Girl in the Cellar (6 page)

Ernst Winter, the communications technician working at electronics giant Siemens who went through the company's training programme together with Priklopil between
1977 and 1981, also recalled the ‘weirdness' that marked his friend out as different—his lack of interest in girls. ‘He simply never, ever spoke about girls, which was unusual for us boys at the time. Weird. The only passion he had that I knew about was cars. He started racing in rallies at the age of seventeen. I think that was even before he got his driving licence.'

Winter also recalled: ‘He was always quiet and liked to remain in the background. We all wanted to be the fastest to finish a job, but he would just take his time. He was very thorough and precise.'

During his time at Siemens, in 1981, Priklopil was absent for eight months' compulsory military service. Austrian data protection laws forbid the military from giving out any detailed information, but it is confirmed that he served at the Maria Theresien barracks in Vienna, a wartime SS barracks, using his skills in electronics as an intelligence communications specialist. He asked for assignment to a radio and reconnaissance battalion, but was never on manoeuvres or away for long periods. He was only confined to barracks for the first six weeks of his service, and neighbours remember that he came home most weekends, usually clutching a bag of washing for Waltraud to do for him. After the first six weeks he lived back at home for the remaining six and a half months of his compulsory service.

The relationship with his father was, by all accounts, an uneasy one. A man who liked sports and the clubby, manly chumminess of the local pub, Karl Priklopil found his son's solitary pursuits strange. Given the rumours
that would later swirl around him when he lived alone with his mother, that he was either a latent or a practising homosexual, it is not hard to envisage the kind of arguments that might have ensued between a straight, conservative father and a son whom he somehow perceived as being deviant.

Deviant he certainly was, but not in the way that Karl suspected.

Franz Trnka, 49, who worked with Priklopil on the Austrian telephone network for the electronics company Kapsch in Vienna between 1983 and 1991—Priklopil was made redundant from Siemens through downsizing—provided an unusual perspective. Unlike most of Priklopil's acquaintances, who depicted him as the shy, socially awkward loner, Trnka regarded him as a ‘rude show-off', ill-equipped to face life's difficulties as they presented themselves. He also claimed that the kidnapper had inferiority complexes regarding women.

Experts think this quote goes to the heart of his compulsion to control. As one journalist wrote: ‘The point was that they were female. They were driving—but he was in the driving seat.'

Trnka went on: ‘He also wanted to show off all the time. He made sure everyone knew his family had money. But his father forced him to get a job—I think that was the only reason he was working at the time. He couldn't wait for his father to die, so he could inherit his money. He did not have a particularly good relationship with him.'

 

Karl Priklopil's father Oskar had been just as meticulous, in many respects, as his grandson. And it was his planning for a nuclear war that gave Wolfgang a ready-built room for his future ‘dungeon'.

In 1950s Austria, a country outside NATO, families received grants if they chose to build atomic shelters in their homes. Perhaps because he had enough money, perhaps because he could not be bothered to wrestle
with the tedious, energy-draining bureaucracy of the sort his country is infamous for, Oskar made no requests for cash from the state; nor did he apply for planning permission from the local authority when he set about constructing a doomsday sanctuary. Such independence from the state would be perfect for his grandson later on.

No permission, no records—it never existed. Ideal for what Priklopil Jnr would later do with the space.

The illicit shelter was later transformed into a utility room by his dad, and as a teenager Wolfgang helped out with the plastering and the drainage gulley. ‘The bunker', as he would call it, would be used in turn as a storeroom, a workroom, a leisure room where his train set was stored and, ultimately, as a prison for a terrified child.

Elisabeth Brainin, another psychoanalyst—Wolfgang Priklopil's legacy to the world will be to keep the textbooks on the dark side of human nature churning out for decades to come—saw pictures of what the world has dubbed his dungeon shortly after Natascha was free. She commented: ‘The whole things reminds me of extreme patriarchal societies, where ten- or eleven-year-olds get married by force to much older men. These men educate and finally make a woman out of them. It is possible that this man wanted to forge a woman exactly the shape he wanted her to be.'

It was in 1986 that Wolfgang's father Karl died of bowel cancer. Although workmates have spoken of the troubles that existed between father and son, the death seemed to affect him deeply. Experts say it is often the
case for psychopaths that, when the object of their hatred or resentment is removed, they experience a kind of mourning. Wolfgang lived on in the Strasshof house alone after the death, but his mother chose to return to the council flat from where they had moved over a decade earlier: curiously, it had never been returned to the authorities for another family to live in. His mother began to play an even bigger role in his life.

