by Allan Hall
We than had some dinner, but it was hard to persuade her to eat anything because she had already eaten some hours earlier. Afterwards we watched Columbo on TV—she liked that series. It was fun watching it with her, she made funny remarks, much like an adult.
But then her mother came, sometime around 9.45 p.m., and started shouting at her right from the door, she did not even say hi to us. She told her that it was wrong to come to my place and that she was supposed to stay at home, alone.
Then she sat down and the two of us, Frau Sirny and I, had Baileys to drink. But she kept shouting at her daughter, insulting her and all. I felt very embarrassed and told her to calm down.
Frau Sirny than told Natascha to go upstairs to their flat, change her bed sheets and go to sleep. Natascha was wetting her bed, and the mother was telling everyone about that. She reproached her because of it in front of me, and I could see that the girl was very ashamed of it.
After Natascha went home, Frau Sirny stayed with me and had more drinks and went on about how Natascha was becoming more and more cheeky with every new trip to Hungary. But that was not true, she was not cheeky at all, and she also loved the trips to Hungary—she would always return happy and positive from there.
Anyway, it was such a shame that the evening had to end like that. Natascha had been very happy, and she’d told me that her mother had cleared out the baby room in the flat and she believed she was finally going to get around to getting her a writing table, which was something that seemed very important to her.
Natascha was, indeed, just hours away from getting such a table—but it was in a hermetically sealed room in Wolfgang Priklopil’s strange home, not her own.
She went to bed sullen, feeling unloved and put-upon. And the combination of a bad night’s sleep and the dreary prospect of an early start at school for a test in the extra German class she’d been attending, meant she was late in getting up. Some 20 days later, in virtually the only interview she has ever given about the family life surrounding Natascha, Frau Sirny admitted to the Viennese paper Kronen Zeitung that there were words the next day about her tardiness. It got more heated, in the way these things do, and her mother lashed out, giving her a firm slap around the face. But as soon as it was delivered, it was regretted. Frau Sirny told the paper: ‘On the morning she disappeared, she stayed in bed for 45 minutes before getting up. She is generally bad at getting up. Then she could not find her glasses. And then she was cheeky. So I gave her a smack in the mouth. But I don’t persecute myself because of it. One must set limits with children. But yes, she was obviously emotionally hurt.’
Natascha dressed in silence, stopping only at the door of the flat as her mother turned to give her a hug, saying, ‘You must never set off for school upset or angry with me, because we may never see each other again.’
One lost childhood later Natascha would reveal in her TV interview: ‘Yup, the second of March 1998. A bad day. On the evening before, I had a fight with my mother because my father brought me home too late and didn’t accompany me to the apartment door. “God knows what could have happened to you,” she said to me, “someone could have grabbed you”—and then the next day, while in her care, that really happened. “Never leave the house after an argument without saying goodbye,” my mother always used to say.
‘Exactly. And I thought, “I don’t agree with my mother right now,” and to spite her I slammed the door. Because nothing was going to happen to me anyway. That’s pretty heavy when you are kidnapped just half an hour later and you are cowering in the back of a van.’
Less than a mile away, Priklopil the predator waited. He parked his van in the Melangasse near to her school gates. White van man, inconspicuous as ever throughout an unremarkable life, waiting for the moment that he had prepared for over the years. The collector, come to collect that which he knew would fulfil him the way no jigsaw puzzle or electronic circuit breaker ever had. He sat, silent and alone in his van, tuned into the local Vienna news radio which, 24 hours later, would be featuring as its lead item the news of a missing girl. The windows of the van were misted from his breath on the inside; the windscreen was running with rivulets of melting ice and snow on the outside. People walking to work paid no heed to a solitary driver waiting for a passenger. Priklopil had counted on his anonymity helping him on this, the most important day in his life, and he was not let down. Herr Nobody. Perfect.
The slap from her mother was still stinging her cheeks as she came close to the end of her cold, weary 15-minute trudge with her heavy satchel of schoolbooks, while luckier school pals drove past in their parents’ warm cars. Splashing through the dirty brown sludge that the previous day had been crisp, white snow, it was not only Natascha’s school bag that was heavy but also her heart—the youngster was deeply unhappy both at home and at school.
As she dwelt on her problems, the young girl noticed a man staring at her from a vehicle in front of her just 500 metres from her school. But she was wrapped up in her thoughts and suppressed her feelings of uneasiness at the stranger and continued towards him, pulling her thick red ski jacket around her and bowing her head against the icy wind.
It was a decision that was going to cost her over eight years of her life. And it wasn’t until her time in hell was over that she could tell the world what she thought and felt in those last moments of being a schoolgirl before she was captured to satisfy Priklopil’s demented urges.
