3,096 Days in a Dungeon: The Survival of Natascha Kampusch
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It was um her manner, and it’s really difficult to explain who she is, but we’ll get into that further.
It’s just who she is, the command she has of herself, the incredibly independent, confident woman that she is, but one of the most complex characters I have ever met.
She has mostly stopped giving interviews now, recently, really.
Do you know why? Is it just because she’s done so many? >> I can completely understand her not wanting to do interviews anymore.
She didn’t want to do them She didn’t want to do them from the very start, from the first time she was released.
She was advised to by the police, and that turned out really badly, her very first interview.
They thought she was too confident, she was too composed, so she must have been in on the whole thing.
She found that very hard.
That was probably pre kind of Twitter days, but there was still such a public backlash.
Um, she went on to do media later on for her book and for her other book.
Um, and she did She had her own show.
She was just trying to find her own way, but she was never comfortable in front of the camera.
And the first interview I did with her, she was extremely uncomfortable.
The second interview, we spent a lot more time together.
We spent a couple of days together, and I really got to know her a lot better, and I realized that she just does not like the public spotlight because she feels that no matter what she says and no matter how hard she tries to clarify it, people still willfully misinterpret what she says.
And she she I think she kept doing interviews to try to clarify all these things that had been misinterpreted, and things would just get worse and worse and worse.
So, I can completely understand her going to ground.
So, how did you get such a in-depth interview with her and a visit to the house? Um, the first time um we It came about because we were doing a story about Madeleine McCann, and we had traveled to Portugal with Madeleine McCann’s parents.
And back then, it was only about, I think, 4 years since Madeleine McCann had been kidnapped.
And so, there was still some hope that she might be alive.
Um, and of course, it’s nearly 20 years now, so I don’t think anyone really thinks she’s alive and out there.
Who knows, maybe she is.
But that was one of the reasons that we wanted to interview Natascha because she was one of these cases where she was kidnapped when she was 10 years old.
Everyone assumed that she was dead.
Everyone thought she was dead.
No one ever thought that this woman was going to emerge running out into the street at 18 years old.
>> That’s right.
And so, that’s how the interview came about.
And we approached her uh That was our approach to her, that we wanted to show that there can be hope.
That really appealed to her because she’s somebody who believes in hope.
I mean, she she is still alive because she held onto her hope.
Well, she is a What I got from consuming a lot of her interviews is she is a very positive, confident person.
It’s so hard to describe the person that she she really is.
Um, she is just she’s incredibly intelligent, unbelievably intelligent.
And I think that’s that’s possibly made things even more difficult for her.
Um, keeping in mind that from the age of 10 to the age of 18, she was kept in this basement, and her only company was her captor, and occasionally a friend came over, although she didn’t really interact with him.
So, in those formative years, she didn’t learn about how to form relationships with people.
She didn’t learn about all those incredibly important things that we learn about between the age of 10 and 18.
>> didn’t go to school.
She didn’t go to school.
>> really.
>> She had a TV, which gave her education, and that’s how she learned to speak English.
And even though she refused to speak English in our first interview, by the end, she agreed to speak some English, and she had quite good English, but she’s a perfectionist, so she didn’t want to speak English because she’s such a perfectionist.
But she’s just such a complex character and such an interesting person.
Well, let’s rewind and tell her story a bit.
Who was Natascha prior to the kidnapping? What do we know about her family life and who she was as a well, 10-year-old kid? So, she lived with both her mom and her dad, they were separated.
Her home life wasn’t great.
She had older siblings, and she had I think they were cousins involved.
Um, I know her home life wasn’t great.
I remember from reading her book.
She didn’t like talking about it too much.
She didn’t want to dwell on that.
She had issues with her mom before the kidnapping and has had issues with her mom after the kidnapping.
So, she doesn’t like to go into too much of what happened, but we know that it wasn’t a happy upbringing.
And she has actually commented that she was considering suicide on the day that she was kidnapped before she was kidnapped.
Yeah, she was 10 years old.
But remember, hyper-intelligent, hyper-aware.
[snorts] So, even at 10, she would have been hyper-intelligent, hyper-aware.
Like, she thinks about everything to the nth degree.
But she had a fight with her mom that day, so she was living in a relatively stable, yet unhappy household.
