West Germany: Alien Horror

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When he first came from his home town of Valtero, in northern Greece, Miltiades Vlachos seemed just another one of the horde of foreign workers who have gone to work in West Germany's booming factories. He settled in Wuppertal, where his wife Eketerini and his elder daughter Helena joined him to work at a cable plant. Vlachos, 42, however, was a moody, tempestuous man, and he eventually lost his job through an argument with a foreman. So when his son Ioannis, 22, who worked near by, decided to send for his 18-year-old wife Niki, the family delegated the idle Vlachos to go home and bring her back from Valtero.

Fortnight ago he returned alone. The family soon learned why. From relations in Greece, a letter arrived, telling how Vlachos had lured his daughter-in-law into a Salonika hotel room and raped her. In the poverty-stricken hill towns of Greece, where whole families are sometimes forced to sleep beneath the same blanket, incest and related affairs are not unknown, nor do these proud but ignorant people turn to the law to deal with such delicate matters.

Just as Orestes murdered his mother Clytemnestra, the closest male relative is still often expected to avenge the family honor.

By unanimous vote, Vlachos' family in Wuppertal decided Vlachos would have to die at the hand of his son.

Three nights later, Ioannis bludgeoned his sleeping father with a hatchet, then stood by with his mother and sister while Vlachos suffocated to death in his own gore. ("Get a towel," Helena had warned beforehand. "There will be a lot of blood.") The family went to the police and told the whole story. Only then did they learn, to their astonishment, that their deed is punishable in West Germany by life imprisonment. "But I had to avenge my father's crime," protested Ioannis. "Why is it murder?" Even his sister Paschalina, 12, agreed: "What my brother did was right."