Austrian woman kidnapped as a child, raped, beaten, starved, escapes and writes of the horror

September 9, 2010 - An Austrian woman who was kidnapped, raped, beaten, and starved when she was 10 managed to escape and is now writing a book to let the world know of the nightmare and horror she lived through.

Not only was Natascha Kampusch raped, beaten, and starved, but every hair on her body was shaved to avoid identification and she was forced to do housework half-naked during the 8 ½ years she was held captive at the mercy of her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil.

Priklopil is a man described as admiring Hitler and considering himself an Egyptian god.

In a new book called “3,096 Days,” Kampusch describes how Priklopil shaved off all her hair and shackled her to him on his bed once she turned 14.

In 1998, Kampusch was snatched by Priklopil in Vienna while walking to school when she was only 10.

She was held prisoner in a dungeon under his suburban home until she fled in August 2006.

Within hours of her escape Priklopil committed suicide. The case was so horrific it made headlines around the world.

Kampusch wrote “3,096 Days” with the help of two authors. She describes Priklopil as a paranoid, unpredictable, and cleanliness-obsessed man who systematically tormented her physically and verbally.

"In many respects, the kidnapper was a beast and more cruel than can possibly be depicted," Kampusch wrote, according to an English edition to be released Sept. 16 in Britain.

If you’d like to be notified when the book will be released, go to www.amazon.com, search “books”, then “3,096 Days.” You will be given the option to request email notification when the book becomes available.

Kampusch describes how Priklopil beat her not only with his hands and feet but also with a sack of cement, pruning shears, and even a crowbar.

"Sometimes he beat me so long it felt like hours," Kampusch wrote.

"In the house I always had to work half-naked, and in the garden I was principally not allowed to wear any knickers," Kampusch wrote. "It was one of the ways to keep me down."

“The man who beat me,” she said, “locked me in the cellar and starved me, wanted to cuddle.”

He told her she was fat and ugly, and deprived her of food. She weighed 84 pounds (38 kilograms) at the age of 16.

"The kidnapper knew precisely which buttons he had to push to land blows to my self esteem, and he pressed them mercilessly," wrote Kampusch.

Kampusch said she tried to strangle herself several times in desperation but at the last minute, her “will to survive” resurfaced.

She said she actually stood up to her captor by refusing to call him “maestro” or “my lord,” and she resisted kneeling in front of him. At 15, she said she even “punched” him in the stomach.

In her attemps to explain why Priklopil kidnapped her, she says he wanted someone for whom he was “the most important person in the world.”

"Today I believe that Wolfgang Priklopil, in committing a terrible crime, wanted to create nothing more than his own little perfect world with a person that could be there just for him," she wrote.

Kampusch will officially present "3,096 Days" in the Austrian capital Thursday. English editions will also be available in some countries, including Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada and India.

What’s happened to Kampusch after she escaped?

In January of this year Steve Boggan and Mike Leidig wrote “Is Natascha Kampusch missing the monster who kept her prisoner in his cellar?”

They talked about Natascha buying the house in which she was held prisoner, and the car owned by her captor.

Some say that’s a good thing and that she needed to be there in order to see that he could no longer hurt her. Others worried she was unable to move forward.

While her story has a happy ending, of sorts, she grew up in an underground cell and was forced to rely on her abductor for food, light, and even air, Boggan and Leidig wrote.

They said she rejected the opportunity to reconnect with her own father, and that she had empathy for the man who abducted her and who threw himself in front of a train after she escaped. There were rumors, they said, that other men may have been involved.

They went on to say that Kampusch’s “3,096 Days” Imprisonment paints a disturbing picture of a lonely and sad young lady trying desperately to find her place in the world.

It discusses how she was, at the time, spending more and more time on her own in the house where she was imprisoned for much of her childhood and most of her teen years. She confided that she planned to meet her captor’s mother.

Boggan and Leidig asked, “So what is going on? Are we witnessing a brave young woman controlling her demons? Or a tragic victim retreating deeper and deeper into a dangerous obsession?”

Kampusch told the TV documentary: “When he grabbed me, I wanted to scream, but my voice would not come – my vocal cords had just stopped working.

“He bundled me into his white van wrapped in a blue blanket … he tore the shoes from my feet and burned them. ‘You won’t be needing those now,’ he said.”

“Then he put me inside,” she said. “The cellar was cold, damp, disgusting. I was preserved alive like an Egyptian pharaoh. I would lie awake at night wondering what would happen to me if he were to die or be unable to come back for me. Would I die and nobody would ever know?”

Over time Priklopil slowly allowed Kampusch out of her cell and into the house where she worked as a virtual slave. This was how she was finally able to run away from him. She said, “When I had the chance to escape, I took it – I ran as fast as I could, as fast as my legs could take me.”

Click here to read Boggan and Leidig’s story.

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Sources:
KATU
Dailymail.co.uk