Never trust an Austrian with a cellar

[DanS]

Glühwein

[Kontiki]

I like the little jab at Belgium in that last article.

[Wernazuma III]

The last article is quite good, but also mingles half true facts to a potpourri.

The main true thing about the reasoning is that in Austria the outer facade is far too important and many people seem to think that well-educated and well-dressed people can't be bad. That's surely an important thing in why some cases can last for so long without anybody noticing. One day before the truth came out, the conservative and overly naive district-official said the family was above suspicion because the father was always proper... Jesus Christ!!
And it is also the main reason why the authorities didn't ask too much when the "wicked" run-away daughter, supposedly in a no-name sect nobody knows, left her child at the doorstep. To be fair, that was in the 80s, today the alert level in such cases is very different.

Also, police (esp. in Vienna) is in a deplorable state of corruption, intrigue, and incompetence, and police seems to be tendentially more racist than the average citizen. However, it's not as if Austria was unique in this aspect. You'd find similar cases of police brutality and unaccountability in most other countries as well, IMHO - lamentably. Just remember how British police handled the murder of the Brazilian guy, how Italian police loves to fake evidence, etc.
AI, rightfully, made a complaint about those three cases, which were very controversial in the media of course, but Austria does not stand out compared to other nations in terms of racially motivated attacks by police, so please everyone check your own record before esp. pointing. Most countries has to deal with this nuisance, Austria too, of course.
And a banking scandal? Oh no, a banking scandal - what an unheard of thing in the civilized world!
The neighbours not knowing much about the family? And this in an urban area - how dare they? Everywhere else, people in cities have lunch with their neighbors on a daily basis!
Concerning pedophily, incest, etc., remember that in Belgium or Portugal there were networks reaching partially deep into politics. Or in Texas, the dimension of the pedophily Mormon sect - certainly another country where "sordid things" happen to children! It's kind of arbitrary that when it comes to Belgium or Austria, a - definitely unusual - row of cases leads to blown up speculation over "national character" that are more than a stretch.

We have to reform our youth welfare, which seems to fail far too often (not only in these prominent cases), and there are other things running badly. But one can always over-interpret things.

[Kuciwalker]

Does anyone else think the father looks incredibly creepy, at least in the photo circulated by all the news services?

[Meticulous Man]

Does anyone else think the father looks incredibly creepy, at least in the photo circulated by all the news services?

Yes

[Meticulous Man]

Another article, from The Guardian...

Austria's subterranean shame

As Austrians woke this morning to the full and shocking details of yet another "girl in the cellar" discovery, the question must surely have been in many minds: "why are we here yet again?"

The case of 42-year-old Elisabeth F, incarcerated for 24 years, her youth and sanity stolen in the process, and systematically abused by her father. She bore his seven children, one of whom died after just three days, in her windowless prison.

Only because of the illness of her 18-year-old daughter, Kerstin, who grew up in the cellar with her mother and had never seen daylight, received any education or been seen by a doctor, did the case come to light at all.

"Failed by the system" does not go far enough to explain how it was at all possible. In a town of 23,000 souls in Lower Austria, did no one ever think to question the story given out by her 73-year-old father that the daughter had run away at the age of 18 and joined a sect? An Interpol search was launched for her while all the time she was languishing in the 60-square metre, 170cm-high bunker he had built beneath his house. Over the years, three children were dumped on his doorstep, he explained to social services and neighbours - children borne by his daughter that she was unable to look after. The authorities gave the father and his wife the right to foster them. The irony is that those three were very probably the lucky ones - they got to "escape" - to go to school, to grow up with other children. Whether they were abused by their father/grandfather is not yet known. They apparently knew nothing of their three siblings living in a hellhole beneath them.

It beggars belief to think that if Kerstin had not fallen ill, to be taken to hospital by her father just over a week ago, that the woman and her children might never have been released from their nightmare.

Hospital staff say police acted on an "ominous tip-off" from a resident of the town, presumably someone who might have been hiding information for years, afraid to come forward.

The parallels with the case of Natascha Kampusch, kidnapped on her way to school as a 10-year-old in 1998, are unavoidable. Natascha, too, only escaped from her captor in August 2006 because she managed to give him the slip while he was washing the car.

Yet, it has since been revealed that police had concrete information - such as the address, name and car number plate of her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil - which could have led to them rescuing her within a matter of weeks after her abduction. Because of the failure to act on the information, the girl endured eight years of hell in a cell not unlike the one in which Elisabeth F was held.

