Episode 593: Josef Fritzl Part III - Fritzl's Pretzels

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Speaker 1 There's no place to escape to. This is the last time.

Speaker 1 On the left.

Speaker 1 That's when the cannibalism started.

Speaker 1 You know, a lot of people reach out to us when we record the show. And, you know, about this, you get asking questions about how do you know

Speaker 1 if the idea that you have is right?

Speaker 1 You know, like

Speaker 1 our opinions. There's so many.
Well, I'm just saying in general, like, how do you know as a person making things or doing things in life that what you're doing is right?

Speaker 1 And like, and what you, what that inspiration, what it's like to catch that lightning in a bottle. Are you having second thoughts about talking about this for three weeks? No.

Speaker 1 No at all. I wish we could talk about it from now on.

Speaker 1 Never stop. But this is selection.
Now, there was a book written by Josef Fritzel's lawyer that got some. This is now hot off the presses, 2023.

Speaker 1 What it's like to finally catch the tale of an idea that you always wondered if you could have.

Speaker 1 Suddenly it was there.

Speaker 1 The The thought as if out of nowhere, like an impulse that flashed in my mind, wandering aimlessly in it, like a small lost leaf, swirling over the asphalt of the road before being carried away by the wind, like forest camp.

Speaker 1 A vague idea I was playing with. Yeah, at first it was just a mind game.
But I got used to it. The thought that had seemed so absurd, so outrageous before, took on shape.

Speaker 1 It became a fixed idea that gradually took root in my mind. I'd always been a person who made decisions alone.

Speaker 1 And one day, I knew what I had to do.

Speaker 1 All that remained was to wait for the right opportunity. Talking about the sex dungeon, isn't he? Yeah.
Welcome to the last podcast on the last place, gentlemen. That was his inspiration.

Speaker 1 That was his inspiration. The leaf on the ground.
The leaf swirling around on the ground. Play Forrest Gump in the movie.
Forrest Gump, yeah. I've got

Speaker 1 the feather brain Henry Zabrowski.

Speaker 1 No feather brains.

Speaker 1 Come on, Marcus. That's true underground literature.
Yeah, it always is.

Speaker 1 And the highly literate Ed Larson. Hi, you doing? A, B, C, D, E, F.

Speaker 1 So when we last left, Joseph Fredzel, it was Elizabeth's 24th year underground. I'm sorry.
I don't mean to say that. Like, happy 24th anniversary.

Speaker 1 Wow, you can't even believe it rolls around that flash.

Speaker 1 I think technically that does make her anniversary in the basement.

Speaker 1 It officially becomes classic rock.

Speaker 1 It was her 24th year underground, and she'd had seven children with her father. Three had stayed underground with her.

Speaker 1 Three had been taken upstairs to be raised by Joseph and his wife, and one had died in infancy. The oldest amongst the underground children was Kirsten, who was 19 years old in April of 2008.

Speaker 1 That month, she became mentally and physically ill as a result of having never once left the dungeon in which she was born. Basically, she was dying of organ failure.

Speaker 1 So Elizabeth begged Joseph Fritzel to take their daughter Kirsten to the hospital. This is not in the plan.
No.

Speaker 1 Incredibly, Fritzel agreed, although he did make Kirsten and Elizabeth wait for days until his wife Rosemarie left for a vacation to Italy. Oh, lucky her.

Speaker 1 Yeah, oh no, they took vacations to Italy all the time.

Speaker 1 It's Austria. It's like if we took a vacation to Arizona, it's not a big deal.
Rosemary's so lucky.

Speaker 1 Once she was gone, Fritzel had Elizabeth write yet another letter, this time to the hospital, explaining Kirsten's situation to the doctors. And honestly, this time, Elizabeth, would you write it?

Speaker 1 I was really, have you heard about this? And it's from America. It's an angry magazine.
I think it's called Mad?

Speaker 1 Angry. Angry magazine.
Fury magazine. And they put these little illustrations on the margins that were just simply to die for.

Speaker 1 So if you could draw little things in there, I'd be fun, little guys with mustaches.

Speaker 1 His name is Sergio Argones, and he's my favorite.

Speaker 1 Well, while the note was terribly vague for obvious reasons, it did say that Kirsten was very afraid of people, that she'd been coughing for a few days now, and that she'd never been to a hospital.

Speaker 1 A bit overexplainy, in other words.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm surprised he didn't kill her.

Speaker 1 That's the question with Joseph Fritzel. It's like, why did he do this? You know why? Like, why? I actually do.
I think I know why. It is

Speaker 1 his sense of ownership over them is so utterly complete that the idea of losing them is way worse to him because it's a failure.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, remember when Elizabeth had her, you know, miscarriage, he got extremely angry and turned off the lights for weeks.

Speaker 1 Angry at her. Angry at her, yes.
And when the child died, when the infant died, even though he tossed it in the garbage, basically,

Speaker 1 he was very angry about it. Like he was very upset that the child had died.
And I think, again,

Speaker 1 like you said, it's like a failure on his part to not take care, to not take care of them, you know, to not keep them alive, like this sort of illusion that he has of this great family man.

Speaker 1 But they were his property. It'd be like losing a pair of his favorite shoes.
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 Now, as I said at the end of the last episode, Fritzel was over 70 years old and was just plain fucking tired.

Speaker 1 So he had to get Elizabeth to help him carry Kirsten out of the dungeon and carry her upstairs to the Fritzel family doorstep.

Speaker 1 It was the first time Elizabeth had set foot outside of the cellar in 24 years, and it was the first time Kirsten had ever left in her entire life.

Speaker 1 But as soon as Kirsten was laid outside, Elizabeth was locked back up.

Speaker 1 Just as soon as Elizabeth was hidden away again, Fritzel called emergency services and told them that he'd found an unconscious young woman on his doorstep.

Speaker 1 Once she was taken to the hospital, doctors noted that she was frighteningly pale, was missing clumps of her hair, and was missing most of her teeth.

Speaker 1 Now doctors were immediately baffled by what was happening here, but they could tell that her organs were failing, so they at least put her on life support.

Speaker 1 But even more puzzling was what happened when Fritzel arrived three hours later. He declared himself her grandfather, then asked them to please cure her, but do not call the police.

Speaker 1 You see, that's always, again, it's a super big tell. Like if you tell them, like, hey, listen, all of this, and you're super shady, right? It's too fucking crazy.
But if you,

Speaker 1 it's just like you can't believe the whole story. You would not be able to handle it.
It's just the whole thing, you know? So if we could just sort of

Speaker 1 move this along, if we could plug plug up a holes she have holes or something i mean at this point he is thinking there's part of him that's thinking like okay i'm gonna take her to the hospital they're gonna fix her up they're gonna release her into my care and i'm gonna put her right back down in the basement and then things are just gonna continue on but she has no like

Speaker 1 id

Speaker 1 no she has nothing yeah well she was born in a cult no kirsten yeah that's how that's the explanation yeah yeah she was born in a cult and like i don't know what goes on you know my daughter dropped her off i found her on my doorstep.

Speaker 1 You know what happens when they start listening to the Beatles?

Speaker 1 They start getting crazy ideas. She was listening to the arrhythmics and I knew she was going to go away.

Speaker 1 Well, naturally, doctors did not follow Fritzel's directive. See, Fritzel had shown them Elizabeth's letter, which said that she'd only been sick for a few days.

Speaker 1 Nothing about that story matched Kirsten's horrifying condition, so doctors called police to investigate.

Speaker 1 Now, Fritzel stuck to his cult story when the cop showed showed up to his house, even going so far as to produce other notes that were supposedly written from the cult compound where Elizabeth had ostensibly lived for over two decades.

Speaker 1 That was his story, and he was fucking sticking to it. But he couldn't even say anything about where the cult was or what it did.
Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 Now, police had already heard this story and they'd accepted it time and again. But Kirsten's condition and perhaps a belated realization that Fritzel's story was fucking nuts.

Speaker 1 Wait a second, I think he's got hair plugs.

Speaker 1 Wait a second. I hate hate hair plugs.
I'm no liar when I see one.

