Girl in the Cellar (17 page)

The most extraordinary outing of all, and one that Natascha at first denied before her lawyers issued a statement contradicting their client, was to the ski slopes of a top Austrian resort; a place crowded with holiday-makers, laughing, joking, skiing, walking within feet of her. Natascha's grand day out was in February 2006, shortly after she was first allowed out of the house, in the ski resort of Hochkar, 150 kilometres from No. 60 Heinestrasse.

Furthermore, Priklopil was pulled over by police officers at a routine traffic check on the same day. Natascha did nothing. She stayed in her seat. She smiled at the policeman. She remained captive.

When a German magazine revealed that she had been on this ski holiday with Priklopil, Natascha vehemently denied the allegations, while her lawyers threatened their customary legal actions.

Talking to Austria's biggest newspaper,
Kronen Zeitung
, she dismissed the reports about her trip as ‘nonsense' and said: ‘I never was skiing. Who says that? It is all nonsense.' One of her lawyers, Dr Gerald Ganzger, threatened the press with lawsuits and said that his firm would go hard against any infringements of Natascha's personal rights.

‘We already have a thick folder of such infringements,' Dr Ganzger went on to say, speaking of press reports he claimed his firm was about to challenge legally. But at the same time he in a way implicitly prepared the public for the revelations that were to come: ‘As Kampusch managed to flee, she weighed a mere 42 kilos, suffered from malnutrition and heart and circulation problems. If I kidnap someone, keep them hostage on a ship and give them caviar, it wouldn't change the fact that they are a prisoner.'

However, within a day of the denials, evidence compelled the law firm to admit that there had indeed been a ski trip. Natascha's other lawyer, Dr Gabriel Lansky, clearly felt damage limitation was in order after Natascha's initial denial of such a trip. He said: ‘If one would put oneself in that situation at least for a second, then one would understand that a captive's excursion to the ski slopes is not really appropriate for getting the first chance of escape in their lives. This needs to be clear: Kampusch had only one chance of escape.'

Dr Lansky said that he and his client kept silent about the excursion because of concerns that the revelation could have trivialised the kidnapping, adding: ‘We will
not allow any attempts to make up new stories and perpetuate the media spiral in order to turn the victim into a perpetrator.'

He went on to say: ‘She was a prisoner for eight and a half years. Her sole contact with the outside world was her kidnapper and media like the Ö1 radio station. And there were no programmes with titles like “How to behave as a kidnap victim”.'

Natascha's lawyers also speculated that Priklopil was searching for some ‘kick' through such a brazen outing with his reluctant captive, while Natascha herself later said that she
did
try to tell a woman who she was while in a ladies' lavatory in the resort. Unfortunately, the woman was a tourist who spoke no German.

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 Prik
lopil'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:

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 crim
inal 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.