by Allan Hall
The clearest summation of the failure of the investigation comes from one of its key players. Edelbacher was head of the Wiener Sicherheitsbüro at the time and only went into retirement the month before Natascha escaped. He said:
Nobody, not me nor any other policeman believed she could still be alive. This is a sensation. However, it is horrible that a girl could be held in our area for eight years while being unsuccessfully searched for by thousands of policemen. Questions, rightly, must be asked about where we went wrong. We thought about it so much and had so many theories, even that she had fallen into the hands of a child porn gang, everything. So many investigators gave their all, their heart’s blood towards getting her back.
So, in the eight and a half years of the Natascha case, two policemen saw their careers ruined. The investigation failed on many levels. No search was made of Priklopil’s home or van, either by officers alone or with dogs. No photograph was taken of him, no full profile drawn up. Police relied on a computer system that only charted known offenders, and the connection was seemingly never made between Christine’s bar, the kidnapper and Natascha’s family, all regulars there. It is not that the investigation lacked energy, but it did lack cohesiveness. It was misdirected, misspent and, ultimately, mismanaged.
6
Limited Freedom
The seasons passed. Natascha fretted about her elderly grandparents and aunts. As her skin grew white her mind stayed sharp. She thought of her growing nieces and remembered fondly the holidays in Hungary. Her vocabulary was improving by leaps and bounds, and she was aware of a world much broader than the 160-square-metre one she inhabited with Wolfi. The books, the TV documentaries, the radio programmes—like parchment soaking up spilled ink, Natascha drank in information.
She had not yet earned a pass into that world she had learned so much about. But on Natascha’s eighteenth birthday there was a celebration in the house. Police sources said the two dined together and there was a special cake afterwards which he bought from a confectioner’s some distance away from Heinestrasse. It’s understood that it was after the meal that he first informed her that she had ‘earned’ the right to leave the house with him. He began allowing her into the garden, taking her to stores, and for walks, but always reminding her that he was heavily armed.
When she had escaped and a stunned world tried to comprehend the ghastliness of her experience, public opinion, ever fickle, turned against her precisely because of those rare trips into the outside world. The girl in the cellar suddenly took on the new and unwanted persona of the ‘occasional prisoner’, with over thirty sightings of her and Priklopil around Austria that the police said they were following up.
According to sources close to Natascha, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, when Natascha was sixteen or seventeen Priklopil eased his regime a little. She spoke of him becoming a little ‘softer’ on her. Some are of the opinion that he believed he could marry her at some stage, that his grooming of her had paid dividends: that she had fallen in love with him. ‘The idea was obviously just a part of his deranged imagination,’ said one of her inner circle.
By the time she was seventeen, however, he noticed that things were not going the way he expected them to, and he also realised her personality was becoming ever stronger. She told her advisers that he found her ‘cheeky’ and ‘demanding’. The authors were told, despite the outings that were to come, that he hardened his regime during the final year together, that he hit her on occasion and sent her back to the dungeon when she was ‘disobedient’. One adviser said:
Things got worse when he, I assume, grasped the certainty of his inevitable failure. He was not able to mould this child into the woman he wanted her to be; his sick experiment was totally unsuccessful. She is also very aware of that and that is why she thinks that he, in a way, gave her a chance to escape.
She told us that he would never ever allow her to be behind him; he always needed to keep an eye on her. But in the last stages of their time together he did start turning his back to her, and on the day of her escape he stayed like that for several minutes. That is when she ran for it. It could well be that, consciously or unconsciously, he wanted her to escape, to get rid of her.
During the period of limited freedom, Priklopil forced Natascha to help him with his house refurbishments, taking her to Hornbach. There she smiled at an employee who came and addressed her, but Priklopil sent him away. The same happened in a supermarket, where Natascha was dragged away by her captor when she started winking at another customer.
The residents of Strasshof remember having seen Priklopil often at the Chicken Grill takeaway, where he enjoyed his meal while Natascha stayed inside his BMW. Even Priklopil’s nearest neighbour, Josef Jantschek, states that he saw Natascha ‘more and more often’ at the kidnapper’s side. When he asked whether she was Priklopil’s new girlfriend, Priklopil only replied that she was a girl from Yugoslavia working for him. Herr Jantschek said:
I saw the young lady in the garden quite often over the past year. They also drove off together in his car, and every time she waved at us in a friendly way. When I asked who the young lady was he claimed she was a ‘Yugoslav aide’ he had ‘borrowed’ from a colleague to do some housework for him.
