Girl in the Cellar (8 page)

It goes to the heart of the Natascha-Priklopil relationship. There are secrets to preserve somewhere in this saga.

 

Eventually she was driven to the Strasshof home while Vienna stirred in the half-light of the wintry morning, dragged from the car, pushed with some force into the pit and left in total, utter darkness. She was snatched at around 7.20 a.m. and arrived in the dungeon some time later that morning, the ever meticulous Priklopil having been careful not to trigger the speed cameras on Federal Highway 8 that led to Strasshof and his sinister, hand-built lair.

Natascha's prison was a masterpiece in technical planning. Priklopil documented every stage of the construction process with pictures later seized by police. The prison is accessible through a staircase in the floor of his garage, the entry hidden under a white cupboard. The flight of stairs leads down to a metal door and
behind that a 150-kilo door made from iron and concrete. This door can only be opened and closed from the outside with concealed threaded rods. This leads into an anteroom where a door decorated with pink hearts—Priklopil's concession to femininity and youth—leads to Natascha's actual prison. The room is absolutely sound-proof. On one side there is a loft bed, on the other a hanging cabinet, a desk, a chest of drawers, a basin and a toilet. Electricity for lights, radio, TV and the fan can be switched on and off from the outside and with a time switch respectively. Natascha was provided with fresh air through a complex electronic ventilating system. She described her initial impressions:

Wolfgang had got what he wished for.

Yet the instincts Natascha had learned at home were already kicking in. She had been left on her own by her family many times—nothing strange or frightening in that. She had been subjected to roller-coaster emotions that left her bewildered, with no one but herself to rely on. Once again, like a soldier who has been trained to withstand isolation in a prisoner-of-war camp, she could compartmentalise: I am alive—check. I am unharmed—check. I am dry, I am intact, I am not being tortured—check, check, check.

The amazing thing is that she was able to marshal this calm, this almost tranquil state, at an age when she was still wetting her bed, still liked to sleep with the light on and still, despite their troubled relationship was deeply dependent on her mother. That filial love would not break despite all the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years that were to follow on from the first stunning moments of this horrendous captivity.

When the light eventually went on she took stock of her sealed world, saw the things that Priklopil had laid out for her with his indefatigable neatness and love for order. Natascha had arrived in the clothes she stood up in, and with her satchel that had a few pens and pencils inside ready for her German grammar test. She would
never know, at least not for years, that the police would later be looking in her room in the flat to make sure they were with her, checking on the truth of the statement that she had gone to school to take a German test.

She saw he had bought what she described as ‘baby cutlery, with big fat teddy bears' on them—carefully chosen instruments designed not to harm their toddler users—or him. The cup was plastic, not glass. There were no scissors. This indicates that Wolfgang Priklopil, however certain he was of the righteousness of his cause, was capable of realising that maybe the object of his desires may not have been as overjoyed as he was with this new life hidden beneath concrete, steel, planking and soundproofed tiles. He didn't want his captive to have tools to hand that she might use on him.

 

Natascha's mother, who later recalled having waved goodbye to her daughter from the window of the apartment, left for work at a company called Meals on Wheels, at 7.30 a.m. She was late, because she had to stop to pump air into a faulty tyre on her car, and arrived at 8.45. When she finished work at midday she went to her tax adviser's office, where she made a phone call to a friend. On the way home, by coincidence, she found herself driving alongside Natascha's father, and so slowly that she was able to wind down the window to ask if he knew where Natascha's passport was. ‘I couldn't find it last night in her bag,' she said, but admitted she hadn't looked in her jacket.

Some time later she arrived home, where she met her lover. When her daughter was still not home by 4.50 p.m. she became nervous and called her son-in-law, who she knew had collected both his children. She thought they might know where Natascha was. A call to classmates made it clear that Natascha had not been in school that day. As a result Frau Sirny went to the police. Ludwig Koch was only made aware at 8 p.m. when he was called on his mobile phone and told that his daughter had vanished.

When it emerged later that evening that Natascha was missing, after not turning up either at school or at her after-school kindergarten where she spent the afternoons while her mother was at work, police initially believed she had run away from home. As a result they failed to launch a proper search for her until over 48 hours later. It was just the start of an eight-and-a-half-year investigation that is now being seriously questioned, the police having missed or failed to act on vital leads that could have revealed the child's whereabouts.

Dr Hannes Scherz, who was leading the police investigation at the time, said hours after she vanished: ‘At the moment we are not sure if Natascha Kampusch is the victim of a crime or has simply run away from home. Natascha lives with her mother but also has a good relationship with her father, where she spends every other weekend. It is possible she ran away to find her dad.' This despite the fact that there were three unsolved murders of females from a few years earlier in the area that were still raw in the public conscience. Alexandra
Schriefl, 20, Christine Beranek, 11, and Nicole Stau, 8, were raped and murdered. Eventually a man was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001 after DNA linking him to the murder of Stau was recovered.

