A jury yesterday ordered Josef Fritzl jailed for life for treating his daughter as a sex slave in the cellar of his home during a 24-year orgy of depravity in which he fathered seven children.
The court in the Austrian town of Sankt Poelten said Fritzl would have to spend the rest of his life interned in a mental institute after a psychiatrist warned that the 73-year-old Fritzl felt “born to rape.”
The jury found him unanimously guilty of murder one of the seven children after Fritzl and other charges of rape and incest and sequestration in the cellar of the family house in Amstetten.
Fritzl at first denied murder and enslavement but changed his plea after being confronted by the video testimony of his daughter Elisabeth.
Before the verdict had been announced, Fritzl had made a last expression of remorse.
“I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart,” the 73-year-old retired engineer told the eight jurors before they retired to quickly reach a guilty verdict on the charges which included murder, rape and incest.
“Unfortunately, I can’t change anything now,” he said.
But chief prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser said the remorse shown by Fritzl was a sham.
“Don’t believe him, he’s shown his true face in trying to exploit people’s gullibility,” she said of Fritzl and his stunning change of heart on Wednesday when he pleaded guilty to enslaving his daughter Elisabeth as well as murder.
The murder charge related to the death of a child whom Fritzl did nothing to help while aware the child was mortally ill.
Elisabeth Fritzl, now 42, went to the court on Tuesday to see her father’s reaction to 11 hours of video testimony she recorded for the trial.
Elisabeth’s lawyer Eva Plaz also poured scorn on Fritzl’s show of remorse, saying the woman wanted her father “to be held accountable until he dies.
“There’s not a trace of remorse. Perhaps he is still counting on an early release,” she said. “Don’t believe one word from the defendant. The defendant wanted to be master over life and death.”
Fritzl had admitted the other four charges against him — incest, rape, sequestration and grievous assault — but pleaded not guilty to murder and slavery when the trial opened on Monday.
Psychiatrist Adelheid Kastner told the court on Wednesday that Fritzl posed a danger as he regarded himself as “born to rape” and should be held in a mental facility.
Fritzl was emotionally stunted, the psychiatrist told the court.
“He is aware — he says so himself — that he has an evil side. He is aware that he was born to rape. He has that partly under control. But as soon as he loosens his grip, everything erupts out,” Kastner said.
Fritzl, who ruled his family with an iron fist, locked his daughter up in a cellar of his home on August 29, 1984. He said she had joined an obscure sect.
Three of the surviving children were brought to live with Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie, 69, while the other three spent their entire lives in the dungeon.
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