10 Years of Freedom

by Natascha Kampusch

  During my years of captivity I felt as if somebody had hollowed me out and stolen my life. In the last several years I sometimes felt as if my ability to be myself had been taken from me. Again and again I have been asked in interviews how I’m doing. Whether I am happy and finally truly free. Sometimes I would have loved to have said, no, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here, and otherwise I wouldn’t be heading for a new round of insults. The sad part about it is that these questions are often meant rhetorically. Very few people truly wanted to know that I am making an effort to go through life with a positive attitude. Despite everything, and particularly because of it. What law is there that says that when you have suffered or run into a rough patch once, that you have to remain trapped in a downward negative spiral until the end of your days?

  It was one of the most upsetting experiences that I had in dealing with other people, that many people had this very particular attitude of being a prisoner of your destiny. I’m not allowed to be happy, because… That cannot be the case, because… People that only see the negative in themselves, never the positive, the strong, even when it has remained buried for a long time. Every person is an individual, and everybody’s destiny is different. But I firmly believe that we are not just subject to the whims of fate. We can empower ourselves to accept the greatest gift that life gives us: The freedom to shape it.

  I now feel that I am slowly able to live out the aspects of my personality that make me me: full of energy and drive with a strong will.

  I know that in many ways I will not be able to shake the effects of the second part of my life. But for the future I hope that when I am in the process of swimming free, others do not try to block my path. I was not allowed to spend my entire adolescence the way other people did, full of hopeful ideas and plans, and it hurts me that now as an adult others try to label me “once a victim, always a victim” again and again. When that happens I feel like an actor forced to go out on stage every day of her life and give the same monologue. A continuous loop, only in this case the stage is my life and I would like to take on another role for a change.

  “I’m trying to get up that great big hill of hope” is part of the song I mentioned above. I don’t want to give up hope, because hope is one of the strongest drives that we have. Life is a process where it is less about the outcome then about the journey you travel. My journey is certainly not comparable to one travelled by most people. But no matter how many twists and turns it takes, I simply want to be allowed to take my journey. I would like to shape my life to be as fulfilled as possible and to enjoy my remaining, valuable time with care. I know how important that is, not just as a result of my captivity, but also from the period just after my escape. After all, we only live once, and this is my life.

  Appendix

  Chronology of Events

  2 March 1998: On that Monday morning I am thrown into a white delivery vehicle by a man around 7:15 AM on my way to primary school on Brioschiweg. Here, on Melangasse, was where the last day of my old life ended, and when my years of captivity in the hands of my kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, began.

  Early that evening my mother filed a “missing persons report” with the Donaustadt district police station. The Vienna Criminal Police Office takes over the case, and the initial search begins in the area surrounding our housing estate at Rennbahnweg, even though the police are still trying to calm fears. Perhaps the girl has simply run away and would turn up the next day, they say. My mother is very certain, “After 48 hours I definitely knew that she would not be disobedient for that long and be sitting in a corner somewhere. Aside from the fact that that is completely unlike her. She is such a reliable girl. She never deviates from her route when walking to school, and she comes straight home again afterwards. Something must’ve happened.”

  3 March 1998: The first witness speaks up; a 12-year-old girl reports having seen a girl being pulled into a white, tall car (suspected to be a Ford Transit) that then drove away at high speed. She describes two assailants, one at the wheel and the other who pulled me through the sliding door into the vehicle. Her statement will be used repeatedly later on in support of the theory that Priklopil was not acting alone.

  5 March 1998: The search for me is expanded to all of Austria; up to now it has been limited to the neighbourhood around my school and my mother‘s flat. One of the investigators tells the press, “We are really groping in the dark here. We have to be open about admitting that.”

  15 March 1998: The Sunday edition of the Austrian daily Kurier reports on an initial lead in the investigation. According to Walter Pöchhacker, a professional detective initially hired by the newspaper who later continued the investigation on his own, police should look for the kidnapper in the girl’s immediate environment, saying that there was possibly “someone who knows everything about her disappearance”. The hounding of my family begins. The most absurd accusations and suspicions are heaped on my mother more than anyone, and she is downright pilloried in public.

  6 April 1998: In conjunction with a large-scale search for owners of white delivery vehicles two police officers also pay a visit to Wolfgang Priklopil. He has no police record, is cooperative and willingly shows the officers the vehicle containing construction debris and building materials. There are no witnesses to corroborate his alibi that he was at home on the day and at the time in question. But there is no cause to doubt his statements.

  11 April 1998: Alleged sex photos of me appear in the Austrian magazine News. My mother had always been more than willing to show visiting journalists pictures of me and our family. Now, some were pocketed while she was in the kitchen making coffee for the journalists in her flat. The snapshots of a girl, who, like all kids, simply liked to dress up, are hyped in the media as pornographic imagery. For some this is evidence that my parents, or their extended circle of family and friends, had either abused me or were planning to sell “indecent” photographs to persons interested in such material.

