My living hell in the dungeon: Chained and beaten 200 times a week, the horrific ordeal of Natascha Kampusch, the girl snatched by a stranger and held for eight years

For more than eight years she was held captive in an underground dungeon, at the mercy of a deranged kidnapper who called her 'my slave'.

Today, for the first time, kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch reveals the horror of her ordeal in full, from the moment she was snatched from the street as a ten-year-old.

In her compelling autobiography - serialised exclusively in the Daily Mail from today - Miss Kampusch describes how she was:



Locked inside a 'hermetically sealed' concrete jail



Beaten up to 200 times a week until she heard her own spine 'snap';



Manacled to her captor while they slept together in his bed;



Forced to shave off her hair and work half-naked as a domestic slave;



Driven to repeated suicide attempts to end her life in captivity.

Miss Kampusch's ordeal shocked the world after her escape from her Austrian basement dungeon in August 2006, when she was 18.



Natascha Kampusch: Now 22, she tells her full story for the first time

She had disappeared on her way to school eight years earlier, in March 1998. Her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, bundled her into a van and kept her in a tiny cellar beneath the garage at his family home.



In one chilling episode, Miss Kampusch described how she discovered the full extent of her captivity.



Trapped for six months in her windowless prison, which was equipped with only a pallet bed, toilet and sink, she begged to be allowed above ground for a bath.



She said: ‘He ordered me to follow him. That’s when I discovered that the door to “upstairs” was a monster made of reinforced concrete.



‘I can hardly put into words what I felt when I saw that door. I’d been encased in concrete. Hermetically sealed.’

Priklopil subjected his captive to years of physical and mental abuse, in which he stripped away her identity, telling her: ‘You’re no longer Natascha. Now you belong to me.’



He forced her to choose a new name and rigged up an intercom system to her cell, monotonously repeating ‘Obey! Obey! Obey!’ into the speaker.

She endured daily physical assaults and was kept starved and semi-naked in a bid to prevent her from escaping, she said.



By the time she was 16, she weighed less than six stone and had already attempted suicide several times.





He said he'd blow me up if I screamed for help

Priklopil forced her to clean his house obsessively, and even to shave off her own hair, telling her: ‘I always wanted to have a slave.’



Deeply traumatised by her years of abuse, 22-year-old Miss Kampusch has shied away from questions about her relationship with her captor.



Now her autobiography finally casts light on the bizarre relationship she fostered

with Priklopil in a desperate attempt to stay alive.



The book – entitled 3,096 Days, the length of time she was held captive – recounts how he ordered her to call him ‘Maestro’ or ‘My Lord’ and to kneel in front of him.



Priklopil, a former Siemens engineer, told her that her parents had refused to pay a ransom for her return and did not want her back, adding: ‘They’re happy to be rid of you.’



Trapped in a nightmarish psychological struggle for survival, Miss Kampusch was forced to rely on him as her only source of human contact and physical affection.



On the first night of her incarceration, she says: ‘I asked him to put me to bed properly and tell me a goodnight story.



‘I even asked him for a goodnight kiss. Anything to preserve the illusion of normality. And he played along.’

Maniac: Wolfgang Priklopil abducted Natascha Kampusch when she was ten, right



Miss Kampusch escaped in August 2006 when Priklopil’s back was turned as she cleaned his car. Priklopil, 44, committed suicide shortly afterwards.



She attempted to build a new life, even launching her own television chat show, but has struggled to cope with the aftermath of her years of captivity, and now lives quietly in Vienna.



She has bought Priklopil’s old home and even his car, and has consulted lawyers about suing Austrian authorities over claims that they botched the investigation into her disappearance.

My 8 years trapped in a psychopath's dungeon



What made me lift my head at that moment during my walk to school? A noise? A bird? I no longer remember; in any case, my eyes focused on a white delivery van.

It was parked on the street and seemed strangely out of place. A man was standing in front of the van, glancing around aimlessly, as if waiting for something. A sudden wave of fear made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.



Images and fragments of sentences raced through my head: don't talk to strange men . . . don't climb into strange cars . . . this walk to school was my test - I'd only recently persuaded my mother to let me go on my own.



I wanted to prove that, at ten, I was no longer a little child - yet I still hadn't quite conquered my fears.

In fact, that very morning, on March 2, 1998, I'd made a resolution: from now on, I'd try to be strong. this would be the first day of my new life and the last day of my old one.

It seems ironic now that it was precisely that day that my life as I knew it came to an end - in a way I couldn't possibly have imagined. The day hadn't started well.



My father, who was separated from my mother, had delivered me home late the night before, and she was so angry that she said I could never see him again. So when it was time to leave for school, I decided to punish her by not saying goodbye.



At the front door of my flat, I hesitated, thinking of what she'd told me a dozen times before: 'You should never part in anger. You never know if we'll ever see each other again!'

Even so, I left without giving my mother a kiss. 'What could happen anyway?' I mumbled to myself.

Out on the street, my courage evaporated. I began to cry. But when I'd come within about two metres of the man beside the van, he looked me straight in the eye.



And at that moment, my fear instantly vanished. He had blue eyes, and his gaze was strangely empty; he seemed lost and very vulnerable.



Natasch Kampusch: He'd beat me, starve me, shave my head and then he'd want a cuddle

Oddly, I even felt a fleeting desire to help him. Then everything happened very fast. At the very moment I lowered my eyes and started walking past, he grabbed me by the waist and threw me through the open door of his van.



It was like a choreographed scene, as if we'd rehearsed it together. A choreography of terror.

Did I scream? I don't think so. Yet everything inside me was one single scream. It pushed upwards and became lodged far down in my throat.

Did I fight back? I must have, because the next day I had a black eye. I remember only a feeling of paralysing helplessness.



The kidnapper had an easy time of it. He was about 5ft 6in tall, while I was only 4ft 9in. Plus, my heavy school bag hindered my mobility. The whole thing had taken just a few seconds.



But the moment the van door closed behind me, I was well aware of the fact that I'd just been kidnapped - and would probably die. There'd been two horrific kidnapping cases in the past couple of months.



In my mind's eye, I saw TV images from the funeral of an 11-year-old girl called Jennifer, who'd been molested and then strangled after trying to escape from a van.





He looked at me like a child with a new toy

And then there was Carla, aged 12, who'd been found floating in a pond. Those reports had really got under my skin. One thing had consoled me, though: I was chubby - over 7st on my 10th birthday - nothing like the delicate girls that child molesters seemed to prefer.

What would it be like to die? Would it be painful? The kidnapper's voice brought me back to the present.



He ordered me to sit down on the floor at the back of the van and not to move. If I didn't do what he said, I'd be in for a nasty surprise.



Then, as we drove off, I heard him frantically punching numbers into his phone. But he couldn't seem to reach anyone. The windows were blacked out, apart from a narrow strip along the upper edge, so I couldn't tell where we were going.



Talk. You have to talk to him, I thought. absurdly, I asked what size shoes he wore. I'd remembered from watching Crimewatch-type programmes that even the slightest detail was important.

Naturally, I didn't get an answer. 'Are you going to molest me?' was my next question. This time I got an answer. 'You're too young for that,' he said. 'I'd never do that.' Then he made another call.



After he'd hung up, he said, 'I'm going to take you to a forest and turn you over to the others. Then I'll be able to wash my hands of this business. We'll never see each other again.'

I went rigid with fear. he didn't need to say any more: I knew what he meant. Child pornography rings had been all over the media for months. What seemed in store for me now seemed even worse than death.

Eventually, we came to a stop in a pine forest. The kidnapper turned off the engine and made another call. Something appeared to have gone wrong. He seemed frightened, agitated. He got out and ordered me not to move.

Veneer of normality: The house and hidden room in a suburb of Vienna where Natascha spent eight years as a captive

I obeyed, picturing vividly in my mind how 'the others' would chase me, grab me and throw me to the ground. I even saw myself as a corpse, buried under a pine tree. The kidnapper's words made me jump. 'They're not coming.' Then he got back in the van, started the engine and drove off again.

We came to a standstill in a garage. There, he wrapped me up in a blue blanket and picked me up like a package. I felt him carry me down some steps: to a cellar?

It seemed an eternity before he put me down. I heard his footsteps moving away. then I held my breath and listened. Nothing.

I was on a cold floor, in total darkness. The room smelled of dust and the stale air was strangely warm. I rolled myself into a ball and whimpered softly. But my voice sounded so peculiar that I became frightened and stopped.

Eventually, he came back with a light bulb that he screwed into a fixture on the wall. Under the harsh light, I could see I was in a room of five square metres, whose walls were covered with wood panelling. a pallet bed was fixed to the wall on hooks.



A loo with no lid stood in the corner and there was a double stainless-steel sink along one wall. The kidnapper started speaking in a voice that people usually reserve for pets; gentle and placating.



I was not to be afraid, everything was going to be all right if I did what I was told. He looked at me like a child eyeing his new toy, full of anticipation and at the same time uncertain what to do with it.

I begged him to let me go: 'I won't tell anybody. I'll just say that I ran away.' But it was no use. He made it unequivocally clear that I'd be spending the night here.





He forced me to shave my head

Had I been able to foresee that this room would be my prison for eight-and-a-half years, I don't know how I would have reacted. Looking back now, I realise that just knowing I'd have to stay that first night triggered a reaction that probably saved my life.



Instead of railing against the kidnapper, I simply accepted what had happened. He asked what I required - as if I were staying the night in a hotel.



'A hairbrush, a toothbrush, toothpaste and a toothbrush cup. An empty yoghurt pot will do,' I said.



Then the kidnapper picked up my school bag, which was lying on the floor. When I asked him to leave it with me, he stared at me and said: 'You could have hidden a transmitter in there and you could use it to call for help. You're trying to trick me and you're playing the innocent on purpose!'



The sudden change in his mood frightened me. Today I realise his words were the first indication that the kidnapper was mentally ill. Back then, such transmitters didn't even exist - but his delusion was real. I'd fallen victim to a paranoid psychopath and become a play figure in his sick fantasy world.



Yet as the door clicked shut, I'd have done anything to get him to stay. Anything rather than be alone. When he backed out of the room, the walls seemed to move in on me, the ceiling seemed to cave downwards.



As an adult, I've often reflected on how I managed to live through the early days of my incarceration. Today, I know that I regressed psychologically back to the age of four or five, when a child accepts the world around her as a given.



I'd only have to do what the kidnapper asked and everything would be all right. Everything would proceed as it always did: the bedtime ritual, my mother's hand on my duvet, the goodnight kiss, the quiet tiptoe out of the room.



So when the kidnapper came back later, I asked him to put me to bed properly and tell me a goodnight story. I even asked him for a goodnight kiss. Anything to preserve the illusion of normality.



And he played along. He covered me with a thin blanket and sat down on the floor. Then, almost timidly, he began to read The Princess and the Pea, which he'd found in my bag. At the end, he kissed my forehead.



The hidden room where Natascha was held captive for 8 years

The next day, I looked at him properly. At 35, he had soft features and neatly parted brown hair. It was only when you observed him for a longer period that you noticed the traces of madness lurking beneath his conservative exterior.



Soon, my dungeon began to fill up. First, the kidnapper brought me some of his old clothes; then a sunlounger; a large electric heater; a hotplate, a small oven, a video machine and screen.



But it didn't take long for him to show me his other face. 'If you're not good, then I'll have to tie you up,' he'd say. He told me my parents had refused to pay a ransom. 'Your parents don't love you at all . . . They don't want you back . . . They're happy to be rid of you.'



These statements were like acid. Systematically, he was undermining my belief in my family. Meanwhile, I intuitively adapted, the way you adapt to the incomprehensible customs of people in a foreign country.



A daily routine developed. He'd bring down a patio table, two folding chairs and some dishes. Then we'd sit down together and eat a precooked meal.



In the evening, he washed me in the stainless steel sink. Unaccustomed to being naked in front a strange man, I eyed him uncertainly. But he scrubbed me down as if I were a car.



As the weeks went by, he dominated me more and more. I wasn't allowed to look him directly in the face. I had to ask permission if I wanted to stand up, sit down, turn my head or speak. He even accompanied me to the loo.



Then he installed an intercom (he'd once been a communications engineer), with a microphone so powerful that it broadcast every noise I made. If I failed to answer him right away, he’d yell into the loudspeaker until my head throbbed.



I felt his presence in every corner — always there, breathing at the other end of the line.

Six months after my abduction, I became seriously depressed. I longed for the profound feeling of security I’d always had when my mother wrapped me in a towel after a hot bath.



Couldn’t I take a bath, just once? I kept asking. And, one day, he ­surprised me by agreeing.



‘If you scream, I’ll have to hurt you,’ he warned. ‘All the windows and exits have been secured with explosive devices — if you open a window, you’ll blow yourself up.’



If I failed to follow his orders down to the last detail, he’d kill me on the spot, he said.



He ordered me to follow him. That’s when I discovered that the door to ‘upstairs’ was a monster made of reinforced concrete. I can hardly put into words what I felt when I saw that door. I’d been encased in concrete. Hermetically sealed.



The concrete door opened into a tiny passageway that I had to crawl through on my hands and knees. There was a massive safe to one side, which my kidnapper pushed in front of the entrance and screwed into the wall every time he left me in the dungeon. And a dresser that concealed both safe and passageway. I knew now that nobody would ever find me.



The house was dim, as all the blinds had been let down. In the bathroom,the kidnapper watched as I undressed and got in the bath. I was already used to him seeing me naked, so I protested only meekly.



Once I sank into the warm water and closed my eyes, I was able to blot out everything around me. My mind carried me back to our bathroom at home, into the arms of my mother, who was waiting with a large, pre-warmed towel.



A little while later, he installed a bunkbed and shelves in my dungeon. 'Why are you screwing that board?' I asked, as he worked at a bookcase with a drill.



For a second, I'd forgotten I wasn't allowed to speak without permission. He bellowed and threw the heavy drill at me.



In the split second before it slammed into the wall, I managed to duck. The message was clear: if I disobeyed, he was going to seriously hurt me.



Yet I was still a child, and I needed the consolation of touch. So, after a few months underground, I asked my kidnapper to embrace me.



It was difficult. I went into a claustrophobic panic when he held me too tight. After several attempts, though, we managed to find a way - not too close, not too tight, and yet tight enough so that I could imagine feeling a loving, caring touch.



A year-and-a-half after my abduction, he suddenly told me: 'You're no longer Natascha. Now you belong to me.' And he stripped away the last shreds of my identity by ordering me to pick a new name.



I chose the name 'Bibiane' from a saints calendar, and that was my identity for the next seven years.



Not long afterwards, he finally told me his own name: Wolfgang Priklopil. I knew as soon as he said it that he'd never let me leave the house alive.







My living hell in the dungeon: He'd starve me, beat me, scream at me..and then he'd want a cuddle

It was a crime that shocked the world. A girl of ten snatched from the street, then kept in a cellar by her crazed kidnapper: Here, Natascha Kampusch continues her chilling story.



When I turned 12 and entered puberty, the kidnapper’s behaviour changed dramatically.

He started treating me as if I were dirty and disgusting, and he’d kick me in the shins as I walked past or punch me. He also subjected me to minor sexual assaults as part of my daily harassment.



It was then, too, that Priklopil started taking me upstairs to do housework. I’d scrub and polish the orange and brown tiles in his kitchen, but they were never clean enough. Without warning, I’d suddenly be kicked in the side or in the shin. And again, until everything shone.



He hated it when the pain made me cry. Then he’d grab me by the throat, drag me to the sink, push my head underwater and squeeze my windpipe until I almost lost consciousness.

Natascha Kampusch aged ten, the year she was kidnapped by Wolfgang Priklopil

I also vividly remember the snapping sound in my vertebrae when Priklopil struck my head repeatedly with his fist. But, emotionally, I felt nothing. It was as if I left my body whenever he pummelled

it, and watched a 12-year-old girl from a distance.

At times, he looked at me pensively and said, ‘How ridiculous that you didn’t come with instructions

for use.’



When I was 14, I spent the night above ground for the first time. I lay stiff with fright on his bed as he lay down next to me and tied my wrists to his with plastic cuffs. I wasn’t allowed to make a sound.

As I felt his breath on the back of my neck, I tried to move as little as possible.



My back, which had been beaten black and blue, hurt so much that I couldn’t lie on it, and the cuffs cut into my skin.



But when he manacled me to him on those many nights, it wasn’t about sex. The man who’d beat me and locked me in the cellar had something else in mind: he simply wanted something to cuddle.



By age 15, I was also spending a lot of time upstairs during the day. But Priklopil’s paranoia made it impossible ever to relax.

This picture shows the stairs that lead to the cellar where Natascha was kept. It was only when she was allowed out on a rare occasion that she realised the door which led to the cellar was made of reinforced concrete

I was forced to stand and walk at the same distance from him — one metre, no more, no less — otherwise he’d explode. If I cried, he’d leave me in the dungeon in total darkness.



Whenever I mentioned my parents, he’d fly into a rage. ‘I’m your family. I’m now your everything. You no longer have a past. I’ve created you.’



He expected me to take on the role of the submissive female who acquiesces in everything. As I came to realise, his image of the ideal family was taken from the 1950s: he wanted a hard-working little woman, who always had his dinner ready on time, who didn’t talk back and did the housework perfectly.

‘I’m your king, and you’re my slave,’ he’d tell me. ‘I always wanted to have a slave.’ And he spoke often and admiringly of Hitler, saying, ‘He was right to gas the Jews.’



Once, Priklopil told me he was one of those evil Egyptian gods from the science-fiction TV series, Stargate, who seek out young men as host bodies.



I suspect he really believed it.



Food deprivation was one of his most effective strategies to keep me in line. ‘Just look at you. You’re fat and ugly,’ he’d told me when I was 12 — filling me with self-hatred.



Today, I believe he was probably battling anorexia himself, which he then tried to transfer to me.



Later, when I was 16, my rations were dramatically reduced to just a quarter of what an adult needs.

Breakfast was milk, tea and two tablespoonfuls of cereal — not a single bite more.



My weight dropped to less than 6st and I had constant, gnawing pains. It took me a long time to understand that he was using hunger to keep me weak and submissive.



He also became paranoid about my hair: the police, he imagined, would be able to trace me if they found so much as a single strand. So he made me cover my head with a plastic bag, which left me with itchy, sore patches.



Whenever I complained, he’d hiss, ‘If you were bald, we wouldn’t have this problem.’ Driven to distraction, I took the proffered scissors one day and cut all my hair off. With a wet razor, he scraped the rest off: I was now bald.



This process was repeated whenever he gave me a shower upstairs. Not the minutest hair was allowed to remain. Anywhere.



I must have been a pitiful sight. My ribs stuck out, my arms and legs were covered in bruises and my cheeks were gaunt. But he obviously found my appearance pleasing. Because from then on, he forced me to work in the house half-naked.



Usually, I wore just a cap and knickers— though when he eventually started letting me work in his garden, it was always without my knickers. In fact, I was never fully clothed. He was convinced

I wouldn’t dare run out on to the street half-naked — and he was right.



One afternoon, when he’d taken me upstairs, I asked him to open a window.

‘You only want me to open it so that you can scream and run away,’ he barked. Then he dragged me to the front door and shoved me outside — without loosening his grip.



‘Go on, run! Go on! Just see how far you get, the way you look!’ I remained rooted to the spot. The fear that a stranger might see me bruised, half-naked and emaciated was greater than the slim hope that someone might see us and start to wonder.



He did that a few times, shoving me naked outside the house and saying, ‘Go on, run! You’ll scream, and then I’ll have to kill you.’



A new phase of my imprisonment began when he decided to renovate the upper floor of his house.

