Josef Fritzl, the notorious incestuous serial killer, will remain in a high-security prison after court judges decided that he is still a threat and should not be moved.
In 2009, the 87-year-old was sentenced to life in prison for confining his daughter Elisabeth in a dungeon-like basement bunker in their Amstetten, Austria, house.
She was detained until 2008, during which time she was raped thousands of times. Fritzl and his daughter have seven children as a result of this.
After spending 23 years in a high-security prison for mentally ill criminals, court justices have reversed efforts to move him to a friendlier prison.
The ruling reached in April by Austria’s Higher Regional Court in Vienna was overturned, and the Krems Regional Court confirmed that he would remain in Stein Prison.
‘The Higher Regional Court (OLG) Vienna has recognized the necessity for additional accommodation in a mental institution for lawbreakers,’ they stated.
On April 1, the correctional court in charge of Austria’s most guarded psychiatric prison, Stein Prison, decided to release Fritzl and relocate him.
He was scheduled to be released into a regular prison, where he might have qualified for early release. If the Vienna court had sustained the order to transfer Fritzl to a regular jail, he would have been allowed to petition for parole the following year, in 2023.
The proposal was thwarted when the public prosecutor’s office in Krems filed a complaint, which was backed up by top judges in Vienna.
They said that keeping Fritzl in the high-security psychiatric jail was justifiable since he still suffers from a significant mental disorder that is not treatable.
Fritzl, then 84, was said to be showing signs of dementia and his mental health was failing in 2019.
He was known to be very unpopular among his fellow inmates at the Krems-Stein prison, and he spent a lot of time in solitary confinement.
Meanwhile, Elisabeth has had no contact with her father since he was imprisoned, and she now lives under a new alias in an obscure area of Austria with the children she had with her own father during the decades he cruelly raped her.
Her father enticed her down to the basement when she was 18 years old, and she vanished.
Fritzl’s heinous actions were only uncovered when one of the children, Kerstin, fell into a coma and he rushed her to the hospital, where physicians noted her malnutrition and decaying teeth.
Another of the children died a few days after being born at the hands of Fritzl. He burned the victim to death in an incinerator.
Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, were among the others who were mentioned.
When Elisabeth, aged 55, was finally allowed to leave the dungeon to see Kerstin in the hospital, she was detained and later confessed to the authorities about her father’s heinous deeds.
Before being imprisoned, Fritzl stated during his trial that he ‘really meant well.’