The lurid details of how Fritzl violated Elisabeth and kept her and several children in a domestic dungeon horrified people worldwide who followed the case.

Josef Fritzl who was accused of imprisoning his daughter in a basement for 24 years and fathering her seven children pleaded guilty in court during the opening of his trial to charges of incest, but insisted he was not guilty of killing her newborn son or enslaving her. Josef Fritzl, 73, wore a mismatched suit and hid his face behind a blue file folder as a judge began the proceedings under heavy security at west of Vienna.

Fritzl pleaded guilty to incest and false imprisonment, but only partially guilty to charges of coercion and rape. He pleaded not guilty to negligent, homicide and enslavement during the trial. In a breaking voice Fritzl briefly recalled his childhood and said life with his mother was "very difficult." Asked if he had friends, he said, "No." The authorities say he imprisoned and repeatedly raped his daughter, Elisabeth, now 42, for 24 years in a cramped and windowless dungeon he built beneath the family home in the western town of Amstetten. Investigators say DNA tests show he fathered her six surviving children.

One of the children died in infancy, which prompted the murder charge. Prosecutors contend the baby boy might have survived if Fritzl had arranged for medical care. In her opening statement, a prosecutor, Christiane Burkheiser, accused Fritzl of repeatedly raping his daughter in front of the children, and said the ailing newborn he failed to save died two and a half days after it was born. "That's murder by neglect" or negligent homicide, Burkheiser said.

Burkheiser said Fritzl did not talk to his daughter during her first few years in captivity and simply came down to the cellar to rape her. "Josef Fritzl used his daughter like his property," Burkheiser said. Burkheiser said Elisabeth was "broken" by Fritzl's actions and the uncertainty of her fate and that of her children. Three of the children grew up underground in Amstetten. The other three were brought upstairs to be raised by Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, who believed they had been abandoned.

However, the woman who bore seven children through incest and was allegedly locked in a squalid dungeon for 24 years confronted her father in videotape shown in court. The 73-year-old, who had already admitted to incest, false imprisonment and rape, had previously denied the charges of slavery, and the murder through negligence of one of Elisabeth's infant sons, who died within days of birth as a result of respiratory problems.
Fritzl said his change of mind, which even caught his defence lawyer by surprise, was the result of his daughter Elisabeth's video testimony, screened in the court.

"I heard her statement, and I realized that I had made a mistake," he told the courtroom. Fritzl said he had not wilfully allowed the baby to die, but had misjudged the health of the infant. "I was of the opinion that the little one would survive," Fritzl told the court. It was revealed in the court that in late August 1984, Fritzl lured the 18-year-old Elizabeth into the cellar and in the years that followed fathered seven children with her, of whom six survived.

After telling the police his daughter had disappeared but didn't want to be found, Fritzl raised three of the six children above ground with his wife, claiming they had been left on the doorstep. When Kerstin, one of the three children living below ground, fell critically ill in 2008, Fritzl took her and Elisabeth to hospital, where the authorities became suspicious.

However, after the 4-day trial Josef Fritzl was finally sentenced to life imprisonment in a secure mental unit for locking up and raping his daughter in a cellar over 24 years, fathering seven children with her and causing the death of his own infant son. "I accept the verdict," the 73-year-old Josef Fritzl told the court after Thursday's unanimous decision by the three-man, five-woman jury in a court west of Vienna. The prosecution also approved it, meaning the trial outcome cannot be appealed. Fritzl would stay in St Poelten jail pending transfer to a unit for mentally ill offenders within a prison where he will receive psychotherapy.