Cue the Banjo Music

[Tisket]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/27/austria.cellar/index.html


AMSTETTEN, Austria (CNN) -- Austrian police believe a 73-year-old man held his daughter captive in his cellar for the past two decades and fathered at least six children with her, according to police and state-run news reports Sunday.

The woman, identified as 42-year-old Elisabeth F., has been missing since 1984, when she was 18 years old, police said at a news conference.

The situation came to light earlier this month after her daughter -- a 19-year-old woman, identified as Kristen F. -- was hospitalized in Amstetten after falling unconscious, according to police.

She was admitted to a hospital in Amstetten, outside Vienna, by her grandfather with a note from her biological mother requesting help. Amstetten is a rural town about 150 km (93 miles) west of Vienna.

But police said a DNA test later revealed her grandfather, Josef F., was also her father, according to ORF, Austria's state-run news agency.

That sparked a police investigation, which revealed that Josef F. may have fathered at least six children with his daughter, forcing her and three of the surviving children to live in the cellar of his house, according to ORF's Peter Schmitzberger.

The children are now between 5 and 19 years old.

Police are awaiting DNA tests to verify their relationship to Josef F., who faces arrest for "severe crimes against family members," according to police. So far, he has not given a statement to police.

Police spokesman Franz Polzer told ORF that the 73-year-old has led police to several hidden rooms in his cellar accessible only by an electronic passcode that he provided to police.

On Sunday, police searched the hidden rooms where Josef F. admitted he kept his daughter and their children, Polzer told ORF. The rooms included sleeping quarters, a kitchen and a bathroom, which Josef F. told police he built, Polzer said. Neighbors told ORF they were shocked to hear the news, and had no indication such horrors were taking place in their town.

"One can't imagine how it could happen, how nobody could realize anything of what was going on in the cellar of this house," Schmitzberger told CNN. "It's quite unimaginable."

Acting on "a confidential tip," Amstetten police apprehended Josef F. and Elisabeth F. on Saturday near the hospital for questioning, according to a police statement. Once police assured the daughter that she would never have contact with her father again, "she was able to tell the whole story," Schmitzberger said.

Josef F. lived upstairs with his wife, Rosemarie F., who police said had no idea about her husband's other family living in the cellar.





Fucking freak. And how could his wife have no idea there were people living in her cellar for twenty years.

P.S. Posted this as an alternative for those not interested in clicking on ClydeR's latest mindless, posturing drivel.

[Gan]

I also agree about the wife not knowing is a load of BS.

Freaks all the way around.

[Clove]

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/deliverance.JPG

[Clove]

...how could his wife have no idea there were people living in her cellar for twenty years.That's just keeping with tradition started in WWII.

[Allereli]

Updated article featuring an interview with an old friend of the Dad/Grandpa. Check out the part where he's called a DIY genius. Imagine if he had taken all that energy he spent building the dungeon and had built a modern man cave instead.

Austrian incest dad vacationed in Thailand

Story Highlights:
Incest dad twice holidayed in Thailand while daughter remained in cellar

Austrian family terrorized by decades of incest meet for the first time

Josef Fritzl kept daughter imprisoned under home for 24 years, police say

Fritzl, who appeared in court Tuesday, has admitted guilt and faces 15 years
AMSTETTEN, Austria (CNN) -- Josef Fritzl, the man Austrian police say has confessed to imprisoning his daughter for 24 years and fathering seven of her children, twice holidayed in Thailand while she remained trapped in a cellar below his house, according to German media reports.

Germany's Bild newspaper quoted a holiday companion, identified only as Paul H, who said he and the 73-year-old Fritzl had traveled to Thailand together twice and spent time in each other's homes.

"He went [to Thailand] without his wife; apparently she had to look after the children... once he had a very long massage from a young Thai girl at the beach. He really loved that," Paul H told the newspaper, which featured video footage of Fritzl laughing and receiving a massage in Thailand on its Web site.