These are not the only cases of children being locked up by parents or foster parents in Austria. There have been several over the past two decades. One child was kept in a coffin for years before being "discovered".

Questions are now being asked as to whether these cases are a symptom of a rich, self-satisfied society as commentators are asking across Austria's press today. A society in which people fail to question what is happening next door, as long as their own lives are happy and intact. It is also a society that, as the Guardian's former diplomatic editor Hella Pick has pointed out in her book Guilty Victim, has a very dark side. For years, it used slick marketing skills - promoting its mountains and Mozart - and the title conveniently given to it by the allies as "Hitler's first victim" to avoid confronting the central role it played in the Holocaust. One should be wary of taking this parallel too far, but this country knows and has ingested the rules of how to cover up.

As neighbours in Amstetten's Ybb street have repeatedly said since the gruesome discovery was made there on Saturday night: "We knew nothing about what was going on - they seemed like such a nice family".

A whole country should now be asking itself, what is going wrong?

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Aivo½so

Coincidence?

[Heresson]

he does look a bit. well, insane.
Anyway, it's a horrible story. How selfish, spoilt and sick can you get, not only to do it once, twice, thrice etc, but to make your abuse of others a systematic, daily routine, and make it last for such a long time, apparently without any signs of guilty conscience. It could've been worse, of course, 60sq m is not that bad, and after all he could've killed the babies, or let the 18yo girl die to avoid risk of getting caught. But it's even more incredible this way, that they lived there their entire life. I can not imagine how ****ed up their life can be because of the unability of this goat to restrain his misplaced lust.

[TCO]

I was fantasizing about this...

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Heresson
he does look a bit. well, insane.
Anyway, it's a horrible story. How selfish, spoilt and sick can you get, not only to do it once, twice, thrice etc, but to make your abuse of others a systematic, daily routine, and make it last for such a long time, apparently without any signs of guilty conscience. It could've been worse, of course, 60sq m is not that bad, and after all he could've killed the babies, or let the 18yo girl die to avoid risk of getting caught. But it's even more incredible this way, that they lived there their entire life. I can not imagine how ****ed up their life can be because of the unability of this goat to restrain his misplaced lust.

They're now investigating if the suspect is also guilty of a murder over 20 years ago of a girl that looks similar to his daughter. He had a store across the street of the girl back then. Seems they're on the right track...

[Krill]

What, so he intended to put a girl other than his daughter in the cellar, and when he couldn;t he just went "**** it, I'll use her instead?"

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Krill
What, so he intended to put a girl other than his daughter in the cellar, and when he couldn;t he just went "**** it, I'll use her instead?"

No, my guess is that his pedophile/incestuous fixation on his daughter made him want that "similar" girl, too. IIRC, the murder was after he first abused his daughter. He had no intention to lock his daughter up in the first place, this happened as a less-than-ideal solution when his daughter got pregnant. All this is what I gathered from the news, so there might be some errors in my interpretation.

[Wezil]

I've read your posts Wernazuma but I have to agree with Asher's advice in the thread title.

[Colonâ„¢]

Originally posted by Wernazuma III Concerning pedophily, incest, etc., remember that in Belgium or Portugal there were networks reaching partially deep into politics.

There were no paedophilia networks reaching anywhere into politics. There only were threats by the suspects to "reveal things" and conspiracy theories flying around, neither of which ever got substantiated.

Reacting the way we did, by holding a big-ass march, was absolutely retarded from a PR point of view (even though it was really born out of a general dissatisfaction with the state of the police agencies and justice system).

[Wernazuma III]

I was thinking more about the Casa Pia scandal in Portugal, having heard only rumors about involvement of politicans in Belgium. And I forgot to mention the Jersey scandal, just to blacken yet another European nation. Anyway, my point was that it's absolutely inane to make such cases a matter of so special attention in an effort to apprehend something "typically XYian" - as a Belgian you must know what I mean. Among primitive people, Belgium still is mainly "the pedophile country".

As a general rule, those scandals that involve whole networks, or mafia organizations where people (and esp. children) are traded and held as sex slaves - exploited by also 'respectable' members of society - are worrying me WAY more than "individual" cases of sickos. And they're much more frequent!

What makes this story so hyped is the bizarre fact that the crime lasted so especially long - this makes our imagination go to work. And that there were two similar cases in the past few years in a small space, of course. It's completely blown out of proportion.