AMSTETTEN, Austria - Authorities investigating a man accused of holding his daughter captive for 24 years and fathering seven children with her are awaiting old court records the media say document a 1967 rape allegation.
Lower Austria prosecutor Gerhard Sedlacek said the file should arrive Monday or Tuesday in St. Poelten, where 73-year-old Josef Fritzl is being held for allegedly imprisoning his daughter in a dungeon cellar. He refused to comment on its contents.
"I do not yet know the contents," Sedlacek said. "The file deals with the accused."
Police have said Fritzl has confessed to fathering seven children with his now 42-year-old daughter Elisabeth. They said three of the children were locked away in the dungeon and Fritzl confessed to burning the body of one child after it died in infancy.
Investigators are combing the property where Fritzl lived, including the underground, windowless rooms where he held Elisabeth and three of her children captive. They are also questioning 100 people who rented rooms in the house over the years.
"We are trying to see everything that might deal with his past," Sedlacek said, indicating the old court records could be particularly useful. "We need this to get a better picture of him."
Reports suggest Fritzl was arrested in the 1960s in Linz and may have served prison time. Police have declined to comment, saying records that old would have been erased under Austria's statutes of limitation.
But the OberOesterreich Nachrichten daily carried an excerpt of what it said was a 1967 court record found in the state archives in Linz, in which a Josef F. was accused of breaking into the apartment of a 24-year-old nurse and raping her.
The daughter of a former employer also backed up the reports.
"He was hired even though he had a record," said Sigrid Reisinger, who heads the Amstetten construction material firm Zehetner and whose father employed Fritzl there from 1969-71. She said the alleged crime was of a sexual nature but did not recall details.
The recent case's chief investigator, meanwhile, described Fritzl as an "absolute ruler" in his household, whose tyranny caused most of the seven children he had with his wife to flee the home as soon as they were old enough.
"He forbid anyone to ask even where he was or what he was doing," Col. Franz Polzer told The AP.
Investigators have received consistent reports from Fritzl's children of daily life in the family with wife Rosemarie, Polzer said. Elisabeth, as well, has described the difficulties she experienced with her father even before her imprisonment at age 18, Polzer said.
He declined to confirm an Austrian media report that Elisabeth ran away from home as a teenager, but said she may have been sexually abused by him as young as 12 or 13.
Over the weekend, investigators are continuing to examine the Amstetten apartment building with the three-room cellar prison, he said. A report on whatever new details emerge is expected early next week.
Authorities have said that what appears to have been an elaborate crime by Fritzl came to their attention April 19, when Elisabeth's eldest daughter, 19-year-old Kerstin, was admitted to a hospital suffering from an unidentified infection.
Baffled doctors appealed on TV for Kerstin's mother to come forward because they needed information about the girl's medical history. Fritzl then accompanied Elisabeth to the hospital on April 26, and her story came to light, authorities said.
Elisabeth's three other children by Fritzl -- a son and two daughters -- were removed from the cellar by him as babies, police said. Fritzl and his wife, who was told Elisabeth had abandoned the children, adopted one and had effective custody of two others.
Fritzl faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on rape charges, the most grave of his alleged offenses. However, prosecutors said Tuesday they were investigating whether he can be charged with "murder through failure to act" in connection with the infant's death. That is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
