Girl in the Cellar

by Allan Hall

  Priklopil was an only child, and perhaps only two or three people really knew him, one of them being his mother: others he came into contact with saw the face he wished to present to them on any given day, in any given situation. He is described variously as ‘a nice boy’—by his mother; as ‘a reliable business partner’, by the man who worked with him; as ‘different’, ‘fogeyish’, ‘picky’ and ‘odd’, by neighbours and work colleagues who never came close to divining the genuine article. No one ever said he was likeable, and perhaps that should be the epitaph on his unmarked grave: ‘Here Lies an Unlikeable Man’.

  At some point the loner who shared his life with cats, who doted on his mother, whose idea of a wild night was to read electronics magazines and technology journals, crossed the Rubicon from fantasy to reality and began to convert a cellar into a customised subterranean dungeon. If only those good neighbours in Heinestrasse, with their swimming pools and pristine barbecue patios, had looked beyond the lace curtains, or nurtured suspicions about whether he worked on the black market, Priklopil’s obsession could have been thwarted before it began. But they didn’t and his apparent normality allowed him to commit a horrifying crime.

  On 14 May 1962, Juan Carlos of Spain married the Greek Princess Sophia in Athens. Across the Atlantic, civil rights protestors in America marked the first anniversary of a bus firebombing in Alabama with a candlelit vigil, while in Yugoslavia the former vice-president Milovan Djilas was given further jail time for publishing a book about Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

  In Austria Wolfgang Priklopil was born into obscurity in the same district in which a young girl with whom he shared his destiny would be born 26 years later. James Bond was saving the world in Dr No, and The Beatles were singing the song which could well have been written for Priklopil: ‘Love Me Do’.

  His father, Karl, worked as the local representative for the German concern of Scharlachberg, the third largest brandy maker in the country, selling it to restaurants, bars and liquor outlets in the region. His mother, Waltraud, was a housewife who worked part-time as a shop assistant. Described as a kind, quiet woman by all who remember her, she was expected in bourgeois society to be a devotee of the three Ks of Austrian life: Küche, Kinder und Kirche—kitchen, children and church. It was a role she was said not to be unhappy with.

  Not much is known about Karl, but one man with whom he forged a friendship has a tantalising piece of information that sheds light on the possible genesis of Wolfgang Priklopil’s criminally deviant plan.

  Heinrich Ehlers, born in Vienna in 1939 a Jewish Austrian, was best friends with Karl, and spent his first six years locked in a cellar. He said, ‘When I saw the pictures on television of Wolfgang it was like looking at his father 20 years before. They were identical. When I heard what he had done my blood froze. It was uncanny. His father was fascinated by my story and he told me on one occasion: ‘I told Wolfi about your life last night. He was spellbound, I can tell you!’

  The Ehlers family including Heinrich’s parents, grandmother and brother Eric, born in 1940, and sister Hermine, born in 1944, lived in two underground rooms just eight square metres in size separated by a glass panelled door, in the Margareten district of Vienna. Brought food by friends, they survived in this subterranean world until the end of the war.

  Herr Ehlers went on, ‘When I first saw the pictures of Natascha Kampusch I could empathise with her. I still suffer from bright light and I cannot bear to be in a confined space.’ He trained as a mechanic at the Graef & Stift company where he met Karl. They were friends, he said, for 20 years, but he only ever met Wolfgang at Karl’s funeral. When the story of the secret cellar hit the TV news bulletins, he said, ‘what really shocked me were the pictures of this heavy safe door which he used to make the cellar secure. I started to have a panic attack. What would have happened to her if he had had a car crash? This girl must have been constantly in terror that one day he might never come back.’

