Girl in the Cellar

by Allan Hall

  Being infantile as he was, he was not able to become a father in the normal way at the age of 34, so he had chosen to abduct a child and mould it according to his own wishes. Of course he also had a sadistic side and wanted to entirely dominate her, otherwise he would not have chosen a ten-year-old child.

  There is no doubt he was bringing her up according to what he thought was right, while he underwent a certain process of maturing himself, so it could be said that they have grown together. But as she developed with time she became stronger and stronger and the balance of power in the relationship gradually shifted. At the end she probably became the one to make the decisions and she completed her transformation from a helpless child victim to a strong, grown-up woman who was in control. Once that happened, she was able to make a healthy decision and end the unhealthy relationship by running away.

  One has to understand that the relationship between the two was very complex. At first she was confined physically, then psychologically, and at the end the strings became emotional. To her he was many things: a father, a brother, a friend and most probably a lover. The situation can to a certain extent be compared to that of fathers who abuse their own children: they also go shopping, out for walks, take holidays together and lead a seemingly normal life. The children are also not crying for help directly because they are tied with emotional strings that force them to keep silent.

  Priklopil was very narcissistic, egocentric and very paranoid, which is what drove him to be meticulous in everything he did. He probably did not have any problem justifying his actions to himself and his victim. People like that are known to be able to rationalise their actions easily, they easily find their reasons in other people or sometimes blame the world for being unjust and so on.

  His outward behaviour has been trained, that’s why people always thought of him as ‘nice’, but not as emotionally hearty. He built up a big inferiority complex and at the same time established a great craving for relationship and family. What led him to become a kidnapper? I think it’s because of genetic factors, but later on something must have gone wrong in his life. That could have been insulting comments when he had his first sexual contacts. Maybe it had been comments from his parents that he didn’t like. He doubted himself, but at the same time there were sound relationships within his family. Apparently he was a good planner, and he was intelligent.

  Natascha must have had something that appealed to him, so-called ‘key stimuli’. That may have been her charisma, her body, the colour of her hair. I think that he chose a child who corresponded the most to his infantile nature. I can imagine that he wanted to lead her across to normality, quasi give her a new identity. He had wanted to mould and change her, until he may have thought that he could safely integrate her (and himself) into the outer world. He might have introduced her as ‘my wife from Russia’ or something like that, given time.

  I don’t think he would have killed her. But I can very well imagine some kind of ‘advanced suicide’, meaning that he would have dragged her into death together with himself when confronted with a hopeless and forlorn situation.

  Georgine Malik, 62, who still lives just around the corner from Priklopil’s house, declared herself to have been ‘as friendly as it got’ with the nobody whose name would become a byword for evil.

  I knew him ever since he was a little boy [she said], and I also knew his mother well. They were good neighbours, very nice people, both of them. He was always working around the house and took care that his garden was tidy. He was a very tidy man, and he even helped the neighbours and cleared the snow off for them in winter. I often talked to his mum, she had a hard time after her husband Karl died of cancer in the eighties. She went to his grave every weekend. She was a bit unhappy about the fact that her son Wolfgang inherited most of her husband’s assets. She also used to tell me how she was worried that Wolfgang would never marry, and that he was only interested in making lots of money and never dated any girls.

  I once asked him directly if he ever planned to marry, because he was quite a good-looking man, and he replied that once he earned enough money he would move somewhere nice abroad and find a nice woman for himself there. That was his aim all the way, to make lots of money and then move abroad. But he never said where he would like to go to.

  I remember he was very good with his hands, he was capable of building or fixing anything. He was very technical. He told me everything in his house was automatic, the blinds, the garage doors and all that. But perhaps gadgets took over from his contact with the real world. I never saw him with any friends, male or female, and I have certainly never heard of anyone seeing him in female company. Some people said that he could be homosexual, but I think that was just gossip. He was a nice person, very sweet.

