Incest monster Josef Fritzl placed under legal guardianship amid worsening dementia
17 June 2024, 15:44 | Updated: 17 June 2024, 17:04
Sexual offender monster Josef Fritzl will be placed under legal guardianship as a result of his dementia - but his legal team are battling against the decision.
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Public officials in Krems, a town West of Austrian capital Vienna, confirmed Fritzl will be placed under guardianship due to his declining mental state.
This means the court will appoint someone to make decisions on Fritzl’s behalf after he has been deemed unable to make them on his own.
Fritzl, 89, infamously fathered seven children with his daughter Elisabeth over 24 years, while entrapping her as a sex slave for 24 years in the basement of their Austria family home.
Since he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2009 he has been held in high-security psychiatric detention at Stein prison.
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But Fritzl’s lawyer, Astrid Wagner, informed Austrian media that she will be fighting the process as she considers the appointment of an adult to manage his affairs as “not tenable” - on the basis that he has no business to attend to and does not own any property.
Wagner says there is no necessity nor justification for appointing an adult representative, despite the fact Fritzl has “beginning dementia and delusional episodes”.
Fritzl has been transferred from Stein’s correctional facility to a cell in the normal prison following a decision by a three-member panel in the Krems Regional Court.
But the sex-offender pensioner was denied a general conditional release from normal prison in mid-May, with authorities deeming it “not possible for special preventive reasons”.
They said that “future freedom from crime” cannot be guaranteed due to the “unprecedented criminal energy in connection with the convicted crimes”.
Fritzl reportedly plans to move to the UK if he is ever released from prison.
“When I get released, it is not Austria I want to stay [in], rather I want to emigrate to the UK. Above all I want to roam free on the wild Highlands of Scotland,” he said according to the Sun.“
For me the lush green fields of Wales are also very, very appealing, but the main thing is it’s to the United Kingdom I am headed.”
Fritzl’s crimes involved rape, coercion and imprisonment, keeping his daughter and her children trapped in a basement for years as he raped her thousands of times.
Elisabeth was abused from the age of 11, and was locked in the cellar from the age of 18 until she was 42.