Speaker 1 That led them to reopen Elizabeth's missing persons case. See, the doctors needed to find Elizabeth because they needed her medical history to help diagnose what they thought was a mysterious illness.

Speaker 1 It didn't cross anyone's mind that this 19-year-old girl had been kept underground for her entire life. That wasn't really a diagnosis a doctor has in his back pocket.

Speaker 1 So to them, the best thing they could come up with was that this was possibly some sort of rare wasting disease. Yeah, because they don't know that she has been literally in an actual basement.

Speaker 1 Because even just being born in a cult doesn't necessarily mean that you're bound inside of a basement. No, a lot of cults got the outside stuff.
Most cults live outside.

Speaker 1 You got to go to it, they all go to the diner before everybody commits suicides, comets, and shit. Yeah, like all that kind of stuff.
They go out, they have excursions. Chicken pop pies.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 So police looked at where the last letter from Elizabeth had been postmarked. It came from the town of Kamaten-on-Deklenz, 43 miles east of Amstedton.
So the police started their search there.

Speaker 1 Now, of course, there was no evidence for Elizabeth anywhere but the dungeon, and so Fritzel may have thought that his plan was kind of sort of working. Good work, Fritzel.

Speaker 1 You're the smartest man in the whole world. Let's go have another daughter.

Speaker 1 Fritzel, however, had not factored in an officer named Manfred Woolfart.

Speaker 1 That's awesome.

Speaker 1 Come on.

Speaker 1 I think he's a hero. You seem to be amused by the existence of his name.
Hello, Suzanne Manfred Wolfart.

Speaker 1 Now I'm the hero of today's school.

Speaker 1 I'm so sorry.

Speaker 1 How much is it?

Speaker 1 Some people have irritable bowel syndrome. I have furious ass syndrome.
My ass marks. I'm Manfred Wolfart.

Speaker 1 Emphasis on the fart.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Now we can treat him like an adult. Shingo.
No, man.

Speaker 1 I've been laughing about Officer Manfred Wolfart for days. Oh, I did.
It's all about what you can cling to.

Speaker 1 Officer Manfred Wolfart studied Elizabeth's letter for clues. Let me take a look at this letter.

Speaker 1 Yes, his handwriting is odd. Looks different.

Speaker 1 Looks different. Looks older.

Speaker 1 Now tell me, Manfred,

Speaker 1 how do you feel about Steven and the panties?

Speaker 1 I'll tell you what is better than poop and the leaderhoes.

Speaker 1 Bigger mouse.

Speaker 1 Stephen eventually disappears.

Speaker 1 Wolfhart. You could keep those patches.

Speaker 1 He found that the handwriting in the letter was odd. as if it was more calligraphy than everyday handwriting.

Speaker 1 He also noticed that the sentence structure felt more like it had been dictated rather than written.

Speaker 1 In other words, police were starting to figure out that there was something stinky about Joseph Fritzel's story.

Speaker 1 Sorry, everyone.

Speaker 1 That's me. I once cleared a psych here to slatter thing.
I once cleared the set of

Speaker 1 Indiana Jones and the title of Fortune. I forgot her name of it.

Speaker 1 But I found it so bad an hour now. Everybody ran, Harrison Fort sued me.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile,

Speaker 1 Kirsten was only getting worse, and the doctor in charge of Kirsten, a Dr. Reiter, was getting more and more frustrated by what he felt was a lack of any real help from her grandfather, Joseph.

Speaker 1 So, in a move that bypassed Fritzel completely, Dr. Reiter issued a press release asking the public if they had any information on Elizabeth.

Speaker 1 And with that, the media got their first taste of what would be Austria's biggest story since a funny little fella named Adolf Hitler

Speaker 1 started making headlines in the 30s.

Speaker 1 You're so delighted with yourself for calling Adolf Hitler. A funny little fella.

Speaker 1 There's something about that idea of

Speaker 1 true turn the clock all the way back to 1939 for a funny little fella called Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 1 But that is wild if you think about like Austria's, like, it was really not known for much, but fucking literally Adolf Hitler and homebound children. No,

Speaker 1 Schwarzenegger, yeah.

Speaker 1 That's the most famous of all of them. These maybe.
Well, who's more famous, Hitler or Hitler? I'd say Hitler's number one, yes. Do you think that Hitler on the star meter?

Speaker 1 Like, if Hitler was on IMDb, he'd have a higher star meter

Speaker 1 than fucking Arnold Schwarzenegger. Let me actually look that up.
I mean, well, he was in Triumph of the Will.

Speaker 1 And that was, you know, Lenny,

Speaker 1 that was a very

Speaker 1 influential movie.

Speaker 1 He has his own IMDb page. Yeah, of course.
And actually, he was in Triumph of the Will. And I want to see what his star meters are.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, everyone who's actually, actually, who has Joseph Fritzel has his own IMDb page. I am.
I had. So his IMDb page, I honestly can't fucking believe that Adolf Hitler actually has.

Speaker 1 That was trivia. Dude.
How did you know that? Oh, my God. Hitler only had

Speaker 1 He has 43 credits. Yeah, as self.
Yeah. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 He is all shy. He has his head shot and has all the pictures in the photo with like where they would have all the Scar Joe stuff.
Yeah. Who manages them?

Speaker 1 Oh, let me look up his agent. His agent.
Do you have IMDb friends?

Speaker 1 I bet he's with CIA.

Speaker 1 Wow. Well, immediately, reporters arrived at Fritzel's house, but instead of finding a concerned, devastated grandfather, they found a furious old bastard berating the press and cursing Dr.

Speaker 1 Ryder for causing trouble. Now, Rosemary Fritzel had still not returned from her Italian vacation, possibly because no one had told her what had occurred while she was away.

Speaker 1 And I would imagine she probably doesn't call to check in with Yosef all that often. I think she's happy to be in fucking Italy, away from the sex dungeon topper.

Speaker 1 And she is just like enjoying herself, I guess. I actually also feel like Rosemary does a lot of the, it's all the clinking of a glass, staring into the middle distance.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, no, she's got the thousand-yard stick. Yeah, just all just being like, someone always goes like, so do you like pirata? And she's like, huh?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's good. Nice and squishy.

Speaker 1 You know, like, that's it. Soon enough, though, she was called back when doctors requested DNA samples from everyone in the Fritzel family.

Speaker 1 She complied, but Joseph refused, saying he was too busy to do so. I'm too busy!

Speaker 1 I'm too busy to come. I've got office work.
It takes me nine hours and my daughter.

Speaker 1 Eventually, though, perhaps because Fritzel was just too tired to keep up the charade once the first kid was out of the dungeon, he decided he had no choice but to free Elizabeth and the rest of the children.

Speaker 1 Some about him opening the doors and them all rutting out like all the animals, the top of Lion King.

Speaker 1 It's not a complete bit, but

Speaker 1 it's just an image in my head.

Speaker 1 I just see Rafiki, him as Rafiki with his red button. He's holding up the

Speaker 1 Kirsten that's like a 19-year-old, super long, skinny, like the emaciated girl and stuff like that. Yeah.
See, to me, it's like if he was Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln at the same time.

Speaker 1 You know what?

Speaker 1 He is Adolph Hitler, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, Joseph Ritzel. That's my Mount Rushmore.

Speaker 1 But before they were all let out, Joseph made Elizabeth swear that she wouldn't tell the truth about where she'd been for the last 24 years and would instead stick to the cult story for the rest of her life.

Speaker 1 Yes, and the way we will bind this is by the sacred Australian power of the pinky swear.

Speaker 1 Elizabeth eagerly agreed, probably knowing that she would drop the pretense as soon as she felt it was safe to do so.

Speaker 1 There was also no chance that once the authorities got a look at the family, they wouldn't immediately see that something was terribly wrong here.

Speaker 1 And they would also see that Elizabeth and her kids were going through whatever her daughter Kirsten was going through as well. They were fucking see-through.
Yes, they were.

Speaker 1 And I think that you should then see this answer from the abysses of Yosef F of why he thought, like, this is just an example of his brain as you could, why he thinks he'd walk through this whole fucking thing unscathed.

