**By Jenny Brown
For 24 years, 42-year-old Elisabeth Fritzl has been shut away in a tiny cellar with three of the seven children she had to the monster who imprisoned her — her own father.**
Elisabeth Fritzl was white-haired, starving, pale and deeply traumatised when she finally, mercifully emerged into the clear light of day.
Drugged, imprisoned and repeatedly raped by her own father — who made her pregnant seven times — she had somehow survived in a secret dungeon for 24 years, together with three of her children.
Until their rescue last week, the youngsters — a 19-year-old girl and boys aged five and 18 — had never been to school, played with friends or stepped outdoors.
Police are now investigating the 42-year-old Austrian’s chilling story of incest and depravity, which sent shockwaves around the world, and have her 73-year-old father Josef in custody.
The outwardly respectable engineer has confessed to seizing, drugging and handcuffing his daughter soon after her 19th birthday, and locking her in a cellar beneath the three-storey family home in small-town Amstetten.
Behind a hidden door, detectives discovered a complex of small, windowless rooms, less than two metres high, where Elisabeth claims she was imprisoned for almost a quarter of a century. There she gave birth to seven children fathered by Josef — who also acted as midwife at each birth — and who it’s claimed has been sexually abusing her since she was 11 years old.
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