Natascha Kampusch: I still visit the house of horrors where I was kept as a sex slave for 8 years
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Old car magazines are still neatly stacked in a mahogany unit in the lounge. Damp, damaged plaster and wallpaper flake off the kitchen walls. Marble tiles collect dust in the half-finished bathroom.
Cold, damp and neglect permeate the rooms of a home abandoned hastily long ago. Tucked away in a quiet suburban Austrian backstreet, this is the house of horrors where Natascha Kampusch was kept as a sex slave for eight years.
She was snatched on her way home from school at the age of 10. And in the decade since her escape, the property has remained untouched apart from the infilling of the cellar where Natascha was imprisoned.
(Photo: Reuters)
The large detached building is an eerie time capsule, left as it was on August 23, 2006, the day Natascha fled and her kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, threw himself under a train. It was awarded to her as compensation for her ordeal – and she still visits.
Now 29, she says: “It has been empty for 10 years. People ­some- times come and leave candles for the soul of the kidnapper. The house itself cannot hurt me, only the memories of what happened here can. Bricks and mortar are not evil.”
(Photo: Reuters)
I am the first UK journalist given access to the home in Strasshof.
Natascha shows me around but forbids ­photographs. Reports she lives there are false. It has been ­unoccupied for years. Its macabre history, along with the fact there is no planning permissions for the extension Priklopil built using Natascha as child labour, means she is stuck with it.
She says: “I do not get upset any more when I come here. I am looking forward.”
After years of ­physical and mental abuse, Natascha was both terrified of, and reliant on her captor. He was the only human she had contact with and he coerced her through fear. Eventually she fled through the back garden while he was on the phone.
(Photo: EPA)
(Photo: Reuters)
Many still ­question why Natascha didn’t run away earlier. But in her new book, 10 Years of Freedom, she says: “One of the worst scenes during my captivity was when he shoved me, wearing only a pair of panties, half-starved, covered in bruises and with my head completely shorn, in front of the front door and said, ‘Come on now, run. Let’s see how far you get.’
“I was so humiliated and filled with shame that I couldn’t take a single step. He tore me away from the door, saying, ‘So you see. The world out there doesn’t want you anyway. Your place is here and only here.’”
Freedom has not been easy for Natascha, who reveals she has been stalked a number of times.
She says: “They were crazy people with crazy ­intentions. They wrote me letters describing things they wanted to do to me. One said he was in love with me and wanted to marry me.
“My mum got a restraining order against him. It went on for several years. There was another one from Australia. He sent me a didgeridoo. I had police protection when I was first stalked.”
Natascha is wary of relationships. She adds: “It is difficult to trust anyone. There have been rumours that I found my first love with several people. None are true but it makes it hard to go anywhere with anyone male in public.”
Her feelings about Priklopil are complex. For much of her life he was the only adult she knew and while he beat and raped her, he also fed, clothed and tutored her.
(Photo: Getty)
(Photo: Getty)
She accepts what he did was wrong but has tried to understand his ­motivations and refuses to be a broken victim. Natascha confirms she even went to see his body after he died. She writes: “I did not want my visits to the morgue to be made public because it is difficult for those on the outside to put something like that in the right perspective.
“I had only one person I was close to for many, many years. On whom my survival depended, and with whom I had to find a way to come to terms. You can’t just simply banish someone that you have spent eight and a half years of your life with from your memory. I spent nearly as much of my life together with him as I had before with my family.” Today, Natascha admits she has therapy and counselling to come to terms with her past. She also has post-traumatic stress disorder.
Since her escape, she has received a shocking degree of hostility.
(Photo: Reuters)
She says: “All these ­upsetting, false theories surfaced, that I had planned it myself and that my mother had a ­relationship with the kidnapper.”
In the book, Natascha, who learnt English by listening to pop music stations in the cellar, reveals she was starved as a means of control in captivity and this has led to a problems with food.
She says: “I am heavier, physically. And that’s the big problem, more than the mental issues.”
Natascha has been involved in several charity projects, campaigning for animal rights group PETA and donated money to the family of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian monster who kept his daughter captive in a cellar for 24 years and repeated raped her.
She is also helping to raise awareness of the plight of refugees.
Theories of cover-ups still haunting case
Natascha Kampusch’s case bred many conspiracy theories. One suggested she had given birth to Priklopil’s child, which was raised in secret by an accomplice.
One investigator asked a school for items with DNA from a pupil he believed to be the child, but the mother proved she was the parent with a DNA test.
The case has been probed three times, the last time in 2012. It found Priklopil acted alone.
Yet last year theorists claimed he was murdered, his body then thrown under a train to hide evidence. It was found near Praterstern station, Vienna.
Natascha said: “Sometimes [people] prefer to tell fairy tales about me. It makes it easier for them to understand what happened.”