I am guilty … It was my sick behavior
Veronika Oleyksyn Austria
AN A stunning turn of events, ari Austrian on trial for imprisoning his daughter for 24 years and fathering her seven children pleaded guilty on Wednesday to all charges against him including negligent homicide hearing his daughter’s heart wrenching testimony.
. Saying he had a change of heart, Josef Fritzi calmly acknowledged his guilt on the third day of a trial that has drawn media attention from around the world for its shocking allegations. “I declare myself guilty to the charges in the indictment,” FritzI, 73, told a panel of judges, referring at one point to what he called “my sick behavior.”
• Fritzi chained his daughter up, strapping up her arms and tying her hands behind her back with an iron chain, which he then secured to metal posts behind her bed.
• He forced her to endure sexual abuse and rape at his hands sometimes several times a day, from the second day of her incarceration right up until her release last April.
• He subjected her to humiliating sexual abuse, including forcing her to reenact scenes in pornographic films with him as
Fritzi faces life in prison on the negligent homicide count, which he initially had con tested along with an enslavement charge. Prosecutors also well as inserting objects into her in a violent manner.
• He told them he had installed a system so that the doors would give them electric shocks if they tried to open them and that poison would be released into the cellar if they tried to escape, killing them all instantly.
.One of the children died in 1996 as “a result of his deliberate failure to call for medical attention”, which led to her death from “acute respiratory distress syndrome”.
A psychiatrist, meanwhile, told the court on Wednesday that Fritzi had a very serious personality disorder and would still pose a threat even at his advanced age if freed. Psychiatrist’Adelheid Kastner recommended that Fritzi serve out his sentence in a psychiatric ward.
Asked by the presiding judge what had led him to change his mind, Fritzi said it was the videotaped testimony from his daughter Elisabeth that he, jurors and the rest of the court had viewed during a closed door session on Tuesday.
Elisabeth is the prosecution’s key witness against Fritzi. Now 42, she was 18 When he imprisoned her in the cramped, windowless cell he built beneath the family’s home in the town of Amstetten.