We could not have known that it was the kidnapped Natascha Kampusch. When I asked him whether she was his new girlfriend, he only said no, she was doing work for him.
Natascha said she dared not try to raise the alarm with him: she truly believed Priklopil would murder the kindly old man without a second thought.
‘You have to imagine what it was like, there just wasn’t any time…he would have grabbed me, strangled me and killed Herr Jantschek. It was far too risky,’ she would later say.
Another neighbour, Frau Stefan, 61, said: ‘I saw him driving down our street with the girl twice recently. I also saw them walking down the main street once. My friend, another woman from the neighbourhood, also told me she saw them walking and holding hands.
‘She looked very young, but seemed in a good mood and positive. We assumed they were a couple, we thought he had finally got himself a girlfriend.’
Natascha said Priklopil was tense every time they went out. She would later comment on how careful he was, hardly moving from her side. Ever the paranoid, Priklopil had panic attacks if she was just three centimetres distant from him, Natascha claims:
He wanted me to always walk in front of him and never behind. So that he could always keep an eye on me. And I couldn’t go to anybody. He always threatened that he would do something to the people if I said anything to them. That he would kill them. And I couldn’t risk that.
There were many people that I tried to give signs to, but people don’t think of things like that. They don’t read newspapers and think, ‘Ah, this could be that girl that I read about…’
But generally there wasn’t enough time. If I had made just one sound he would have pulled me away…and if that had been too late then he would have killed that person or me.
It was worse with the nice ones. Like the nice assistants in Baumarkt [a DIY store]. One asked me, ‘Can I help you?’ And I just stood there in a panic, uptight, with my heart beating fast and hardly able to breathe. And I could hardly move. And I had to helplessly watch as he got rid of the assistant. And I just had the chance to smile at the assistant because he was so friendly. I mean, he didn’t know any better.
I always tried to smile a little bit like I did in the old photos, in case anybody recognised my picture. But sometimes, at the beginning, I couldn’t stand being around people. I wasn’t used to it, and many people are discontented. It was very uncomfortable.
Natascha also recalled the weird mind games Priklopil played with her before they went out: ‘Now and again, in his way, he gave me suggestions about how I could go behind his back and escape. This must have dawned on him within his paranoia. It was almost as if he wanted that some day I would be free. That things would go wrong, that somehow justice would win.’
The pair were frequently seen going shopping in supermarkets. Pensioner Hans Georg, 67, claims she winked at him during one of their shopping trips. He said: ‘I thought to myself, something is wrong with her. I wanted to come up to them and ask what was the matter, but her companion took her by the hand and pulled her away. He gave me an evil stare.’
Natascha was also seen with Priklopil in another DIY shop, buying construction material and paint that was probably used during the time she was helping him renovate the flat in Vienna’s 15th district that he wanted to rent out to immigrant Slavs in the area: the very flat he would be trying to lease to a prospective tenant who called on his mobile phone on the day of her escape.
As well as the outings, Natascha also won the right to choose the furniture of her cellar dungeon, so Priklopil took her to a furniture store and bought the things she selected. But the illusion of a normal life together would shatter at the most simple things. Priklopil was compulsively parsimonious. He would refuse to buy fresh bread until the last crust of the old one was eaten.
He even tried, sometimes successfully, to pass on his neurotic ideas to her. If she felt unwell he would deny her medicine and persuade her that they were all filled with ‘heavy metals’. According to her advisers, the suggestion was implanted in her fragile mind so deeply, that she considers it to this very day. She scrutinises, for example, the content details on food can labels with the intensity of a microbiologist.
There were also more relaxing moments during their forced union, when she would help him tend the garden, plant roses or water the small vegetable patch next to the always empty pool. It would be a chance for her to enjoy the light of day, feel the fresh breeze on her pale skin and hear birds singing in the trees around her unlikely prison.
