INFAMY: The Monster Who Inspired Room

Hi everyone, before today's episode, we want to tell you about What the Fact. It's a new show from Conor Tomlinson, who you know from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum, and Carter Roy from Murder, True Crime Stories. Every week they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Conor's infectious energy will make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on Earth. Follow What the Fact, wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact on. Welcome back to Crimes of Infamy. Alright, so we're gonna let's kick this episode off the exact same way we did the first episode with a quick game of two truths and a lie. We are going to be talking about today's subject, Josef Fritzel, so tell me which one you think is a lie. Okay. Number one, Josef built an underground prison in his cellar, single-handedly. Number two, he imprisoned his wife, Rosemary, in that cell when she found out about his crimes. And number three, he was a prominent landlord in real estate mogul, well known in his hometown of Austria. I want all three to be lies. Of course, that's always the answer. Every single episode, it's like, ugh, why are any of these factual? Why does this have to exist? Why do people have to be horrible monsters? But I do know the number two is the lie. Number two is the lie. Josef's wife remained unaware of his brutal crimes for over 20 years. He did imprison another family member, Elizabeth, his daughter, and his underground bunker, and no one in his family, not even his wife, knew about the prison underneath their home. Today we are going to tell you all about Josef Fritzel, one of the most evil men in modern history. His sickening crimes made headlines around the world, eventually inspiring a novel and film by Elizabeth Donahue called "Room." And while "Room" is more of a dark psychological drama than a typical horror film, the story is truly dark, truly twisted, and truly terrifying. Welcome to Crimes of Infamy, a crime house original powered by paved studios, where Sabrina Diana Broga and Corinne Vienne. Every Tuesday, we are exploring a different corner of the true crime universe, examining cases that left a permanent impact on society, and we're giving you a frenzy to every twist and turn along the way. I'll be the one walking you through the chilling narratives of every story. And I'll be zooming in on the moment and showing you how the very real scenes in these stories played out. If you're loving Crimes of, please follow, rate, and review us wherever you listen. It helps us build this community, and we love hearing from you. To get early access and ad-free listening, subscribe to the Crimes House Plus community on Apple Podcasts. You can also catch us on YouTube where we include visuals that bring every case to life. This season is all about the crimes behind the world's most iconic horror movies, and today we're talking about Josef Fritzl, a man who kept his daughter locked in his basement for 24 years. During that time, he sexually assaulted her repeatedly and forced her to have seven children. Several of the kids live for over a decade underground without ever seeing sunlight. The tale of his shocking abuse inspired the 2015 film Room. A warning before we begin, this episode covers topics that are extremely disturbing. It contains descriptions of murder, sexual assault, child loss, infanticide, and incest. So please listen with care. From 1984 to 2008, Josef Fritzl kept his daughter Elizabeth locked in a dungeon beneath his house in Amsterdam, Austria. He starved her, beat her, and raped her repeatedly. Over the course of two decades, Elizabeth gave birth to seven kids who Josef also abused. So before we talk about anything else, we want to say the names of these children. Kerstin, Stefan, Felix, Lisa, Monica, Michael, and Alexander. Elizabeth and these children have their lives twisted by Josef's demented abuse, and it is crucial that we acknowledge the indescribable pain and trauma that they endured, all at the hands of Josef Fritzl. When his sickening acts became public, they shocked Austria and the wider world, but author Emma Donahue found herself in awe of Elizabeth Fritzl's resilience. The struggle to be a mother in such dehumanizing conditions inspired her to write a fictional novel called Room. And in 2015, her book was made into a critically acclaimed film starring Rielarson and Jacob Trimbley. I have seen a lot of horror films. I have seen a lot of really dark graphic things take place on the screen, and I will say Room actually traumatized me. I agree, but weirdly, it is like a movie that I time and time go back to because it's so powerful. And I think what it comes from is as someone who battles with a lot of mental health issues and has gone through a lot of therapy. I feel like this movie was the first film that I saw that while I can't relate to so much of the horrible things that they went through, it was the first movie that I feel like showed mental health and depression and anxiety in a way that I related to. So it's like a weird twisted comfort movie for you. Yeah. I'm sick. That's in the head. That's wild. Because I truly, I will never re-watch it because I think that acting wise, it was so well done, but I had never cried so hard from a movie. I had to pause it. I was dry heaving. I was convulsing. I was like gasping for air for like a full-time minutes. It took me days to recover from watching it because it does feel so real. You feel like you're actually watching this happen. But at the time that I watched that, I did not know that it was based on a real case. I re-watched it last night and I experienced what you did. It's like you can't hold it back. I ugly cried in a lot of moments and it is horrific to know that it is inspired by a true case because I can't even fathom, but I really do agree that the courage and the will to survive that Elizabeth Fritzell, the real-life victim in this case, displayed is truly inspiring. Right. And the resilience of children who are said to me, their world is complete. It's like being abducted by aliens, like you're suddenly in a completely different world that you've never. Yeah. Well, okay. So, if you haven't seen a room before, let me give you a quick synopsis. There's a young woman at her son who are held captive in a shed for years before attempting a daring escape. Like Joseph Fritzell, their captain in room, Old Nick, abuses them, starves them, and cuts them off from the outside world. And as hard as it is to believe, the real-life case that inspired room is even more brutal than the film. At precisely 7 a.m. on April 19, 2008, an emergency dispatcher in the small town of Amstet in Austria receives a call from an old man. The caller says he found a young woman collapsed in his apartment building, and she needs urgent medical attention. He gives the address, but before the dispatcher can ask for more information, the old man hangs up. When the ambulance arrives, the paramedics are shocked by what they see. The young woman is unconscious. Her lip is bleeding. It seems she's bitten into her tongue. She is deathly pale. It almost looks like she hasn't seen the sun in years. On top of that, she has gaping bald patches on her scalp, and most of her teeth are gone, too. This girl is in critical condition. She's in such bad shape she's placed on a ventilator when she gets to the hospital. Dr. writer, head of intensive care, rushes to examine her, and what he sees shocks him. Severe anemia, multiple organ failure, and signs of long-term neglect that defy explanation. At first, he suspects poisoning, but tests quickly come back negative. Whatever has destroyed this young woman's body, it is unlike anything he's encountered before. This girl's life is on the line, and three hours later, he finally learns who she is. That is when a distinguished, looking old man with gray hair and a bushy mustache walks into the hospital. His name is Josef Fritzel, and he explains that the girl is his 19-year-old granddaughter, Yosef. Josef tells Dr. writer that he'd found Kirsten on his doorstep this morning. His daughter Elizabeth had abandoned her there with a note, begging Yosef to help her. In a very strangely matter-of-fact tone, Yosef says this isn't even the first time she's done this. His daughter Elizabeth is in a cult that disapproves of children, and she has dropped three other kids at his doorstep over the years. 