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Fritzl cried like a baby over 'runaway' cellar daughter
Allan Hall in Berlin25.03.09
THE psychiatrist who examined Josef Fritzl said he "cried like a baby" with his wife when he told her their daughter Elisabeth had run away.
Dr Adelheid Kastner said the cunning of Fritzl - who locked Elisabeth in a secret cellar beneath his Austrian home and repeatedly raped her - was "beyond belief".
Dr Kastner, who gave vital evidence at Fritzl's trial last week, said today: "In the 24 years he kept Elisabeth locked up he didn't betray himself once - not once. Only a man who can strictly separate the door to the cellar with a door to his mind could do this.
"Fritzl even sat with his own wife and cried with her like a baby about the fact that their daughter had 'run away'."
She told Germany's Stern Magazine that Fritzl, 73, felt an overwhelming desire to control. "The emotions which he knows are the feeling of triumph, of domination. And fear. He does not know any finer, positive emotions," she said.
Dr Kastner, 46, said she had never seen a client like Fritzl, who raped his daughter 3,000 times in the dungeon and fathered seven children with her, one of which died after three days.
He was convicted of his son Michael's murder and five other charges, including rape and incest, and will die behind bars in a secure psychiatric facility.
Dr Kastner said Fritzl saw Michael's death as a "logistical problem," and nothing more. "After the child died he had to find an efficient way to dispose of it. Before the court he even said he was a supporter of cremation over burials," she said.
Fritzl burned the baby's corpse in the solid-fuel stove he used to heat the house and scattered the ashes in his garden.
She said he planned to free his secret cellar family - Elisabeth, 42, her daughter Kerstin, 20, and sons Stefan, 19, and Felix, six - in April last year and "truly believed Elisabeth would not go to the police".
