When I was traveling through Austria, I was struck by the cleanliness and orderliness that characterized its countryside.

The roadside fields looked like a patchwork quilt and the houses in the towns looked like a picture in a storybook.

The streets of Vienna were so clean you could practically eat off them.

Since my Austrian travels, any mention of that country has brought to mind all that is pristine and picturesque.

Now those Austrian scenes routinely feature in my nightmares.

Ever since my friend told me the horrific story of Josef Fritzl and his cellar, I dream that patchwork quilts are covering up scenes of rape, imprisonment and unspeakable evils.

In case any of you missed it, Fritzl is a terrible human being who built a little apartment in the windowless cellar under his house and imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth there for 24 years.

Since she was 18, this girl lived in the dark underbelly of her parents' house and bore her father seven children.

One of them died at birth, three were adopted or fostered by her parents and the rest stayed with her and never saw the light of day.

Normally, I am not one to follow crime stories. Human tragedies or evildoings unnerve me and I hate the fear and paranoia that results from reading about every nasty thing that happened any given day.

I am so sensitive to ugly news that I nearly got fired from my first job for refusing to photograph car crashes and so my new obsession with the Austrian case has taken me by surprise.

A Beautiful Life

Every morning, I go on the web and look for the latest updates. I have read about Elisabeth's letters from before her capture that tell her friend about how she is planning to leave and live a beautiful life.

I have read about her father's assertions that he is not a monster and that he took care of his children and his children/grandchildren. (Shudder).

Now, I find myself eyeing strangers with mistrust. Craggly eyebrows and neatly trimmed moustaches are linked to the image of Fritzl and anyone who sports either scares me.

I am uneasy with adults at the park and I have been filling my son's head with dire warnings of bad people pretending to be good people.

I don't know why this story had such an effect on me.

After all, the first column I ever wrote for the Sun was about walking out of my Fort McMurray apartment and straight into a psychopath's line of fire while he shot at random out of a neighbouring basement.

Clearly I lived after being saved by the surrounding SWAT team.

I was shaken up but that incident was not the stuff of nightmares - it was just the local crazy guy and no one was surprised.

A worse case was in Grade 8 when one of my peers was kidnapped by her lunatic boyfriend after he killed or maimed her entire family.

We were awakened by gunshots ringing out in the middle of the night.

That was shocking and terrible but somehow still fit into the imaginable realm of human crimes of passion.

What sets those stories apart from the cellar one is that as a society, we can take some preventive measures.

Both gunmen had shown signs of disturbance or dementia prior to the incidents. Neither should have had access to weapons.

Complaints against them should have been investigated more carefully.

But what can we do when a man locks his daughter in a cellar?

Do we investigate peoples' basements?

How can we protect people from their family? Why must we?

My friend says that my reaction over this cellar story was caused by its reflection of some of my deepest fears.

I suppose she is right.

Infinitely Preferable

A shooting death is infinitely preferable to a lifetime of being buried alive, screaming for your friends and neighbours who are just metres away and never being heard.