  14 April 1998: The investigators receive their first specific tip to look into Wolfgang Priklopil. An anonymous tip from a canine police officer in Vienna. Everything fits: The description of a loner, a suspicion of having a liking for children, possible weapons possession, the address, the house on Heinestraße 60 with its barricaded and secure outward appearance. The tip is filed away.

  Later the discussion on errors in the investigation would flare up primarily due to this inadvertent or intended “blunder”. The entire issue is greatly inflated by the media. For me, this information, and its subsequent instrumentalization on the political stage, are a bitter pill. At the same time I have tried to develop a certain nonchalance when confronted with revelations like these. It would be misguided to let myself get all worked up, because it wouldn’t change the facts one bit. Even if there had been at least one tiny chance of finding me and ending my captivity just six weeks after my disappearance.

  1998 to 2002: Private investigators and “self-proclaimed” investigators – in other words those without an official mandate – such as family court judge and former National Council member Martin Wabl push the police and the public in every direction. My parents have to submit to a lie detector test; they grasp at straws and allow themselves to be instrumentalized against each other by the media. Divining rod practitioners enter the picture, contact with the afterlife is established, again and again wannabe copycats call claiming to have me in their grasp or to know where my body has been buried.

  Unspeakable accusations are heaped primarily on my mother. One claim accuses her of having colluded with a supposed lover to kill me and dump my body in a pond. Another charge was that I had been sexually abused in the family, was planning to go to the police and therefore had to disappear. The most stubborn claim was the suspicion that my mother had something to do with my kidnapping. Retired judge Martin Wabl files a lawsuit against her in 2001 on these grounds. During the trial he is advised by Detective Pöchhacker.

  My mother wins the case
: in November 2001 the court orders Dr. Wabl to cease and desist from claiming that my mother had anything to do with the kidnapping.

  The judgement is upheld on appeal in the last instance. After my escape Wabl demands that the case be reopened, as I am to be considered new “evidence”. His petition is granted, and the legal dispute drags on until 2009 – with the same outcome as back in 2001.

  17 July 2002: The Interior Ministry orders the Vienna Criminal Police Office to relinquish the case to their colleagues in Eisenstadt, the capital of the province of Burgenland, after four years of investigations. A new special task force is set up there, which is to systematically examine the case and review all of the clues. However, it is understaffed and the case file is too extensive.

  23 August 2006: Around noon I am able to flee after 3,096 days in captivity. The kidnapper is distracted, talking on the phone, and the back garden gate is slightly open. I just take off, sprinting across a narrow gully to Blaselgasse, and from there into an allotment garden. A window is open on one of the houses, and I am able to draw attention to myself. The woman, who calls the police after considerable hesitation, will not, however, allow me into the house asking, “Why did you come to me?” I am panicked and my whole body is trembling for fear that the kidnapper could discover me and drag me back to his house at any second.

  That same evening Wolfgang Priklopil jumps in front of a train not far from the Praterstern station in Vienna.

  24 August 2006: Around one hour after the news of my escape the previous day was sent through the wire and spread through electronic media at high speed, a Canadian man is the first to secure an Internet domain containing the name “Natascha Kampusch”. Shortly thereafter all conceivable variations are taken; later my attorneys are to spend days reclaiming these domains in order to prevent their misuse. Some fourteen days later a man attempts to file for protections for the trademark “Natascha Kampusch” at the Patent Office in Munich – fortunately without success.

  25 August 2006: A DNA report confirms that the “confused young woman” taken into custody in the allotment gardens in Strasshof is in fact “abduction victim Natascha Kampusch”. The first press conference is held by the interior minister and the chief investigator.

  28 August 2006: In my “letter to the world public” I ask the media for calm and restraint until I have regained enough of my strength to provide my own telling of recent events. The letter does not have the hoped-for effect. The race for the first photograph of me enters a new round. Quotes supposedly from me have already been published. Confidential statements I made to police officers and police psychologists are also leaked to the public.

  6 September 2006: In order to relieve the official pressure and put a lid on continued speculation it is decided that I am to give three interviews: Kronenzeitung, the magazine News and the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF). The roughly 45-minute television interview is broadcast that evening at 8:15 PM in Austria, and one hour later in Germany. All in all, the broadcast is shown in its entirety in ten European countries, and excerpts from the interview are broadcast in 120 countries.

  21 September 2006: Criminal proceedings against Wolfgang Priklopil are discontinued due to his death. In November the police also close the file on a man, who – baselessly – was suspected of possibly being involved in my abduction.

