.

The Kurim Cult

 

 

 

 

Mason Ryan

 

 

 

© 2021 Mason Ryan

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contents

 

Author's Note

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

The Cast of Characters

References

 

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The list of sources used in the research of this book can be found at the conclusion of the final chapter.

INTRODUCTION

In May 2007, the baby monitor feed of a man in Kurim (a town in the Brno-Country District in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic) suddenly began to show distressing images of a naked boy who seemed to be chained up in a cupboard or cellar. There was ample evidence of injuries on the boy and it turned out he wasn't alone. His brother also appeared to be a captive. The man deduced that the images were being transmitted from a scrambled mixed up baby monitor feed in the immediate area. This meant that the awful situation was most likely taking place in the house of a neighbour.

The police were quickly on the scene but the case was strange to say the least. The apparent perpetrators of this abuse turned out to be Klara Mauerova (who was the mother of the two captive children) and her sister Katerina. Klara was university educated and had never harmed her children in any way before. She had always appeared to be a loving and normal mother to all that knew her. Katerina was also well educated and had nothing in her past to indicate she was a danger to children. Katerina had even worked in a children's home in a professional capacity.

The police and authorities were understandably perplexed and confused by the facts that now seemed to be before them. These two normal and placid looking young women appeared to have subjected Klara's children to dreadful abuse and treated them like prisoners. Yet more confusion was layered into this case when it transpired that a mysterious thirteen year-girl named Anna also lived in the house. Klara claimed that Anna was an orphan from Ukraine but the true identity of Anna would turn out to be the most confusing twist of all when it came to what became known as the Kurim Case.

This bizarre and rather grim case only started to make any modicum of sense when it transpired that the women were connected to a breakaway religious sect that was enigmatic and eccentric to say the least. An understanding of this religious cult group was the key to establishing how this strange and awful state of affairs had come to pass but the secretive and sinister nature of its members ensured such a task would never be easy. This cult sect had tentacles throughout Europe and proved to be remarkably adept at vanishing acts and obfuscation.

In the book that follows we will attempt to make some sense of the Kurim Case. We will try to understand why these women did what they did and how many cult members were involved in the awful events in Kurim. We will also try to make sense of the mysterious 'Anna' - a task that is worthy of a book in itself. This was an exceptionally complex and knotty case with a large (and occasionally confusing) gallery of alleged conspirators. We shall do our best to explain who these people all were and what role they played in this bewildering case.

The Kurim affair is a tale of abuse, manipulation, mystical delusions, brainwashing, and the belief systems and modus operandi of a cult. "Terrible things have happened," said Klara Mauerova at the trial. "I realise it and can't understand how I could have allowed it." Hopefully, by the end of this book you will have a much better understanding of what happened in Kurim and WHY these things happened in the first place.

Accounts of this particular true crime case often tend to be exaggerated and embellished (with misleadingly lurid promises of cannibalism) but even putting that to one side the actual facts of the case are shocking enough. In the book that follows we will detail exactly what happened in that little yellow cottage in Kurim and how the case unfolded after the abuse of the children came to to light. This was a mysterious case full of remarkable twists and shocking revelations. It was a classic example of how truth really can sometimes be stranger than fiction.

The purpose of this book is to make sense of the Kurim case in a way that is respectful and well researched. The reader is encouraged to obtain additional information of this case based on the published investigation results. I remind the reader again that a list of sources used for the research of this book can be found at the end of the last chapter.

CHAPTER ONE

The peaceful landscape of Moravia does not exactly conjure the language of nightmares. This historic and ancient region is one of comforting spires and restful green hills. In the 4th century Moravia was home to Germanic and Celtic tribes. By the 8th century Slavic tribes had settled and in the long years that followed Moravia expanded to include Bohemia, southern Poland, and western Hungary. Byzantine missionaries preached Christianity through Slavonic translation. Great Moravia came to an end in 906 when it was vanquished by Hungarian armies.

In 1526 Moravia, with Bohemia and Silesia, was claimed through inheritance by Ferdinand of Austria, the future Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand I, and so came under the rule of the Habsburgs. The margraviate of Moravia was merged late in the 18th century with what remained of Austrian Silesia, and, following the Revolution of 1848, the Habsburgs made Moravia a separate Austrian crown land. In 1918 that crown land became a province of the new state of Czechoslovakia. It was restored to the reconstituted state of Czechoslovakia after World War 2. In 1993, the Czech Republic became an independent nation.

