New Fritzl’s chamber of horror
AUSTRIAN Gottfried Wagner is said to have violated his two daughters in a nightmare spanning 15,000 days and nights.
“If you fight back, then I will kill you,” their father, now 80, told Christine, 53, and Erika, 45.
Amid farming implements, old oil drums, wood, cement sacks and filth he allegedly subjected his daughters to sickening sex ordeals.
His wife Berta, 85, died in 2008. She too was a victim of the former council labourer’s sadism, beaten like them with a stick, poked with a pitchfork.
Police say she made them promise on her deathbed not to tell about what their father did to them.
The pair became mentally ill over the years as a result of his abuse.
Other rooms in the sprawling house near Braunau am Inn – birthplace of Adolf Hitler – were kept tidy.
But the girls were forced to live in squalor, sleep on a wooden shelf in a kitchen and use a commode. Forty years of alleged abuse ended in May when Wagner tried to have sex with Christine one more time and she finally snapped. She hit him on the head with a milk jug. He fell and cracked his head. For two days he could not move. Police say the daughters hoped he would die.
The pair became mentally ill over the years as a result of his abuse.
Then the women – seen from time to time by a social worker but conditioned never to expose him – called her. She got an ambulance for him and the women went into care. But they said nothing until in June they opened up to a Red Cross worker who called police.
Austria – still coming to terms with the kidnapping of schoolgirl Natascha Kampusch in the Nineties and the Fritzl incest saga – is stunned.
Wagner, who denies the allegations, was an archetypal Austrian father of the old school – stern master of his house and keeper of its secrets.
He is in jail in nearby Ried while the investigation continues. He faces charges of rape, unlawful imprisonment, cruelty, assault and making threats to kill. His daughters are undergoing psychiatric therapy in a clinic.
