Episode 593: Josef Fritzl Part III - Fritzl's Pretzels
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Hey, everybody. It's democracy time again. The deadline for registration in Wisconsin is October 16th for online and mailed registration. Pennsylvania and Michigan, you're October 21st. And Nevada, you can online register until October 23rd. Go to your state's websites or vote.gov to find requirements and deadlines for your state because every single one of you motherfuckers needs to show up to vote no matter where you live this November.

and we hope to see you out there on the pole lines. Yeah, boat, you fuckers. And I'm offended by pole lines, by the way. It's Polish people. There's no place to escape to. This is the Lost Hot Test. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started.

You know, a lot of people reach out to us when we record the show. And you know about this, you get asking questions about how do you know if the idea that you have is right?

You know, like our opinions. There's so many. Well, I'm just saying in general, like, how do you know as a person making things or doing things in life that what you're doing is right? And what you do with that inspiration, what it's like to catch that lightning in a bottle. Are you having second thoughts about talking about this for three weeks? No, no, at all. I wish we could talk about it from now on. Never stop.

But this is Selection. Now, there was a book written by Josef Fritzl's lawyer that got some, this is now hot off the presses, 2023. What it's like to finally catch the tale of an idea that you always wondered if you could have. Suddenly it was there, the thought as if out of nowhere, like an impulse that flashed in my mind, wandering aimlessly in it.

Like a small lost leaf swirling over the asphalt of the road before being carried away by the wind like Forrest Gump. A vague idea I was playing with. Yeah, at first it was just a mind game. But I got used to it. The thought that had seemed so absurd, so outrageous before, took on shape. It became a fixed idea that gradually took root in my mind. I'd always been a person who made decisions alone.

And one day, I knew what I had to do. All that remained was to wait for the right opportunity. Talking about the sex dungeon, isn't he? Yeah. Welcome to the last podcast on the last place, gentlemen. That was his inspiration. That was his inspiration. The leaf on the ground. Leafs swirling around on the ground. Like Forrest Gump in the movie. Like Forrest Gump, yeah. I've got the feather brain, Henry Zebrowski. No feather brain. Come on.

Come on, Marcus. That's true underground literature. Oh, it is. And the highly literate Ed Larson. How are you doing? A, B, C, D, E, F. I'll keep going.

So when we last left Joseph Fredsel, it was Elizabeth's 24th year underground. I don't mean to say that like, happy 24th anniversary. You can't even believe it rolls around that fast. I think technically that does make her anniversary in the basement. It officially becomes classic rock. It was her 24th year underground and she'd had seven children with her father.

Three had stayed underground with her, three had been taken upstairs to be raised by Joseph and his wife, and one had died in infancy. The oldest amongst the underground children was Kirsten, who was 19 years old in April of 2008. That month, she became mentally and physically ill as a result of having never once left the dungeon in which she was born.

Basically, she was dying of organ failure. So Elizabeth begged Joseph Fritzl to take their daughter Kirsten to the hospital. This is not in the plan! No. Incredibly, Fritzl agreed. Although he did make Kirsten and Elizabeth wait for days until his wife Rosemarie left for a vacation to Italy. Oh, lucky her. Yeah, oh no, they took vacations to Italy all the time. It's Austria. It's like if we took a vacation to Arizona. Yeah.

It's not a big deal. Rosemary's so lucky. Well, once she was gone, Fritzl had Elizabeth write yet another letter, this time to the hospital, explaining Kirsten's situation to the doctors. Honestly, this time, Elizabeth, you write it. Have you heard about this? And it's from America. It's an angry magazine. I think it's called Mad...

I agree. I agree. Fury magazine. They put these illustrations and margins that were just simply to die for. So if you could draw little things in there, that'd be fun. Little guys with mustaches. His name is Sergio Argonis, and he's my favorite.

Well, while the note was terribly vague for obvious reasons, it did say that Kirsten was very afraid of people, that she'd been coughing for a few days now, and that she'd never been to a hospital. A bit over-explaining, in other words. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm surprised he didn't kill her. That's the question with Joseph Fretzel. It was like, why did he do this? You know why? Like, why? I actually do... I think I know why. It is...

His sense of ownership over them is so utterly complete that the idea of losing them

is way worse to him because it's a failure. Well, I mean, remember when Elizabeth had her miscarriage, he got extremely angry and turned off the lights for weeks. Angry at her. Angry at her, yes. And when the child died, when the infant died, even though he tossed it in the garbage, basically, he was very angry about it. He was very upset that the child had died. And I think, again...

Like you said, it's like a failure on his part to not take care of them, to not keep them alive, like this sort of illusion that he has of this great family man. But they were his property. It'd be like losing a pair of his favorite shoes. Yeah, that's true.

Now, as I said at the end of the last episode, Fritzl was over 70 years old and was just plain fucking tired. So he had to get Elizabeth to help him carry Kirsten out of the dungeon and carry her upstairs to the Fritzl family doorstep. It was the first time Elizabeth had set foot outside of the cellar in 24 years, and it was the first time Kirsten had ever left in her entire life.

But as soon as Kirsten was laid outside, Elizabeth was locked back up. And just as soon as Elizabeth was hidden away again, Fritzl called emergency services and told them that he'd found an unconscious young woman on his doorstep. Once she was taken to the hospital, doctors noted that she was frighteningly pale, was missing clumps of her hair, and was missing most of her teeth.

Now, doctors were immediately baffled by what was happening here, but they could tell that her organs were failing, so they at least put her on life support. But even more puzzling was what happened when Fritzl arrived three hours later. He declared himself her grandfather, then asked them to please cure her, but do not call the police. You see, that's always, again, it's a super big tell. Like, if you tell them, they're like, hey, listen, all of this, I know it's super shady, right? It's super fucking crazy. But if you...

It's just like, you can't believe the whole story. He would not be able to handle it. It's just the whole thing, you know? So if we could just sort of move this along, if we could plug up holes. Does she have holes? I mean, at this point, he is thinking, there's part of him that's thinking, like, okay, I'm going to take her to the hospital. They're going to fix her up. They're going to release her into my care, and I'm going to put her right back down in the basement. And then things are just going to continue on. But she has no, like...

ID? No, she has nothing. Yeah. Well, she was born in a cult. No, Kirsten, yeah. That's how, that's the explanation. Yeah. Yeah, she was born in a cult and like, I don't know what goes on. You know, my daughter dropped her off. I found her on my doorstep. You know what happens when they start listening to the Beatles? They start getting crazy ideas. She was listening to the Eurythmics and I knew she was going to go away. Naturally, doctors did not follow Fritzl's directives.

See, Fritzl had shown them Elizabeth's letter, which said that she'd only been sick for a few days. Nothing about that story matched Kirsten's horrifying condition, so doctors called police to investigate.

