Murder, Mystery & Makeup · Audioboom Studios

He Kept His Daughter in the Basement for 24 YEARS

·58 min·5 clips

Bailey starts by saying she's put this story off for a long time. Josef Fritzl is introduced as an only child born on April 9, 1935, in Amstetten, Austria, when the area was under Nazi control. His father leaves when Josef is about four. His mother comes across as intimidating and physically abusive. Josef later says he was an alibi child, which adds another ugly layer to the family history. The episode then moves into his adult life and the way he keeps control over the people around him. He spends long stretches in the cellar under the house. He tells his wife he is working. She is not allowed to bring him coffee or food. People around the house assume he is busy with whatever he is doing below. Tenants come and go over the years while the home keeps its secrets. One tenant later says they heard noises from the basement for a long time. Josef brushes those sounds off as old pipes or the heating system. The episode keeps circling back to how ordinary the house must have looked from the street. That plain surface makes everything underneath it worse. Down in the cellar, Elizabeth is trapped in a life that has been hidden for years. The account stays with the timeline long enough for the weight of that confinement to settle in. Then Kirsten, Elizabeth's eldest daughter, becomes seriously ill and falls unconscious. Elizabeth convinces Josef that Kirsten needs to go to the hospital, and for the first time she is let out of the chamber. Bailey ends sounding shaken and furious, which fits this case exactly.

As heard by us

A grim Josef Fritzl retelling that stays blunt and human, with a slight slowdown in the house-and-tenants stretch.

The episode starts with Josef Fritzl's family background and then settles into the basement situation that gives the story its dread. Bailey keeps the pace moving through the control, the tenants upstairs, the noises below, and the way people brushed past what they heard.

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Why you'd press play

A true-crime story about Josef Fritzl that starts in family history and sinks into a hidden basement chamber you do not want to picture.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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