‘Sexual sadist’ and his wife lured au pairs to their home where they were subjected to months of BDSM-style torture, chained in a windowless cage for up to 15 hours a day and punished if they broke strict rules

An alleged sexual sadist and his wife lured au pairs to their home where they were subjected to months of BDSM torture, a court has heard.

The couple kept two women in a small windowless cage for up to 15 hours a day in their glamorous home in the Andelfingen region, near Zurich, Switzerland, a court has heard.

The man, 46, and his Filipina wife, 32, kept a 22-year-old women from the Philippines and another from Brazil, aged 30, as ‘house slaves’ after luring them in online by promising training and a residence permit, Swiss newspaper Blick reports.

The Swiss IT manager admitted to regularly tying up the 22-year-old with handcuffs, leg irons and a waist belt, which he would sometimes connect to each other, while she was trapped in the cage.

Judge Thomas Keller called it a ‘setting with BDSM elements’ and said that by controlling the woman, the man ‘satisfied a sadistic sexual inclination’.

During her time as a ‘house slave’ for the couple, the husband ‘tested’ the Filipina with exams in the catering trade he was ‘training’ her in. 

If she did well, she was rewarded with restaurant or zoo visits – but if she performed badly, punishments included shortening the chain connecting the handcuffs and leg irons, a longer period of confinement in the cage, wearing very tight gloves and further restrictions on the use of a phone. 

The couple kept two women in a small windowless cage for up to 15 hours a day in their glamorous home in the Andelfingen region, near Zurich, Switzerland, a court has heard (pictured: the district court in Andelfingen)

The Swiss man has confessed to first locking up the 22-year-old in the house he lived in with his Filipina wife from July 2018 to April 2019 after starting to recruit the victim online in December 2017.

She had to do housework six days a week and had to be at the couple’s beck and call around the clock, which equated to more than 45 hours of work per week, for which the woman earned just 800 francs (about £715) a month. 

On her ‘day off’, she was locked in the windowless cage of just 20 square feet, which only had a bucket as a toilet, a small bed, stuffed animals and a surveillance camera watching the woman sitting behind the metal bars.

It also featured an emergency key box, according to the accused, who told the court: ‘There was one of those little red boxes where you have to break the window.’ 

She was also tied with hand- and leg cuffs connected to a leather collar every day, unless it was a special occasion like Easter, her birthday and New Year’s Day. 

The young woman could hardly move while wearing the restraints, which the man told her were a ‘school requirement’, the court has heard. 

‘I thought that the cage and the bondage were part of the training,’ the wife told the court, adding that she did not know the culture and customs in Switzerland and just believed her husband.

She even said she helped the victims put the shackles on sometimes. 

Even when her husband wasn’t home, the 22-year-old woman was in the cage, but the wife – who also said she lets her husband tie her up in bed – claims she usually closed the cage herself and tied herself up.

‘When she was tied up, she couldn’t use the toilet,’ the wife told the court.

In the contract drafted on June 29, 2018, it says that the 22-year-old is to be locked in ‘a room’ – not a cage – without a toilet at night, but makes no mention of any additional restraints. 

Other terms include dress codes – like wearing white underwear and a maid’s costume while working in the house – as well as comprehensive camera surveillance. 

File image of agricultural fields with gravel road at village of Andelfingen, canton Zurich, on a sunny summer morning

She ended up signing the contract under pressure after being picked up by the husband in Ticino, southern Switzerland, after she had travelled to Italy.

The man also showed the Filipina fake applications to the immigration office to convince her that he had applied for her to get a residence permit.

When the 22-year-old said that she didn’t want to sleep in the cage anymore, the man threatened her with the police, telling his victim that officers would deport her from Switzerland. 

‘I had to lie in the cage as if I were dead,’ the woman told the court.  

The man claims the relationship between him and the woman was ‘not just one of coercion’, adding that he gave her holidays.  

The IT manager, who currently has a salary of 150,000 francs (£135,000) and his wife had promised the young woman an apprenticeship at the ‘International Maids School’ – which doesn’t exist – as well as a residence permit for coming to work for them Switzerland. 

The first employment contract, which the woman rejected, included caged confinement as one of the terms, which she didn’t want to accept. 

Instead, she allegedly asked him to ‘enter into a sham marriage’, the man told the court.  

When the woman finally managed to escape after ten months after she said she ‘realised that there was no school’, the couple allegedly recruited yet another ‘house slave’. 

The Brazilian woman came to Switzerland to learn German and was lured to the couple’s home by the husband, who promised her ‘German lessons at the highest level’. 

She was kept as a ‘house slave’ by the couple from June to mid-July in 2019, when she was freed by police who had received a report by the Filipina ‘at some point’ after she escaped.  

The man used the pseudonym ‘Gustav Wohlenweber’ to send the 30-year-old pictures of the family home with a pool. 

The man claims that the women agreed to the ‘setting’ of being locked in a cage at night and being tied up by signing their ‘work’ contract. 

Instead of offering her hotel training like the first victim, the man lured her in promising German lessons, which she received from his wife. 

Pictured above is Andelfingen Castle with a mill in the foreground

She was also subjected to tests and if she didn’t do well, she was tied up, locked up for a longer period of time or handcuffed. He also threatened her with a ban on jogging. 

The wife acknowledged to reading the possible punishments on a German test for the Brazilian woman, but said that she assumed it was part of the agreement between her husband and the woman. 

Before arriving at the house, the man had shown her a small room with a table and told her that she would be locked in – but she ‘had not seen the cage’, she told the court. 

She said that she agreed to sleeping in the cage because it was ‘the only possibility’, as there was no other place to sleep than the two cages in the house. 

The 30-year-old victim never received any wage payments, which the man explained to the court by his accounts being blocked while he was in custody. 

The ‘sexual sadist’ is accused of human trafficking, false imprisonment, forgery, aiding and abetting illegal entry as well as the illegal employment of foreigners and has confessed to the charges.

The prosecutor has asked for a partially suspended prison sentence of 36 months for the man, which his defence agreed to. 

He would only have to serve nine of these months, but since he has already been in custody for five, he would probably only face another four.

The man has also paid 16,000 francs (£14,300) to the two women in compensation.

Meanwhile his wife, who has not received a deal from the prosecutor’s office, could be forced to leave Switzerland and faces a suspended prison sentence of ten months for multiple counts of aiding and abetting the deprivation of liberty of the woman.

She claims that all she knew about the two women’s responsibilities in the house were ‘cleaning and studying’.

She also admitted that the women were locked into the cage for a large part of the time with her and her husband, but added that they were not locked in for 24 hours. 

The Filipina told the court that she was ‘manipulated’ by her husband. 

The Swiss court is due to announce its verdict tomorrow afternoon, on September 18 around 3pm local time.