16-year-old Lisa, 15-year-old Monica, and 12-year-old Alex. His words are calm, but his tone is off. He doesn't ask after Kirsten's condition, doesn't express worry, doesn't even betray the slightest tremor of fear. only in the world. insists she be made well quickly so that he can take her home. Now Fritzel's reputation precedes him, a successful landlord outwardly respectable with the heir of an old-world patriarch. Yet standing at the bedside of a girl fighting for her life, he seems "curiously hollow," more concerned with appearances than with her survival. When Fritzel finally steps out of earshot, Dr. Reiter moves to the nurse's station, picks up the phone, and calls the police. His instinct scream that something is wrong. Josef Fritzel is hiding something, and if they don't get answers soon, Kirshin may very well die. A few hours after Dr. Reiter alerted the authorities, officers then questioned 73-year-old Josef Fritzel at his home. They were familiar with his stories, Dr. Elizabeth's disappearance had been investigated by local authorities, and Interpol back when she first went missing. And all they knew was that apparently she had joined a cult, and the information provided by Josef himself when she had gone missing at first was that she ran away, and then the knowledge that she ran away to a cult. Initially police investigated it, and there was no sign of her, no sign of Elizabeth, and after Elizabeth's 19th birthday passed, she was officially no longer a minor under Austrian law, and so they stopped looking for her. But now, with Kirshin's life on the line, they were desperate to finally find Elizabeth. However, Josef was actually not really being cooperative, even though he did bring this child, this kid into the hospital, I guess, kind of an adult. He was very evasive, he didn't seem very interested in seeking out his daughter and talking to Elizabeth, or even finding her. And so Dr. Reiter took matters into his own hands, and he went on TV, and he called to the public to help find Elizabeth, so basically like reopening her case in a way. Yeah, well, because now it's child neglect, like they need to find Elizabeth to find out what's going on with Kirshin. Right, and she keeps having kids and just dropping them off, and so what is going on? So the more headlines the story generated, the more resistant Josef became, but the story wouldn't go away. And a week after Kirshin was brought to the hospital, Josef called Dr. Reiter with some shocking news. Elizabeth, who had been missing for over two decades, had suddenly returned. So upon returning, he brought her to the hospital to assist with Kirshin's medical condition, and the police were there waiting for them. They brought her down to the station so that she could answer questions about her daughter. Investigators expected to charge her with parental neglect. But after some time, Elizabeth promises to tell the police the truth, as long as she and her children never have to see her father again. Alarm bells. Yeah. Elizabeth then proceeds to tell police the horrifying truth. The her father, Josef, had kept her locked in his basement for the past 24 years. Over the course of those years, Josef raped her countless times, abused her, kept her locked in the dark and forced her to bear seven children. Her daughter, Kirshin, had never seen the light of day before coming to the hospital. And the allegations were just so seconding it was almost beyond belief. And at first, police didn't want to believe it. But with these accusations, they took Josef into custody and eventually were given access to the codes to enter Josef's secret backyard dungeon. And what they found was worse than they ever could have imagined. Unopening the door, the smell was so foul that they had to start working in three hour shifts maximum. That's the max that they could spend in that bunker. And keep in mind, Elizabeth spent nearly two decades in there. So everything Elizabeth had said and more was true. Police discovered countless sexually sadistic reading materials, photocopies of diaries from Josef's female tenants, gags, essentially a torture chamber filled with damning evidence of all of his crimes. And they were just barely uncovering their horrific truth at this point. Because as they were putting all the pieces together, they couldn't help but wonder how could anyone do something like this? And what kind of monster is Josef Fritzel? Today we're going to look back at his upbringing and his background to try to understand maybe what led him to these monstrous crimes. And this is a very hefty case, and there's so much to dig into. But I think truly throughout all of this, it's important to remember the unbelievable courage that Elizabeth had to survive and ultimately save herself and her children from such traumatic events. I just keep thinking about the detail of the smell and how disgusting and poor living conditions it was. And it's like she bore children there. But she gave birth, there were infants, 24 years, disturbing, more than disturbing. It doesn't even seem real, it's so horrible. So the story starts even before Josef Fritzel was born. And really this is kind of an examination at the beginning of generational trauma being passed down because it starts with Josef's grandmother who was abused by her husband and forced to raise the children that he fathered with their maids. And it's basically just like this history of these male figures in the Fritzel family just abusing their children and wives and it's just a pattern that continues and continues. Yeah. And this leads us to Josef Fritzel who was born in Amsterdam, Austria in 1935. It was a very turbulent time at this time in the country because when Josef was just three years old, this is when Adolf Hitler invaded Austria. And by 1939 World War II was in full swing. And this is kind of a bit of a generalization for Austria at this time, but basically Austria was very influenced by conservative values and strict social norms and sometimes less oversight and private and family matters. And according to Josef, this external climate was not the only thing he had to fear because according to him, danger lurked inside of his own home. Right. And to Josef, his mom, Maria, she was a super religious fanatic and a committed Nazi. What a combo. Yeah. So she was diehard Catholic, she was very domineering, demanding, abusive. And so it's fair to say there was probably not a lot of love to go around at the home. And almost as soon as Josef could walk, his mom taught him to hate his own father, calling him a loser and a coward, which maybe he was if the trauma and cycle of abuse was basically that these women were abused by their partners, perhaps he was a loser and a coward. I don't know, but Josef was taught that at a very young age. And then when Josef was four, Maria, threw her husband out of the house and Josef never saw his dad again. And this is when his mom becomes his entire world. She ruled the household with an iron fist quite literally and discipline was all she cared about. She made sure Josef grew up to be a man, even if that meant physically beating him into being said man. And I think this is the really tough part about true crime because we never want to put blame on someone else for a person's actions. But I do think it's important to look at what formed Josef. And most of this information is alleged after the fact by Josef himself. But all being said, I think the toxic cycle of abuse is really prevalent in this case. And I did read, which is factual beyond Josef's retellings, that Maria did have a violent streak that led to her spending time in a concentration camp, like she attacked an officer. Oh wow. But even that, it's hard to know what she's trying to defend herself. Right. Yeah, we can't say for certain. Yeah. Sometimes when everyone's lying, what even is the truth when you're living in that moment? And also what types of abuses did Maria face in the concentration camp itself? Right. It's also interesting Sabrina that at the end of the episodes, you say by mommies when I feel like a lot of these episodes and a lot of these killers have really bad relationships with their mommies. Mommie issues or misplaced anger for their mothers that is being put onto others. Right. I know exactly what Maria was facing and what happened to her when she was in the concentration camp. But according to Josef, when she returned home, the abuse became so much worse, it was intolerable. Regardless, it's clear that it was Josef with his mother for most of his upbringing and her opinion, her rules were paramount and that was all Josef knew a lot of the information that we got from the story comes from the book Secrets in the Cellar by John Glatt. And he did a really good job of laying out kind of like what Josef claimed that he went through as a boy. And it's very clear that his upbringing was very skewed, his perspective of what a healthy or like normal parent and child relationship was reflected in his crimes. Yes. And according to Josef, nothing he did was ever good enough for his mom, Maria beat him often, far beyond the occasional spanking. And this is pretty bad. Yeah, there was one report where she beat him so badly, like he fell unconscious in his own pool of blood. It's really, really, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I think I referenced this before, but a child called it, that book is horrible and it was written by the man who went through that sort of child abuse himself. So it's kind of like that. So his love for her was confusing, right? Because he's a child and this is his mom and he's supposed to look at her for protection and care. It was a sort of like toxic blend of fear and admiration as he was growing up. Yeah. to his teenage years, that relationship became a bit more twisted and confusing for him. He actually admitted to having some inappropriate fantasies about his mom, but for the time being as he was growing up, he mostly kept those thoughts to himself. He did well in school. He managed to make some friends with classmates, even so it seems like he was always trying to keep people at an arm's length afraid that his mom wouldn't approve. Yeah. It's just like, hey, we've had read the same story. We know exactly. Yes. A lot of similarities in the cases we've talked about. While he was interested in girls, he didn't really go on many dates either, though apparently the girls still sought him