After three months of suffering and abuse, a 27-year-old woman in the Czech Republic managed to escape her confinement at around 3 a.m. on February 16, according to to local newspaper Mlada fronta Dnes (translated as Young Front Today).
The victim woke up neighbors at a nearby residence, who described her appearance when they opened their door to her. She had allegedly been held captive since November.
“She had no hair and a thick chain with a huge lock around her neck. She was just skin and bones,” the neighbor told the newspaper, per Google translate. The victim was described as looking like she was “from a concentration camp” to one neighbor, who spoke with Dnes.
According to the neighbor who spoke with Dnes, the woman said that her captor “shaved her head and rarely gave her anything to eat, just sometimes a little bread and water from a bowl, like a dog.”
The woman said the victim told her she “was tied to a heavy bed,” and that she’d “managed to pull the chain out and use it to climb out the window.”
The woman’s months of abuse happened in the village of Sirem, approximately 30 miles northwest of the nation’s capital, Prague. Her alleged abuser has only been reported as a man named Karel N., described as a 40-year-old truck driver who reportedly did not live where the victim was held in captivity, per CNN Prima News.
The neighbor and her husband helped to pry the chain from the victim’s neck, per Dnes, while contacting emergency responders.
Speaking to reporters, per the outlet, police spokesman Kamil Marek said that the suspect was arrested and charged “with the crimes of deprivation of personal liberty, rape, and extortion.”
CNN Prima News further reports that according to three independent testimonies, this escaped victim is the same woman who allegedly helped Karel N. perpetrate a similar crime in 2021.
According to CNN Prima News, this latest alleged incident was not an isolated one for Karel N., with the suspect convicted of holding and abusing a prior woman in 2021, after luring her to his home with the promise he could help her get a job.
“I knew the defendant through my aunt, whom he was dating,” the 22-year-old victim said in court at the time, per the news outlet. “He approached me saying I could work as a hostess. I was unemployed, I was looking forward to having [a job]. We agreed that he would pick me up at home and that I would go to his place to take some photos and sign a contract.”
Instead, when she arrived, the suspect allegedly put a dog’s head mask on the woman, hung her with chains on all fours, and gave her electric shocks, with the outlet reporting that his latest alleged victim was the accomplice that helped commit this previous crime.
Hana Bachova, president of the Louny District Court where this previous crime allegedly occurred, told CNN Prima News the original victim was “held in a torturous manner, one could even say tortured in various ways, and her human dignity was humiliated. There was also a certain form of sexual intercourse.”
That previous victim managed to escape after one day, but Karel N. was sentenced to three years for rape and deprivation of liberty, per the news outlet. He was released in 2022 following an appeal.
According to CNN Prima News, Karel N. swore he would never do anything like that again at his appeal, with the judge presiding over his case determining that the three-year sentence was disproportionately harsh and converting his sentence to probation.
“The defendant is a person of complete integrity. At the same time, it is necessary to point out his well-organized personal, family and financial circumstances, where he has been properly employed for a long time, and it is therefore clear that on his part, the matter currently under consideration was clearly an excess of an otherwise proper way of life,” read the July 18, 2022 judgment, per translation.
After this latest alleged crime, Karel N. is being held without bail, for fear he is a flight risk and that he might influence other possible witnesses — or even “repeat his criminal activity” — per Katerina Dousova, deputy of the Regional State Prosecutor’s Office.
He faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted.
