'I was born to rape' – inside the sick mind of incest father Fritzl

AUSTRIAN incest father Josef Fritzl has laid bare his soul in a mammoth session of interviews with a woman psychiatrist in which he told her: "I was born to rape".

A court in St Poelten, Austria, which will be handling his eventual trial, commissioned Dr Adelheid Kastner, 46, of the Wagner-Jauregg psychiatric clinic in Linz to provide a psychiatric examination of Josef Fritzl, 73.

A 130-page report compiled during six interview sessions, attempts to answer the key question of how one man could lock up his own daughter for 24 years, together with the children he forced her to have.

Dr Kastner found part of the answer for Fritzl's behaviour was in his childhood. She said he was not a "wanted child" and that his dominant mother had raised him without love.

He had been lacking a father figure that caused psychological problems from an early age and already as a teenager he had attacked a girl in a park.

Among the things he told a psychiatrist was: "I was born to be a rapist" and also: "I simply have an evil streak".

At the end of the report, Dr Kastner recommends that Fritzl is never again allowed to be free. She says he will remain a danger to the public and there is a "considerable risk that whatever age he is he will reoffend".

But she said he was not insane and was fully aware that what he was doing was wrong and was answerable for his actions.

In the report, the psychiatrist writes: "Mr Fritzl was born as a disadvantaged child, which will have consequences for his entire life. His domestic situation was uncertain and he had to suffer a mother who demotivated him, denigrated him and was prone to violence – a home situation which was absolutely devoid of security and lacking in understanding of the basic needs of a child. It was a childhood that left him emotionally crippled.

"Josef Fritzl grew up without his father and was ignored by his mother, sadistically mistreated and constantly left neglected," she said.

"As a child he suffered from a condition that sometimes affects boys and left him in incredible pain every time he urinated. His mother only bothered to take him to a doctor when a neighbour discovered how much the child was suffering and forced her to take him for treatment."

The report says that during the Second World War, whenever the air-raid sirens sounded, Fritzl's mother refused to go into the bunkers and he would be taken there by neighbours, sitting underground terrified that he would emerge to find his mother dead.

The degradation left his personality "severely deformed" and he has almost no ability to empathise with others.

Because of his anger at his mother, he developed a permanent need to dominate women. Because of this loneliness that he felt, he developed a need to "own a person" and to "have that person totally for myself" and create a "totally inseparable and irremovable connection".

His daughter Elisabeth was the terrible victim of the crippled person that he grew up to be.

Fritzl realised that his own intellectual abilities were his best chance of getting away from this emotionally deprived past. At some stage he decided to make something out of his life. No-one was more surprised than he was when he was the only one in his class to be allowed to move to secondary school a year earlier than the other children because of his good grades – and he told the psychiatrist: "I realised I wasn't that stupid."

His success at school gave him ever greater confidence. This in turn gave him strength to stand up to his mother, who stopped beating him when he reached secondary school. He read hundreds of books to help him escape from his tortured past and found respect as a teenager among his peers by becoming the intellectual.

This also gave him excellent opportunities when it came to choosing a career. He became a construction engineer and appeared, to the outside world at least, a typical middle-class man-next-door. The things that mattered to him included "order and discipline and smart dress". He was ambitious and hard working and amassed a property empire.

The psychiatrist writes that his sexual tendencies came from his impotence as a child that develops later into a desire to dominate women.

At the age of 32 he attacked a nurse after climbing into her flat and raping her at knifepoint.

Questioned about it, he said: "I was born to be a rapist – although I waited a relatively long time before I gave in to my desires. I could have done a lot worse to my daughter in the 24 years that I had her in the cellar, but I used to put those urges into my work to keep them at bay. Maybe there is a good part to me as well that helped to keep those urges back."

On the basis of Dr Kastner's report, the prosecution has demanded from the court that Fritzl be tried and sentenced, then committed to an institution for the criminally insane, where he would receive psychiatric care and therapy.

The trial is expected to start early next year.


WHO'S WHO

FRITZL fathered seven children with his daughter Elisabeth, whom he kept in a soundproof and windowless cellar in the basement of the family home in Amstetten in Lower Austria, claiming she had joined a cult.

Three children were imprisoned with their mother for their whole lives: Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18 and Felix, five. Three others were raised by Josef and his wife Rosemarie in the upstairs home. He engineered the appearance of these children as foundlings discovered outside their house, giving the impression that Elisabeth had abandoned them: Lisa at nine months in 1993, Monika at ten months in 1994 and Alexander at 15 months in 1997. Alexander's twin, Michael, died three days after birth.