Girl in the Cellar (12 page)

It has been described as the most disgraceful police operation in Austria since the post-war republic was founded. Natascha Kampusch's disappearance triggered the biggest hunt the country had ever known. But it was a deeply flawed one, full of missed opportunities, blunders, even at times a lack of enthusiasm. More than one commentator has remarked that perhaps the authorities might have done more if they had been searching for a well-to-do child instead of one from a sinkhole estate and a broken home. Whatever the reasons, the Kampusch case will be debated long into the future and will be seen as the benchmark for how not to conduct a MISPER—missing person's—investigation.

Until she was found, Austrian police had always maintained the operation had been a textbook one, with every lead followed and every clue carefully scrutinised. The missing girl was certainly high profile; at one stage she was in seventh place on the international police agency Interpol's top 10 of missing children. Interpol
Austria chief Herbert Beuchert insisted: ‘We have tried everything. The child abuser rings in the Netherlands, the corresponding website on the Internet. But we could not find a substantial lead anywhere. No suspicious connections. Nothing.'

Another detective, Rudolf Koenig, said: ‘There is no comparable case of a missing person that has seen such effort during the investigation. We really did everything humanly possible.' But did they? The facts suggest a series of missed opportunities and wild goose chases. The police even visited the kidnapper's home, stood yards from where their quarry was hidden. They failed ever to suspect the quiet loner.

The first the public knew of the story was when the Austrian Press Agency APA carried a brief report on 3 March, one day after Natascha vanished. It said: ‘A 10-year-old girl went missing yesterday, Monday, in Vienna-Donaustadt. After the girl did not come home in the evening, the parents called police. Natascha Kampusch did not go to school or the after-school kindergarten. Police inquiries during the course of the evening were unsuccessful.'

The final sentence is one that could be applied to the whole eight-plus years of Natascha's ordeal.

Although she was snatched some time between 7 and 8 a.m. on Monday 2 March 1998, the first police knew of the disappearance was when Natascha's mother turned up at the police station on Rennbahnweg at 5.30 p.m., some ten hours later.

Officers on the reception desk told her they were unable to take missing person reports and diverted her
to a different police station where such reports could be logged. As a result she was sent instead to the Donaustadt police station. There the mother was taken to an interview room where a report was written up and dispatched to the Vienna Sicherheitsbüro [security office], an organisation which has since been disbanded and which has borne the brunt of the criticism over missed opportunities in the Kampusch case.

In police circles, as well as to the public, the Sicherheitsbüro was known simply as the SB, or Berggasse, after the street where it is located. It was designed as an élite crime-fighting unit to tackle serious crimes, created to mirror the Sureté in France, and it regarded itself as the flagship of the Austrian police force, comparable with the FBI in America or Scotland Yard in the UK. But, unlike Scotland Yard and the FBI, Austrian police were rarely equipped with even computer facilities, and even when police officer Sabine Freudenberger, who was one of the first to interview the girl, gave her now famous interview with the ORF on Natascha's release, a typewriter could be seen in the background.

This, in September 2006. Was it a symbol of the antiquated methods used to try to solve the case?

The SB had been created in the times of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Berggasse in the Alsergrund district of Vienna where it is based was also the street where the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud once had his offices. The SB was located in a sprawling nineteenth-century brick-built military barracks at the end of the street near the Danube canal—designed by an
architect who killed himself after he realised he had forgotten to include toilets in the design.

As Natascha's mother outlined what she knew of her daughter's disappearance at the Donaustadt police station, the missing ten-year-old had already been in the cellar for twelve hours.

By the next day, 3 March, a 12-year-old girl who went to the same school told her mother she had seen Natascha being pulled into a white minivan and that she thought the abductor had a helper. The information was not made public for another two weeks when the statement was released to the media on 19 March. In the intervening period the girl was debriefed by detectives and a search instigated for the kind of white vehicle the girl had managed to describe.

At the same time Wolfgang Priklopil was heading back from the Korneuberg Hospital after having his middle finger stitched, the result of his accident with his 150-kilo door guarding the entrance to Natascha's prison.

In Donaustadt, where the search was most intense, officers put out an appeal for witnesses who might have seen something, and questioned family, school-friends and locals to build up a picture of the youngster's last known movements. A large number of policemen were on the streets near her home, interrogating passers-by and scouring the route to school for clues. A child's pullover found on the street near where she was taken was found and rushed to her parents for identification, but was quickly ruled out as not belonging to Natascha.

Two more people contacted the police claiming to
have seen her. One said she had been on a No. 37 tram, while another claimed to have seen her shopping in a supermarket in Vienna's 23rd district. Natascha's family can believe the latter; they say she enjoyed shopping, so more officers were dispatched to look for signs of the missing girl in the Donauzentrum shopping centre, named as one of her favourite spots.

The police seemed to set some store by the fact that Natascha had vanished with her passport on her, fuelling the suggestion that she might have run away after the row with her mother. As a consequence, Austrian police informed their Hungarian colleagues through Interpol.

The statement of the child witness who claimed to have seen her being taken into a van was also scrutinised in detail, especially after police received an anonymous tip-off about a white minivan from Strasshof that matched the description of the vehicle they were looking for.

On the day of the disappearance, a decision was taken to follow every possible link to any van owners. There were 700 white vans, registered all over the country, that matched the description given by the witness. Their owners, including the kidnapper, were all traced, interviewed and crossed off the suspect list.

It was two weeks after Natascha's abduction that police finally got around to questioning the then 36-year-old Priklopil. Two weeks in which he was able to prepare his explanation for having the van, and to have his answers to possible police questions carefully rehearsed.

