Thursday, May 1, 2008

Something rotten in Austria

For almost a quarter of century, as life unfolded in the quiet Lower Austrian town of Amstetten, Elisabeth Fritzl was enduring an unimaginable ordeal behind the plain gray walls of a nondescript house there.

Her 73-year-old father, Josef, today confessed that he held his now 42-year-old daughter captive for 24 years in a concealed, windowless basement hideout, where he repeatedly had sexual intercourse with her and where she gave birth to seven of his children. The shocking case has reminded many Austrians of the fate of Natascha Kampusch, who was kidnapped at the age of 10 and kept in a narrow basement for eight years until she managed to flee in August 2006. But the senior investigator in Amstetten, Franz Polzer, said that the cruel deliberateness of Josef Fritzl's deed outstripped the Kampusch case "by far." Though cases of such longstanding hidden crimes have cropped up elsewhere in recent years, the revelation of two in less than two years has set about a round of public soul-searching in Austria.

That's some top-notch parenting there. Given this man has a penchant for locking up and raping his children for decades, I'd say it's time to stop him from breeding. In fact, I'd be first in line for the hacksaw castration.

1 comment:

Gormanite said...

haha, you're waiting in a line