Parents who kept kids inside for years due to Covid given jail terms

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.

German freelance tech recruiter Christian Steffen, 53, and his American-born wife Melissa Ann Steffen, 48, were today handed their sentences following a behind-closed-doors trial in the northern Spanish city of Oviedo, where they lived.

There, the couple kept their three young children – a then-ten-year-old and twins aged eight at the time – inside a squalid home for nearly four years between December 2021 when they arrived in Spain and April 28, 2025, claiming the kids needed to be protected from the Covid-19 pandemic.

But the couple’s children were left with severe mental and physical health problems after being kept from society for years on end, prosecutors said. 

Police found soiled nappies and used sanitary towels and tampons dumped around the house, and worktops covered in animal excrement. 

Officials said the children faced problems with bladder and bowel control, as well as bowed legs caused by years of being kept in tiny beds too small for their growing bodies. 

Investigators found disturbing scrawls created by the children on the inside of their cots, showing monsters with jagged teeth in red ink. 

Police said following the children’s release from their years-long hell that one child knelt on the grass outside the home and, overcome with emotion, ‘touched it with amazement’.

Ahead of the couple’s trial, prosecutors revealed how awful the children’s living situation was: ‘[The Steffens] locked the minors up inside their home and isolated them completely from the rest of the world, denying them contact with other people both physically and through other forms of communication.

Christian Steffen and his American-born wife Melissa Ann Steffen kept their three children locked inside their Spanish home for nearly four years. (Pictured: Two of the children being freed in April 2025)

Deeply unsettling pictures showed the children’s illustration of monsters with jagged teeth on their cots

Police found soiled nappies and used sanitary towels and tampons dumped around the house, and worktops covered in animal excrement

‘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.

German tech recruiter Christian Steffen (pictured) was, alongside his wife, sentenced to nearly three years in prison 

The house where the children were held captive for more than three years in Oviedo, Spain

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.’ 

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 Christian and his wife 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.

Christian Steffen, 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. 

But the children’s existence was noted by a local university professor called Silvia, who grew suspicious of how they were being treated. 

She took extensive records of what she saw from her windows, which 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.

She handed a ‘forensic detective’s’ diary filled with evidence to police, who began their own investigation into the matter. 

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 children were kept inside the home, unable to even go into the garden (pictured) 

A city hall source told respected Spanish daily El Mundo at the time: ‘The neighbour had collected evidence that during school hours no one left the house and expressed with certainty there had to be children living there, and even claimed to have seen them.

‘She went to Oviedo City Council’s Childhood and Family Service on April 14 with what was practically a handmade police report.

‘The shopping list was the clue that set it all off.

‘It was the list of a family, not a single person, and there was something that didn’t fit at all which was the striking amount of nappies.’

The source added: ‘Without that neighbour, the children would almost certainly have gone undetected in that house for many more years. Some close neighbours didn’t even know the house was being lived in.’

The Steffens were found guilty 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 (984ft) of their kids as well as being ordered to pay each of the three youngsters €30,000 (£26,000) in compensation.

Christian and his wife went on trial on March 10 at the Audiencia Provincial Court of Oviedo.

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.

Police in the northern city of Oviedo found the three young boys – twins aged eight at the time and their then-ten-year-old brother – in April 2025

Local woman Silvia (pictured) kept meticulous records of what she saw of the Steffens’ home and handing the dossier of information to the police

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.’