Austrian woman locked in a cellar for 24 years

Yahoo! News: Austrian woman says she was imprisoned by father

That is just beyond f*cked up. I don't see that woman ever being able to recover from that. Did all of the children survive? They didn't mention anything on Sky.

What's the deal with Austria and weird cases like this?

All over the news and one of the seven died shortly after birth. What gets me is that the wife knew nothing?!?!?!?!

So she claims...

She must have wondered where all those extra children came from, though surely?

BBC has fuller coverage.

Austria has produced some very weird people, Wittgenstein (weird, but brilliant), Hitler (was in the same class at school with Wittgenstein), Gustav Klimt (brilliant, but slightly mental), and Sigmund Freud, (cunning charlatan or brilliant genius?), plus others

That's sick.

Hmmm, wife knew nothing...

Daughter goes missing for over 20 years when she is realy in the celler.

A certain Mrs West in the UK also said she knew nothing about what her husband had been upto.

Not until the police started to dig up the bodies under the celler floor...

24 hours after the thread starts and still no sign of the TT proud parent brigade stating that only parents can understand this and others shouldn't comment...

I think this incident left a lot of people speechless. It's a horrible story.

How big was the cellar? Did it have TV?

Don't know why this story reminds me of the Park Chan-Wook movie Oldboy

@ btr - No, this thread is reserved for the victims of abuse.
According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung (German link) the father claimed that his daughter had run off to join a sect and that she had abandoned the children on his doorstep as newborns. He had begun abusing Elisabeth when she was 11 years old, he also had a rubber cell in the basement reserved for punishing her (and possibly his other children).
It makes me sick just reading of this, there is no punishment severe enough for this kind of crime, it's murder over and over again for 24 years.

EDIT: Yes, there was a tv, a kitchenette and a sanitary cell along with various rooms.
Sicksicksick.

I was just thinking that...

(from The Sun)
what an evil evil man. amazing how he got away with this crime for so long!
poor kids. hope they manage to get back to having some sort of normal life, they really deserve it.

The wife must have known something. Cmon. I mean didn't she wonder why he took food downstairs all these years? Where he disappeared to in the cellar? There is something not kosher here.

Im going to go out on a limb and guess that maybe the wife could have possibly been somewhat abused as well. I mean, its hard to beleive a stand up fellow like this would do something like that, but its definately a possibility.

Or she could be an evil twisted nutjob like him..

How is it possible that in a "civilized" society nobody realized what was going on in that house? How is it possible that these people were made invisible, even to the neighbors?
Probably the concept of privacy went too far...

How can 16 year old girls keep a pregnancy hidden from their own family and secretly give birth? If you're determined enough you can do anything.

Besides, everyone complains about nosey neighbors who should mind their own business. And when they do, we're down on them like hawks for not paying better attention!

I don't complain, I liked it when they asked me about my second cat: they were used to two cats meowing in the night.
Ok, probably the neighbors should intervene only by calling the police after 22.00 if the party is not over, that's their role, but how to avoid this kind of episodes then? Like in the Kamputsch case, pretending that everything is normal? Mind your own business in any case?
Is there a compromise between minding our own business and showing interest for the others?!

The Father told the wife that the daughter had run away from home. When a new baby arrived he would give the baby to the wife to take care of and he would tell the wife that the daughter had turned up at the door with the unwanted baby.

That makes sense. I suppose that trying to contact the missing daughter was impossible (forget the police) and going to the basement was out of question: "oh no dear, I'm going to take the wine".
This story is worse than a badly written soap opera.

and she didn´t smell a rat the THIRD time he did this?

The scariest thing about this and the Natasha incident is that nobody can stop it from happening.

What can you do, have a license to have children? regluar check ups?