out. He was. So he says. But the hardest thing about this is a lot of these retellings come from him, and as we'll learn throughout this episode, his version of reality is very skewed, and there's a lot of delusion going on. Who knows if that's actually true? It seems like a common theme. So instead, he threw himself into schooling instead of dating, and after a one-year electrical engineering course, Josef got a job at a steel factory in 1951 when he was just 16 years old. And for a while, he would work his shift, and then he would come back home to his mother. But by the time he got into his early 20s, he wanted a little more independence. He didn't really want to be with his mom all the time. And that is kind of when some real resentment started to grow between Josef and his mom. He started going out to bars, but that wasn't really what kept him out all night. Instead, he started spending time out on the streets indulging in really creepy desires that normally he kept private. It's a moonlit night in the woods outside Lins, Austria, and 20-year-old Josef coasts on his bike down a gravel path. The thin, crescent moon just bright enough to outline the road ahead. Few people are out, and that suits him. Solitude sharpens his senses. And that is when he spots her. In the distance, a young woman heading back toward town. Josef pedals faster, the steady clink of his chain carrying across the quiet night. She hears the sound, and turns toward him. For a moment, her face catches in the moonlight, high cheekbones, a halo of red hair. Josef's pulse quickens with excitement. She looks just like his mother, the exact kind of woman he's been looking for. Everything happens quickly. He breaks hard, swings off the bike, drops his pants right in front of this young woman. She screams and bolts into the trees. Josef watches her go of volcano of rage and desire rumbling within him. He lives for these moments. He loves embarrassing young women, making them flee from him. It gives him a rush of power. And when the woods fall silent again, he mounts his bicycle, drifts into a nearby neighborhood. Windows glow like beacons, calling to him. He lingers in the shadows, peering in at undressing women, savoring the thrill of secrets stolen. It is intoxicating, like seeing pieces of their lives no one else is meant to witness. Then, a siren wails in the distance, and Josef stiffens. He's been caught before and cannot afford to be found out again. Reluctantly, he mounts his bike and rides back home. As he approaches his back door, unease sparks in his mind. Because sure, he got a fix, a rush of endorphins from the endeavour, but he knows it won't last. And lately, these urges have come stronger, earlier, and more frequent. If they get any stronger, he's not sure what he might do. The thought frightens him and excites him. Why have so many crop circles appeared around Britain? How did thousands of people demonstrate powers of telepathy? Can the dead suck the life from the living? Join me, Tim Hartford, for a trip into the paranormal, throughout Halloween month on cautionary tales. Listen to cautionary tales on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Josef stayed under the radar, or at least he wasn't caught for the next year or so, which is so thickening, like think about how many people and how many women he creeped on over the years. I know. They just don't know. Right. But also, there is one woman during that period of time that he met and started dating and married, 17-year-old Rosemary. Rosemary was four years younger than Josef, and outwardly they did look sort of like this conventional couple. Neighbors would describe Rosemary as quiet and polite and somewhat submissive, which we can imagine. Josef can I like that? Yes. Because it was all about control, as many of these murderers seek out. So he wanted a wife that he could control, the kind of person who wouldn't question his longnights out, prowling the town. And almost as soon as the two got married, Josef tells Rosemary that he expects them to have a very large family. And this goes back to the generational trauma thing, again, one, he is finally retaking control in his life, right? He lived his whole life with his mother who was in control and abusive. And now, he's repeating the cycle by finding someone he can enact that abuse on to because he never had that control in his life. And then to going back to Josef's grandmother, there's this like theme in their family ancestry of not being able to have children and having this desire, the strong desire to continue the family line over and over, right? And Josef and Rosemary had seven children together. Rosemary took on the role of homemaker and, as we could have guessed, and was later confirmed and interviews. Josef was emotionally and physically abusive towards Rosemary. Nothing she did was good enough. Sound familiar? Rosemary's parents despised Josef. They fully believed that he was taking advantage of her, which their belief was correct. He was. But Rosemary sided with her new husband. He started to isolate herself from family, which is a common thing with people who are in these sort of abusive relationships. But still, exerting dominance over his wife was not enough for Josef. Even though Rosemary gave him literally everything he wanted, he started to have more perverted fantasies and they started to fester and they started to grow. And at night, he continued to go around to the windows and peep in the windows. And while Rosemary was pregnant with their second child, he actually was arrested for exposing himself to a local woman. But getting caught didn't discourage him at all. After that, his nightly crime sprees got even more intense. And in 1967, now 32-year-old Josef broke into a home of a 24-year-old woman and threatened to kill her with a knife and he then raped her. Fortunately, Josef is caught for this crime and he's even suspected of multiple other attacks, rapes, and attempted rapes, so you would think that he would go away to present forever. Right. And that is where the episode could wrap up. But the police are only able to pin one crime onto him. And Josef is sentenced to 18 months in prison of which he only serves 12 months. And then by 1970, his release goes right back home with this family back into civilization like no big deal and continues to work. He works as an engineer and manufactures sewage pipes. Rosemary's family begs her to leave Josef but she stays. And two years later Rosemary gives birth to twins so this is now her fifth and sixth child with Josef. Yeah. 35-year-old Josef decides the family needs more space, right? So they need to move to a bigger home. And guess who is a bigger home? His mom. A three-story home. A three-story home. Mommy. But Josef doesn't want to live with his mommy. But he wants her house. He wants to alter himself. And so now, the next piece of information I'm going to tell you, it has been debated over time. In court documents, it's said that Josef admitted that before moving his family into the home, he locked his own mother in the attic going as far as breaking up the windows. And then he told his neighbors that his mother Maria died. And when you look this up, most articles will say that this is fact, like even the Guardian reported it, but Josef later claimed that this wasn't true and it was purely something he imagined and wanted to do. And Maria wasn't the only relative he fantasized about imprisoning because before long, he would turn his attention to another member of the family, his own daughter. And this time, he would act on those impulses in the most sickening way possible. It's 1971, and Josef, Rosemary, and their six children move into their new home, his mother's home. Rosemary has her hands full of managing six children. And Josef's only parental responsibility, I guess, is to punish them. That's the only time that he becomes present in their lives. Yeah. Great dad. Anytime they disobey, he beats them, beats them as badly as his mom used to be him. Sometimes he beats Rosemary too. He belittles her in public. He demands absolute subservience, yet despite all of this behavior and his criminal past, apparently, the community still liked him. I'm not sure how much they actually saw, because if he's berating her in public, you would think that there'd be more witnesses or something. But apparently, he remained well liked in his community. He had a good reputation as a businessman, he was a landlord. And in public, he treated everyone else with respect. But behind closed doors, he's a monster. And - My biggest thing here is clearly he's frightening. He's terrifying to his children. He's terrifying to his wife. Are people kind of just keeping their opinions to themselves and not getting involved in a family's personal matters? And are people actually scared of him as well? Like I couldn't imagine him being your landlord. - Yeah. - And what's later found in this underground bunker, like journal entries, he photocopied from tenants, like young women who lived in his buildings. - Absolutely disgusting. I mean, he was like peeking into their homes and sneaking out. - Basically, it's bought a building to be a peeping comment. - Yep. - He becomes a regular with several local sex workers, but this isn't just morally questionable. The acts that he engages in with them are super dark, like downright dark. - Yeah. - He's only interested in sadomasochistic sex and over time his taste become more and more extreme. Sometimes he actually pays the women to pretend like they're dead, to pretend like they're corpses. - She is. - And eventually all of these women, his regulars stop taking him. They refuse to engage with him and take him on as a client anymore because it just, his request keep building on one another and they become more and more dark and twisted. And so they're just like, these are bizarre. We can't do this. So left frustrated. Joseph finds other outlets for his violent urges and he becomes obsessed with one of his very own children, his 11 year old daughter, Elizabeth. - 11. - A baby. Elizabeth was born in 1966. She is Joseph and Rosemary's fifth child and knowing some context already, it's very, very clear that Joseph instilled fear and discipline in the home. He fostered an environment of obedience and by the time Elizabeth was 11 in 1977, he had already successfully broken down her autonomy instilled fear, made her dependent on him, truly ultimate control. He had groomed her essentially. - Yeah. And Joseph sexually assaulted Elizabeth for the first time when she enrolled in middle school. And this is obviously horrific and it's so hard to comprehend. It's hard to say. - Yeah. - But many professionals have tried to understand why he fixated on Elizabeth and there are a few theories. So one, she resembled his own mother. So she looked like her grandma. And two, maybe because she was accessible to him. - And Joseph did later admit that in his mind, Elizabeth became his second wife, which is not justifiable in any way. I think it ultimately comes down to he got off on this control. He loved to control. It's sick. - There's something like horrifically wrong with you in that situation. There have been studies too to prove that the sweat and the smell of family members is meant to basically gross you out. - Really? - Yes. - I didn't know this. It's like a genetic thing that like over time has taken place because like-- - Incest is not good. - Right, so like we're animals and that's part of-- - Yeah. - We're not supposed to breed with our own. - Right. - Gotcha. - Anyway, Joseph didn't get the memo and in summer of 1971, Rosemary takes the children to Italy for vacation, but she doesn't take one of her children. She leaves behind Elizabeth with Joseph. And it doesn't seem like he gave too much of a reason as to why she specifically couldn't go on vacation. He insisted that Elizabeth needs to stay behind, that his wife can take all the other kids. And so that's what happened. - And I think this is one of the hard things with this case is it's so easy now after the fact to discuss this and be like how could Rosemary and other family members not know what was going on? But Rosemary is also a victim. - Right. - It's so deep and so-- - Yeah. - But like I can't even imagine what he would have said to make Elizabeth stay back. - She didn't have a choice. - I know. - No, but I mean like to Rosemary. What's the reasoning you give? Anyway, that doesn't-- - Maybe she was too skish. She might not have even gotten a reason at all and that was-- - Yeah. - It just-- - What? - All that happened, shows. - Exactly. So as we can imagine now with everyone else out of the house, he's alone with his daughter and the abuse escalates. Elizabeth was a very outgoing girl and she turns into this super shy, anxious child. And even after the rest of her family comes home after this trip, she's afraid of her friends being around. She tells everyone that her dad's really strict but she won't say anything more. And when she eventually enters high school, Joseph becomes even more possessive and even more controlling of his daughter. And though he's rough with all of his kids, he is far tougher with Elizabeth. She's always one single doubt. He doesn't let her go anywhere. She can't go outside of school. She can't go to a friend's house. And he wants her to never speak to any boys. Makeup is forbidden along with anything that he considers to be provocative clothing. And the older Elizabeth gets, the more and more, Joseph becomes controlling of her. - And I feel like when it comes to all of these true crime cases, I'm so drawn to what is happening psychologically. So just doing a little bit of research here, I did learn that abusers often focus on the child who resist the most strongly, seeing them as both a threat and a challenge to their dominance. And despite Joseph's abuse, Elizabeth did continue to rebel. She tried to run away at 15 years old, but unfortunately she was found and returned by police. - Which likely in Joseph's mind, I reinforced his ability to control everything that was happening. He can't be caught, he's in the ball. - And he's going to return her to you. - Right, yeah. And he always had this fear that Elizabeth, growing up would one day leave him, which is also like, that's what children as kids do. So this instance of the cops bringing her back, probably gave him more confidence. Outside help was not going to help protect Elizabeth. And his obsession with her only continued to grow. He starts to imagine what keeping Elizabeth all to himself would be like, what it would be like to imprison her, just like his mother or how he always fantasized about potentially imprisoning his mother. - So now it's early 1981, and despite the winter chill, Joseph dabs the sweat from his brow as he drives a roaring excavator through his backyard. What was once a garden is now a gaping wound in the earth, the beginnings of something far more sinister than a normal construction project. This is taken three years, but he is finally dug out the bunker of his dreams. And because his mother recently died, he now has a lot more time on his hands, and a staggering mound of dirt sits to his side. One that eventually takes 17 huge trucks to haul away. Joseph smiles as he imagines what comes next, reinforce concrete floors, walls, full plumbing, electricity, a maze-like series of doors and fail-safe switches, and on top of it all, a lush garden thick fur trees and shrubs to hide the secret entrance. Everything is going according to his plans. His engineering expertise is being put to ultimate use. He tells the local planning board he's building a nuclear fallout shelter, but this bunker isn't built to protect anyone. It is a dungeon modeled after the Nazi death camps he saw as a child, a dungeon that will be impossible to escape. When his wife comes out to the backyard to check on him, he waves her away. Tells her he can't talk, he's working too hard. He has to do everything himself to make sure it fits his standards. He can't afford to bring anyone else in on the project or let his family know the full extent of his ambitions, especially not little Elizabeth. She can never know what her father plans to do with his prison, because he's building it for her. Joseph spends years designing his prison single-handedly. His neighbors are curious about what he's building and he surrounds the property with tall trees to basically stop them from snooping. Joseph continues the abuse of his family and especially his daughter, Elizabeth. And now at this point, Elizabeth knows that her father's actions are wrong, right? And she has already tried to run away at one point. She wants to leave desperately and so she plans to move out with her sister as soon as she can. And when she's 18, she falls in love with a boy that she meets through work and together they want to run away and leave her abusive father behind forever. But unfortunately, Joseph finds out basically about their relationship because he intercepts one of the love letters and he just falls into this absolute fit of rage. He hurries to finish his bunker, crowning it with a final, heavy metal door that weighs over half a ton, which again, I'm like, how was he even putting this together himself? - By himself, yeah. - On August 28th, 1984, he then lures 18 year old Elizabeth down to this newly completed dungeon. He tells her he needs help carrying a door. And once they're down there, he grabs her from behind. He knocks her out using a rag soaked in ether. And when she awakens, he ties her up and he sexually assaults her. He then turns off the lights, locks the heavy door behind him and leaves her in complete darkness. - Elizabeth screams for hours begging for help, but the walls are completely soundproof. No one can hear her. And to answer for her sudden disappearance, Joseph comes up with a lie. He tells Rosemary, family, neighbors, everyone that Elizabeth has run away. from home. He leaves her there, locked away for two days before eventually coming back with a bowl of food, two days, two days in the dark by herself. He then chains his daughter to the wall by her waist. The only thing she can reach now is a small toilet. And beyond that, there is a series of eight heavy doors with electronic locks. So now she's totally trapped inside this concrete prison. There is basically no hope of escape, days pass, then weeks, then months. And during that time, Joseph has sexually assaulted her nearly every single day, absolutely horrific. Jesus. He torches her relentlessly. He barely brings her food. He forces her to live in the darkness with a very limited amount of air supply too. So he pumps oxygen into the munkers so that she can survive, but only pumps enough to like barely keep her alive. So she's super weak with this limited air supply. She's barely able to move. It's absolutely terrible. And I know