Pat Dollard | Young Americans

As I commented in an earlier post to this continuing story, this just keeps getting “better and better” …

If`n I was the Austrian police I’d be looking at more than a few “cold cases” this guy might have a direct connection to …

The Independent

Police in Austria are examining links between the murder of a young woman and the man who has confessed to holding his daughter captive for 24 years and fathering her seven children.

The body of Martina Posch was discovered 22 years ago near a lake where Josef Fritzl owned property. Martina, who was 17, had vanished 10 days earlier.

Her corpse was found on the shore of Mondsee lake near Salzburg. She was believed to have been raped.

Fritzl has admitted keeping his daughter Elisabeth in a secret dungeon underneath his home in the town of Amstetten where she had the seven children by him.

Alois Lissl, chief of police of Upper Austria province, said that although no evidence had surfaced so far, police have widened their investigation into the unsolved murder 22 years ago to include Fritzl because he could have been in the area at the “time and place” of the killing.

“We have found no sign” of a concrete link up to now, Mr Lissl said.

But he added Fritzl would be asked for an alibi because the property owned by his wife could mean he was in the area when Posch was killed.

“We are looking at the case from a third angle,” he said.

Hospital personnel in Lower Austria, meanwhile, fought to save the life of Elisabeth’s 19-year-old daughter Kerstin whose emergency admission to hospital triggered the discovery that her family had been imprisoned and terrorised for decades.

Her condition was critical but stable. She is the eldest of the seven children Fritzl fathered with his daughter.

Kerstin, who is in an induced coma, is undergoing dialysis because of the effects of lack of oxygen. She was brought to the hospital unconscious and later suffered seizures.

The fate of her family came to light after doctors, mystified by her ailment, publicly appealed for her mother to come forward because they needed her medical history.

Authorities were providing little information about Fritzl, 73, who they say has confessed to locking up Elisabeth since she was 18 and repeatedly raping her. He said he incinerated the body of one of her children, who died in infancy.

Leopold Etz, chief of homicide for Lower Austria province, said authorities were confident that Fritzl acted alone.

“I think we can rule out accomplices,” he said.

He said DNA tests confirmed that no other man entered the soundproof cellar rooms Fritzl made into a prison below his home.

Fritzl let his wife Rosemarie believe that Elisabeth had run away to join a religious cult when she disappeared, and authorities say there was no evidence she knew what was going on.

Fritzl brought three of the cellar-born children into his home, registering them officially as Elisabeth’s abandoned children, but kept three more with their mother, cut off from the outside world. All, except Kerstin, were reunited with their mother and grandmother in emotional scenes at a psychiatric clinic on Sunday.

The father faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on rape charges, although he could be charged with “murder through failure to act” in connection with the infant’s death. That is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Since his initial confession on Monday, Fritzl has refused to talk to police.

Franz Polster, Lower Austria’s top criminal investigator, said one detail Fritzl had divulged - that the heavy steel door shutting the basement dungeon off from the outside world had a timer allowing it to be opened if he was away for a protracted period - was being checked on.

Amid the sordid details, precious little has been revealed about Fritzl’s life or what led him to commit such a crime.

He was born on April 9, 1935, in Amstetten, 75 miles west of Vienna. He owned a number of properties in the region and paid his dues at the fisherman’s club. Besides that, most neighbours or townsfolk remember only an affable, if remarkable, fellow.

After leaving school Fritzl studied electric engineering at a polytechnic and got his first job with a steel company.

From 1969 to 1971 he worked for a building company in Amstetten, where he gained a reputation as an intelligent worker and a good technician. Then he went into the service industry and took over an inn 15 years ago.

Elisabeth, Rosemarie and the other five children remained in psychiatric care today. Clinic director Berthold Kepplinger said they were doing “quite well” under the circumstances in the care of a team of specialists.

Authorities, meanwhile, were deliberating the future of Kerstin and her two brothers, Felix and Stefan, aged five and 18, who effectively have no identities. Officials have discussed the possibility of providing new names for the children, who “never saw sunlight” until they were freed from the basement on Saturday.

Mr Kepplinger said the 18-year-old could read and write in a “reduced form.”

He said Elisabeth had spoken “quite a lot” about what she went through in captivity, but he declined to provide details. “It was definitely dreadful for her and for her children,” he said.

The case started unfolding on April 19 when Kerstin was found unconscious and was taken to a hospital. After receiving a tip, police picked up Elisabeth and her father on Saturday. Fritzl freed the captive children the same day.