(NewsNation) — Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man imprisoned for holding his own daughter captive and raping her, is asking to be released from prison and move to a nursing home.
Fritzl, 88, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2009 and has been held in a high-security unit for mentally disturbed prisoners. Under Austrian law, he was eligible for conditional release in 2023.
His lawyer, Astrid Wagner, is asking the court to release him to a care home. Fritzl has dementia and a court psychologist said in a report he was no longer dangerous and had become physically frail and now requires a walker to move about.
Fritzl's case has been described as one of the worst in Austrian history. In 1984, he lured his daughter Elisabeth, who had just turned 18, to the basement and trapped her in a hidden prison cell he had secretly constructed. He had already been sexually abusing her for many years, beginning when she was 11.
Elisabeth had previously run away from home and Josef Fritzl convinced his wife and police that she had done so again and joined a cult. He would keep her in the prison cell for 24 years, raping her and forcing her to bear seven children with him.
One of the children died shortly after birth. Josef took three of the other children upstairs to live with him and his wife, reporting to social services and his wife that Elisabeth had dropped the children on the doorstep before returning to the cult.
The remaining three children were kept in the basement cell with Elisabeth. In 2008, one of those children, Kerstin, fell ill and Elisabeth persuaded Josef to take her to the hospital. She eventually convinced him to allow her to visit Kerstin and police, acting on suspicions from those at the hospital, took both her and Josef in for questioning. That's when the whole story was revealed.
Fritzl pleaded guilty to rape, false imprisonment, manslaughter by negligence and incest. Fritzl was also suspected in the death of three sex workers, but there was not enough evidence to connect him to the case.
Elisabeth and her children were given new identities due to the intense coverage of the case and required significant therapy to recover and reunite the children held captive with those raised by Josef and his wife.
In 2022, the courts blocked an effort to move Fritzl from the high-security jail to a normal prison, citing untreatable psychiatric conditions.