He would return home from work at the Kapsch company, not to the Strasshof house, but to the flat, where his mother would prepare him Wiener schnitzels and potato salad, noodles with cream sauce or beef hotpot. He would later tell people that they sat together watching TV—quiz shows and old westerns were favourites—or leafing through photograph albums that chronicled the history of the Priklopil family. After a short while he moved in with her full time and only returned to Strasshof at weekends to check on the house.

There is a particular feature of the flat that is worth noting: it was very near to the school that would later be attended by a little girl called Natascha Kampusch.

Something changed in him in 1991, when, aged nearly thirty, he suddenly wanted to live alone. The shy teenager who did not like to be away from his family during his army service—who, in fact, had never lived alone except for brief periods during that time—chose to pack up and move back to No. 60 Heinestrasse. Here he would grow tomato plants in the dried-out family swimming pool, tune up the motors of his beloved cars and fine-tune the plans for the very, very special space beneath the garage floor.

While he fixated on one demonic plan, his mother remained the singular emotional prop in an otherwise lonely life, leaving the council flat most Fridays with bags of pre-cooked food labelled Monday to Friday which she had frozen so Wolfgang would ‘eat properly' during the week. He also acquired two cats that he came to dote on. Christa Stefan, a lifelong friend of Waltraud, whose home in Strasshof faces Priklopil's, said: ‘Waltraud came to stay with him here every weekend. She did all his cooking and housework, and either brought or made meals to be frozen for the entire week. She always said: “Wolfgang is my everything”.'

Police psychologist Manfred Krampl believes that early on in the 1990s the obsession to kidnap a child was already crystallising in his mind:

Even when plotting to bring to life the kidnap fantasy, Priklopil still indulged in the cruelties he enjoyed from childhood. In 1992 a retired policeman, Franz Hafergut, out walking in the neighbourhood with a weather eye on property and people, reported him to his still-serving colleagues when he saw him eating cake and shooting birds, this time not with the DIY gun he assembled at school but with a .22 calibre air pistol he had bought for £60. He received a warning not to do it again. Otherwise, apart from one or two motoring offences, he was never in trouble with the law again.

With his neighbours it was a different story. Many remember him as odd at best, often downright rude, even deeply strange. Peter Drkosch, 68, who lived nearby, had known him since he was a boy. He and his wife Hedi owned an allotment with a small summer-house that they stayed in often just opposite 60 Heinestrasse. The proximity irritated and upset Priklopil, as Drkosch recalled:

The police would duly come along, unaware of what the complainant had ‘parked' beneath his garage. Herr Drkosch went on:

Another neighbour has a much more disturbing memory of him. Stefan Freiberger said: ‘My eight-year-old daughter, and another neighbour's child of the same age, were riding their bikes in the nearby forest because there are a lot of raspberries and blackberries. Suddenly he came and took off his clothes. He was completely naked. The children naturally were afraid and returned home immediately. My wife tells me to this day that we should have called the police.'

Priklopil's seemingly easy access to cash, his fancy cars and apparent lack of regular work hours made neigh
bours believe that he either had a private income or had had a windfall. ‘I always wondered where he got all the money from that he needed for building,' said near neighbour Rosemarie Helfert. ‘It was always rumoured that he'd won the lottery.'

‘In my eyes, he didn't work at anything,' said Peter Drkosch.

Local postman Hermann Fallenbüchl, who delivered the mail in the Heinestrasse, said: ‘I never spoke to him and I saw him maybe once a month, no more. He was very polite, greeted me in a friendly way and waved from his
car. Only once did I see an old woman—it must have been his mother.'

‘Priklopil was a phantom in the town,' said Fallenbüchl.

In the early 1990s Priklopil forged a business partnership with the one individual who seemed to be a true friend to him. Ernst Holzapfel, who was quizzed by police after Natascha escaped, was cleared of any involvement in her kidnapping and detention, but if Priklopil had chosen to reveal his secret to anyone it might have been him. He would even come to meet Natascha a month before her breakout and, like the neighbours who never suspected, thought she was merely a friend.

Holzapfel was a pal from the Siemens days and invited ‘Wolfi', as he called him, to join him in a business venture, the Resan construction and renovation company. The pair started out renovating old properties and then branched out into the entertainment business, staging birthday and wedding parties at a gaudily decorated warehouse on a Viennese industrial estate. The pair made money and ‘Wolfi' was able to indulge himself in his cars—‘bombing up and down country lanes', as another former Siemens workmate said. He once received a speeding ticket for £50, and on another occasion was involved in a minor accident in which no one was hurt.