Friday, May 27, 2011

Monster Fritzl's 'animal' children

THE SUN

Saturday, 28 May 201

By VIRGINIA WHEELER

Published: 01 May 2008

Monster Fritzl's 'animal' children

tory? Email : talkback@the-sun.co.uk

Monster ... Fritzl

THE two boys plucked from monster Josef Fritzl's dungeon talk to each other with animal-like growls.

And one walks like a monkey, sometimes crawling on all fours.

Video: Dungeon Dad On Holiday

Fritzl enjoys sun while kids are locked up

Sun Exclusive

The pitiful world created by Stefan Fritzl, 18, and his five-year-old brother Felix during their lifetime of underground captivity was revealed by police yesterday.
It also emerged that their mother Elisabeth - caged with the boys by her rapist father - never told them the truth about their terrible plight.
Instead she invented a fantasy world for them by filling their heads with wondrous stories of princes and princesses.
The Austrian boys DO understand their native language, gleaned from years of watching TV in the windowless bunker.

Furnace ... where baby was buried

But their accent is unique and when left alone they babble in their own coded tongue. Police Inspector Leopold Etz said: "With each other, the boys communicate with noises that are a mixture of growling and cooing.
"If they want to say something so others understand, they have to focus and really concentrate - which seems to exhaust them."
It is thought Felix's joints and muscles did not develop properly in the cramped bunker, possibly due to malnutrition. And the little lad walks like a monkey.

'Far from normal' ... Dr Kepplinger

Insp Etz said: "He prefers to crawl but can walk upright if he wants. He mostly uses a mixture of the two - half walking, half crawling."
Doctor Berthold Kepplinger, who has examined the boys, said: "They communicate with each other but with a far-from-normal way.
"Their mother taught them some reading and writing, although Elisabeth herself lost much of her childhood knowledge due to the years of abuse that began when she was 11 and her imprisonment from the age of 18.
"There were no books in the dungeon. The main source of education, over the years, has been the television."
The children's only exposure to anything like real life was through storylines of daytime soap operas.
Psychiatry professor Rotraud Perner, who has seen them, said: "It seems they may have created their own illusory world."

Daughter ... Elisabeth

Insp Etz told how Felix has been "full of joy and excitement" at seeing the outside for the first time. The officer said: "He made excited gurgling noises when he saw a cow. He slaps the air with his hand when he can't control his excitement. "He squeaked when he saw the sun. He kept covering his face with his hand after realising looking at it directly was not possible."
But the boy is scared of confined spaces - and clasps his mother while in lifts.
Elisabeth, now 42, had seven children through being raped by her 73-year-old father in the dungeon below his house in Amstetten.
He immediately "adopted" three - Lisa, 16, Monika, 14, and Alexander, 12 - and took them above ground.
A twin of Alexander died at birth. And yesterday the furnace in which Fritzl burned the body to maintain his awful secret was revealed.
The red solid-fuel burner is in the family cellar, just outside the security-coded trapdoor leading to the dungeon.

The antiquated clunking contraption has a steel hatch and pipes linked to the house's central heating system.
The other child kept underground, 19-year-old Kerstin, was still in a coma last night with kidney failure.
Fritzl remained in custody as more details emerged of the children he had with wife Rosemarie, 67.
They had four daughters apart from Elisabeth - named Rosemarie, Ulrike, Gabriele and Doris - and two sons, Josef Jnr and Harald.

v.wheeler@the-sun.co.uk