Austrian Family Presents Psychiatrists With Bizarre Case

With it’s themes of incest and secretly imprisoning children, this is quite the Flowers in the Attic-type story; only, it’s more like Flowers in the Basement.

Oh, and unlike the V.C. Andrews novel, this isn’t fiction.

A 42-year-old Austrian woman, simply identified as Elisabeth F., has been rescued from her 73-year-old father’s windowless basement cell, where she and three of the seven children her father fathered with her, have lived since 1984. Three more of the children lived with her (and their) father as orphans who just happened to show up on their doorstep, and the remaining child died shortly after birth.

According to the story, the man’s wife had no idea any of this was going on. She assumed her daughter ran away at 18, thanks largely in part to a letter that surfaced a month after the girl disappeared (in 1984). Apparently, when three infants showed up at her doorstep at three different times over the years, the wife (whom I’m assuming is Elisabeth’s mother) agreed to take them and raise them with her husband – completely oblivious to the fact that her husband actually fathered the children with their daughter who was being held captive right under her feet. Literally.

According to Elisabeth, her father began raping her when she was 11 years old, and then drugged and handcuffed her at 18 in order to lock her in the basement cell (complete with television, a hot plate for cooking, and electronic entry) and proceed to father seven children with her.

I can’t even begin to wrap my brain around the mental damage this had done to everyone involved, much less the mental damage this man already had in order to commit such a horrifically disturbing crime. I mean, let’s put this in perspective:

• Elisabeth F. – Her father began raping her at 11 years old, then locked her in a basement cell at 18 to continue raping her and fathering children with her.
• Three of the children – Lived with Elisabeth in the basement, where they never saw the light of day, or other human beings for that matter.
• Three more of the children – Lived with their bizarre grandparent/father/step-mother duo, whom they thought was just a nice couple of old folks who took them in to raise, having no idea the man was their biological father or that their mother and three of their siblings were living under them in a basement.
• The wife – Thought her daughter had run away, but was actually raising her daughter’s children (her grandchildren? her step-children?) by her husband, the man who’d secretly imprisoned their daughter for over 20 years.

And it all came to surface at once.

If this doesn’t smack of something Nancy Grace would greedily lap up for ratings, I don’t know what does.

Fortunately, Elisabeth and her children have been placed in psychiatric care.

How do you help someone deal with this? How do you help someone re-enter (or, simply enter society, for some of the children’s cases) society after suffering a blow like this?

My heart goes out to this family, as well as the law enforcement and mental health professionals who are attempting to wade through it all.

For more information, check out Austrian Elisabeth Fritzl kept captive by dad, has seven children, House of Horror children never saw daylight, and Austrian police: woman says her father held her captive for 24 years, fathered 7 children.

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