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Elisabeth prompts Fritzl confession

By Lucy Halfhead on Thursday 19 March 2009

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Marie Claire news: Austrian, girl locked up for 24 years

The courtroom presence of Elisabeth Fritzl may have tipped her father into abandoning his defence case and admitting yesterday to the murder of their baby.

Ms Fritzl – who made a virtual appearance in Court 119 on Tuesday to testify against Josef Fritzl on a giant television screen – may also have entered the room in disguise to observe her 73-year-old father. Sources in the clinic where she is staying and other trial observers appeared to confirm: she was there in person.

The court spokesman Franz Cutka said: ‘I can neither confirm nor deny her presence during the in-camera sessions on Monday and Tuesday.’

The return of Ms Fritzl could explain Fritzl’s astonishing change of heart. Having fiercely contested many of his daughter’s claims and pleaded not guilty to murder and enslavement on Monday, he is suddenly confessing to everything.

‘I regret it,’ Fritzl told Judge Andrea Humer. ‘Only yesterday did I realise how cruel I was to Elisabeth.’ His daughter, now 42, was locked up for 24 years in an improvised dungeon in the family home, where she was raped up to 3,000 times and bore seven children – one of whom died soon after birth.

Seeing Elisabeth, he told the judge, had made him think again. After watching 11 hours of her evidence on television, he was shattered and decided to change his plea.

Despite the fuzziness of official statements, the balance of probability is that Ms Fritzl really was present. She is writing a book as part of her therapy, aided by notes scribbled during her incarceration on the back of Fritzl’s shopping bills. But if she was in court, it was not as a clandestine reporter, but as a victim. 'Victims have the right to come to court and observe a trial,' Mr Cutka said.

The verdicts are expected today.

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