Those who were born in Moravia include the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and the famous tennis player Ivan Lendl. 'Moravia is all rolling hills and pretty landscapes,' say Lonely Planet. 'The capital, Brno, has the museums, but the northern city of Olomouc has captivating architecture. The lesser-visited south is dominated by vineyards and, naturally, wine-drinking day-tipplers. This was the former stomping ground of some of the wealthiest families of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and you can still see the glint of this old money at former noble piles in Mikulov, Valtice and Lednice.' In the modern Czech Republic, Moravia is split into two administrative government units. The Moravian-Silesian Region and the South Moravian Region. Our dark and unfathomable tale will take place in the latter.

Some criminal cases are so strange and out of the ordinary they still retain their ability to baffle, anger and perplex in equal measure years after the dust has settled and the guilty parties are either languishing in prison or have served their time and been released. The jigsaw pieces of the most bewildering cases never completely fall into place or bend under the well intentioned will of logic to reveal the complete picture to us. Around the edges and beneath surface of what we regard to be normal society is a netherworld of inscrutable and impenetrable conduct.

In these abstract cases of crime there are always lingering questions which remain frustratingly unanswered and guilty participants who appeared so complex and aberrant that we can seemingly never truly understand their real motives. One such case was the Kurim affair of 2007 - a case which sent shockwaves through the Czech Republic and made headlines around the world. "It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," said Winston Churchill of Russia in 1939. This famous oft-quoted line would be perfectly applicable to the Kurim case.

The Kurim case remains one of the strangest criminal child abuse cases in recent memory. Even the six month court trial at the end of the long and highly complicated criminal investigation found itself struggling to connect all of the dots and make sense of the eclectic and - at times - rather sinister gallery of defendants who found themselves at the heart of this affair. And then there were the people that the police wanted to speak to but could never actually locate. This was a most tangled mystery and establishing the precise relationships and connections of the accused was nigh on impossible at times. There were too many shadows in the Kurim case. Shadows that then vanished into nothing when their cover was blown or simply refused to divulge anything when their day in court arrived.

The Kurim case had all the tropes and narrative twists of a horror film - only this was real life. The case featured unfathomable conduct in the heart of a perfectly ordinary leafy suburbia, dark secrets, mysterious outsiders, dysfunctional family dynamics, and then - as if all of this wasn't enough - even an elusive and strange religious cult who were alleged to have been orchestrating the whole dreadful affair from the shadows like enigmatic puppetmasters. The Kurim case was like the plot of a David Lynch film at his darkest and most experimental.

What became known as the Kurim case began in May 2007. Late spring with summer in the air. The location was Kurim - a town in the district of Brno-countryside in Moravia, Czech Republic. Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic by population and area, the largest Moravian city, and the historical capital city of the Margraviate of Moravia. Kurim is a town situated 14 kilometres north-west of Brno and about 5 kilometres from the dam Brnenská prehrada. Moravia was rich in gothic history and offered the beautiful vistas of a fairy tale. What was about to transpire in Kurim was most certainly not a fairy tale. Not even the Brothers Grimm on their darkest day could have conjured anything quite like the Kurim case.

It all began in perfectly ordinary and completely mundane fashion with a man named Mr Eduard Trdy in Kurim. Trdy had a new baby in his house and so had rigged a baby video monitor to his television in order that this precious new addition to the family could be monitored and observed at all times. Unwittingly, by pure chance, Mr Trdy was about to trigger one of the most bizarre child abuse cases anyone could remember.

It would have been impossible for Trdy to anticipate what he was about to see. It's safe to say that no one could have imagined this - let alone predicted it. It would turn out to be something he would never forget. He was about to become the first witness to an unimaginable piece of strangeness residing in his own neighbourhood. This was a beautiful region with a zoo, hotels, churches, and nice places to eat. It was a pleasant place to live or to visit. Trdy was - by complete accident - about to peel away a very dark and secret corner of his town.

When the picture from the baby monitor came through, Trdy was taken aback by the footage that appeared. He did not see the comforting sight of his own baby sleeping soundly and safe. An altogether more harrowing image filled the television screen. Trdy saw footage of a naked boy bound and tied in what appeared to be a confined space. A cellar or a cupboard. The boy, his hands tied like a prisoner, was being fed by hand as if he was a dog. The floor seemed to be concrete and looked filthy. We can only imagine the dumbfounded shock of Trdy as he tried to make sense of this awful image that has invaded his television screen like a grim found footage horror movie that has suddenly started streaming in his living room without permission.

