Josef Fritzl Pleads Sanity
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s at-a-glance look at media treatment of Josef Fritzl…
Fritzl has pleaded guilty to rape and incest but not guilty to enslavement and murder – the murder charge relates to the neglect of one of his daughter’s children.
The Sun: “Cellar fiend hides his face”
He’s the “dungeon dad”
CELLAR fiend Josef Fritzl hid his evil face behind a blue file today as he admitted rape – but denied killing one of his grandchildren. The beast shielded himself from reporters as he faced a raft of charges including murder, rape, incest, coercion, false imprisonment and enslavement.
Daily Mail: “Cellar monster Fritzl hides his face in shame as he admits: ‘I did rape my daughter but I didn’t murder her child’”
The murder charge relates to a child which died in infancy in 1996 whose body Fritzl burned in the wood-burning stove of the family home. Prosecutors allege the baby might have survived if Fritzl had arranged for medical care.
Fritzl, who fathered seven children with his daughter, Elisabeth, has confessed to keeping her in a windowless dungeon beneath the family home for 24 years, where he raped her more than 3,000 times.
Outside:
Two protesters outside the court in St Poelten west of Vienna, carried baby dolls smeared in fake blood as a media scrum descended on the small town.
Daily Mirror: “Hide And Sick”
Evil cellar monster hides behind blue ring binder as trial begins
BBC:
Escorted by six policemen and dressed in a light grey, checked jacket and dark grey trousers
The Times: “Sketch: Josef Fritzl cuts a shrivelled figure in Austrian courtroom”
As Josef Fritzl was led into a wood panelled Austrian courtroom, he seemed a shrivelled figure. For his re-entry into the world after almost a year of pre-trial arrest, he held a blue ring binder over his face, a visor against the flashbulbs of photographers but also an ancient symbol of shame…
And the face — so tanned when he abandoned his entombed family for a month to take a month’s holiday in Thailand — was parchment yellow, a prison complexion…
And Austria:
Judge Andrea Hummer speaking on a podium that bore a wooden cross and two candles — almost like an altar piece — stressed that the trial would assess crimes committed against members of a family, “Not of a region, let alone a whole nation.”
Austria, in other words, was not in the dock. Only Josef Fritzl.
Austria. Nazis.
In time we will learn his name and hear how his Austrian upbringing (here, here, here and here) and Nazishere, here, here and here) and his beach towel contributed to his crimes.
Meanwhile, Lorraine Kelly noted:
“The British police should have a massive recruitment drive and set up a special unit to search every single cellar in their entire country. Who knows what more vile horrors would be revealed.”
Break into homes. Smash doors. Shatter glass. It’s what the Nazis would have wanted…
Meanwhile, in Britain…
Daily Telegraph: “Josef Fritzl blames ‘troubled childhood’ for his incest”
Speaking in a thick local Austrian dialect, he said: “I did not have a good relationship with my mother.
“She used to stop me having any friends. I wasn’t allowed any independence at all until I was 12, but I did manage to have one secret friend and that friend bitterly let me down.
“Then I decided I did not want any friends after that.
“I had a very troubled childhood and at times I was taken away and put into a foster home.”
Create excuses. Create a cordon sanitaire to protect the mind from the truth. I was produt of the time, of events. You would have done the same had you been me…
His lawyer Rudolf Mayer told the court: “My client is not a monster. He is a man who wanted a second family and wanted to care for that second family.
“If it was just rape, sexual lust, then he wouldn’t have wanted children, or he could have used contraception. Or if he just didn’t care and had the children, he could have just got rid of them.
“But this was a man who cared for his family and spent Christmas with them.”
The eight-man jury will be expected to deliver its verdict on March 20.
Posted: 16th, March 2009 | In: Reviews Comments (3) | TrackBack | Permalink
