Austrian Serial Rapist Josef Fritzl aka The Monster of Amstetten (Crime Documentary)

Fritzl was born in Amstetten, Austria, on April 9, 1935. At the time, Austria was under the control of Nazi Germany. His father abandoned the family when he was four years old and later died in the war, leaving him to be raised by his mother, who often beat him severely. Later in life, he was reputedly very strict and disciplined. At the age of 21, he married a woman named Rosemarie, who was four years younger than him and worked as a kitchen helper. In 1967, he was known to have raped a young woman at knifepoint in Linz, though the record was erased after 15 years. Fritzl was also a suspect in two other assaults in the area, is said to have engaged in indecent exposure, and is also alleged to have raped one of his sisters.

At some unknown point, he graduated from a technical college with a qualification in electrical engineering and worked at Voestalpine, an Austria-based steel company. For a while, he worked in mail-order lingerie, but gave up on it in 1972 and bought an inn and campsite near Salzburg. He is currently a suspect in the unsolved murder of a young girl in the area. None of this apparently affected Fritzl's marriage, in which he dominated his wife to the point that he was able to make frequent trips alone to Pattaya, a city in Thailand known for its sex tourism. Fritzl and Rosemarie had seven children together, including two sons and five daughters, including Elisabeth, whom he reportedly started sexually abusing as early as 1977, when she was 11 years old.

In January 1983, Elisabeth ran away from home with a friend and went to Vienna, but was found and returned to her family in less than a month. In an apparent attempt to keep Elisabeth isolated from the outside world, Fritzl started building the dungeon below the Amstetten house that he shared with his wife. The construction is believed to have started in 1978, not long after his first rape of Elisabeth. The windowless dungeon had electrical lighting, electronic locks on each door, and a remote code-lock on the main door, which Fritzl, an electrician by trade, installed himself. On August 24, 1984, Fritzl lured Elisabeth into the basement by having her help him put on the door, after which he drugged her with an ether-soaked towel and locked her in the 15' x 15' cell. She wouldn't see the light of day again for over two decades. During her first year of captivity, she was kept entirely restrained, but afterward, she was allowed to walk around freely inside. Fritzl's wife eventually filed a missing person report. To cover up Elisabeth's disappearance, Fritzl forced her to write a letter saying she had moved in with a friend and that she would try to leave the country if her parents came after her. The letter was postmarked in Branau.

Over the following 24 years, Fritzl would come down to Elisabeth every three days to give her food and supplies and rape her. After the birth of her first three children, he expanded the cell from 380 sq. feet to 590 sq. feet. He also put in a TV s