The explanation for this nightmarish visual invasion of normality was that Trdy had received the view from another baby monitor signal altogether. The camera and monitors were manufactured by the same company and their signals had become all mixed up. Lost and scrambled in the ether. As he looked at this terrible image in astonished silence, Trdy began to experience some vague flickers of recognition. He thought that he might possibly know who the abused boy in the awful footage is. He wasn't completely 100% certain but he thought it might well be eight year-old Ondrej - one of the two sons of a 31 year-old neighbour named Klara Mauerova. It is here then - with this fluke occurrence - that the shocking and inexplicable Kurim case begins.

Trdy called the police and told them what had happened. He told them of the awful thing he had seen on the baby monitor feed and shared his hunch that the image had possibly come from the Mauerova family. This was all very puzzling to Trdy. Klara Mauerova seemed most unlikely to be the sort of person who abused her children. Klara had always seemed like a nice enough person to him. A little reserved perhaps and not someone who went out of her way to talk to the neighbours but a good mother with happy children. In this case though appearances would prove to be deceptive. Something weird had happened in the Mauerova house. Something inexplicable. Heaven knows what Trdy made of it all. Perhaps he thought the Mauerova family were all being held hostage by home invaders. The madness indicated by the video feed was beyond comprehension.

CHAPTER TWO

The police quickly arrived in the neighbourhood in large numbers. They were directed to the yellow cottage of Klara Mauerova but some other houses were searched too - lest Trdy should be mistaken. Nothing could be left to chance but time was not a luxury. They needed to find the location of the boy in that awful image as quickly as possible. The Mauerova house was a nice, charming looking sort of house. It looked like a cosy enough place to live - the sort of place a tourist might rent as a holiday cottage. * This didn't look like the sort of house where children are abused and scenes straight out of a horror film play out in a secret dungeon. Could this really be the scene of what Trdy described? It all seemed unbelievable.

Klara Mauerova answered the door and the police asked her if she had any children. She told the police she only had a daughter. The police went away, briefly, but when they checked the video footage again they detected some music in the background. This was the same music they heard in the background when they spoke to Klara Mauerova on her doorstep. Suspicions are confirmed. This is definitely the house they want. When the police knock on the door again they are eventually (and reluctantly) allowed inside by the nervous inhabitants. Klara Mauerova is not alone. Her 33-year-old sister Katerina is also living in the house.

One can only imagine the shock and fear of the sisters at the police coming back so soon. Their hearts must have been pounding. The day of reckoning had arrived - thanks only to the pure chance of a scrambled baby monitor. The police were literally the last people that the Mauerovas wanted to see on their doorstep. They must have been terrified when they saw the uniformed officers and police cars outside.

Klara Mauerova has short blonde hair and is petite and thin. She has grey-blue eyes. You could probably say that Klara, under normal circumstances, is quite pretty. She somewhat resembles the famous actress Renée Zellweger. Klara Mauerova appears nervous and frazzled though. She can barely contain her shock and distress at opening her door and finding police officers there. Her older sister Katerina has slightly longer very dark brown hair and is also very thin. If one was choosing the 'wicked' sister out of this duo then Katerina would be more out of central casting. She has a rather cold and unemotional looking pinched face that gives her a slightly unsettling aura of blankness and indifference.

There is clearly something 'off' about the two women in close proximity. Their behaviour is suspicious. One didn't need to be a body language expert to detect this. They also look as if they haven't been taking care of themselves very well. They appear tired and drawn and in need of a good meal and a hot bath. Klara's hair is scrapped back and needs washing. Her skin is pale. The women are nervous and on edge in the presence of the police. Are they hiding something? Officer Miroslav Gregor is eventually permitted to search the house by the sisters but an already tense mood becomes even more tense when he asks about a door in the house by the stairs that seems to be locked and won't open.

The sisters are clearly unhappy and anxious at the sudden attention this locked door is receiving from the police. They begin to stall for time and try (unsuccessfully) to change the subject. They simply refuse to open the door. When pressed on this by the police, the sisters say that the landlord never gave them a key for this mysterious door. This door, they claim, has always been locked. There is, they insist, nothing of consequence behind the door. The Mauerova sisters are not convincing at all to the police. They clearly have something to hide. The Mauerovas continue to protest that there is nothing behind this door but this only serves to make the police more suspicious. Why the obfuscation over a locked door?

The two women are plainly agitated and frightened by the escalating police interest in the door by the stairs. The police quickly run out of patience. They decide they must open the door and see for themselves what is on the other side. They call for firefighters to break the door down. What the police found behind this locked door when it was finally broken down was wicked beyond belief. Ondrej was confined to a cramped space suffering from dehydration. He was a prisoner in his own house with his own family the apparent jailers. His hands were bound. Excrement and vomit was visible on the floor. The smell was hideous. A bucket served as a toilet.

