 in the morning and he would often even spend the night there, allegedly to draw blueprints for the machines he was selling," she told the Oesterreich newspaper.

"Rosi was not even allowed to bring him a cup of coffee."

Police say that Fritzl began abusing his daughter when she was 11 but held her captive from the age of 18. When she became pregnant from the abuse, he began to expand the underground dungeon from initially one room to three.

No one was aware of the existence of the dungeon, not even fire inspectors who routinely checked a heating boiler in the cellar in 1999.

The entrance to the dungeon was reachable only via a labyrinth of different underground rooms. The door itself, about 3.2 feet high and nearly 2 feet wide, was reinforced with concrete and had an electronic lock that could only be opened with a remote control.

Fritzl was a retired electrical engineer and police believe he had the expertise to build such a door and install it by himself.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,353622,00.html

wow, i'm reading the thread, and now I'm completely confused.

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