As more details come to light about the Fritzl case, one of the weirdest and saddest stories I’ve ever read, it has reinforced the idea that nothing good comes from being blindly obedient. If you don’t question authority bad people get away with things. I’ve learned it in my own personal life, having been involved with a psychotic man who put up a good front but was so unhinged beneath the surface no one dared disrupt his state of mind for fear of a tantrum at best. Herr Fritzl, however, is a different animal altogether. He truly doesn’t deserve to live. I wish someone would lock him in a dark room for the remainder of his days.

What continues to trouble me is how no one questioned his weird behavior. No one dug deeper when he said his daughter ran away to join a cult. What cult? Where was it? Why not inform the police so they could go look for her? None of the siblings nor the mother nor the teachers at the school seemed to care about Elisabeth’s whereabouts. If one person in the long chain had perhaps they could have spared this poor woman’s wasted life at the hands of a living demon. Neighbors who heard childlike noises in the cellar, a wife whose husband had rape convictions on his record and was a known sex addict yet he never had sex with her, preferring instead to have it with his own daughter — children mysteriously showing up the doorstep, all of whom probably looked a little too much alike…question authority, even if it means risking everything to do so. And while you’re at it, trust only a very few. In some cases, you can’t even trust your own husband, as this case, and many others like it, illustrates.