  In fact to his immediate neighbours the house had a nickname. When Priklopil eventually came to live there alone, he peppered the walls with security gadgets, including a high-tech video surveillance system, which Priklopil told neighbours were there to ‘keep out burglars’. He told them never to pop round for a visit unannounced because he had ‘built a number of surprises into my house and we don’t want somebody innocent to get fried’. As a result, according to 66-year-old pensioners Josef and Leopoldine Jantschek who lived next door, the house was known locally as the ‘Fort Knox of the Heinestrasse’. Josef Jantschek said:

  I know it sounds awful now, but we had a good relationship with Wolfgang. How could we know something so terrible was going on? We used to stand at the fence with him for hours talking about God and the world. But Priklopil would act strangely sometimes, particularly when his mother came to visit. He would pace around the garden staring at the grass and looking in the bushes and checking every window, which he told us was just him ‘cleaning up and making everything perfect.’ It seems likely now he was checking that there was no evidence of his secret captive.

  The mayor in Strasshof, Herbert Farthofer, was like the neighbours; he said he heard nothing to make him think there was a monster in the midst of the community, and added, ‘He was not one of our problem residents. While we twice sent someone to change the water meter, they never noticed anything. Roland Paschinger, spokesman for the local authority, said, ‘According to our records, we never noticed anything unusual.’

  Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher and historian who first coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’—about SS leader Adolf Eichmann when he was on trial in Jerusalem for his unparalleled crimes, crimes which included holding 21,000 Hungarian Jews as hostages in a concentration camp in Strasshof that was just a few minutes’ walk from Heinestrasse—could so easily have applied it to Wolfgang Priklopil.

  Most of the things he did, his individuality, certainly marked him out as a one-off—yet everything about him screamed sad, not bad. And nothing emitted a signal about the predator he was to become. He was a banal figure.

  Because of this hiding-in-plain-sight demeanour, Priklopil was ultimately able to pull off that which all criminals dream about: the perfect crime.

  Paschinger said Priklopil had once called the council in a ‘furious rage’ because the hedge around his house had been cut back too much, ‘making it easier to see into the garden’. He went on: ‘No one thought at the time—why? He was not someone who stood out, and you would never have imagined the truth. This sort of thing only happens in America, we thought. But we forgot a simple truth here—that evil people don’t look evil.’

  Another neighbour, Wilhelm Jaderka, said, ‘We never noticed him. He never turned up in the local beer garden.’ Yet another, Franz Zabel, offered up: ‘This community is not a village any more. Many people are moving, many want nothing to do with anyone else. That is why people don’t get noticed, or get noticed too late.’

  At Rugierstrasse 30, where he used to live and where his mother still lives, until she was forced to go into hiding by the tumultuous events of August 2006, neighbour Charlotte Strack remembered Wolfgang as a timid creature who was afraid of her dogs.

&nbs
p; He had a terrible fear of my dogs Amor and Nando, even though everyone here in this block of flats knows that they would never harm anyone. If I happened to come across him when I had the dogs, he would press himself flat against the wall to get as far away from them as possible and turn white in the face. He would demand that I take the dogs away.

  When he moved away permanently to Strasshof he visited his mother once a week. Well, I think it was more pestered than visited. Through the ceiling I could hear how he screamed and ordered her about. He treated her like a slave.

  Ernst Winter, the communications technician working at electronics giant Siemens who went through the company’s training programme together with Priklopil between 1977 and 1981, also recalled the ‘weirdness’ that marked his friend out as different—his lack of interest in girls. ‘He simply never, ever spoke about girls, which was unusual for us boys at the time. Weird. The only passion he had that I knew about was cars. He started racing in rallies at the age of seventeen. I think that was even before he got his driving licence.’

  Winter also recalled: ‘He was always quiet and liked to remain in the background. We all wanted to be the fastest to finish a job, but he would just take his time. He was very thorough and precise.’

