TWO twisted parents who locked up their three bow-legged children aged 8 to 10 and forced them to wear nappies have been freed.
Christian Steffen, 54, and Melissa, 49, were banned from seeing their kids after trapping them in a so-called “House of Horrors” for four years – but are now seeking to regain custody of the infants.
The children were discovered imprisoned in a villa in Oviedo, Spain after neighbours raised the alarm of suspicious activity around the home.
Cops raided the property and discovered three children hunched over, barely able to walk up stairs, suffering from bladder problems and constipation from wearing nappies for too long.
The twins, then aged 8, were sleeping in cots with the bars broken so they could climb in, said court docs.
The house was filthy with mounds of trash in the corners.
Chilling photos showed scratchy kid’s drawings scribbled onto the cots – including a screaming toothed monster and a skull and cross bone.
All three of the youngsters had been locked inside the home from 2021 to 2025 and banned from seeing family, friends or even entering the garden.
Their parents had moved from Germany to Spain to avoid having to send their kids to school amid “insurmountable fears” of catching COVID, according to their lawyers.
Police said that when they were freed, one of the children knelt on the grass and “touched it with amazement.”
German tech recruiter Steffen and his American wife were arrested in April last year on suspicion of child cruelty and abuse.
They were each convicted of “habitual psychological violence” within the family and sentenced to two years and four months in prison each.
They also received an extra six months in prison each for abandonment of family – and faced a potential 25 years each for psychological violence and illegal detention.
But the Steffens won their appeal against the most serious charge of psychological violence on Monday – and today sources close to the case revealed the pair had already been freed from prison and would now be focusing on trying to regain custody of their kids.
The parents’ defence lawyer said: “They are happy, but they have received a lot of criticism.
“The first feeling was relief, but the next was great concern about how they are going to regain contact with and custody of their children.”
Appeal judges ruled that Steffen and his wife did not intend to degrade or humiliate their children, adding that the extreme isolation stemmed from “misguided overprotection” sparked by fears of COVID infections.
The couple’s defence lawyer had previously argued that the parents had taken a series of “probably wrong but not criminal decisions”.
The judge was also swayed by the fact that the parents inflicted the same horror conditions upon themselves and insisted they had always acted in the interest of their children.
But regional Social Rights and Welfare Minister Marta del Arco said that the “trauma” the children experienced was “bound to surface later on”.
He added that: “Both educators and psychologists are working very intensively with them because they really need it.”
