#Elisabeth fritzl now picture skin#

No photographs have been released of the two tiny rooms where all four slept, or the rubber-padded room where Fritzl is believed to have raped his daughter away from the children. On the grimy white bathroom tiles are a painted yellow snail with green shell, a purple octopus, a child's drawing of a flower and a fish, and stickers of stars and the sun - all of them things her 'cellar children' had never seen, except on the television, which was on all day. Poignantly, the pictures show how Elisabeth desperately tried to decorate the drab rooms for the sake of her children. All the rooms were lit by harsh strip-lighting. A small area housed a lavatory, sink and tiny shower. There was an ancient cooker, washing machine, freezer, as well as a television, video and radio. Police photographs of the labyrinth of cellar rooms show narrow, stone-lined passageways, uneven floors and ceilings no higher than 5ft 6in. If she can live with her children again, 'it will be because of her desire to be a mother,' he said. Of all those Fritzl damaged, she was the only one to know she was a victim. According to a forensic psychiatrist, Dr Guntram Knecht, she has been 'destroyed by all means'.

#Elisabeth fritzl now picture skin#

At the age of only 42, her crudely cut hair is completely white, her lips are shrunken around toothless gums, her face is deeply lined, her body painfully thin, her skin almost transparent. She is said to be 'deeply distressed', agreeing to talk to doctors and detectives only on the promise that she will have no further contact with her father. Perhaps the worst fears are for Elisabeth. A seventh child, Alexander's twin, died three days after birth, his body incinerated by Fritzl in the house's furnace. Her two brothers are stooped, anaemic and barely able to communicate in anything other than their own peculiar growling language. 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.