Now, Fritzl stuck to his cult story when the cops showed up to his house, even going so far as to produce other notes that were supposedly written from the cult compound where Elizabeth had ostensibly lived for over two decades. That was his story, and he was fucking sticking to it. But he couldn't even say anything about where the cult was or what it did? Yeah, of course. Now, police had already heard this story, and they'd accepted it time and again. But Kirsten's condition, and perhaps a belated realization that Fritzl's story was fucking nuts... Wait a second, I think he's got hair problems!

Wait a second. I hate hair plugs. I know a liar when I see one. That led them to reopen Elizabeth's missing persons case. See, the doctors needed to find Elizabeth because they needed her medical history to help diagnose what they thought was a mysterious illness. It didn't cross anyone's mind that this 19-year-old girl had been kept underground for her entire life. That wasn't really a diagnosis a doctor has in his back pocket. Okay.

So to them, the best thing they could come up with is that this was possibly some sort of rare wasting disease. Yeah, because you don't know that she has been literally in an actual basement. Because even just being born in a cult doesn't necessarily mean that you're bound inside of a basement. No. A lot of cults got the outside stuff. Most cults live outside. You got to go to a, they all go to the diner before everybody commits suicide. Yeah, there's comets and shit. Yeah, like all that kind of stuff. They go out. They have excursions. Chicken pot pies. Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

So police looked at where the last letter from Elizabeth had been postmarked. It came from the town of Kamaten an der Klemz, 43 miles east of Amstetten. So the police started their search there. Now, of course, there was no evidence for Elizabeth anywhere but the dungeon. And so Fritzl may have thought that his plan was kind of sort of working. Good work, Fritzl. You're the smartest man in the whole world. Let's go have another daughter.

Fritzl, however, had not factored in an officer named Manfred Wolfart. That's awesome. I think he's a hero. You seem to be amused by the existence of his name. Hello, this is Manfred Wolfart. Now,

I am the hero of today's story. Oh, I'm so sorry. Oh, this is a condition I have. Some people have irritable bowel syndrome. I have furious ass syndrome. My ass barks. I'm Manfred Wolf. Yes. I'm just a son of a fart.

Now we can treat them like an adult. I got that out of my system. I've been laughing about Officer Manfred Wolfart for days. Oh, I bet. It's all about what you can cling to. Officer Manfred Wolfart studied Elizabeth's letter for clues. Let me take a look at this letter. Aww.

Yes, his handwriting is odd. Looks different. Looks different. Looks older. Now tell me, Manfred, how do you feel about Steven and the panties? I'll tell you what is better than poop in the leaderhosen. Bigger mess. Steven actually disappears.

Wolfheart. You can keep those patches. He found the handwriting and the letter was odd.

as if it was more calligraphy than everyday handwriting. He also noticed that the sentence structure felt more like it had been dictated rather than written. In other words, police were starting to figure out that there was something stinky about Joseph Fritzl's story. It's me. Sorry, everyone. It's me. I once cleared the side of...

Indiana Jones and the Tile of Fortune? I forgot the name of it. But I have fallen so bad on that one, everybody ran. Harrison Ford sued me. Meanwhile...

Kirsten was only getting worse, and the doctor in charge of Kirsten, a Dr. Reiter, was getting more and more frustrated by what he felt was a lack of any real help from her grandfather, Joseph. So, in a move that bypassed Fritzl completely, Dr. Reiter issued a press release asking the public if they had any information on Elizabeth.

And with that, the media got their first taste of what would be Austria's biggest story since a funny little fella named Adolf Hitler.

Started making headlines in the 30s. You're so delighted with yourself. We're calling Adolf Hitler a funny little fella. There's something about it. There's something about that idea. We're going to turn the clock all the way back to 1939 for a funny little fella called Adolf Hitler. That is wild if you think about like Austria's like it was really not known for much

but fucking literally Adolf Hitler and homebound children. Schwarzenegger. He's the most famous of all of them, maybe. Who's more famous, Hitler? Hitler's number one, yes. Do you think that Hitler, on the star meter...

Like, if Hitler was on IMDb, he'd have a higher star meter than fucking Arnold Schwarzenegger. Let me actually look that up. I mean, well, he was in Triumph of the Will, and that was, you know, Lenny... Like, that was a very, like, influential movie, so... He has his own IMDb page. Yeah, of course. He was in Triumph of the Will. And I want to see what his star meter is. Well, I mean, everyone who's actually... Actually, who has... Joseph Fritzl has his own IMDb page. I am... I had...

So his IMDb page, I honestly can't fucking believe that Adolf Hitler actually has... Add to his trivia. Dude, dude.

Did you know that he literally had one book? He has 43 credits. Yeah, as self. Wow. Yeah. He is awesome. He has his head shot. It has all the pictures in the photo where they would have all the ScarJo stuff. Who manages him? Oh, let me look up his agent. His agent, Morty Finkelberg.

Wow. Well, immediately reporters arrived at Fritzl's house. But instead of finding a concerned, devastated grandfather, they found a furious old bastard berating the press and cursing Dr. Reiter for causing trouble.

Now, Rosemary Fritzl had still not returned from her Italian vacation, possibly because no one had told her what had occurred while she was away. And I would imagine she probably doesn't call to check in with Yosef all that often. I think she's happy to be in fucking Italy, away from the sex dungeon top

and she's just like enjoying herself I guess I actually also feel like Rosemary does a lot of the it's all the clinking of a glass staring into the middle distance like oh yeah no she's got the thousand yards yeah just all just being like someone always goes like so do you like some burrata and she's like

Yeah, it's good. Nice and squishy. You know, like, that's it. Soon enough, though, she was called back when doctors requested DNA samples from everyone in the Fritzl family. She complied, but Joseph refused, saying he was too busy to do so. I'm too busy! I'm too busy to come! I've got office work, it takes me nine hours, and my daughter!

Eventually, though, perhaps because Fritzl was just too tired to keep up the charade once the first kid was out of the dungeon, he decided he had no choice but to free Elizabeth and the rest of the children. Some about him opening the doors and them all running out like all the animals, the top of Lion King. Mm-hmm.

It's not a complete bit, but it's just an image in my head. It's a seed of a... I just see Rafiki, him as Rafiki with his red butt and he's holding up Kirsten that's like a 19-year-old, super long, skinny, like the emaciated girl and stuff like that. Yeah. To me, it's like if he was Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln at the same time. You know what?

It's Adolf Hitler, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, Joseph Ritzel. That's my Mount Rushmore. But before they were all let out, Joseph made Elizabeth swear that she wouldn't tell the truth about where she'd been for the last 24 years and would instead stick to the cult story for the rest of her life. Yes, and...

The way we will bind this is by the sacred Austrian power of the pinky swear. Elizabeth eagerly agreed, probably knowing that she would drop the pretense as soon as she felt it was safe to do so.

There was also no chance that once the authorities got a look at the family, they wouldn't immediately see that something was terribly wrong here. And they would also see that Elizabeth and her kids were going through whatever her daughter Kirsten was going through as well. They were fucking see-through. Yes, they were. And I think that you should then see this answer from the abysses of Yosef F. Of why he thought, like, this is just an example of his brain as to why he think he'd walk through this whole fucking thing unscathed.