"Once I saw how Josef bought an evening dress and racy lingerie for a very slim woman in Pattaya [Thailand] on the beach. He got really angry when he realized I saw him. Then he told me that he has a girlfriend on the side. The items were meant for her. He told me not to tell his wife." Watch footage of Fritzl on vacation at a Thai beach resort »

The pair had also ventured to Oktoberfest.

Paul H said he had visited Fritzl's house three times, the last in 2005.

"We sat out on the terrace and had a really nice evening... the kids were well behaved, however, they had a great respect for their father. They were never allowed downstairs into the cellar but we never thought anything of it," he told Bild.

"Now that I think of the dungeon down there, I feel really sick in the stomach."

Paul H said Fritzl was a DIY "genius," constantly extending and building on to the house.

Meanwhile, family members at the center of the incest and imprisonment case have held an "astonishing" reunion, medical officials said.

"They met each other on Sunday morning," clinic director Berthold Kepplinger told reporters Tuesday. "And it is astonishing how easy it worked, that the children came together and also it was astonishing how easy it happened that the grandmother and the mother came together."

Investigators say Fritzl held his daughter, Elisabeth, captive in a cellar for 24 years. He raped her repeatedly, they say, and eventually fathered seven of her children.

Elisabeth and two of her children were reunited Sunday with three of her other children and her mother, Kepplinger said Tuesday. The three children and her mother lived in the home above the cellar.

Elisabeth's eldest child, 19-year-old Kerstin Fritzl, remains in hospital.

A seventh child died years ago, shortly after birth. Fritzl told police he burned the infant's body in a furnace.

The story of the family's imprisonment began to unravel a week ago, when Kerstin fell seriously ill with convulsions and was hospitalized.

Austrian police Wednesday denied reports that they were investigating possible links between Fritzl and the unsolved murder of a woman.

Franz Polzer, director of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, said Fritzl had owned an Austrian hotel near where a woman was found murdered decades ago. However, they were not investigating the incident at this stage.

Meanwhile, an Austrian girl who was held prisoner in a basement for eight years said the family faced a long period of adjustment. See how Austrians are troubled by the case »

Natascha Kampusch was 10 years old when she was kidnapped on her way to school in March 1998.

She escaped from a bunker below the house of Wolfgang Priklopil in a suburb of Vienna in August 2007. Priklopil killed himself by throwing himself under a train only hours later.

"Although they are now in a secret location, I believe it might have been even better to leave them where they were but that was probably impossible," she said of the Fritzl family Tuesday.

"Yes, because that was of course the environment they were used to and now they're somewhere else. Pulling them abruptly out of this situation, without transition, to hold them and isolating them to some extent, it can't be good for them."

Officials said Tuesday that DNA testing had confirmed Fritzl fathered the children.

His DNA also was found on a letter sent to the Fritzl family that was made to look like it was from his daughter, Elisabeth, said Polzer. See inside the 'House of horrors' »

Authorities said Fritzl sent other letters over the years, leading the family to believe that Elisabeth was a runaway who had abandoned three of her children on their doorstep. He dictated at least one of the letters to his daughter, they said.

Authorities said it did not appear that Fritzl's wife, Rosemarie, was involved in or knew about her husband's activities.

Reports have surfaced in The Times of London and Austria's Presse that Fritzl was convicted of sexual assault in the 1960s, but there is nothing in his record to confirm this, said District Governor Hans Heinz Lenze. He added, however, that records were expunged after a certain number of years.

Prosecutors were checking archives to find the information, said Gerhard Sedlacek, prosecutor for the state of Poelten.

The Times of London quoted a 50-year-old neighbor who said that when he was 10, he remembered "how we children were afraid to play near Mr. Fritzl's house because of the rumors that he had raped a woman and spent some time in jail for it." Watch a report of how the case unfolded. »

Fritzl led police to the cellar on Sunday. A day later, he confessed to raping his daughter, now 42, and keeping her and their children in captivity, police said.

Fritzl was able to convince social service workers, friends and family that Elisabeth had run away in 1984, when she was about 18. The father, who police described as an authoritarian figure, forbade anyone from entering the cellar.

In the cellar with Elisabeth were Kerstin and two sons, aged 5 and 18.

CNN's Phil Black, Nadine Schmidt and Eileen Hsieh contributed to this story.

All AboutAustria








Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/30/austria.meeting/index.html

[Clove]

It's going to be interesting to see the Austrian Tourism Board respond to this. "Come to Austria- nobody will lock you in a cellar."

Nicht in Österreich

[Allereli]

actually Austria is the shit. I was awestruck by Vienna

[Clove]

actually Austria is the shit. I was awestruck by ViennaYou got lucky...

[Tisket]

Fritzl, who appeared in court Tuesday, has admitted guilt and faces 15 years

Ok, I don't usually bump my own threads but this really bugs me, I mean 15 years for imprisoning someone for 24 years?

Granted, at his age he will probably not survive fifteen years in prison but the sentence range for the crime seems incredibly low to me.

[radamanthys]

I'm a banjo player, and I find the thread topic extraordinarily offensive. I mean... my daughter's baby doesn't like it...

[Clove]

Ok, I don't usually bump my own threads but this really bugs me, I mean 15 years for imprisoning someone for 24 years?

Granted, at his age he will probably not survive fifteen years in prison but the sentence range for the crime seems incredibly low to me.Remember that next time you're pissed off at American justice. We're not unique.

[Stanley Burrell]

Ok, I don't usually bump my own threads but this really bugs me, I mean 15 years for imprisoning someone for 24 years?

Granted, at his age he will probably not survive fifteen years in prison but the sentence range for the crime seems incredibly low to me.

I was like "What?"

This is an AP article from The Sun, I think. My brain is not yet ready to go over the multiple political themes at hand.


VIENNA, Austria — Police say Josef Fritzl left a lot of human wreckage in his wake: the daughter he imprisoned and raped for 24 years, the seven children he fathered with her and the wife whose life he shattered.

Yet, for an atrocity that has stunned the world, he may wind up serving just 15 years in prison if charged, tried and convicted.

Practically speaking, that may translate into a life sentence for Fritzl, 73. But his case has revived a debate over Europe’s lenient penal system — and whether harsher, U.S.-style sentencing guidelines might help deter such heinous crimes.

‘‘Fifteen years for destroying human lives is unacceptable,’’ said Harald Vilimsky, a public safety policy official with Austria’s conservative Freedom Party. ‘‘Any punishment that falls a single day short of a life sentence is a mockery of the victims.’’

Many Europeans abhor the death penalty, and capital punishment is illegal across the 27-nation EU. But in many countries, even convicted murderers handed life sentences seldom serve more than 25 years.

Sweden has life imprisonment for murder, but the sentencing guidelines go as low as 10 years. That applies — in theory at least — even to serial killers.

In Germany, convicted rapists are punished with sentences of six months to five years. Serial cases, and those involving weapons or death threats, can fetch up to 10 years in prison — but also as little as 12 months.

Poland’s maximum for rape is 15 years, and that would apply even for sexual assaults repeatedly carried out over two dozen years as alleged in the Austrian case. The standard time served? Two to 12 years.

‘‘It’s rare that anyone serves the full sentence in Europe,’’ said James Whitman, a professor of comparative and foreign law at Yale. ‘‘It’s expected that people are let out early.’’

In the U.S., by contrast, first-degree rape is punishable by up to life imprisonment in states ranging from Maryland to South Dakota.

Experts say Europe’s shorter sentences — and its reluctance to jail people for offenses considered minor, such as possessing small amounts of marijuana — help explain why its prisons are far less crowded than U.S. lockups.

The U.S. has the most prisoners per capita in the world, with 751 for every 100,000 people, according to the London-based International Center for Prison Studies. Most European nations trail far behind: Britain’s rate is 151 per 100,000, Austria’s is 108 and Denmark’s is 66.

Fritzl surely would face a tougher prison term anywhere in America, and in some states maybe even the death penalty, said Dan Richman, a law professor at Columbia University.

‘‘I think it’s fair to say that in any jurisdiction in the U.S. his maximum sentence would be much more severe,’’ he said.

In Italy, murder carries a minimum sentence of 21 years and a maximum of life. But life terms are rarely handed down in a system that emphasizes rehabilitation over incarceration, said Carlo Guarnieri, a justice expert at the University of Bologna Law School.

