Crime Rant’s pick for International Creep Idol of 2008 (and even though the century is young, he’s surely a top-ten finisher for the century list no matter what happens in the next 92 years) Josef Fritzl will plead insanity to avoid a jail sentence, his lawyer said yesterday.

Here’s a snip from the Age out of Australia:

“In my personal opinion, Josef Fritzl is mentally ill and therefore of diminished responsibility,” lawyer Rudolf Mayer told German weekly Bild am Sonntag. “I believe that my client does not belong in prison but in a secure psychiatric unit.”

Mr. Mayer said he was “not defending a monster but a human being, even if that is hard to take for some people”. He also revealed he had received death threats.

Boo hoo. Neighbors and coworkers say he was a tyrant — sullen, demanding. But he looked pretty happy in his Speedo vacationing in Thailand, didn’t he? Poor Thailand. First John Mark Karr, now this guy. Maybe they should change their tourism motto: Thailand — Mecca for Molesters.

Yesterday Franz Polzer, heading the police investigation in Austria, said police were close to completing their examination of the cellar of horrors.

“Our puzzle is almost complete,” he told the Austrian newspaper Kurier, adding that a major task was to establish whether Fritzl was serious about his alleged threat to gas the occupants of the bunker if anything happened to him.

Colonel Polzer told British newspaper The Sunday Mirror that the cellar network included bare punishment cells.

He said there appeared to be new areas of the cellar under construction but that it was impossible to know what Fritzl’s intentions had been as he was no longer co-operating with police.

The German weekly Der Spiegel reported that for the first nine years of her imprisonment the dungeon was just one room, suggesting Fritzl raped his daughter in front of their young children.

From 1984 to 1993, “repeated rapes committed by Josef Fritzl” took place in front of children born in 1988, 1990 and 1992, the report quoted Elisabeth’s testimony to police as saying.

It said Elisabeth was handcuffed to a post for the first two days underground, when she was 19 years old. She was then tied to a leash for the next six or nine months so that she could go to the toilet on her own.

Interesting how Fritzl’s mind works here. OK to rape his daughter in front of the kids, but she needs some privacy to use the bathroom?
 

We’ve all been talking about the sickening story out of Austria. You know the one. The story of Josef Fritzl who held his daughter captive and raped her repeatedly for 24 years?

Here’s a snip from CTV and pic of the dungeon:

The 73-year-old man allegedly held his daughter Elisabeth, now 42, and three of their children in a soundproof chamber below an apartment block in Amstetten, a town near the Austrian Alps.

Police say he raised three of the children with his wife, who knew nothing of the secret cellar chamber.

The man told police he burned the body of the seventh child, who allegedly died of neglect shortly after birth, in an incinerator.

Elisabeth was originally reported missing in 1984 when she was 18 years old. She was located by Amstetten police on Saturday evening after they received a tip. She is now in psychiatric care with her children, two of whom are said to be in poor health.

“They are in a life-threatening condition,” the head of the clinic where they are being treated told reporters. “All of them are being given intensive medical treatment. I can give no prognosis. Only God knows that.”

Seriously? Josef’s wife didn’t have a clue. Hard to believe. In fact, impossible.