
“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 have confirmed. Police spokesman Franz Polzer [said] 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 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?”