#Elisabeth fritzl pictures now install#

Elisabeth had threatened to run away many times. The final door before the darkness of the tomb-like cellar was the one that Elisabeth herself unwittingly helped him to install. There were initially two access points – a heavy hinged door and a metal door reinforced with concrete operable via a remote-control device.Ī total of eight doors had to be opened before reaching the purpose-built cellar. They watched as he tossed tons of earth from beneath the house and shifted it in a wheelbarrow to make way for the rooms he planned to build.Ī precise planner, he had thought of every last detail, securing concrete and steel supplies through contacts at construction companies where he had previously worked. Neighbours had observed with some intrigue as the electrical engineer hired a digger, which sat in his garden at Ybbsstrasse 40 in the tidy town of Amstetten for months. The local council had even given him a grant of a couple of thousand pounds towards the building costs. Nuclear bunkers were seen as an even more normal and necessary addition to an Austrian home than a conservatory or a kitchen extension might be viewed in Britain. It was at the height of the cold war and this, after all, was Lower Austria, which during those tense and heady days in world affairs found itself on the frontier with the Soviet Union. It was not difficult to get officials to approve underground constructions.

#Elisabeth fritzl pictures now install#

How could Elisabeth have known that she was helping her own father install the final building block to his plans to lock her up as his sex slave?įritzl had been planning what was effectively a dungeon for years, receiving official permission to construct his cellar complex as far back as the late 1970s.

It was a deeply cruel start to an unbelievably cruel deed. As she turned to leave, a piece of cloth soaked in ether was held over her mouth and nose and her world went dark. It was a hot day in August 1984, a month in which Prince released his hit Purple Rain, the space shuttle Discovery took off on its maiden voyage and the country of Upper Volta changed its name to Burkina Faso.Įlisabeth climbed down the stairs into the cellar and helped him fix the door in the dusty confines of his underground creation.