Fritzl wants retrial, report claims
Incest beast Josef Fritzl has plans to call for a retrial of his case, a magazine has claimed.Austrian weekly News reports in yesterdays edition (Thurs) that the 75-year-old has been meeting lawyers and reading the thousands of pages of his case to check the chances for a new trail.Fritzl was jailed for life after admitting to rape, incest, murder and enslavement last year. He imprisoned his own daughter Elisabeth in a self-built cellar dungeon under the family home in Amstetten, Lower Austria, for 24 years.He told the jury: “I plead guilty to all the charges in the indictment.”Fritzl told judge Andrea Humer that his daughters stirring videotaped testimony was the reason for pleading guilty. Elisabeth secretly attended her father’s trial on the day the public and media were barred from proceedings.Adelheid Kastner who told judges at the trial he was sane when he kept his daughter as a sex slave claimed in a recent interview Fritzl was “no murderer in the classical sense”.She said: “Fritzl accepted the death of one of his children, but he was probably not able to deliberately plan the death of a human. He did not cross this border as he regarded it as a taboo not to be breached.”Fritzl incinerated the body of one of the seven children his daughter Elisabeth, 43, gave birth to after the boy began showing signs of breathing complications.Now News magazine reports Fritzl has made a spectacular U-turn on how he reviewed his sentence. It quotes him as saying: “I allowed them to drag me to the guillotine like a sheep.”Fritzl reportedly hopes to find evidence he was not guilty of the death of the boy he incinerated.News reports Fritzl is optimistic over the chance of a retrial, and has started writing long letters to his ex-wife Rosemarie about a “wonderful future” they could have together.Local media reported recently that Fritzl had made friends in prison with a brutal killer serving life for slaughtering seven helpless victims and a former Olympic figure skater serving a spell for human trafficking.Bosses at Stein jail in Krems, Lower Austria, meanwhile said Fritzl had become a model prisoner. Prison general lieutenant Peter Prechtl said: “He is unobtrusive and has adapted well to day-to-day schedules.”Prechtl said Fritzl earned around 130 Euros a month working as a cleaner and a helping hand serving food to inmates.An unidentified inmate meanwhile claimed Fritzl had two prisoners transferred to another section of the jail after he became convinced they were plotting to kill him.