She had a fight with her mom on the way to school, so she walked by herself, and then it’s, you know, it’s everyone’s nightmare for their kid.
>> Yeah.
What do we know about what exactly happened? She was walking along the footpath.
Was Wolfgang on that street? How did he kind of take her without anyone seeing? Well, somebody did see.
A kid saw.
So, she was walking down the street, and he had his white van there, and he just bundled her into this van.
He had this big white Mercedes van, and a kid saw what the kid described as two men putting a girl in a van.
And so, that’s how he got her, and then slammed the door, just drove to his house, but bundled her up in a blanket, and then carried her into the cellar that we now know about.
But then, as a result of this kid seeing this, they pulled over, I think, about 800 white vans, including his, and they actually visited Police visited his house because he had a van matching the exact description.
She was downstairs at the time, and he managed to convince them that he was at home, you know, just doing his stuff.
Stop.
Truly, she was this close to being found in the weeks after she was kidnapped.
Could have been such a different story.
Such a different story for her.
The house that he took her, what was that area like, that neighborhood? Was it a kind of kids, families? Was it that kind of vibe? She was just literally in plain sight.
In plain sight.
It was a totally normal neighborhood.
It was a middle-class neighborhood, lovely houses everywhere.
You know, people doing their gardens.
Um it was just the most normal neighborhood.
She was, yeah, hidden in plain sight the entire time.
And he even took her out of the house, but the neighborhood was just like any normal neighborhood.
And people had looked far and wide, and they thought she’d been trafficked across the border, and there she was the whole time in the middle of Vienna.
Like how far from her home? She was as close as 25 km to her own home.
So, the whole time they’re searching far and wide, they’re searching other countries.
They thought she’d been trafficked across to another another country, and she was just 25 k’s away from her home all that time.
So, let’s talk about Wolfgang for a minute, then.
Wolfgang Priklopil, he was a 36-year-old technician.
What else do we know about this guy? >> So, what we know, or what I know, is what she told me.
So, it’s really interesting that she has compassion for him, and that’s part of who she is.
Um even though she didn’t go to school, and she says she got her education from books and television, um she’s an incredibly insightful person.
We can get into this more, but of course there was some element.
She hates the term Stockholm syndrome and says it simplifies things too much.
That’s that’s very much her personality to argue against being put in a box.
And so, I don’t want to say therefore she had Stockholm syndrome, but it is very much what we think of as Stockholm syndrome.
So, she told me that he could be very nice to her.
Um that his mother used to come like every couple of weeks, and she would have to go downstairs when his mother was there.
Um and he was very nice to his mother, and he was very nice to his friends.
When his friend came over, he was always very lovely.
He seemed like a kind man.
He seemed handsome.
He was well-spoken.
Um but at the same time, she said there were two sides to him.
So, we know that he beat her often.
Um he beat her weekly.
Um he starved her.
He starved her so that she couldn’t get away.
When she was kidnapped, I think she was 45 kilos, and when they found her 8 years later, she was 48 kilos.
So, we also know that he sexually assaulted her.
We know that she was forced to sleep in his bed.
She doesn’t like to talk about that, understandably.
But yes, there was definitely a really horrible side to him.
I know that you you mentioned a friend and a mom, but it doesn’t sound like he had, you know, a girlfriend or relationships.
Like, he seemed to live quite a lonely life.
>> Yeah, he seemed like a loner.
He was always described as a loner, and it sounds like he was a loner cuz she was often upstairs at his house and had to go downstairs when people came, except for this one friend.
Um and yeah, I think he was definitely a loner, and I would suggest that one of the reasons he took her was for company.
>> Right.
I was going to say I think that’s one of the things I’m struggling to understand in this case.
Why? Why did he take her? Because you mentioned sexual assault, but that doesn’t seem to be the main motive.
>> No, and that didn’t happen for many years.
Um and she even speculates she she wonders whether he was waiting until she got to a a more appropriate age um for anything like that to happen because nothing like that happened for the first three or four years.
I think she was about 14 when she first slept in his bed.
Again, not an appropriate age by any means.
That doesn’t seem to be the primary motive.
He doesn’t seem to have been a pedophile because nothing like that happened at an early age.
