Free Girl in the Cellar by Allan Hall

been him. He would even come to meet Natascha a month before her breakout and, like the neighbours who never suspected, thought she was merely a friend.
    Holzapfel was a pal from the Siemens days and invited ‘Wolfi’, as he called him, to join him in a business venture, the Resan construction and renovation company. The pair started out renovating old properties and then branched out into the entertainment business, staging birthday and wedding parties at a gaudily decorated warehouse on a Viennese industrial estate. The pair made money and ‘Wolfi’ was able to indulge himself in his cars—‘bombing up and down country lanes’, as another former Siemens workmate said. He once received a speeding ticket for £50, and on another occasion was involved in a minor accident in which no one was hurt.
    People around the Strasshof house began to refer to Priklopil as a ‘Bachener’—a colloquial, derogatory term for homosexual—although Holzapfel claims he never saw this side of his friend and business partner.
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    The ‘realm’ referred to by police psychologist Manfred Kram—the realm in which he was going to rule everything—would be the erstwhile shelter beneath his garage. He meticulously set about making this into an undetectable, soundproofed, windowless void—the only way for fresh air to reach it would be through a ventilation system controlled from above by him. He bought the materials necessary for the conversion from everyday DIY stores, always paying cash.
    He bought a desk for the intended victim to use. He installed a small sink and toilet, plumbed into the mains, and used insulating material of the kind favoured by music recording engineers to make the chamber soundproof. After Natascha finally escaped, police lifted floor-boards inside his house to reveal stairs leading down to a maze of doors and passages. Underground, detectives found a metal cupboard, behind which was a tunnel barely big enough for a person to squeeze through. At the end of the tunnel was a makeshift concrete door leading to yet another passage and finally the room where Natascha was held. Her world measured barely more than 5 square metres, with a bed on a raised platform and its ladder used to hang clothes.
    This was the end station of Wolfgang Prikopil’s life: a hole in the ground, 3.5m by 1.8m by 1.5m, to which childhood isolation, an all-forgiving motherly love, a few fragile friendships and an increasingly powerful compulsion had somehow led him. His work training and innate skill with his hands allowed him to build it without too much effort. This much we know—what remains asmurky as his own hideous motives are the circumstances which led him one day to choose Natascha Kampusch as the resident of this subterranean pit.
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    Apart from his council flat, the Strasshof house with its prepared dungeon and the home of Natascha, there is a fourth location that is central to the complicated existence of Wolfgang Priklopil. This is Christine’s Schnellimbiss, a lowly truck-stop cum fast-food joint in a dreary outlying district of Vienna—far removed from the period grace of the old imperial capital’s still imposing buildings—where Priklopil downed the occasional non-alcoholic drink. It is central, and not a little chilling, because it is a place that Natascha’s parents used to go to and, according to her father in interviews with the authors, Natascha herself. Ludwig Koch would never walk from his home to the pub near his house: for 20 years he would drive across town to Christine’s.
    Christine’s is at the corner of Obachgasse and Rautenweg, which is about five minutes’ walk from the Rennbahnweg estate and on the route between Priklopil’s council flat in the Rugierstrasse and his house in Strasshof. It lies in the most down-at-heel part of Vienna’s northern industrial zone, close to the city limits, among construction