Girl in the Cellar (5 page)

Was he psychotic with an inbuilt genetic need to behave as he did [Kletzer asks], or was he a neurotic who was forced by the society and the world and the circumstances into which he was born to act as he did? I believe in his case it is the latter which played a greater role in making him what he was.

He has been called a kidnapper or criminal in all that has been written about him, but he was not born a kidnapper or criminal; a person can be born a duke or lord, but you are not born a kidnapper. There are some studies that indicate a genetic predisposition towards certain types of antisocial or criminal behaviour, but there are many people who may have these genetic traits who do not become kidnappers or criminals. What is vital to know in his case is what influenced him after he was born.

What role did genetics play, and what role did his upbringing play? What was his relationship to his mother and father?

What is certain is that there was something in his life which forced him to become detached from the real world and obsessed with his own inner world and a fantasy view of life. Typically it can be a very dominating father or a clinging mother that forces a child to introspection as the only way to really give vent to their emotions. If you put on too much pressure, something has to give somewhere. In the case of Wolfgang Priklo
pil his choice of a young girl who did not leave him feeling threatened, and his clear hostility to women exhibited in his conversations with workmates, does indicate that he may have had problems with his mother, or his utter dependence on her, his feelings of self-worth only activated by her doting attitude toward him on any given day. Equally it could simply have been that he was impotent.

The ability to enjoy sex and from this to build a happy relationship is one of the basic tenets of human existence. He may have felt cut off from life through impotency, and removed from society, and this may well have been the enormous pressure that he suffered.

I believe he must have suffered something that made him in turn want to inflict something on others.

What was it that Priklopil had experienced that made him feel the victim and want to escape from that by becoming the perpetrator? Look hard enough and all too often you will see the person beaten later becomes the beater.

Whatever the pressure Wolfgang Priklopil was under, it must have been enormous for him to have committed such a crime; his fantasy world must have been all consuming for him. He spent enormous amounts of time thinking and preparing what he was to do, and how to move from being the victim with no friends and no girlfriend to becoming the perpetrator, and turning the tables on the world. In his mind the fantasy world where he would snatch and mould the perfect woman merged with the real world, until he could no longer see
the difference. The preparation he made in the cellar showed he was obsessed with this idea.

Ironically, though, what he saw as his salvation was always doomed to end in failure. From the moment he kidnapped Natascha he had made a choice to end his loneliness, and slowly over the years he would have learned to understand feelings and developed an intense relationship with this young girl who was totally dependent on his actions. From her he would have learned to become a better man, because he had to learn to think about her and not just about himself. It was as he allowed himself to care for her, and the healing process started, that his fate was sealed. Another life was not possible for him because of the way he had chosen to escape from his problems. What he had done gave him no chance of a return to normal life.

People are fascinated by this story because everyone can see it in black and white. They can empathise with Natascha, who was powerless to act, and can see themselves in the same situation and try to imagine how they might react. It is a normal human condition to put oneself in the place of another. But nobody would put themselves in the place of Priklopil; after all, he was a monster.

In the end his illness was cured: he had no fear of women any more, they no longer dominated. But at the same time the world he knew had ended: he knew he would never see again the woman who had brought him back into the real world. The image he had portrayed to neighbours had been ripped away and he would no
longer have the thin veneer of popularity he had recently started to gain. His true self was revealed. The friendly Wolfgang, the new Wolfgang, could no longer live and he had no choice but to die.

In my opinion [said Haller] Priklopil had a very complex personality disorder, with very low self-esteem and strong fears of failure, most probably sex-related. He probably feared that he lacked manhood, and that is why he had chosen a child of that age. In doing that he wanted to grow out of his own infantilism and probably to overcome his infantile sexuality.

Being infantile as he was, he was not able to become a father in the normal way at the age of 34, so he had chosen to abduct a child and mould it according to his own wishes. Of course he also had a sadistic side and wanted to entirely dominate her, otherwise he would not have chosen a ten-year-old child.