  The Priklopil family moved from their council flat at No. 30 Rugierstrasse to the Strasshof house in 1972 after the death of Wolfgang’s grandfather Oskar. Karl inherited the 160 square metre house with four bedrooms and renovated it over the years. Wolfgang had a seemingly happy childhood, with the occasional family trip to the Italian Adriatic coast and other holidays spent on farms in Austria and Germany. There was an introspection to him, however, a solemnity punctuated by screaming fits with his mother, whom he adored but did not fear, and savage tongue-lashings from his father, who often scared him witless. His uncle, Johann, who lives in Heinestrasse next door to the Priklopil house, is understood to have tried to be a mediator between the young Wolfgang and his father—but he has refused all requests to speak about his disgraced, deceased nephew.

  His parents used to worry about his lack of school friends. He was happiest reading in his room or completing huge jigsaw puzzles of famous structures like the Eiffel Tower. He also liked model-making and plastic aircraft kits. Toy trains were another passion: a supreme irony, given how his life would ultimately end. Essentially, he was into all kinds of solitary pursuits that kept him separate from his peers.

  In school he was a middling student with average grades, although he always scored the highest marks in Betragen—behaviour. He was the kind of obedient student teachers pray for, even if his academic prowess was less than stellar. He went to Hauptschule Afritschgasse for four years until the age of 14. In the Austrian education system a Hauptschule is a cross between elementary and high school: his placement there meant he was neither at the top of the academic pile nor at the bottom, just an average kid in an average school.

  But as he grew there were disturbing signs, ones that experts often use to determine whether simple anti-social behaviour or rebelliousness has the potential to lead to psychopathy. Cruelty to animals is one of them, fire-starting another, prolonged bed-wetting the third. He was guilty of the first and suffered the third into his late teens.

  When he was 13, the technically gifted Priklopil, who scored high marks in metalworking and science at school, built his own air rifle, which he used to kill sparrows and pigeons in the back garden of the family home. He also took pot-shots at stray dogs, but cats were out of bounds. He had a respect for their solitary, predatory ways, and often would try to merely injure a bird so he could then sit, contentedly eating cake that his mother had baked for him, and wait and watch as a cat came along to toy with the wounded creature before finally killing it.

  One neighbour who did not want to be named said: ‘Sometimes you could hear the mother yelling at him—to do his homework, clean his room, take his clothes down to the washing machine.’ There’s nothing odd, of course, in the truculence of teenage children leading to an escalation in pitch and tone during arguments with their parents. ‘But he would scream back at her, literally scream, that he was fed up being ordered about, that one day he would be in charge, and she would listen up then,’ added the neighbour. ‘It was always around lunchtime, when the father wasn’t there: I think he was a little bit afraid of the father. And on the couple of occasions I heard them shouting—once when I was walking past to go to the shops—I heard her saying he should take his “wet bed things” to the washing machine before going out.’ The same neighbour went on:

  Karl had set his mind on a son that I think he wanted to take to football, on hikes, to do ‘manly’ things with, but his son was sensitive and shy. There was friction too between Karl and Waltraud. He drank—he always had lots of free samples from his company, I saw him often unloading them from his car—and this was another flashpoint. Waltraud was very abstemious: a glass of hot wine at Christmas. So many of us never see beneath the surface of relationships and lives, like we never saw beneath the surface of his building and the secret underneath. It must be that something in his relationship with his parents made him what he was, mustn’t it?

  A school photograph of Priklopil at 14 shows an earnest-looking boy with dark eyes and thick hair parted on one side. It gives little clue as to what
was going on inside his disturbed head. He wore the mask of innocence.

  ‘I once told him he looked like a girl, he was so angelic-looking,’ said Rosi Doni, a 55-year-old hairdresser who regularly cut his hair at the home he shared with his mother until 15 years ago. ‘He liked it long and would never let me take off that much.’ She recalls Priklopil’s mother complaining that her son was obsessed with technology and that just getting into the family’s house in Strasshof was ‘a real effort’. ‘I remember, after he had grown up and he was living with her alone there, the mother having to yell at me, saying, “Wait while I deactivate the security system so I can open the door.”