even talking about it, listening to it, this is really, really hard to stomach, but this is happening for real to Elizabeth. Like she has to endure this. And it's terrible. I mean, it was bad enough for her during her adolescence from age 11 to 18. She is being abused by her father, but at least she's able to go to school, to work, have friends, have something outside. But now she's alone, trapped in the dark. And eventually her will is broken. And she stops fighting back. Naturally, people are very worried about where Elizabeth went, right? Like this girl who has been a part of the community, who has friends, who had a boyfriend that she was going to run away with, just suddenly up and disappears. And Joseph furthers the lie about Elizabeth. She says that she hasn't just run away. Now she's left to join a cult. He even forces Elizabeth to write letters saying that she joined this cult, the super religious cult, and that she was safe. She doesn't want to be found. Everyone should stop looking for her. And he passes the message along to police so that they actually close her missing person's case. He even goes as far as to date and postmark the letters from other towns, which in truth, he traveled for work. He would make her write these letters. And then he would mail them when he was at those locations. So they were authentically being sent to him out of town. But it was Joseph sending them. And at this point, he's working mostly as a landlord building this empire of housing, real estate, managing buildings and tenants. Right. So meanwhile, he makes sure that his family doesn't go into the cellar at all under any circumstances, probably because he was just really scary. So they listened anyway. But also how would they even get in? Because there's eight heavy doors with codes that they don't know they access to. Yes. But I mean, he's been working on this forever. And they've witnessed him doing it. Neighbors once knew he was working on something. So basically to me, because he tells everyone that this is a war bomb fallout shelter, right? And I remember as a kid, like in case of an emergency, like my family did run throughs of if there's a fire, this is what we do. This is how we escape the house. If you wouldn't truly building a bomb shelter, every kid would have been informed how to get there, what the escape plan is. So clearly, it's not for that. Yeah. So bomb shelters, one of its excuses, but he also tells his wife at one point that he's actually downstairs tinkering, making some mysterious machines that will make them a fortune. So there's just a lot of lies happening from everywhere. He sends more and more time underground, he's continuously violating his daughter all the while. And then in September of 1986, Elizabeth becomes pregnant with her father's child. At 10 weeks, she loses the child. And I can only imagine psychologically what she's going through. And on top of everything that's happening to her, then maybe this is probably like a beginning of hope, like she'll have some sort of purpose or something else to love and be loved by. So she unravels when she experiences this miscarriage. She will later admit that it caused her to spiral into depression. She screams herself horse. She contemplates ending her life. And she begins to bargain with her father for freedom. And he is just cold, unsympathetic, unmoved by all of her pleas. All he cares about is living out his dark twisted fantasies. And those fantasies continue to twist and grow. It's 1987, though for 21-year-old Elizabeth Fritzel, time has lost its meaning. She crouches on the concrete floor of her cell, picking at some lumpy food in a dirty bowl. Her father looms over her with a dark smile. Yosif paces back and forth across the tiny room. His expensive Italian loafers squeaking softly with each step. He seems eager to speak, but Elizabeth ignores him, chewing slowly, uncertain of when her next meal will come. Finally, Yosif clears his throat and tells her he's going on vacation to Thailand. He'll be gone for a month, maybe longer. And Elizabeth looks up, surprised and afraid. A month? Yosif gestures to the new mini-fridge he recently installed in the cell. He promises to stock it with just enough frozen food for her to survive while he's away. She can use a hot plate to prepare her own meals. Elizabeth puts down her bowl and staggers to her feet. She tries to hide her relief. But Yosif seems to notice. He reminds her to be careful while he's gone. Because no one else knows she's down there. If something happens to him, it is all over for her. Elizabeth sighs, she knows he's right, the weight of this truth crushing her brief moment of hope. Yosif sits on the bare-caught, leaning against the cold wall. He tells her to enjoy the time to herself. Because he knows he certainly will. Through the many months in captivity, Elizabeth has realized her father has long to speak openly, to share his sadistic desires unfiltered. He does not hold back. Because he knows Elizabeth won't tell anyone. In fact, she can't. Yosif paddles on and on about the infamous sex resort that he will be staying at in Thailand. A place with no rules. Elizabeth watches as his eyes glaze over his lips quiver with a sick excitement. Yosif muses about how the sex workers there don't know him. And he can do as he pleases. And then Yosif says goodbye, like he's leaving his wife for a work trip and will be back soon. And this sick delusion is not lost on Elizabeth. But there's nothing she can do as he flicks off the light and locks the door behind him, leaving Elizabeth alone in the dark once more. And for the next four weeks, she lives in constant terror, dreading, what will happen if he never returns. And even more terrifying, what happens if he does? 52-year-old Yosif Fritzel returns from Thailand in late 1987. The following year, Elizabeth becomes pregnant again. She hopes her father will take her to the hospital. But no, he does not. He refuses. And instead, he gives her a stack of medical books about pregnancy and a supply of towels and basically leaves her to handle this on her own. Nine months later, while trapped in this tiny, dirty, dark dungeon all by herself, Elizabeth gives birth entirely alone. She names the baby girl, Christian. And for the first time in nearly three years, Elizabeth feels like she has a reason to live, to survive. And she devotes herself to protecting her new daughter. Yosif would later speak of the pride that he felt when he first met Kirsten, 10 days after she was born. Everything he wanted was a second family, I guess. He tells Elizabeth that he expects her to have more children, very similar to what he first told her mother when he married her. By 1992, she has two more children, a son named Stefan and a daughter named Lisa. Yosif allows Elizabeth to have a little more movement around her cell, but that's about all he does for her and beyond giving her diapers and formula for the children. He does basically nothing else to help. The conditions are squalid, it's depressing, it's cramped, it's foul, it's bestering with bacteria. There's no sunlight. No, and there's hardly even room for everyone in this dungeon. And I will say something that in this horrific case, there's one, it's not even shining hope, but it's one like beautiful sentiment that Elizabeth really truly loved her children. And at some point, when one of her children was examined by medical professionals, they said that the child must have been born in a hospital based on the way the umbilical cord was cut and all of these things, meaning she learned and educated herself so well. She's done eating that material. Yeah, yeah. Cripped everything in every way she could to try to at least give them whatever chance that they had in the horrible conditions in which they were born in. And I think that goes back to Elizabeth now how to do everything by herself. And so there's no room in the sun to mom too. Her mom's upstairs doing everything by herself as well. There's hardly any room in this dungeon for everyone. And Yosif basically tells Elizabeth, you can expand it for yourself by yourself. She has no heavy equipment. She must clear everything out by hand, which takes years. This is like dirt, like she's clawing at the dirt, the ground, because she lives in the ground. In the meantime, Yosif decides that he is going to take the nine-month-old Lisa upstairs in May of 1993 along with a phony letter from Elizabeth. So this is basically where the messaging where it's like, "Oh, she keeps dropping off her children from this cult where she's having a bunch of kids and they're dropping the kids at our doorstep." Comes from. So in this message, she asks Rosemary to take care of her daughter, claiming that the cult will not allow her to have children. So that's why she needs to drop off this infant. There's a bunch of questions I have as an outsider here. How does Elizabeth, who's apparently in a cult, drop her daughter at the front door with a letter, and no one sees her? And also Amstetten, where this house is that the family lives in, isn't a pretty public space that people would have, you would suspect someone sees her dropping off a baby on the front step. And we'll do it three times in total, supposedly. Joseph then takes the baby and this letter to the police and officials, and without much pushback or seemingly any investigation into Elizabeth's whereabouts or health, they let Joseph legally adopt the