I think he wanted company, and maybe maybe it was a power thing.
Maybe he had no power in his life, and so he wanted to have power over somebody.
Um who knows? I I really don’t know, but I kind of feel like because of the way she describes him, and because she’s she was so sad when he died, and because they did form a relationship, partly because she pretended that she was his friend um to stay alive, but I think a friendship ultimately formed from that.
Yeah, he’s just such a complex character, and I don’t know.
We’ll never know.
We’ll never know.
I think she’s tried to explain it as best she can, but it still doesn’t make sense.
To be clear, he he hadn’t planned to kidnap Natascha.
Was It was just a random girl.
It was just a random girl.
From everything we understand, it was just a random girl.
She just happened to be walking down the street that day.
Again, it is, you know, it’s such a overused statement, um every parent’s worst nightmare, but that’s got to be right up there.
That your kid’s walking down the street and, you know, is bundled into a van and disappears.
>> That is the ultimate stranger danger warning.
>> It is the ultimate stranger danger warning.
It doesn’t happen that often.
It really doesn’t.
But when it does happen, it freaks the hell out of you, and it makes everybody not want to let their kid walk down the street, and that’s why I guess so few of us let our kids go out and play in the street, you know, as often as they should.
But he had gone as far as pre-plan and create this kind of bunker for many, many months prior.
So, it was very like premeditated.
Absolutely premeditated.
Yeah, because um even though it wasn’t Natascha he was after, he was certainly after somebody.
So, there was this war bunker that had been built under the house.
His grandfather built the house, I think.
His grandfather or great-grandfather.
Um but it was definitely built by his family, and there was a bunker down below, and then he had carved it out further.
Um and it was like a 5 square feet room.
Um and he had even furnished it with stuff for somebody, you know, who would be in there.
There was There was very little when she first went in, but more stuff got in there.
But the way he had it shut, like this huge concrete slab went over it and shut, and it was absolutely impossible to get out.
And her greatest fear the entire time she was there was that something would happen to him, and no one would know she was there, and she would just die slowly in that bunker.
Is that >> [sighs] >> just one of the terrifying things that young woman had to live with? Yeah, one I I mean, it just imagine that.
She was She was so scared cuz she could hear the car leave, and she was so scared every time he left that, you know, another car would hit him or something would happen to him.
And >> Well, you can understand why she would form some kind of relationship because that was her lifeline to the outside world.
>> That’s right.
And she was so smart.
She was so smart, and she knew that was the only way she was going to survive.
So, she was I think at the very beginning as a 10-year-old kid, she was banging on the wall.
She was trying to make noise.
She was doing what she could, but she worked out pretty quickly that that just was futile.
Nobody could hear her.
>> I want to talk a little bit more about what Wolfgang did to her during those years.
I’ve heard her describe that he liked to call her a concentration camp victim, or like he would treat her like that.
Like, he he shaved her head.
Yeah.
There was a lot of just humiliation amongst the cruelty.
Yeah.
And again, I think that comes from and this is pop psychology, what do I know, but a lonely man who had no power in his life.
Uh he was a communication technician.
He just went to his job and came home.
He had nothing else going on in his life.
Maybe he’d been fantasizing about this for a long time, but he did use her as his little doll.
He did shave her head.
He did humiliate her.
He enjoyed humiliating her.
She said he got pleasure from that.
Uh if she did the slightest thing wrong, he beat her.
As you know, he starved her.
All of these things were part of the power, I think, for him.
It was all part of a power game.
Um but at the same time, he could sometimes be kind to her, and they would have conversations, and they ate breakfast together every morning.
It’s just so complicated and weird, and all forms part of this whole, you know, it’s just so wacky.
You just can’t even believe it.
Well, is it true that he planned to make her his wife at one stage? Yeah, there are there are suggestions that he was trying to get passports for both of them so that they could leave the country, and then they could marry.
And I think she thought that was her future, and and that was just what was going to happen because again, I think she was very torn about the whole situation.
Over time, he did start to grant her more privileges.
So, she did spend the first few years kind of confined downstairs in the bunker.
And then over time, he kind of let her come upstairs a bit more.
But you’ve said like that might have looked like breakfast.
What else did that look like? Was she allowed to go out of the house? Was she allowed to go on trips with him? So, initially, it was just coming upstairs to have breakfast.
