Austrian Man Who Kept Daughter And Their Children In Basement Threatened Victims With Gas Death

Josef Fritzl, despite having a name that calls to mind rosy-cheeked old men selling balloons and whistling jaunty little tunes, not only locked his daughter Elisabeth in a basement for twenty-four years and raped her countless times, but also threatened their children together with death by gas. So, really, he’s like a rosy-cheeked old man selling balloons and whistling jaunty little tunes only to knock you unconscious and lock you in a basement:

Fritzl, 73, told police earlier this week he had made threats to pump gas into the cellar where he hid his daughter and three of her children, a spokesman for the national criminal investigation office said.

“But we have not yet proved if this claim is correct,” Helmut Greiner of the Federal Criminal Police Office said.

You know how we almost make jokes about, like, punching a baby or stomping a kitten wearing a tiny little pair of mittens? This story is so repellant that we can’t even come up with a heinous act that would seem ludicrous in comparison.

Austrian threatened incest victims with gas death [Yahoo]