A 73-YEAR-OLD woman is being investigated for “kidnapping and maltreating a family member” after allegedly keeping her mentally disturbed daughter locked in a darkened bathroom for 30 years.
Police said that Annina Gentilezza had kept her daughter, Giuseppina, now 52, a prisoner in the top-floor council flat at Pescara, on the Adriatic coast. They raided the flat after being tipped off by Signora Gentilezza’s daughter-in-law.
They found Giuseppina curled in a ball in a tiled room measuring 7ft x 9ft containing a lavatory, bidet, sink and washing machine. Wires hung from the ceiling where the light had been disconnected. The room contained a camp bed and plastic dog bowls in which Giuseppina was allegedly fed leftovers.
Police said that instead of being washed Giuseppina was “hosed down” on the balcony. Nicola Zupo, the officer who led the raid, said that Giuseppina was sometimes left out on the balcony as a punishment, especially in the winter, and beaten. She was allowed out once a month with her mother and stepfather, but only to collect her invalidity pension.
Psychiatrists at a local hospital where Giuseppina has been taken said that she was beginning to talk. “She doesn’t want to go back home,” a hospital spokesman said.
Giuseppe De Felice, Signora Gentilezza’s second husband and the father of her two sons, who is also under investigation, denied the allegations: “Those bowls really are for the dog. We never hurt her, she sleeps in her own room, she eats with us and watches television with her mother in the evening.”
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