Girl in the Cellar (15 page)

Over the years, Priklopil bought Natascha clothes, books and toys. But
despite the clutter, this could never be a normal teenager's bedroom.
© ABC, Vienna
© Rex Features

 

 

Aerial view of the house showing the rear garden with the disused swimming pool (white circle) where Priklopil grew tomatoes and the rear garage with white van parked outside it. The green square just below that is a plastic sheet on which soil from the garden was
placed for forensic analysis.
© ABC, Vienna
© Katarina Angerer/EuroPics(CEN)

 

 

The last image of Wolfgang Priklopil, recorded by a CCTV camera on the day of Natascha's escape, shortly before he committed suicide.
© ABC, Vienna
© Reuters

 

 

At about the same time, Natascha is led from the Donaustadt police station under a blanket. She is wearing the dress and ballet slippers she escaped in and the marks on her legs are clearly visible.
© ABC, Vienna
(photo Karl Schoendorfer)

 

 

© EuroPics(CEN)/Michael Leidig

 

 

Natascha's horrific ordeal and dramatic escape were front page news in Austria for weeks and the story quickly became an international phenomenon.
© ABC, Vienna
© EuroPics(CEN)/Michael Leidig

 

 

Natascha's first TV interview was the most viewed programme of all time in Austria with over 2.7 million viewers, or 80 per cent of the market.
© ABC, Vienna
© EuroPics(CEN)/Michael Leidig

 

 

Natascha's dad Ludwig Köch with a copy of one of the first pictures taken of his daughter after her extraordinary reappearance.
© ABC, Vienna
© First Look

 

 

Her mother Brigitta Sirny with a picture of her daughter after learning she had been freed.
© ABC, Vienna
© Junior Foto, Vienna

 

 

Natascha, her mum (in the red suit) and other family members go flat hunting. The return to normal life will be long and potentially difficult, even for someone as exceptionally resilient and courageous as Natascha Kampusch.
© ABC, Vienna
© AP/Empics/Helmut Stamberg

Geiger, 51, was head of the Homicide Commission of the Vienna SB from 1991 until 2002, and then became head of the Criminal Police Department. In 2005 he was decorated with a silver medal for merits in serving the country, but early in 2006 he was given a suspended three-month sentence for tipping off pimps about impending police raids on their illegal brothels.

Natascha's mother meanwhile showed she was well capable of using the media to further her cause. At one point she triggered a huge debate across the country after she told the local public broadcaster the ORF that her family allowance for Natascha had been stopped just over a week after she vanished. She said: ‘They told me where there is no child there is no money.' The family minister even got involved at one point, and messages of support from the public came flooding in, with offers of money to aid in the search for Natascha.

She also started a campaign of criticism of the SB for daring to suggest that a poor mother could be involved in the disappearance of her daughter. Her interview with one newspaper sparked a campaign against this police line of inquiry.

The police probe included questioning two of her married lovers. This infuriated the men in question, as, according to Poechhacker, they were terrified their wives would find out. One had been pulled out of his local pub and invited to allow police to search his flat, which he
had agreed to as his wife was away at the time. They also tried to find a third man but never succeeded.

One of the other two, Ronnie Husek, is understood to have spent the weekend with Brigitta Sirny before Natascha vanished. He was known to be wealthy and it is believed he was the source of the funding that Frau Sirny had spoken about with Frau Glaser when she said she expected to start up in business again shortly.

With Natascha still missing and the finger-pointing increasing, the pressure on her parents also increased, and with no love lost between them they started blaming each other for the girl's disappearance.

The accusations had first started on 22 March 1998, when Natascha's mother told local newspaper
Kronen Zeitung
that on trips to Hungary the father had been in the habit of taking Natascha to nightclubs that in Austria you would need to be over 21 to visit. She said: ‘I asked him how an adult person could be so stupid as to take a ten-year-old child into a disco where go-go girls were performing.'

Hungary was quickly ruled out as a crime scene. Not only did Natascha's schoolfriends, interviewed by police officers, emphasise how much she spoke of enjoying the time she spent there, but in addition, one hundred Hungarian officers had searched the village where Natascha's father owned a house and questioned neighbours. The house itself was put under observation. Neighbours set up patrols and one policeman was stationed there. The result was they believed her father was telling the truth and had no idea where his daughter was.

For his part Natascha's father, tormented with grief and not enjoying the best of relations with his ex, became convinced his wife was involved, and made a claim accusing her of involvement in their daughter's abduction. He later retracted it, and when Natascha was finally found, apologised. He said: ‘The main thing is my little girl is back, anything else is unimportant. I don't want to create any bad feeling.'

Natascha's face then, as now, was all over Vienna as the increasingly desperate search dragged on. She stared out from posters plastered all over the capital. Her image was even pinned up in Christine's truck-stop bar, no doubt giving Priklopil some strange satisfaction when he called in there for his apple juice and sausage snack.

She featured on an Austrian version of
Crimewatch
called
Aktenzeichen XY Ungeloest
or ‘Cases XY Unsolved', during which a member of the public called in to say they had spotted Natascha in a car with Hungarian licence plates.

‘If we had a crime scene, it would be much easier,' bleated Haimeder of the SB. After a summit in the Sicherheitsbüro the night before, police decided to change their strategy. ‘The time of big searching operations is over,' he declared. The police were to switch to more detailed, smaller swoops.

Natascha's parents reported that people continued to approach them, claiming to have seen their daughter. One man called repeatedly, asserting that he lived in Langenzersdorf and then also in Gänserndorf. ‘He said that he had kidnapped Natascha because she reminded
him of his deceased daughter. That would fit the clues claiming our child had been driven away in a bus with Gänserndorf plates,' said Ludwig. The capacity that other people had to play cruel mind games with them left them wounded, astounded and exhausted.

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:

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.

The 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.