Speaker 1 The woman, the this horrible lawyer that asked him the question, being like, I'm going to ask you, it's like, I got the impression that you're someone who's always wanted to have everything under control.

Speaker 1 Didn't that play a decisive role in your crimes? And he says,

Speaker 1 you see where all this leads? Think of values like family. It used to count as the nucleus of society.
The parental home was the most important thing. Nowadays, everything is completely different.

Speaker 1 The state interferes everywhere. This leads to nothing good.
I can see it here, where I am now. Many of those who end up in prison, they come from broken homes.

Speaker 1 As opposed to the home that you created.

Speaker 1 Very, very, very put together.

Speaker 1 Very bound. We were bound together.

Speaker 1 This is why they didn't have to watch Sesame Street because they were being held captive by one of the characters.

Speaker 1 That's the best part. It's like our wives with last podcast.
Why would they listen? They get so much.

Speaker 1 But after 8,516 days in the dungeon, Elizabeth finally left with her two remaining children, Stefan and Felix. Stefan was 18 and Felix was five.

Speaker 1 And just like their sister in the hospital, neither had seen sunlight in all their years on earth.

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Speaker 1 Now, Rosemarie and the upstairs children, who had also been birthed by Elizabeth, they were out of the house when Elizabeth got her first taste of freedom.

Speaker 1 But when they came home, they were surprised with the arrival of the wayward daughter and mother Elizabeth, who'd supposedly come home from the cult after 24 years.

Speaker 1 She's just suddenly in the fucking living room. Yeah, just hanging out.
And

Speaker 1 again, I'm trying not to at all talk any mess about the, but it's also the visual must have been very stark. Yeah.
Because I think that it's very similar to the Donner Party kids, right?

Speaker 1 Where they get kind of like feral.

Speaker 1 Like this idea that this person that went from the basement, no sunlight, like she must literally be translucent, red, gray, stringy hair, teeth rotted out of her mouths, and she's just, what's supposed to do?

Speaker 1 She's supposed to be sitting there being like, hey, everybody, what's Saturday night live? You know what I mean? Like just saying stuff like random weird questions. We have to go like,

Speaker 1 so this is normal now, our new normal. Now, at this point, are there people living in the apartments in the house that have to like deal with her?

Speaker 1 Not deal with her, but you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 well the apartments were completely separate from like the home itself yeah okay i didn't know if there was like a shared living space no no no no okay well soon after she was let out joseph fritzel called dr ryder and told him that elizabeth had suddenly returned and fritzel was bringing her to the hospital to see kirsten it's crazy this shit's fucking crazy to me i i just it's like life's crazy you know i jumped in and said life is what happens when you're making other plans

Speaker 1 the twists and turns in this story if you would have wrote a Hollywood screenplay, you would have thrown it to the trash. Honestly, they would be like, okay, that's it made up.

Speaker 1 He then, again, quite suspiciously, told Dr. Ryder to not call the police.
Don't

Speaker 1 call the police. The job I was always going to say that.
You're going to get a touch on my mind.

Speaker 1 I don't like to be annoying, you know. Half an hour later, Elizabeth showed up at the hospital, disoriented and sporting a head of snow white hair, despite being just 42 years old.

Speaker 1 See, she's right here. She's the cookie code.
It's great. I can't believe she's in town.
Totally uncastable. Totally uncastable.
We're going to have to get her hair dyed because red makes you flirty.

Speaker 1 She told the receptionist that she was there to help her daughter Kirsten, but Dr. Ryder figured it was better for Elizabeth to immediately talk to the police.

Speaker 1 Now, Fritzel's cult story had already started to wobble with the police due to their inability to find a cult anywhere near Armstadten. And that's not to mention the work of Officer Manfred Wolfhard.

Speaker 1 That's how we're ever looking out. Anybody who's jail.
I try to see anybody who's operating a group or anything. I was so hard.

Speaker 1 No one was doing anything except the bowling league. And I was way more.
I honestly was surprised how consensual the bowling league was.

Speaker 1 Excuse me.

Speaker 1 Very difficult.

Speaker 1 You don't think it's difficult? Well, you go ahead and take a walk of my big police boots. My fur-filled pants.

Speaker 1 Nevertheless, Elizabeth did try to stick to the script when police first questioned her. It became obvious very quickly, however, that Elizabeth wasn't telling the truth.
Her story made no sense.

Speaker 1 And like her daughter, she was unnaturally pale, obviously malnourished, and missing most of her teeth. She was, in a word, completely jacked up.
Yeah. And like talking to her, she obviously.

Speaker 1 Three words.

Speaker 1 Completely jacked up. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It was three words.

Speaker 1 Did you break?

Speaker 1 I'm just getting to it early before you get the emails.

Speaker 1 I'm just trying to jump on top of it. Harold, we'll snap him out.
Mr. Fritzel, your daughter's in the living room.
No, it's it. Boy.

Speaker 1 That was my erection.

Speaker 1 In case you didn't know, that's what the sound

Speaker 1 red. Thank you.
It read.

Speaker 1 Finally, though, Elizabeth agreed to tell the truth, but only if the police promised to protect her and her children, and only if she would never have to see her father ever again.

Speaker 1 Investigators agreed, and Elizabeth quickly broke into tears and summarized the last 24 years of her life in just two hours. Oh, my dear.
Talking as fast as she could.

Speaker 1 She told them about the dungeon, the sex slavery, the forced pregnancies and births, and the baby that had died from medical neglect and was subsequently burned in the incinerator.

Speaker 1 The first session of therapy is always the worst.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because you gotta say it.

Speaker 1 It's the long one. It's the long one.
And that's when the investigation fell solely on Joseph Fritzel.

Speaker 1 Because even though the dungeon story was fucking insane, it still made more sense than the cult story. Of course.
And then it just.

Speaker 1 The vibe in that room. Like the idea of sitting and hearing this, because this story is.

Speaker 1 And looking at her, the way she look at her, looking at the way she looks, and knowing everything else they experience with interacting with Yosef, that just must have been such a

Speaker 1 crazy afternoon.

Speaker 1 The idea of like. It's not a summer at camp.
Like, it's not just a history. It's a wild.
But unfortunately, there's like one cop that's like,

Speaker 1 fuck, this is going to be a lot of paperwork.

Speaker 1 Especially in a liberal country like this, where you're just like, oh, God, this is going to.

Speaker 1 Wow. I just wanted the cult thing to be real.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, initially, Joseph Fritzel was a tad standoffish when he was brought in for questioning.

Speaker 1 Eventually, though, he couldn't deny the situation any longer and confessed to the whole thing in a highly whitewashed version of the truth. See, he admitted to the incest.

Speaker 1 How could he not at that point? There's seven kids. But he made it more quote-unquote romantic by saying that he never technically forced Elizabeth to have sex with him.
I made her laugh.

Speaker 1 Yes, he said he did have sex with her, but she'd wanted him to. And besides, he hadn't had sex with his daughter for many months now.
Hey, listen, okay, you try to fucking tell me.

Speaker 1 Have you ever tried to quit cold turkey on anything? I haven't touched my daughter once in like four months.

Speaker 1 Do you know how hard that is for me? And that was actually something he said in his defense as if it made him a better person.

Speaker 1 The only way to really describe, I mean, he is so unbelievably mentally ill and nothing illustrates it more than the book from his perspective. And it's all of this.

Speaker 1 He lives in an entire fantasy realm. Yeah.
It's crazy because I keep trying to think of people to reference him to, but he is the worst one. He's saying he's unique.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 In his words, he imprisoned Elizabeth for her own good to save her from drugs and so-called bad company.

Speaker 1 He said he always meant it well, and he therefore had no reason to be sorry for keeping her underground for almost two and a half decades. In his book, he also

Speaker 1 puts it like it was this colorful second life. Yeah.
And that what he it was the stress that he had at home. And he would always love going out to go to work.

Speaker 1 He would travel for work and he would go out and he said that, like, and then he would describe in this book that when he would go out for work, these like trists, these like romantic, consensual trists with waitresses and flights attendants and people working in hotels.

Speaker 1 And he told this like long stories: like, I met the most beautiful woman in Ghana. She was a professional painter, and I wooed her with my international waist and fine moustache.

