The wife of Austria's accused ‘horror father' Josef Fritzl never believed her husband was involved in the 24-year disappearance of their daughter, even though he had already served an 18-month prison sentence for a 1967 rape conviction, her sister said. In an exclusive television interview for The Associated Press, the sister-in-law of the man accused of imprisoning his daughter in a dingy dungeon for over two decades provided the intimate details of the life of oppression inside the Fritzl home. The woman, who asked only to be identified as Christine R., said incest victim Elisabeth ran away from home as a 17-year-old, about six months before police say she was locked into the soundproofed cellar beneath their apartment - hinting at a motive for the crime. She described the father as a ‘tyrant' who instilled a culture of fear at home, which helped him create an elaborate cover story that no one questioned of Elisabeth running away to join a cult and abandoning three children on their doorstep. “When he said it was black, it was black, even when it was 10 times white,” said the woman, who was interviewed Saturday. “He tolerated no dissent. Listen, if I myself was scared of him at a family party, and I did not feel confident to say anything in any form that could possibly offend him, then you can imagine how it must have been for a woman that spent so many years with him. In any case, he was a tyrant.” Christine R. also painted the most complete picture to date of her sister: a woman who against all odds fought to hold together a troubled family, yet never suspected that the cause of so much pain was in her own home. “She never believed him capable of it,” the woman said of her 68-year-old sister. “We spoke about it often when we met. And I would say, ‘Rosemarie, where can Elisabeth be?' I even told her myself, she is definitely in a cult where you can only have a certain amount of children, or they don't want sick children.” “Every person that looked in his eyes was fooled by him,” Christine R. said of her brother-in