The woman, this horrible lawyer that asked him the question, being like, let me ask you. He's like, I got the impression that you're someone who's always wanted to have everything under control. Didn't that play a decisive role in your crimes? And he says, you see where all this leads? Think of values like family. It used to count as the nucleus of society. The parental home was the most important thing.

Nowadays, everything is completely different. The state interferes everywhere. This leads to nothing good. I can see it here where I am now. Many of those who end up in prison, they come from broken homes. As opposed to the home that you created. Very, very, very put together. Very bound. We were bound together. This is why they didn't have to watch Sesame Street because they were...

Being held captive by one of the characters. You get it at home! That's the best part! It's like our wives with last podcast. Why would they listen? They get so much. But after 8,516 days in the dungeon, Elizabeth finally left with her two remaining children, Stefan and Felix.

Stefan was 18 and Felix was five. And just like their sister in the hospital, neither had seen sunlight in all their years on earth. I feel horrible. I was at the bowling alley for too long last night and my first drink was

wasn't a Z-biotic pre-alcohol probiotic drink. It was booze. It was booze and I was sick and I could have felt normal, but I did it bad. I did it bad to myself. I gotta remember to make Z-biotics my first drink of the night and I gotta drink responsibly and then I'll feel my best. But now I'm

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This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Oh, that's the sound a ghost makes when it's sitting down. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Oh, spooky. It's a spooky season. Don't you want to make a website to tell everyone that you're not a werewolf?

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Check out Squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, Squarespace.com slash left to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Now, Rosemarie and the upstairs children, who had also been birthed by Elizabeth, they were out of the house when Elizabeth got her first taste of freedom.

But when they came home, they were surprised with the arrival of the wayward daughter and mother Elizabeth, who'd supposedly come home from the cult after 24 years. She's just suddenly in the fucking living room. Yeah, just hanging out. And again, I'm trying not to at all talk any mess about the dick, but it's also the visual.

Must have been very stark. Yeah. Because I think that it's very similar to the Donner Party kids, right? Where they get kind of like feral. Like this idea that this person that went from the basement, no sunlight, like she must literally be translucent, red, gray, stringy hair, teeth rotted out of her mouth. And she just, what's supposed to do? She was just sitting there being like,

Hey, everybody. What's Saturday Night Live? You know what I mean? We're just saying stuff like random weird questions. We have to go like... So this is normal now. Our new normal. Now...

At this point, are there people living in the apartments in the house that have to deal with her? Not deal with her, but you know what I'm saying. Well, the apartments were completely separate from the home itself. Oh, okay. I didn't know if there was a shared living space. No, no, no, no. Oh, okay. Well, soon after she was let out, Joseph Fritzl called Dr. Reiter and told him that Elizabeth had suddenly returned, and Fritzl was bringing her to the hospital to see Kirsten. It's crazy! This shit's fucking crazy, too!

me. Life's crazy. You know, I jumped in and said, life is what happens when you're making other plants. There's twists and turns in this story. If you would have wrote a Hollywood screenplay, you would have thrown it to the trash. Honestly, they would be like, okay, that's made up.

He then, again, quite suspiciously, told Dr. Ryder to not call the police. Don't call the police. The job I was always going to say that. You're going to be so annoyed.

I don't like to be annoying, you know? Half an hour later, Elizabeth showed up at the hospital disoriented and sporting a head of snow white hair despite being just 42 years old. See? She's right here! She's good! It's great! I can't believe she's in town! Totally uncastable. Totally uncastable. We're gonna have to get her hair dyed because red makes you flirty.

She told the receptionist that she was there to help her daughter Kirsten, but Dr. Ryder figured it was better for Elizabeth to immediately talk to the police. Now, Fritzl's cult story had already started to wobble with the police due to their inability to find a cult anywhere near Amstetten.

And that's not to mention the work of Officer Manfred Wolfhardt. I'm trying to see anybody who's operating in a group or anything. I'm so hard. No one's doing anything except the bowling league. And it's way more. I honestly was surprised how consensual the bowling league was. Excuse me. Very difficult.

You don't think it's difficult. You go ahead and take a walk in my big police boots. My fart-filled pants. Nevertheless, Elizabeth did try to stick to the script when police first questioned her. It became obvious very quickly, however, that Elizabeth wasn't telling the truth. Her story made no sense, and like her daughter, she was unconfident.

unnaturally pale, obviously malnourished, and missing most of her teeth. She was, in a word, completely jacked up. Yeah. And like, talking to her, she obviously... That's three words. Completely jacked up. Yeah. That's three words. Did we, did you break my word?

I'm just getting to it early before you get the emails. I'm just trying to jump on top of it. Here, we'll snap them out. Mr. Fritzl, your daughter's in the living room. Oh, excellent! Boing!

Finally though, Elizabeth agreed to tell the truth, but only if the police promised to protect her and her children, and only if she would never have to see her father ever again.

Investigators agreed, and Elizabeth quickly broke into tears and summarized the last 24 years of her life in just two hours, talking as fast as she could.

She told them about the dungeon, the sex slavery, the forced pregnancies and births, and the baby that had died from medical neglect and was subsequently burned in the incinerator. The first session of therapy is always the worst. Yeah, because you've got to say, it's the long one. It's the long one. And that's when the investigation fell solely on Joseph Fritzl. Because even though the dungeon story was fucking insane, it still made more sense than the cult story. Of course. And then it just...

the vibe in that room, like the idea of sitting and hearing this because this story... And looking at her. And looking at her, looking the way she looks and knowing everything else they experience with interacting with Yosef, that just must have been such a crazy afternoon. The idea of like... It's not a summer at camp. Like, it's not just... But you know... But unfortunately, there's like one cop that's like...

Fuck, this is going to be a lot of paperwork. Especially in a liberal country like this, where you're just like, oh, God. Wow. I just wanted the cult thing to be real. Yeah. Now, initially, Joseph Fritzl was a tad standoffish when he was brought in for questioning. Eventually, though, he couldn't deny the situation any longer and confessed to the whole thing in a highly whitewashed version of the truth.

See, he admitted to the incest. How could he not at that point? There's seven kids. But he made it more quote unquote romantic by saying that he never technically forced Elizabeth to have sex with him. I made her laugh. Yes, he said he did have sex with her.

but she'd wanted him to. And besides, he hadn't had sex with his daughter for many months now. Hey, listen, okay? You try to fucking tell me, have you ever tried to quit cold turkey on anything? I haven't touched my daughter once in like four months. You know how hard that is for me? And that was actually something he said in his defense, as if it made him a better person. The only way to really describe, I mean, he is so...

He's unbelievably mentally ill and nothing illustrates it more than the book from his perspective. And it's all of this. He lives in an entire fantasy realm. Yeah, it's crazy because I keep trying to think of people to reference him to. But he is the worst one. He's singular. He's unique. Yeah. In his words, he imprisoned Elizabeth for her own good to save her from drugs and so-called bad company.

