You can tell me what you like: Rosemarie Fritzl knew

Like everyone else I’m reading everything and anything on the Austrian father, Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter captive for 24 years and fathered her seven children. Unbelievable – beats anything I’ve seen as a criminal attorney. Yet one thing keeps haunting me – how could Rosemarie Fritzl not have known what was going on?

Shades of the returning canoeist?

Certainly along the lines of Lydia Guoardo the French woman who underwent similar treatment from her legal but not biological father.

Yet if you go through the article in the Evening Standard (lots of pictures and a diagram of the house) then it is inconceivable that Rosemarie Fritzl did not hear her daughter’s voice, or at the very least go looking for the sect where she supposedly was. I’d be very interested to see whether a missing persons docket was opened as well as her statements from that time.

According to the version of Mrs Fritzl, if it is to be believed, Elisabeth supposedly left to join the sect in 1984 and only returned to leave children on their doorstep.

If that was the case, were the police brought in and what statements were made by Rosemarie? Did she advertise or put out a reward for the return of her daughter? I guarantee you that the most damning evidence against Rosemarie that is going to emerge, is the lack of tangible steps taken by her to ascertain her daughter’s whereabouts.

Most parents would have driven the police and media mad trying to find out where their missing daughter was – where was Rosemarie?

Even though Fritzl was an engineer and a domineering husband and father, you can’t tell me that Rosemarie didn’t know that there was a secret cellar underneath her house. I accept, as the BBC article shows, that the living quarters were well concealed but in 24 years she must have come across them.

While this genius could get way with building it, how did she fail to notice what was going on when he enlarged it?

Of course the fact that the family (mother and grandmother with Elisabeth and the children) seemed to react normally when reunited, is either creepy or testimony to something else – a previous meeting or meetings perhaps?

Lastly Fritzl was jailed for sexual assualt and arson and served prison terms in the late 1960s. Surely Rosemarie must have been slightly suspicious of her daughter first disappearing then dropping off the odd baby or two, and should have mentioned her husband’s past to the police – but she didn’t.

There are also many other questions that arise:

Is there any way society can avoid this? : The daughter has gone to join a sect – now what? Who is going to check on that? Under what authority?

Can follow up procedures be adopted? If so, for who? She wasn’t missing as in kidnapped but left of her own accord according to her parents.

What are the charges? Abduction, rape, incest, imprisonment, assault and in the case of the child who died, culpable homicide?

How do you punish this? Death penalty? Life imprisonment? Will that stop a sick individual like this?

The only thing that you can be sure of is that just around the corner, somewhere on this planet, even sicker and more twisted acts will emerge sooner rather than later.

We truly are a bizarre species.