There is no doubt he was bringing her up according to what he thought was right, while he underwent a certain process of maturing himself, so it could be said
that they have grown together. But as she developed with time she became stronger and stronger and the balance of power in the relationship gradually shifted. At the end she probably became the one to make the decisions and she completed her transformation from a helpless child victim to a strong, grown-up woman who was in control. Once that happened, she was able to make a healthy decision and end the unhealthy relationship by running away.

One has to understand that the relationship between the two was very complex. At first she was confined physically, then psychologically, and at the end the strings became emotional. To her he was many things: a father, a brother, a friend and most probably a lover. The situation can to a certain extent be compared to that of fathers who abuse their own children: they also go shopping, out for walks, take holidays together and lead a seemingly normal life. The children are also not crying for help directly because they are tied with emotional strings that force them to keep silent.

Priklopil was very narcissistic, egocentric and very paranoid, which is what drove him to be meticulous in everything he did. He probably did not have any problem justifying his actions to himself and his victim. People like that are known to be able to rationalise their actions easily, they easily find their reasons in other people or sometimes blame the world for being unjust and so on.

His outward behaviour has been trained, that's why people always thought of him as ‘nice', but not as
emotionally hearty. He built up a big inferiority complex and at the same time established a great craving for relationship and family. What led him to become a kidnapper? I think it's because of genetic factors, but later on something must have gone wrong in his life. That could have been insulting comments when he had his first sexual contacts. Maybe it had been comments from his parents that he didn't like. He doubted himself, but at the same time there were sound relationships within his family. Apparently he was a good planner, and he was intelligent.

Natascha must have had something that appealed to him, so-called ‘key stimuli'. That may have been her charisma, her body, the colour of her hair. I think that he chose a child who corresponded the most to his infantile nature. I can imagine that he wanted to lead her across to normality, quasi give her a new identity. He had wanted to mould and change her, until he may have thought that he could safely integrate her (and himself) into the outer world. He might have introduced her as ‘my wife from Russia' or something like that, given time.

I don't think he would have killed her. But I can very well imagine some kind of ‘advanced suicide', meaning that he would have dragged her into death together with himself when confronted with a hopeless and forlorn situation.

I knew him ever since he was a little boy [she said], and I also knew his mother well. They were good neighbours, very nice people, both of them. He was always working around the house and took care that his garden was tidy. He was a very tidy man, and he even helped the neighbours and cleared the snow off for them in winter. I often talked to his mum, she had a hard time after her husband Karl died of cancer in the eighties. She went to his grave every weekend. She was a bit unhappy about the fact that her son Wolfgang inherited most of her husband's assets. She also used to tell me how she was worried that Wolfgang would never marry, and that he was only interested in making lots of money and never dated any girls.

I once asked him directly if he ever planned to marry, because he was quite a good-looking man, and he replied that once he earned enough money he would move somewhere nice abroad and find a nice woman for himself there. That was his aim all the way, to make lots of money and then move abroad. But he never said where he would like to go to.

I remember he was very good with his hands, he was capable of building or fixing anything. He was very technical. He told me everything in his house was automatic, the blinds, the garage doors and all that. But perhaps gadgets took over from his contact with the real world. I never saw him with any friends, male or
female, and I have certainly never heard of anyone seeing him in female company. Some people said that he could be homosexual, but I think that was just gossip. He was a nice person, very sweet.

I know it sounds awful now, but we had a good relationship with Wolfgang. How could we know something so terrible was going on? We used to stand at the fence with him for hours talking about God and the world. But Priklopil would act strangely sometimes, particularly when his mother came to visit. He would pace around the garden staring at the grass and looking in the bushes and checking every window, which he told us was just him ‘cleaning up and making everything perfect.' It seems likely now he was checking that there was no evidence of his secret captive.

He had a terrible fear of my dogs Amor and Nando, even though everyone here in this block of flats knows that they would never harm anyone. If I happened to come across him when I had the dogs, he would press himself flat against the wall to get as far away from them as possible and turn white in the face. He would demand that I take the dogs away.

When he moved away permanently to Strasshof he visited his mother once a week. Well, I think it was more pestered than visited. Through the ceiling I could hear how he screamed and ordered her about. He treated her like a slave.