Speaker 1 And when we made love,

Speaker 1 her excursions would fill the hut with all

Speaker 1 sweat-filled noises and gasps as I plunged in and out of her. And then he says that he had like a baby that he went to go see.
He said he had babies all over the fucking world, which people go.

Speaker 1 I actually do believe, but they did not come from consensual sex. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, Elizabeth Fritzel's underground children, meanwhile, were alternating between being ecstatic and terrified of what they found outside of the cellar.

Speaker 1 On one hand, Felix Fritzel screamed with delight when he finally saw the actual moon. Oh my god, but he couldn't handle cancel culture.

Speaker 1 And 18-year-old Stefan was able to stand up straight for the first time in his entire life. On the other hand, the outside world was also overwhelming.

Speaker 1 The kids could barely stand to be apart from Elizabeth at all, and they were absolutely terrified of cars.

Speaker 1 Each child also had their own complex health problems, from paper-thin skin to wildly defective immune systems, not to mention the health problems that come from inbreeding.

Speaker 1 Additionally, they also had to wear protective goggles in all but the most dimly lit rooms because their eyes couldn't handle the light, and they had to wear prescription strength sunscreen just to go outside they're basically vampires yeah i mean like as as far as like what they can handle i mean a little flash sunlight can burn them but when they said when like felix would feel like sunlight on his face he'd like giggle he'd scream you know like there's these but like scream and delight yeah like there's the this like dichotomy here of like yeah they've lived in their baby cellar but they're also kids yes at the same time doctors even had to install a cargo container at the hospital to replicate the underground world the Fritzel children were accustomed to.

Speaker 1 Like pandas. Yeah.
And they had to like the kids would like go into the container when the outside world became too overwhelming. It was pre-training.
Windows were too much.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just windows, people, sounds, you know, anything like that. So they would just like to go into like a dark place, a dark small place.

Speaker 1 I mean, that was what they'd known their entire life, you know? Like, I don't really like Texas all that much, but I can't deny it's kind of comforting to

Speaker 1 drive down a dirt road. It's your home.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's where I'm from.

Speaker 1 It's in your blood. Yeah, it's in your blood.
Like, that's the thing. Where you're raised, there's something comforting about that.

Speaker 1 You know, I enjoy the Everglades, but it's horrible.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I love the back of a cop car.

Speaker 1 That's where I was conceived. And

Speaker 1 that's where I really cut my teeth. Yeah.
Despite all that, though, you know, the kids were remarkably happy and were continuing to make progress.

Speaker 1 Rosemarie Fritzel, however, had a total nervous breakdown when she was told the full scope of her husband's crimes, when she finally had to face it.

Speaker 1 She just knew that her life was over. Yeah.
That is how I view this. I think that she,

Speaker 1 I don't blame her. She was just as much of a victim as anybody else.
But it's so hard because you want to say that the mother's job is to sort of like...

Speaker 1 be the shield or fix things or do something to help the kids. Yes.
Yeah. But so it's hard.
So I know it. I know that she was also a part she was also a victim.

Speaker 1 Also, if she didn't have that nervous breakdown, then that'd be like, oh, okay, well, you should go to prison. Yeah.

Speaker 1 She was so distraught that she very nearly died from the shame of it all and was hospitalized for a time with severe heart problems.

Speaker 1 Partly, her stress came from the incredibly intense press coverage of the Joseph Fretzel case. Do you guys remember when this story broke in 2008? Oh, I remember.
We were on Roundtable.

Speaker 1 No, we weren't. Roundtable didn't start till a little bit later.
When did we start it?

Speaker 1 I think we were actually talking about the other story that referenced this story, and then our minds were shattered when we found out about this.

Speaker 1 I think when, by the time, we didn't start doing Roundtable until 2010.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So I think that his trial was coming up.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because I don't think we were talking about it on Roundtable until like 2000. I think Fritzel's Pretzels was like 12, 13.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was real early. Yeah.
Real early. We're really late.

Speaker 1 Well, when Austrian police released a statement with details about Fritzel and his underground dungeon, the press dubbed him Das Inzest Munster, while claiming, and this is a biggie in this part of the world, that his actions were, quote, the worst crime in history.

Speaker 1 I will stay. I will say it's clear.
For Austrians.

Speaker 1 For Austrians. Yes.

Speaker 1 No. That's what I'm saying.
Hitler's an Austrian.

Speaker 1 It's hard because I just feel like. That's what I mean.
Like, that's a hell of a judgment. Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, no, again, no problem. I'm not trying to disparage Elizabeth Fritzel, but the

Speaker 1 Holocaust.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It is a bit much.

Speaker 1 It is a bit much. I've always said that.
I've always said, I was like, why do we got to go this hard? Yeah. And when she got released, it was a little bit like the sound of music.

Speaker 1 Hells.

Speaker 1 Sure, sure, sure, sure.

Speaker 1 The police held multiple press conferences full of stunning details, including one announcing that DNA tests confirmed that Joseph Fritzel had fathered seven children with his own daughter.

Speaker 1 According to a test,

Speaker 1 you are the father.

Speaker 1 No, that's not bitch.

Speaker 1 I kill you, Maury.

Speaker 1 Well, this steady stream of information made Joseph Fritzel a blockbuster worldwide news story that always mentioned Austria, Austria, Austria as the location. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, Natasha Kampush, the girl we talked about last week, she'd escaped her captor just south of Vienna in August of 2006, meaning that within a little over a year and a half, two underground rape dungeon stories broke out of Austria on a global scale.

Speaker 1 Well, this is all very distressing to the Austrian government, who'd hoped that 2008 was the year everyone was going to talk about how good of a job Austria had done hosting the massive European Cup soccer tournament.

Speaker 1 That's instead of asking why Austria has so many highly disturbing fuck dungeons everywhere. Hey, listen, I am sick of these questions.

Speaker 1 No one wants to ask how we got the Nets, how we got the Netshop in court, right?

Speaker 1 No one wants to ask the question, oh God, isn't it crazy that fucking Britney Spears' sister with the opening fucking, she's saying,

Speaker 1 no one talking about this? No one's into this.

Speaker 1 Fluorescent new balls?

Speaker 1 And so Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer Gusenbauer announced that the government was going to launch a PR campaign to take the focus off Austria as, quote, the land of dungeons and shift it to the fancy football tournament that was sure to bring in mini tourist dollars.

Speaker 1 But while many Austrians thought the PR campaign was distasteful, people weren't going to stay away from Austria because of the dungeons any more than people stay away from America because of the serial killing and gun violence.

Speaker 1 Yeah, dungeons only got one person at a time. Yeah, I mean, that's even factoring in that you're far more likely to get shot in America than kidnapped in Austria.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Your father's not Joseph Fritzel. You know, like you don't know you're gonna be haha.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's not yeah it's not great for Austria, but it's not gonna like I mean they still had Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know? Yeah, yeah, it's always gonna have that.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? It's only a randomly gonna end up in a sex dungeon with your father. I said, well, what do people want for them to not promo the soccer tour?

Speaker 1 No, well, they just didn't want them to like sweep the Joseph Fritzel story under the rug, which is what they were trying to do. They were trying to like kind of like

Speaker 1 a story in an eight-door basement. Yeah.
I mean, what do you want to do? Talk about it all the fucking time? Yes. Yeah.
But they did. They just wanted to remake Austria's image with a PR campaign.

Speaker 1 I agree.

Speaker 1 Honestly, though, it would take Arnold Schwarzenegger showing up as the Terminator, going like, you know, like, you will not be back in days, dungeon. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Now, Joseph Fritzel was largely unfazed by all the negative media attention and, in fact, seemed to enjoy it all quite a bit.

Speaker 1 He spent all his time in his jail cell reading news and watching TV coverage about himself, soaking up every word. Because he liked how his hair looked.
He liked how his mustache looked.

Speaker 1 In a kind of sick irony, though, the prison cell where he was kept for imprisoning his daughter was far nicer than the cell he built for Elizabeth.

Speaker 1 Fritzel had a TV, a radio, a comfortable bed with clean sheets, a window, and a potted plant. He also got three fresh meals a day and an hour to go outside and get exercise.

