‘Nobody knew what was happening’

WHEN he looks across the road from his shop to the house which has brought notoriety to a small town in Austria, Guenter Haller feels a chill.

“This is the friendliest town I’ve ever lived in. It is a complete shock to know that such a man lived across the road and did those horrible things to his daughter,” the 42-year-old glazing salesman from Amstetten said yesterday. “How the other tenants did not see anything escapes me.”

Beneath the drab grey housing block Haller looks out on, is the cellar where a 73-year-old imprisoned his daughter for 24 years, along with some of the six children he fathered.