Teen Who Fled Captor Recalls 8-Year Ordeal

Natascha Kampusch is a sad, withdrawn-looking young woman, a lifetime apart from the ruddy-cheeked 10-year-old she was when she disappeared eight years ago.

She weighs less than 100 pounds, and police who interviewed her shortly after she escaped from her kidnapper this week described her as having a pallor that comes from a lack of natural light.

Kampusch’s reappearance brought joy to her parents, who gave a tearful interview on television, and has transfixed Austria, where sordid behavior rarely is on display. But it also has created a rising sense of sadness, as psychiatrists emphasize how hard it will be and how long it may take before she can feel at home again in the world.

“Of course the experience is a very severe psychological trauma, especially for a young person like Natascha,” said professor Ernst Berger, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Vienna. “There are two sides of the coin: On one hand the victim experiences suffering and pain because of the violence, but on the other hand, strong emotional bonding [to the kidnapper] is involved as well.”

Kept in a cramped, windowless underground bedroom through the years when most girls run around with friends, chat on cellphones and begin to date boys, Kampusch was completely controlled by her kidnapper, isolated from interactions with other human beings.

According to police, she was schooled by her captor, an information specialist named Wolfgang Priklopil, 44, who committed suicide hours after her escape by leaping in front of a train.

Priklopil occasionally took her on walks in the neighborhood, but no one took note of the odd pair: a young, shy girl and the far older, clean-cut man. People keep to themselves in the area, a suburb of Vienna.

A policewoman, Sabine Freudenberger, who interviewed Kampusch shortly after her escape Wednesday, told the public broadcasting network ORF that when Kampusch was asked whether she had been sexually abused, “she said everything she has done she has done voluntarily; he didn’t force her.”

Freudenberger added, however, that she believed Kampusch had been abused and “is not aware of it.”

Police halted their questioning of Kampusch, now 18, for the weekend to allow her to rest and spend time with her family. They are continuing to question her because her abduction is believed to have involved a second man, who has not been caught.

Cases of children surviving long abductions are rare. Berger said he could think of no similar ones in Europe in recent decades.

In the United States, Steven Stayner, a Merced boy, was kidnapped in 1972 at age 7 and sexually abused for seven years. He escaped, but died in a hit-and-run motorcycle accident when he was 24. Similarly notorious, but far briefer, was the case of Elizabeth Smart, a 14-year-old Utah girl kidnapped in 2002 and held for nine months before she was rescued by police.

Kampusch’s prison was a well cut in the garage floor -- it appeared to be the type used by professional mechanics. A steep flight of stairs led to a tiny crawl space, sealed off with a 300-pound locked door. Behind the door was the small room in which Priklopil kept the girl. It was equipped with a toilet and sink, a bookshelf and a small table and chair. It had ventilation but no windows.

The fact that Kampusch escaped speaks to the depth of her survival instincts and may suggest as well that her captor had become careless.

While Kampusch was vacuuming his car, Priklopil apparently received a telephone call, and moved away from the noise to hear better. The door was unlocked, and Kampusch bolted to a neighbor’s house, according to the police report.

The neighbors called the police and said, according to the police report, “that a young woman was semi-disoriented in the garden.” It is unclear when she identified herself, but a short time later, she said, “I am Natascha Kampusch.”

Initially she was identified by a small scar on her arm. DNA test results confirmed her identity Friday.

The details that have emerged of her captivity are disturbing. She told Freudenberger that during the first years after she was kidnapped she had to refer to her captor as ‘master.’

Over and over, she tried to persuade Priklopil to let her go. “She wanted family, children, freedom ... but he wouldn’t let her go. He threatened her; he said he would harm her family and her if she escaped,” Freudenberger said.

Priklopil appears to have alternated between intimidating behavior with sexual overtones and more subtle manipulation, including caring for some of her needs.

When she escaped, the girl was clean, and relatively healthy, except for rashes. Freudenberger described her as “very well educated; she is highly intelligent. This vocabulary -- incredible.”

Her daily regimen was to eat breakfast with her captor and spend time with him in the house or garden. When he left, she was locked in her room and listened to the radio, she said. He gave her books and stuffed animals.

Her saga began eight years ago when Priklopil snatched her as she was walking to school.

The disappearance was the subject of media reports that told of her troubled family. Her father was a baker and her mother had two older children by a previous partner.

They lived in one of the roughest housing developments on the outskirts of Vienna, a world away from the elegance of the inner city or the tidy middle-class suburbs that nestle along the famous Vienna woods. The district where she grew up has little greenery. Unemployed men drink on the street, and many residents’ lives are torn by poverty.

News reports at the time of her kidnapping said her parents were estranged although they were getting along. Her father cared for her on weekends. The couple are now divorced, and the father has remarried.

Her memory of her family as she related it to Freudenberger seems tinged with anger. “She told me that on the day of her abduction her head was full of thoughts about an argument she had just had with her mother. On one side of the street she saw a man with a van. She thought first of changing the side of the street, but then didn’t do it,” the policewoman said.

Later, Priklopil reinforced her feeling of vulnerability by telling her that “ ‘if he hadn’t caught her that day, he would have been successful the next day,’ ” Freudenberger said.

From her years in a broken family, through the nightmare of her captivity, she seems to have been yearning for signs of safe affection. When she was picked up by the police, Kampusch was wearing only a light summer dress in unseasonably chilly weather. “She was shivering,” Freudenberger said. “I gave her a jacket, and that’s how the ice melted. Then, she told me everything from the beginning.”

Max Friedrich, director of the University Clinic for Neuropsychiatry for Children and Young Adults in Vienna, warned that it would be a long haul for her to be able to live anything resembling a normal life.

“We have similar reports only from concentration camps,” Friedrich said. “But there was a community of victims there. Isolation is the worst torture you can inflict on a person.”