Cesare Borgia
Of the Borgias, it is Lucrezia, perhaps, who has the worst reputation. But all she was was weak. It was her brother, the tyrant and murderer Cesare Borgia who seduced and tormented her, and then – mad with jealousy – scared off her first husband and murdered her second. After Cesare was wounded in battle and left to die, she lived a blameless life for another eleven years.
Cesare Borgia, like sister Lucrezia, was the bastard child of a courtesan and a cardinal who later, in 1492, became pope. He was immediately, aged 16, appointed Archbishop of Valencia; by 17, he was a cardinal. But it wasn’t enough for the unscrupulous spoiled brat. For what he wanted was power: power over people, power over the affairs of state. Not for nothing was he the model of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince.
Power over people he satisfied sexually. He slept with every woman who attracted him, among them his sister and his brother’s intended wife, and regularly had his homosexual partners either poisoned or assassinated. The Venetian ambassador later wrote:
‘Every night four or five murdered men are discovered – bishops, prelates and others – so that all Rome is trembling for fear of being destroyed by the Duke Cesare.’
Power over the affairs of state, though, took more time. For elder brother Giovanni had been made head of the papal army and at the beginning of his reign the pope made a mistake: when the king of Naples died, he immediately recognized the king’s son as his successor. Charles VIII of France, believing he himself had a better claim, promptly invaded; and the Borgias were forced into a humiliating retreat. Cesare was taken as a hostage, and though he subsequently escaped, he wanted personal revenge for the humiliations he’d suffered at the hands of the French court. He murdered all those he could find who had witnessed them; and then had a group of Swiss mercenaries who’d broken into his mother’s house during the Frenchmen’s stay in Rome tortured to death.
As far as the politics of state were concerned, however, fate soon played into his hands. For brother Giovanni disgraced himself in a campaign against the Orsini family, who’d collaborated with the French. So Cesare had him assassinated and – abandoning his church titles – took over Giovanni’s role as his father’s military and political right-hand man. Allied to the French again by now, and married to the king of Navarre’s sixteen-year-old sister, he set about the business of bringing rebellious nobles into line and carving out a kingdom for himself in the area south of Venice.
As a commander, he was every bit as devious and ruthless as he had been as a cardinal. In one captured town he ordered forty of the prettiest virgins to be brought to him for deflowering. In another, he demanded that its female ruler be brought to his bed – and wrote gloatingly to his father about what transpired. In yet another he promised to give safe passage to its young master in return for his surrender, only to have him sent to Rome and tortured to death. His friends and allies also suffered. He double-crossed the Duke of Albino; had his own deputy hacked in two and displayed on a public square; and when he suspected disloyalty among those around him, invited them to a banquet and had them strangled.
Every time Cesare returned to Rome, the body count went up there. In 1500 he had sister Lucrezia’s Neapolitan husband waylaid, and when he refused to die of his wounds, strangled him personally. He was also an adept poisoner – and it was poison, in the end, that brought him down. For in 1503 he and his father were invited by a cardinal to a banquet at a vineyard outside Rome. Both later became ill; his father died; and Cesare’s life began to unravel. He was arrested and forced to give up his new kingdom. He fled to Naples, where he was again arrested, this time for disturbing the peace of Italy, and was sent to jail in Spain. He escaped once more to join the army of his brother-in-law, but after being wounded at a siege, he was recognized, stripped entirely naked and left to die of thirst.
Andrei Chikatilo
Between 1978 and 1990, a serial sex murderer who became known as ‘the Forest Strip Killer’ terrorized the region around Rostov in southern Russia. When he was finally caught, he turned out to be a mild-mannered schoolteacher and Communist Party member called Andrei Chikatilo, who’d committed at least fifty-three murders – of women, children and drifters – over a period of twelve years. Chikatilo, though – who’d confessed to them all – was found guilty of only fifty-two of them. For another man had been executed for the first of his murders, that of a nine-year-old he’d lured into a rented shack at the age of 42.
That first killing of Chikatilo’s, however, set the pattern for all the rest. For Chikatilo was impotent; and after choking the nine-year-old and attempting unsuccessfully to rape her, he ended up violating her with his fingers. It was the sight of the blood from her ruptured hymen that seems to have set him off. For he stabbed her repeatedly in what became a frenzy of sexual excitement; from then on power, blood, sex, torture and death became inseparably interlinked in his mind.
It was two years before he struck again – his victim this time a seventeen-year-old girl playing hookey from school who was willing to have sex for the price of a meal. He took her into the woods and beat her to death. Then he bit off one of her nipples and masturbated over her corpse.
From then on, the number of tortured and mutilated bodies began to pile up: older women, children and teenagers of both sexes. In 1984, Chikatilo was actually arrested by an investigating detective who noticed him behaving strangely on a bus. But though a rope, a long coil of wire and a knife were found in his briefcase, he was eventually released because his blood-type didn’t match that of the killer’s. As it turned out, the bespectacled Chikatilo, fortunately for him, was a medical anomaly for his semen- and blood-type were different, AB and A. He was struck off the list of suspects.
Chikatilo always professed his guilt once he was captured
He was finally caught, many brutal murders later, only in October 1990, when the last of his victims was found in woods near a remote country station. A policeman remembered asking a man he’d seen emerging nearby, dressed in a grey suit and with cuts to his finger and ear, for his identity. It was Chikatilo. He was first put under surveillance, and then pulled in. After several days’ grilling, he confessed.
Put on trial in April 1992, he had no excuses – though he did mention that he’d seen his elder brother eaten by his neighbours in the Ukraine during the famine of the 1930s. He said:
‘When I used my knife, it brought psychological relief. I know I have to be destroyed. I understand. I was a mistake of nature.’
