Fritzl given life sentence

Evil Josef Fritzl was sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars today for fathering seven children by raping his daughter and allowing one to die through neglect.

Fritzl ,73, was sent to a secure psychiatric hospital for life after a jury formally convicted him of the rape, incest, homicide and enslavement charges he had already pleaded guilty to in Austria.

Fritzl accepted the verdicts and waived his right to appeal.

The verdict brought a dramatic end to a case that has drawn worldwide attention.

Fritzl sat calmly and bowed his head as the verdicts were read by the jury.

A court spokesman said Fritzl would be taken to a secure psychiatric ward for mentally deranged criminals.

The homicide count – “murder by neglect” in German – was the most serious of the charges against 73-year-old Fritzl, and the jury gave him the maximum punishment allowed by law. Officials said Fritzl would not be eligible for parole for at least 15 years, and psychiatric experts would have to concur with any decision to free him.

The other charges included incest, false imprisonment and coercion. Fritzl had changed his stance and pleaded guilty yesterday to all counts against him after he and the court viewed 11 hours of emotional videotaped testimony by his daughter, Elisabeth, whom he locked in a dungeon when she was 18.

“I regret it with all my heart ... I can’t make it right anymore,” Fritzl told the court today, hours before the verdicts were announced.

In a surprise move, Elisabeth appeared in the court as it viewed her evidence. Fritzl’s lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said Fritzl decided to stop contesting the homicide and enslavement counts after seeing that heart-wrenching videotape.

Prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser had called for the maximum punishment in her closing arguments in Fritzl’s trial in St. Poelten, near Vienna. She urged the jury to think about his daughter’s nearly quarter-century ordeal as it considered how much time he should serve.

“Don’t be duped like Elisabeth was 24 years ago,” when Fritzl took her captive in a cramped, rat-infested dungeon he built beneath the family’s home, she said.

Elisabeth, now 42, and her six surviving children, who range in age from six to 20, have spent months recovering in a psychiatric clinic and at a secret location. Prosecutors described her as a “broken” woman after enduring multiple rapes – some in front of her children.

The homicide charge stemmed from the 1996 death in captivity of a boy. Prosecutors said the baby might have survived if Fritzl had arranged for medical care.

“Any amateur could have determined that the child was in the throes of death for 66 hours,” Ms Burkheiser said, arguing that Fritzl should be locked up for the rest of his life for refusing to intervene and save the baby’s life.

The three other children were brought upstairs to be raised by Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, who was led to believe they were abandoned by Elisabeth when she ran off to join a cult.

Eva Plaz, a lawyer for Elisabeth and the other victims, urged the jury not to lessen Fritzl’s sentence just because he pleaded guilty. In Austria, guilty pleas can be a mitigating factor.

Fritzl’s pleas “were not a confession,” she said, adding that Elisabeth’s main reason for testifying was that she believed she “owed it” to her dead child.

Fritzl’s lawyer did not argue he was innocent – even telling the court at one point that Fritzl raped his daughter 3,000 times. But he said Fritzl had been plagued with guilt for the past 24 years, and asked the jurors to take a hard look at the homicide charge.