Sickest Of The Sick
A disgusting story unfolding in Austria, of a “man of stature” who led a horrific double life, leaves me in disbelief. It’s not that I don’t believe the man kept his daughter in a dungeon and used her as a sex slave, fathering 7 children with her. It’s not even that I don’t believe he convinced the rest of his family that she ran away as a teen and that he built a basement lair for her and some of her children to live in. What I don’t believe is that his wife, her Mother, didn’t know a thing.
The older couple raised three of the babies born of this incestuous relationship. Where did the husband tell his wife the children came from? How clueless was she to accept infant after infant, brought home by her husband, in order to raise, without asking a million questions? Men simply don’t come home one day and present a baby to their unquestioning wives. It’s not the same as a bouquet of flowers or a tennis bracelet. And they don’t do it three times over the years. But he did.
I maintain that the wife, the mother of the now 42 year old woman who has been rescued and is under psychiatric care, knew at least part of what was going on and turned a blind eye to it, perhaps for her own safety. But she knew.
I believe this partly because I know of a situation that’s too much like this story. My ex-sister-in-law attended college with a young woman who was “kept” in an apartment by both of her parents, to be a sex thingy for her own father. She had four children by him and she was raising them with the help of her parents. It was this family’s dynamic. Mom and Dad paid for her apartment and whatever the children needed. Mom was IN on it. And the kicker is, the young woman was taking psychology and sociology courses at college.
If someone was building an apartment in the basement of the home I shared with a mate, I would know about it. If there were children in the basement, I would hear them. If my husband was gone downstairs for long periods of time, I would wonder what he was up to if he never built or fixed or noodled away at anything in particular. Women have intuition. Gut feelings tell you something’s not right. I believe it because I know it. There is absolutely no way the Mother didn’t know something wrong was going on, even if she didn’t exactly know what it was. She lived in a third floor apartment in the rambling house but…still. I don’t for a minute believe she she was completely unaware, and therefore, partly culpable.
