Girl in the Cellar (9 page)

Twenty-one children, her school classmates, went off to a local church for a special prayer service. Their prayers went unanswered for over eight long years.

Well-wishers left flowers at the door of Natascha's flat, while others who had lost children, through illness, accident or murder, wrote letters of condolence to Ludwig and Brigitta. None of them could know she was alive, well, and beginning her slow metamorphosis from victim to victor in a cellar three metres below ground just a few short miles from the old bedroom which her mother visited every day to draw strength from her spirit.

In 2002 Frau Sirny admitted in an interview with the Austrian magazine
Woman
that she knew, for certain people, she was a suspect. The interview went thus:

Police later had to admit that Frau Sirny had been dropped as a suspect in the case.

Time passed, the seasons blending into one. Ludwig Koch lost his businesses one by one as he ploughed money and time into trying to find his daughter, prowling the streets late at night, scrutinising the waifs outside the city's West Station to see if she was among them, looking at the young hookers in the red-light district, asking anyone and everyone to look at the photo of Natascha he carried around with him.

‘Have you seen this little girl?' he would ask. ‘Have you seen her with anyone?' But the strays, the junkies, the hookers, the flotsam and jetsam of urban life, answered with mute shakes of the head.

Frau Sirny, too, coped with her own private hell—first the animosity of her husband, then of people like Anne
liese Glaser. Placing faith in clairvoyants gave a little comfort and hope, but only a little. Nothing could make up for the loss of her flesh and blood.

The agonies were piled on whenever headlines surfaced in another country of a child killer—and the worst pain came in 2004 when 62-year-old Michel Fourniret, the ‘Beast of France', hit the headlines as the mass murderer of at least nine women and girls. He took some of his victims in a van similar to the one that a witness had told police she had seen someone dragging Natascha into. Frau Sirny said in an anguished interview at the time:

 

Asked in the same interview if she still clung to the hope that Natascha was alive, she said: ‘I will never lose that
hope, until I know, one hundred per cent, that Natascha is dead. And in my dreams it happens every now and then, that my little girl suddenly stands at the door and says: “Mommy, now I'm back.” And waking back up is so awful, because I'm back in reality, and there is the terrible uncertainty…'

 

If she could have known how her daughter was conducting herself in those first few hours she would have had nothing but pride in her. Natascha would later say: ‘In principle, I knew within the first couple of hours of my abduction that he was lacking something. That he had a deficit.'

She would go on to say that he had a ‘labile personality' in contrast to what she judged a ‘healthy social environment around me—maybe not a particularly happy, but a loving family. Both my parents had assured me that they loved me. He didn't have that. In a certain way he lacked self-assurance. And something else—security. He didn't have that.'

A labile personality. A complex word describing a complex complaint, learned by a little girl who taught herself such things in her cellar world.

Her freedom was to the psychoanalyst's profession what war is to armaments industries, with theories about him, her, her family and relationships piling up like wrecks at a stockcar rally. But she was closest of all to Priklopil in a hothouse environment unencumbered by other social contact. Perhaps her take on him is one that has more value than any of those ‘experts' who would swarm around her after 23 August 2006.

A labile personality is described as manifesting itself in people who are chaotic, whose relationships are stormy, short-lived and unstable. Those who suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder often display a labile—wildly fluctuating—sense of self-worth and self-image and affect emotions they do not really feel.

Sam Vankin, an authority on such types and author of
Malignant Self Love—Narcissism Revisited
, said:

 

Curiously, most borderlines are women, but not all, and a woman, Wolfgang's mother, was the single biggest influence on his life. Weak, violent, dependent, some
times self-hating…Natascha spotted the weak spots in her kidnapper's armour from the outset.

This would be priceless ammunition in the war of wills against Wolfgang Priklopil.

It is unimaginable, but we must try to imagine it. We must try to place ourselves in Natascha Kampusch's skin if we are to understand what she went through in her man-made grotto. The asthmatic wheeze of a ventilator pumping in tepid air, the light which went on early every morning and faded out each evening, the utter silence: no birdsong, no chit-chat of neighbours, no watching the vapour trails of planes high in a blue sky or hearing the friendly rustle of leaves blowing in mini tornadoes in a garden. When it was dark down there, at night, or if Priklopil had turned the light off in some temper fit, it was akin to complete sensory deprivation. It is the kind of mind-training undergone by élite soldiers to enable them to survive torture in captivity and to keep their sanity when lost in deserts or jungles. It is not meant for little ten-year-old girls thinking about cats and dolls and homework left undone. The experience compresses time: although the experience is unpleasant, if the captive has no access to timekeeping—as Natascha did not have for
the first few months—time, paradoxically, seems shorter than normal time. In one test in the 1980s a subject who spent 58 days underground to gauge the effects on both psyche and body thought he had been under for just 33. But Natascha could not have known that when she awoke after her first night; nor could it have offered much comfort if she had.