baby. And in doing this, he also qualifies for a state grant, and this will lessen his financial burden, because now he's raising two families. The move prompts repeated visits from social workers, which you would think, "Oh my gosh, this is the moment. Social workers are going to be inside this house all the time, checking on the welfare of this kid and all the other children that he's probably neglected and abused this entire time too." But they do not find anything suspicious about the fritzels. Because Rosemary is upkeeping the standard of home and the children in a really good way. They don't notice that there's a hidden entrance in the home, and that is the entrance to Joseph's dungeon. Lisa is raised above ground, but Elizabeth's other two children, Piershten and Stefan, are kept downstairs in this prison, in captivity, locked in the bunker with Elizabeth, suffering from a lack of sunlight and nutrition. Elizabeth cares for them as best she can. She tells them stories about the outside world, seems like fairy tales, because they've never seen it. Is it even real? And I feel like that's one of the themes that comes up in the movie room, where it's like room is the whole world, and kind of showing how her child then has to deal with the understanding that their entire world is shattered, and that there's so much more. It's heartbreaking, everyone should watch it and cry. In 1994, Elizabeth has a fourth child, once again, cutting the invoke accord all by herself, and Joseph takes this baby again, named Monica, to live above ground as well. And I want to remind everyone at this point in the story, Elizabeth was only 18 years old. When Joseph trapped her, her very own father, trapped her in this disgusting prison. She has now spent years down here, had to endure senseless torture on top of learning how to raise her children on her own. And I did read that she was sure to, when Joseph was not around, tell her children that she was in the bunker with, in this prison, I should say, that this was not normal, that Joseph was a monster, that there was a world beyond them waiting for them. So she really wanted to teach them of the real world, and she would even educate them. She would have quizzes and tests to try to like keep them on par with what life would have been like for them outside of this prison. Oh my god, I can't even imagine what she had to like mentally overcome just to keep herself alive and then to do all that and more for her kids. And to keep track of time. Yeah. Yeah. Over time, Joseph does add a few amenities to the place he adds a television, he furnishes a separate bedroom, but these so-called comforts are not really much comfort, right? Because it does little to dispel the horror of his prisoner's existence. And in 1996, Joseph is now 61, Elizabeth is 30, and she has been underground for over a third of her life. So she's been kept prisoner for 12 years now. She's developed serious health problems like anemia and vitamin deficiency. And in April of 1996, she delivers twins, Alexander and Michael. In the squalid conditions, Michael develops respiratory problems. And tragically, without any treatment, he does pass away a few days later. So sad. And she's now grief-stricken. She's desperate for help. Elizabeth is pleading with her father. Please, please help these children. But instead, he takes the babies from her, both of them. He burns the deceased child's body in the same incinerator that he used to burn garbage. And then he takes the surviving twin, Alexander upstairs. And again, tells authorities that his daughter, Elizabeth, who ran away to this religious cult, has once again come and dropped a child at a store step. Three children now. Yeah. So he's granted guardianship and there's another monthly check now coming in to pay for this other child. Somehow, Elizabeth pulls through and continues surviving for the sake of her kids. Stefan is now too tall for the cramped prison. So he spends all of his days cramped over and his posture is like horrendous. And he actually, his growth becomes stunted from years of bending over like this. And things are only getting worse for them. Two years later, Elizabeth has her seventh and final child, a son named Felix. The pregnancy is particularly difficult. And like her children, Elizabeth is suffering from severe malnutrition. Her teeth are falling out. Her hair is thin and gray. And Joseph sees her. And he says, oh, I'm no longer attracted to you. The sexual assaults do stop, which is a shining light right here in this moment. But the hellish life underground continues. And by 2008, Elizabeth and her children are now constantly sick. Joseph is 73 years old. And he's now finding it more difficult to get around himself. His second family is becoming, in his mind, a little more troubled than their worth. So Joseph clearly isn't a good father. Clearly. I think we can say it objectively. When he would go down into this prison to visit Elizabeth and the children, apparently, he would sometimes come down wearing a crampus mask. What is wrong with this guy horrifying. So he's now thinking these children and Elizabeth are more troubled than their worth. And he's getting worried that in time, Elizabeth, Christian and Stefan are going to be able to overpower him. The three versus one. So he starts making a plan for the future. One that is absolutely deluded. And I'm going to let you share it. But I think we can all agree this. This man is absolutely delusional. Yeah. So he gives two of his tenants of the flats right above his underground prison. Notice that his daughter is going to return home soon. And they need to move out of the building. So in his mind, he thinks that these three people who he has kept prisoner and have viciously abused for years, he can then let them out. And because they're still under his control after years and years of having the power over them, he can use them in a different way. Elizabeth can now be his secretary. Kirsten could be a cook. And Stefan can be a builder. And he believes he can groom his youngest baby Felix to be his heir and take over his property empire. In thing. Yeah. It is now April 16th, 2008, Elizabeth's 42nd birthday. From below the low ceiling, she hears the heavy hobbling footsteps of her abuser and father on the cellar stairs. Joseph appears, clutching a brightly wrapped gift his face twisted into something that passes for cheer. He opens the series of heavy doors guarding his prison ready to celebrate. But inside his second family is in chaos. 19-year-old Kirsten rides in her mother's arms, wheezing and tearing out her hair. Then her body stiffens and convulses violently. Elizabeth can only hold onto her, sobbing as her daughter's seizure overtakes her. She screams for Joseph begging him to help. And he just stands there watching. His hands tugging absently at his suit lapel. Elizabeth sees it in his face. This is not a father or a grandfather looking at a child in pain. This is a man calculating risk already annoyed by the inconvenience. Joseph is thinking again about pulling the plug on the entire dungeon. He's too old and frailed overpower the children now. But even if he starves them out, he's not sure he could dispose of the bodies. Elizabeth steers streak down her cheeks as she strokes Kirsten's damp hair. She pleads over and over. Please take her to a hospital. Please, I'll do anything. Every part comes from the rawest part of her. A mother's terror that she's about to lose her child forever. Joseph looks at the child. The child that he spent a lifetime torturing and finally he exhales, tired of the screams, tired of the chaos. And his decision comes coldly. He will take Kirsten. And together, he and Elizabeth carry Kirsten's limp body upstairs. It is the first time in 24 years that Elizabeth has ever left the cellar. But at this moment, all she can think about is her two sons left in the cellar in the prison alone for the first time ever. She begs Joseph to get Kirsten help and immediately races back down to the bunker to be with her sons Stefan and Felix. Elizabeth hugs her children back in the dark again. Her heart breaking, not knowing if her daughter will survive or if she'll ever see her again. And I can't even imagine that moment of being out of her prison for the first time in 24 years. But immediately, her thoughts go, she'd rather be locked up and be with her two sons. Yeah, to project them. But in a way, I almost feel like that move contributed to Joseph's delusion that he could let them out and that they would do whatever. She didn't immediately try to run and escape. Right. So now, for the first time in her life, 19-year-old Kirsten leaves the dungeon and she's exposed to sunlight. She has never seen sunlight. It is never hair skin. She's never seen the outside world. Which I can't even imagine how you would react to that. On top of the fact that she's having seizures and near death. I know. Well, I feel like the movie does a pretty good job at depicting it when the little boy escapes being rolled up in a rug and it's almost like everything is buzzing around him and it's like he's about to faint. And it's just like everything's a hot and foggy and fuzzy and it's just so overstimulating. And as horrific as the movie room is, at least in that iteration of the story, there's a sunlight. So Kirsten is driven and admitted to the hospital and prior to going to the hospital himself, Joseph races down to the cellar to have