by Allan Hall
In August of 1998 body parts found in Croatia caused a stir in Vienna when Interpol faxed the task force that the dismembered remains were those of a girl aged between ten and fourteen. The parents braced themselves for the worst, but the body was declared not to be that of Natascha within hours of paperwork and DNA samples being sent to Zagreb.
In October the search went into the realms of the paranormal. Chief Inspector Helmut Gross turned out a large contingent of officers to search a Second World War era ammunition depot where he was told by a psychic that Natascha was being held. Neither a living or a dead Natascha was discovered.
In December 1998 the task force was able to access a new computer system called VICLAS—the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System—which recorded and compared behavioural patterns of offenders, including sex offenders. The programme also offered up probability theories on how likely it was that several crimes had been committed by the same offender. ‘In the past, we would have needed weeks—even months—for this work,’ said Thomas Mueller, head of the police psychological department. Mueller had worked on the cases of Franz Fuchs, the mad bomber, and Jack Unterweger, the serial killer, and was formerly head of the criminal psychology department of the SB—which consisted only of himself. His book Beast Man was Austria’s bestselling book in 2004. The computer system was hailed as a breakthrough for detectives, but it had one flaw—it could only work if the perpetrator was in the system.
Wolfgang Priklopil had only ever had a speeding ticket and a telling-off for killing a sparrow. He was not on the radar.
Christmas came and went. Natascha’s parents bought presents for her, wrapped them up and placed them under a tree in her home. The ceremony was a necessity for their psychological stability, a statement that they believed she was alive, not dead. This faith, in the face of all the signs that she was, probably, long dead, kept them sane.
Now the hunt was truly about to depart from this world to enter the next. Psychics who triggered one search would now play a far more prominent part in the hunt.
‘We have had fortune-tellers contact us several times over the past years,’ said SB chief Edelbacher, ‘but never quite as many as now.’ From the thousand-plus tips the Natascha task force had received about her disappearance, every tenth one came from what he termed the ‘fourth dimension’.
On an official level police said they were none to happy with the deluge of information from Ouija board shufflers, soothsayers and crystal fondlers. Unofficially, said Edelbacher, ‘In the Natascha case we do not want to leave anything untried. After all, we’ve all got kids of our own.’
Thus it was that three officers of the narcotics squad were assigned to deal specifically with psychic sightings of Natascha Kampusch in their spare time. They were known as ‘Department X-Files’ among colleagues in the Vienna force.
Of the dozens of psychics who were either consulted by family or volunteered their services, one stands out. Clairvoyant Haller was asked to take part in a discussion about the case by the Austrian state broadcaster ORF, nearly a year after Natascha went missing. Haller had first become involved when she was contacted by police, but has refused to name the high-ranking officer who she alleges turned up at her home for advice.
The prediction she gave on television was the same one which she had given to the police and which turned out to be uncannily accurate. She told listeners how she could detect the ‘energy of Natascha in the north-east of Vienna, past the pond for bathing in Hirschstetten’—which lay between where Natascha was kidnapped and where she was imprisoned in the cellar.
She also saw railroad tracks: Priklopil’s home was next to one of Vienna’s largest railway depots. She also spoke about a bar that the kidnapper used to frequent. She described it as a simple, one-storey, typical bar in the suburbs with loose chippings in the front. At the door there is one step and an old wooden floor, and ‘something’ inside was green—she was not sure if it was the door or the chairs.
Christine’s bar, where Priklopil is suspected of first seeing Natascha, is also a simple one-storey affair in the style of dozens of similar bars across the city, with stone chips outside and a single step leading inside, but it is yellow not green.
Haller added: ‘I saw the kidnapper as a slim man, around 40 years old.’ The clairvoyant, now aged 61, still appears regularly on Austrian television and radio and in Austrian newspaper columns, and has worked as a clairvoyant for 40 years. That she foresaw that Natascha was located exactly where she was eventually found has not been commented on by police, who will also not confirm her claims that a senior member of the Natascha task force had approached the clairvoyant for help. It is therefore not known if he ever tried to match up the advice with files that might have shown Priklopil as a suspect from earlier in the investigation.