Gerhard Lang, head of the strategy department for the Federal Criminal Office who became a spokesman for the case after she freed herself, said:
There were a lot of videos and books in Priklopil’s house. Many of the books were about the countryside, natural history and that sort of thing. The films were mostly the usual Hollywood movies you would see in any collection, the only thing I really remember is that Mr Bean was among them. There were also lots of recordings of news programmes that had obviously been edited to remove anything the kidnapper thought was unsuitable. She knew all about the introduction of the euro and was well informed about Austrian politics, for example. She got all that from the news programmes. Other things she taught herself from books. She learned how to knit from a book.
But reading, knitting and watching TV were interspersed with bouts of forced heavy labour, despite the fact that she was often weakened by what she said was the forced malnutrition that was part of her captor’s bid to break her will. When Priklopil was building his second garage for the van he used to snatch her off the street, he made her carry heavy buckets filled with earth, as well as bulky construction material.
Despite her claims that she had one shot, and one shot only, at breaking loose, the opportunities for escape seemed, superficially, many and varied. One woman from Graz, over 200 kilometres away from Vienna, told police that Priklopil came to her house to repair her computer and that Natascha was waiting downstairs in his BMW for about an hour. She reportedly came down to her, opened the car door and asked her if she would like to come upstairs for a coffee, but Natascha politely declined and remained in the car.
‘Our computer was broken,’ the unnamed woman said, ‘and a service man was sent from Lower Austria. When I saw the pictures of Herr Priklopil in the newspapers I recognised him straight away.’
She claims to have escorted Priklopil back to his car, where Natascha was sitting and waiting for him. The pensioner added, ‘I told him then: “You have let your girlfriend wait for quite a long time.” He just laughed and drove off.’
Ernst Holzapfel, the businessman who sold Priklopil a 24 per cent stake in his building renovation company for a little over 8,000 euros, also met her shortly before she took the decision to run.
Holzapfel, 42, was an interesting character to the police in the investigation. He was twice quizzed when the dungeon was discovered, the first time on the very day of Natascha’s escape. However, he was cleared of having anything to do with the abduction and subsequent imprisonment of Natascha. His memory of meeting her parallels those of more casual acquaintances or passers-by: simply because no one could think the unthinkable of such a bland and seemingly asexual character as his associate, he too was fooled by him when he was within inches of Natascha.
Holzapfel, who would ultimately have to identify the corpse of his friend and colleague, was also the last person to speak with him alive. He said in a rather strained press conference shortly after Priklopil’s death:
I first met Herr Priklopil during my time at Siemens in the eighties. We occasionally kept in touch after that. In the nineties he worked in my company and helped me out with the renovating and upgrading of real estate.
I have always thought that if one works with someone well over many years, one would get to know them well, too. That is why I am even more shocked about the events. I never noticed anything untoward throughout the whole time. Herr Priklopil behaved with me as usual. I would have never thought something as appalling as that would ever have been possible. I am bewildered over this appalling act. I would never have thought that he could have been a kidnapper.
I have never met any girlfriend of Herr Priklopil. Of course, we talked about his family and his mother and also about other trivial things, as is customary among good colleagues.
In recent years I occasionally visited his house in Strasshof, to pick up or bring back tools and machinery. Once I was in the garage and I saw the service pit from above. This was nothing unusual for me, because I knew that Herr Priklopil was often working on his cars.
As far as I know, he did all of the work in his house entirely on his own. He borrowed some tools and machinery from me for that purpose, like winches and scaffolding.
Herr Prikopil called me in mid July this year and said he wanted to borrow my trailer. I told him that there was no problem and that the trailer was in front of the event hall. He came an hour later, accompanied by a young woman. She was standing with Herr Priklopil in front of the door. Both of them waited for me to come out of the hall. As I opened the door, he introduced the young woman as his acquaintance, but never mentioned her name.
We shook hands and she greeted me politely. She made a cheerful, happy impression. I was very surprised, and could not determine whether she was his girlfriend or just a friend. Unfortunately, I had only a little time and had to say goodbye shortly afterwards. I obviously did not know at the time that it was Natascha Kampusch. Only after the police questioning I was shown a picture and I recognised the young woman.
Police later hinted that undercover officers were mingling with journalists in the crowd to try to detect any facial tics or body language that might have suggested he was being economical with the truth. Later they reported that he was in no way suspected of having anything to do with either the kidnap or subsequent imprisonment of Natascha.
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 a
bout 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.