Girl in the Cellar (16 page)

Police turned once more to the paranormal. ‘I want the murderer of the child to be found,' said Franz Plasch, a pendulum operator who told the
Kronen Zeitung
with alarming authority: ‘Natascha is dead. She was murdered on the second day of her disappearance.'

In front of Plasch, for the sake of the newspaper story, was spread a map of Vienna. The pendulum he dangled kept swinging towards a point in the north-east of the town. ‘Here, near the so-called Kreuzlwiese, about 15 kilometres from the Stephansdom [St Stephen's Cathedral], lies the dead body. The murderer
buried the girl about 25 centimetres deep in a section of the forest.'

Plasch could only point to an area within a radius of about 300 square metres. ‘Unfortunately a more precise prediction is not possible. But I am confident that the police will find the dead body and release the parents from the pain of the uncertainty.' The police duly dispatched a search team with dogs. Of course, nothing was found, but Plasch was right in a few details: she was underground, she was north-east of the city and she wasn't far from St Stephen's Cathedral.

The new millennium arrived but brought no breakthrough in the case. In 2000 an officer said: ‘Our knowledge has remained pretty much the same since 1998. We are sadly not any smarter than we were at the beginning.' Over 300 sites were checked in 1999 following indications that Natascha's body could have been buried at any one of them.

In 2001 the Internet was used for the first time in Austria in a missing person's case. A fully automated search machine, equipped with a photograph of Natascha, started rummaging through two million pages in the World Wide Web for the missing girl. The system of a German computer firm even digitally aged the face of Natascha. It was a slim hope, but a hope nonetheless.

Private enterprise came on board, too. The German computer corporation Cobion developed their own search engine machine designed to allow 1,000 computers to search all over the world for an image of Natascha. The help of the company, which usually searched
for the criminal abuse of company logos and images, was welcomed.

In 2001, three years after she vanished, Ernst Geiger, one of the senior detectives in the investigation, said: ‘The case is unique. It is the only example of a missing child under 14 who did not reappear—or turn up deceased—since the republic was founded in 1945.'

Natascha's father, still convinced that police were missing vital clues, devoted his efforts to working with Poechhacker in a relentless, all-consuming quest to find new evidence. The information he gave to officers led to several more digs in the area in an unsuccessful attempt to locate her body. For eight years neither of her parents gave up, despite the widespread belief among the public she was dead.

In 2002 the SB was disbanded, and suffered the insult of being merged with the local criminal investigation squad from which it had so long held itself haughtily aloof. But the Natascha case was not taken with the SB to its new home in the CID. Instead it became a ‘cold case', the worst kind of all to work on, and the worst kind for parents who want results.

Under pressure from Poechhacker, an eight-man special commission of officers went back to reviewing all the files, witness statements, search material, and even tips, not just from this world but from the one beyond. A special commission of the local police squad mainly consisting of investigators from Burgenland, was set up, with their first task to go through the 140-page report and folders of evidence amassed in the previous four years by the private detective Poechhacker.

But although the team from the Natascha task force ploughed through thousands of pages, the original suspects and witnesses were not re-interviewed.

Poechhacker tells of his frustration and the repeated false leads. He said that at one point he and Koch had been planning to speak to friends of Koch's from local bars, because he knew some of them had seen Natascha. He said the questioning was called off when Frau Sirny called the pair of them to demand that they investigate a new lead which turned out to go nowhere.

Koch had tried to say no, but she called him again an hour later and talked him into it. Poechhacker said: ‘Without Herr Koch it was obviously difficult for me to gain access to the circle of people in the community.'

Five years into Natascha's imprisonment the officers on the case were rotated again as a matter of principle. All unsolved murder cases are continually reviewed and new officers, it was felt, came to the Natascha case free of bias and sometimes ‘able to see things that were originally overlooked by colleagues. And witnesses often have completely new motives after a few years. Lovers give alibis, ex-lovers take them.'

