http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 989020.eceJesus, yet another one. THIS is why I believe in the death penalty.
Police arrest 'Italian Fritzl who taught son to rape'
In a case that has shocked Italy and drawn comparison with Josef Fritzl in Austria, Italian police have arrested a 64-year-old Turin man for allegedly sexually abusing his daughter over 25 years and encouraging his son to follow his example.
The 41-year-old son is also behind bars, accused of abusing not only his sister, now 34, but his own young daughters, aged 6, 8, 12 and 20.
“It seems that in this family there was a sort of droit de seigneur of the father over the daughter,” Pietro Forno, the Turin prosecutor, said. The two men deny the charges.
Italian newspapers identified the father as Michele Mongelli, and his son as Giuseppe. The 34-year-old daughter was identified with the pseudonym Laura. Police said that the 64-year-old man’s daughters and granddaughters had been kept in “conditions of slavery and mistreatment”, with Laura often locked up in the dark in her bedroom.
However Mr Forno said Laura was “strictly speaking free, though she did nothing without her father, who completely dominated her psychologically". He said Laura was the eldest of nine children, and “according to a family rule, the eldest daughter was reserved” for the father.
"The young woman is suffering from personality disorders because of the prolonged incestuous situation and mistreatment,” he said. "A psychiatric evaluation has determined that the situation was one of very serious distress." He said Laura had a “totally passive personality before her father, who made her live in a climate of threats,”.
She complained to the authorities of sexual abuse as early as 1994, when she was 19, but her complaint had been judged “unreliable” on the ground that she was “disturbed”. “It appeared to be a normal family,” Mr Forno said.
The man and his son, both street traders dealing in scrap metal who moved to Turin from Apulia in southern Italy, are accused of rape, incest and obscene acts in public because some of the alleged sexual abuse took place in a car. Reports said Laura was forced to leave school in her early teens.
“This is a terrible story of sexual violence, perversion, humiliation, abuse and tyranny in a Turin family,” reported La Repubblica. “It is a story just like that of the monster Josef Fritzl.” It said the abuse had come to light because of police telephone taps “but everyone knew about it in the family”.
The 34-year-old woman and her four nieces have all been taken into care and are being given psychiatric help, police said. “This is not an easy story to tell,” Mr Forno said. “It took us a while to find out what was really going on behind those domestic walls.”
He said that the inquiry began in October last year, when Laura went to the police to denounce not her father but her brother, telling them that he had raped her twice and forced her to stay at home for two weeks. She was accompanied to the police station by her father and mother. During the investigation it was alleged that her father had been raping Laura since she was 9, and had held her “as his slave”. She had only been allowed to go out accompanied by her parents, and although she had been withdrawn from her school, the educational authorities had failed to find out why.
Police said that telephone interceptions and bugs in the house showed that the 8-year-old girl had been told: “Get into bed, if you’re asleep you won’t feel a f***ing thing.”
Antonio Genovese, the lawyer for the father, said that he had asked for the man to be released on the grounds that he had diabetes and difficulty walking. Antonio Foti, the lawyer for the son, said that he had asked for “Laura” to be given a psychiatric examination. “I am sure of my client’s innocence,” he said.
Mr Foti said it was “possible” that both the father and the son had used “vulgar and threatening language” towards the women in the family, but “there is a very great difference between verbal and physical abuse”.
Josef Fritzl, a 73-year-old Austrian, was sentenced to life this month for locking up and raping his daughter in a cellar over 24 years, fathering seven children with her and causing the death of his own infant son.
Never make someone a priority in your life when that someone treats you like an option.