Girl in the Cellar (11 page)

Despite the apparent normality of the grotesquely abnormal situation, Natascha insists that she first formulated plans for escaping when she was just twelve: ‘By the age of twelve, or around that age, I started dreaming about breaking out of my prison…But I could not risk anything. He suffered badly from paranoia and was chronically mistrustful. A failed escape attempt would have meant that I would never be able to leave my dungeon. I had to gradually win his confidence.

‘At the age of twelve I basically promised myself that I would escape. I told myself, my “I”, that I would escape, and never abandon any thoughts about escaping.'

Asked how she coped with loneliness, she said: ‘I had no loneliness. I had hope and believed in a future…I thought about my family during the whole time. For them the situation was even worse than for me. They believed I was dead. But I knew they were alive and fading away because of worries about me. At this time I was happy to be able to use my childhood memories as a way to freedom.'

Of her captivity, she said: ‘Sometimes I dreamt of chopping his head off, if I only had an axe. Obviously I would then reject all that because I can't look at blood and I would never want to kill a person. I continuously looked for logistical approaches to a solution. First the escape, and then whatever was to come next. Was I simply to run into the streets of Strasshof, screaming, going to the neighbours?' Asked if Priklopil had threatened her, Kampusch said: ‘Yes, but before, I didn't have any fear. I am freedom-loving and for me death was the
final freedom, the release from him. I knew that he would kill himself.'

As this strange life continued, the outside world passed her by. In February 2000, in Austria, a right-wing party led by bogeyman politician Joerg Haider entered a power-sharing government. On the streets of downtown Vienna, a few short miles away, protestors clashed with police, and the world's opprobrium rained down on the country. In November of the same year 155 skiers lost their lives on the funicular railway fire at the ski resort of Kaprun. Both events requiring massive resources of police manpower: both events that eclipsed a long-lost little girl who hardened detectives and child charity workers were now convinced was dead.

One year previously, Natascha was still in her media blackout phase, so she never heard or saw the 1999 broadcasts on radio and TV shows by 61-year-old popular clairvoyant Rosalinde Haller, who said she could feel ‘the energy of Natascha'. She went on: ‘Already back then I suggested that she was in the north-east of Vienna, past the pond for bathing in Hirschstetten. I saw the kidnapper as a slim man, around 40 years old,' says Haller, who had already offered her help at the mining disaster in Lassing 1999, and who ‘saw' the tsunamis that devastated parts of the world on Boxing Day 2004 in her book published five years earlier. Natascha
was
north of Vienna, but such vagueness triggered no new police momentum to try to find her.

 

At some point in 2000 Priklopil allowed Natascha limited access to papers, TV and radio. Life on the outside
came to be viewed through the prism of what Priklopil wanted her to see and hear. As well as being her gaoler, he acted as censor. But Natascha was hardly the kind of person interested in frivolity. She liked listening to serious news programmes on her radio and watching nature documentaries. She recalled: ‘For the first two years I didn't see the news. I was just scared. Then I got a radio, and I could hear the Austrian news again. It was quite emotional really.

‘Sometimes I would get a weekly newspaper. He read it, then I would read it. He had control of everything I did. He checked I hadn't left any messages on the newspaper or anything like that.' Checked so that when he threw it away, no garbage worker might find a clue as to what he kept in his cellar.

Although Hollywood films fascinated her, she found articles and programmes about the private lives of the stars prurient and of no concern to anyone but themselves: a yardstick she would apply to the media and herself when the long confinement finally ended.

In the only TV interview she gave shortly after her breakout Natascha gave another clue to the slowly changing nature of the captor-captive relationship at No. 60 Heinestrasse. She told how she insisted that Priklopil shower her with Easter eggs, Christmas and birthday presents, saying:

The desperate need to control, to dominate, married to his innate animal instinct that she would bolt if he let her outside, meant that the touchy-feely life of watching
Star Trek
together, eating meals that she had learned to cook from books he bought for her, washing, tidying, cleaning, sewing, preparing shopping lists for the food she would cook that evening, ended each day with a return to the dungeon and the slamming shut of the impenetrable steel door.

One side-effect of this housebound existence was to reduce the effectiveness of Natascha's immune system. Because she was not exposed to the everyday germs and viruses carried around by people, this would hit her hard when she was finally free. She also felt she suffered some kind of heart problems during her captivity, as she later said:

When asked to elaborate on her heart problems, she said: ‘I didn't receive any treatment; he only kept annoying me and giving me grief and had me carrying bins full of earth.'

