Girl in the Cellar

by Allan Hall

  And so Natascha returned, a reluctant hostage but by no means a helpless one. In his home she carried on with her faux-wifely duties, until the real Frau Priklopil in the shape of his doting mother came to stay—and then it was back in the dungeon until she had gone.

  There was one compensation, however, in Frau Priklopil’s visits: although it meant prolonged time underground, Natascha had to admit that the house was ‘spotless’ after she had been.

  Natascha obviously came to learn a great deal about the bond between mother and son, and she developed strong feelings for her although she never once met her while in captivity. Through the words of her captor and the images that he showed her of the family on numerous holidays and outings, she came to love and respect her.

  Waltraud Priklopil was, ultimately, the benchmark by which Wolfgang judged all women. Whether or not he thought that Natascha Kampusch ever came close to this perfect ideal during all the years they shared together is a secret he took to his lonely death with him.

  All the sightings, the police stop, the unsuccessful attempts to alert store staff that she wanted to be freed from the bonds of the last eight years, indicate that Natascha kept true to the vow that she made to herself as a twelve-year-old girl: that she would one day be free. Yet the missed opportunities to run were to rebound on her within weeks of freedom, when it finally came, and to raise questions about why she chose to end her imprisonment exactly when she did.

  Trying to imagine what was going on in Priklopil’s mind during those long years is nearly impossible. Very little is known. But Priklopil, his emotions stunted by his own discordant childhood relations with his father and his extraordinary reliance on his mother, continued to drink in the little truck-stop bar called Christine’s throughout the entire period of Natascha’s confinement. He would have propped up the bar and listened as her father bemoaned the lack of a police breakthrough, earwigged as regulars spoke of the family heartbreak, and seen the face of Natascha in the ‘Missing’ poster fade to yellow.

  Nothing, however, would dent his conviction that the prize was worth all the pain—other people’s pain.

  In the search for answers, police attention has become focused on the Commodore 64 computer found in Priklopil’s house. For a man with an inordinate amount of knowledge about technology, who subscribed to ten techie magazines and who filled his house with the latest in alarms, buzzers, sensors and other security devices, the computer remains, like its owner, something of a conundrum.

  By any standard the computer was obsolete. The beige-coloured machine was popular in the 1980s but is now considered an antique, though some electronic dance acts still use it, and it is beloved by amateurs of retro-computers. Its very age makes it a challenge for police to crack, because its memory does not function like those of modern-day laptops or PCs. Any attempt to download its secrets will result in some data loss: detectives hope that this will not destroy vital clues—if they exist—as to how he came to choose Natascha as a victim and how he prepared for it both mentally and physically. A Commodore 64 had external storage, in the form of floppy disks or tapes, and police are currently taking counsel from electronics experts about the best way forward in a bid to extract its secrets.

  And secrets there must be. Experts and police concluded that Priklopil was one of two things: he was a paedophile or he was asexual. The latter has been all but ruled out, leaving investigators to conclude that he was a sexual scavenger of the worst kind.

  A theoretical understanding of Priklopil’s disorder has been developed through clinical studies of paedophilia. Paedophiles rarely operate alone. The very compulsion that draws them towards the forbidden objects of their desire by its nature also draws them into a clandestine world of fellow predators. Excitement is gained through images of those they abuse, hold captive or otherwise torment. Images and the fantasies they ignite are the high-octane fuel for paedophiles. Lawmen at the heart of the investigation told the authors that it is those images they continue to search for. It is still not known whether Natascha was sexually abused and she has refused to answer questions about ‘intimate personal matters’, but the profile of Priklopil is relevant and important in the study of such individuals and what they are capable of, so that other children can be saved from such a terrible fate.

  Christoph Joseph Ahlers, a prominent German psychologist who is treating paedophiles at the renowned Charité clinic in Berlin, emphasised the unique nature of the case:

  The Kampusch case corresponds to a pattern well known in the study of paedophilia, when a paedophile kidnaps a small girl and spends years living with her.

  It is not unusual and happens very often—but only in the paedophile’s imagination. To this very day I have not heard of this fantasy ever having been turned into reality by someone. The closest attempts only lasted for a short period of time, and many ended with the death of the victim.

  The reason for that is probably that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to realise that fantasy and actually get away with it. In that sense the puzzling Kampusch case is a unique phenomenon throughout the world.

  Ten years ago paedophilia was a taboo subject, rarely discussed by the mainstream media. The floodgates were only opened to stories revealing child abuse in homes, schools and congregations across the world, encouraging investigation and prosecution, after the Dutroux case in Belgium; the monster who kept children in his cellar, raping them and offering them to his friends to do the same. Police believe the exposure that the Dutroux case garnered may have fuelled Priklopil’s desires and tipped him over the edge from daydreaming into action.

  ‘I was a stroppy little madam,’ said Sabine Dardenne, one of Dutroux’s victims who lived. So was Natascha Kampusch, by all accounts. Her kindergarten teacher, who watched her TV interview, testified to that. She remarked at one stage how Natascha seemed to have to use all her strength to rein herself in when she didn’t like the way a question was put to her. ‘That’s how I remember her, always impulsive, always having to be right,’ she said.

