5/5/08

title:Lawyer prepares insanity defense for incest captor
current event

who:Attorney Rudolf Mayer
what:The Austrian who reportedly admitted holding his daughter captive for 24 years and fathering seven children with her will plead insanity, his lawyer said.Attorney Rudolf Mayer said he believed 73-year-old Josef Fritzl had a mental disorder, The Associated Press reported. Mayer said someone who was mentally ill "didn't choose" to do what police allege he did.
"I believe that the trigger was a mental disorder, because I can't imagine that someone has sex with his own daughter without having a mental disorder," Mayer said in an interview broadcast late Sunday.
Mayer said Fritzl would be confined to a psychiatric institution rather than a prison if he was certified as insane and convicted, AP reported.
when:5/5/08
where:AMSTETTEN, Austria
why:The horrifying story has shocked many locally and across the world. On Sunday, members of the Amstetten religious community held a Mass to remember Fritzl's family. After the Mass, members of the church signed a banner outside a church in support of the victims.
how:The 19-year-old girl, who had been locked in the basement her entire life along with her mother and two brothers, was in an artificially induced coma in an Amstetten clinic. She was suffering from a kidney ailment that worsened because she did not receive medial treatment sooner, authorities said. Fritzl told his wife that their daughter Elisabeth, who is now 42, ran away from home at age 18.
The couple adopted three of the children who Josef said were left on their doorstep as infants by his runaway daughter.
In the interview Christine R. said her sister, Rosemarie, truly thought that her daughter had ran away to join a cult.
"She never believed him being capable of it," said Christine R. "We were all taken in by him and believed that she (referring to Elizabeth), was in a cult and that she wouldn't come out."
It may have been Fritzl's strict rule over the household that made it possible for him to keep his gruesome secret hidden for so long, Christine R. said.
The unspeakable ordeal has taken a toll on the whole family, Christine R. said, stating that she spoke to her sister on the phone recently.