Girl in the Cellar

by Allan Hall

  She agreed, but I could see she was uncomfortable. I gave them straight to police and an expert on child abuse, who immediately came back to say he was very concerned about them.

  But the police expert, Dr Max Friedrich, charged with leading the medical team looking after Natascha in the first weeks following her escape, said the pictures were not criminal.

  Dr Eva Wolfram-Ertl, another psychiatric expert trained to aid child victims of sexual abuse, also saw the photographs. She said, unequivocally, that they showed a child of around five years of age and that they were sexual in nature. Dr Wolfram-Ertl said that she and her colleagues all agreed that these pictures ‘left no room for interpretation.’ As she told the top Austrian magazine Profil in 1998: ‘Taking the pictures raises serious questions about sexual abuse. These poses, a small child wouldn’t adopt such poses on their own. This is not about the child, her well-being, her development or her needs, it is just about the needs of the grown-up who certainly animated the child into such postures.’

  According to Dr Wolfram-Ertl, children have their own eroticism and exhibitionistic phases in their development, but an act of abuse begins when adult persons with paedophile tendencies use children’s sexuality for the satisfaction of their own perverse desires.

  From a psychoanalyst’s point of view, Dr Wolfram-Ertl said at the time that she would like to eliminate any link between the photographs and the disappearance of Natascha. Dr Wolfram-Ertl wanted a thorough investigation into any men who may have met Natascha, for example friends of her mother or father. She also mentioned Natascha’s symptoms—wetting the bed, poor performance in school and the oscillating weight—as sometimes related to a sexualised atmosphere at home, which the photos suggested.

  When contacted for this book about the remarks that put her at odds with one of Austria’s most famous psychiatrists, Dr Wolfram-Ertl declined to comment further. Her interview at the time remains her sole analysis of the pictures.

  As for Professor Friedrich, it was his expert opinion that her disappearance could not be connected to paedophile pornography that had stopped the police investigation from following this line of inquiry.

  He was asked this question at a press conference shortly after Natascha was freed: ‘Is it right that you have written an expert opinion in 1998 concerning her and her family surroundings? That in 1998, there was the assumption that within her family environment there might be sexual abuse? Is it right that you were dealing with that assumption in that expert opinion? And to which conclusion did you come?’

  Professor Friedrich looked uncomfortable at the question and replied, ‘I was working in a team of criminologists who served me with information. And I could also get information on my own.’

  QUESTION: ‘Which conclusion did you draw then?’

  ANSWER: ‘I don’t know whether that report is still sealed by police. I will not give any comment. What is written in there were my thoughts.’

  Claudia was never charged with any crime over the pictures, if indeed she did take them, as her mother claims. When contacted by the authors for confirmation, the family declined to comment. Several detectives who worked on the Natascha case down the years expressed themselves dumbfounded that these pictures could ever be regarded as innocent.

  Max Edelbacher, 62, a former leader of the police squad that was assigned to hunt for her, who was interviewed for this book, classified Natascha as an abused child. He said:

  Ninety-five per cent of all missing children cases are solved within 24 hours, when this hadn’t happened in this case we called the mother in to interview.

  She was well known as a woman that liked men. From the start of the investigation details of her relationships were quickly known. The men around her, particularly those who met Natascha, ought to have been properly investigated. An example of how the case was not properly investigated was in the failure to do a search of Natascha’s home. It was a mistake not to follow this line more.

  I know about the photographs, and that they were shown to Max Friedrich, but I believe he made a mistake in suggesting that should not be investigated further. I also think it was a mistake that he was the person that had responsibility for her care when she was found. I did speak to Claudia and she confirmed she had taken the photographs.

  When Natascha was free and taken to the police station at Deutsch-Wagram they had her for maybe one or two hours, and I think this was the biggest mistake of all. This was the time when the matter could have been solved and the full truth known. Instead she was interviewed by policewomen in a station with officers who knew nothing about the case and had no idea what questions to ask. In addition the people who had taken over the case in 2002 had nothing to do with it before that date and were therefore not as well informed as the original team. If some of the original team had been given access to her in this crucial one or two hours we might have been able to clear up the mysteries that still surround this case. I’m not criticising officers in Burgenland but they do not have to deal with the level of crime in the capital city and if the Vienna officer from the original Natascha squad had been given access to her the situation might have been very different.

  As it is Natascha now has her story and she is sticking to it. I don’t know what went on in the conversations between her and Max Friedrich but I know that the police were not given proper access and her family were also barred. Instead she was counselled and the chance to get the full story was lost. She has been allowed to create her own version of events and there is no way anyone is going to get through that at any stage now. I think the best that we can hope for is that when she gets to at least 30 or older, some of the truth or the whole truth may finally come out, but now there is no chance.

  We know that Natascha was abused by her mother’s lover at the time, he used to shout at her and mistreated her, she used to tell others who we interviewed about it including her father. My wife was a teacher at the school and she told me that Natascha was definitely a strange child, clearly intelligent yet not performing as well as one might have expected and with a worldly wise attitude about her that was beyond her years.