He said he always meant it well, and he therefore had no reason to be sorry for keeping her underground for almost two and a half decades. In his book, he also, he puts it like it was this colorful moment.

Second life. Yeah. And that would he, it was the stress that he had his home at home and he would always love going out to go to work. He would travel for work and he would go out and he said that like, and then he would describe in this book that when he would go out for work, these like tris, these like romantic consensual tris with waitresses and flight attendants and people working in hotels. And he told this like long stories. Like I met the most beautiful woman in Ghana. She was a professional painter.

And I wooed her with my international ways and fine mustache. And when we made love, her excursions would fill the hut with all sweat-filled noises and gasps as I plunged in and out of her. And then he says that he had like a baby that he went to go see. He said he had babies all over the fucking world. Which I believe. I actually do believe, but they did not come from consensual sex. Yeah.

Well, Elizabeth Fritzl's underground children, meanwhile, were alternating between being ecstatic and terrified of what they found outside of the cellar. On one hand, Felix Fritzl screamed with delight when he finally saw the actual moon. Oh, my God. But he couldn't handle cancel culture. And 18-year-old Stefan was able to stand up straight for the first time in his entire life.

On the other hand, the outside world was also overwhelming. The kids could barely stand to be apart from Elizabeth at all, and they were absolutely terrified of cars. Each child also had their own complex health problems, from paper-thin skin to wildly defective immune systems, not to mention the health problems that come from inbreeding.

Additionally, they also had to wear protective goggles in all but the most dimly lit rooms because their eyes couldn't handle the light. And they had to wear prescription-strength sunscreen just to go outside. They're basically vampires. Yeah. I mean, as far as, like, what they can handle. I mean, a little flash of sunlight can burn them. But when they said when, like, Felix would feel, like, sunlight on his face, he'd, like, giggle. Yeah.

You'd scream, you know, like there's these, but like scream and delight. There's this like dichotomy here of like, yeah, they've lived their entire lives in the cellar, but they're also kids at the same time.

Doctors even had to install a cargo container at the hospital to replicate the underground world the Fritzl children were accustomed to. Like pandas. Yeah, and they had, like, the kids would, like, go into the container when the outside world became too overwhelming. It's crate training. Windows were too much? Yeah, just windows, people, sounds, you know, anything like that. So they would just like to go into, like, a...

dark place, a dark, small place. I mean, that was what they'd known their entire life. You know, like, I don't really like Texas all that much, but I can't deny it's kind of comforting to drive down a dirt road. It's your home. Yeah. That's where I'm from.

It's in your blood. Yeah, it's in your blood. Like, that's the thing. Where you're raised, there's something comforting about that. I enjoy the Everglades, but it's horrible. Yeah. I love the back of a cop car. That's where I was conceived, and that's where I really cut my teeth. Despite all that, though, you know, the kids were remarkably happy, and we're continuing to make progress.

Rose Marie Fritzl, however, had a total nervous breakdown when she was told the full scope of her husband's crimes. She finally had to face it. I mean, she just knew that her life was over. Yeah, that is how I view this. I think that she I I don't blame her. She was just as much of a victim as anybody else. But it's so hard because you want to say that the mother's job is a sort of like.

be the shield or fix things or do something. Protect the kids. Yes. Yeah. But so it's hard. So I know it. I know that she was also a part, she was also a victim. Also, if she didn't have that nervous breakdown, then that'd be like, oh, okay, well, you should go to prison. Yeah. She was so distraught that she very nearly died from the shame of it all and was hospitalized for a time with severe heart problems.

Partly, her stress came from the incredibly intense press coverage of the Joseph Fritzl case. Do you guys remember when this story broke in 2008? Oh, I remember. We were on Roundtable. No, we weren't. Roundtable didn't start until a little bit later. When did we start it? I think we were actually talking about the other story that referenced this story, and then our minds were shattered when we found out about this. I think by the time we started, we didn't start doing Roundtable until 2010. So I think that his...

was coming up. Oh, that's what it is. We were talking about it on Roundtable until like 2000. I think Pretzels was like 12, 13. Yeah, it was real early. Yeah, real early. We're really late.

Well, when Austrian police released a statement with details about Fritzl and his underground dungeon, the press dubbed him Das Inzestmonster while claiming, and this is a biggie in this part of the world, that his actions were, quote, the worst crime in history. I will say, I will say it's close. For Austrians. Yeah, for Austrians. No. That's what I'm saying. Hitler's an Austrian. That's right.

It's hard because I just feel like that's a hell of a judgment. Yeah. Yeah. No. No. Again, no problem. I'm not trying to disparage Elizabeth Fritzl, but the Holocaust. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've always said that. I've always said I was like, why do we got to go this hard? Yeah. And when she got released, it was a little bit like the sound of music. Yeah.

The hell's going on? Sure, sure, sure, sure. The police held multiple press conferences full of stunning details, including one announcing that DNA tests confirmed that Joseph Fretzel had fathered seven children with his own daughter. According to our tests, you are the father. Oh, what the fuck? No, that's not bitch. No, it's good to not be. I kill him.

Well, this steady stream of information made Joseph Fritzl a blockbuster worldwide news story that always mentioned Austria, Austria, Austria as the location. Yeah. The Natasha Kampusch, the girl we talked about last week, she'd escaped her captor just south of Vienna in August of 2006, meaning that within a little over a year and a half,

Two underground rape dungeon stories broke out of Austria on a global scale. Well, this is all very distressing to the Austrian government, who'd hoped that 2008 was the year everyone was going to talk about how good of a job Austria had done hosting the massive European Cup soccer tournament. That's instead of asking why Austria has so many highly disturbing fuck dungeons everywhere. Listen, I am sick of these questions. No one wants to ask how we got the nets.

How we got the nits so big and cool? Right? No one wants to ask a question. Oh, God, isn't it crazy that fucking Britney Spears' sister with the opening fucking, she's saying, Oh, it's Deutschland über alles. Are we, no one talking about this? No one's into this?

Fluorescent new balls. And so Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer announced that the government was going to launch a PR campaign to take the focus off Austria as, quote, the land of dungeons and shift it to the fancy football tournament that was sure to bring in many tourist dollars.

But while many Austrians thought the PR campaign was distasteful, people weren't going to stay away from Austria because of the dungeons any more than people stay away from America because of the serial killing and gun violence. Yeah, dungeons only got one person at a time. Yeah, I mean, that's even factoring in that you're far more likely to get shot in America than kidnapped in Austria. Yeah, exactly. Your father's not Josef Fritzl. You know, like, you don't know you're going to be... Ha, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's not...

Yeah, it's not great for Austria, but it's not going to like I mean, they still had Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, they're always going to have that. And you need to tell me you're randomly going to end up in a sex dungeon with your father. I said, well, what do people want for the not promo the soccer tour? No, it's what they just didn't want them to like sweep the Joseph Fritzl story under the rug, which is what they were trying to do. They were trying to like, no, they should have a story in an eight door.

basement. Yeah. I mean, what do you want to do? Talk about it all the fucking time? Yes. Yeah. But no, they did. They just wanted to remake Austria's image with a PR campaign. I agree. Honestly, though, it would take Arnold Schwarzenegger showing up as the Terminator going like, you know, like, you will not be back. No.