Asked where he was on the morning of 2 March, he
said: ‘I was alone at home.' Police said later that they had taken this at face value. Austrian police spokesman Gerhard Lang described Priklopil eight years later as ‘convincing, friendly and co-operative' and added, ‘There seemed no reason to doubt his claims.' He said they had taken pictures of his van in which they found building debris and tools.

They did not, however, photograph Priklopil. The private detective Walter Poechhacker, who worked on the case for eight years, says the decision was incomprehensible. He said: ‘Even the simple decision to take a snap of the 700 suspects might have brought the matter to a speedy conclusion.' He went on: ‘They had in their hands at least one person who clearly claimed to have seen the kidnapping, and who was later proven quite correct in what she said. Think of what a difference it might have made if they had photographed the kidnapper along with the others who were on the suspect list, and if they had shown it to those who claimed to have witnessed the kidnapping! But they never did this.'

The police defended the way Priklopil slipped through their fingers by saying they did the best they could with 700 people to interview, but Poechhacker refused to accept this: ‘Even if they did not want to photograph the people they interviewed, why did they not take a police sniffer dog along when questioning Priklopil? They might well have discovered the small child hidden in the cellar. The dog might have gone crazy if it had been allowed to sniff in the van. Why not?'

When officers turned up at the kidnapper's home to
question him and to search his minivan, they were quick to dismiss him as a suspect—this despite the fact that his relatively new vehicle was covered in building site dirt and dust, a fact that might have led a police officer to wonder whether the suspect had been burying evidence, or a body.

When interviewed on the doorstep, his prize safely concealed yards from where the policemen stood, Priklopil claimed he used the people carrier to transport building materials to and from properties he renovated.

And that was that. A single man, living alone, no girlfriends, but he was instantly dismissed in an interview that took less than four minutes. And neither then nor subsequently did they ask to search his premises.

In the light of everything that has occurred since 23 August 2006, Austrians are starting to ask why police did not search Priklopil's house then, and why, during an eight-and-a-half-year investigation that never led anywhere, they did not consider going back to the home in Strasshof with a search warrant. Natascha case detective Dr Ernst Geiger said: ‘What should we have done? We couldn't search the houses of 700 people and prise open their cellars without concrete suspicions. Legally, it would have been impossible.'

He added that it was Priklopil's façade of normality that worked in his favour: he had no previous offences and did not appear suspicious. He was calm and polite when the officers interviewed him and seemed, according to them, as if he had ‘nothing to hide'.

Just one week after Natascha went missing Detective
Hannes Scherz from the SB had expressed the frustration of his men. ‘Our hope that the child disappeared “voluntarily” and will reappear somewhere alive diminishes by the day. We have absolutely no leads on this girl whatsoever.'

This was hearty news indeed to the owner of No. 60 Heinestrasse as he tuned into the press conference on the radio.

Critics say the policemen who went to see Priklopil should have spoken with neighbours, from whom they would have heard about the whacky security devices that peppered his home, his lack of girlfriends, his apparent mother fixation. Could have, should have, would have—hindsight has become the watchword of the Natascha Kampusch case.

Instead, in those first weeks, the focus shifted wildly to the city of Graz, 200 kilometres away, where a released child murderer lived. He had no white van.

‘Often police have to act on intuition: either you feel something or you don't. Ultimately criminologists have to rely on coincidences,' said Dr Geiger, but added that the fact that they had been so close to solving the case more than eight years ago and didn't was ‘very, very unsatisfactory'.

Nonetheless, efforts were made, even if they were misdirected. Huge numbers of officers were deployed on the streets of the capital, while in neighbouring Hungary, Interpol alerted officers there to be on the watch for Natascha. It was her favourite place, and perhaps the unhappiness she felt at home had tipped her over the edge and she had decided to flee there.

‘Hell is breaking loose here,' said Scherz, of the situation in Austria as the leads started to come in and were one by one checked and ruled out. ‘We constantly get new leads,' he said, ‘but none has really been viable so far.' In fact, three weeks into the investigation, 300 leads had already been followed, all of them ultimately fruitless, all leading nowhere.

In Vienna a month after Natascha vanished the search was upgraded, and became the biggest missing persons investigation in the city's history when hundreds of officers and volunteers joined up in a last push to explore every unexplored avenue. Police divers from the WEGA (Vienna Action Squad A) searched lakes and the Danube, ten police dogs were used for scouring the island called ‘Donauinsel', and there was support in the water from ships of the Danube Service and the federal police.

They also searched all the neighbouring lakes and streams, without success. Police helicopters were fitted with special infra-red detection equipment, so that local woods could also be searched. Hundreds of officers fanned out as far as the Czech border nearly 130 kilometres away. Their counterparts across the frontier joined in, with Czech police carrying out inquiries in Prague and sending alerts across the country. Vienna's 21st and 22nd districts were divided into sixteen sectors in total and assigned foot patrols with dogs. All abandoned buildings were searched, and 20,000 people quizzed.

Nothing.

On 6 April the search was downsized, but police pledged to carry on, opening a Natascha Taskforce office
involving dozens of officers, a search that was still in operation, on a smaller scale, in August 2006, the week she came back to life.

On 13 April came a new clue. A married couple reported to the police that they saw a white van in Rennbahnweg at the time when Natascha disappeared. ‘The van is believed to have a licence number plate from Gänserndorf (“GF”). At least the G is certain,' according to now Lieutenant-Colonel Gerhard Haimeder of Criminal Direction 1 of the Vienna police force.

Gänserndorf, north of Vienna, includes the suburb of Strasshof where Priklopil lived. Even this did not instigate a return visit to No. 60 Heinestrasse.

In Austria, as in England, as in Zambia or Zimbabwe, the longer a child remains missing, the more a MISPER investigation turns slowly into a murder inquiry. ‘That we have still not found a solid trace of Natascha after four weeks greatly concerns me,' said Haimeder.