![]() When she interviews a criminal, she usually starts with their childhood, but with Fritzl she started with his mother's. She lists the other ways: her friends, her dog, her garden. I look around her office in a psychiatric hospital in Linz, 47km (30 miles) from Amstetten, and notice the Prada handbag, the fur coat, patent shoes, perfect dark-painted nails, a cigarette habit and a stack of Bach and Mozart CDs, which she says, are one way of dealing with the horrors of interviewing some of Austria's most disturbed criminals in her 11 years as a forensic psychiatrist. She is fiercely clever, and quick with a wry laugh. If you were to create the character of Kastner in a crime novel, I doubt you could come up with anything better than Kastner in real life. He said he wanted a clean slate." What was he like? "He was very. "I was relieved when I met him because he was very polite and he told me that he had decided he would tell me everything. "I was wondering whether he would talk to me," she says. She had to interview him alone six times before producing her report, in which she concluded he was sane enough to stand trial. It could have been part of it." She refuses to say if she has met Elisabeth.Īs expert witness for the prosecution, Kastner first met Fritzl last May, in prison. Was that why he changed his plea, I ask Kastner. He did this after watching his daughter's harrowing video testimony, and after Elisabeth, who is now 42, had attended the courtroom in person. At first he denied this last charge, but on Wednesday he changed his plea. ![]() Over just three and a half days this week, Fritzl was tried and found guilty on all counts of a crime that went on for 24 years - imprisoning his daughter in a bunker under his house in the town of Amstetten in Austria, repeatedly raping her and fathering her seven children, and of causing the death of one of the children, Michael, soon after he was born by failing to get him medical help. As crimes go, few can be as horrific as Fritzl's. "He told me that for someone who was 'born to rape' he controlled himself for a long time. "He said that it was hard to control," says Dr Heidi Kastner, the forensic psychiatrist who interviewed him at length. It feels too simplistic to talk of "evil", but Josef Fritzl said he always knew there was an "evil streak" inside him.
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