  During his time at Siemens, in 1981, Priklopil was absent for eight months’ compulsory military service. Austrian data protection laws forbid the military from giving out any detailed information, but it is confirmed that he served at the Maria Theresien barracks in Vienna, a wartime SS barracks, using his skills in electronics as an intelligence communications specialist. He asked for assignment to a radio and reconnaissance battalion, but was never on manoeuvres or away for long periods. He was only confined to barracks for the first six weeks of his service, and neighbours remember that he came home most weekends, usually clutching a bag of washing for Waltraud to do for him. After the first six weeks he lived back at home for the remaining six and a half months of his compulsory service.

  The relationship with his father was, by all accounts, an uneasy one. A man who liked sports and the clubby, manly chumminess of the local pub, Karl Priklopil found his son’s solitary pursuits strange. Given the rumours that would later swirl around him when he lived alone with his mother, that he was either a latent or a practising homosexual, it is not hard to envisage the kind of arguments that might have ensued between a straight, conservative father and a son whom he somehow perceived as being deviant.

  Deviant he certainly was, but not in the way that Karl suspected.

  Franz Trnka, 49, who worked with Priklopil on the Austrian telephone network for the electronics company Kapsch in Vienna between 1983 and 1991—Priklopil was made redundant from Siemens through downsizing—provided an unusual perspective. Unlike most of Priklopil’s acquaintances, who depicted him as the shy, socially awkward loner, Trnka regarded him as a ‘rude show-off’, ill-equipped to face life’s difficulties as they presented themselves. He also claimed that the kidnapper had inferiority complexes regarding women.

  During the lunch break on Mondays the men would get together and talk about women, but Priklopil would always leave at that moment, so as not to have to hear anything on the subject. It was difficult to have a normal conversation about current affairs with him.

  He had very limited interests: his BMW and its subwoofer stereo system, the electronic alarm systems he built in his parents’ house and his model trains.

  He could talk for hours to another colleague who also drove a BMW. To other people he made it clear that they were not worth anything to him, because they did not fit in with his schedule and interests. Whenever he could, he tried to humiliate someone in order to promote himself in some way.

  He had an especially bad relationship with women. He perceived them as inferior and they were not worth anything to him. He would proudly tell us how he stopped women drivers from turning towards the exit on the motorway by blocking them with his car on purpose.

  Experts think this quote goes to the heart of his compulsion to control. As one journalist wrote: ‘The point was that they were female. They were driving—but he was in the driving seat.’

  Trnka went on: ‘He also wanted to show off all the time. He made sure everyone knew his family had money. But his father forced him to get a job—I think that was the only reason he was working at the time. He couldn’t wait for his father to die, so he could inherit his money. He did not have a particularly good relationship with him.’

  Karl Priklopil’s father Oskar had been just as meticulous, in many respects, as his grandson. And it was his planning for a nuclear war that gave Wolfgang a ready-built room for his future ‘dungeon’.

  In 1950s Austria, a country outside NATO, families received grants if they chose to build atomic shelters in their homes. Perhaps because he had enough money, perhaps because he could not be bothered to wrestle with the tedious, energy-draining bureaucracy of the sort his country is infamous for, Oskar made no requests for cash from the state; nor did he apply for planning permission from the local authority when he set about constructing a doomsday sanctuary. Such independence from the state would be perfect for his grandson later on.

  No permission, no records—it never existed. Ideal for what Priklopil Jnr would later do with the space.

  The illicit shelter was later transformed into a utility room by his dad, and as a teenager Wolfgang helped out with the plastering and the drainage gulley. ‘The bunker’, as he would call it, would be used in turn as a storeroom, a workroom, a leisure room where his train set was stored and, ultimately, as a prison for a terrified child.