"Using special equipment, we forcibly entered the room under the stairs," a fireman would later say in court. "A naked boy was lying on the floor. His hands and feet were bound with transparent adhesive tape. He lay on the bare concrete floor. I cut the boy's cuffs with a knife." The fireman said that Ondrej did not scream or make any noise. He was very calm. Ondrej and his 9-year-old brother Jakub had clearly been subject to terrible abuse. Their bodies were marked with visible welts, scars, and burns. They were malnourished and deprived of light and fresh air.

In the weeks and months that followed we would learn more about the abuse the boys suffered. It was by any standards harsh and hard to believe - especially as two of the main perpetrators of this abuse seemed to be the women who were supposed to be caring for these children and the people that loved them the most. It was a case that baffled and perplexed from the moment it first came to light right through to the trial and aftermath.

Ondrej and Jakub had burn marks, scars, and sores from where cigarettes had been put out on them. They had had their heads stuck underwater in a primitive form of waterboarding. They were forced to cut themselves with knives and sharp objects. One of the children had even been ordered to pretend he was dead and had a shallow grave dug for him. Ondrej also had some skin removed from his arm. Reports often say he was forced to eat this skin himself. Others said that this was for the abusers to eat. Lurid and exaggerated tales of cannibalism would soon begin to stir in reports of this case. The boys were also whipped and forced to stand in their own urine.

The children had plastic bags tied over their heads and were scratched with forks. Ondrej had some flesh removed from his buttocks and then the wound was burned. They were put in dog cages so they could only kneel down and were forced to beat one another and recite obscene sentences. What on earth had possessed these women to facilitate such unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence against these boys? The fact that Klara Mauerova looked so normal somehow made the case all the more shocking and bizarre. She was an attractive and very slim blonde haired young woman. She didn't look like a monster. She had worked in a youth centre and studied engineering at university. There was no historical evidence she had ever abused or harmed her children before.

These two sisters didn't exactly fit the generic profile of child abusers. You wouldn't look at these two women in the street and immediately mark them down as closet sadists. Katerina had a certain aloof aura but she had worked in a children's home and seemed very intelligent. Katerina had a university degree in pedagogy (the study of how knowledge and skills are exchanged in an educational context) and, like Klara, there was nothing in her background that said she was a danger to anyone. There was nothing at all in her history which suggested Katerina was not to be trusted with children.

One interesting detail, later mentioned by the police, was that Klara told them Katerina knew nothing about the children being locked up as captives. This was plainly ridiculous. There was no way Katerina could live in that house and not notice that the children were locked up under the stairs. Of course Katerina knew what was going on. We would later learn that Katerina was no amateur when it came to locking children in small rooms and cupboards. What was interesting though was that Klara had tried (as hopeless as it might be) to shield Katerina from blame. This display of selfless solidarity would be one of the last when it came to the sisters. Once they were in custody they turned on one another in no time at all.

The case quickly attracted international headlines. The media around the world were just as fascinated by this morbid case as the press in the Czech Republic. 'In a case with echoes of the Fritzl family horror in Austria,' reported (in somewhat over the top fashion) the Daily Telegraph in London, 'Ondrej Mauerova was partially skinned in the closet in a cellar at his home in Kurim near Brno, in the Czech Republic, according to reports. The abuse was uncovered by chance last May when a neighbour's television baby monitor picked up graphic pictures of what was happening next door. Ondrej and his nine-year-old brother Jakub were locked and chained in the cellar for months by their mother Klara, 31. He was caged, beaten and gagged to stop him screaming, according to reports. Mauerova had the monitor installed so that she could watch the abuse from her kitchen ** but the images were picked up by a neighbour who used an identical system to monitor a newborn baby.'

It was here the Kurim Case started to become complicated. The two sisters were not completely alone in the house. This was not strictly a family affair. There were others with a hand in this awful case. This was where the jigsaw puzzle started to scramble its pieces. A most knotty and grim affair began to spiral. The Kurim case would soon become more complex than a simple investigation of two women who had abused the children they were supposed to protecting.

In time we would get more background information on these two (soon to be infamous) sisters. They were clearly troubled women and obviously had what one would describe as a dysfunctional relationship. It was said that they were both very religious from a young age but not in an especially healthy way. They harboured dreams of being the 'chosen' ones. Klara in particular felt she was destined to fufil some great task for God. She became lost in her delusions. Both of the sisters had suffered from mental illness in their youth but it was never sufficiently acknowledged or treated in thorough fashion. Their mother in particular would never allow them to stay in a hospital or finish a course of treatment.

