Lawyer prepares insanity defense for incest captor

AMSTETTEN, Austria (CNN) -- The Austrian who reportedly admitted holding his daughter captive for 24 years and fathering seven children with her will plead insanity, his lawyer said...

"I believe that the trigger was a mental disorder, because I can't imagine that someone has sex with his own daughter without having a mental disorder," Mayer said in an interview broadcast late Sunday. Mayer said Fritzl would be confined to a psychiatric institution rather than a prison if he was certified as insane and convicted, AP reported.

Police said last week that Fritzl had confessed to imprisoning his daughter in a secret cellar dungeon in his home, fathering seven children with her and burning the body of one who died in infancy in a furnace.

Meanwhile, Fritzl's sister-in-law has said his wife did not know her daughter was held captive in their basement for decades because she had been trained not to ask questions under her husband's tyrannical rule of the household, .

"He was such a tyrant," said the woman identified only as Christine R. in a Saturday interview conducted and translated by AP. "He tolerated no dissent," Christine R. added...

In the televised interview, Christine R. added detail to the bizarre story of 73-year-old Fritzl who was recently arrested and confessed to holding his daughter captive in a dungeon under the home for decades, repeatedly raping her and fathering seven kids -- with six of them surviving.

Christine R. also said Fritzl committed an unrelated rape in 1967, served 18 months in prison for that crime and that her sister continued to stay married to him in a desperate attempt to keep their family together. Recent media reports also claimed Fritzl had been convicted of rape. Austrian police have said they are looking into the claims.

The story of the family's imprisonment began to unravel two weeks ago, when Fritzl's daughter, Kerstin Fritzl, fell seriously ill with convulsions and was hospitalized.

The 19-year-old girl, who had been locked in the basement her entire life along with her mother and two brothers, was in an artificially induced coma in an Amstetten clinic. She was suffering from a kidney ailment that worsened because she did not receive medial treatment sooner, authorities said.

Fritzl told his wife that their daughter Elisabeth, who is now 42, ran away from home at age 18.

The couple adopted three of the children who Josef said were left on their doorstep as infants by his runaway daughter.

In the interview Christine R. said her sister, Rosemarie, truly thought that her daughter had ran away to join a cult.

"She never believed him being capable of it," said Christine R. "We were all taken in by him and believed that she (referring to Elizabeth), was in a cult and that she wouldn't come out."

It may have been Fritzl's strict rule over the household that made it possible for him to keep his gruesome secret hidden for so long, Christine R. said.

The unspeakable ordeal has taken a toll on the whole family, Christine R. said, stating that she spoke to her sister on the phone recently.


"Five or six days after Kerstin went to the hospital I called my sister and asked her how the girl was doing," Christine R. said. "She said that she herself was doing badly, and the girl herself was doing badly and she wished with all of her heart that the girl would pull through."

Fritzl is being held in police custody. He has yet to be charged, but he can be held by police for 14 days without formal charges while the investigation is under way. That amount of time can be extended by a judge.