You've probably heard of this incredibly bizarre and sad story when it broke a couple of days ago: Josef Fritzl is an Austrian man who locked his daughter Elizabeth in a cellar beneath his house for 24 years and fathered 7 children with her.
All this time, Josef's wife (and Elizabeth's mom) lives upstairs not knowing that her daughter, whom she was told ran away to join a religious cult, was held captive.
What's even more bizarre is that three of Elizabeth (and Josef's) children were allowed to live in the house (they told the wife that Elizabeth couldn't keep the kids at the cult) and lived normal lives. Three more children (1 died shortly after birth) spent all of their lives in the cellar - and had never seen daylight before the police freed them.
Josef's crime was uncovered when one of his "dungeon" child was deathly ill and had to be taken to the hospital:
Psychiatrists believe he was obsessed with power and must have been insane to have kept them incarcerated for so long and to have managed to keep it a secret.
Elisabeth is said to be white-haired, mentally and physically frail and traumatised, while Kerstin, 19, is fighting for her life. It was Kerstin's collapse that prompted the discovery of the dungeon in the basement of Fritzl's home in Amstetten.
The teenager is in critical condition and in an artifically-induced coma after suffering from cramping fits caused by lack of oxygen. Like her mother, and her siblings, she had been forced to live in the windowless cellar for years.
Because she and two of her brothers were kept there their whole lives, they had never seen sunlight until they were released. [...]
Three other children - Lisa, 16, Monika, 14, and Alexander, 12 - were adopted and brought up by Josef and his wife Rosemarie, 78.
Leopold Etz, a regional police official, says Fritzl apparently chose which of the children would live upstairs with him and his wife according to whether they were "crybabies."