I want hardest punishment: Josef Fritzl

Dungeon dad Josef Fritzl has given his first interview from his prison cell one week after the sex beast was caged for life. Fritzl (73) said he wanted to endure "the hardest punishment" after he locked his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.

The monster dad again tried to justify his perverse "love" for his secret family.

He insisted, "I tried to make life in the cellar as pleasant as possible for my second family -- and in the course of the years, a partnership between my daughter and myself."

His fantasy collapsed when he saw Elisabeth, who he locked up aged just 18, come into his trial and stare at him as he was made to watch hours of her harrowing testimony.

The next day he changed his pleas to guilty on all counts including raping her 3,000 times and the murder of their newborn son who died in his dungeon prison.

Fritzl added, "I had such a strange feeling, which I can hardly describe, but when she was there I can only say I felt somewhat different, knowing she was in the vicinity of me.

"After that, I want only the hardest punishment. Until the end.

"As I noticed that she was here, in the court room, and I finally turned, into the auditorium and looked and saw her myself, I was suddenly so ashamed."

Elisabeth went into the courtroom in St Poelten, Austria, as her videotaped evidence of her years of hell was played to jurors.

Fritzl, who had up until that point denied charges of murder and slavery, said, "I could hardly bear hearing what she was saying.

"But I deserved nothing better. I do not deserve indulgence. I knew I had to confess everything, I could not varnish over the truth any longer, before anyone."

He said of his decision to change his pleas, "I understood, finally, what suffering I brought to my family."

Although under suicide watch he said that he does not contemplate killing himself.

And shockingly he told how he would like to write to his daughter "to explain" his sick actions.

"I would like to write a sympathetic book," he said.

"Not for the public, only for her. I will try to explain why I acted in such a horrible way. I wish nothing more than that my victims can somehow forget me and what they experienced from me."

He said he wants psychiatrists to delve into his "sick soul" so he can use their findings to help in the recovery of his cellar family.

Meanwhile German lawyer Klaus Ulrich Groth has served a summons on Fritzl's wife Rosemarie, and his eldest son Harald, claiming they knew of the secret dungeon.

The interview was given to Fritzl's lawyer Rudolf Mayer and appeared in an Austrian magazine.