Whatever the shortcomings in her upbringing, she had been schooled by her parents, like all children everywhere, to beware the bogeyman, not to accept lifts from strangers, not to talk with them outside school gates, nor take sweets from anyone offering them. Kindly policemen, either too fat or too old to pound the beat any longer, had come to her school to hammer the same message home. Now, on 3 March 1998, as the light in her cell came on at 7 a.m., she realised all the nightmares had come at once. It is testament to an incredible will allied to a keen intelligence that she rallied, marshalled the forces of resolve and said to herself: this will not beat me. I will survive.

If she emerged as a remarkable young woman, it was because she went in there as a remarkable young girl.

Later she would be asked if she cursed the fate that put her, rather than anyone else, three metres below the ground. She replied: ‘No! Straight after the kidnapping I asked myself what I did wrong. I asked myself if I had done anything to the Lord God. I was seriously in despair. I had claustrophobic feelings from that tiny room and it was really harrowing. And I had no idea
what was going to happen to me; whether they would kill me, what they would do with me. At the beginning I thought there were many offenders.'

But there was only one. At the time of writing the police have just finished their lengthy investigation of the crime scene. They used sniffer dogs and, after pumping in artificial fog in a bid to find other possible hiding-places for other potential victims, could find no other secret chambers or hidden, deceased girls. They dragged numerous bags of earth away from the site and continue to pore over the ancient, Commodore computer he used (which wasn't connected to the Internet) to see if its relatively primitive memory holds any secrets of his plan or of what he might have subjected Natascha to over the years. Or if he had an accomplice at any time for his diabolical scheme.

Yet while detectives believe that he may have had contacts with other perverts, they are certain he acted alone in the kidnap and only had one victim—Natascha. Heat-seeking sensors and rods pushed deep into the earth around the property have turned up no unmarked graves.

 

‘Gebieter,' he said to her during their first meeting after she was taken to the clandestine jail. ‘That is what I want you to call me.' ‘Gebieter' is German for master, and it shows that from then on Wolfgang Priklopil intended to shed the persona of the seven-stone weakling who always got sand kicked in his face. He was to be in charge in a way that he had never been
in charge of his life. But Natascha never once bowed to his wish.

Criminal psychologist Thomas Mueller claims he was ‘a high-grade sadistic perpetrator, who wanted complete control over his prisoner. He wanted the power of life and death over her.' Despite the books of fairy stories he bought, the videos he would later let her watch, the clothes he chose, the toiletries, cutlery and food, he was staking his claim to superiority.

This was the moment he had waited for, had rehearsed in his mind a million times for the sexual frisson it gave him. Master! Ruler of a strange world with a population of two. It was a time to cherish and, while he always celebrated birthdays and Christmas with Natascha, in his mind the best anniversary of all would remain that of the day he acted, finally acted, and brought her into his world. In fact, made her his world.

Aside from nearly severing his finger in the steel trap door when he had first locked her inside the dungeon, this was his first mistake. Natascha was a wilful girl in freedom: if anything, in captivity, she became even more so. In spite of his size and the situation he had forced Natascha into—his complete control over her movements, her total severance from her family—if he had dreamed of a pliable beauty for his secret room he could not have been more wrong. In devoting himself to his Pygmalion-style task, to make her love him, he had embarked on the road to his own destruction. She was not the obedient wallflower of his sick dreams, as he would soon learn.

Naturally, there was terror instilled into her, particularly in those first hours and days. She fought the horrors that jostled for space in her mind, stricken with anxiety that she would run out of water or air or food. She feared that he might become involved in a road accident and not be able to come and rescue her; the precise theme of a story in a
Pan Book of Horror Stories
from the 1970s in which a hapless, cellar-bound female kidnap victim is reduced to a rat-eating, half-mad skeleton after her captor ends up in hospital for six months after a road crash.

‘When he was going out of the house I would always wonder: how long would he stay there—hours? The whole day? The thought that something could happen to him…an accident, a heart attack. Then I would never, ever get out. How long would the ventilator last? Longer than I would?'

Someone else in her situation might have said to themselves: ‘If it makes him feel good to be called master, then why not?' But not Natascha. She steadfastly refused to bend to his wishes.

Subservient she may have been: sugar, she would tell police later, always gets you more than vinegar, no matter what the situation. But beg? Not Natascha Kampusch's style.

Paying lip-service to his grandiose ideal of himself was a far cry from bending her will to him. That she refused to do from day one. That is why she would later say that everything that went on between them was voluntary. That is why she remains convinced he never
broke her. ‘I was always the stronger one,' she said. ‘I think he had a very bad guilty conscience, but massively tried to repress it and deny it. That shows in itself that he felt guilty.'