  ‘The house looked very normal, I can’t remember anything peculiar about it, it was nice and tidy. The only thing I was surprised about is that he never spoke about girls, not once. And he was such a handsome man. He also looked a lot younger than he was.’

  Long before Wolfgang the master pupated from Wolfgang the servant, he began learning the skills which would enable him to indulge his fantasy. He started work as an apprentice at Siemens, the German electronics giant, when he was 15, after dropping out of technical school after one year, at a wage of some £25 per week. It was a good job with a solid company, and one which his father urged him to take, although according to some accounts he wanted to stay on at school.

  Contemporaries at Siemens say he completed his apprenticeship with good marks and was subsequently hired by the firm. One of his ex-colleagues from this period described him as ‘not at all ostentatious. He joined in all those normal jokes we did, like hiding untraceable malfunctions in switches, or letting an electrolyte-capacitor “explode” exactly when the instructor passed by. Apart from that we thought he must have derived from a wealthy family, because he always had money.’

  Ernst Winter, a fellow apprentice, remembered Priklopil’s obsession with cars when he was working at Siemens, describing him as a ‘petrol head’ who really only became animated when talking about machines, not his fellows. ‘The other thing that stood out is how much time he took over everything,’ said Winter. ‘He was slow, but thorough. Very thorough.’ Nothing in his demeanour or his manners gave any inkling to the strange obsession that he was carrying around inside him—to kidnap a girl and hold her hostage—but at the time when other lads his age were dancing and dating girls, or at the very least dreaming of dating them, he had formed views on the opposite sex indicating his warped persona. He told a friend that ‘all girls are tarts’ and added: ‘They don’t interest me. I want a partner who will understand when I want to be alone, who can cook well, is happy to be only a housewife, who looks good but does not consider looks important. I want a woman who will simply support me in everything I do.’

  Kurt Kletzer, a Vienna psychotherapist who is working on a detailed study of Wolfgang Priklopil and his adolescent slide into the mind’s danger zone, said it is possible now that his school or family doctor might have picked up on his problems. ‘But in the 1960s and early 70s being a quiet lad who liked to shoot birds wouldn’t necessarily have marked him down as being a potential threat to other humans,’ he said. ‘But even then, there is not much beyond monitoring and medicating that could have been done. His mental make-up was formed. Probably, at best, society could have hoped merely to keep Wolfgang Priklopil at bay. ‘Was he a genuine psychopath genetically hard-wired to act as he did or was he a neurotic and a victim of the environment that raised him?’

  Psychopathy is a term derived from the Greek psych (mind) and pathos (suffering), and was once used to denote any form of mental illness. These days, psychopathy is defined in psychiatry as a condition characterised by ‘lack of empathy or conscience, poor impulse control and manipulative behaviour’.

  It is unclear at what stage in his life his obsession to kidnap and detain a young girl for his pleasure developed. Naturally it has drawn parallels with Frederick Clegg, the strange and withdrawn ‘collector’ of the John Fowles book of the same name who, no longer content with butterflies, ‘collects’ art student Miranda Grey—he is fixated on her—and keeps her captive in his Sussex house. Fowles’s compelling psychological study charts a battle of minds and wills which, in addition to its fascinating and terrifying account of a psychopath, lays open to display the powerful condition of attachment.

  There is a common trait among psychopaths and neurotics—the need to hide things or characteristics in order to appear normal. Marc Dutroux, the Belgian paedophile, built himself the same kind of underground dungeon that he needed to carry out his crimes as Priklopil. Certainly his relationship to his father—and more significantly to his mother—made him the creature he became.

  ‘I subscribe to the theory he was actually more of a neurotic than a psychotic personality,’ said Kurt Kletzer in an interview for this book.

  Was he psychotic with an inbuilt genetic need to behave as he did [Kletzer asks], or was he a neurotic who was forced by the society and the world and the circumstances into which he was born to act as he did? I believe in his case it is the latter which played a greater role in making him what he was.

