Woman kept in dungeon for 25 years by her father

[Menydh]

No doubt there is more wrong with this modern world than what meets the eye.

Austria: woman was 'imprisoned by father for almost 25 years'

The Times
April 28, 2008

Police last night entered the homemade dungeon where a 73-year-old engineer allegedly held his daughter captive for almost a quarter of a century, sexually abusing her and fathering up to seven children.

Behind a hidden door they discovered a complex of small windowless rooms, less than six feet high, where Ms F claims that she was kept imprisoned with three of her children.

Ms F, 42, effectively disappeared in 1984. Since then no passport, driving licence or other official document has been issued in her name. There are no photographs of her since she was at school.

Ms F claims that she was seized, drugged and handcuffed by her father soon after her 19th birthday and locked in the basement of their three-storey home in Amstetten, a small town in eastern Austria. She says she had been sexually abused since the age of 11.

The basement was connected to the house by a hidden door and protected by an elaborate electrical locking mechanism to which only Mr F knew the code. Because he had been an electrical engineer and had access to explosives, police feared booby traps, but they gained entry last night after Mr F, in custody, disclosed the code.

The rooms that they encountered contained sanitary facilities and cooking equipment, and one was described as a padded cell.

The Austrian state prosecutor’s office said that Ms F’s claims were credible and that DNA tests were being conducted to see whether Mr F was indeed the father of her children.

“She had been abused continuously during the 24-year imprisonment,” said a police statement, summarising the testimony of Ms F. “This led to six children.”

Police said she was “greatly disturbed” and agreed to talk only after receiving assurances that her children would be cared for and that she would no longer have to see her father.

A seventh child was born but died three days later. The body of the baby was later allegedly burnt in the garden by her father. The surviving children, three boys and three girls, are aged between 5 and 20 and all are being cared for by police psychologists.

Police found out about, and freed, Ms F after one of her daughters, Child, 19, was taken to hospital eight days ago. She was one of three children living in the dungeon.

All three were fed and clothed by Mr F but they were not allowed to go to school. According to her testimony, Ms F had to teach all three – the others were Child, 5, and Child, 18 – to speak, read and write. Her father passed clothing and food through a hatch.

Between 1993 and 2000, Mr F allegedly maintained an elaborate pretence. On three occasions he claimed that the children of his missing daughter had been mysteriously dumped on him and that she had then disappeared. The three accounted for in this way were formally adopted and allowed to attend school. “Their behaviour was good and their marks were too,” a school spokesman said.

The other three, however, were more difficult to explain away – and were condemned to the dungeon.

The case has echoes of the Natascha Kampusch affair in which a Viennese schoolgirl was kept in a cellar from the age of 10 for eight years before escaping.

The case is also likely to fuel a furious debate in Austria about how easy it is to slip through the welfare net. “This is one of the most extraordinary cases in Austrian criminal history,” Colonel Franz Polzer, a police spokesman, said.

But while Ms Kampusch’s captivity was possible because of the anonymity of the suburbs, Ms F and her children were prisoners in a small, close-knit community. Neighbours talked yesterday of how Mr F’s wife used to take her three grandchildren for walks and how Mr F always gave a cheery greeting. “This is terrible,” said a neighbour.

Mr F and his wife, who is said to have been ignorant about the makeshift prison and the years of sexual abuse, called a doctor when Child, 19, fell unconscious in front of their door. Since then she has been in a coma.

When the police called on the household in search of Ms F, Mr F presented a letter supposedly written by his daughter, suggesting that she had left to live with an isolated sect.

Mr F and his daughter were seen in the grounds of the hospital where Child, 19, is being treated. That rare concession by Mr F to his daughter appears to have been his undoing.

There was an eerie silence in this sleepy town yesterday as its 23,000 inhabitants learnt from the television news of the horrors said to have been perpetrated in their midst for almost three decades.

The only sign of life was at Ybbs Street, where a legion of international television crews and news organisations besieged an inconspicuous blue three-storey house, the home of Mr and Mrs F, a retired middle-class couple well known and well respected in the tight-knit community.

As a police spokesman held an impromptu press conference in front of the house, neighbours listened with disbelief to the allegations of how Mr F, a retired electrical engineer, kept his daughter imprisoned in a subterranean dungeon. He adopted three of the children he is alleged to have fathered with her, and they went to school and had a normal life in the apartment upstairs. The other three were allegedly imprisoned two storeys below and, until this weekend, had never seen daylight.

Their window on the outside world was a television set that police said was the only concession Mr F made for his secret family.

“This is a shock to all of us,” a neighbour who gave her name only as Maria, 66, said. “I’m good friends with Mrs F. Both she and her husband are lovely people. I’ve seen her take the children to school very often – they are well dressed, polite and very nice. I just saw her the other day and I still cannot believe that this was going on in front of our noses. We always believed that the mother of the children had run away and dumped them on the grandparents. Who would ever think of such a horrible thing?”

But surely someone had questioned the whereabouts of a woman who had gone missing since 1984 and had three children growing up with her parents?

“There are no records of Ms F. She has not had any dealings with the authorities since her disappearance in 1984 and there are no photos or files on her,” a police spokesman said.

The neighbour, Maria, despite claiming to be a friend of the family, admitted that she could not remember ever learning their first names, although she had known them for decades.

Mr F worked as an engineer for the construction company Zehnter. As well as Ms F he had four children, all of whom now have families of their own.

The police said that the dungeon in Mr F’s house was taboo for the rest of the family, including his wife, who claimed to have known nothing about her daughter’s fate.

Mr F is said by police to have presided over all family affairs with an iron hand. But how he managed to keep a secret so horrifying behind an underground door will puzzle psychiatrists and sociologists for years as they decide whether there is such a thing as an “Austrian syndrome”.

Dark world of child hostages

— Natascha Kampusch was held for eight years by Wolfgang Priklopil before escaping. Priklopil snatched Natascha, aged 10, as she walked to school and kept her in a dungeon under his house near Vienna

— Three Austrian girls were imprisoned by their mother in a house in a suburb of Linz for seven years. They were kept in almost complete darkness, playing only with mice and communicating in their own language. They were rescued in 2005 when police broke into the house after a neighbour, who had reported his suspicions several times, threatened a local council official with a lawsuit

— In 1996 Sabine Dardenne, 12, was abducted by the Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux. She was confined to a cellar and abused until her rescue 80 days later

— June Candelario locked her grandson in a portable kennel for 11 hours a day while she went to work. It was three years before authorities in Colorado found out. Candelario was convicted on child abuse charges last year.


[source]

[Lutiferre]

I heard this in the news. Very disturbing.

[Delbáeth]

Holy f*ck. That's just disturbing, as Luit rightfully put it.

[wilpuri]

I blame American popular culture.

[Savorgnan]

Every nation seems to have its speciality:


-In Northern France, they rape and kill children, and then set fire to the corpse

-In Italy, they assassinate teenagers in satanic fashion

-In Austria, they keep people in dungeons


Who said that the national "cultures" were gone?