Josef Fritzl Incest Trial Begins: Fritzl Kept Daughter Elisabeth In Cellar Raping Her For 24 Years

Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man accused of keeping his daughter Elisabeth hostage for 24 years in a windowless cellar in his family home in Amstetten and fathering her seven children, pleaded guilty to rape and incest but is also being tried for murder in the death of an infant. Read more on this sickening story below.

Josef Fritzl, 73, a retired electrician, is being tried for murder, rape, incest, false imprisonment and enslavement.

During his nearly a year of detention prison, Fritzl has already confessed that he’s guilty of incest and rape. But Fritzl still denies the murder charge, which is the focus of this trial. This will determine if he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

The murder charge is from one of his daughter Elisabeth’s children that Josef fathered. The baby boy named Michael was born in the cellar in 1996. She has testified that the infant had serious breathing problems shortly after he was born, and that her father ignored her pleas to get help for the baby by saying “What is is.”

The infant died two days later and Fritzl told authorities that he tossed the dead body in the wood-burning furnace of the dark cellar where he kept his daughter imprisoned.

A neonatologist hired by the court confirmed that the baby could have survived if it had been given the proper care at the time.

The defendant, Josef Fritzl held a blue file folder up covering his face from news cameras, and was led into the courtroom by two police officers.

The judge and jurors listened to sad details of Josef Fritzl’s daughter Elisabeth’s treatment.

“Hard to imagine for any of us,” she said, “He made her live like a slave, used her like a toy, raping her repeatedly and torturing her.”

In the summer of 1984, Josef grabbed his daughter at age 18 and locked her up in the basement of the family home in Amstetten.

Fritzl told everyone his daughter had run away from home to live with a sect and no one questioned him.

The first year Elisabeth was kept in iron chains that were padlocked to a wall in the windowless dungeon, forced by her own father to become his sex slave.

Fritzl tortured his daughter and made her perform sexual acts several times a day, often for hours at a time.

By videotaping her witness statement and using it at the trial, the Austrian authorities are honoring a promise they gave her shortly after she was freed in April 2008.

The officer in charge had promised her she would never again have to see her father for as long as she lived if she would tell police the truth about her and her children’s ordeal.

It was then that the horrific details of the crime came to light and Fritzl was arrested and locked up.

The defendant’s lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, urged the jurors to see the human being in Josef Fritzl and not the monster, as the Austrian media has dubbed him.

“This is not a monster. He did not plan to murder the infant. I don’t expect you to accept what he did, but please be fair and see him for what he is, a human being who has done wrong and who failed, but that does not make him a monster.”

Over the years, Elisabeth gave birth to seven children. Three of her children were forced to live with her in her cell, never seeing daylight until they were freed last year.

The other children were allowed to live upstairs with Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, after he pretended “he found the babies on his doorstep”. The “foundlings” were carrying handwritten messages from their “runaway” daughter asking her mother to take care of the kids, messages Fritzl had forced Elisabeth to write.

Elisabeth and her children have been reunited and have been given new identities by the government.

The trial, which has attracted 200 journalists from all over the world to the small town of St. Poelten, is scheduled to last for four days. The verdict is expected this Friday.

Incest carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison, but Fritzl faces life imprisonment if convicted of murder. If he is not convicted of murder, he could receive a maximum sentence of 15 years on the charges to which he pleaded guilty.

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Source: news

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Posted by: Monya

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