Elizabeth Wright another one of those infamous notes that he made her write at this time explaining Kirsten's symptoms. The severity of Kirsten's condition and the unusual story from Joseph basically alerts Dr. Ryder and he calls police. Thank goodness. Yes. So this leads them to launch an investigation to find Elizabeth and basically to hold her responsible for parental neglect. I'm glad that this happened, but it is so upsetting that the police take this very seriously, but back when Elizabeth was 18 and all of a sudden went missing and went to join a cult, the investigation wasn't as thorough. Yeah, definitely. But I can see where this came from because now they have a man in front of them who is a local business man who has adopted three of his missing daughter's children who has social services coming into his home very frequently who finds nothing at fault, everything is perfect, everything is pristine. So of course they're going to think that Elizabeth is like this wild card child who Joseph is great, the hero. Right. And then they're going to pause saving the children. Yeah. Okay, so thank goodness Joseph's about to be found out because they are now looking for Elizabeth so hold her responsible for parental neglect. And that same day the police actually make an appeal through media for Elizabeth to return to homestead in. Police continue to poke around in question, Joseph, which leads him to produce this letter that Elizabeth had apparently written in February of that year, announcing that she was actually planning to leave the cult to return home to be with her three children. This was his big plan of his releasing everyone and having them work for him and pass on his empire. His secretary, his cook, his builder, and his horrific. Yeah, his heir. So now three days after Kirsten was admitted to the hospital, Elizabeth anxiously is awaiting news of Kirsten's condition. Joseph has not been back down since. And this is basically because he's being watched if there's a police presence now. And according to the family that during this three day period, Joseph is acting completely normal. No stress, totally fine work in life as usual. And it's not until police start asking Joseph for a DNA sample so that they can confirm for a fact that Kirsten is, in fact, Elizabeth's daughter that he starts acting weird. This is a question I just have generally about this case and I don't know the police standards here, especially not in Austria. But when someone like Joseph arrives to the police station with a child and claims it was his daughters, is there no DNA testing to make sure that it is actually his daughters? I don't know what the protocols are. Yeah, I don't know either. Because forensic was wise what DNA testing started to be more of a thing in the crime scenes in the 80s and 90s. So that is basically when this is happening. But maybe it's just not protocol to do that. I really don't know. And in the conditions that it may be, yeah. Yeah. Who knows? I mean, he had letters to back it up. We don't understand really how any of this could happen. Yeah. But Joseph now decides that with all this pressure and the police looking at him that this is the time for him to execute this plan, Elizabeth is going to escape from the cult and return back home. So he decides to bring Elizabeth, Stefan, and Felix out of the cellar. He gives them a clean change of clothes. He brings them out. Truly, this is the first time in Stefan and Felix's lives that they have ever left the bunker and seen daylight. He then introduces them to the rest of the family. Acts like this is this beautiful reunion. Crazy. And exactly one week after Kirsten is admitted to the hospital, Joseph phones the doctors and says, "Hey guys, Elizabeth, she's finally escaped the cult. She's returned home. She's ready to come in and chat with Kirsten." And this goes back to his delusion, but also maybe Elizabeth not running that night when they had brought Kirsten out of the bunker or prison. Maybe actually helps here because it fed into that delusion that he did have them under his control. I mean, it had been 24 years of captivity. He had successfully threatened and controlled her for all of them. But here is where we get to Elizabeth's courage. It's truly one of the most incredible parts of the terrific story. And after visiting the hospital, police obviously take her into custody. And at first out of fear, she does back up her father's story. But I think investigators threaten that she will never see her kids again. And she finally decides to tell the truth if her children never have to see Joseph again. And that's when she tells them everything that her father had kept her prisoner for years, forced her to have sex with him, and that she gave birth to seven children. And at first, police don't want to believe it because this accusation is horrendous, but they do have to check it out. And they find the secret dungeon. And then they take Felix and Stefan and then emit them to the hospital. And at this moment, when I read this, my heart broke. Apparently Stefan, as he's walking with the police, he sees the moon. He looks at it in awe and asks, "Is that where God lives?" I know. Heartbreak. Okay, so finally the moment that we've all been waiting for in this episode. Joseph, this horrible monster is arrested on slew of charges, murdered by negligence, enslavement, incest, rape, coercion, false imprisonment. And the case makes headlines around the world. This is an unthinkable evil. And about a year later in 2009, he pleads guilty to all charges. And after a four-day trial, he is sentenced to life in prison. Which I wish we could rewind his life and put him in prison when he was like 20. Because now he's already towards the end of his life anyway. I'm like, "That's not fair. He needs way more time." There are a lot of things that are discussed in the trial case and court documents itself. There's one horrendous thing that I want to say. And I mean, this whole case is horrendous. But he accuses Elizabeth of coming onto him. He said verbatim that he didn't use a condom because Elizabeth didn't like how sex felt with it on. Is that my god? I just literally got to hit my stomach. Yeah, it's vile. And also in reviewing this case, the sentencing, this is really, really tragic. But because Joseph was found guilty of murder by neglect, which basically when the twins were worn and baby Michael had died, it was found that had Joseph brought him to the hospital upon birth or had the children been born in the hospital, he would have survived. That because of that charge, he faced life in prison, but without that, he probably would have only faced 15 to 20 years. Yeah. Which that is a problem with the justice system. Absolutely. There should be one million life sentences. Yes. Actually, did you see? I just saw that this is starting to become a thing that certain judges are not giving life sentences, but giving multiple life sentences because there have been people who have died in prison for like maybe like the death of like three minutes or whatever and come back to life. And then they legally argue that they already served a life, their life sentence. That shouldn't be allowed. That, that. Yeah. I hate that so much. There was like a clip that went viral of a judge being like, you're sentenced to this life sentence. And then when you die, you come back, you're still in prison and like just keeps going and like pounding into the-- It's just, yeah. There's problems in so many areas of crime and punishment, but Joseph did serve a life sentence. And the small community of Amstettin is turned on its head as all of these stories start to come out and Joseph's current and past sex crimes start to circulate and he is also investigated in at least four other murder cases outside of his family, including women who were also sexually assaulted near some of his known locations. Some of them did resemble his daughter Elizabeth. However, he was never charged with any of these crimes due to lack of evidence. Yeah. Meanwhile, Christian recovered in the hospital, Elizabeth and the other children retreated physically and psychologically and I'm sure is continuing to take years and years of therapy and this will always be a part of their life, I hope. Yeah. All six of them were eventually reunited and they requested new legal identities which the government granted. And at first, Elizabeth was estranged from her mother, Rosemary, but over the years, apparently they have been working to kind of slowly rebuild that relationship and Rosemary visits Elizabeth and her children about once a week. I did hear-- one of the hardest things for Elizabeth was when she was reunited with her children who were raised above ground. It was really hard for her to hear them call Rose Marie mother. And I think that was like even just saying that out loud, maybe emotional, but I think that was really, really difficult for her. And then this is a beautiful thing. Elizabeth ended up falling in love with her bodyguard. And together they lived together with the kids. And I know I'm not getting emotional, my goodness. And this brings us back to Rosemary who does claim to have had no knowledge of her husband's backyard prison or any of his violent crimes, which we can't speak on the validity of. But I think it's very safe to say that we can all agree Rosemary, the children and grandchildren are all victims here. Joseph abused them all. But