Klara's marriage had collapsed because of her strange obsession with this mystical sense of destiny. Her husband simply couldn't take any more in the end and moved to Hungry. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that usually appears in late adolescence or early adulthood. Characterised by delusions, hallucinations *** and other cognitive difficulties, schizophrenia can often be a lifelong struggle. It was reported that Klara was suffering under the weight of delusions created by episodes of this condition. She had endured episodes of schizophrenia in the past.

Klara Mauerova had started to feel that the conventions of marriage and children had diverted her from the mystical path she was supposed to follow. She talked about wanting to start all over again. Her religious delusions were starting to cloud her ability to make rational decisions. This would have terrible consequences for her family and for herself. At some point - a precise and tragic moment in this event - Klara's delusions had become so powerful that they relegated her children to second place in her life and thoughts. And then everything became jumbled and confused in her mind. She become manipulable for anyone who was was willing to exploit her religious devotion. Klara Mauerova became a weak and vulnerable person who was easy to influence.

There was a time before all of this when Klara was a good mother. There are photographs of Klara with her children taken before the dark days of the Kurim case. They are all smiling. They all look happy and healthy. There are birthday cakes and beaming faces. Klara looks content and is affectionate with her children. But something went badly wrong. How could they go from that happy family to the boys being forcibly locked up and abused in a room under the stairs? What finally tilted Klara over the edge and made her embark on this bizarre path?

Something changed in Klara around 2005. The boys started to see less and less of their mother and spend more time with their grandparents. Klara was looking pale and thin and her hair appeared greasy and lank. She didn't look well at all. Klara had changed. She was preoccupied with something and being manipulated by forces close to her. Klara's sense of spiritual destiny was going to be used to trigger the awful events which so bewildered the Czech Republic. The catalyst for Klara's final 'tilt' into delusion and madness would be uncovered when the investigation gathered pace.

Klara's descent was not an overnight process. It was a form of mental illness slowly exacerbated by those who saw an opportunity to exploit a vulnerable woman for their own unfathomable ends. All the ingredients for a disaster were gradually put in place. In the end it was almost inevitable that something awful was going to happen. The voices of reason and sanity (Klara's former husband, her parents, and the third Mauerova sister Gabriela) were pushed away and kept in the dark.

This left only Katerina but Katerina was, to many retrospective eyes, the worst influence of all. This whole affair might never have been set in motion in the first place if it wasn't for Katerina. There were other people close to Klara besides her children. To say that these people were a bad influence would be something of an understatement. And it wasn't just Katerina - the 'wicked' sister who came to stay. There was also a cuckoo in the nest. That person would become the most enigmatic and mysterious player in this sad drama.

The house of Klara Mauerova did not just contain Katerina and the two children. It also contained a mysterious thirteen year-old girl named Anna (aka 'Anicka' - pronounced 'Anitchka') who had been adopted (or so it seemed) by Klara as her own daughter. "There was a little girl," said firefighter Radim Štepánek, recalling the dramatic day when they had been forced to break down the mysterious door the Mauerova sisters didn't want to open, "dressed in a red dress with yellow patterns and a cap on her head, she had round glasses, she was not talking, just rocking from side to side and making strange sounds."

Anna became hysterical when the police broke the door down. Who exactly was the mysterious Anna? This question would weave a twisting narrative in the months to come. Klara said that Anna had been abandoned after her grandmother and drug addict parents died. Anna and was an orphan and so she had adopted her to give this little girl a better life. In time we would learn though that it was Katerina who brought little 'Anna' into the orbit of Klara and the children. The kind hearted Klara had made protecting this vulnerable girl her new mission in life.

Anna was said to be suffering from a battery of serious medical conditions. This was one of the reasons why Klara had apparently taken the 'orphan' in and been so concerned with looking after her. It was all done in good faith - Klara insisted. Klara was under the impression (the first of many false impressions she was coaxed into believing it seems) that Anna was from Ukraine and would die if she was sent back there. The good Samaritan in Klara kicked in. She made it her quest to save little Anna. It was Anna that Klara had been so preoccupied with - to the point where she eventually neglected her own biological children.

For a time, Klara had lived only with Anna. The children were under the care of Katerina until that changed and they all lived together in that house in Kurim. Having two boys under the

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 31.05.2021
ISBN: 978-3-7487-8457-9

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