  Wenzel Schimanek, 56, and his wife Lotte still live on the same landing in the same tower block as Brigitta Sirny and used to baby-sit little Natascha when Sirny was away—which they claim was very often. Herr Schimanek, a lorry driver of Czech origin, is a very good friend of Ludwig Koch and meets regularly with him, for a beer, and to chat about old times. He was impressed by the young Natascha, as he told the authors:

  Natascha was the most intelligent child I had ever seen. She was speaking all the time and entertained everyone around her. At the age of six she could have a real conversation with an adult person and always knew the answers to everything. We played cards with her when she was around five.

  She was also very funny. She was a very witty child and was telling jokes all the time and making everyone laugh. She really was an adorable little girl.

  She loved animals, she played with all the cats and dogs from the neighbourhood and had one cat of her own, Tashy, which still lives with Herr Koch. She loved watching TV, but was also often out and about playing with other children.

  She used to draw a lot. She liked drawing and that sort of thing—she was very creative.

  The Schimaneks used to go on weekend trips outside Vienna with Koch and Sirny and little Natascha, and they often went to neighbouring Hungary (but not to Koch’s holiday house). Herr Schimanek recalled one of these trips:

  Once while we were in Hungary, Luki [Koch’s nickname] told everyone he had a surprise for us. He got us on to this horse carriage and we went down this country road. He was just telling everyone about how interesting the surprise would be, when we came to a pool of water on the road in front of us. One of the horses tried to jump over it while the other simply stopped. That caused the axle of the carriage to break and the whole thing turned over.

  Luki reacted quickly and threw little Natascha on the grass, but the rest of us, including hi
m, flipped over with the carriage into the pool of muddy water. We all ended up soaked and very dirty, and little Natascha started to laugh, shouting: ‘This is your surprise, this is your surprise, what a funny surprise! Look at you!’ We all had to laugh, standing there soaked and dirty in that pool of mud.

  Schimanek moved on to say that two years before Natascha’s disappearance Frau Sirny simply stopped talking to them for no apparent reason and they never found out why to this day. ‘We were the best of neighbours,’ he said, ‘and friends too, but something happened and she stopped talking to us. We never found out why.’

  But in the Wars of the Roses atmosphere that began to dominate life at flat 18, Natascha increasingly found herself caught in the middle of a disintegrating relationship. Ironically, it was the skills that she would learn while vying for the affections of her parents that would stand her in good stead when captive.

  Neither Frau Sirny nor Natascha has said whether the slap she received across the face on the day she walked into captivity was an isolated incident: experts think not. Frau Sirny admitted she felt a little bad about it, but at the same time she said that children need ‘discipline’. Natascha herself has since dismissed it as little more than a ‘clip’ and not something she dwelled on.

  Frau Sirny never gave any indication that this was the only time it happened. A slap is a long away from systemised brutality, but there seemed to be an environment surrounding Natascha unconducive to healthy development: rowing parents, rows with her mother, her mother often absent for long periods in the evenings, her unhappiness with her mother’s choice of boyfriends. Natascha built up unseen walls, hidden defence mechanisms, within herself.

  Natascha took into that cellar survival skills which she had learned at home, and which would enable her not only to get through the ordeal, but to master it.

  ‘How you survive an extreme situation depends on what you know before you go into it,’ wrote one commentator: a small phrase among the millions that have been penned about her since the story broke. The writer went on: ‘Natascha survived because she already knew that people could be nasty; it wasn’t a shock to her. She didn’t have friends, she was lonely and unhappy, and by the time she was kidnapped she was already experienced in looking after herself.’

  Experts discussing child—mother relationships talk of three different types of mothering figure. There is the always-reliable, all-loving, all-forgiving type; the one who is always horrible, and one who is a little of both—with the horridness usually being a child’s take on discipline that he or she doesn’t care for.

  ‘That was the relationship Natascha had to form with her kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil. It appears that she had already had that kind of relationship with her parents, so she would have been skilled in making the most out of when he was nice, and dealing with him when he was nasty,’ wrote one UK clinical psychiatrist from reading media reports. ‘It would have been worse if she had had an entirely loving mother. Her kidnapper treated her as being special, and this gave her the loving, kindly attention that she had not always got from her parents.’

  Since her release many experts have commented that they don’t consider Natascha as a ‘people person’, and this gels with recollections of contemporaries who last saw her when she was in their class at school. ‘She looks even more in control now than she wanted to be back then,’ carped one. Control: it is the classic grail quested after by children who feel they have none.

  Brigitte Weber, a lady who entered into a relationship with Ludwig after his long liaison with Natascha’s mother ended, knew Natascha from several trips to Hungary and also had her to stay at her home in Vienna. She said Natascha had a strong bond with her eldest daughter and kept in touch via telephone with them after the relationship with Ludwig ended.