Speaker 1 The difference was that Elizabeth did not have multiple men threatening to kill her day and night like Joseph Fritzel had in Jaya. Well, you know, she had him.
Yeah, that was true.

Speaker 1 He was, but he only was only one of them. Yeah.
It wasn't like an entire jail full of men. Yeah, but he says he's very well liked.
Well, that's what he says.

Speaker 1 He was simply called Satan by the other inmates, and an actual bounty was put on his head that would be paid to the inmate who finally murdered him.

Speaker 1 Now Joseph Fritzel had naturally been a fan of true crime for his entire life. So when it came time to pick a lawyer, he knew exactly who to call.

Speaker 1 The lawyer was named Rudolf Mayer, and he defended the most notorious criminals in Austria's recent history. Most notably, he defended Alfreda Baunsteine, the so-called nanny doss of Austria.

Speaker 1 Elfrida was a black widow who'd murdered seven elderly men for their money by poisoning some of them with the diabetes drug euglucon one terribly cruel death however came when she locked an old man in a bathroom in an ice bath with the windows open during winter which froze him to death god pretty impressive you know he said because he also knew very well he got really well there was a guy that was his next-door neighbor in jail That was the name of Alfred Yu.

Speaker 1 He was a man. When he was awaiting trial? While he was awaiting trial.

Speaker 1 And so he got him. They got to be really good friends, according to him.

Speaker 1 And he said that he was the guy who was called the sea killer after being in prison for more than 30 years for violent and sexual offenses. He was released on parole.

Speaker 1 Then, after two years, he relapsed because it's

Speaker 1 how they do it over there.

Speaker 1 He strangled a sex worker, dismembered her body, and then he took up a bunch of her body parts, minced them into a bunch of beef, and then would taste them, would eat them, and then sell those things that meet to other people.

Speaker 1 Wow. Now he's a chef in jail.
And he makes specialized meals for Yosef. Interesting.
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Speaker 1 Now, Rudolf Mayer had represented Al Freyda seven years earlier in 2001 after her initial conviction when more bodies were exhumed. So Joseph Fritzel was well acquainted with Mayer's work.

Speaker 1 Mayer, meanwhile, who seemed to revel in publicity, immediately agreed to represent the most notorious Austrian of the 21st century.

Speaker 1 The reason why, Mayer said, was that he could tell when people were really monstrous. And when he met Joseph Fritzel, he detected, quote, no negative aura.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, it's all about, he definitely, Joseph Fritzel definitely passes the vibe check. He's totally mellow, totally fun, and he's just fucking like chill as hell.

Speaker 1 And he's just fucking, he'll be there, he'll have sex with his daughter, and that's it. That's it.
You don't got to worry about anything. You're going to take care of Joseph at all.

Speaker 1 He handles himself. Well, in the mayor's words, he wanted to show Joseph Fritzel as a human being instead of a horrific monster or a sexual tyrant.
That, of course, meant pleading insanity.

Speaker 1 Now, even though there was a mountain of obvious evidence showing what Joseph Fritzel had done, Austrian authorities were taking no chances.

Speaker 1 They interviewed everyone who'd lived at all of Fritzel's properties over the last 24 years, cataloging every bit of information they could find. Can you imagine that?

Speaker 1 Like someone showing up and like asking, hey, you remember that landlord you had 10 years ago? Yeah. He had an underground rape dungeon with his daughter.
Yeah, you were living on top of it.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
What do you remember? Oh, I remember him being real nice. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I remember one time I went in the backyard and he beat me with a hose. Yeah,

Speaker 1 but I deserved that. I was not supposed to be in the backyard.
And I spent a lot of time in the dungeon, but really just hanging out.

Speaker 1 Well, in all 30 detectives and 300 police officers worked around the clock for months. Even though they knew he was guilty.
They wanted an airtight fucking case.

Speaker 1 This is like a Nuremberg level trial where they're like, we must put, because also what's intense about their legal system is, which we covered a little bit with Anders Brevik, not they're, you know, not the same countries, but kind of similar in vibe, where they really have to spell out why.

Speaker 1 Josef Fritzel must be in jail forever. Yeah.
Right. Because they like to, they believe in

Speaker 1 rehabilitation.

Speaker 1 And they believe that, like, and I believe they do have the 20-year maximum sentence as well i'm not certain if it's like that but his sentence gets re-evaluated every couple years well i think i don't think they have uh like life without parole and i know he gets parole after 15 years yeah so they have he has to keep meeting with people yeah and cops also looked at over 700 cold cases they looked at sexual assaults missing persons murder but they could find nothing new to stick to joseph outside of what he'd done to his family but we know he'd done some we we found out he did some bad things well it was speculated that

Speaker 1 he committed a couple of murders, but it's just that he was around at the same time that these horrible murders occurred. And then, did he plead not guilty to this whole fucking dungeon crime?

Speaker 1 We'll get to that here in a second. All right.
And that's the thing: authorities, they took no chances.

Speaker 1 They used sonar probes at Fritzel's other properties to see if he had built any other underground dungeon. His second underground dungeon.
It's more exhausting than having a daughter for a wife.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 it's deeper than a sonar probe, a shovel. No, no.

Speaker 1 You don't have to ruin the precious apartments of Austria.

Speaker 1 Well, such escapades as using sonar, that was just more fodder for the media, who couldn't stop talking about Joseph Fritzel's Austrian sex dungeon.

Speaker 1 Journalists camped outside of the hospital where Elizabeth and her children were recovering, and allegedly there was a reward of $1.5 million for the first photo of Elizabeth after her escape.

Speaker 1 After that, Austrian anti-terrorism forces guarded the hospital and many photographers were arrested trying to get in.

Speaker 1 I do think that they took her safety and happiness very seriously. Yes.
Which I will say that is also what's kind of. It's almost like

Speaker 1 they took it personally of like, we failed this girl. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It is, it's, because it is very different than you see it sometimes in certain cases in America, but this is just one of those cases where you could tell. Yeah.

Speaker 1 They smelt their failure all over themselves and they knew that they had to do something about it.

Speaker 1 And they, they, the way that they very closely guarded her was, was very, uh, you know, like it was great. Like, she, we still don't necessarily know where she is.

Speaker 1 I wonder if Natasha was the other woman, right? Yes. I wonder if they ever met and like talked about this shit.
Yeah, they're on a group text with the girls who escaped Ariel Castro.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, they all talked. They talk all the time.

Speaker 1 Well, on one occasion, an English photographer, a type of journalist known to be the scummiest around,

Speaker 1 climbed the hospital walls to the third floor to try to claim the reward, but was arrested when a nurse spotted him.

Speaker 1 A different nurse, however, was caught surreptitiously taking a photo of the family so he could sell it to a magazine for nearly half a million dollars. It's a lot of money.
After that, the hospital.

Speaker 1 Are you saying that? Is it like,

Speaker 1 you know, McMee, he probably did it that way. It was a nurse.
It was a lot of money. It was a nurse.
It's a lot. It's like when you keep ramping up the reward of it.

Speaker 1 I feel like, in a way, it's like, that's where you could almost blame a little bit of the institution, too, being like, you're doing this on purpose.

Speaker 1 You're driving people that are desperate to want to do it. Oh, no, it's the institution's fault, definitely, for offering the money for the privacy, to

Speaker 1 destroy the privacy of these people. Oh, yeah.
After that, the hospital banned all phones and cameras and threatened the job of anyone who broke the no-phone, no camera rule.

Speaker 1 Eventually, the family's plight gained the attention of the world's second most famous Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think he's more famous.

Speaker 1 You really think so? Than Joseph Fritzel? No, than Hitler. Oh, yeah.
He's definitely more famous than Fritzel. He's definitely more huggable.

Speaker 1 Actually, I don't know.

Speaker 1 But Arnold Schwarzenegger, yeah, I mean, they won't show me. I got to log into my IMDb Pro.
I have to change it again because I let it lap.

Speaker 1 So I'll look at their star meter and I'll find out the definitive answer if Schwarzenegger is more popular than Hitler. He's definitely more popular than Haritz.
Well, positively, yes.

Speaker 1 He's more welcomed.