  4 October 2006: German magazine Stern publishes speculations of “S&M rituals with Natascha”. Barely six weeks after my escape I am at the focus of increasingly sordid “reporting” that is not even worthy of the name. Where the official events are deemed insufficient, embellishments, distortions and exaggerations are added. To this day this wave has yet to subside. Most often it goes hand-in-hand with suspicions of additional abductors, or even a pornography ring that would have to reach the highest levels – because otherwise it would have long been unearthed. Where there is nothing, there is nothing to reveal. There is nothing more to say on that from my point of view.

  15 November 2006: The public prosecutor‘s office confirms that there are no indications that Priklopil had any accomplices. The information does nothing to impede continued speculations concerning additional abductors, as well as alleged “porn videos”.

  5 February 2008: Former head of Austria’s Federal Criminal Police Office Haidinger (head of the second special task force in Burgenland) testifies before the Parliamentary Committee on Interior Affairs that there were clues that could have led to the case being solved much earlier on, but had been covered up. The Interior Ministry did not want the issue to become public knowledge, as nobody wanted a police scandal ahead of the general elections.36

  The Interior Ministry responds by setting up a six-member “evaluation commission” to examine these accusations over the next several months. The head of the commission is retired Constitutional Court President Ludwig Adamovich; assisting him is former Supreme Court President Johann Rzeszut, also retired.

  3 March 2008: A parliamentary fact-finding committee is set up to shed light on the work carried out in various ministries.

  18 April 2008: The free newspaper Heute publishes fragments from my first interviews with the police. Quotes are taken out of context and shortened beyond recognition. The upshot is that I had voluntarily maintained a sexual relationship with the kidnapper (what could possibly be deemed voluntary under those circumstances?) And possibly given birth to a baby while in captivity. “What happened to the possible baby? Did she lose it, or did it disappear in a manner that has yet to be explained?” wrote the newspaper.

  The alleged pregnancy is skilfully brought into connection with the work of the evaluation commission and the fact-finding committee, giving it a veneer of “fact”. Subsequently additional details from the police reports, which had been confidential up until then, are made public. They had been provided to the parliamentary committee for the purposes of their investigation. In addition to the confidentiality clause that the members were required to sign.

  Several media outlets begin to demand that all of the materials be made available to the public, claiming that everything else would feed suspicions that there had in fact been a cover-up. It is apparently unimportant that the objective was to protect the victim, to uphold her right to privacy. Just the opposite: If I were to take legal action to block such a move, that would only prove that I had a great deal to hide and an interest in never fully clearing up the crime, they write.

  11 June 2008: The commission‘s report is submitted to the interior minister. Essentially the report indicates that the “pertinent investigative approaches” had apparently “not been fully implemented” (for example, with regard to the tip provided by the police officer from the canine unit). The report also states that there was no indication of a targeted cover-up.

  23 October 2008: The press reports that the “Kampusch case” is to be reopened again. One month later the investigative order from the public prosecutor’s office reaches the new special task force formed to shed light on the unanswered questions concerning the manner of the original investigations. Franz Kröll is charged with managing the operations of the task force.

  Moreover, an additional commission headed up by Adamovich is to help to clear up unanswered questions arising from the evaluation report.

  The mandates are actually quite clear. The focus is on facts stemming from the internal handling of my case, not on the continued investigation of the case itself. Nevertheless, the head of the commission specifically redirects the probe, heading into a different, very well-known direction. Once again it is about sex, pornography rings and accomplices. And the accusations of abuse are raised once again. The photographs stolen from my mother could be an indication; perhaps there was even a direct connection between my family and the kidnapper, it is said.

  May 2009 to August 2009: In the wake of an unpublished interim report from the commission, rumours and speculation are once again stoked. The work of the body set up to examine the processes carried out in various public aut
horities also leads to my family and myself being discredited once again. In a newspaper interview Adamovich states that my time in captivity was possibly “entirely better” than what I had “experienced before”, and that considering the conditions in which I had grown up, assumptions that I was a victim “by coincidence” could not be taken seriously.

  My mother files a lawsuit against these claims. In December 2009 Adamovich is found guilty of defamation and ordered to pay a fine of € 10,000. His attorney appeals the decision, and one year later the appeal is successful. The appeals court rules that Adamovich’s statements were still protected under freedom of opinion.37

  Even during the hearing before the court of first instance he had claimed that Priklopil had acted on orders and that I was likely covering up for accomplices, because I was being blackmailed with compromising material. In addition, there were “indications” of a “positive, and even loving relationship” between the kidnapper and me. The fact that I was given a cake for my 18th birthday, among other things, did not “dovetail very cleanly with the image of my supposedly lurid captivity,” whereas, during the period before my abduction I was in an “unfortunate situation”.38