As well as mediums, cranks also appeared as the case captured the popular imagination. A former judge and Austrian presidential candidate, Martin Wabl, started his own investigation into the case and subsequently voiced allegations that the mother was involved in the disappearance of her daughter. But his claims lost their credibility when his belief became an obsession and Frau Sirny succesfully sued him for slander. He was eventually arrested for pretending to be a police officer in a bid to gather evidence to prove his case.
In 1999, their differences buried, the parents appealed for sponsors to come forward to contribute to a million-schilling fund—nearly 50,000 UK pounds—as a reward for people with information about Natascha’s whereabouts. But the world, in its inevitable way, was moving on. Natascha remained an aura, a presence in the city and in the consciences of millions, but in time other figures—Joerg Haider, the late Princess Diana—became the front-page stories and in the lead items of the news shows.
The police admitted they were no nearer a solution than when the girl vanished a year before. ‘We have not made any progress in this case compared to one year ago,’ said Scherz on the first anniversary of Natascha’s disappearance.
Another criticism of the police investigation was that no complete profile of a likely kidnapper was ever drawn up. Profiling, as developed in the FBI labs at Quantico in Virginia, is now used routinely by police forces all over the world. Psychiatric ‘sketches’ of the kind of man who might have taken her were attempted, but police sources told the authors that they were highly unsatisfactory.
The motives of sex offenders are very varied. Experts say they can be broken down into five categories—sex, power, anger, control and fear, in no particular order of prevalence. If a full profile of Priklopil had been drawn up it would have painted a picture of a loner, a man with a lot of time on his hands, a man who may have been an AMAC—a male abused as a child—and a man who had base views on women, who was probably a virgin, who needed to control.
And who owned a white van. If a full profile had been married to the white-van-man information, then it is a probability that the van owners who were visited in Austria would have been looked at again and those fitting the bill of the profile would have been revisited.
It never happened.
One year on from the kidnapping, the Austrian police released this statement:
We followed up 2,000 witness accounts, looked closely at 150 people, used 500 police officers, 200 gendarmes and 13 search dogs on various occasions, as well as the officers of the Danube patrol, and deployed search helicopters that spent a total of 150 hours in the air. We have arrived at our end. The possibility that Natascha was the victim of a crime is high. But we cannot rule out that she is still alive. Everything is possible.
The following month, after naked photos of a girl who had been missing for three years in Germany turned up on the Internet, investigators began probing the child pornography underbelly in Vienna. The city of Habsburg-ian elegance has its own seamy side of forced child prostitution and predators, warped souls preying on innocence. By the West Bahnhof rail station, and near the Prater park where the big wheel draws tourists, prostitution is rampant.
T
he homes of known paedophiles were raided, sickening images traded between criminals across Europe downloaded from their computers. Officers spent days comparing all images with those of Natascha. Several arrests were made. None of them had to do with Natascha.
Police thought that Natascha’s kidnapper might be stealing children to order after a man tried twice in two weeks to snatch children in a Viennese suburb into his VW van. On the second occasion a girl bit him on the hand. The man was never caught.
One problem confronting investigators on the team was that every sexual assault, attempted abduction or abuse had to be scrutinised for links to Natascha. It meant weary and wasted hours of checks and crosschecks around the country. All the while Priklopil was less than 25 kilometres from the police HQ where his crime continued to baffle all those hunting him.
At one time a child molester was arrested in Lower Austria. It caused great excitement among the Natascha team, not least because a year before he was registered as living on the same street as her. He had a long record of child molestation, he was a loner, and he was a paedophile of the worst kind. He was also in prison for sex crimes on the day she was taken.
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 unde
r 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.