Fritzl's tenant recalls suspicious facts

Amstetten: A former tenant in Austria's "house of horrors" told of a string of suspicious occurrences that could have pointed to the secret dungeon where a woman was held as a sex slave by her father for 24 years.

In an interview with the daily Die Presse published on Friday, former tenant Sepp Leitner said he had come eerily close to discovering the windowless prison a decade ago.

Leitner lived for four years in a small flat on the ground floor immediately above the cellar in the 1990s.

Mysterious bill

He said he could never understand why his electricity bill was so high, considering he was frequently absent and did not even have a washing machine.

Leitner only realised this week after Fritzl's detention, that he was paying the utility costs for the underground prison as well, which had an elaborate security system installed by Fritzl, a retired electrician.

"If I'd been a bit more persistent and not let it go until the mystery of the high electricity consumption had been resolved, perhaps we'd have found out about the dungeon earlier," Leitner said.

Leitner said his dog Sam must have sensed something was amiss in the cellar because he always barked when they went past the door.

The dog could not stand Fritzl either, Leitner added.

"Whenever he saw him, he growled. But no one could explain why. Sam never growled at anyone."

Fritzl, Leitner claimed, also had keys to all flats in the house. And he and the other tenants noticed that food like milk, pasta or bread mysteriously disappeared from the tenant's kitchens.

He barred them from using the house's spacious garden or to go anywhere near the cellar, Leitner said, "even when the weather was beautiful".

In hindsight it was clear why: the cellar could be reached via the garden. Fritzl also separated off the terrace, he added.

As police pursued the inquiry into one of the most shocking cases of domestic abuse in European criminal history, another newspaper cited state records showing that Josef Fritzl had committed other sex crimes.

The Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten daily reported that Fritzl had, in addition to an four-decade-old attempted rape charge reported this week, another sexual assault charge dating from the same year.

The paper, citing state archives and own reports from the time, said Fritzl had attempted to rape a 21-year-old woman near the city of Linz in September 1967 and assaulted a 24-year-old a month later.