Mr. X, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has been dubbed ‘Britain’s Fritzl’, in reference to Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter and raped her, resulting in the birth of eight children.
"He called himself the ‘Gaffer’: he liked to think of himself as a hard man," said Nicholas Campbell QC, quoting the defendant’s son for the prosecution.
"The whole family was frightened of him. When they heard his car pulling up outside the house they ran to their bedrooms and hid silently. He had a one second temper - he was a Jekyll and Hyde character," continued his son’s evidence.
The man began abusing the girls when they were as young as eight years old and started raping them before they were teenagers. Their first pregnancies occurred when they were aged 13 and 14.
At several points in their statements both daughters quote their father as saying the abuse would "never end" whenever they asked him to stop or threatened to leave.
Despite genetic abnormalities resulting in miscarriages, abortions and the birth of unhealthy children, Mr. X insisted that his daughters not take the contraceptive pill because he wanted more children with them.
He even offered his eldest daughter £500 to have another child with him. She refused the money.
"I didn’t want to, I didn’t want any more kids. My dad was getting nasty, he was hitting me. I didn’t want any more babies suffering in that way," she said when asked why she had more children with him.
To evade social services, the police and suspicious neighbours, the family regularly moved between South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Frequently they lived in small, isolated rural villages.
When the children were at primary school they did receive a visit from social services, but no action was taken and the social worker who carried out the visit does not remember it.
Broken bones, bruising and burns were passed off as accidents and the children were kept from school if they were too visibly bruised.
The chance of multiple babies, with the types of abnormalities found in the girls’ children, being born to non-related parents was one in 100, said expert witness Dr. Alexander Henderson.
When the parents of a child are father and daughter the chances of these abnormalities is one in two.
The majority of the children conceived had some form of abnormality picked up in pre-natal screening, yet the daughters continued to tell doctors that their dad was not the father, despite the mounting evidence.
The girls’ father convinced them that if they told the police or social services the truth they would lose their children. After one particularly harsh beating the girls rang Childline and asked whether they would keep their children if they reported their father.
The Childline worker was unable to say that they would, which only helped to reinforce their father’s threats.
Mr. X’s wife and son both fled the family within months of each other when the girls were in their early teens. The daughters believe that their mother knew of the abuse but was too frightened to do anything.
The case has been subject to extraordinary reporting restrictions, with news sources banned from reporting the identity or ages of the victims and their children.
The nature of any of the children’s health issues is also to be kept secret along with numerous other details.
The victims’ solicitors have already reported the Daily Mail, News of the World and Sky News to the Attorney General for attempting to contact the victims.
Mr. X pleaded guilty to 25 counts of rape and four counts of assault; he was given 25 life sentences, with a minimum tariff of 19 and a half years imprisonment.
Alex Orton
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