On August 23rd, 2006 an elderly woman was
startled by a knock on her kitchen window.
In her garden was a young, blonde
woman— she was only skin and bones.
“Call the police!” the young woman yelled
through the glass— and the elderly woman did.
What in the world was going on?
She couldn’t let this crazy woman into her home,
but she also couldn’t refuse her request for help.
Little did she know, the police had given up on
this 8-year long case that would change the way
Austrian parents viewed the safety of their children.
On March 2nd, 1998, 10 year-old Natascha Kampusch left
her mother’s home in Vienna to walk to school as usual
around 7 AM, sour and upset that they’d just had a fight.
Why did her parents have to get a divorce?
And why did her mother need to work all the time?
Still, her mother always said, never leave the house angry.
She debated going back to apologize
and tell her mom she loved her.
No, it would be fine.
What could possibly go wrong?
While distracted in her thoughts,
she noticed a white van in her path.
She considered crossing the road, but decided
she was being silly and continued on her way.
Shortly after, she was being pulled into the van.
She tried to scream but nothing would come out.
When her daughter didn’t arrive home from
school, Brigitta Sirny was worried sick.
She frantically called the school to see
if her daughter showed up, but she hadn’t.
The police were called shortly after.
For four days, over 130 tips were
received by the Vienna police.
People claimed they spotted Natascha with her mother as
close as the grocery store all the way to Hungary, which
wouldn’t be impossible, as she would still have her papers
on her from the weekend trip she’d taken with her father.
Police continued to search the route she
took to school, as well as the nearest ponds.
A 12 year old student contacted the police reporting
seeing a girl being forced into a white van.
This began the investigation of over 1520 owners
of white trucks and interrogation of 650 others.
Natascha’s mother Brigitta’s phone line was
tapped, in hopes of a call from the kidnapper.
This resulted in hoaxes and copycats who called in
claiming to have her daughter and the demands of ransoms.
Alas, the police were left empty handed.
In 2001, the police generated computer rendered
images of what she might have looked like and
used it to compare images on illicit websites.
By 2002, there were 167 files on the case, and by 2003
a private investigator was convinced that Brigitta
was having an affair with a married businessman and
thought her daughter was in the way— Brigitta must
have murdered and buried her daughter under a pond.
But after digging up the pond, he
realized that Natascha was not there.
With all options exhausted, the Vienna City
Council informed Brigitta to buy a grave plot
so she would have a place to talk to Natascha.
Brigitta burst into tears at the thought.
There was no way her little girl could be gone, right?
“What’s your shoe size?”
“Are you going to mo—t me?”
Natascha Kampusch watched a lot of late-night television
and the stories of kidnapped children ran through her head.
Would she end up part of a human trafficking
or CP ring like those children she saw on TV?
No, she wasn’t blonde and skinny, she was
brunette and chubby… She braced herself to be just
another number on the list of murdered children.
“You’re too young for that,” the captor responded.
“I am bringing you to the others and I’ll be done with you.”
But this was a lie, there weren’t any others.
Natascha was brought from Vienna to the nearby town
of Strasshof an der Nordbahn, where her captor lived.
He covered her in a blanket and dragged her into the
garage, eventually pushing her into a tiny, moldy cellar.
When she pulled off the blanket, she
was met eye to eye with her captor.
He demanded she take off her shoes
for him to burn, and took her bookbag.
He was convinced she had some kind of device she could use
to contact the outside world—something that would be very
out of place in the 90s for a 10 year old to carry around.
She begged and pleaded with him to let her
go, promising that she wouldn’t tell anyone
and would forget his face, but he ignored her.
10 year old Natascha Kampusch was left alone in the hole to
fend for herself, a single lightbulb lighting the dark room.
The only noise that accompanied her was the rattling
of the fan blowing air from the garage into the cellar.
For the first few months of her capture,
Natascha was extremely bored and lonely.
She relished the idea of being around
her family and friends once again.
