On April 19, 2008, Josef Fritzl, age 73, made a remarkable choice, surprising many who knew him, perhaps even himself. He called an ambulance to rescue his daughter Kerstin, 17, who had fallen in her room and had remained unconscious. He asked her mother Elisabeth to help him carry her out of the house to meet the ambulance. And then he followed the ambulance to the hospital, where he explained to Dr Reiter what had happened, with a note from Kerstin’s mother, who remained at home with their other children.
The remarkable and surprising aspect of this compassionate and fatherly act lay in Fritzl’s choosing to initiate a series of events which he knew could soon lead to his arrest and incarceration for the rest of his life. In the heat of this crisis, Fritzl chose to expose himself to risks of revelation that he had chosen to avoid for 24 years. Why, after 24 years of successfully deceiving his wife, his children, the tenants in his building, and the authorities in his town of Amstetten, Austria, would Josef Fritzl deliver his daughter to the hospital and to the inquiries of professionals? He might as well have been delivering himself.
Kerstin’s condition, severe renal failure, and oddities in her mother’s note, which purported to have been written from the distant village of Kematen, where her mother had supposedly joined a cult 24 years earlier, puzzled Dr Reiter sufficiently that he alerted the police. The investigation revealed that Kerstin had lived every day of her 17 years in a concrete dungeon behind eight locked doors, clandestinely built by Josef Fritzl in the basement of the building where he and his wife Rosemarie raised three children and served as landlords to other tenants. Until the day her father and mother carried her to the ambulance, Kerstin had never seen daylight. Nor had her two siblings, who also had been born and raised in this dungeon.
The investigation also proved what Kerstin’s mother said, which is that Josef Fritzl was both Kerstin’s father and grandfather. Twenty-four years earlier, Fritzl had lured his defiant teenage daughter Elisabeth into helping him move a door in their basement. In the process he gassed Elisabeth. She fainted and awoke locked in this dungeon, never leaving until the day she carried Kerstin to the ambulance. Elisabeth bore seven children by her father in this dungeon. One baby died age four days. Three others were removed by Fritzl, who later claimed to have found each one near the house, persuading local authorities to allow Fritzl and his unsuspecting wife Rosemarie to adopt them.
On March 19, 2009, just 11 months after he chose to send Kerstin to the hospital, Fritzl was charged with murder, rape, incest, kidnapping, false imprisonment, and slavery. He pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to life in prison. Why, after nearly a quarter of a century of successful deception, did he, in effect, deliver himself to the authorities? We do not know, but his choice tells us something about the shifting economy of secrets. On some level Fritzl recognized at 73 that the costs of his secret had finally outweighed its benefits. He chose to let the truth be known.
You don’t have to be such a monstrous criminal to learn the hard way that one enemy of the keeper of secrets is our overriding need to be known. You and I know this about our less lurid deceptions. We can’t help spilling the beans about that detour to the casino on the way home from the business trip. Like the otherwise smart politicians who get caught with their pants down, we set ourselves up to be discovered in our indiscretions. We want our control over what others know about us, but we also want others, at least those closest to us, to know who we are, eventually. The older we grow, the more important this may be to us. This need to be known becomes so great that we take risks we did not dare to imagine when we created the secret. Our need to be known overrides the shame that created the secret.
I recently met a Vietnam Vet who, after 44 years of telling his family that he had won a Purple Heart, finally admitted to them last year that he had lied about this award as a way of coping with the dishonor he felt when he returned from combat service in 1970. After so many years of expecting rejection for this false claim, he was stunned to learn that his family responded with forgiveness. He could have persisted with his secret for many more years, but after his retirement from an honorable career as a fireman, he chose instead to show them this underbelly of his private life. His need to be known finally outweighed his need for a Purple Heart.