Speaker 1 More well-liked. Yeah.
His movies are more watched. Actually, I don't know if Triumph of the Will is pretty big.

Speaker 1 Pretty big.

Speaker 1 Well, at the time of the Fretzel case, this was back when Schwarzenegger was governor of California. And he offered a personal invitation to visit him here as his personal guest.

Speaker 1 You bring me your Lizbeth, you bring me the daughters, and I will pump them up. They're very very skinny looking.
I will make them strong. Lie on lie on.

Speaker 1 Lie little dungeons. Your little pectoral monsters are for little wussies.

Speaker 1 Because of the fault lines, we cannot build that many basements. You love it here.
Come on, you pussy. Don't put up 20 more pounds.
I don't care. Your skin is ripping off at the simple touch of metal.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, he became Fritzel. Yeah, he did.
Yeah, he became really horrible.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, and you're spitting.

Speaker 1 You have a bunch of spittle on your lip that you just, I just saw you suck it back in.

Speaker 1 You love your spit. You really do.
It's called the fucking, it's Montong's Lube.

Speaker 1 Well, on a far smaller scale, a former schoolmate of Elizabeth's, in a misguided attempt to help, she recorded and released a schlager song about Elizabeth's experience called Veirun Schwansegiara, or 24 years.

Speaker 1 The song, however, is completely unobtainable because Elizabeth's lawyer very quickly slapped the singer with a cease and desist order, even though all profits from the CD went to Elizabeth.

Speaker 1 Year one, it's not so fun, year two.

Speaker 1 Hey, I'm feeling blue. Year three.

Speaker 1 Hey, what's growing in me? Year four. That's my daughter.
She's on the floor. But aren't you allowed to just write a song? Yeah, but they still slapped her with a cease and desist.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 Maybe the laws are different in Austria. I think that it's maybe in poor taste.
And the longer song, I think, is in quiet poor taste. Yar,

Speaker 1 Yara, Eins. It's like a drinking song.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, kind of sort of like a drinking song.
You know, I feel like it's not what I want to hear in a tavern. You know what I mean? Like, I don't want to think.

Speaker 1 Well, if I'm drinking a big stein, no, but then I'm in October fast. You could totally do a schlager song that's kind of based on your imal.

Speaker 1 That would be like, you could imagine yourself in a beer hall holding a shte.

Speaker 1 And everyone's me out. No, and everyone's going, Yara eins, eins, eins, Yara eins, eins, eins.
It's kind of nice. I know it'd be a way to reformat the memory.
I'm just saying it can be done.

Speaker 1 You know who should write a song about it? Boy George.

Speaker 1 Why? Didn't he keep someone a prisoner on his Facebook? Yes, he did.

Speaker 1 That's what I referred. Oh, yeah.
I didn't know about that.

Speaker 1 I didn't know about that at all. Boy George, captive man.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah, 15 months for falsely imprisoning male escort.
Wow. Yeah.
Wow. He looks like Kingpin.

Speaker 1 It's still, I mean, like, much better.

Speaker 1 I really think the basement was lovely. Unfortunately, yeah, you're being held in Boy George's, like, nice house.
You got the big bath. You got the fucking glory holes.

Speaker 1 You got the DJ room. Kirsten Fritzel, meanwhile, had finally come out of her medically induced coma and had been taken off life support.

Speaker 1 But speaking of who could have done a song, when she regained consciousness, doctors gave her a CD CD player and every album from UFO enthusiast Robbie Williams because Kirsten had seen him on TV in the cellar and had become obsessed.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 So he could have written the song.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and then I could just see Robbie Williams showing all up, just like, you know, hey, hello there, logo, you know, you're like doing like the weird sort of like, you know, the meet and greet that they do for like, you know, like the cancer kids or mango-ish kids, and she's just like,

Speaker 1 and I'm sure he did a great job being nice, you know what I mean? But it's super awkward. Yes, it is.
But while there were some happy times with Elizabeth and her family, there was...

Speaker 1 You can't play the kids as fucking goblins. I didn't.
I didn't. I'm just saying it must have been a weird afternoon.

Speaker 1 But nice. I'm glad he did that.

Speaker 1 But while there were some happy times with Elizabeth and her family, there was a certain resentment that was starting to grow concerning Elizabeth's mother, Rosemary, especially concerning the question as to how much she knew about her husband's crimes.

Speaker 1 Reportedly, Elizabeth took the three so-called upstairs children out of Rosemarie's care after giving a deposition as to what happened to her in the previous 24 years, which I think got her to thinking about just how her mother couldn't have known about the dungeon.

Speaker 1 Yeah. The dungeon is different.
Like, I know it's ridiculous to say. I think that the dungeon was specifically, Fritzo's entire life was devoted to keeping that dungeon a secret for the most part.

Speaker 1 And his work, which is what he said everybody ignored, was how hard he worked. And but Rosemary, I just, it it was more all of the rest.
It was just all the kids showing up, no questions asked.

Speaker 1 She was the perfect person to go along with it. Any other person might have asked a question.
He picked, when he was 20 years old, he knew exactly who he was picking.

Speaker 1 He specifically paired himself with someone he could entirely dominate and abuse. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, after giving the deposition, Rosemarie was kicked out of Elizabeth's new house, which, of course, shattered the elderly grandmother.

Speaker 1 The nightmare only continued for Rosemarie after that, who was hounded by the press both at her new home in Linz and at her former home with Joseph when she went back to pick up a few possessions.

Speaker 1 I would fucking, whatever's in that house still, leave it in that dog. Leave it, man.
Also, with these reporters, isn't there anything else going on? In Austria?

Speaker 1 Well, this is the biggest story in the world. Dude, this story's fucking ape shit.
This story is.

Speaker 1 You really, we're used to it. You know what I mean? When this was like a hot new single, this shit was blowing people's minds like R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Like, this is a crazy, crazy story.

Speaker 1 No, there are people being sent from America and England and countries all over the world, being sent to Austria specifically for this story. Oh, my God.
Yeah. I mean, this was massive.

Speaker 1 This is covered wall to wall. What's the big deal?

Speaker 1 And soon after that, she finally announced she was divorcing from Joseph Fritzel. Oh, it took that.
It took a long time.

Speaker 1 As far as what happened to the house at Ypststrasse-Viasig, where Fritzel built his dungeon, Joseph actually hired a second lawyer to transform it into a true crime attraction.

Speaker 1 He was going to charge admission. But once police heard about this plan, they flooded the cellar with liquid concrete.
The house, however, still stands to this day. Yeah.
Now, concerning Fritzel.

Speaker 1 You go right there. Yeah.
Just build another house. No,

Speaker 1 it's a good house. Yeah.
That's not a good house.

Speaker 1 Okay. Maybe not.
Maybe not. Now, concerning Fritzel, he was charged with manslaughter for the dead baby, 3,000 counts of rape, and slavery under an obscure 19th-century penal code.

Speaker 1 In other words, there was no way Joseph Fritzel was ever going to be free.

Speaker 1 Now, although the trial was kept private, except for opening statements and sentencing, the court psychiatrist's 130-page report on Joseph Fritzel's mental state got leaked to the press.

Speaker 1 In it, Fritzel blamed his mother for everything, saying that because of her, he was, quote, born to rape.

Speaker 1 You see, though, I feel like they twisted the statement because the actual quote is, I lasted a long time for someone born to rape.

Speaker 1 Yes, he did. That's the actual quote.
He did say that, yeah. That's the actual quote.
That's the actual quote, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, he did also say that he could have behaved a lot worse than locking up his daughter. Oh, that's basically saying, like, you're lucky this is the worst I did.
And it's not even that bad.

Speaker 1 Yeah, thank you. I appreciate everything you've done for us.

Speaker 1 Yeah, dude, I could have totally

Speaker 1 done.

Speaker 1 He also blamed seeing bombs fall on Amstedten during World War II when he was a Hitler youth, saying it was a traumatic experience for him. Everyone had it.

Speaker 1 Hundreds of millions of people went through the exact same fucking experience. But do other people have siren phobia?

Speaker 1 Yeah, Yeah, a lot of it. Whatever.

