Josef Fritzl breaks silence about keeping daughter locked up for 24 years

Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man that kept his daughter locked up in his cellar for 24 years, using her as a sex slave, forcing her to help him expand the cellar space after impregnating her and keeping three of the six children they had together locked up in the cellar with her, has broken his silence on why he did what he did to his family.

Fritzl says he was obsessed with a desire to have a family with her because she was a “great housewife and a mother”.

Rudolf Mayer, who is Fritzl's lawyer spoke to an Austrian magazine, reading from notes that Fritzl gave him, said, "I knew that Elisabeth did not want the things I did to her. I knew that I was hurting her. But the urge to finally be able to taste the forbidden fruit was too strong. It was like an addiction.”

“In reality I wanted to have children with her. I was looking forward to the offspring. It was a beautiful idea for me — to have a proper family, also down in the cellar, with a good wife and a couple of children.

“I always wanted to have many children. Not children that would have to, like I had, grow up alone but children that would always have someone to play with. I had a dream about a large family ever since I was a little boy.”

Fritzl does confess to luring his daughter into the cellar and keeping her there but he denies her claim that he was sexually abusing her when she was 11 years old.

You can read the rest for yourself, but it appears from one specific statement that the defense his attorney plans to use, one of insanity, might not make it in court, because he acknowledges he knew right from wrong and did it anyway.

“With every passing week in which I kept my daughter captive my situation was getting crazier. I really was thinking about whether I should let her go or not. But I was not able to make that decision, although — or maybe exactly because of that — I knew that with every passing day what I had done would be more severely judged.

“But I was afraid of being arrested and of having my family and everyone out there find out about my crime — and so I postponed my decision again and again. Until one day it was really too late to free Elisabeth and take her upstairs.”

The insanity defense is usually based on evaluations by forensic professionals that the defendant was incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong at the time the offense was committed.

Cross posted at Stop the ACLU.

.