For the police, the Natascha case was a riddle they never solved: one they never came close to solving.

 

There were few victories scored by Natascha in those first hours of captivity, but her captor had not escaped entirely unscathed. The day following her seizure he was treated at the nearby Korneuburg Hospital for an injury that almost severed his middle finger.

The chief physician of the hospital, Dr Wolfgang Hintringer, said: ‘He claimed that he got his finger jammed in a safe door. The finger was almost severed, but it healed very well following the intervention.' It is accepted that Priklopil, who had no safe in his home, almost certainly caught his finger in the heavy steel door he had installed to keep Natascha secure. It weighed 150 kilos and his finger bore all the signs of having been trapped in something that exerted tremendous pressure.

Dr Hintringer also indicated that Priklopil visited the hospital once more about a year after the kidnapping. He said: ‘He fell in some hole at a construction site and had several bruises.'

As great as the coming nightmare was to be for Natascha, it was to become one she would manage, to compartmentalise, to get through each day gaining concessions from her zookeeper. For her parents it was a
nightmare without end, particularly for her mother who had to endure the guilt which that final, temper-fuelled slap had injected into her conscience. And because she knew the police were trying hard at times to swerve the inquiry in her direction, to link her with the abduction.

Frau Sirny claimed that for over eight years she prayed every day that her daughter would be returned to her, and that she knew in her heart that she was alive:

Frau Sirny says she tried everything to find her daughter, including hiring clairvoyants, some of whom assured her she was still alive. Her father Ludwig, too, forfeited all life's trivialities and pursuits after she was taken. He cursed himself for not having tried harder when he split with her mother to gain custody of Natascha. Like her mother, he was reduced to scouring the streets of the ancient capital in a desperate search for her.

Frau Sirny said, ‘In the first few weeks I trawled the streets of Vienna looking for her. I would sit in parks all
day in the hope that she would turn up. Then I started to travel to other Austrian towns and cities and hang out in places where there were lots of children, especially kids who had run away from home or were skipping school, but there was no sign of her.'

When the police told her there was little else they could do and were scaling down the investigation into Natascha's disappearance, Brigitta Sirny sought help from psychics.

‘I didn't know what else to do, and so I went to a clairvoyant to ask if she could help me. She told me that Natascha was alive. She said that she was being held north of Vienna in a cellar in a house, but the police refused to act on the information, saying the psychic was probably just a hoax.'

Also painful, even in the aftermath of reunion, was the knowledge that she had driven to Strasshof one day for work and had actually travelled right past the house. ‘I can't believe I even drove past it one day when I had a presentation in Strasshof,' she said, her head bowed, her eyes filling up with tears.

Even as the days, months and years passed, she said it never got any easier for her:

At Natascha's school her loss hit hard and deep. Many schoolfriends recalled the fateful day she vanished from their lives. Michael Ulm, who was in the same class as Natascha—4C—fell ill with worry because she had gone. ‘She was my friend,' he said. ‘I want the person who took her away to bring her back.' Schoolchildren pleaded with teachers to be allowed to form search parties to scour the streets and wasteland nearby, but the idea was soon scotched for fear of more unsupervised children going missing.

Mothers who took their children to school were the lucky ones: most parents were too busy working to ferry their offspring to the gates and to pick them up again. Gabriele Boehm, 38, who started escorting her son to school after Natascha vanished, said: ‘Most mothers work around here. You can only hope every day that things will turn out OK, but there are no guarantees—we know that now, don't we?'

Liane Pichler, 45, was upset that the authorities hadn't seen fit to inform the mothers that another school in the area had posted a warning about a sex criminal they
believed was stalking children in the area. Whether or not the suspect was Wolfgang Priklopil will now never be known.

Newspapers at the time printed the messages of hope and love that they hoped would touch a nerve in a stony-hearted man:

The children were allowed, after a time, to take her books home with them to keep as totems of the pal they lost. For a long while her seat was left empty in school, a reminder that they never stopped thinking of her. But as the years passed and her pals grew up, it was occupied by other pupils as the memory of her, inevitably, faded.

‘We pray each evening for Natascha,' said her form teacher Susanne Broneder, who added that a planned excursion for the pupils to see
Amy and the Wild Geese
had to be cancelled because her chums were too upset at her vanishing.

The headmaster back then, Guenter Willner, said the only way to carry on was to believe in a happy ending.
He thought that if his pupils believed Natascha had gone for ever, many of them would have been unable to cope.

Numerous children came forward to say they had seen her on the morning she went missing. Bettina Hoffmann, 12, said she saw her ‘not more than 100 metres from the school gates. She was heading in the direction of the school.' But Bettina had not seen what happened next.