The parents who held their three children captive for four years in a Spanish ‘House of Horrors’ amid fears they would contract Covid have been freed from prison.

Disgraced parents German tech recruiter Christian Steffen, 53, and his American-born wife Melissa, 48, were facing jail sentences of more than 25 years each when they went on trial in March in Oviedo.

But on Monday they were acquitted after appealing their most severe charge of ‘habitual psychological violence within the family environment’, where they were handed a prison sentence of two years and four months each.

The pair were also convicted of family abandonment and given an additional six-month jail term, which was upheld by the Asturias High Court of Justice.

Sources close to the case said they are now focusing on trying to regain custody of their children, who are in state care.

Mr Steffen’s defence lawyer said after being told the appeal verdict: ‘They are happy, but they have received a lot of criticism.

‘They had already expected a ruling like this beforehand, so the first feeling was relief, but the next was great concern about how they are going to regain contact with and custody of their children.’   

Public prosecutors have been offered the option of appealing the latest court decision. 

Christian Steffen and his American-born wife Melissa Ann Steffen have been freed from prison after they 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 couple kept their three young children – a then-ten-year-old and twins aged eight at the time – inside a squalid home between December 2021 when they arrived in Spain and April 28, 2025, claiming they needed to be protected from the Covid-19 pandemic.

But the 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 drawings 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’.  

Now appeal judges have ruled that the parents did not intend to inflict degrading or humiliating treatment on their children and the extreme isolation was a result of ‘misguided overprotection’.

They added the couple imposed the same living conditions on themselves without using physical violence against their kids.

The lesser charge against them was upheld by judges who said they had committed a ‘flagrant and unjustified breach’ of the duties inherent in parental responsibility, and seriously deprived their children of the right to education and the need to socialise with others.

They were arrested in April last year after a local woman kept records of what she saw of the Steffens’ home and reported it to the police. The pair were remanded in prison until their trial in March. 

German tech recruiter Christian Steffen (pictured) was, alongside his wife, was freed from prison following an acquital

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

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.

‘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 parents insisted during their trial they had always acted in the interest of the children.

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 Steffen and his wife had caught Covid and had decided to self-confine and educate their children from home out of an ‘insurmountable fear’ of falling ill again, but rejected the ‘House of Horrors’ description of the property they lived in.