Linz sisters

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The Linz Sisters are three sisters (Viktoria, Katharina and Elisabeth) who were confined in isolation by their mother (a 53-year-old lawyer) for seven years in their home on the Pöstlingberg hill, in the northern part of Linz. They were rescued by police in 2005, but their story was not made public until 2007.

The girls’ ordeal started shortly after their parents’ divorce. Their mother appears to have suffered some sort of emotional breakdown following the end of her marriage. She won custody of the girls (then aged 7, 11 and 13) and withdrew them from school, claiming that she was going to home-school the children. Her husband (who is identified by the pseudonym “Andreas M”) is a local judge in Linz, Austria. His ex-wife did not allow him to see his daughters. When the father came to see his children, the mother would tell him that they were not home or were sick. He filed nine separate claims with the court for access, but was stonewalled by his lawyer ex-wife.

The girls were locked in a room with no running water and no natural light, which was filled with human excrement and mice urine. The girls were rescued after a concerned neighbor made repeated calls to the police. When the girls were discovered, they were severely malnourished and suffered from an extreme sensitivity to light. Due to their isolation, they do not speak normally but instead have evolved their own unique language. Experts say that the girls may never fully recover. Their therapist, Waltraud Kubelka, described their social and physical development as “catastrophic”.

The mother is currently being held in a special remand prison branch for the mentally unstable. She is due to appear in court on charges of grievous bodily harm and torture.^[1]