Product Description

The only inside account of the Fritzl case - Josef Fritzl's horrific incarceration of his daughter in a windowless dungeon for 24 years and the seven children he fathered with her - from the journalists who helped to break the story. Until April 19 2008, Josef Fritzl seemed like an upstanding member of the community in the Austrian town of Amstetten: an ideal father and successful businessman who had worked his way up from humble beginnings to become a role model of respectability. Yet for over two decades he had been living a double life of unimaginable and unparalleled horror. In 1984 he had drugged his 18-year-old daughter, Elisabeth, and dragged her into a purpose-made prison under the house that he had spent five years preparing. He held her captive there for 24 years and raped her frequently. Fritzl initially kept his daughter chained to a bed and forced her to re-enact scenes from pornographic films he projected in the cellar. Three months into her incarceration Elisabeth miscarried what would have been her first child. Over the next 18 years in the cellar she bore her father seven children - six of whom survived. Lisa, Monika and Alexander were taken 'upstairs' to live with their grandmother. Michael died after birth. Kerstin, Stefan and Felix were never to see daylight, trapped with their mother in the five-room cellar. This bold and forensically-researched study sheds new light on the mind and the psychological development of the man who became one of the most unique and frightening criminals in history. It includes new information on the bizarre formative experiences that shaped his pathology and argues that his crimes, though unthinkable, were in many ways inevitable. Stefanie Marsh and Bojan Pancevski were the first English-speaking reporters to break the case and were there as the police uncovered the dungeon. They draw on previously unreleased testimonies from the trial as well as exclusive interviews and documents including confidential official files on the case to give the only complete and authoritative account of the forces that drove Fritzl to create another world, far from the light, in which his fantasies of control could be played out.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #84534 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
You won't need reminding of the case. But if you want to understand how and why it happened, this book is the one to get. It is no cuttings job - the authors are respected journalists who spent a year in Austria dedicated to the case.
--London Paper, 26th May 2009

Review
I was up with (this) excellent and calmly written book till one o'clock in the morning and am still feeling the after-effect.
--Libby Purves, Midweek, 10th June 2009

Review
Bojan Pancevski and the Times journalist Stefanie Marsh tell this story factually and without unnecessary embellishment. (...) they see Fritzl for what he is: a convicted rapist who got away with premeditated crimes because the authorities accepted his preposterous invention about his daughter running away to join a cult.
--Times, 19th June 2009

Customer Reviews

suprising page turner
I've not really read any crime books before and I was amazed at how engrossing a biographical account can be. I couldn't put it down. What really drew me in was the way in which the authors draw this clear psychological portrait of Fritzl. The book isn't salacious or demonizing, it's just cold accounting of his rationale for doing these terrible acts. And that's the terrifying part, you really start to understand the dysfunctional family dynamics. Dynamics that started way before Elizabeth, that were born out of the atrocities of Nazi Austria and his horrifying one-eyed mother. This is a really great read.

It made me cry
Finally I feel as if I sort of understand how this horrible thing happened - the authors dig back not just to Josef's mother, but to HER mother and the whole twisted "family values" - love and hate seem to intertwine and blend. But when he drags Elisabeth into the cellar, the writing is so vivid that I almost felt sick, and found tears running down my face. This is the only book that goes all the way through the trial, so has closure that the others don't.

Excellent book
This book is amazing. It takes the reader through the life of Josef Fritzl, and in fact through the hard and brutal life of his mother before him, so that we get some insight into what brought about his character. The author does this without at any point being sensationalist or salacious. I thoroughly recommend the book.