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VIENNA - A FORMER tenant in Austria's 'House of Horror' unwittingly paid the electricity bill for the dank dungeon in which a woman was held as a sex slave by her father for 24 years, the man told the daily Die Presse in an interview released on Thursday.
Mr Sepp Leitner told the newspaper that in the 1990s he lived for a period of four years in a small flat on the ground floor immediately above the cellar where Josef Fritzl has admitted to imprisoning and sexually abusing his daughter for over two decades.
Mr Leitner said he could never understand that his electricity bill, for a tiny 30-square-metre flat from which he was frequently absent and where he did not even have a washing machine, was so high.
His quarterly bill once reached 5,000 Schilling (S$765) which was exorbitant for the time and which led to a dispute betweeen Mr Leitner and Fritzl, he said.
It should have amounted to only a few hundred Schilling.
'If I'd been a bit more persistent and not let it go until the mystery of the high electricity consumption had been resolved, perhaps we'd have found out about the dungeon earlier,' Mr Leitner told Die Presse.
But it was clear even then: 'There's something attached to my electricity meter,' he said. 'But I could never find out what.' Because he refused to pay the bill, and because Mr Leitner also had a dog, which was not allowed under his tenancy contract, Fritzl eventually threw him out of the flat.
Mr Leitner, who worked as a waiter, said the dog, Sam, must have sensed something was amiss in the cellar because it always barked when they went past the door.
'We always wondered why he barked precisely there. We thought he was just happy to be going for a walk.' The dog, Sam, could not stand Fritzl, either, Mr Leitner continued.
'Whenever he saw him, he growled. But no-one could explain why. Sam never growled at anyone.'
Fritzl, Mr Leitner claimed, also had keys to all the flats in the house. And he and the other tenants noticed that food - milk, pasta or bread - mysteriously disappeared from their kitchens.
Fritzl also strictly forbade his tenants to use the house's big garden or to go anywhere near the cellar, Mr Leitner said.
'Even when the weather was beautiful.'
In hindsight it was clear why: the cellar could be reached via the garden. Fritzl also separated off the terrace, he added. -- AFP
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