But nowadays there is a third important reason to dedicate time to these cold cases. Hannes Scherz said: ‘Forensic science, especially the analysis of DNA through biological traces, has opened a whole new chapter with great chances over the last few years. The first thing we now do is look at the evidence that was collected at the time. Then we search for any traces, and finally we look at exactly what happened to that evidence.'

‘Coincidence, that's what they are waiting for,' grumbled Poechhacker. ‘Just like the murderer of schoolgirl Alex Schriefl, a famous case here in Austria, was discovered only after more than ten years when he got into a hassle with a police officer while drunk—just the same way they will solve the mystery of Natascha's disappearance. Only by coincidence.' He was nearly right.

But the cold case team did draw up a 50-page memorandum claiming that ‘different people involved in the case at different times told different stories which, ultimately, did not add up.' Sources told the authors that they determined that ‘in Natascha's surroundings there were people who had certain things to hide, petty crimes…that nonetheless might prove to have a connection to the disappearance of Natascha.' And so the investigation went back to square one with the re-interviewing of her family members, the van-spotters, the neighbours.

Everyone, it seems, aside from the loner in Strasshof who should have been ringing all sorts of alarm bells but wasn't. The Natascha case slid into a kind of legal torpor. Police went through the motions, appeals were made from time to time for new witnesses. Even a fresh set of photographs of the kind of clothes she wore on the day she went missing were made for Interpol and distributed around Europe.

General Roland Horngacher, a leading investigator on the case, said in despair: ‘The Natascha Kampusch case is a police nightmare. We have done everything we can. But
until we find new traces, or get new leads, this case simply cannot be closed.'

Horngacher was certainly in a position to comment but he was not a blameless figure. Between 1997 and 2002 he was head of the Wirtschaftspolizei, from 2002 to 2005 head of the Criminal Investigation Office, and from 2005 to 2006 head of the Vienna police. He was decorated with a Golden Medal of Merit for services to the country, but in 2006 he was suspended and at the time of writing was under investigation for abuse of office and accepting unauthorised gifts, and was also suspected of passing on confidential information to journalists.

By 2004 the focus had switched once more overseas. The police quizzed the French authorities regarding a possible connection to the case of child molester Michel Fourniret. The head of the Department of Investigations and Organised and General Crime of the Criminal Intelligence Service, Erich Zwettler, insists this is ‘pure routine. There is no clue and no lead that there is any connection.' Fourniret stated that he often travelled abroad, using a white van. ‘In Europe there are several thousand white vans, so you can hardly call this a lead,' Zwettler said.

In November of that year Poechhacker released his book
The Natascha Case
. In the foreword he expressed his frustration over the fact that a catalogue of blunders had meant a case that should have easily been solved had dragged on for years, and added: ‘This book chronicles one of the biggest police scandals in modern Austrian history.'

Criticism has come from almost everyone who has been in a position to observe the investigation at close quarters. Dr Berger, who now plays such a pivotal role in trying to heal Natascha's mind, has been critical of the way the police handled the case, claiming they showed ‘too much reticence', while prominent local editor Gerfried Sperl, in his column for the Vienna newspaper
Der Standard
, has said there are many questions that need to be asked of the police.

He asks: ‘Why was Priklopil's house not at least put under observation, if for some reason a search warrant was not possible to get?' and goes on to ask how many of the 800 people currently officially missing in Austria, 200 of them children, are suffering fates similar to Natascha's, locked in dungeons while life goes on as normal above their heads.

The clearest summation of the failure of the investigation comes from one of its key players. Edelbacher was head of the Wiener Sicherheitsbüro at the time and only went into retirement the month before Natascha escaped. He said:

So, in the eight and a half years of the Natascha case, two policemen saw their careers ruined. The investigation failed on many levels. No search was made of Priklopil's home or van, either by officers alone or with dogs. No photograph was taken of him, no full profile drawn up. Police relied on a computer system that only charted known offenders, and the connection was seemingly never made between Christine's bar, the kidnapper and Natascha's family, all regulars there. It is not that the investigation lacked energy, but it did lack cohesiveness. It was misdirected, misspent and, ultimately, mismanaged.

