An Austrian court ruled Monday that Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, still poses enough of a threat to keep him behind bars rather than be paroled into a nursing home, despite the 90-year-old’s dementia diagnosis.
Fritzl, serving a life sentence for his crimes since 2009, had won his way out of psychiatric detention to regular prison in May 2024 after numerous back-and-forths between various courts. Attorney Astrid Wagner then requested her client be transferred to a dementia care center outside of prison.
But Monday’s ruling reaffirmed the previous court’s determination that Fritzl still posed a danger and should not be released, the Austria Press Agency reported. The court cited his delusion-fueled aggression toward family members and said Fritzl had not been prepared for release, had no one to take responsibility for him, and did not have a place to live. Wagner said she would appeal on grounds that “the reasoning is flawed.”
Fritzl received a life sentence after pleading guilty in 2009 to incest, rape, coercion, false imprisonment, enslavement and negligent homicide. His eldest daughter, Elisabeth, had been reported missing after disappearing at age 18 and was only discovered in 2008 at age 42 while seeking medical care, bringing the horrific story to light.
Fritzl had essentially kidnapped Elisabeth in 1984, locked her in a windowless cell he’d built beneath the family’s home in the town of Amstetten, and kept her as a sex slave.
The “monster of Amstetten” raped Elisabeth thousands of times, resulting in seven births. Three children he brought into the family he shared with his wife (who lived upstairs but swore she had known nothing and believed her daughter had gone off to live in a cult); one, a twin, died in infancy for lack of medical care (Fritzl later admitted to tossing his body into a furnace), and three grew up underground with their mother and “never saw sunlight,” police said at the time.
With News Wire Services