‘‘The Italian system is very European and not American at all,’’ Guarnieri said. ‘‘In general terms, penalties are lenient. The general outlook of the court is in favor or rehabilitation, although today there is a lot of discussion that this doesn’t work.’’

In Austria, prosecutors are still mulling how to charge Fritzl, who police say confessed to imprisoning his daughter Elisabeth — now 42 — in a warren of windowless, soundproofed rooms beneath his home when she was 18 and raping her repeatedly.

They say Fritzl also admitted to incinerating the body of one of the seven children he fathered after the child died in infancy.

Authorities say Fritzl could face up to 15 years if convicted of rape. Prosecutors are looking into whether the retired electrician could be tried for ‘‘murder through failure to act’’ in the infant’s death.

Austria’s criminal code prescribes prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years to life for murder — but in Austrian terms, a life sentence is interpreted as 20 to 25 years of confinement.

Courts also don’t tack on extra time for related offenses, unlike in the U.S., where weapons charges or crossing state lines can add significantly to the time ultimately spent behind bars.

Fritzl has not yet been charged, but the most likely charges he faces are rape, incest and false imprisonment. If convicted of all three, he would serve the sentences concurrently and the maximum would be 15 years based on the rapes.

Potentially, it could be far less if he mounts a successful insanity defense.

Either way, a trial could be a long way off: Police say their investigation may drag on for another six months.

Austria’s justice minister, Maria Berger, said Wednesday the government will conduct a sweeping review of all sentencing laws and propose legislation doubling prison sentences for ‘‘especially dangerous’’ predators.

But Berger insists a more draconian approach probably wouldn’t stop the next Fritzl.

‘‘To this kind of perpetrator,’’ she said, ‘‘the severity of the punishment means nothing.’’

Europeans frequently criticize the U.S. system, where first-degree murder and other heinous crimes are punishable by life without possibility of parole, or, in some states, death.

Many criticized this month’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld Kentucky’s three-drug lethal injection method and prompted other states to take steps to resume executions, a practice considered barbaric in Europe.

In 2005, death penalty opponents succeeded in getting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name stripped from a soccer stadium in his Austrian hometown because he refused to pardon a convict on California’s death row.

But Europeans have also been rattled by some singularly horrific cases that have challenged their approach to crime and punishment:

— In Spain, groups representing victims of the 2004 Madrid commuter train terrorist bombings that killed 191 people and injured more than 1,800 expressed outrage over last year’s acquittal of the alleged ringleader, Rabei Osman. Although the three main figures were sentenced to tens of thousands of years in prison, four other top suspects got off with sentences of 10 to 18 years. Prosecutors are appealing Osman’s acquittal.

— Belgium’s notorious serial pedophile, Marc Dutroux, was on parole for raping schoolgirls when he committed a spree of child kidnappings, rapes and murders that eventually led to a life sentence in 2004. In theory, Dutroux eventually could come up for parole, though that’s unlikely because a judge has pronounced him a danger to society and Belgium has toughened its parole rules.

— Britons are still debating the handling of the infamous 1993 murder of 2-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. They were tried as adults and jailed for the slaying, but released eight years later with new identities. Britain’s maximum penalty for adults convicted of murder, rape or kidnapping is life imprisonment, but judges have broad discretion to decide whether to grant parole.

Guarnieri, the Italian justice system expert, said his country’s approach reflects its Roman Catholic culture.

‘‘There is an attitude to forgive,’’ he said. ‘‘If you read the newspapers or watch TV, every time there is a crime, the journalist tries to interview the victim and ask if they are forgiving. Always.’’

[Stanley Burrell]

Alright. First two Stanley conspiracy theories of the day is that (I'm not caffeinated enough to think beyond personal agendas):

A) A nation deeply involved in The Holocaust must always refrain from appearing heavy handed.

B) Anti-American sentiment is so strong, in this day and age, that the court system across the Atlantic will be manipulated as strongly as possible in order to always pose a mirror of U.S. justice, due to envious butt hurt-ism.