Father Impregnates Daughter Part II

Part one of this sad and sick tale can be found here. I am dumbfounded by this. There is so very much that I do not understand about it, not the least of which is how his “upstairs” family was kept in the dark.

I can’t help but wonder if they don’t know more than they are letting on.

AMSTETTEN, Austria (CNN) – Three children freed from a cellar in which their mother had been imprisoned and raped by her own father for 24 years had never seen daylight, police in Austria have confirmed.

Police spokesman Franz Polzer told CNN that 73-year-old Josef Fritzl admitted holding his daughter, Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, hostage in the windowless cell and fathering seven children by her.

“The mother had memories [of the outside world] and got used to the situation,” Polzer told a press conference Monday afternoon. “The others knew nothing else.”

The main question reverberating from the small Austrian town: How could a man keep his daughter locked in his basement for 24 years, where she gave birth to seven of his children while her mother and three of those children lived upstairs without an inkling of the horrors in the cellar?

Fritzl explained Elisabeth’s disappearance by saying she had run away from home, a story backed up by letters he forced Elisabeth to write, including one that begged her parents not to look for her.

Other letters made it seem the missing daughter had left the three children on the parents’ doorstep — when in fact they had been born in captivity in the family’s basement.

Elisabeth told police that she and her three children Kerstin, 19; Stefan, 18; and Felix, 5, did not see the light of day during their entire time in captivity underneath the building in Amstetten, a rural town about 150 km (93 miles) west of Vienna.