Parents of three children rescued from four-year 'lockdown' in Spanish villa jailed

THE parents of three children rescued from a four-year Covid ‘lockdown’ in a so-called Spanish “House of Horrors” have been jailed for nearly three years.

A German freelance tech recruiter, 53, and his American-born wife, 48, were warned they could face prison sentences of more than 25 years each if convicted as charged when they went on trial in March.

But today they learnt they had been acquitted of the most serious charges of unlawful detention they were facing following their behind-closed-doors trial in the northern Spanish city of Oviedo.

They were found guilty of a crime of “habitual psychological violence within the family environment” and handed a two-year four-month prison sentence each.

The pair were also convicted of a crime of family abandonment and given a separate six-month prison sentence.

Prosecution sources said today they had also been disqualified from exercising parental authority for three years and four months and banned from going within 300 metres of their children as well as being ordered to pay each of the three youngsters 30,000 euros in compensation.

The duo went on trial on March 10 at the Audiencia Provincial Court of Oviedo. The trial finished on March 20 pending sentence.

Judges made the rare decision to keep out the press and public because of the seriousness of the allegations being prosecuted and the “unfavourable consequences” it could have for the couple’s three children.

The plight of the youngsters, two twins aged eight when they were discovered and their 10-year-old brother, who are now all a year older, came to light following their parents’ arrests in April 2025 at the rented family villa in an affluent neighbourhood of Oviedo at the foot of Mount Naranco.

The father, a Hamburg University philosophy graduate, was the only registered occupant of the property he and his naturalised German wife had started renting at the end of 2021 after leaving Germany amid reports they emigrated when they were refused permission to school the kids at home following the Covid crisis.

The pair have been held in Asturias Prison since their remand in custody shortly after their arrests and the kids remain in local authority care.

Public prosecutors announced they were seeking prison sentences totalling 25 years and four months for the couple in pre-trial indictments.

They were also charged with three separate counts of unlawful detention in conjunction with a crime of family abandonment - one to cover each of their children - and told prosecutors wanted them jailed for seven years and eight months for each of the crimes if convicted.

Prosecutors said ahead of the trial in their indictment, outlining how the kids lived between December 2021 when they arrived in Spain and April 28 2025 when their nightmare ended: “The accused, by mutual agreement, failed to fulfil their duty of care they had towards their children and deprived them of their educational, health, emotional and social needs.

“They locked the minors up inside their home and isolated them completely from the rest of the world, denying them contact with other people both psychically and through other forms of communication.

“The children didn’t even know their relatives or any other people that weren’t their parents.

“They never went outside, not even to the garden of their home, for almost four years because of the unfounded fear the accused had, and they had instilled in their children, that they might be infected with something.

“The accused never enrolled their children in school in Spain and learned by themselves or with the help of their parents, with the result that the younger children, aged eight when they were found, didn’t know how to read or write.

“Furthermore, the children did not receive any health monitoring: the last time they saw a doctor was in 2019, and it was the defendants who were responsible for diagnosing and treating their problems when they arose.

“They had a large supply of medicines at home, purchased without the required medical prescription. Furthermore, the children also had problems with bladder and bowel control, caused by the prolonged and improper use of nappies.

“The home was in poor condition, with a significant lack of cleanliness and large amounts of rubbish and dirt accumulated in various rooms.

“In addition, the furniture was inadequate to meet the children's needs: the twins slept in cots, the bars of which they had broken so they could get in and out freely.

“Their brother slept in a bed that was too small for his age. The children walked hunched over, with bowed legs, had difficulty going up and down stairs, and had irritated skin and onychomycosis.

“One of them had a slight stoop. When they went outside, once their situation had been discovered, the children were surprised by their surroundings.

“As a result of these events, the children suffer from social dystocia, which will delay their incorporation into social relationships appropriate for their age.”

As well as long prison sentences on conviction, prosecutors had said they wanted judges to put a restraining order on the couple preventing them for going near their children or communicating with them and make them pay four figures in compensation to each of their kids.

After the arrests, the the youngsters’ saviour was identified as a university professor called Silvia who handed in a ‘forensic detective’s’ diary with evidence minors were inside the large villa.

Silvia reportedly started chronicling the evidence that sparked a police watch on the property the same day she handed in her dossier after observing what she initially mistook for a little girl playing in the garden around 65 feet from one of her windows.

They included details of the days and times curtains on the second floor moved or blinds were opened or lowered as the bespectacled man she only ever saw leaving the house with a face mask on briefly went to the front gate to meet delivery drivers bringing supermarket purchases or takeaway food.

Her suspicions grew when she saw the amount of supermarket deliveries he received and she began to hear what she believed to be children’s voices.

Police discovered the purchases included nappies when they started working on Silvia’s dossier, sparking a decision to enter the property and see what was going on inside.

The convictd mother reportedly told police they had left Germany after the Covid crisis when officials there warned them they would alert social services if they tried to take them out of school over their health fears.

Police have said that when they were freed, one of the children knelt on the grass and “touched it with amazement.”

The children were placed in regional social service care after their parents’ arrests.

Their maternal grandparents were tracked down to the States and ended up visiting them in the centre where they were being looked after, but have now returned to America.

Regional Social Rights and Welfare Minister Marta del Arco said recently: “These are children whose trauma from what they experienced was bound to surface later on, and both educators and psychologists are working very intensively with them because they really need it.”

The children’s parents insisted during their trial they had always acted in the interest of the youngsters.

Their defence lawyers insisted the kids had never been unlawfully detained, describing the situation they were in as a “voluntary isolation” from the world by parents who had taken a series of “probably wrong but not criminal decisions”

They also said the couple had caught Covid and had decided to self-confine and educate their children from home out of an “unsurmountable fear” of falling ill again, but rejected the ‘House of Horrors’ description of the property they lived in.