Josef Fritzl who fathered seven children with a daughter he locked in a cellar  has pleaded guilty to rape and incest but denies murder in connection with the death of a newborn boy. He also pleaded not guilty to a charge of enslaving his daughter Elisabeth for most of her life, Reuters reports.

Apparently he told his lawyer: “I’m scared.”

Fritzl case will be in court all week.  The jury will hear 11 hours of videotaped interviews with his daughter, Elisabeth. She was interviewed about her 24 years of captivity in her father’s cellar. The interiew will be broken into short sections as it considered too harrowing.

A verdict is expected by Friday. And Fritzl is expected to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

His family are being held in a psychiatric clinic this week to escape the publicity surrounding the trial of their notorious father.

Here is the AP report:

  A trial has started in Austria for the man accused of imprisoning his daughter for 24 years and fathering her seven children.
Josef Fritzl held a blue file folder over his face as he was escorted into the courthouse in St. Poelten, west of Vienna. He is on trial for murder, rape, incest, coercion, false imprisonment and enslavement.
Police say 73-year-old Fritzl confessed to holding his daughter in a cell he built beneath his home. Investigators say DNA tests show he fathered her six surviving children.
One of the children died in infancy, and prosecutors charged Fritzl with murder, contending the baby might have survived if Fritzl had arranged for medical care.
Fritzl faces up to life imprisonment.

(In the AP picture at the top of this blog  a detail is seen of a poster painted by victims of the Fritzl incest crime, which hangs in a window at the main square in Amstetten, Austria. For almost a quarter of a century, Josef Fritzl allegedly held his daughter as a sex slave in a cramped, rat-infested cellar where he fathered seven children with her. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak, file)

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