‘I saw the man and thought there was something strange about him. I knew I should have gone over to the other side of the street, but for some reason I didn’t,’ said Natascha. She admitted she wasn’t really concentrating because of an argument with her mum, who was angry because Natascha had slept through her alarm and didn’t get to sleep until late the night before. Her mother had argued on the phone with her father after he had dropped Natascha off late after the Hungarian weekend break. ‘And I was tired,’ she recalled.
Natascha said her mum was also angry because she refused to wear her glasses, which she thought made her look ugly, and that had provoked the slap across the face. She was walking towards calamity, splashing in the slush, her face down, her thoughts concentrated. Then she saw his Mercedes van and something gripped her…not exactly terror, just a feeling of unease. There were only a few paces to go now and she slowed down a little, but was still walking towards the van. She would mentally flagellate herself for her decision later. Why didn’t I cross the road? Why didn’t I walk with some other kids or an adult? Why didn’t I listen to the voice in my head telling me that something was wrong here? But time was running out. Drawn inexorably towards the innocent-looking white van, unaware of the evil that sat waiting for her in it.
Did the unhappiness in her life shroud her judgement? Was the sting of that slap—in itself nothing major but a totem of the stresses and antagonism that lived with her at the flat—blocking out reason? ‘What if?’ is a question that can be asked about so many things in life. All Natascha knows is that if she had crossed the road she would not have been living in a pit.
But maybe she would have. As her captor would later tell her: if not that day, then another. She was, after all, the chosen one. The real threat the van-man posed, however, only dawned on Natascha when he grabbed her and pulled her into his vehicle. ‘The man climbed out of the van and was suddenly beside me. He grabbed my arm and threw me inside before shutting the doors and speeding off. He shouted at me and said I should be still and quiet or there would be trouble,’ she said of the nightmare journey that was just the start of her ordeal.
‘Are you going to rape me?’ Natascha’s mother, speaking to a journalist in Vienna years later, after her daughter was freed, claimed these were the first words that Natascha spoke to Priklopil. Does this show an awareness of sex and sexual things outside the normal remit of a ten-year-old girl? Or is it merely another marker of her intelligence?
Discussing the actual kidnapping, she said he growled at her that nothing would happen to her if she remained still and did n
ot move. ‘And do as I say and you won’t get hurt,’ he added for good measure. A few minutes later her told her it was a kidnapping and that if her parents paid a ransom she could go home ‘that day or the next’.
Natascha’s thoughts went into overdrive. Fear and confusion jostled for pole position in her young mind. She said she had no fear initially—but then admits that she thought he might kill her. ‘I had heard of children who were raped and then quickly buried in the woods somewhere. And I thought I could put my last few hours or minutes or whatever to good use, and at least try to do something. To escape, or to talk him out of it or something. I told him that it wouldn’t work and that going against the law never prospers. And that the police would soon get him and so on.’ She told herself that if she could remember details, of his face, his van, his house when they got there, they would aid police when the time came to capture him. Later she would say: ‘At that point I was sure the police would get him and it would all have a good ending.’
It would not have a ‘good ending’—at least not for a very, very long time.
But before Natascha was driven to the Strasshof house, Priklopil took her somewhere else. In her interview with the Kronen Zeitung shortly after regaining her freedom many years later, she said enigmatically: ‘We didn’t drive directly home. I don’t want to falsify history, but I will say no more.’
This statement is pregnant with implications. Where did she go? Was it to meet someone—an accomplice perhaps? To buy something? To sightsee? This was a kidnap, wasn’t it? Isn’t urgency and haste of the essence in such a situation? Is Natascha trying to protect someone here, other than the memory of the kidnapper who she ultimately felt sorry for? The riddle remains unanswered, both by her and the police.
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:
The first time I didn’t really see it [the dungeon] because it was pitch black. There wasn’t a light on there or anything. He only fetched one after some minutes, I don’t know, maybe half an hour. I was very distraught and very cross and angry that I hadn’t crossed the street or gone with my mum to school. That was really awful. And the powerlessness. Crying because I was powerless to do anything. I was really angry and didn’t know what to do. It was awful—the feeling of being powerless, of not being able to do anything. That was the worst. I could hardly stand the noise of the ventilator at the beginning, it got on my nerves so much. It was horrible. Later on, I just jumped out of my skin at any noise. I felt claustrophobic. There were no windows and no doors. I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t even know if anyone could hear me outside. He said my parents did not care for me and were not looking for me. And later he told me they were in prison.’
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.