  A child’s stroppiness, assertiveness, meekness or pliability—nothing excuses the crime of paedophilia. Yet Natascha insists that whatever took place between them was consenting, which of course it could not have been. If sexual abuse occurred it could not, legally, have been by consent prior to the age of 16. Thereafter, if there were any consensual acts, the issue of consent must be morally compromised by the fact this young girl had been held hostage in such unnatural circumstances.

  This much is certain: Wolfgang Priklopil thought that what he had done to that little girl over the course of 3,096 days warranted nothing less than his death.

  A significant percentage of individuals with this disorder were sexually abused as children. There are those who argue that paedophilia may also result from feelings of inadequacy with same-age peers, and therefore a transfer of sexual urges to children. This disorder is characterised by either intense sexually arousing fantasies, urges, or behaviours involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child (typically aged thirteen or younger). To be considered for this term, the individual must be at least sixteen years old and at least five years older than the child.

  It is accepted that paedophilia is not a disease and that it cannot be ‘cured’—it is therefore by definition lifelong and compulsive behaviour. Because of this there will always be a risk that the individuals it refers to, and who already have a conviction for a relevant offence, may reoffend.

  Paedophiles are usually attracted to children of a particular sex, although some are attracted to both sexes. In the case of attraction to boys it is normally, though not exclusively, to pre-pubertal boys. In the case of girls, the majority are attracted to girls aged eleven to fifteen.

  Paedophiles will often engage in sexual activity with a large number of children, case studies have shown. Until now there is nothing to indicate that Priklopil ever had that sort of contact with other children. But the so-called situational abusers are well known to medical and criminal
research: people who may feel sexual attraction to a particular child but do not necessarily have a sexual attraction to children in general, or simply focus on one single victim and became obsessed with them.

  Judging from the evidence so far, Wolfgang Priklopil fits the bill of situational abuser exactly.

  The protagonist of The Collector is not the only literary figure with whom Priklopil invites comparison. A notorious literary invention out of the pen of one of the greatest masters of the twentieth-century novel famously portrayed exactly one such ‘situational paedophile’, and became an artistic benchmark in analysing the disorder of paedophilia. And it comes disturbingly close to the Austrian story that sickened the world.

  Could Priklopil have been the Austrian proletarian version of probably the best-known literary paedophile, Professor Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous masterpiece, the 1955 novel Lolita?

  Meticulous and pedantic, the deviate paedophile Humbert does to a certain extent bear an uncanny resemblance to the invisible man from Strasshof. Humbert lost his childhood sweetheart to a deadly disease and both developed and nourished a lifelong perverted fixation, in contrast to his otherwise fastidious nature, for what he called nymphets; pre-adolescent female children he found sexually alluring.

  But Humbert, like Priklopil, becomes obsessed with only one single child, his twelve-year-old stepdaughter Dolores Haze, or Lolita. He only marries Lolita’s mother, Charlotte, in order to be close to Lolita, and eventually seduces her after the mother is killed in a car accident.

  With her mother out of the way, Humbert ventures into a paedophile relationship with Lolita, posing as her father. Not unlike Priklopil, Humbert becomes deeply paranoid, fearing pursuit and eventual discovery, and he suffers jealous anxieties about losing his precious prey to another man. Rather than locking away the child he abducted from normality, he starts with her a life on the road—a different kind of kidnapping—moving from one place to another in the hope of being able to hide his criminality from society.

  Although Humbert is aware somewhere in the back of his mind that his attempt to forge a marriage-like union with his child victim is doomed, he, like his lowly real-life counterpart Priklopil, partially succeeds in becoming Lolita’s friend and a father-like figure, as well as her lover. Experts have speculated that in his complex relationship with Natascha, Priklopil played the roles of ‘a father, a brother, a friend and most probably a lover’.

  His mind clouded and his will consumed by his sickly infatuation, Humbert gradually comes to fulfil Lolita’s every wish but eventually does lose her to another paedophile. After embarking on a quest that only ends some years later, he sees Lolita, now aged seventeen, married and pregnant, for the last time. But this time his distorted passion is spent: Humbert now only sees the shadow of the nymphet he once imagined her to be, because as a grown woman she is no longer attractive to him.

  Despite the essential difference—Lolita was not kept imprisoned and brutally punished whenever her captor found it necessary—the parallels between the fiction and the real life story are striking. Like Lolita, Natascha had also learned with time how to deal with her captor and even how to assume control in certain situations; for example, when she, in her own words, ‘forced’ him to celebrate Christmas and give her presents.

  Humbert loses his diabolical attachment to Lolita when the child grows into a woman. Top psychiatrists and even Natascha herself have speculated that Priklopil, too, was towards the end simply defeated by the fact that his once helpless victim had developed into a young woman in many ways stronger than himself.

  It is possible that he, like Humbert, might have lost some of his attraction to her, realising that his demented fantasies were never to become true.

  She grew up. The mirror cracked. The spell was breaking.