The seasons passed. Natascha fretted about her elderly grandparents and aunts. As her skin grew white her mind stayed sharp. She thought of her growing nieces and remembered fondly the holidays in Hungary. Her vocabulary was improving by leaps and bounds, and she was aware of a world much broader than the 160-square-metre one she inhabited with Wolfi. The books, the TV documentaries, the radio programmes—like parchment soaking up spilled ink, Natascha drank in information.

She had not yet earned a pass into that world she had learned so much about. But on Natascha's eighteenth birthday there was a celebration in the house. Police sources said the two dined together and there was a special cake afterwards which he bought from a confectioner's some distance away from Heinestrasse. It's understood that it was after the meal that he first informed her that she had ‘earned' the right to leave the house with him. He began allowing her into the
garden, taking her to stores, and for walks, but always reminding her that he was heavily armed.

When she had escaped and a stunned world tried to comprehend the ghastliness of her experience, public opinion, ever fickle, turned against her precisely because of those rare trips into the outside world. The girl in the cellar suddenly took on the new and unwanted persona of the ‘occasional prisoner', with over thirty sightings of her and Priklopil around Austria that the police said they were following up.

According to sources close to Natascha, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, when Natascha was sixteen or seventeen Priklopil eased his regime a little. She spoke of him becoming a little ‘softer' on her. Some are of the opinion that he believed he could marry her at some stage, that his grooming of her had paid dividends: that she had fallen in love with him. ‘The idea was obviously just a part of his deranged imagination,' said one of her inner circle.

By the time she was seventeen, however, he noticed that things were not going the way he expected them to, and he also realised her personality was becoming ever stronger. She told her advisers that he found her ‘cheeky' and ‘demanding'. The authors were told, despite the outings that were to come, that he hardened his regime during the final year together, that he hit her on occasion and sent her back to the dungeon when she was ‘disobedient'. One adviser said:

During the period of limited freedom, Priklopil forced Natascha to help him with his house refurbishments, taking her to Hornbach. There she smiled at an employee who came and addressed her, but Priklopil sent him away. The same happened in a supermarket, where Natascha was dragged away by her captor when she started winking at another customer.

The residents of Strasshof remember having seen Priklopil often at the Chicken Grill takeaway, where he enjoyed his meal while Natascha stayed inside his BMW. Even Priklopil's nearest neighbour, Josef Jantschek, states that he saw Natascha ‘more and more often' at the kidnapper's side. When he asked whether she was Priklopil's new girlfriend, Priklopil only replied
that she was a girl from Yugoslavia working for him. Herr Jantschek said:

Natascha said she dared not try to raise the alarm with him: she truly believed Priklopil would murder the kindly old man without a second thought.

‘You have to imagine what it was like, there just wasn't any time…he would have grabbed me, strangled me and killed Herr Jantschek. It was far too risky,' she would later say.

Another neighbour, Frau Stefan, 61, said: ‘I saw him driving down our street with the girl twice recently. I also saw them walking down the main street once. My friend, another woman from the neighbourhood, also told me she saw them walking and holding hands.

‘She looked very young, but seemed in a good mood and positive. We assumed they were a couple, we thought he had finally got himself a girlfriend.'

Natascha said Priklopil was tense every time they went out. She would later comment on how careful he was, hardly moving from her side. Ever the paranoid, Priklopil had panic attacks if she was just three centimetres distant from him, Natascha claims:

Natascha also recalled the weird mind games Priklopil played with her before they went out: ‘Now and again, in his way, he gave me suggestions about how I could go behind his back and escape. This must have dawned on him within his paranoia. It was almost as if he wanted that some day I would be free. That things would go wrong, that somehow justice would win.'

