AMSTETTEN, Austria — Casual acquaintances knew Josef Fritzl as a jovial fellow who liked to drink beer and enjoyed a bawdy joke.
But former neighbors say the man accused of imprisoning his daughter and fathering her seven children ran his household like a dictator. Piece by piece, a picture is emerging of a shrewd liar and an obsessive tyrant.
“At home, he was clearly the lord of the manor. Even at his campground, he was very strict and his rules had to be followed,” said Anton Graf, who rented Fritzl’s land along Austria’s Mondsee Lake.
“He was inflexible and had no sensitivity,” Graf, 57, told The Associated Press. “You were sick, something happened, he didn’t care. . . . There was a rule — and that was it.”
Although authorities have clamped down on records, examples of Fritzl’s double life are coming to light.
The 73-year-old retired electrician was both a hard worker respected by his peers and a fiercely private man whose life revolved around the home he ruled with an iron fist.
The mosaic of Fritzl now taking shape also points to an astonishingly agile criminal mind. He allegedly forged letters, concocted an elaborate but consistent cover story that his daughter Elisabeth had joined a cult, and even impersonated her in a phone call to his wife.
Fritzl apparently complemented trickery with a heavy reliance on authoritarianism: To keep family and tenants from the windowless, soundproofed rooms where he confined Elisabeth for 24 years, along with three children, he menacingly banned them from the basement.
Former tenants said Fritzl told residents of the apartment house he owned that the cellar was off-limits, and they were not allowed to take photos there. Anyone who broke that verbal agreement was threatened with eviction, they said.
Police say Fritzl also told his daughter and the three captive children the cellar was rigged to release toxic gas if they tried to escape.
“One day he came to my door and told me that Elisabeth was not coming home any more, that she had left to join a cult,” Graf said. He said Fritzl was so believable that no one was suspicious.
Graf said Fritzl also told of discovering one of Elisabeth’s children on his doorstep — and Graf said he never doubted the tale. Two other children turned up the same way — handpicked to live upstairs, police say, because Fritzl decided they were “crybabies” who would raise a ruckus in the basement.
Social workers visited the house about 20 times to check on the three children Fritzl and his wife were raising upstairs, and “there was no reason to suspect that something was wrong,” said Josef Schloegl, head of the Amstetten district court.
