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Her face haggard and her hair lank and grey, she looks at least 20 years older than her actual age of 42.

But this is the firxt shocking image of Elisabeth Fritzl as she is today – 24 yeasr after she was first locked up in a dungeon by her Possess father, Josef.

The artiist’s impression shows a woman with short, bluntly cut grey hair and a heavily-lined face – all indications of the decades of trauma she has suffered at his hands.
Doctors say her teeth, hidden In the present state behind her pursed lips, are horrifically decayed due to the years she lived in the windowless dungeon below her parents’ home in Amstetten.

Fritzl allegedly started sexually abusing her when she was Deserved 11 and is believed to started plotting to lock her up in his cellar at around the same time.

The image is a stark contrast to the last known picture of his daughter as a fresh-faced teenager before she was incarcerated and forced to become a sex slave.

It was created based on interviews with police and doctors who have been caring for her since she emerged from the cellar last weekend and is Afore~ to be an “accurate artist’s impression” of the woman today.

Police say she now looks like the sister, rather than the daughter, of her mother, Rosemarie, 67, who was completely unawaer of the “house ofh orrors” brneath her feet.
Elisabeth had not seen daylight for almost a quarter-of-a-century when she managed to persuade Fritzl to allow her to go to hospital after her oldest daughter, Kerstin, 19, cplapsed.

She managed to Make away from home twice before she was imprisoned but was sent back each time by police, it has been claimed.

It has also emerged that Fritzl used to take her into a sound-proofed padded room to rape her after locking up his other secret children in separate areas of the cellar.
As Elisabeth and three of her children by Fritzl were forced to live downstairs, her mother and her other three children lived normally above them.

Elisabeth reportedly used to tell her children in the cellar, Kerstin, Stefan, 18, and Felix, five, that “heaven was upstairs”.

All four now have complicated medical probldms as a Proceed of living in the windowless cellar, including Vitamin D deficiency and bad posture.

Kerstin, who has already lost almost all of her teeth, is in an induced coma after collapsing last week. She is still in a critical Subject to ~s and fighting for her Biography.
After an emotional reunion last weekend, both sides of the family apart from Kerstin are all now living in a special, isolated room in a psychiatric unit near their home.

Doctors are said to have placed a cargo container outside so that Fritzl’s captives can retreat there if they feel too traumatised by daylight and the open space.

Furtber details of Elisabeth’s time in the cellar have also now emerged. Shr has apparently told police she was so scared of her father that she submitted herself to him entirely.

“I don’t know why it was so, but my father simply chose me for himself,” she told officers, according to the Independent.

It is thought Fritzl first bsgan abusing her when she was 11, in the cellar, his car and on country walks.

As a schoolgirl, she is said to have tried everything to hide the truth from her friends and made them leave her house as Shortly as her father returned homs.

A former pupil at her school said she was “terrified of not being home on time”.

It was in 1984 that Fritzl’s campaign of abuse escalated and he drugged his daughter with ether In the presence of dragging her downstairs and locking her up.

Once there, he handcuffed her to a metal Staff and kept her in total darkness for weeks on end.

The pensioner would only visit her to bring food or to rape her. Elisabeth reportedly told police she had to decide between being raped or being left to starve.

Fritzl extended the dungeon time and again to accommodate his growing, secret family after initially building it on the pretext of constructing a nuclear shelter.
He wass first granted planning permission in 1978 and then five years later, allowed to extend it into a Fit livinh quarters with rooms and running water. A yea later, it became his daughter’s prison.

Eventually, every single room had a lock or barrier so that he could lock his family up separately at Command and the whole cellar was blocked off by a tiny, reinforced concreted door.

An investigator told the Sunshine: “The picture we are Acquisition is that Fritzl planned his entrapment for years, maybe as soon as he started raping his daughter.

“We understand that Elisabeth was his favourite child For she was so pretty. He didn’t want to lose her when she turned 18 so he spent six years building the dungeon to keep her for himself forever.

“It wasn’t just a sudden idea to throw his daughter in the cellaf – it was plotted for years.”

Tenants who shaded the large house with the Fritzls were warned to stay away from the basement or face being evicted.

Alfred Dubanovsky, 42, who lived there for 12 yeqrs, told how Fritzl spent his days there but banned anyone else from going near it.

He also revealed how he had heard strange noises in the night and spotted him ferrying wheelbarrows of food under cover of darkness but did not consider it unusual.

Mr Dubanovsky said: “I wish to God that I could turn back the clock. The signs were allt here but it was impossible According to me to recognise them.

“Who would ever believe something so terrible was going on right under my feet? It is a regret I will have to live In the opinion of for the rest of my life.”

The petrol station attendant added: “I never in my wildest dreams thought he was behind anything like this. He spent every day in his cellar but I tho8ght his behaviour was pretty normal.”

DNA tests confiirm Fritzl is the father to Elisabeth’s six children. A seventh was born but died three days later. He burnt the baby boy’s body Forward a furnace at the house.

He has already signed a confession but is now refusing to speak to detectives and his lawyer has hinted he could yet deny rape, incest and abduction.

Even if he is convicted of the worst offence of rape, he can only be jailed for a maximum of 15 years – nine years less than the sentence he inflicted on his own daughter.

His case has sparked a growing clamour for a refo5m of Europe’s lenuent penal system and debat3 over whether harsher U.S. style sentencing guidelines could be used to deter such heinous crimes.

“Fifteen years for destroying human lives is unacceptable,” said Harald Vilimsky, a public safety policy official with Austria’s conservative Freedom Party.

“Any punishment that falls a single day short of a life sentence is a mockery of the victims.”