It was her life-threatening illness that would eventually betray Fritzl's monstrous secret. Kerstin is comatose in hospital, suffering from renal failure. Then there is the 'downstairs family' - Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix, five - who remained in the tiny prison, never once seeing daylight and knowing only four other faces in their whole lives. Fritzl would tell everyone that their mother had run away to join a sect, dumping them with her parents because she could not care for them herself. All three were taken in as babies by him and raised by his wife Rosemarie, 68, after seemingly just appearing, one after another, on the doorstep of the family home. Half are the 'upstairs family' - Lisa, 16, Monika, 14, and Alexander, 12 - all fathered by Fritzl in the cramped chambers he dug out beyond his cellar. Today she and her children are a few miles away from their dungeon home in the Clinic Mostviertel, where they have begun a long and painful journey towards rehabilitation that experts estimate could take eight years.Įlisabeth and her children have their own unique traumas to resolve.

'I don't know why it was so,' she has told detectives. It is a cruel blow for a daughter who still can offer no clue as to why her father held her captive in a windowless bunker beneath the grey, three-storey townhouse at Yppsstrasse 40, in the small town of Amstetten.

As Fritzl was moved to solitary confinement for his own safety, his heavily mortgaged property empire was on the brink of collapse, taking with it any dreams of a haven where Elisabeth and her children could find happiness.

Today elisabeth fritzl now