He was executed, by a single gunshot behind the right ear, on Valentine’s Day in 1994.
Josef Frizl
Josef Fritzl was a strict father – a product, he would claim, of the Nazi-controlled Third Reich in which he grew up – but a good one, or so it seemed. An electrical engineer, he lived with his wife Rosemarie in their normal, provincial townhouse in the small Austrian town of Amstetten, where they brought up their seven children. But behind closed doors, he was a manipulative sociopath, driven to exert his power over others, patriarchal or otherwise, at any cost. In fact, he had already served a prison sentence, back in 1967, for raping a woman at knifepoint – a conviction which, conveniently for him, had been wiped from his record 15 years later in accordance with Austrian law. It was this mixture of outward respectability, fierce domination and legal loopholes that allowed the so-called ‘Monster of Amstetten’ to continue his reign of terror for nearly a quarter of a century. It was a horror story that was to ignite an international media furore and send shockwaves through local and national communities alike.
Elisabeth Fritzl was only 11 years old when her father’s sexual abuse began. As she entered her teens, she began to rebel, staying out till the small hours and drinking and smoking in bars. She was stubborn and strong-willed to boot – which Fritzl didn’t like one bit. He would later explain:
‘That is why I had to do something; I had to create a place where I could keep Elisabeth, by force if necessary, away from the outside world.’
By the time she was 18, and no more disposed towards obedience, Fritzl had done just that. In fact, his meticulous planning of the kidnap and incarceration of his daughter had begun years in advance: he had built a secret basement and converted it into a prison cell up to three years earlier. Kitted out with just a washbasin, toilet, bed, hot plate and refrigerator, the dank, windowless dungeon was no luxury apartment. Fritzl had had the useful foresight to soundproof the 35m2 area and install huge, electronically-locking doors weighing up to 500kg, which he hid behind shelves in his basement workshop. A total of eight doors needed to be unlocked to reach the innermost cells. Clearly, Fritzl’s plans were well-laid to the last detail.
Josef Fritzl became known as the Monster of Amstetten
On 29th August 1984, Fritzl lured Elisabeth into the basement, drugged her with ether, and locked her in the tiny concealed cellar. It would mark the last time in 24 years Elisabeth would see daylight. Upstairs, Fritzl told his wife Rosemarie that their daughter had run away to join a religious sect. It was not entirely beyond belief: Elisabeth had already run away from her unhappy, abusive home twice before. Submissive Rosemarie accepted her husband’s explanation without question.
House of horrors: the Fritzl home concealed an underground dungeon
Elisabeth’s father would visit the cellar regularly – once every three days or so – to bring food and supplies, and, before long, to have sex with his captive daughter, sometimes using chains to prevent her struggling. Over the course of her imprisonment Elisabeth was raped an estimated 3,000 times. Unsurprisingly, it was not long before she was impregnated. The first pregnancy miscarried; the second resulted in the birth of Kerstin in 1989. Between 1989 and 2002, Fritzl fathered seven of his daughter’s children. One child, Michael, died three days after birth: when Fritzl saw the baby struggling to breathe, he told his anguished daughter, ‘What will be, will be’, and went upstairs to eat his dinner. After the baby’s death, he incinerated the body in a stove in his cellar.
Of the six surviving children, three remained with Elisabeth in the basement. The other three, seemingly picked at random, Fritzl took upstairs one by one at birth and left them on the doorstep of his own house, each time with a note ‘from Elisabeth’ to express her wish for Rosemarie to bring them up. Once again, no questions were asked by family, friends or, indeed, the state. The ‘upstairs children’, fostered and later adopted by Josef and Rosemarie, were intelligent and well adjusted, oblivious to their mother and siblings living beneath them in tiny, dark quarters, threatened with gassing and electrocution if they tried to escape and ruled by fear of, and dependence on, their despotic father.
And so might Fritzl’s terrifying domination have continued, but for Kerstin’s sudden illness in April 2008. A desperate Elisabeth begged her father to allow the critically ill and unconscious 19-year-old to be removed from the cellar and taken to hospital for treatment. Fritzl agreed, explaining on arrival to sympathetic doctors that Kerstin had been left on his doorstep in this condition by his errant, absentee daughter. A week later, he even allowed Elisabeth a hospital visit to Kerstin, who had been diagnosed with kidney failure. Local police, acting on a tip-off, brought Elisabeth in for questioning. It was only after assurances she would never have to lay eyes on her father again that she began to reveal the horrific details of her ordeal.
The ordeal was at last over, but the aftermath continues. The three ‘downstairs children’ suffered vitamin D deficiency, anaemia, illiteracy, agoraphobia and countless other issues linked to their incarceration; the three ‘upstairs children’ must come to terms with the breakdown of their adoptive family, their new relationship with their mother and the guilt that they did not suffer the traumas of those underground. All six are at high risk of genetic disease generated by the incest from which they were born. All have been given new identities. Life for the Fritzls will never again be normal.
It took a jury just three and a half days to find Josef Fritzl guilty of murder, rape, enslavement and incest. During the trial, the court heard that he knew he was ‘born to rape’ and chose Elisabeth, of his seven children, as his victim because:
‘She was most like me. She was as stubborn as me, as strong as me. The stronger your opponent, the bigger the victory.’
When the 73-year-old was handed his life sentence, it seemed he had accepted that the remainder of his life would be spent firmly under lock and key. It is perhaps a fitting end for the tyrant who subjected his family to the same fate for so many years. His cell, though, has the luxury of a window.