Now Joseph Fritzl was largely unfazed by all the negative media attention and in fact seemed to enjoy it all quite a bit He spent all his time in his jail cell reading news and watching TV coverage about himself Soaking up every word because he liked how his hair looked like that was mustache looked in a kind of sick irony though the prison cell where he was kept for imprisoning his daughter was far nicer than the cell he built for Elizabeth and

Fritzl had a TV, a radio, a comfortable bed with clean sheets, a window, and a potted plant. He also got three fresh meals a day and an hour to go outside and get exercise. The difference was that Elizabeth did not have multiple men threatening to kill her day and night like Joseph Fritzl had in jail. Well, you know, she had him. Yeah, that was true. But he was only one of them. There wasn't like an entire jail full of men. Yeah, but he says he's very well liked. Well, that's what he says.

He was simply called Satan by the other inmates and an actual bounty was put on his head that would be paid to the inmate who finally murdered him.

Now, Joseph Fritzl had naturally been a fan of true crime for his entire life. So when it came time to pick a lawyer, he knew exactly who to call. The lawyer was named Rudolf Mayer, and he defended the most notorious criminals in Austria's recent history. Most notably, he defended Alfreda Baunsteiner, the so-called Nanny Doss of Austria.

Elfrida was a black widow who'd murdered seven elderly men for their money by poisoning some of them with a diabetes drug, Euglucon. One terribly cruel death, however, came when she locked an old man in a bathroom in an ice bath with the windows open during winter, which froze him to death. Pretty impressive. You know, he said, because he also knew very well, he got really well. There was a guy that was his next door neighbor in jail that was the name of Alfred Yu. He

He was a man when he was awaiting trial while he was awaiting trial. He got it. And so he got him. They got to be really good friends, according to him. And he said that he was the guy was using. He was called the sea killer after being prisoned for more than 30 years for violent sexual offenses. He was released on parole. Then after two years, he relapsed because it's how they do it over there. He strangled a sex worker, dismembered her body, and then he took up a bunch of her body parts, minced them into a bunch of beef and

and then would taste them, would eat them, and then sell those things that meet other people. Wow. Now he's a chef in jail. And he makes specialized meals for Yosef. Interesting. Wow. Live from Northridge.

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Now, Rudolf Mayer had represented El Freida seven years earlier in 2001 after her initial conviction when more bodies were exhumed. So Joseph Fritzl was well acquainted with Mayer's work. Mayer, meanwhile, who seemed to revel in publicity, immediately agreed to represent the most notorious Austrian of the 21st century.

The reason why, Mayer said, was that he could tell when people were really monstrous. And when he met Joseph Fritzl, he detected, quote, no negative aura. Oh, yeah. It's all about he definitely, Joseph Fritzl definitely passes the vibe check. He's totally mellow, totally fun. And he's just fucking like chill as hell. And he just fucking, he'll be there. He'll have sex with his daughter. And that's it. You don't got to worry about anything. You want to take care of Joseph at all. He handles himself.

In the mayor's words, he wanted to show Joseph Fritzl as a human being instead of a horrific monster or a sexual tyrant. That, of course, meant pleading insanity.

Now, even though there was a mountain of obvious evidence showing what Joseph Fritzl had done, Austrian authorities were taking no chances. They interviewed everyone who'd lived at all of Fritzl's properties over the last 24 years, cataloging every bit of information they could find. Can you imagine that? Like someone showing up and like asking like, hey, you remember that landlord you had 10 years ago? Yeah. He had an underground rape dungeon with his daughter. Yeah, you were living on top of it. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Yeah. What do you remember? Oh, I remember being real nice. I remember one time I went in the backyard and he beat me with a hose. Yeah, but I deserved that. I was not supposed to be in the backyard. And I spent a lot of time in the dungeon, but really just hanging out. Well, in all, 30 detectives and 300 police officers worked around the clock for months.

Even though they knew he was guilty. They wanted an airtight fucking case. This is like a Nuremberg level trial where they're like, we must put... Because also what's intense about their legal system is...

which we covered a little bit with Anders Breivik, not the same countries, but kind of similar in vibe, where they really have to spell out why Josef Rützel must be in jail forever. Because they believe in rehabilitation. And I believe they do have the 20-year maximum sentence as well. I'm not certain if it's like that, but his sentence gets re-evaluated.

every couple of years. Well, I don't think they have life without parole. And I know he gets parole after 15 years. Yeah, so he has to keep meeting with people. And cops also looked at over 700 cold cases. They looked at sexual assaults, missing persons, murder, but...

They could find nothing new to stick to Joseph outside of what he'd done to his family. But we found out he did some bad things. Well, it was speculated that he committed a couple of murders, but it's just that he was around at the same time that these horrible murders occurred. And did he plead not guilty to this whole fucking dungeon crime? We'll get to that here in a second. All right.

And that's the thing, is that authorities, they took no chances. They used sonar probes at Fritzl's other properties to see if he had built any other underground dungeon. His second underground dungeon? It's more exhausting than having a daughter for a wife. Very difficult. Cheaper than a sonar probe, a shovel. No!

No, no. You don't want to ruin the precious apartments of Austria. Well, such escapades as using sonar, that was just more fodder for the media, who couldn't stop talking about Joseph Fritzl's Austrian sex dungeon. Journalists camped outside of the hospital where Elizabeth and her children were recovering, and allegedly there was a reward of $1.5 million for the first photo of Elizabeth after her escape.

After that, Austrian anti-terrorism forces guarded the hospital and many photographers were arrested trying to get in. I do think that they took her safety and happiness very seriously. Yes. Which I will say that is also what's kind of... It's almost like they took it personally of like, we failed this girl. Yeah. It is...

Cause it is very different than I, you see it sometimes in certain cases in America, but this is just one of those cases where you could tell. Yeah. They, they smelt their failure all over themselves and they knew that they had to do something about it. And they, they, the way that they very closely guarded her was, was very, uh,

you know, like it was great. Like she, we still don't necessarily know where she is. I wonder if, uh, the Tasha was the other woman, right? Yes. I wonder if they ever met and like talked about this shit. Yeah. They're on a group text with the girls who escaped Ariel Castro. Yeah. They talk all the time. Yeah.

Well, on one occasion, an English photographer, a type of journalist known to be the scummiest around, climbed the hospital walls to the third floor to try to claim the reward, but was arrested when a nurse spotted him. A different nurse, however, was caught surreptitiously taking a photo of the family so he could sell it to a magazine for nearly half a million dollars. That's a lot of money. After that, the hospital... Oh, my God.

