Fritzl II.

The Incest Monster of Amstetten created a culture of fear in the household, according to his sister-in-law.

His tyrannical attitude made people wary of challenging anything, and certainly wife Rosemarie would have been intimidated by him.

Besides intimidation, what other things did the Incest Monster do to con people he was a pillar of the community?

The years in the dungeon – so easily summarised in a paragraph, so dreadful endured in dank reality – went on in their seasonless way. In 1999, Kerstin was 10; three years later she was a teenager with a new baby brother, and the following year Stefan reached 13. Did he, one wonders, even know how old he was? For this was a life measured not by days and nights, routines and holidays, but only by the rotting of another tooth, the greying of their mother. Upstairs, time was measured. In 2006, Amstetten honoured the Fritzls for reaching their golden wedding. Such a good family man, Josef.

But his secret family was beginning to hang heavy on Josef Fritzl. Around Christmas 2007, he got his daughter to write another letter. It seems that Fritzl, bored by the daily chores – the shopping, the rubbish burning – and no longer beguiled by a daughter who now resembled a woman of his wife's age, was preparing the endgame. At some point, he would stage-manage the release of Elisabeth from the cult that had held her this past quarter of a century, and she would return to the house that she had, in reality, never left.

This is a well-written piece.