Girl in the Cellar

by Allan Hall

  Even love?

  She had tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to catch the eyes of strangers in stores, to communicate who she was with pleading looks and a smile which she tried to make as similar to that in her schoolgirl photo as it was possible to do, on numerous occasions. She had cried in frustration, dreamed of her parents, written down her deepest feelings in exercise books she managed to keep secret from him—and now, on this day, at 12.53 p.m. Central European Time, all the gods were smiling on her. Wolfgang Priklopil decided it was a good day to clean his car.

  Rather, he thought it was a good day to let his prized possession clean it for him. No stress for him, and a breath of fresh air for her in the big outside. What could be better?

  It was time for Natascha Kampusch to grow up and get out.

  The weather was good. Natascha was given his vacuum cleaner and told, as always, that he would be ‘right beside you’. As if she needed reminding. He was an aura, omnipresent, ready to pounce if his illusion of keeping this perfect woman-child should ever be endangered.

  In the end the techno-freak was brought down by that most indispensable of personal technological items of the twenty-first century—the mobile telephone.

  He took a call as Natascha did what she was instructed to do—first clean the driver’s side of his beloved BMW before moving on to the passenger cockpit and finally the back seat. On the line was a man enquiring about renting the apartment in the Hallergasse that Priklopil had renovated with Natascha’s help.

  The noise of the vacuum cleaner coupled with the poor reception just where he was standing made Priklopil drop his guard momentarily. He was charming on the phone to the young Austrian IT technician who was asking about the property, when it would be ready and how much he wanted to rent it for.

  Unbeknown to the caller, he had released a young woman from captivity. A banal enquiry to a banal man broke the chains that bound her for over eight long years.

  Wolfgang K’s boss was later called back by police to be told how his employee’s innocent enquiry about somewhere to live had ended the nightmare for Natascha, her family and for everyone who cared for them. He in turn told Wolfgang how his simple telephone call had brought the tragedy to closure. Herr K—his full name has not been revealed by police at his request—is still flabbergasted to think of his role in history:

  I was looking for a flat to rent. I found this ad on the Internet about the flat in the Hallergasse in Vienna’s Rudolfsheim district.

  It took quite a while before Herr Priklopil answered the phone. But I actually thought that I was speaking to Herr Holzapfel. I remember that conversation clearly, although I had spoken to many people on that day, because he was one of the very few that were polite to me. And he sounded a very serious man.

  He finished the conversation in a very normal way and we agreed to meet on Friday evening. He was not at all nervous or excited in any way. The conversation can’t have lasted for more than a few minutes.

  I am happy to have helped her, but I am sure that she would have been escaping that tyranny sooner or later. I think she should be left in peace. I hope she can find a normal life. I don’t want to be over-estimated, I’m just a small cog in her story.

  Far from it. He was a Ferris wheel in the saga, which just happened to stop at the right place at the right time.

  Still barely able to explain it when she appeared on TV just fourteen days later in one of the most watched programmes ever screened in Austria, she admitted: ‘I just knew that if not then, then maybe never. I looked over at him. He had his back to me. Just moments before then I had told him that I couldn’t live any more like that. That I would try to escape. And well, I thought, if not now…’

  Yet at the same time as she was closing the door on his life, it was nonetheless a shared life, one that had its highlights, tenderness, tears, laughter: the full spectrum of human emotions divided into 74,304 hours that were far from all bad. By her own admission Priklopil had saved her from drugs, from tobacco, from bad people, from wrong decisions. However warped her rationale, there would always be—will always be—a place in her heart and her head for the man she ‘sat in the same boat with’ on this voyage through life.

  Even in the nano-seconds that it took her brain receptors to kick in, to tell her to run like the devil if she was ever going to break free, Natascha’s caring side also demanded to be heard:

  I was also really worried about ruining the perceptions of his mother, his close friends and his neighbours. And of destroying them. I mean, to them he was a nice, helpful man. Always friendly and always correct. I didn’t want to do it to his mum, to show her the other side of her son. He had always told me what a good relationship they had. That she loved him and that he liked her.

  I feel really very sorry for Frau Priklopil. That her perceptions of her son have been destroyed. And that she lost all faith on that day. Her belief in her son. And her son himself.

  And on this day Herr Priklopil made me…well, I was fully conscious of it because I was the one who fled, I knew that I had sentenced him to death because he had always threatened to commit suicide. But on this day he turned me, as well as the man who drove him to the train station and the train driver, into murderers.

  But the momentous decision had come and she ran. With the electric thrumming of the vacuum cleaner in the background and with his back turned to her, she took the one chance she had and bolted. Racing through her mind were the previous, failed attempts at freeing herself.

  ‘Once I wanted to jump out of the moving car on to the road, but he held me tight and accelerated so fast I was thrown against the door,’ she would later say. This time she would make certain he was not able to get to her.

