Posted on 08/26/2006 2:58:14 AM PDT by Pontiac
NATASCHA KAMPUSCH, who was kidnapped at the age of 10 and held for eight years until she escaped her captor in Vienna this week, kept a diary throughout her ordeal, it was revealed yesterday.
Rupert Leutgeb, a family spokesman, confirmed that Fräulein Kampusch had kept a record hundreds of pages long. He said that no details would be disclosed until Fräulein Kampusch decided what she wanted to do with the diary.
The revelation came after police announced that DNA analysis had established beyond doubt that the young woman who was found distraught in a garden on Wednesday is Fräulein Kampusch.
Nikolaus Koch, head of the police taskforce “Natascha”, said that she would not be questioned until Monday. Until then the police will focus on evidence in the cellar in Stasshof, 15 miles from Vienna, where she had been kept, as well as the house and garden.
They are requestioning the female witness of the kidnapping in 1998 — now aged 20 — to discover if Fräulein Kampusch’s captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, had an accomplice.
Herr Koch explained that on the day that Fräulein Kampusch escaped, Priklopil was making her vacuum his car, which was parked in the garden. He received a phone call but the vacuum cleaner was too loud for a conversation, so he moved away from the car.
Fräulein Kampusch saw her opportunity and fled. Priklopil committed suicide soon after.
Yesterday police allowed photographers into the room where Fräulein Kampusch was kept. It was so low that, according to police reports, she could no longer stand upright. She weighed just 42kg (93lb), less than before her disappearance, despite having grown 15cm to 160cm (5ft 3in).
The witness to be re-examined said, when 12, that she had seen Fräulein Kampusch being driven away by two men in a white minivan with a Gänserndorf district numberplate. That statement has been backed up by Fräulein Kampusch’s description.
The witness said that she had seen the girl walking to school at 7.15am on March 2, 1998, on Rennbahnweg in Vienna, where Natascha lived. The witness told police that there was a white minivan parked on the right of the street.
As the girl walked past, a man aged between 20 and 40 jumped out and bundled her in the back, while a second man, whom the witness did not get a good look at, drove the van off.
More than 700 minivan owners were questioned, including Priklopil, but police dismissed him as a suspect after he claimed to need his minivan to transport construction debris.
Fräulein Kampusch’s complex family situation has been clarified. Her family name — Kampusch — is the maiden name of her mother, Brigitta Sirny. Sirny comes from her mother’s first marriage, which ended “many years ago”.
When the Sirnys split, Brigitta met Ludwig Koch, a baker, and in 1988 gave birth to Natascha. Because the pair were not married the girl was given her mother’s maiden name, following Austrian law.
When the pair split after a few years, the girl lived with her mother and her new boyfriend but spent weekends at her father’s holiday house in Hungary. Her father later married a Hungarian woman.
The neighbour who found Fräulein Kampusch in her garden said: “She was just suddenly standing in front of my kitchen window, panicking, white in the face and shaking.”
After being reunited, her father said that his daughter had asked him: “Daddy, do you still have my toy car?” Herr Koch told her that he had kept it, along with all her dolls.
Sabine Freudenberger, the first police officer to speak to Fräulein Kampusch, said that she was astonished by her “intelligence, her vocabulary”.
This story breaks my heart.
The demon who did this to that little girls should be fed swift justice.
Too bad the guy committed suicide. That's too kind.
Ah, but his punishment has not yet started.
WOW, a great ending to a terrible story.
Sadly, too many stories like this end up with an open file at the station.
The only justice available to him now is the Lord Almighty.
A diary. Man, reading that would be more horrifying than a Stephen King novel. Probably helped her through the ordeal. Maybe the day will come when she'll want to burn it.
Burn the diary? It’s worth millions. It's her ticket to the best treatment available. There are probably studio scouts sniffing around the family by now.
Under Socialist EU law..isn't the girls fault?
The real world doesn't accept Socialist EU law.
The only good news in this whole nightmare story.
Yes your right, it is worth millions to those who would exploit the bottomless desire of society to gaze on the worst that man can do to man.
But I hope that there is some charitable soul out there who will take pity on this poor girl and provide her with the help she needs and deserves after this ordeal that was not of her own making.
If only this news had come eight years earlier and had spared the girl her eight years in h*ll and a life time of reliving that pain.
I figure that there are others just like her, it might help to let people become more aware.
Maybe the publication of the story could help to free some of those others. It might give clues that "normal" people could look for.
I'm not familiar with the details of this story, so perhaps my skepticism is unwarranted...
Eight years, and this is the first opportunity to flee? Eight years a prisoner, and he never found (and confiscated) the diary?
I do know something about brainwashing and Stockholm syndrome, but adolescence trumps both, no?
He merely escaped from the frying pan into the fire.
Exactly. Only the fire is much hotter.
BUMP!
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