The captor, a skinny, reclusive man, would play
board games with her and brought her books,
pre-recorded TV shows, and a radio to occupy her time.
Despite the fact that she wasn’t there out
of her own will, he always demanded she be
thankful for whatever he brought down for her.
He was using his own money, after
all, and she was becoming expensive.
He told her that her parents no longer wanted
her so she should be grateful that he did.
He eventually got tired of always cooking for her, so
he provided a hot plate and some instant food to cook.
The way he treated her within the first few
months seemed rather kind compared to the
torture he would subject her to over the years...
Eventually, he began denying her meals
and entertainment if she disobeyed him.
The captor’s mother would come over during
the weekend, oblivious to the young girl
in the cellar left to her own devices.
During these times, he would usually give
her enough to last until Monday, but when she
was being disorderly, he would deprive her.
As she got older, he began policing her food more,
often calling her fat and having her weigh herself.
Natascha began wondering if he had an eating disorder himself.
He would randomly listen in on her through an intercom
he set up, and call out to her if he was suspecting
her of doing something she wasn’t supposed to.
He would expect her to respond in excruciating details
on her activities and would get angry if she refused.
“Obey, obey, obey…” he would continuously
call out, enough to drive her crazy.
The mental torture of the repeated order
accompanied by the hours of darkness he
would subject her to was only the beginning.
In 2000, Natascha had her period, which was also the
time he decided she would be his housemaid and labourer.
The kidnapper had an obsession with cleanliness
and would force Natascha to clean up anything she
touched so she wouldn’t leave fingerprints anywhere.
He would stand behind her scolding her for doing things
wrong and roughly showed her how to cook and clean properly.
His obsession with hygiene moved to her hair, which
he made her cover with a plastic bag to avoid getting
everywhere—eventually he just shaved it all off.
Part of being his personal labourer was assisting
with renovating the upper floor of his house and going
with him to help renovate apartments he would flip.
Being so malnourished, having never been fed
properly, made it even more difficult for her to
pick up heavy bricks and lumber, causing her to
make more mistakes and as a result be beaten for it.
He wouldn’t allow her to cry.
If she did, he would grab her wrists to make
her rub her eyes with the back of her hands, or
push her head under the sink to wash the tears
away, causing her to grow up emotionally stunted.
Eventually, at 17, he began pushing
his ideal perfect life on her.
He allowed Natascha to grow out her hair and dye it blonde.
He blamed not being able to bring her outside
on trips on the fact that she was disobedient.
Eventually, in 2004, the abuse got to be so much that she
tried to take her own life— she turned on her hotplate
and burned toilet paper rolls, until her dungeon was
filled with smoke, when revelation struck she realized
that she wanted to live and that she would survive.
She quickly put out the smoke and
vowed to focus harder on getting out.
Natascha believes she got through such traumatic abuse
by disconnecting the experiences from herself — as
if it was happening to someone else she was watching.
She would also occasionally fight back, hitting herself
until he stopped yelling, or sometimes even hit him back.
When he demanded she call him “master” or
“lord”, she would refuse, and take the beating.
She was growing mentally stronger, setting up a
boundary, giving her the strength to respect herself.
There were a few times when Natascha could
have escaped, but the timing wasn’t right.
The captor would sometimes bring her out to stores
to pick up supplies, or a treat on the rare occasion.
Natascha would see a friendly face that would be willing
to help her, but a voice inside her head always told
her that the captor would kill everyone, or that the
friendly face might think she was crazy if she spoke up.
One time, her captor was stopped by
a police officer at a checkpoint.
She tried to signal with her eyes that she
was in trouble, but the officer didn’t notice
the signs of her desperately asking for help.
Finally, on the 23rd of August 2006, she took her chance.
Natascha was outside helping her captor
vacuum his car, when he got a phone call.
He was unable to hear the phone over
the vacuum noise, so he walked away.
Little did the captor know, he forgot to close the front gate.
