US neurologist bids for Fritzl brain check
An American neurologist wants to scan the brain of incest beast Josef Fritzl, it has emerged.Kent Kiehl is quoted in Austrian press today (Thurs) as saying: “I want to clarify why criminals can torture, rape and kill without showing any sympathy for their victims.”The New Mexico-based expert has examined the brains of 1,200 murderers who volunteered to take part in the scans.Kiehl acquired a 1.9-million-Euro mobile Siemens Magnetic Resonance Tomography (MRT) to investigate criminals all over the world.”Fritzls actions are those of a true psychopath. He knew exactly how badly his victims suffer, but he didnt show any signs of guilt. He acted without any emotion,” Kiehl explained.He added: “Psychopaths show as much sympathy as we do with a Christmas goose while we carve it. My studies have shown that the brains of psychopathic killers show reduced activity in the parts where feelings are normally dealt with.”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.The 75-year-old has recently been meeting lawyers and reading the thousands of pages of his case to check the chances for a retrial, according to reports.Adelheid Kastner who told judges at the trial in March 2009 that he was sane when he kept his daughter as a sex slave claimed in a recent interview that 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 Fritzl apparently made a spectacular U-turn on how he reviewed his sentence. A recent report quoted 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.Austrian newspapers also report that Fritzl has started writing long letters to his ex-wife Rosemarie about a “wonderful future” they could have together since he was optimistic over chances for walking free after a retrial.An unidentified Krems-Stein inmate meanwhile claimed Fritzl had two prisoners transferred to another section of the jail after he became convinced they were plotting to kill him.