Are you saying that? Is it like, you know, he probably did it, that's a lot of money. With a nurse, it's a lot. It's like when you keep ramping up the reward of it. I feel like in a way, it's like, that's where you could almost blame a little bit of the institution too, being like, you're doing this on purpose. You're driving people that are desperate to want to do it. Oh no, it's the institution's fault, definitely, for offering the money for the privacy, you know, to...

destroy the privacy of these people. Oh, yeah. After that, the hospital banned all phones and cameras and threatened the job of anyone who broke the no phone, no camera rule. Eventually, the family's plight gained the attention of the world's second most famous Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah! I think he's more famous. You really think so? Than Josef Fritzl? No, than Hitler. Oh, yeah. He's definitely more famous than Fritzl. He's definitely more huggable. No.

Actually, I don't know. But Arnold Schwarzenegger, yeah, I mean, they won't show me. I got to log into my IMDb Pro. I have to change it again because I let it lap. So I'll look at their star meter and I'll find out the definitive answer if Schwarzenegger is more popular than Hitler. Positively, yes. He's more...

More well-liked. Yeah. His movies are more watched. Actually, I don't know. Triumph of the Will is pretty big. Pretty big, yeah. Well, at the time of the Fretzel case, this was back when Schwarzenegger was governor of California. And he offered a personal invitation to visit him here as his personal guest. You bring me your Elizabeth, you bring me the daughters, and I will pop.

Damn up! They're very skinny looking! I will make them strong! Very little dungeons! Your little pectoral muscles are for little wussies? Because of the fault lines, we cannot build that many basements. You will love it here. Come on, you pussy! Don't put up 20 more pounds! I don't care! Your skin is ripping off at the simple touch of metal!

I'm sorry, he became Fritzl. Yeah, he did. Yeah, he became really horrible. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, and you're spitting. You have a bunch of spittle on your lip that I just saw you suck it back in. Ha ha ha!

You love your spit. You really do. It's called the fucking, it's my tongue's lube. Well, on a far smaller scale, a former schoolmate of Elizabeth's, in a misguided attempt to help, she recorded and released a schlager song about Elizabeth's experience called 24 Years.

The song, however, is completely unobtainable because Elizabeth's lawyer very quickly slapped the singer with a cease and desist order, even though all profits from the CD went to Elizabeth.

Year one, it's not so fun. Year two, hey, I'm feeling blue. Year three, hey, what's growing in me? Year four, that's my daughter. She's on the floor. But aren't you allowed to just write a song? Yeah, but they still slapped her with a cease and desist. I don't know. Maybe the laws are different in Austria. I think that it's maybe in poor taste. A Schlager song, I think, is in quiet poor taste. Yum.

It's like a drinking song. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of sort of like a drinking song. You know, I feel like it's not what I want to hear in a tavern. You know what I mean? Like, I don't want to think, if I'm drinking a big stein and I'm in Oktoberfest. You could totally do a Schlager song that's kind of based on your model that would be like, you could imagine yourself in a beer hall holding a stein. That's me out. No, and everyone's going, Jahre ein.

Eins. Eins. Klar. Eins. Eins. Eins. It's kind of nice. I don't think it'd be a way to reformat the memory. I'm just saying it can be done. You know who should write a song about it? Boy George. Why? Didn't he keep someone a prisoner in his basement? Yes, he did.

That's what I forgot. Oh, yeah. I didn't know about that. I didn't know about that at all. Poor George, captive man. Wow. Yeah, 15 months for falsely imprisoning male escort. What?

Wow. Wow, he looks like Kingpin. It's still, I mean, like, much better. I will say that. The basement was lovely. Unfortunately, yeah, if you're being held in Boy George's, like, nice house, you got the big bath, you got the fucking glory holes, you got the DJ room.

Kirsten Fritzl, meanwhile, had finally come out of her medically induced coma and had been taken off life support. But speaking of who could have done a song when she regained consciousness, doctors gave her a CD player and every album from UFO enthusiast Robbie Williams because Kirsten had seen him on TV in the cellar and had become obsessed.

Wow. So he could have written the song. Yeah. And then I could just see Robbie Williams showing all up, just like, you know, they have their logo and you're like doing like the weird sort of like, you know, the meet and greet that they do for like, you know, like the cancer kids or make-a-wish kids. And she's just like, and I'm sure he did a great job being nice. You know what I mean? But it's super awkward. Yes, it is.

But while there were some happy times with Elizabeth and her family, there was a certain resentment that was starting to grow concerning Elizabeth's mother, Rosemary, especially concerning the question as to how much she knew about her husband's crimes.

Reportedly, Elizabeth took the three so-called upstairs children out of Rosemary's care after giving a deposition as to what happened to her in the previous 24 years, which I think got her to thinking about just how her mother couldn't have known about the dungeons.

Yeah. The dungeon is different. Like, I know it's ridiculous to say. I think that the dungeon was specifically, Fritzl's entire life was devoted to keeping that dungeon a secret for the most part. And his work, which is what he said everybody ignored was how hard he worked.

But Rosemary, it was more all of the rest. It was just all the kids showing up, no questions asked. She was the perfect person to go along with it. Any other person might have asked a question. He picked, when he was 20 years old, he knew exactly who he was picking. He specifically...

paired himself with someone he could entirely dominate and abuse. Yeah. Well, after giving the deposition, Rosemary was kicked out of Elizabeth's new house, which of course shattered the elderly grandmother. The nightmare only continued for Rosemary after that, who was hounded by the press, both at her new home in Linz and at her former home with Joseph. When she went back to pick up a few possessions,

I would fucking, whatever's in that house still, leave it. Leave it, man. Also, with these reporters, isn't there anything else going on? In Austria? Well, this is the biggest story in the world. Dude, this story is fucking apeshit. This story is, you really, we're used to it. You know what I mean? When this was like,

A hot new single? Yeah. This shit was blowing people's minds like R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Like, this is a crazy, crazy story. No, there are people being sent from America and England and countries all over the world being sent to Austria specifically for this story. Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, this was massive. This was covered wall to wall. What's the big deal?

And soon after that, she finally announced she was divorcing from Joseph Fritzl. Oh, it took that. It took a long time. As far as what happened to the house at Ipstrasseviesig, where Fritzl built his dungeon, Joseph actually hired a second lawyer to transform it into a true crime attraction. He was going to charge admission.

But once police heard about this plan, they flooded the cellar with liquid concrete. The house, however, still stands to this day. Yeah. You can go right there. Yeah. Just build another house. Yeah, it's a good house. It's not a good house. It's not a good house.

Okay. Maybe not. Maybe not. Now, concerning Fritzl, he was charged with manslaughter for the dead baby, 3,000 counts of rape, and slavery under an obscure 19th century penal code. In other words, there was no way Joseph Fritzl was ever going to be free.

Now, although the trial was kept private, except for opening statements and sentencing, the court psychiatrist's 130-page report on Joseph Fritzl's mental state got leaked to the press. In it, Fritzl blamed his mother for everything, saying that because of her, he was, quote, born to rape. You see, though, I feel like they twisted the statement because the actual quote is, I lasted a long time for someone born to rape. Ha ha ha!