there is one piece of evidence that was examined in preparation for the trial, but was never used in court. So I don't know why, but it was determined like a soundproofing test was performed in the bunker to see what could actually be heard above ground. And keep in mind, there are tenants literally living on the first floor of the house above this bunker. And it was determined that a good amount of sounds could have been heard from outside the bunker. It never really came into play. So it's hard to know. I hate to think that for 24 years, people were hearing things and nothing was reported. The early attempts at making noise were unheard or just were dismissed because that was already a house with a bunch of kids making a bunch of noise. It probably was hard to pick out any screams or like associate it with now you're missing child who's written a letter saying that she's run away to a cult who already had plans to run away and wanted to. Because you don't assume that the sounds that are coming from outside means there's someone being kept in a bunker. That's not your normal assumption. Right. Yeah. And so my assumption is that over the years, there probably wasn't many attempts made. Or if there were attempts made, Josef is this violent man who probably threatened and harmed Elizabeth and her children. And they were still weak too. Yeah. He kept them that way. A documentary about Josef aired in April of 2017 and he did not display an ounce of remorse for his crimes. No. Instead, he focused on his own plates. His teeth were knocked out in a fight with another inmate. And as of this recording, he is currently alive. And though he's suffering from bouts of dementia, Elizabeth, now 59 years old, is currently living in obscurity with the rest of her family. I mean, this case is absolutely horrific. Yeah. I am so glad Elizabeth and her children, aside from the two that she did lose, are now living their life outside of this prison. But I cannot even fathom the psychological side effects that they have to every day deal with. Oh, yeah. That's like ingrained in you now. But I so hope that they get all of the support and resources that they weren't given for all of those years that they're just inundated with love and support now. I did hear that the town that they live in, the whole town is so extremely protected above them. Good. Which I think is beautiful. Yeah. I'm anything we can all agree. This is one of the most disturbing cases we've ever encountered. Oh my god. Truly no words to describe how sick, twisted, and evil, Josef and his acts were and are. The fact that Elizabeth and her children managed to survive at all is a true testament to her strength and her courage. And that is what struck for Emma Donahue when she read about the case. Because this is a, this is a survivor case, right? This is about survival and Elizabeth is so strong. It's the struggle to be a mother in such appalling conditions. And that is really what struck accord with Emma Donahue and inspired her 2010 novel Room. In 2015, the story was adapted into a film and in the movie, a mother named Joy lives with her five-year-old son Jack in a tiny shed. And like Elizabeth, they have a bed, they have a television and a basic kitchen. And Jack's father in the film Old Nick sexually assaults Joy and holds them captive. And Joy tries everything and her power to protect her son from the abuse just like Elizabeth Fritzel did. And in a very eerie parallel to the Fritzel case, Joy tries to get Old Nick to free them by convincing her son to fake an illness. And then pleading with Old Nick to help. And it does almost work. But Old Nick is cautious. Like Joseph Fritzel, he is completely devoid of sympathy and even guilt's joy in the movie and is like, I do all of this for you how ungrateful you are. He truly would rather his captives die than risk being found out. But when faking sick doesn't work, Joy has her son played dead and she wraps him in a rug to hide the body from Old Nick. And Old Nick is fooled in the movie and he throws this rug with this boy in the back of his pickup truck to dispose of the evidence. And this is when the five-year-old sees the wider world for the very first time. He is shocked and afraid, just like Kirsten Fritzel must have been. But he works up the courage to escape and he gets someone's attention. And just like Joseph might have done Old Nick in the movie, tries to cover his tracks, he poses as a normal, respectable member of the community. But he fails, he's arrested, and Joy is free, enabled to reunite with her family. But similar to Elizabeth and her children's case, the story doesn't end there because the film does briefly touch on the psychological fallout of this experience. And there's one really powerful scene that I think about from time to time, from that movie, which is when Joy and Jack are sitting with Joy's parents at the dinner table and Joy's realizing that her father cannot make eye contact with Jack. And she gets so upset, she's like, look at him, he's a real person. And it's just like pleading with her father to recognize her son as her son because to her dad, this is a reminder of his daughter being taken and raped. Like, it's not abused. That's why it's like there are victims everywhere. I know. It really is really sad like the psychological fallout extends to the survivors outside of the prison as well. So there are definitely some similarities between room and Elizabeth's spiritual story, but the brutality of the captivity is understandably toned down in the film, although it's still plenty harrowing. It's wild because watching the movie like I was so just like drained of everything watching that and it is powerful. It's so powerful, but like this case is the details are so much works. It's so much more gruesome. Right. It's impossible to actually imagine what Elizabeth went through, even just trying to put ourselves there mentally, even just talking about it here in this episode is difficult for us. Yeah. Let alone being Elizabeth and her children. The fact that she survived for 24 years is astounding. And after Joseph's arrest, he got a lot of the press's attention, but we want to make it very clear that the frontal case is really Elizabeth's story. Her ability to keep her children alive in such tragic conditions is nothing short of heroic. And though her isolation is over, that trauma will no doubt last a lifetime. We can only hope that Elizabeth and her family find some peace. And Elizabeth and those kids, they truly deserve to know joy and to see the beauty of the world after so many years of pain. Yeah. If there's any consolation is that Joseph Ritzel will never see the light of day again. Thank you so much for listening. We are your hosts Sabrina Dianne-Roga and Karin Vienna. Join us next Tuesday for another peek inside another crimes of infamy. And if there are any other cases that you would like us to cover, let us know in the comments. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you've heard today, please reach out on all social media at Crime House. And don't forget to rate, review, and follow crimes of wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And I think to conclude this episode in maybe a lighter way, we should give some recommendations of lighthearted things to watch to kind of settle yourself after such a tragic and horrific story. I recommend anything on Bravo, really different horror and reality. But Summer House. I'm going to go with Summer House. What's yours? I'm going to choose Bob's burgers. That's a good one. That's my palate cleanser. A good old burger. Well, we'll see you next week. Mommies. Bye. Bye. Did you know penisillin, the drug that has saved more lives than any other in history, was discovered because a scientist forgot to clean a Petri dish before going on vacation. I'm Connor Tomlinson and history is my thing has been my whole life. And I'm Carter Roy and this is what the fact, the history lesson you actually wished you had in high school with everything they cut for being too interesting put back in. Every week we take the wildest true things that ever happened and tell you the whole story behind them. I bring the history, I bring the facts, the tangents and the occasional British accent. The wildest stuff is real and the real stuff is wilder than you think. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow what the fact on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or subscribe on YouTube at what the fact pod. The moment a body is found, the clock starts ticking. 48 hours. That's how long detectives have before the trail begins to go cold. From A&E and Crime House, this is the official podcast from the famous True Crime series The First 48. Step inside the critical window, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs that crack a case wide open. On Carter Roy, each week I revisit a landmark homicide investigation with the depth you know and immersive long form storytelling built for your ears. Real detectives, real cases, real stakes, this is the first 48. New episodes every Thursday. Listen to and follow the first 48 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Looking for your next podcast? Check out What the Fact. It's a new show from Connor Tomlinson, who you know from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum, alongside Carter Roy. Follow What the Fact, wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pot.