  Frau Weber recalled what happened when an eight-year-old Natascha spent yet another weekend with her while Brigitta Sirny holidayed in Paris. She expressed a desire to stay with Frau Weber for good rather than returning home. She said that Natascha always looked for physical contact while they were watching TV, cuddling up to her, always wanting to be held, to be close, often sitting on her lap ‘until my knees hurt’. She added: ‘She said she wasn’t allowed to do that with her mother because she was concerned that her clothes would wrinkle.’

  Furthermore, Natascha claimed that her mother prohibited her from answering the phone when she was home alone, out of fear that the caller might realise that Natascha was unsupervised at an early age. According to Frau Weber, Natascha asserted that she often pretended to be sleeping when her mother left the house. When alone, Natascha often felt scared and ‘received comfort from neighbours through the letterbox slit because Frau Sirny had forbidden her to open the door’.

  Anneliese Glaser, the neighbour with whom Natascha spent several hours during her last night of freedom, is also scathing about Frau Sirny’s qualities as a mother. It is unknown whether in the past huge rows engulfed these former friends, whether jealousies or hatreds drive her assessment of her. But her comments go to the heart of what others have said: Natascha was not a happy child. She told the authors:

  Frau Sirny always complained about Natascha, she always spoke of her as if she was a problem child, but that was not the case at all. But Natascha never spoke badly of her mum, although we knew that she had a hard time with her.

  Once Natascha stormed into the shop where I was working and hugged me and held me tightly for a minute. Then her mother came in, all red in the face and angry. When Natascha raised her head I saw that her eyes were all wet and her cheek was bright red—there was a hand imprint on it.

  Natascha often spoke of her dad and her grandma, she really enjoyed the time with them and loved going there. She had a great relationship with her dad and her grandma, but the mother couldn’t stand that.

  I was so happy when the news about her escape broke. It was one day before my birthday, and I went to Herr Koch to celebrate with him, we were all so happy.

  But I believe the whole truth has not been revealed yet.

  The psychiatric experts have not only had a field day with the mind of the man who took Natascha, but also with Natascha herself.

  Professor Johann Zapotoczky, head of the child and adolescent psychiatry clinic in Graz, said:

  She was abducted at the age of ten, and by then her personality was already formed. She already knew about the world. If she came from a happy and loving family background, as she said in the interview, then she would have had a healthy foundation, an emotional basis on which to build a strong personality.

  But even if the opposite was the case, she would have been ready to deal with her hardship in some way: if her previous circumstances were hard, that means she would have learned how to deal with difficult situations and how to interact with adults in that sense. In a way, if she had to deal with hardship before the abduction, it would mean she was prepared for what came after that.

  Dr Reinhard Haller, Austria’s most famous criminal psychiatrist, had this to say:

  From what we hear and read, she was used to suffering from an early age and she developed ways to cope with that suffering. It seems she was exposed to violent behaviour as a child already and she had developed strategies of dealing with situations like that. Those survival strategies were obviously of great use to her during the years of captivity. A person who was, so to speak, hardened, who knew how to deal with extreme situations and who had experienced violence in early childhood but learned to cope with it, is obviously more prepared for an ordeal of any sort than any other person.

  This was the life of Natascha Kampusch as seen through the eyes of those who knew her and those who would come to know her: the family, neighbours, friends and, finally, psychiatric experts tasked with reliving past trauma to build a happier future. Hers was not the best of worlds, although she had happy times in it. She overate, she wet the bed, her friends taunted her at school, she felt insecure.

  It is possible, though, that her—albeit short—l
ife experience had equipped her better than many children to survive the ordeal to come and that she would have been able to take from the trauma small day-to-day compensations, such as routine and attention, which made the horror bearable.

  2

  Wolfgang Priklopil: Portrait of a Monster?

  In a land of curtain twitchers and neighbourhood snoops, forever ringing up the taxman to inform on the jobless resident across the way with his new car, writing indignant, anonymous letters to authorities about infractions real and perceived against the state, Wolfgang Priklopil never even registered on the radar. The famous Churchillian put-down of a political rival could easily have applied to him: he was a modest man, with much to be modest about.

  Self-reliant, good with his hands and fastidious in his habits, he never drank, didn’t smoke, didn’t gamble and certainly had no time for women. Like some modern-day Norman Bates, the mad, mother-loving motel-keeper in Hitchcock’s classic thriller Psycho, there was, outwardly at least, nothing major to signal to an unsuspecting world the strange demons which gripped him. He just seemed a bit of a mummy’s boy, a nonentity, one whose dreams and fantasies were kept to himself. Many men have sexual fantasies, often dark and lurid ones. In the country where Freud was born, Priklopil could have satisfied his in cyberspace on any one of thousands of websites, or he could have paid for them to be acted out in the red-light zones of Vienna where money will buy most perversions with few questions asked or eyebrows raised.

  His name has Czech roots and comes from a verb, the infinitive of which, ‘pøiklopit’, means ‘to cover something’. ‘Pøiklopil’ is the past form of the verb, meaning that someone covered something.