Yes, he did. That's the actual... He did say that, yeah. That's the actual quote. That's the actual quote, yeah. Well, he did also say that he could have behaved a lot worse than locking up his daughter. Oh, this is... Basically saying, like, you're lucky this is the worst I did, and it's not even that bad. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate everything you've done for us. Yeah, dude, I could have totally...

That's worse. Lots of shit I could have done. He also blamed seeing bombs fall on Amstetten during World War II when he was a Hitler youth, saying it was a traumatic experience for him. Everyone had it! Hundreds of millions of people went through the exact same fucking thing. But do other people have siren phobia? Yeah! A lot of them! Whatever!

You don't know me. Don't talk like you know me. I'm going to my basement. He said that it was a traumatic, especially since his mother would abandon him during the bombings, which sounds like his mother wanted him to die.

These statements were expanded upon in an interview Joseph Fritzl did with his lawyer, Rudolph Mayer, who thought, because Rudolph Mayer thought, hey, if only people could see Joseph Fritzl's human side. He's so charming and funny and cute. They understand him a lot better. Yeah. You sit down, have a meal with him. Yeah.

As author John Glatt put it, the interview was, in a way, Fritzl's Mein Kampf, his way to explain himself to everyone. Now, Mayer was probably trying to show people how crazy Fritzl was, because you'd have to be crazy to imprison your daughter, rape her, and father seven children with her over the course of 24 years. Crazy like a fox! Crazy like a fox! It's because he built a den! Ha ha ha!

It was a burrow. But surprising no one except Rudolph Mayer, the hours-long interview only creeped people out even more than they were already creeped out. Crazy! Fritzl spoke at length about his sexual feelings for his mother, then implied that he should be congratulated for never acting on his fantasies. Get over it! No! No! I was strong! Okay? Do you have... Tell me. Okay? All right.

Who's your mother-in-law? I tell you what, she had bigger tits than your mom. I stole the name from her.

My mom had great tits. How dare you say anything bad about my mom had great tits. Oh, great tits my mother did have. Fritzl then talked about how much pride he had in raising an incest family in a dungeon of his own making. I did it myself. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. I got the concrete. I made the daughter. I made the daughter's daughter. And then I was going on to make the new daughter be my new wife. Okay? And you tried.

He basically said that the reason why he was such a brutal tyrant was because he'd grown up a Nazi, which wasn't his fault either. But he liked it, but it also wasn't his fault. It's bad, but it's good, but it's also bad, but also good. And also, what's bad about it? Come on. Why does everyone get so weird about this? Come on, guys. Hey. Yeah. He then said that he was not the monster the media portrayed him as because, quote, Hey, I could have killed them all. Then nothing would have happened. No one would have ever known about it.

Okay. Arguably would have been better. Well...

Maybe. But at the same time, I could have totally done it in crazy ways. Fritzl, however, got angry when his lawyer brought up Elizabeth's claim that her father started raping her at age 11. Fritzl denied that, saying that he was not a man that has sex with little children, but was definitely a man who had sex with his daughter after she turned 18. I waited until my daughter became a woman. Yeah, because there's nothing wrong with that. No. And he'd keep banging her after he's...

She was dying. Yeah. You know what I'm noticing from you? You know what? I'm letting it get to me. I'm letting it bother me. From you, you know what I get?

From all this work, I'm so surprised. We're in Los Angeles. You're so judgmental. You're so judgmental of this man, the way he lives his life. Okay? How dare you? I know. I should feel sorry for this Nazi that raped his daughter. Yeah. Think about how much pressure that was for him. He says it right here. He says it. He's like, think about it. I could tell no one how I felt. I was a man alone that could never tell anyone my true inner struggle.

Don't you feel bad for him? I take it back. His comp. Mine comp. Well, Fritzl also doubled down on what he told police, saying that the only reason why he put Elizabeth in the cellar was because she didn't follow his rules. She spent all her time hanging out in local bars, hanging out with persons of questionable moral standards. She was 11. Yes, the dungeon, he said. Well, no, she was 18 when she was put in the cellar.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. But still, it's early. It's very early. The dungeon, he said, was a place where he gave her a chance by force to stay away from bad influences.

Now, Mayer hoped that all this would garner sympathy for Fritzl. Definitely, yeah, of course. They just gotta see. Yeah, but predictably, everyone saw him as cynical and delusional. The media pulled quotes like, I could have killed them all for headlines and ran photos of Fritzl sunbathing in a Speedo next to a story called, I lusted after my mother. And aren't you jealous? The Joseph Fritzl story.

Now, after just four days in court, Joseph Ritzel pled guilty to all charges and was sentenced to life in prison. Okay, good. And since then, he'd been imprisoned at a psychiatric hospital for mentally ill prisoners. Although, as of just this year, it was determined by courts that the 89-year-old Joseph, he's still fucking alive today. These mean bastards never fucking die. They never do. There's also something about people with...

Like, you know, I hate it when people throw the word like narcissism around, but he legitimately is the textbook, like of the very peak of having a narcissistic personality disorder. My grandmother was also diagnosed with the same. And what she would do is take a very implicit care of herself. And so she lived till she was 94.

evil bitch to the very end. So we just got five more years. Well, the hospital said that he no longer posed danger and could therefore be transferred to a regular prison. His new lawyer, a woman named Astrid Wagner, said that she will apply for his release after his transfer.

Joseph wrote in his book that if he is ever released, he plans to move back to Amstetten and open a small business. Here's a couple of these. Now, this woman... Quite possibly Fritzl's Pretzels. I legitimately... This is the time. This woman that wrote the book, The Abysses of Joseph S. The Abscesses. Of Joseph F.,

She is. I would actually put her in a category of apparently she dated a serial killer in jail.

And so she became a serial killer groupie in this world. She's deep in this world, which is why Josef Fritzl chose her. He wrote her a letter saying, I saw and read your book about Jack Unterweger, and I loved your sympathetic stance with him. Will you retell my story? Now, this is in 2023. So this is years after this. So all of the trials happened. He's had a long time to really sit and think. And...

she's trying to show the world. Same thing. You got to know him. If you meet him, he is just a frail grandfather who just, he is the most charming, delightful. And what she does is a very similar, it's, how do you put this? I feel like it's the same way. Anybody who loves these historically bad men, where they must identify with something within their family that they see. The way she seems to talk about him is that he's,

she's either physically in love with him or like all she does is ask questions stuff like she's like what does love mean to you like she says stuff like that like one time she asked me like one of the questions she asked um tell me hey tell me joseph who was the true love of your life

And he said, don't even ask him that question. No, this is like it is very, very it's just like stuff like that where he said, my wife, I always got along well with her. But we had very different spheres of life. You know, I had my job, my travels and of course, my secret love affairs. I was always looking for adventure in some way. I guess I didn't appreciate her enough. You know, could you perhaps get in touch with her?

I have so much to explain to her. They say that you should not only be at peace with yourself, but also with others before leaving this world. So he believes that also my favorite was she's like, what do you look for in a woman? And he says, I like it when she has a temper, when she's approachable. And I mean, I don't mean that in a sexual sense. I mean, open-minded in terms of a character. He likes to see himself in there. Yeah. Well, like he said in the book with no irony, he says that he is a good guy. I'm a good guy.

It is literally the headline. I'm a good guy. Yeah. And a responsible family man. He also says the direct quote from him. And he is bitching constantly about how no one paid attention to how great his work was, like how he was such an impressive, successful businessman. And that he would call these like his dalliances and he would mostly talk about the

pressure of having a secret love and how hard that was on him. Never mentions Joseph Jr. No. Which I find interesting. Does not come up at all. None of the other kids come up. No one mentions Joseph Jr. Nobody does. And it is just really fucking crazy. Yeah. Well, he also claims to have many illegitimate children abroad from his many trips, especially to Thailand. He says they keep correspondence with him. He also claims that his son in Ghana is a respected lawyer.

supposedly. Yeah, that it was just not true. We know that he did go to Ghana. It was all for work. And like, he did travel around various things for work, for the concrete and steel companies that he worked for. And, but then, but there's no way he wasn't doing sex tourism at the same time. Of course! He was doing sex tourism at home! The entire time, yes. But the best part is, I just gotta go downstairs! Don't hassle me, I'm local. Oh my God. Ha!

If you see anyone in Ghana or Thailand with a pencil-thin mustache, it might be a pretzel.

He also called that guy who killed all the people, killed the woman. He called him a helpful, nice guy. Yeah, he loves that guy. And he says he's super popular in prison, but he can't walk around because people hound him to want him to talk. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. He's just so popular. What is he fucking busy? Talk to him. No, he says he's busy. He gets up every day. He has his fitness regimen that he does every single day where he he doesn't

He doesn't need a walker, even though they've been forcing him to use one. Man, it must be... Austrian prisons must be kind of nice, because this guy is alive. He gets to garden. He gardens. He gets to make his own meals. They have a communal kitchen where they make meals and pastries together. That's the one thing he doesn't like to eat because he's watching his figure. Oh. And they... That's all real. And so they... It's...

It seems really nice, yeah. Yeah, but it does, reports to the contrary are far more credible. It seems like people want to kill him. Most people want to kill him, and he's in solitary confinement most of the time for his own safety. The second he's in general gen pop, someone's going to fuck, someone already did beat him up. He was attacked very badly once in the shower, where the same thing, they mashed up his face, they did a bunch of bad shit to him, and now he just forever just kind of went back into solitary confinement.

And concerning Elizabeth and her kids, they were settled in an unnamed rural Austrian village where they are fiercely protected from outsiders by their fellow villagers. No one knows where they actually are. As far as I know, no picture has ever been taken of Elizabeth or any of her so-called downstairs children.

As for Joseph Fritzl, his unprecedented criminal energy, as the Austrians put it in their sentencing, means that there is absolutely no way he will ever be released, even though he is eligible for parole this year. Now, I think it's important you remember, this is what the lawyer, his lawyer, reminds us all of. And I want you to think about this in terms of this story. This is the new chick. Yeah. Yeah.

I can already hear them shouting their phrases of how a lifelong sentence must stay lifelong. Those who condemn my wanting to understand the darker sides of the human soul, to them I'd like to say to their face, keep me from judging a person before I've walked a mile in his moccasins. Moccasins?

There's no moccasins in Austria. What? She ended it with a racist statement. You know what? Fine. He can go live with you. Yeah, yeah. Have Joseph Fritzl live in your fucking upstairs apartment.

Well, Joseph Fritzl has been in prison for just a fraction of the time that he imprisoned Elizabeth. And unless he lives to be 97 years old, Joseph Fritzl won't even come close to the sentence he imposed on his daughter.

But unlike Elizabeth, Fritzl will most likely die alone in a prison cell as one of the most hated and reviled men of the 21st century. Well, I hope that we did our part in rehabilitating his image. Because that's such a hard burden to live with. Yeah, well, we have muppetized him. Yeah, you turned him into Grover. Yeah.

But you know, honestly, he could never turn himself into Grover and that was the problem. Yeah, he's more of an Oscar the Grouch. Oh, he is a Grouch. I'll tell you that. And more like Mr. Groper.

That seems more of a snuffleupagus. Oh, yeah. In appearance. Yeah, if he would have made a movie, it would have been a snuffleupagus film. A snuff film. Disgusting. Patreon.com slash last podcast on the left. Unbelievable.

Un-fucking-believable. I never thought about it. We went this entire series without a single tasteless joke, and you fuck it up at the end. We didn't? We did? I found that joke to be delicious. No! Vidro.com slash last podcast on the left is where you can watch Vidro.

of every single episode that we do. You can watch Side Stories for free over on YouTube, and you can also follow us for free at LPNLUT on TikTok and Instagram. Be sure to check out LPNTV on Twitch. That's twitch.tv slash LPNTV for all the shows we have coming out almost every weekday at 9pm

And go check out all of our shows after the fact on our Last Podcast on the Left YouTube. And come see us on tour at lastpodcastontheleft.com. Check out shows. Check out the date. Come see us in Boston, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, London, and Iceland all in the coming months. And then next week.

We're coming back for some good old-fashioned, spooky true crime. I love it. We've got some good spooky true crime. We need to be doing this. Yeah, I mean, you weren't spooked by this? No, this is different. When it's real life, it's harder. I find spooky... Oh, it's going to be real life again. I feel like this is spookier than ever. Okay, yeah, so he's... Yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger is number 57. Is Hitler on this list?

So Arnold's right between Shia LaBeouf and Robert Downey Jr. Interesting. I would have never... This is a flawed list. I don't even want to get into this. If you're around in Los Angeles on Sunday, October 13th, I'm going to be doing a forced firefighter benefit. Again, don't bring your fucking wives to that shit because...

Yeah, these guys are fucking hot, but I think they're busy right now. Yeah, they're not coming to the comedy show. Yeah, so it's a night of comedy and country music at Scribble in Highland Park. That's October 13th. Come check it out if you want to get tickets. It is on eddytoons.com. All right. Whoa, IMDb Pro won't let me look up. All right, Adolf Hitler. Wow, his star meter is 8,766. Let me look at Arnold Schwarzenegger for the final answer. He's 57.

Wow, I guess, yeah. And I want to say 8,000 spaces higher. Illegitimately, Schwarzenegger is officially more popular than Adolf Hitler. Now, are you more popular than Adolf Hitler? Yeah, that's the big question. Let me see. All right, so he's at 8,667. I am at... Oh, this is great. Drum roll. Yeah, I can't wait for this. Come on. Is Henry funnier than Hitler? More popular. He's not.

He's not at all. I can tell. It's inconclusive. You're not even a number. Dative is inconclusive. No, I'm just saying the results. Inconclusive. Yeah, that's too bad. I'm just going to hide that score like I hid my other daughter. Hail Satan. I'm not. No, there's nothing. Schwarzenegger. Hail Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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