Elba Reinshocker embraces her mother, Hilde, after being discovered in a basement where she was chained up for 22 years as a sex slave. Hilde said she “could not comprehend how happy she was” to learn that this was her daughter’s fate.
DATELINE–St. Louis:
“You know, there really can be miracles,” Hilde Reinshocker told a press conference, failing to contain her tears of joy. “I’m just so grateful Hilde has been enduring an unimaginable hell all this time.”
Elba Reinshocker, then 7, was abducted from a supermarket aisle in 1987. Previously presumed to have been raped once or twice and killed, it has recently come to light that Reinshocker was raped in excess of 5,000 times while living in the basement of her captor.
“You have no idea what a relief this is to our family,” noted Bill Harken, the guy that Hilde is dating. “When I first met Hilde, all she could talk about was how much she hoped Elba was in some basement somewhere in America, living what most people consider to be their worst nightmare. She never gave up hope that she had spent the last 22 years in misery and now our prayers have been answered.”
Elba fathered nine of her captor’s children since the Berlin Wall came down, enduring all pregnancies without anesthetics and with the bare minimum of nourishment. Most babies failed to come to term, but those that did were promptly snuffed out with a shovel.
“My only wish,” sighed Hilde toward the end of the press conference, “is that some of those children could have joined Elba in her nightmare. Maybe one of them could have grown up to catch the eye of her captor and they could have shared that experience together.”
Elba herself was mum on the issue of what a relief the last 22 years had been, though she did express happiness that she had not been raped that day. She noted that she was looking forward to a life of unimaginable paranoia and trauma as she dealt with her ordeal.
“I’m hoping to find new ways of feeling awful as I reconcile the pain of my struggle, the guilt at surviving, and the unspeakable horror of wondering if this could happen to me again.”
Hilde concluded with words of hope and encouragement for her fellow mothers who had presumed their children had been put out of a very brief misery after their abduction. “Don’t let anyone tell you they’re gone,” she said. “Keep fighting, keep praying, keep hoping, keep loving. Your child might just be chained up in the only place on Earth worse that Guantanamo Bay. And that thought should fill you with hope.”