The pair were frequently seen going shopping in supermarkets. Pensioner Hans Georg, 67, claims she winked at him during one of their shopping trips. He said: ‘I thought to myself, something is wrong with her. I wanted to come up to them and ask what was the matter, but her companion took her by the hand and pulled her away. He gave me an evil stare.'

Natascha was also seen with Priklopil in another DIY shop, buying construction material and paint that was probably used during the time she was helping him renovate the flat in Vienna's 15th district that he wanted to rent out to immigrant Slavs in the area: the very flat he would be trying to lease to a prospective tenant who called on his mobile phone on the day of her escape.

As well as the outings, Natascha also won the right to choose the furniture of her cellar dungeon, so Priklopil took her to a furniture store and bought the things she selected. But the illusion of a normal life together would
shatter at the most simple things. Priklopil was compulsively parsimonious. He would refuse to buy fresh bread until the last crust of the old one was eaten.

He even tried, sometimes successfully, to pass on his neurotic ideas to her. If she felt unwell he would deny her medicine and persuade her that they were all filled with ‘heavy metals'. According to her advisers, the suggestion was implanted in her fragile mind so deeply, that she considers it to this very day. She scrutinises, for example, the content details on food can labels with the intensity of a microbiologist.

There were also more relaxing moments during their forced union, when she would help him tend the garden, plant roses or water the small vegetable patch next to the always empty pool. It would be a chance for her to enjoy the light of day, feel the fresh breeze on her pale skin and hear birds singing in the trees around her unlikely prison.

Gerhard Lang, head of the strategy department for the Federal Criminal Office who became a spokesman for the case after she freed herself, said:

But reading, knitting and watching TV were interspersed with bouts of forced heavy labour, despite the fact that she was often weakened by what she said was the forced malnutrition that was part of her captor's bid to break her will. When Priklopil was building his second garage for the van he used to snatch her off the street, he made her carry heavy buckets filled with earth, as well as bulky construction material.

Despite her claims that she had one shot, and one shot only, at breaking loose, the opportunities for escape seemed, superficially, many and varied. One woman from Graz, over 200 kilometres away from Vienna, told police that Priklopil came to her house to repair her computer and that Natascha was waiting downstairs in his BMW for about an hour. She reportedly came down to her, opened the car door and asked her if she would like to come upstairs for a coffee, but Natascha politely declined and remained in the car.

‘Our computer was broken,' the unnamed woman said, ‘and a service man was sent from Lower Austria. When I saw the pictures of Herr Priklopil in the newspapers I recognised him straight away.'

She claims to have escorted Priklopil back to his car, where Natascha was sitting and waiting for him. The pensioner added, ‘I told him then: “You have let your
girlfriend wait for quite a long time.” He just laughed and drove off.'

Ernst Holzapfel, the businessman who sold Priklopil a 24 per cent stake in his building renovation company for a little over 8,000 euros, also met her shortly before she took the decision to run.

Holzapfel, 42, was an interesting character to the police in the investigation. He was twice quizzed when the dungeon was discovered, the first time on the very day of Natascha's escape. However, he was cleared of having anything to do with the abduction and subsequent imprisonment of Natascha. His memory of meeting her parallels those of more casual acquaintances or passers-by: simply because no one could think the unthinkable of such a bland and seemingly asexual character as his associate, he too was fooled by him when he was within inches of Natascha.

Holzapfel, who would ultimately have to identify the corpse of his friend and colleague, was also the last person to speak with him alive. He said in a rather strained press conference shortly after Priklopil's death:

Police later hinted that undercover officers were mingling with journalists in the crowd to try to detect any facial tics or body language that might have suggested he was being economical with the truth. Later they reported that he was in no way suspected of having anything to do with either the kidnap or subsequent imprisonment of Natascha.