Should 88-year-old 'monster' Josef Fritzl, from Austria, be allowed to live out his final days in a nursing home?

The move could pave the way for Josef Fritzl to be moved into a nursing home

It was the case that shocked Austria 16 years ago, when a 42-year-old woman told police that she had been held prisoner underground for 24 years by her own father.

Now a legal battle is raging over the future imprisonment of Josef Fritzl, who was jailed for life in 2009 for keeping his daughter, Elisabeth, in a purpose-built jail in his basement and raping her thousands of times.

Last week, a court granted an application for Fritzl to be granted early release from the psychiatric detention centre where he is held on the grounds of old age and dementia to live in an ordinary prison. From there, he could potentially be moved into a nursing home. Now 88, the man who became known as the “monster of Amstetten”, after the Austrian town where he locked up his then-18-year-old daughter in 1984, is said to be frail, vulnerable and suffering from dementia.

Josef Fritzl pictured here during his trial in St. Poelten, Austria in 2009.

However, after an appeal by prosecutors, his fate will now be decided by a court in Vienna.

The details of the case, which emerged at the time of his trial in 2009, were unimaginable. Drugged with ether, Elisabeth – who had been abused regularly by her father from the age of 11 – was locked in the basement after being asked to “help” her father mend the door. The first months of her imprisonment saw her shackled and unable to move, released only because, as her father admitted during the trial, the chains were impeding his ability to abuse her.

During her time underground, she gave birth to seven children, one of whom died after Fritzl failed to get him medical care as a newborn.

In a twist that seems even more inconceivable than the rest, Fritzl decided to allow three of the children to live upstairs with himself and his wife, having told her – Elisabeth’s mother – their daughter had run away. He claimed Elisabeth had contacted him, telling him she was unable to look after her children and begging for her parents to do so. The other three children remained just feet away, in the basement, for years, while their siblings played in a swimming pool Fritzl built above the basement.

The Stein correctional facility, where Austrian Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for over 24 years and fathered seven children with her, is currently held in Krems an der Donau, Austria. Last week, an Austrian court approved the transfer of Fritzl from a special security unit to a regular jail.

There is little doubt Fritzl, now elderly by any measure, is unlikely to be a danger to society. Whether or not he is truly remorseful for what he did – and his lawyer claims he is – physically, he would be unlikely to overpower anybody. Psychologically, his dementia means he would be unlikely to be able to think through anything requiring the kind of planning of his earlier crimes.

Other residents of the nursing home may not be aware of his identity – he already lives under a different name.

Yet the question the Viennese judges will have to grapple with is whether this man, who is guilty of such unspeakable crimes, deserves to live out his final days – however many they may be – in the ordinary way of normal life that he denied to his daughter.