News

We use the radio for our alarm. We woke to the news. I was half asleep the first time the news cast talked about the man in Austria that had kept his daughter captive for twenty-four years, and fathered seven children by her. I thought I’d dreamed it. It couldn’t be real, right?
I was getting dressed when the news repeated, and Mother of God, it was real. This is one of those real life events that make me realize that nothing I write will ever be as awful as what real people are doing to each other. Researching real crime has made me know things I didn’t want to know, but this case is too bizarre to be real. You couldn’t have used this plot in a book or movie as fiction because it would have been too unbelievable. Surely, no one could keep their daughter captive in a basement for that long, fathering children by her, and no one notice.
The neighbors are asking themselves that in interviews. Three of the children, two of them nineteen and eighteen had never seen the light of day. The oldest girl fell gravely ill, and the man took her to the hospital, where they appealed for the mother to come forward and give them more medical information. It was supposed to be a case of a bad mother having abandoned a sick child with their long suffering grandparents. Then the man (I won’t call him father or grandfather, he’s just the man) brought the mother and all the other children up, and out. Then the truth came out.
Several people have asked, why he brought the girl to medical attention? Why didn’t he let her die? I think I can answer that. If you listen to most molesters they don’t think of themselves as bad people. They aren’t evil in their own minds. If he had let the girl die, then he would have been evil even to himself. He could not bear that. So, he tried to save her. Why did he finally bring the others up? Maybe, at 73, he wondered what would happen if he died, and they were trapped down there. He didn’t save them for them, never mistake that, he brought them out into the light because if he had died knowing that they would slowly starve to death, he wouldn’t have been able to see himself as anything but evil. No one, even monsters, want to believe they are wrong.
This story is so overwhelming, that I had trouble settling down to work. I spoke with a couple of friends, and they, too, were having trouble not dwelling on it. It was simply too inconceivable to be real, but it was real.
But bear in mind that today the three children that have never seen sunlight, are seeing it. The woman who has been enslaved for over two decades is free today. As terrible as it all is, today is a better day. Today, there are people who truly care about all of them, taking care of them. Today there is hope. And there are moments when hope is all there is, to act as our shield against the unfathomable evil of our fellow human beings.
Don’t try and understand what has happened, because most of us cannot understand it. It is so awful, so unthinkable, that our minds just can’t wrap themselves around it. People are going to be trying to make sense of this for years, but I tell you now, there is no sense to be made. We are sane, and we are not evil, so we will not understand this person, or what he did. There is no set of circumstances where this sounds like a good idea to us. It is so far beyond the pale, that there is no conceiving of it. For the few people that heard about this, and thought, even for a moment, that it sounded like a good idea, don’t get cute. Keep it in the realm of fantasy, and know that there are some of us who understand that, some of you, didn’t react with horror. Some of you, thought, wow, I wonder. The answer is, no. You can’t get away with it, because this person getting caught makes the rest of us realize that this is possible. Him getting caught makes it harder for the rest of you. Though, most of you, will be comforting yourself with the thought that you would never do it to your own daughter. Only strangers. I suppose that is some comfort, some line to draw. I suppose in the end, for the people who didn’t react with outrage, that any line you can draw is safer for the rest of us.
Some of you think that last paragraph was too dark, too creepy? You don’t know what’s out there, and you don’t want to know. Worse, you don’t know what’s inside the mind of the person next to you, and you don’t want to know that either.
I spent the day writing about the morgue, and my own created serial killer, Olaf. This was one of the days when what I was writing, paled beside what was happening in the real world.