Speaker 1 You don't know me. Don't talk like you know me.
I'm going to my basement.

Speaker 1 He said that it was a traumatic, especially since his mother would abandon him during the bombings, which sounds like his mother wanted him to die.

Speaker 1 These statements were expanded upon in an interview Joseph Fritzel did with his lawyer, Rudolph Mayer, who thought, and because Rudolph Mayer thought, hey, if only people could see Joseph Fritzel's human size.

Speaker 1 He's so charming and funny and cute. They'd understand him a lot better.
Yeah. Just sit down, have a meal with them.

Speaker 1 As author John Glapp put it, the interview was, in a way, Fritzel's Mein Kampf, his way to explain himself to everyone.

Speaker 1 Now, Mayer was probably trying to show people how crazy Fritzel was, because you'd have to be crazy to imprison your daughter, rape her, and father seven children with her over the course of 24 years.

Speaker 1 Crazy like a fox.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's only ways he's crazy like a fox.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 1 It was a burrow. But surprising, no one except Rudolph Mayer, the hours-long interview only creeped people out even more than they were already creeped out.
Crazy.

Speaker 1 Fritzel spoke at length about his sexual feelings for his mother, then implied that he should be congratulated for never acting on his fantasies. Get over it! No!

Speaker 1 No!

Speaker 1 I was strong!

Speaker 1 Okay?

Speaker 1 Do you have... Kill me.
Okay.

Speaker 1 What was your mother like? I tell you what, she had bigger tits than your mom. I still didn't fuck.

Speaker 1 Mama with great tits. How dare you say anything bad about

Speaker 1 mama great tits? Oh!

Speaker 1 Great tits my mother did have.

Speaker 1 Fritzel then talked about how much pride he had in raising an incest family in a dungeon of his own making. I did it myself.
I put myself up by my bootstraps. I got the concrete.
I made the daughter.

Speaker 1 I made the daughter's daughter. And then I was going on to make the new daughter be my new wife.
Okay? And you try it.

Speaker 1 He basically said that the reason why he was such a brutal tyrant was because he'd grown up a Nazi, which wasn't his fault either. But he liked it, but it also wasn't his fault.

Speaker 1 It's bad, but it's good, but it's also bad, but also good. And also, what's bad about it? Come on.

Speaker 1 Why does everyone get so weird about this? Come on, guys. Hey.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 He then said that he was not the monster the media portrayed him as, because, quote, hey, I could have killed them all, then nothing would have happened. No one would have ever known about it.

Speaker 1 Okay, arguably would have been better.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 maybe I at the same time, I could have totally done it in crazy ways.

Speaker 1 Fritzel, however, got angry when his lawyer brought up Elizabeth's claim that her father started raping her at age 11.

Speaker 1 Fritzel denied that, saying that he was not a man that has sex with little children, but was definitely a man man who had sex with his daughter after she turned 18.

Speaker 1 I waited till my daughter became a woman. Yeah, because there's nothing wrong with that.
No.

Speaker 1 And he keeps banging her after he's,

Speaker 1 she was dying. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah, Eddie.

Speaker 1 You know what I'm noticing?

Speaker 1 You know what? I'm letting it get to me.

Speaker 1 I'm letting it bother me.

Speaker 1 From you, you know what I get?

Speaker 1 From all this work, I'm so surprised. We're in Los Angeles.
You're so judgmental.

Speaker 1 You're so judgmental of this man, the way he lives his life. Okay, how dare you? I know.
I should feel sorry for this Nazi that raped his daughter. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Think about how much pressure that was for him. He says it right here.
He says it. He's like, think about it.
I could tell no one how I felt.

Speaker 1 I was a man alone that could never tell anyone my true inner struggle. Don't you feel bad for him?

Speaker 1 I take it back. His comp

Speaker 1 mine comp.

Speaker 1 Well, Fritzel also doubled down on what he told police, saying that the only reason why he put Elizabeth in the cellar was because she didn't follow his rules.

Speaker 1 She spent all her time hanging out in local bars, hanging out with persons of questionable moral standards. She was 11.

Speaker 1 Yes, the dungeon, he said. Well, no, she was 18 when she was put in the cellar.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's right, that's right.
But still, it's early. It's very early.

Speaker 1 The dungeon, he said, was a place where he gave her a chance, by force, to stay away from bad influences. Now, Mayer hoped that all this would garner sympathy for Fritzel.
Definitely. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 They just gotta see. Yeah, but predictably, everyone saw him as cynical and delusional.

Speaker 1 The media pulled quotes like, I could have killed them all for headlines, and ran photos of Fritzel sunbathing in a speedo next to a story called, I lusted after my mother. And aren't you jealous?

Speaker 1 The Joseph Fritzel story.

Speaker 1 Now, after just four days in court, Joseph Ritzel pled guilty to all charges and was sentenced to life in prison. Okay, good.

Speaker 1 And since then, he'd been imprisoned at a psychiatric hospital for mentally ill prisoners.

Speaker 1 Although, as of just this year, it was determined by courts that the 89-year-old Joseph, he's still fucking alive today. These mean bastards never fucking die.
He never do.

Speaker 1 There's also something about people with, like, you know, I hate it when people throw the word like narcissism around, but he legitimately is the textbook, like of the very peak of having a narcissistic personality disorder.

Speaker 1 My grandmother was also diagnosed with the same, and what she would do is take

Speaker 1 implicit care of herself. And so she lived till she was 94.

Speaker 1 Evil bitch to the very end.

Speaker 1 So we just got five more years.

Speaker 1 Well, the hospital said that he no longer posed danger and could therefore be transferred to a regular prison.

Speaker 1 His new lawyer, a woman named Astrid Wagner, said that she will apply for his release after his transfer.

Speaker 1 Joseph wrote in his book that if he is ever released, he plans to move back to Amstetten and open a small business. Here's a couple of these.
Now, this woman. Quite possibly Fritzel's Pretzels.

Speaker 1 I legitimately,

Speaker 1 this is the time.

Speaker 1 This is this woman that wrote the book, The Abysses of Joseph S. Joseph F.
The abscesses.

Speaker 1 Of Joseph F.

Speaker 1 She is,

Speaker 1 I would actually put her in a category of,

Speaker 1 apparently she dated a serial killer in jail. And so she became a serial killer groupie outs in this world, right? She's deep in this world, which is why Joseph Fritzel chose her.

Speaker 1 He wrote her a letter saying, I saw and read your book about Jack Unterweger, and I loved your sympathetic stance with him. Will you retell my story? Now, this is in 2023.
So this is years after this.

Speaker 1 So all of the trials happened.

Speaker 1 He's had a long time to really sit and think and she's trying to show the world same thing you got to know him if you meet him he is just a frail grandfather who just he is the most charming delightful and what she does is a very similar it's how do you put this I feel like it's the same way anybody who loves these historically bad men where they must identify with something within their family that they see.

Speaker 1 The way she seems to talk about him is that he's, she's either physically in love with him or like all she does is ask questions stuff like she's like

Speaker 1 what does love mean to you like she says stuff like that like one time she asked me like one of the questions she asked um

Speaker 1 tell me hey tell me yoseph who was the true love of your life and he said

Speaker 1 don't even ask him that question no dude no this is like it is very very it's just like stuff like that where he said um my wife i always got along well with with her but we had very different spheres of life you know i had my job my travels and of course my secret love affairs i was always looking for adventure in some way i guess i didn't appreciate her enough you know could you perhaps get in touch with her i have so much to explain to her they say that you should not only be at peace with yourself but also with others before leaving this world So he believes that also my favorite was she's like, what do you look for in a woman?

Speaker 1 And he says, I like it when she has a temper, when she's approachable. And I mean, I don't mean that in a sexual sense.
I mean, open-minded in terms of a character. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He likes to see himself in there. Yeah.
Well, like he said in the book with no irony, he says that he is a good guy. I'm a good guy.
He's literally the headline. I'm a good guy.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And a responsible family man. He also says the direct quote from him.
And he is bitching constantly about how no one paid attention to how great his work was.

Speaker 1 Like how he was such an impressive, successful businessman, and that he would call these like Kazdalliances, and he would mostly talk about the pressure of having a secret love and how hard that was on him.

