The fresh family atrocity has stunned the Austrian public,already reeling from the revelations of how Josef Fritzl kept his own daughter as a sex slave in the cellar for 24 years.
The man is reported to have told detectives that after murdering his 42-year-old wife and their daughter by hitting them on the head with an iron axe, he then climbed into his car and drove for over two hours to the city of Linz, where he killed his father-in-law with the same axe, before heading to the nearby town of Ansfelden and murdering his own parents.
He walked into a police station in Vienna, covered in blood and in a "confused state" and confessed to the murders. He said, "my dead wife and my dead child are in my flat."
Police said that the suspect claimed he killed his entire family in order to spare them from the "shame" of finding out that he was bankrupt.
A police spokesman said:´´He claims to have borrowed a six-figure sum from someone within the family but then lost it in failed investments. According to him, the motive for the gruesome fivehold murder was to spare his family from the "shame" of finding out that he was ruined.