Kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch now lives in the home she was held captive in a cellar for more than eight years.
Ten years after her escape from Wolfgang Priklopil’s home in Vienna, Kampusch has given a detailed account of how she got away.
Wolfgang Priklopil kidnapped Kampusch on her way to school when she was 10 years old. During this time she was beaten, starved and turned into his sex slave. But on August 23 2006, she managed to flee to a neighbours house, who then called the police.
‘I was told to clean his car. He wanted to sell it and had told me to clean it really thoroughly and completely,’ Kampusch recently told Germany’s BILD newspaper of the day she fled.
‘I remember that I felt like I could eat a horse because I had to make him jam sandwiches for breakfast but got nothing myself.’
Just before 1 p.m Priklopil took a phone call but because of the vacuum he had to step away.
‘I crept to the gate which was usually closed or blocked by heavy objects, but not on this day. I could hardly breathe. I felt solidified, as if my arms and legs were paralysed. Jumbled images shot through me,’ she said.
Adding: ‘I was afraid he would follow me here so I wanted to get further away and hide.’
First, she met two men who ‘ignored’ her. However, noticing a woman ‘in a garden house’, Kampusch ‘knocked her on her window and whispered: “Please help me!”’ The woman asked what she was doing in her garden and then called the police.
Priklopil killed himself shortly after her escape.
The Daily Mail reported in 2010 that Kampusch ‘bought the house where she was imprisoned because it was such a big part of her formative years. Yet she pledges to fill in the cellar if it is ever sold, adamant that it will never become a macabre museum to her lost adolescence.’
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