  Elisabeth Brainin, another psychoanalyst—Wolfgang Priklopil’s legacy to the world will be to keep the textbooks on the dark side of human nature churning out for decades to come—saw pictures of what the world has dubbed his dungeon shortly after Natascha was free. She commented: ‘The whole things reminds me of extreme patriarchal societies, where ten- or eleven-year-olds get married by force to much older men. These men educate and finally make a woman out of them. It is possible that this man wanted to forge a woman exactly the shape he wanted her to be.’

  It was in 1986 that Wolfgang’s father Karl died of bowel cancer. Although workmates have spoken of the troubles that existed between father and son, the death seemed to affect him deeply. Experts say it is often the case for psychopaths that, when the object of their hatred or resentment is removed, they experience a kind of mourning. Wolfgang lived on in the Strasshof house alone after the death, but his mother chose to return to the council flat from where they had moved over a decade earlier: curiously, it had never been returned to the authorities for another family to live in. His mother began to play an even bigger role in his life.

  He would return home from work at the Kapsch company, not to the Strasshof house, but to the flat, where his mother would prepare him Wiener schnitzels and potato salad, noodles with cream sauce or beef hotpot. He would later tell people that they sat together watching TV—quiz shows and old westerns were favourites—or leafing through photograph albums that chronicled the history of the Priklopil family. After a short while he moved in with her full time and only returned to Strasshof at weekends to check on the house.

  There is a particular feature of the flat that is worth noting: it was very near to the school that would later be attended by a little girl called Natascha Kampusch.

  Something changed in him in 1991, when, aged nearly thirty, he suddenly wanted to live alone. The shy teenager who did not like to be away from his family during his army service—who, in fact, had never lived alone except for brief periods during that time—chose to pack up and move back to No. 60 Heinestrasse. Here he would grow tomato plants in the dried-out family swimming pool, tune up the motors of his beloved cars and fine-tune the plans for the very, very special space beneath the garage floor.

  While he fixated on one demonic plan, his mother remained the singular emotional prop in an otherwise lonely life, leaving the council flat most Fridays with bags of pre-co
oked food labelled Monday to Friday which she had frozen so Wolfgang would ‘eat properly’ during the week. He also acquired two cats that he came to dote on. Christa Stefan, a lifelong friend of Waltraud, whose home in Strasshof faces Priklopil’s, said: ‘Waltraud came to stay with him here every weekend. She did all his cooking and housework, and either brought or made meals to be frozen for the entire week. She always said: “Wolfgang is my everything”.’

  Police psychologist Manfred Krampl believes that early on in the 1990s the obsession to kidnap a child was already crystallising in his mind:

  Nobody could have anticipated at this stage, that Priklopil surreptitiously developed a rapidly growing need to have someone with whom he could communicate. Someone who is nearby all the time—a little girl he could possess. At first Priklopil ran through this scenario—or his vision of this scenario—in his mind. Then he ‘decorated’ it in daydreams. By kidnapping the little girl Priklopil would create some kind of parallel world, his very own insular realm, undetected and unknown by everyone else. A realm in which he rules everything.

  And I think it all came down to a single thing—that he had a severe deficit in the ability to form normal human relationships.

  Even when plotting to bring to life the kidnap fantasy, Priklopil still indulged in the cruelties he enjoyed from childhood. In 1992 a retired policeman, Franz Hafergut, out walking in the neighbourhood with a weather eye on property and people, reported him to his still-serving colleagues when he saw him eating cake and shooting birds, this time not with the DIY gun he assembled at school but with a .22 calibre air pistol he had bought for £60. He received a warning not to do it again. Otherwise, apart from one or two motoring offences, he was never in trouble with the law again.

  With his neighbours it was a different story. Many remember him as odd at best, often downright rude, even deeply strange. Peter Drkosch, 68, who lived nearby, had known him since he was a boy. He and his wife Hedi owned an allotment with a small summer-house that they stayed in often just opposite 60 Heinestrasse. The proximity irritated and upset Priklopil, as Drkosch recalled: