Posted on 08/25/2006 6:07:36 PM PDT by blam
Natascha weighs less than when kidnapped
By Kate Connolly in Vienna
(Filed: 26/08/2006)
The full horror of Natascha Kampusch's eight-year kidnap ordeal became clearer yesterday as her mother said that the 18-year-old girl weighed less now than when she was abducted.
Brigitte Sirny said she had been shopping for size 6 clothes for her daughter whose weight had dropped to 6st 6lb despite having grown to 5ft 3in. She said her daughter had "nothing" except for an orange dress she was wearing when she escaped her "master".
Natascha has developed a formal, slightly stilted high-German accent similar to that of a radio presenter. She is intelligent and articulate and uses sophisticated language to express what remain very childish thoughts.
advertisement During her years locked in an underground cell by her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, the young girl was able to listen to a radio set, which her kidnapper controlled via a timer switch outside her cell, as well as a select number of children's television programmes that he recorded for her.
Air was pumped in through a pipe, but the cell received no daylight.
Psychologists said that while biologically she was a young woman, emotionally she had remained a child, having been unable to develop either a proper sense of self, or relationships with other people. They said it could take her years, and constant therapy, before she was able to lead anything close to a normal life. It could not be ruled out that she might try to take her own life.
Police are still working on the assumption that Natascha was sexually abused, but refused to give more details yesterday.
As they continued to question the girl, it became clear that she had escaped from her kidnapper's home while he took a telephone call as she was vacuuming his car. The garage was unlocked as the telephone rang and Priklopil took a step to one side in order to hear better above the noise of the vacuum cleaner.
"That's when I ran," said Natascha. She dashed from the garage and into a neighbour's garden.
Priklopil jumped in his red BMW and sped in the direction of Vienna once he realised that she had fled on Wednesday. He left his vehicle in the basement car park of a shopping centre before throwing himself in front of a high-speed train.
Natascha found a neighbour, identified as Inge T, and banged on her kitchen window to be let in. The pensioner alerted the police.
Priklopil, a reclusive technician who had kidnapped her on her way to school in March 1998, had relaxed his grip on her over the past few months, since her 18th birthday in February, she told an investigator.
She went from being ordered to call him "my master" to being allowed to call him by his first name. She was also allowed to leave her purpose-built, bunker-like prison beneath Priklopil's garage. "I was allowed up into the rest of the house and later into the garden where I had to work," she told the investigator.
Neighbours occasionally saw her in the garden, mowing the lawn, and in his car when they went on brief shopping trips. But they did not think anything strange about seeing the 44-year-old loner with a female companion.
"I saw him drive his car close to his house and that there was a girl sitting in it," said Maria Rath, a pensioner who lives in the same street as Priklopil, in Strasshof, 15 miles north east of Vienna. "I thought, 'Finally he's found a girlfriend'," she said.
Police said they would not question the girl further over the weekend because she was finding it a "very agonising procedure". She is believed to be suffering from "Stockholm syndrome", a psychological condition in which long-held captives feel sympathy with their captors.
School friends of Natascha who still live on the same run-down estate in the west of Vienna close to where she was abducted remembered her as a "very positive person" and said the atmosphere in the neighbourhood since her abduction had become fearful. "The climate of fear that developed after the kidnapping can still be felt today," Christine, Nadine and Ursula said. "Hardly any children are allowed to go anywhere on their own."
Liese Prokop, the interior minister, said: "She's in a completely new world and she needs to learn to breathe again."
Natascha's mother appealed for funds to pay for an education for their daughter. The state broadcaster ORF set up a Natascha fund and was appealing for donations.
Police said they had renewed their search for an accomplice in the kidnapping after Natascha confirmed an eye-witness report that a second man had been at the wheel of Priklopil's white van when he snatched her.
6St6lbs = 70lbs
sorry that's 90-lbs
What a pity her abductor didn't die a very, very, very slow excruciating death.
If so I hope he's located and then torn to bits by an angry mob.
L
"Police said they had renewed their search for an accomplice in the kidnapping after Natascha confirmed an eye-witness report that a second man had been at the wheel of Priklopil's white van when he snatched her.
Is there another missing little girl for the second man?
Guaranteed, his present condition is far worse then anything he would have experience in this world.
Freaks like this are one of the reasons I watch my child like a hawk. I stand at the corner every morning and make sure he gets to his bus stop alright and that there are other children there with him.
He and I talk about this kind of stuff often. It's hard to know where to draw the line between warning him and scaring the living crap out of him. We want him to be aware that there are indeed monsters in human skin walking the earth, but we also want him to be able to sleep nights.
It's his job to 'sleep like a baby' and our job to lay awake nights worrying.
L
Amen.
Being a parent is a tough job in more ways than one.
My boy is almost 12. Just at that age where he is pretty sure he's invincible and that his dad and mom are indeed Zeus and Hera. So for now he pretty much listens to what we say and takes it as gospel.
In a couple of years Mrs. L and I will have all the 'cool' of a rack of yard tools at Sears. So we've got a limited window in which to instill the proper attitude before he becomes convinced he already knows everything.
So some days it's "we've got to hurry up and teach him this stuff" and others it's "we don't want him to grow up too fast."
Drawing that line is the hardest thing I've ever done.
L
Drawing the line is the hardest thing, no doubt. I wish I could just let them be kids and enjoy their childhood, but that's not the world we live in.
I hope they confiscate everything that belonged to him and give it to the girl as compensation for her trial. That BMW should be worth something, as well as the house if it wasn't mortgaged to the hilt.
What a coincidence. Our small neighborhood is composed entirely of duplex units, 110 of them to be exact.
How do I know there are exactly 110? Because I've counted them to make sure each and every one of them gets a Neighborhood Watch meeting flyer every time we plan a meeting.
The folks in my neighborhood our mostly good people, but we have a couple of 'problem houses'. They're Section 8 housing and when we have issues with drug dealing, petty theft, gang graffiti, etc. they've always and I mean always been the source of the problems.
So we make sure they get notified of our meetings just like every body else.
Mrs. L and I have been running this NW for about 5 years now and it has made a dramatic difference in our area. We've managed to get about a dozen homes in the neighborhood to install those little CCTV cameras outside in places where they can watch the 'problem' homes.
They're a cheap and dirty solution to the problem of catching bad guys in the act. Oh the usual suspects have bitched and moaned about us 'invading their privacy' but local LEOs simply remind them that the streets aren't private.
We've also gotten pretty sophisticated with our NW patrols. Everyones got one of those little FRS/GMRS radios when they go out, video cams, and cell phones also. So any trouble and LE can be called and other NW patrols can converge post haste. Incidents can also be documented that way.
It doesn't take too long before the bad guys figure out that their lives will be easier elsewhere. So they move on to greener pastures if you know what I mean.
I highly recommend you look into setting one up in your neighborhood. I think you'll be suprised how many folks show up. We had over 70 people at our last meeting. Once the bad guys see that there are more of you than there are of them they tend to quiet down pretty quick.
We've simply refused to turn our neighborhood over to scum bags and gang bangers. By and large our local PD has been excellent to work with. There's only been one over muscled neanderthal jerk with a badge cop an attitude with us and he didn't last long with our Department.
Fortunately our Police Chief is a stand up guy and recognizes that the residents are an asset to be cultivated and not just a bunch of sheep needing to be guarded.
Like I said, look into setting one up in your area. I think you'll be pleasantly suprised at how much response you get.
Best of luck to you.
L
He knows how to handled firearms, but since he's not yet 12 and we live in the Peoples Republik of IL letting him have even a small pocket knife is completely out of the question.
It is hard, indeed.
L
The single biggest problem we face are the uberlibs in our 'hood who do everything in their power to kibosh every proposal we make. We have one intersection which has been the root of most of our crime for as long as I've lived here. We wanted cameras at the corner; the libs, with the backing of the local media, raged that we were attempting to "profile" because the racial makeup of our 'hood is about 60/40, non-whites being the 60%. Funny thing is, all four properties at the problem crossing are owned by white folks, and they all wanted the cameras. For the past four years, we have been working our butts off trying to close access to the intersection from one critical direction--basically, we want to dead-end the street into a cul-de-sac. We tried it with temporary barricades for three months and the difference was remarkable. Arrests increased dramatically for the first few weeks and then incidents at the intersection stopped altogether. It was amazing. We got the city council behind us, all the planning boards, we got the police/fire departments to sign off on it, we got the money set aside in the budget to create the cul-de-sac. Out come the uberlibs. We're moving too fast, we haven't given this enough thought, we need more studies, we're going to balkanize the whole city...unbelievable. The folks who do the loudest yelling are the ones who head up to their Canadian cabins every weekend, who have never shown up at a neighborhood function, who hire illegals to tend their yards. Uberlibs. The slumlords are loving it.
/rant!
Here's how we avoided that issue entirely. We put X-10 Cameras up on our homes. That means they're on private property and the usual suspects can't say jack cheese about it.
For the record I have no affiliation with the folks at X-10 other than being a satisfied customer. I'm sure there are other brands of systems and you can find them if you google 'security cameras'.
It was an investment of a couple of hundred bucks and not everyone on the block could afford the higher end systems, but we've got over a dozen of these little cameras monitoring the public areas of our block. Mrs. L and I even paid extra for the low light versions. The neat thing is they have audio capabilities, too.
Yea, there was some whining about 'invading our privacy' and some accusations of racism but the PD told them that the cameras are on private property so no laws are being broken. They further explained, more than once, that public areas are just that; public. They have no expectations of privacy. If they want private, go inside.
We've also dealt with the 'right now folks. They're my second favorite. My favorites are the somebody folks. You know, the ones who say "It's about time somebody did something." My response has always been "Well you look like somebody to me." That usually shuts 'em up.
There's also no law against sitting in your yard or on your porch with a video or still camera. We do lots of that. There's nothing like the sight of 5 or 6 residents just enjoying a nice evening with a camera in their hands to cool the ardor of a young drug dealers heart. Once they realize they're being filmed they tend to practice their entrepreneurial skills elsewhere.
It really cuts down on the visits from the customer base, too. We put up some signs, once again on private property, notifying folks that suspicious vehicles were filmed and the footage sent to the PD, so they should purchase whatever product they were looking for elsewhere.
It's the old one-two punch.
Is it perfect? Nope. Is it ideal? Nope. Has it made a big difference in our area? You betcha. The gang graffiti has disappeared, petty crime has dropped a lot, we haven't heard a gunshot in the neighborhood in 3 years, and the quality of life for all the residents has gone up.
So try some of that. Start out small and I think you'll be surprised at how many folks just sort of join in once they see that mystical 'somebody' doing something.
Best of luck to you.
L
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