This is a story in the current news about a woman who was kidnapped.
- She was kidnapped off the street at the age of 10
- She was held hostage in a cellar
- When she hit puberty at the age of 12, her kidnapper (Priklopil) started to be physically, sexually and verbally abusive towards her.
- At the age of 12 he started to take her upstairs and make her clean the house.
- Priklopil didn't like it when Natascha cried, he would either cuddle her and try to make her stop crying whilst telling her how sorry he was, or he attempted to drown her, but not completely, so she was nearly unconscious.
- At the age of 14 she was made to sleep in his bed but not for a sexual reason, for the fact that he wanted someone to cuddle when he went to sleep.
- At the age of 15 she realised that Priklopil had a 1950's view of things and he believed that he should have a young housewife.
- He used to tell Natascha how fat and disgusting she was and she believed this was because he was anorexic and trying to push his anorexia on her.
- It was shortly after this that he cut the amount of food she was allowed to eat and she became drastically skinny, with her bones protruding through her skin.
- Priklopil was very paranoid about the police being able to track Natascha down by them finding one of her hairs, so he made her wear a plastic bag on her head until eventually she got her head shaved every time she was allowed upstairs to wash.
- After she became very skinny he forced her to work in the house half naked, and in the garden naked, knowing that she would never try to escape if she was naked and covered in bruises.
- He often held her outside the front door when she was naked and told her to try and run away, he didn't care that people may be able to see him because he knew that she would never run away without any clothes on
- To punish her he re-opened healing wounds
- After 2 years of being imprisoned she started to fight back but he was a lot bigger and stronger than her.
- She kept notebooks of the type of things that happened to her
- He had an intercom in her cellar
- She tried to kill herself when she was 14 by strangling herself with clothes
- At 15 she tried to slit her wrists with a large sewing needle.
- She also tried to kill herself by filling her lungs with smoke
- He occasionally took her out
- She was allowed to listen to the radio where she heard her name mentioned by the author of a missing persons book.
- Priklopil killed himself on the day that Natascha escaped
- She owns the house she was kept captive in
- She can see it from other peoples view and she shudders at the thought of what happened to her but it was her home for 8 years and she became used to that.
- She built an emotional relationship with him
- When she died she had to grieve for him because she felt she had lost someone close to her.
- She has a more acute awareness than women of her age
- She is lacking in aspects of her social skills
- She finds it hard to get close to people and from relationships with potential boyfriends. When she was locked in the cellar she craved human contact but now that she is out she is afraid of it.
- Her father was an alcoholic and her parents had marriage problems.
- She as given literature in the cellar but has no knoledge of fashion or how young women her age should behave.
- 'You have to remember my mother lost her daughter. She had a child. She lost that child. She got the child back, but it was no longer a child, no longer someone she knew.'
- The chief police officer working on the case shot himself when people were challenging the police force for not doing enough to find Natascha.
The Italian Josef Fritzl
*Michele Mongelli has been dubbed the Italian Josef Fritzl
*He locked his daughter up for 25 years and raped her and his son repeatedly.
*The 64 year old groomed his son to sexually abuse his sister.
*Detectives have said that he started raping his daughter when she was 9 years old. She managed to escape once and told the police about her sexual abuse however her father managed to convince the police that she was mentally ill.
*His daughter was forced to live in a darkened room with no electricity and was only allowed out with her father.
*Michele's brother had also sexually abuse his own children aged 6, 8, 12 and 20.
The case was uncovered after police secretly planted listening devices in the household and recorded the 9 year old daughter saying: "Dad, get your hands off me. You are a bastard, stop it."
Josef Fritzl Story
*Josef Fritzl started sexually abusing his daughter Elisabeth at the age of 11.
*At the age of 18 she was lured into her basement by her father. She was kept there for 14 years and fathered 7 children with her father, one of whom became suffered from breathing problem and died a few days after birth. Josef burned the body in an incinerator and scattered the ashes in the garden of his house.
*Josef and his wife adopted 3 of his daughters children, however Josef’s wife, knew nothing about the hidden cellar as Josef had claimed that his daughter had runaway to join a sect. This was plausible as Elisabeth had a history of running away; at the age of 15 she ran away with a friend but was later brought back to her parents by police.
*Josef claimed the sex was consensual however Elisabeth stated that she was chained to a wall and repeatedly raped.
*Josef was a qualified electrician and had installed electric locks on all the doors in the cellar so the family could not escape. The cellar was also sound proofed and had no windows. He would get food delivered to them at night so no-one would see. The room where his family was kept was hidden in the cellar but a shelf unit.
*Josef was eventually discovered when Elisabeth's eldest daughter became seriously ill and needed medical treatment. Elisabeth hid a note inside her daughter's clothing, this was discovered by hospital staff.
*When Josef was arrested he said that he knew there was something wrong with him because what he was doing was wrong, but it became an addiction for him.
*He took toys and books into the secret room because he wanted to care for his family and make them happy.