  ‘He could not handle the increasingly independent, grown-up woman she’d become, and I am sure that he wanted to get rid of her in some way,’ a psychiatrist said, adding that Priklopil probably ‘consciously or unconsciously wanted her to escape’.

  As Lolita is becoming increasingly detached from her pathological captor Humbert, he tries to intimidate her into believing that the outside world would offer her no better alternative, just as Priklopil tried, and sometimes partially succeeded, to plant his paranoid, insane ideas into Natascha’s mind. But at one point Humbert utters what now might seem an eerie prophecy of Natascha’s present—another example of life following fiction.

  Talking to Lolita, Humbert says: ‘In plainer words, if we two are found out, you will be analysed and institutionalised, my pet, c’est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell […] under the supervision of hideous matrons. This is the situation, this is the choice. Don’t you think that under the circumstances Dolores Haze had better stick to her old man?’

  High-tech equipment must be deployed in a bid to find out Priklopil’s secrets, but experts need nothing electronic to debrief Natascha about her time in captivity, particularly the months between February and August 2006 when she tasted this freedom of a kind. For this they need infinite patience and care.

  Listening to her account brought Professor Berger and his team to their limits as psychiatrists. Because what she went through was unique, there were no textbooks to work from when it came to therapy for her.

  ‘We had no previous experience to draw on,’ said Professor Berger. ‘There wasn’t a textbook case for someone like Natascha—she wrote the textbook.’

  Academia does not have a record of a criminal with Priklopil’s profile, nor of a victim who suffered an ordeal comparable to what Natascha had to endure for almost a decade.

  We can learn something from the trauma research of the fifties and the sixties, from the cases of former concentration camp prisoners,’ said Berger, adding that the 1945 report of the famous Vienna psychiatrist Dr Viktor E. Frankl about how he survived in Auschwitz, the most notorious death camp of them all, will be valuable in dealing with Natascha’s mental scars.

  In his book entitled Man’s Search for Meaning, Dr Frankl gives a chilling account of the death camp existence between ‘vegetating’ and ‘internal victory’ and describes in detail how ‘an abnormal reaction in an abnormal situation’ slowly becomes ‘normal behaviour’.

  While he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and expected each day to be his last, Dr Frankl developed his own spiritual exercises in which he would speak to himself in his mind for hours and would analyse and re-enact seemingly irrelevant everyday things he had experienced in his life before he was incarcerated there. At the same time, he never erased from his consciousness the constant threat of death that was lurking throughout every single second of his captivity.

  The doctors say that this is exactly the path Natascha went down from that first day. She constantly had to fear for her own life when Priklopil locked her up in the concrete cellar behind the 150-kilo steel door that could have easily become her tomb if anything were to have happened to him. But in contrast to the concentration camp survivors, the innocent child was also made to fear for her captor’s life, as he constantly repeated that he would kill himself if she tried to break out.

  Psychologist Philipp Schwärzler, from the Child Protection Centre in Vienna, likewise compared Natascha’s situation to that of the victims of the worst manmade horror of the twentieth, or any other, century—the concentration camp inmate. ‘Humans function by their will to survive, which makes its way through in the most terrible situations,’ Schwärzler said.

  He went on: ‘In order to do this, the psyche uses a protection mechanism: stop thinking, detach and discard anything dreadful. No person can live in constant resistance, because that only tortures them further. To live with the unbearable may not be healthy, but in emergency situations, it’s necessary for survival.’

  And Christoph Stuppäck, chief physician at the University Clinic for Psychiatry in Salzburg, said the Stockholm syndrome is, especially for these reasons, very pronounced in Natascha Kampusch’s case. ‘To iden
tify with your aggressor is a survival strategy. If you can’t conquer the enemy then you show solidarity with him,’ he says, indicating why she felt unable to escape on prior occasions even though the slightest of chances may have been there.

  ‘When you only have one person as an attachment figure, you lose the ability to communicate,’ says Stuppäck. ‘All the experiences that you have on your way to becoming an adult were taken away from her.’

  Schwärzler also says that one could rebuild the capability for bonding and relationships. Even with the best of therapies, however, Natascha’s martyrdom cannot be undone. ‘She will have to learn to live with it. That will take a long, long time.’

  But Natascha’s supreme psychological strength is evident. When asked if she really was, eventually, the stronger of the two, Dr Berger only said, ‘There is a simple answer to that: her survival is the proof of her strength. She is alive, he is dead.’

  7

  Breakout

  Wolfgang Priklopil planned and executed the taking of Natascha Kampusch with the precision of the engineer he was. In contrast, her choice to free herself from his grip on 23 August 2006 was as spontaneous as the decisions of an eighteen-year-old girl should be when choosing a new hairband or picking a new shade of lip gloss. Impulse, not planning, told her that D-Day had arrived.

  Several times before, she had gone towards the garden gate at No. 60 Heinestrasse, that alarmed, mute sentinel guarding her captor’s domain, fully intent on crossing the boundary into a universe beyond Planet Priklopil, only to be drawn back into his strange orbit. She was pulled by the conflicting forces of fear, apprehension and, probably, a kind of affection for the man who brought her up.