  It took minutes for her to scramble over fences, across neighbours’ gardens and to the door of an elderly lady who treated her with bemusement and suspicion. Undernourished and a sickly colour she may have been, but Natascha was determined. She feared that if Priklopil came after her now, the old lady she was pleading with through an open window to call the police would be dead. This is how she recalled her flight:

  For me it was like an eternity, but in reality it was 10 or 12 minutes. I simply ran into the allotment area, I jumped over many fences, in a panic I ran in a circle, to see if there were any people anywhere. First I rang on the doorbell of this house, but for some reason that didn’t work, then I saw there was something happening in the kitchen.

  I had to be very clear and explicit that this was an emergency. As taken aback as this woman was, she would not have reacted straight away. She kept saying, ‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand.’ Again and again she said that. ‘I don’t understand all this.’

  She didn’t let me in. For a split second that amazed me. But to let a complete stranger into your apartment—you have to also understand this woman, in that little house with a sick husband.

  The old lady, whose full name was withheld from the media by police, later gave a statement saying: ‘She was just suddenly standing in front of my kitchen window. Panicking, white in the face and shaking. She asked me if I had any old newspapers from 1998, but I didn’t find out who she was until the police came.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about her all night. She had no childhood and had to become a young woman all on her own.’

  As Natascha waited, she feared that Priklopil could come at any moment.

  I couldn’t allow myself to even hide behind a bush. I was afraid that the criminal would kill this woman, or me, or both of us.

  That’s what I said. That he could kill us. The woman was still really worried and didn’t want me to step on her tiny piece of lawn. I was in shock. What I really didn’t want was for a local police car from the nearby Gänserndorf office to come. I wanted straight away to talk to the person in charge of the ‘Natascha Kampusch Case’.

  Two policemen came. I said that I had been kidna—well, that I ran away and that I had been kept imprisoned for eight years.

  Was there a significanc
e in the fact that she choked off the word kidnapped mid-sentence? ‘Kidna—’ It is incomplete, like the refusal to say where the white van driver stopped en route after he had chosen her.

  Later, the full complexity of the relationship she shared with Priklopil would confuse people who had thought the story was a simple morality tale of good, eventually, winning out over evil.

  The police, when they arrived, were indeed of the local variety sort, more used to dealing with stolen cars than stolen children. Natascha’s account continued:

  They asked me what my name was and when I was born and where and which address and so on. I told them all that. Naturally that wasn’t all that great. They were a bit perplexed and repeated my name and they shook their heads and thought a bit and said: ‘That doesn’t mean anything to me, that name.’

  Then they repeated the information I gave them into their radios. I then basically insisted that they run with me to their car. I’m not simply walking through this garden to the car, I told them.

  Whatever else the years of solitude with Priklopil had done to her, they had imbued Natascha Kampusch with a finely tuned sense of her impending self-worth as a media star. In those first moments of safety and freedom she asked only for a blanket to put over her head. ‘As soon as I was in the police car I demanded a blanket so that no one could see my face, so that no one could take a picture of me. I thought maybe an irritated neighbour might take a photograph of me over the garden fence and then later sell the picture,’ she said. ‘I can, as a matter of principle, always react quickly to situations. I knew that I couldn’t allow myself to make any mistakes.’

  As she was driven to the local police station, the last minutes of Wolfgang Priklopil’s life were ebbing away.

  In the car, enunciating in her high German speech learned from years listening to the radio, she told the officers where she had been held and who the captor was. A massive police operation swung into action. They had failed Natascha down the years, causing her through blunder and inefficiency to lose her young life. They would not fail her now, they promised. But they did—at least in her eyes.

  Within minutes, hundreds of officers had been mobilised. Traffic in the north-eastern part of the capital was paralysed, with literally dozens of police cars sealing off roads while a helicopter hovered in the region of the Strasshof house. All vital traffic arteries were blocked, as well as every approach to the borders, creating mile-long lines of cars in streets like the Wagramer Strasse and the S2 in the city and on motorways like the A23. Frontier police were issued with the registration numbers of Priklopil’s vehicles.

  Locked gun cabinets in police stations were opened, automatic weapons with extra ammunition clips distributed. The specially trained police commando units were set loose. Priklopil became more than just a perp on the run, another criminal. He was the walking embodiment of evil, as far as lawmen were concerned, and one who had outsmarted them for the greater part of a decade.

  Erich Zwettler of the Vienna police said: ‘We covered pretty much the whole of eastern Austria to try to prevent any attempts to escape across the border. We used everything we had, hundreds of officers.’ As the news spread that a little girl lost had come back from the dead and began to leak out to the media, details of the search for Priklopil were announced on the radio. It worked. Drivers sitting in traffic jams caused by the police operation began calling in that they had seen the BMW with Priklopil at the wheel, careering like a madman through the streets of the capital.

  A motorised patrol spotted the car near the Bruenner Strasse—an area with high-rise flats not dissimilar to those where Natascha had once lived—and tried to follow it, but they were no match for his 12-cylinder BMW. His attention to detail always kept the car in perfect working order, and he was able to accelerate away at speeds of just over 140mph. Shortly after that he also managed to shake off a second patrol that tried to chase after him near the Erzherzog-Karl-Strasse.