The controlling of her by controlling her food is an interesting aspect of her confinement and one that seems to contradict the otherwise cosy aspects of their time together.

She says he literally starved her—but then says she prepared their dinners, which surely must mean she
could have scarfed down food when he wasn't looking. She says she was allowed to eat the cakes that his mother baked on her weekend trips. She had her own fridge with its own comestibles in it and, as she was capable of teaching herself high German, handicrafts, science and other subjects, it seems unthinkable that she would not have also been able to learn what kind of nutrition she needed and to get it from him: after all, she wheedled most other concessions from him, including, eventually, the right to venture outside. Could she not have asked for, and got, more than the tinned and frozen foods that she has since told investigators they lived on?

That Priklopil aided her in her schooling cannot be denied. Superintendent Sabine Freudenberger was the first to speak with Natascha after she freed herself. She said: ‘Natascha has a huge vocabulary; the kidnapper taught her, gave her books. He also told her that he had chosen her. If he hadn't taken her on that day, he would have caught her another day.'

It was only in 2006 that Priklopil decided to grant Natascha the ultimate concession, day-release from his ordered and closed universe into an outside world that he had for so long painted bleaker than a starless sky. Priklopil had reached a stage in his disturbed mind where he considered Natascha to be a ‘proper' girlfriend.

It was the beginning of the end of everything.

 

The parallels between the John Fowles novel
The Collector
and Natascha's situation have been mentioned
before and, at the time of writing, police confirm that they are still trawling through Priklopil's possessions to see if he read this book or used it as any kind of blueprint for what he did. Even as Priklopil prepared to step out into the real world with Natascha—the world he had deliberately retreated from in order to enjoy his illicit life with his captive—the thoughts that his captive has mirror exactly those of Miranda Grey in the Fowles book.

Natascha says she dreamed of attacking Priklopil with an axe, and that is the very way Fowles's heroine Miranda attacks the nerdy, obsessive Frederick Clegg; the real girl and the fictional girl, both kept in dungeons, took on the female role of making shopping lists, and both are concerned about the plight of the starving in the world. In her diary, Fowles's Miranda writes: ‘There is a sort of relationship between us. I make fun of him. I attack him all the time but he senses when I'm “soft”…so we slip into teasing states that are almost friendly. It's partly because I'm so lonely…part weakness, part cunning, and part charity. But there's a mysterious fourth part I can't define. It can't be friendship. I loathe him.'

That complexity of feeling was apparent in Natascha from the first time she spoke of her captor. Fowles said of his fictional captive: ‘Knowing somebody automatically makes you feel close to him. Even when you wish he was on another planet.' Miranda is so lonely that she wants her captor to come to her, saying: ‘I had a feeling…of the most peculiar closeness to him—not love or attraction or sympathy in any way. But linked destiny. Like being shipwrecked on an island—a raft—together.'

Yet when he came to Natascha, to take her out, parade her like a girlfriend so she could boost his ego the way steroids boost a weightlifter's muscles, Priklopil was laying the foundations for the destruction of the world he cherished. He had duped himself into thinking that being bonded together by circumstance was genuine love and affection, when it was only ever an accommodation to get by. It was his Achilles heel and would, ultimately, kill him.

It was after her eighteenth birthday on 17 February 2006 that he began taking her with him to shops and museums, having warned her that he was heavily armed and wired with explosives. If she made any attempt to attract attention, he said, he would blow both of them up.

At the time of writing the Austrian police are following up 30 sightings of Natascha in public with Priklopil. In restaurants, in supermarkets, in the DIY chain store Hornbach, in his car, in his garden and on the streets near his home. This plethora of sightings has contributed to a growing speculation in Austria—one that manifested itself a month after she was freed in a particularly virulent e-mail campaign against her—that she could in fact have escaped at virtually any time and simply chose not to.

She was held back, however, by the knowledge of what her captor was capable of, what she thought him capable of. ‘We are not Natascha and we should not judge her,' said one psychiatrist. ‘She knew him, she knew her own fears. We do not: we were not there.'

Priklopil, the loner, the mummy's boy, the tormented wretch who fitted in nowhere, who nurtured a sick obsession until it took his sanity, kept Natascha in line with threats of violence. It would take a very special person to break such a grip. Someone like Natascha Kampusch.