Then and now: Elisabeth Fritzl at age 18 and an artist’s impression 24 years later
Josef Fritzl moved 197 tonnes of earth to create the secret underground dungeon without any of his neighbours, tenants or family asking questions, Austrian police revealed today.
The news came as detectives completed their examination of the cellar rooms where he kept his daughter Elisabeth prisoner there for 24 years, fathering seven children by her.
But they also revealed that there are still more rooms that are sealed off that they have not yet opened or examined.
The earth Fritzl dug out of the ground would have taken 17 lorries to move, and at the same time he carried into the underground cellar tiles, bricks, wooden wall panels, a washing machine, a kitchen sink, beds and pipework of all shapes and sizes, all without anybody noticing anything suspicious.
Enquiries this week will centre on examining how an estimated 116 cubic metres of earth had been removed from the illegal and unauthorised part of the building project.
Only a small 20 square metre room had been officially approved by planning officials as an air raid shelter, meaning a further 34 tonnes of earth in addition to the 197 that had been legally taken from the cellar.
Meanwhile it emerged today that Elisabeth, 42, will be confronted with the news coverage of her case for the first time as her lawyer seeks approval to take legal action against media that allegedly breached her privacy.
The whole family has been put under medical and psychiatric care and have been kept in “therapeutic isolation” without access to any newspapers, internet or TV ever since the case was revealed on April 26.
Also, news of the tremendous excavation job carried out by Fritzl, 73, comes as police confirmed they will be continuing to dig today to look for further rooms.
When Fritzl bought the site at 40 Ybstrasse in Amstetten he demolished an earlier house that was situated further back from the road, and then built the current property nearer to the street.
In doing so he left a small cellar intact which was the start of what would later become the underground prison of his daughter Elizabeth.
However he did not use all of the original cellar for Elisabeth’s prison, for reasons not yet clear, and the part he bricked up has now been detected by police forensic experts, who plan to open it this week to see what is inside.
Police are also starting this week to examine the work on the cellar, including the organisation of the electric work, plumbing, security doors and the gas lines.
They want to check if he could have done all the work alone or if any of the work had possibly been done with outside help.
First though they also plan to scan the entire 1,000 metres of ground of the property to see if there are any other rooms or other objects that had been buried in the garden.
The ground radar scanner machine that they are bringing in can detect hidden spaces and objects such as bodies that might be underground.
Inspector Franz Polzer who is leading the investigation said they are not expecting any surprises but confirmed they want to do a thorough investigation and leave no stone unturned.
Fritzl is already being investigated in connection with a number of unsolved murders and sexual assaults in the area, including many of the 700 unsolved missing persons cases in Austria.
Some 150 of these were people aged 18 or under, and include the case of Julia Kuehrer, who two years ago vanished when she was 18 from Pulkau in Lower Austria, 100 miles from Amstetten.
They have also reopened the case of Anna Neumayr who was just 17 when she vanished on August 22, 1966, from Pfaffstaett near Matighofen on the way from the town of Voecklabruck to the town of Wels.
Three days later her body was found in a maize field near Raasdorf in Lower Austria, more than 150 miles from where she disappeared.
Police have now confirmed that convicted sex attacker Fritzl was never questioned at the time and they will now see if there are DNA links or any other evidence that might link him to the killing.
The decision to reopen the new cases comes as the extent of Josef Fritzl’s sex offences were exposed after being hidden by Austria’s complicated privacy law - including a rape conviction and a second woman who says he raped her but who had been too embarrassed to tell police.
Fritzl was convicted of the rape attack in 1967 and jailed, but the convictions were erased later under a law encouraging the rehabilitation of offenders.
It meant that social workers had no knowledge of his sex crimes when they examined his request to adopt the children of his daughter in 1993.
Ex-police chief Gerhard Marwan, now aged 77, who caught Fritzl after the rape, said: “We traced him by a print from his palm at the scene, and he was identified by the victim, a nurse, as well as by a 21-year-old woman who was attacked in Ebelsbergerwald woods but managed to escape.
“As early as 1959, we recorded Fritzl, then aged 24, as an exhibitionist.” In a report in the local paper at the time it confirmed Fritzl was “no stranger to the Linz police”.
It added: “Due to two other relevant offences, once for exhibitionism, and the other time for attempted rape, Fritzl already had a police record.”
Elisabeth Fritzl will be interviewed by the same reporter who spoke to Natascha Kampusch
Dungeon: The hallway in the cellar leading to one of the bedrooms where the children slept
The cellar bathroom: Bright decorations cannot disguise the ramshackle state of the hiding place
Monster: Josef Fritzl confessed to holding his daught captive for 24 years and fathering seven children
Elisabeth Fritzl and her children are being cared for at this private Austrian hospital
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