You can only rely on the humanity of man and sadly in this case, its missing.

the running away and leaving her babies on the doorstep is imo not too far fetched and it's plausible the wife believed it, especially as notes were left with the babies from the daughter, however it's the fact that they were all living in the cellar and that she failed to notice that which strikes me as unlikely...I mean, in 24 years surely you might go to the cellar once?! On the other hand who knows what it was like there, he may have been so abusive that she was scared to change seats without prior permission.

His story was that she'd run away to join a cult, and had written to him loads of times telling him not to look for her. The wife seemed to have believed it and so did the rest of the neighbourhood. So no missing persons report was filed and they just carried on with life as 'normal'.

Ok, I would have acted differently, but of course I am closer to an italian mother than to an austrian wife...

He must have done some pretty big weekly shopping? Walks in the house with 5 bags of shopping etc. It is indeed a frightening story. Kids that have never seen daylight? As it happens the psychologists will have a field day with these kids.

The Times has a good article on what's happened so far: Link. It seems that where the daughter and other children were imprisoned was hidden in the cellar, not simply downstairs.


What bothers me so much about this case is not just him ruining one life, that of his daughter; but so many others are involved in this terrible situation.

It seems that the oldest daughter (19) was taken to the hospital in a life-threatening condition due to a congenitive condition. This led to the authorities looking for the parents and accosting the abuser.


(from my quoted SZ article)
We've been through this before ...

Related topic: Incestous German couple fight for their rights
Related topic: German court upholds ban on incest
Related topic: Incestous Aussies ask for understanding

BBC has an update. He's confessed + photos of the cellar etc.

BBC

If they were a very traditional Austrian married couple, with a strict division of labour (e.g. wife irons husband's underpants while husband has his "Mittagsschläfchen"), they wouldn't have been that unusual. If she was in charge of the kitchen, the cellar could easily have been his fiefdom.

Only parents can understand this and others shouldn't comment.

If it's a detached cellar she may not have even known about it (or at least that part of it)

oi! Since when did you become Gideon?

I was only allowed that position for two years, Crawlie has now taken over. Anyway I don't think you should be able to comment on this thread unless you are an expert DIY builder. Awesome amount of work and nobody noticed? This guy should advertise his services, he'd get a lot of work. Discreet and Silent.

I have to agree with Gideon. That is some incredible DIY that he undertook there. He must have been pretty proud of his efforts. And a coded entry system. Genius

And he helped deliver seven babies. An all round talent.

Surely the wife must have wondered how all of these babies she was caring for looked remarkably like her husband/daughter? Strange

I'm not sure anyone can 'understand' the atrocities for which this man is responsible.

If you read the entire topic you will see why I posted that

I did and I don't.

Well next time read carefully

Terrible absolutely terrible... cannot understand why anyone would want to do this. How could anyone waste so much of their work / hobby room space...

Just kidding of course.. absolutely no laughing matter. I shiver to think of what these poor victims have gone through. I bet more of this weird shit goes
on.

The dad/grandad claimed that the daughter left the babies on the doorstep and went back to her sect.
For want of any other phrase ...

What I also find strange is that shit like this seems to happen more frequently in smaller countries in Europe as opposed to the larger ones...is Austria becoming the new Belgium?!

Unfortunately, I wonder if it just may be that these things get caught in the smaller places.

Are there any tasteless jokes about it yet?

Not only her - what about the authorities? Those kids went to school, two of them were adopted by the couple, one stayed with them as a foster child. How did this work? Why did nobody ask about the whereabouts of their mum or tried to find out who their dad was?

What is the standing of the abuser in the community? If he is a pillar of the Catholic church, head of the Schützenverein and member of various other sects organizations no one was going to bother him much with awkward questions. Besides, small town Austria is ten times worse than small town Germany, still a very patriarchal society. You just don't ask and you hear no harm.

There was a psychiatrist interviewed yesterday on ...forget the channel, anyway her diagnosis was that he had narcissistic personality disorder. Through a web of lies and manipulations he was able to maintain control over the family. Needless to say, these people are really sick, but they're not confined to Austria. They make up about 1% of the human population.