Together, we dragged marble slabs and heavy doors, hauled sacks of cement across the floor, broke open concrete with a sledgehammer.



I had to hold the bowl with the filler for hours, not moving, while he smoothed out the walls.

‘Hand me the putty knife,’ he said once. I gave him the wrong tool. From one second to the next, his eyes went dark and his features became distorted.



He grabbed a sack of cement lying next to him and threw it at me with a shout.



The sack hit me with such force that I staggered. But Priklopil’s burst of aggression was over as quickly as it had arrived. He came over and tickled me, then pushed the corners of my mouth up with his fingers.



‘Be normal again. I’m sorry. What can I do to make you normal again?’ I stood motionless, eyes closed. Then, at some point, my childish pragmatism won out. ‘I want an ice cream and gummi bears!’



Yet his outburst seemed to throw a switch. A couple of days later, he decided I was too slow in passing him a panel. So he grabbed me, rubbing my hand so hard against one of the panels that I was left with a burn.



A carefree Natascha before she was kidnapped

It never completely healed. Again and again, Priklopil would punish me by rubbing the wound open. Another time, when I yet again reacted too slowly to an order, he threw a Stanley knife at me. As the sharp blade punctured my knee, the pain was so searing that I felt nauseous.



Once, I slipped on the stairs and fell. After that, I had to spend several days in bed — probably with concussion. Yet, over the next few weeks, he aimed directly at the sore spot on my head whenever he beat me.

After about two years of this, I began a kind of passive resistance. When he drew his hand back to strike, I’d hit myself in the face until he told me to stop.

A year later, at 15, I punched him twice in the stomach. He was somewhat stunned; then he grabbed me and put me in a headlock — and, of course, I didn’t stand a chance.



His violent outbursts started becoming more frequent: repeated punches to my head that made me nauseous, sometimes more than 200 blows to my body in a week. I began keeping records in notebooks — I still have them today.



He was also more unpredictable than ever. On the nights he couldn’t sleep, his voice droned for hours through the loudspeakers in my dungeon. Other nights, he simply harassed me: ‘Obey! Obey! Obey!’ he’d say on the intercom in a monotone.



‘Obey! Obey! Obey!’



Once, when he didn’t like the way I’d baked a cake, he dragged me back to the cellar and left me in total darkness for two days, with only a bag of carrots to eat.



Amazingly, one day I heard my old name on the radio. The author of a book on missing persons was saying there was no hot trail and no body. I wanted to scream: Here I am! I’m alive!



After that, I suddenly saw everything very clearly. I knew I couldn’t spend my whole life this way. There was only one way out: taking my own life.



That day wasn’t the first time I’d attempted suicide. At 14, I’d tried several times to strangle myself with articles of clothing. At 15, I tried to slit my wrists with a large sewing needle.



This time, I piled paper and toilet rolls onto my hotplate. The dungeon

would fill with smoke and I’d gently drift away, out of a life that was no longer my own.



When the acrid smoke reached my lungs, I inhaled deeply. But then I began to cough and the will to survive kicked in.



I held my pillow in front of my mouth and threw wet clothes on top of the blistering paper. The next morning, the dungeon still smelled like a smokehouse.



When Priklopil came in, he yanked me out of bed. How dare I try to escape him! His face revealed a mixture of anger and fear. Fear that I could ruin everything.



There seemed little chance of that. Indeed, he eventually grew confident enough to take me out in his car — the first time I’d been allowed to leave my prison in seven years.

I’d looked forward to this moment for so long, but I was stiff and silent with fear.



We drove through a world I knew only from memory, where everything seemed unreal. Then, we stopped in a small forest, where I knelt briefly on some pine needles and pressed my forehead against a tree trunk.



On the way back, neither of us said a word. When Priklopil locked me in my dungeon again, a deep sadness welled up within me. I felt I’d just visited an imaginary world, where even the people on the pavements looked like wind-up toys.



He must have sensed I was caught in a psychological prison. I didn’t know it then, but he’d soon be

confident enough to take me to a bustling ski resort. And, there, for the first time in eight years — I’d find myself alone in a room with someone I could ask for help . . .

