First Natascha, now three sisters

After his divorce in 1998, a judge in the northern Austrian city of Linz found it more and more difficult to keep in touch with his three daughters, aged six, ten, and 13, who were living with his ex-wife. Soon it became impossible.

Every time he showed up in front of their home in a fancy suburb, his ex-wife would come up with new excuses as to why he couldn't see them. They were sick, she said, or staying with their grandmother.

But what was really happening to them was beyond their father's worst fears. After the divorce, the unstable woman completely disintegrated. She petitioned to have her three daughters taken out of school and to teach them at home (the request was approved, perhaps thanks to her legal education).

She then locked them up in the house, removed the light bulbs and drew all the curtains. The household fell apart. Mice began appearing, and the girls almost suffocated in the filth. They gave the mice nicknames and began speaking in their own secret language.

This went on for seven years. The frantic father tried all legal means to gain access to his daughters, without success. Neighbours complained about a dog barking all night and about the increasingly desolate condition of the house. Some were alarmed because they never saw the girls anymore. Their appeals to the police went unheard. Only when a neighbour threatened to sue a government official did the authorities intervene in October 2005.

The story was kept under wraps for more than a year; it broke on Saturday, when a horrified public learned the details from an article in the mass-circulation daily Oesterreich ahead of the woman's trial.

The media reaction has not yet approached the frenzy following the dramatic escape of 18-year-old Natascha Kampusch, who had been held captive for eight years, but there is a palpable sense of deja vu as Austrians wonder what else might lurk beneath the surface of their placid country.

The mother has been in custody ever since her daughters were found and will soon stand trial for abusing and inflicting serious bodily harm on the girls. The oldest daughter was severely malnourished when she was found. All three girls are in need of constant psychological support.

The case suggests that the line between mental illness and evil may be thinner than we'd like to believe. It also explodes any comfortable myth that child abuse is a product of desolate housing projects: Austria is a prosperous and conservative country where serious crime is rare.

But the main lesson of the Linz case is that living in a paternalistic state does not absolve individuals from taking decisions on their own. Without the neighbours, state complacency might have kept these girls in their living grave for many more years. ·