So they embarked together on this unnatural journey, one which would consume the rest of her childhood, her puberty and some of her young adult life before it ended. They forged the accommodation which fulfilled his fantasy and allowed Natascha her small victories which, ultimately, added up to a great many.

For the first six months he never let her out of her prison. She had books—the fairy stories, mostly, even though Natascha had long outgrown those before she fell into his clutches—but no TV or radio during that period. She ate, performed her bodily functions, washed, slept, cried, dreamed and grew stronger in her isolation. She saw him regularly but there have been few details from her of what they discussed. It is known that they read together and that she began to look forward to his company: when you have nothing and no one to talk to, say the experts, then ‘Stockholming' is bound to come into effect.

‘Stockholming', or Stockholm syndrome, is a psychological response sometimes seen in an abducted hostage, in which the hostage exhibits loyalty to the hostage-taker, in spite of the danger in which the hostage has been placed. Stockholm syndrome is also sometimes discussed in reference to other situations with similar tensions, such as battered person syndrome, child abuse cases, and bride kidnapping.

The syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at NorrmalFrautorg, Stockholm, Sweden in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from 23 to 28 August 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their victimisers, and even defended their captors after they were freed from their six-day ordeal. The term was coined by the criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police during the robbery, and referred to the syndrome in a news broadcast.

Yet what Natascha underwent, and the period she underwent it for, required a new term for a new phenomenon, and after it was all over it was called ‘Vienna syndrome'. Stockholm syndrome became a redundant phrase for a young woman who would, in many senses, start dictating the pattern of life at No. 60 Heinestrasse.

In her curious ‘Letter to the world', released after the maelstrom of publicity that engulfed her when she was finally free, she told of how that daily life developed:

Indeed, evidence that she was the ‘wrong person' came within the first few weeks of captivity. Priklopil had installed a bell in her chamber that she was to use to call him if she wanted anything. She used it so much and so often that, in a fit of frustration, he simply ripped the thing out. Another point to Natascha.

After that first dark night, in which she hardly slept at all, a kind of routine developed.

She explained that her captor regularly brought her books of her choice: ‘At the beginning I wanted the children's classics like Karl May,
Robinson Crusoe
and
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. I was reading and reading.' The Karl May books she particularly liked were about the Old West and the immense bond of friendship between a cowboy, Old Shatterhand, and Winnetou, an Indian brave. Like Natascha, Karl May had never travelled to America when he wrote the books. Like him, she would dream of the vast open spaces, trying to visualise them from her captivity.

Unlikely compadres, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou. A bit like Natascha and Priklopil.

 

For the first six months she was not allowed upstairs. She had to take showers in her dungeon, with a mineral water bottle with some holes in it. This was replaced by a hose with a kind of shower head attached to it. She was later allowed to take showers or baths upstairs, every week or every two weeks. She would be let out under the intense scrutiny of her captor. He would check security monitors, ensure that no one was approaching the house, and keep the blinds drawn and the shades down before leading her from the dungeon to the bathroom. He had installed special locks on the bathroom window, and there was no lock on the bathroom door, so he could burst in if he felt she was up to anything other than her ablutions.

As soon as she was given permission to move around the house, Priklopil started bringing her video tapes; for example, episodes from
Star Trek
, the 1980s television series
Magnum
and recorded Austrian TV programmes. Police later said he was ‘very economical' with his tapes. He had hundreds and hundreds of them, and every inch of usable tape was recorded upon, even if it was snippets of news items or advertisements after the main programme he had wanted to record was finished.

At some point he installed a TV and radio in the dungeon. ‘So I developed myself more and more,' said Natascha. ‘Because I was reading so much, I thought to myself, I could also start to write books, novels. I started writing in different notebooks, it wasn't only the diary.'

Were these books about escape, about love, about
imprisonment, a sort of pre-pubescent
Papillon?
Natascha has kept them as secret from the world as she did from Priklopil.

While she was committing her thoughts and dreams to paper, she said Priklopil respected her privacy. She recalled that he never came into her ‘room'—she referred to it variously after her escape as her room or her dungeon—without knocking.

The ‘master' was reduced to acting in the manner of a servant in a remarkably short time. It was evident, too, that harming Natascha was not on the agenda. If he wanted her to love him he was prepared to do anything, and that included performing to an agenda rapidly being dictated by her.

She went on: ‘My diary and everything I wrote belonged only to myself. He could never take a peek into it. He never got mixed up in my private things. But he intervened in a humiliating way when it came to random daily things, like the way I was supposed to wash my toothbrush and things like that. But my writings belonged to me alone. And he also never entered my room just like that, unannounced.'

A pattern was emerging which would put Natascha, in a bizarre, but strong position. She was coping better than many adults would. Major-General Gerhard Lang, the spokesman for Austrian police on the Natascha case, reported how he had himself locked up in the dungeon for five minutes in order to try and understand how she felt during her captivity: