Setting up a new baby monitor, Eduard Trdy hoped it would help keep his newborn daughter safe.
But the video monitor recorded something much worse than his bub’s cries.
After accidentally picking up the signal of an identical model in the house next door, Eduard saw the image of a naked boy chained and being beaten appear on the screen. Sickened to his stomach, he immediately called police.
He had no idea he was living next door to a cult called The Grail Movement.
In the house of horrors were sisters Klara and Katerina Maurova and Klara’s little boys, Jakub, 10, and Ondrej, eight.
After the sisters joined the cult eight months earlier, the innocent boys were brutally beaten and tortured by Klara and the other cult members.
When they weren’t kept naked in cages, the boys were subjected to whippings, burned with cigarettes and sexually abused.
Under the orders of the leader, known only as ‘The Doctor’, Jakub and Ondrej also had parts of their skin sliced off, which was eaten by cannibal cult members.
Klara had installed a monitor in a cellar so she and other members could watch the abuse on her sons from the kitchen.
When interviewed by officers, Jakub and Ondrej revealed the depraved extent of abuse they suffered at the hands of the person they loved the most. ‘My mother tied me up a lot,’ Ondrej said.
In 2008, a court heard how relatives partially skinned Ondrej and even forced him to eat his own raw flesh.
The sisters refused to say why they tortured the boys.
‘The aim was to make the boys blindly serve their religious goals,’ state prosecutor Zuzanna Zamoravcova said.
Sentencing the women, Judge Pavel Goth said, ‘Ondrej and Jakub were repeatedly psychologically and physically tyrannised and held in locked rooms.’
Klara was sentenced to nine years in prison and was released in 2013, while Katerina got 10 years.
Jakub and Ondrej were placed in the care of family members.
Read more in this week’s issue of that’s life!, on sale now.
Gripping podcast How I Survived this week features Louisa Hope, who was used a human shield by a terrorist in the Sydney Siege, and lived to tell the tale. Subscribe via iTunes: https://apple.co/2LkCKg0 or Omny: https://bit.ly/2MRTAQp
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