Leaving the vacuum on, Natascha took her chance to run.
She sprinted as fast as she could, looking back
to check, afraid of him being right behind her.
She ran up through a garden to the window of
an elderly woman and knocked, startling her.
Natascha Kampusch was free.
Natascha may have been free but so was her captor…
44-year-old Wolfgang Priklopil’s decapitated body was found on train
tracks, shortly after the police began looking for him.
He was one of the first people the police had interviewed upon
Natascha’s disappearance, and had managed to push the whole
case back 8 years with his alibi— that he was home the day
of the abduction, and he used his van for construction work.
Had the police further investigated him, they could have
prevented 8 years of torture and misery for the poor girl.
Despite the abuse she endured for 8 long years,
Natascha felt some sympathy for Wolfgang.
She explained that he was trying to live
the perfect life that he wanted through her.
The man was clearly mentally ill and
couldn’t cope with regular society.
In order for her to survive, she needed to forgive him...
and she did.
She wasn’t saddened by his death, but still
made sure to express that she felt bad for him.
The police and media were not sympathetic
to the young girl, especially when she did
not cry and seemed to forgive her captor.
According to Natascha, when she was in Vienna’s General
Hospital for rehabilitation after her traumatic experience,
reporters did anything to get photos of her— they would
climb up trees or disguise themselves as patients.
Pictures of her dungeon littered front pages of
newspapers, all of her belongings out in the open as a
spectacle, rather than something meant to stay private.
Natascha was not ready for her story
to be told, yet newspapers were already
telling it… but it wasn’t really her story.
They would add in made-up details that did not happen,
and treated her traumatic experience as if it wasn’t
horrible enough, and needed gorier details to be perfect.
After she got out of the hospital, she received letters
from stalkers who loved her or wanted to kill her.
She also received letters from people who offered her jobs at
their homes, doing cooking and cleaning in exchange for board,
but she wanted to be free and live in her own apartment.
Her reaction was seen as ungrateful even
when all she wanted was to live on her own.
Natascha described this eerie feeling as, “the
sympathy extended to a victim is deceptive.
People love the victim only when they
can feel superior to him or her.”
Due to the speculations and false accusations of the press,
she ended up telling her story only two weeks after her
escape, giving interviews to the Austrian Broadcasting
Corporation, the Kronenzeitung, and a magazine called
News, hoping that the media would leave her alone.
Natascha, now 33, lives a normal life in Vienna, Austria.
According to her sisters, she seems very happy and active.
She enjoys horseback riding and creating jewelry,
hobbies that she claims help with her rehabilitation.
She also takes singing lessons which helps
her express herself in ways that words cannot.
In a twist, Natascha purchased the dreaded house
she was held captive in for all those years.
She claims it gave her peace knowing that she is
preventing it from becoming a horror theme park for
people seeking enjoyment out of her past suffering.
Every couple of months, she would drop by and
clean the house, or deal with any maintenance.
Other than her occasional visit, the property remains vacant.
In 2006, she had the cellar filled in
with concrete to hide the horrors behind.
In 2010, Natascha published a book based on her experiences
called “3096 Days”, which was later made into a movie
in 2012 and published another book in 2016 called “10
Years of Freedom,” in response to the media attention.
“There are lots of people who
didn’t believe that I was captured.
They thought I had planned it all since I was 10.
That I was in on it.
It is upsetting, but I try to hide my emotions.”
Natascha reflected in a 2016 interview with The Sun.
This is one of the many conspiracy theories the
public has made up to explain Natascha’s 8 years of
captivity and her forgiveness for Wolfgang Priklopil.
Even government officials were convinced Natascha
was hiding a CP ring or a second culprit.
Despite all that, Natascha chooses to remain
strong and not let the criticism get to her but
it is not easy at all when demons are behind.
“I am thankful.
I have had a second chance and
I want to do something positive.
I am lucky, it is a great gift to share my inner happiness.”