A CHILDHOOD friend of Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian teenager imprisoned in a basement for 24 years, has admitted he was told she had been raped by her father but decided to say nothing so he could keep the flat he was renting from him.
Joseph Leitner went to secondary school in the same town as Elisabeth in the early Eighties and knew her best friend well.
He said that when he moved into an apartment in the house rented out by her father Josef in 1990, their mutual friend tol
d him Elizabeth had been sexually abused by her father before she apparently ran away from home to join a cult in 1984.
He said: "I knew Sissi (Elisabeth] was being raped by her father before she disappeared. I have had a good friend from school who was really close to Elisabeth. I would say they were best friends – they spent a lot of time together.
"She confided in me, telling everything that had happened. She told me what a monster Josef was – and what he had done to Sissi.
"But I decided I did not want to get involved. I did not want to get kicked out of the flat. I did not want to lose it. I kept myself to myself." Asked who the friend was, Leitner said: "I can't say, but she was really close to Elisabeth. They didn't tell anyone, but came up with a plan to run away together.
"Elisabeth packed her bags and left the house in 1983. She and my friend were 17 years old at the time.
"They went to Linz and I think they spent some time in Vienna as well."
He added that Josef Fritzl had eventually found his daughter and brought her back home.
"He was furious, and I know Sissi was banned from having anything to do with my friend."
When Elisabeth vanished at the age of 18, her friends were among those who believed her father's story that she had left home to seek a new life.
"When Elisabeth vanished (in 1984], my friend thought she had run off again. She never said anything because she was scared. It wasn't only Elisabeth that was terrified of Fritzl. My friend was as well. That was why she kept quiet for so long."
Leitner, a waiter, was a resident in the Fritzl family building in Amstetten between 1990 and 1994. Like many other tenants, he was unaware that Elisabeth and her children were living in the cellar beneath his feet. He was eventually turfed out of the flat when he broke the terms of his contract by getting a dog.
He said: "Every time I went on the stairs the dog tried to run to the cellar door and barked. When Fritzl noticed, he kicked me out by changing the locks from my flat. He was furious."
Leitner had also crossed swords with his landlord over his high electricity bill.
Even when all his electric devices were shut off, the counter kept running, he said, adding: "If I had put more effort into finding out what was behind all that, maybe the dungeon would have been discovered much earlier.
I know what the problem was now. I was paying for the electricity being used downstairs."
Police are continuing to interview the tenants who lived in the apartment block over the period that Elisabeth was held captive beneath. Fritzl fathered seven children with his daughter with three living upstairs with him and his wife and three in the cellar with their mother.
The cellar three were freed last weekend after the oldest, Kerstin, fell ill and had to be admitted to hospital. She remains critically ill.
INSIGHT: Rape, incest and lies: the warped world of Herr FritzlThe full article contains 635 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
