August 28, 2006
True Crime: The Girl & the Beast
Last week Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian teenager, escaped from a cellar where she had been held captive for over eight years. Called the "ugliest crime" the country has ever seen, the police now face tough questions.
When ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch didn't return home from school on March 2, 1998, the police launched the biggest investigation in the country's post-war history. There was a massive search for her throughout Austria, as well as neighboring Hungary and the Czech Republic. The case was aired on television and at one point even Kampusch's mother was suspected of being involved in the disappearance.
But what really happened to the young girl borders on the unthinkable...Austrian Interior Minister Liese Prokop called it the "ugliest crime in Austrian history."
The country is once again as shocked by the case as it was eight years ago. The press is constantly interviewing Kampusch's weeping parents, while newspapers print computer-generated images of the girl, images meant to convey what she would look like today.
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Natascha's new life began in the Deutsch-Wagram police station outside Vienna. Now an 18-year-old woman... she was interviewed by an attractive young police officer named Sabine Freudenberger
...Freudenberger...said that the kidnapper became a "father figure" to Natascha. He paid attention to her hygiene and gave her schoolbooks.
Natascha was essentially buried alive in a house at Heine Strasse 60. Although the Austrian tabloids have dubbed it a "house of horror," that isn't the way it looks...It was the house of Wolfgang Priklopil, 44, who converted it into his personal prison camp, a realm completely under his control.
The girl was forced to live in a room that measured five square meters.
Christa Stefan, 61, who lives across the street. On two occasions she even saw Natascha at his side, but thought nothing of it. "He waved from his car, and she just sat there, looking quite normal. It just surprised me to see him with such a young girlfriend."
Jantschek (who lives behind the house where Kampusch was kept captive)...says he was Priklopil's "closest acquaintance" in the neighborhood...also claims to have seen Natascha Kampusch several times, sometimes even helping out in the garden. Once, he says, he was standing in the garage watching Priklopil work on his car when the girl came in to bring him some tools. "He said he had borrowed her from his business partner."
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Priklopil had briefly been a possible suspect in Natascha's abduction eight years earlier, when someone in his neighborhood placed an anonymous call to the police to report his white delivery van.
At the time of the kidnapping, they (Erich Zwettler of the Bundeskriminalamt, Austria's federal office of criminal investigation, Nikolaus Koch, head of the special task force set up to find Natascha)
said, the authorities inspected 700 white delivery vans, and Priklopil not only seemed credible but also had no criminal record.
Max Edelbacher, 61, headed the investigation until 2002... He too insists that his conscience is clear, that there were so many leads to follow back then. Besides, says Edelbacher, Natascha's friend who told the police about the delivery van at the time of the kidnapping was someone whose teachers said liked to tell stories and make things up, and that she wasn't believable. A tough case, he insists, a hard one to solve.
[Interior Minister Prokop of the conservative Austrian People's Party (ÖVP)-- under fire for her alleged role in a corruption scandal -- had said that the kidnapper could have become nervous because the police had recently begun investigating the case again. To widespread derision, she claimed this demonstrated that the police had helped break the case.]
story w/ photos | Spiegel
~The 'personal prison camp' metaphor is noteworthy. Here in the USA journalists writing about a similar kidnapping would rely more on descriptions from popular horror movies and metaphors for slavery and bondage never prison camps?
The politicians taking credit for this young woman's release and Mr. Edelbacher excuses for ignoring a witness (an eyewitness??) are sickeningly typical. ...True-to-form and priceless.
Posted by Stubbornson at August 28, 2006 11:11 AM