Speaker 1 Never mentions Joseph Jr.,

Speaker 1 which I find interesting. Does not come up at all.
None of the other kids come up. No one mentions Joseph Jr.
Nobody does. And it is just really fucking crazy.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, he also claims to have many illegitimate children abroad from his many trips, especially to Thailand. He says they keep correspondence with him.

Speaker 1 He also claims that his son in Ghana is a respected lawyer, supposedly. Yeah, that it was just not true.
We know that he did go to Ghana. It was all for work.

Speaker 1 And like, he did travel around various things for work for the concrete and steel companies that he worked for. And, but then, but there's no way he wasn't doing sex tourism at the same time.

Speaker 1 Oh, of course.

Speaker 1 He was doing sex tourism at the time. The entire time.
Yes.

Speaker 1 But the best part is, I just got to go downstairs.

Speaker 1 Don't hustle me. I'm local.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 If you see anyone in Ghana or Thailand with a pencil-tin mustache, it might be a pretzel.

Speaker 1 He also called that guy who killed all the people, but killed the woman. He called him a helpful, nice guy.
Yeah, he loves that guy.

Speaker 1 And he says he's super popular in prison, but he can't walk around because people hound him to want him to talk. Wow, that's crazy.
Yeah. Yeah, he's just so popular.
What is he? Fucking busy?

Speaker 1 Talk to him. No, he says he's busy.
He gets up every day. He has his fitness regiment that he does every single day where he

Speaker 1 doesn't need a walker, even though they've been forcing him to use one. Man, it must be...
Austrian prisons must be kind of nice because this guy is he gets to garden. He gardens.

Speaker 1 He gets to make his own meals. They have a communal kitchen where they make meals and pastries together.
That's the one thing he doesn't like to eat because he's watching this figure. Oh.

Speaker 1 And they, oh, which is all, that's all real. And so they, it's just, yeah, it seems really nice.
Yeah. Yeah.
But it does reports to the contrary

Speaker 1 far more credible. Like it seems like people want to kill him.
Like most people want to kill him. And he's in he's in solitary confinement most of the time for his own safety.

Speaker 1 The second he's in general. genpop, someone's going to fuck him.
Someone already did beat him up. So he was, he was attacked very badly once in the shower where he did the same thing.

Speaker 1 They mashed up his face. They did a bunch of bad shit to him.
And now he just forever just kind of went back into solitary confinement. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And concerning Elizabeth and her kids, they were settled in an unnamed rural Austrian village where they are fiercely protected from outsiders by their fellow villagers.

Speaker 1 No one knows where they actually are. And as far as I know, no picture has ever been taken of Elizabeth or any of her so-called downstairs children.

Speaker 1 As for Joseph Fritzel, his unprecedented criminal energy, as the Austrians put it in their sentencing, means that there is absolutely no way he will ever be released, even though he is eligible for parole this year.

Speaker 1 Now, I think it's important you remember: this is what the lawyer, his lawyer, reminds us all of. And I want you to think about this in terms of this.
He's the new chick. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I can already hear them shouting their phrases of how a lifelong sentence must stay lifelong. Those who condemn my wanting to understand the darker sides of the human soul.

Speaker 1 To them, I'd like to say to their faiths, keep me from judging a person before I've walked a mile in his moccasins. Moccasins?

Speaker 1 There's no moccasins in Austria.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 She ended it with a racist statement.

Speaker 1 You know what? Fine. He can go live with you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Have Joseph Fritzel live in your fucking upstairs apartment.
Well, Joseph Fritzel has been in prison for just a fraction of the time that he imprisoned Elizabeth.

Speaker 1 And unless he lives to be 97 years old, Joseph Fritzel won't even come close to the sentence he imposed on his daughter.

Speaker 1 But unlike Elizabeth, Fritzel will most likely die alone in a prison cell as one of the most hated and reviled men of the 21st century. Well, I hope that we did our part in rehabilitating his image.

Speaker 1 Because that's such a hard burden to live with. Yeah, well, we have Muppetized him.
Yeah, you turned him into Grover.

Speaker 1 But you know,

Speaker 1 honestly, he could never turn himself into Grover, and that was the problem. Yeah, he's more of an Oscar the Grouch.
Oh, he's a Grouch for Truth.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 yeah, I tell you that. And more like Mr.
Groper.

Speaker 1 That seems more of a snuffle upicus. Oh, yeah.
In appearance. Yeah, if he would have made a movie, it would have been a snuffle upicus film.
A snuff film. Disgusting.

Speaker 1 Patreon.com/slash last podcast on the left.

Speaker 1 Unfucking believable. I never thought that.
You made this entire series without a single tasteless joke, and you fuck it up at the end. We did.

Speaker 1 We did.

Speaker 1 I found that joke to be delicious.

Speaker 1 Patreon.com slash last podcast on the left is where you can watch video of every single episode that we do. You can watch side stories for free over on YouTube.

Speaker 1 And you can also follow us for free at LP on the left on TikTok and Instagram. Y'all be sure to check out LPNTV on Twitch.

Speaker 1 That's twitch.tv/slash LPNTV for all the shows we have coming out almost every weekday at night.

Speaker 1 Go check out all of our shows after the fact on our LastPodcast on the left YouTube. And come see us on tour at LastPodcastonLeft.com.
Check out shows.

Speaker 1 Turn up a date. Come see us in Boston, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, London, and Iceland, all in the coming month.
And then next week, we're coming back for some good old-fashioned

Speaker 1 spooky true crime. I love it.
We got some good spooky

Speaker 1 season. We need to be doing this.
Yeah, I mean, you weren't spooked by this? No, this is different.

Speaker 1 When it's real life, it hits harder. I find spookier ever.
That's going to be real life again. I feel like this is spookier than ever.
Okay, yeah. So he's, yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger is number 57.

Speaker 1 Is Hitler on this list? Oh,

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 Arnold's right between Shia LaBeouf and Robert Downey Jr. Interesting.
I would have never.

Speaker 1 This is a flawless. I don't even want to get it.

Speaker 1 If you're around in Los Angeles on Sunday, October 13th, I'm going to be doing a forest firefighter benefit.

Speaker 1 Again, don't bring your fucking wives to that shit because

Speaker 1 2050

Speaker 1 is fucking hot. But I think they're busy right now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're not coming to the comedy show. Yeah, so it's a night of comedy and country music at Scribble in Highland Park.
That's October 13th. Come check it out if you want to get tickets.

Speaker 1 It is on eddytoons.com.

Speaker 1 All right. Whoa, IMDB Pro.
Well, let me look up. All right, Adolf Hitler.
Wow, his star meter is 8,766. Look at him.
Let me look at Arnold Schwarzenegger for the final answer. He's 57.

Speaker 1 Wow, I guess, yeah.

Speaker 1 And I want to say, 8,000 spaces higher. Legitimately, Schwarzenegger is officially more popular than Adolf Hitler.
Now, are you more popular than Adolf Hitler? Yeah, that's the big question.

Speaker 1 Let me see. All right, so he's at 8,667.

Speaker 1 I am at.

Speaker 1 Oh, this is great. Drum roll.
Yeah, I can't wait for this.

Speaker 1 Come on, is Henry funnier than Hitler?

Speaker 1 More popular. He's not.
He's not at all. I think it's a bit more.
I can tell it's closed as hell. I can tell it's close as he is.
It's inconclusive.

Speaker 1 Oh, they know. You're not even a number.

Speaker 1 Dave is inconclusive.

Speaker 1 No, I'm just seeing the results. Oh, okay.
Inconclusive. Yeah, that's too bad.
I'm just going to hide that score like I had my other daughter.

Speaker 1 Hail Satan everywhere. Hail Keene.

Speaker 1 I'm not. No, there's nothing.
Just a Schwarzenegger. Hail Arnold.
Arnold Saturday.

Speaker 2 Hey, weirdos. I'm Elena.
And I'm Ash. And we are the hosts of Morbid Podcast.
Each week we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 2 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

Speaker 2 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird. Two new episodes drop every week, and there's even a bonus once a month.
Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

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