VIENNA — A woman who went missing in 1984 was found by police over the weekend and told investigators she had been held by her father in a cellar, where she was repeatedly raped and gave birth to at least six children, police said Sunday.
Authorities said the father may have told others that his daughter had joined a cult and disappeared.
Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, told reporters that the father, identified as Josef F., had been taken into custody. Police said Josef and his wife had been raising three of their daughter’s children. The other three grew up in the cellar. The wife, Rosemarie, allegedly knew nothing of her daughter’s captivity and believed that the grandchildren had been abandoned on her doorstep by her wayward daughter.
“We are being confronted with an unfathomable crime,” Interior Minister Guenther Platter said.
The case unfolded after a gravely ill young woman was taken around April 19 to a hospital in the town of Amstetten. When police appealed for the mother of Kerstin, 19, to come forward, the woman authorities identified as Elisabeth F. was released by her father.
She told authorities that on Aug. 28, 1984, her father had sedated her, handcuffed her and locked her in a room in the cellar of the family’s apartment building.
Polzer told reporters Josef F. had given police a code to unlock a hidden door, revealing the area where Elisabeth and the children had been held.
It had “several” rooms, an uneven floor and a “very narrow” hallway, Polzer said, adding that the door was “very small” and that one had to bend one’s neck to get through.
The area also contained sanitary facilities and “small hot plates” for cooking, Polzer said.
Elisabeth said her father had been sexually abusing her since she was 11. According to the police statement, Elisabeth said she and her children got food and clothing only from her father.
Police said Elisabeth appeared “greatly disturbed” during questioning and agreed to talk only after authorities assured her she would no longer have to have contact with her father and that her children would be cared for.