  He has been called a kidnapper or criminal in all that has been written about him, but he was not born a kidnapper or criminal; a person can be born a duke or lord, but you are not born a kidnapper. There are some studies that indicate a genetic predisposition towards certain types of antisocial or criminal behaviour, but there are many people who may have these genetic traits who do not become kidnappers or criminals. What is vital to know in his case is what influenced him after he was born.

  What role did genetics play, and what role did his upbringing play? What was his relationship to his mother and father?

  What is certain is that there was something in his life which forced him to become detached from the real world and obsessed with his own inner world and a fantasy view of life. Typically it can be a very dominating father or a clinging mother that forces a child to introspection as the only way to really give vent to their emotions. If you put on too much pressure, something has to give somewhere. In the case of Wolfgang Priklopil his choice of a young girl who did not leave him feeling threatened, and his clear hostility to women exhibited in his conversations with workmates, does indicate that he may have had problems with his mother, or his utter dependence on her, his feelings of self-worth only activated by her doting attitude toward him on any given day. Equally it could simply have been that he was impotent.

  The ability to enjoy sex and from this to build a happy relationship is one of the basic tenets of human existence. He may have felt cut off from life through impotency, and removed from society, and this may well have been the enormous pressure that he suffered.

  I believe he must have suffered something that made him in turn want to inflict something on others.

  What was it that Priklopil had experienced that made him feel the victim and want to escape from that by becoming the perpetrator? Look hard enough and all too often you will see the person beaten later becomes the beater.

  Whatever the pressure Wolfgang Priklopil was under, it must have been enormous for him to have committed such a crime; his fantasy world must have been all consuming for him. He spent enormous amounts of time thinking and preparing what he was to do, and how to move from being the victim with no friends and no girlfriend to becoming the perpetrator, and turning the tables on the world. In his mind the fantasy world where he would snatch and mould the perfect woman merged with the real world, until he could no longer see the difference. The preparation he made in the cellar showed he was obsessed with this idea.

  Ironically, though, what he saw as his salvation was always doomed to end in failure. From the moment he kidnapped Natascha he had made a choice to end his loneliness, and slowly over the years he would have learned to understand feelings and developed an intense relationship with this young girl who was totally dependent on his actions. From her he would have learned to become a better man, because he had to learn to think about her and not just about himself. It was as he
allowed himself to care for her, and the healing process started, that his fate was sealed. Another life was not possible for him because of the way he had chosen to escape from his problems. What he had done gave him no chance of a return to normal life.

  People are fascinated by this story because everyone can see it in black and white. They can empathise with Natascha, who was powerless to act, and can see themselves in the same situation and try to imagine how they might react. It is a normal human condition to put oneself in the place of another. But nobody would put themselves in the place of Priklopil; after all, he was a monster.

  In the end his illness was cured: he had no fear of women any more, they no longer dominated. But at the same time the world he knew had ended: he knew he would never see again the woman who had brought him back into the real world. The image he had portrayed to neighbours had been ripped away and he would no longer have the thin veneer of popularity he had recently started to gain. His true self was revealed. The friendly Wolfgang, the new Wolfgang, could no longer live and he had no choice but to die.

  Another opinion on Priklopil is supplied by Austria’s most prominent court psychiatrist, Dr Reinhard Haller, famous for working on the cases of the mad bomber Franz Fuchs and the Nazi doctor Heinrich Gross: the decorated medical specialist who was revealed after the war to have been involved in the systematic murder of mentally retarded and handicapped children at a Viennese clinic.

  In my opinion [said Haller] Priklopil had a very complex personality disorder, with very low self-esteem and strong fears of failure, most probably sex-related. He probably feared that he lacked manhood, and that is why he had chosen a child of that age. In doing that he wanted to grow out of his own infantilism and probably to overcome his infantile sexuality.