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Amstetten/Berlin: Evidence how a wall of silence hid the crimes of Joseph Fritzl mounted on Saturday as it was revealed that his abuse of daughter Elisabeth as a teenager was an open secret among people who knew the family.
Former lodgers at the family house and school friends of Elisabeth have admitted that they heard she was being sexually abused and mistreated, yet none contacted police or social services either before or after she disappeared.
Joseph Leitner, a former lodger, said that shortly after he moved in, he learned through a friend that she had been repeatedly raped by her father.
"I had a good friend from school who was really close to Elisabeth," said Leitner, who lived at the house in the Austrian town of Amstetten between 1990 and 1994.
"She told me what a monster Josef was - and what he had done to Elisabeth.
No involvement
"But I decided I did not want to get involved. I did not want to get kicked out of the flat, I did not want to lose it. I kept myself to myself."
The fact that Fritzl had convictions for rape, attempted rape and indecent exposure was well known in the local community among those who had lived there for longer - but this was not passed on to police or social workers when Elisabeth vanished.
Leitner cast doubt on police insistence that Fritzl's wife, Rosemarie, 68, was entirely unaware of what was going on. The pair routinely holidayed separately - an arrangement that would have meant there was someone at home to look after the prisoners, otherwise they would have starved to death.
"I am almost certain that she was aware," he said.
Similarly, a schoolfriend of Elisabeth, whose family spent time lodging in the Fritzl household, claimed that shortly before she vanished Elisabeth had said she planned to run away for good to escape her father shortly.
"We were in the same class and we were friends," said 42-year-old Alfred Dubanovsky.
"After she vanished we were talking about it, and we knew she had run off before. We thought she had run off again because she had told someone in our group that she had had enough, couldn't stand it anymore at home and that her father had beat her, and had hurt her. She said she was scared of him.'"
Dubanovsky broke down in tears as he admitted seeing Fritzl taking food into the cellar by wheelbarrow after Elisabeth's disappearance, yet thought nothing of it at the time.
- Failure
Clues missed
- Lodgers in main house complained of enormous electricity bills
- More than 100 cubic metres of dirt (up to 120 tons or 7,200 bucketfuls) had to be carried out through the house
- Extra household waste may have totalled two tons a year.
- Fritzl spent repeated nights in "workshop"
- Ventilation system believed to end in garden. Neighbours reported knocking sounds
- The house would have had huge food bills. Neighbours saw him pushing shopping from garage in a wheelbarrow
- One tenant said his dog was unusually interested in the cellar
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