  Herr Ordinary knew how to drive, the police would later say, somewhat embarrassed that the special courses that officers took for high-speed pursuits were no match for the kidnapper.

  Christine Palfrader, whose truck-stop played such a central role in the drama, saw Priklopil’s BMW racing down the street as he came from Strasshof. She later recalled watching as he took a sharp curve at the junction where her bar is located at an unusually high speed.

  It was like in the films, he came down at an incredible speed and than took a sharp left turn and stopped for a second just across from my place. I could see his face clearly. There were pearls of sweat on his forehead, but he looked composed and took a split second to decide which way to go.

  I think he then heard the police sirens closing in from the distance and took a quick turn into a side road. Only people from the neighbourhood know this little road. That saved him, because he would have driven right into them at the road block they set up down the main street. They would have got him and he would not have had a chance to kill himself.

  He must have been a very good driver to do all that and keep full control over that huge car of his at that speed. It smelled of burning rubber, probably from the tyres; we saw his tyre marks on the street afterwards.

  Another eyewitness to the chase was Chris White, 26, a British worker at the United Nations, whose offices are a five-minute tube ride from where Priklopil’s car was found. He described the police action:

  It was a Wednesday, and as usual on my way home from work I stopped at the Donauplex shopping mall for a bite to eat, a couple of pints and a game of pool with some mates. Suddenly I looked up and saw there were dozens of police all over the place, at least 50. At that moment my Dad called and said he had heard a radio newsflash about this girl who had been kidnapped when I was young and that police were surrounding the shopping mall I was in. I walked out of the bar to hear him better and you could see them all walking through the building obviously looking for someone, moving quickly from bar to bar. You could also see dozens of police cars parked outside and I saw cops heading downstairs to scout the large underground car park.

  Despite the dozens of checkpoints and, by now, nearly 1,000 officers deployed to stop him, aided by a citizenry galvanised into action by the drama—tip-offs and sightings were pouring in at the rate of one per second—Priklopil managed to pull into the underground car park of the massive Donaustadt shopping centre. He was back in the area where it all began. Back to where it would all end.

  His downfall had started with that one telephone call which allowed Natascha to escape. Now it was Priklopil’s turn to try to make his peace with the one person he called a friend. The last image of the kidnapper alive on this earth, just before he called Ernst Holzapfel, was captured on a security camera above the information desk at the shopping centre. The camera looks down on a composed Priklopil as shoppers and children move in the background. He doesn’t look evil, only intense.

  Minutes later he called his business partner. ‘Please help me, come quickly,’ he stammered down the phone to Holzapfel.

  Later, in the only statement he would give about his relationship with Priklopil, which included his account of the sighting he had of him with Natascha, Ernst Holzapfel spoke about this last phone call with the man he once called a pal: a man he thought he knew everything about.

  I had spoken on the phone with Herr Priklopil that morning about the renting of his completed flat in the 15th district. He called me again in the afternoon and said: ‘I am in the Donauzentrum by the old post office. Please pick me up. This is an emergency. Please come at once.

  He sounded very excited, and I therefore did not ask any questions but drove off to the Donauzentrum. He got in as soon as I arrived, and said that I should drive along Wagramer Street in the direction of the city. He said: ‘Please drive, we will talk later.’ So we drove through the Wagramer Street, over the Praterstern into Dresdenerstrasse in the 20th district. We found a parking place there. He asked me to turn off my mobile so that we could speak without being i
nterrupted.

  He told me that he was drunk and had sped through a police control point. He was very excited and said several times: ‘They will take my driving licence away. It will be difficult without a car. I will not be able to visit my mother any more.’ I tried to calm him down. I knew that cars and therefore his driving licence were ‘sacred’ to him. I had known him for a long time and I had no doubt about this explanation. He was very excited, and I had never seen him like that before. As he normally never drank alcohol, I assumed this was a consequence of the drinking.

  I tried to calm him down by speaking about work. We had a longer conversation about his flat and the work that still needed to be done; we spoke about the renting possibilities, and we calculated the income. All that did indeed seem to calm him down. I tried to convince him that he needed to give himself up and that he would probably only lose the driving licence for a few months. He promised to do that and got out in Dresdenstrasse. As I knew him as a reliable person, I had no doubt that he would do what he said.

  I then drove back to the event hall, did some work and had a meeting with a client. At about 10 p.m. I was approached by the police as I was going to my car. Only during the questioning was I told about the horrible deed. It left me bewildered, and I was not able to imagine it to be true at all. I simply could not believe that Herr Priklopil was capable of doing something like that.

  At the police station I also had to identify Herr Priklopil from a photograph made after the suicide. It was horrible for me to identify him.

  He should perhaps have said identify what was left of him. On 23 August 2006, at 8.59 p.m., Wolfi made good on the promise that he had made to Natascha—that he would take his own life if she ever left him. Passengers on a commuter train heading towards the city’s north station reported feeling a slight ‘bump’.