Um then he had her coming upstairs to clean, and that was her main job upstairs.
He would bring her upstairs to clean.
Sometimes he would tie her to him, um which is kind of weird.
He said, you know, so she couldn’t escape, but again, I feel like that was to keep him company in a way.
Um then she was allowed go out of the house with him.
Um they went to restaurants.
They went to shopping centers.
She said she tried to get people’s attention, but she was terrified in doing that because he had said, “If you do anything, I will kill you.
” Um and she truly believed that.
So, when they were at shops or out at restaurants or anything like that, she was trying to make eye contact with people.
She described me the eye contact she was trying to make with people, but nobody responded.
Nobody understood why this young girl with this man was kind of making weird eyes at them.
Um she even um went on a skiing trip with him, which is again, [clears throat] it’s just it’s just all so wacky and forms part of your understanding as to why she’s had a really difficult time reintegrating into society because her world was just so wacky.
Here she is on a skiing trip with her captor, with this guy who has kidnapped her, and you think, “Well, couldn’t she have skied away?” I assume he had her at a very close distance.
Yeah, well, 8 years of power and control from when you’re a young child.
But, it sounds like she always wanted to escape.
She never kind of gave up on that hope.
>> She always hoped that she would have a life outside that bunker.
Yeah.
Um and that’s what kept her going.
She always believed that that would be possible and that could be possible.
And she was thinking of different ways of escape, but at the same time she was terrified that he would kill her if she attempted to escape and she failed and he caught her.
Um and I think there was some kind of bond with him as well that kept her there.
Um but by the time she was 18 and she saw her moment, she was ready.
She was ready to get out of there.
Well, that was 2006 when she escaped and it was just like a chance moment, really.
He left a gate unlocked.
>> He did.
So, she was washing the car.
That was part of her duties.
She was just cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, always cleaning.
And she was helping him wash the car and he had the vacuum cleaner on to to vacuum inside the car and the phone rang.
So, he went to take a phone call and he walked away and the gate was open and he never left the gate open.
But, I guess he’d kind of been lured into a false sense of security as well.
He felt that she was never going to run away.
She saw the gate.
She saw him.
She described the moment vividly, just looking at the gate, looking at him, judging the distance, how long would it take her to run.
And then she just thought, “I’m going for it.
” She bolted out the gate.
She ran down the street.
She didn’t even know where she was.
She’d never even seen the house from the outside properly.
You know, she’d always been driven in and out of this driveway.
So, she ran out and she ran down the street.
And the incredible thing is the first door she knocked on, the people just told her to go away.
Um so, she was knocking on doors saying, “I’m Natascha Kampusch.
I’m Natascha Kampusch.
” And people just said, “Go away.
” She eventually got an older lady, an old lady who took her in and called the police and thank god she was found.
She was found, but we never heard from Wolfgang because because he took his own life.
And she said that he always said he would never get caught.
He would never allow himself to get caught.
Um and so, he threw himself on the train tracks and was run over by a train.
Was that pretty soon after she was free? >> Yeah.
Yeah, it was almost immediately afterwards.
Yeah.
As soon as >> a plan.
He Yes.
If this happens, I do this.
Absolutely.
Yep, engage emergency plan.
He did it straight away.
So, yeah, he was not going to jail, which is, you know, he could jail her.
He was not going to allow the same thing to happen to him.
How did the outside world I want to get to how they covered her reappearance because there’s a lot to talk about there.
But, before she was found, what did the media coverage look like? Cuz it was 8 years, really, of I’m assuming like every year it rolls around, they cover the anniversary, but was her family big in talking to the media? Um so, initially there was all the media you would expect.
10-year-old girl missing, it was huge.
Everybody was, you know, there was a lot of coverage um very early on.
There were anniversaries, but as time went on, it faded away.
Um the case of Madeleine McCann is so unusual in that it does get brought up year after year partially because the parents are just so active in pushing for that.
In her case, I think the story had really waned by the time she appeared.
It was still around.
There were anniversaries, but I think people had well and truly given her up for dead.
I don’t think anyone in a million years thought they were going to see her again.
So, that would have been insane coverage when she came out.
Absolutely insane.
Everybody wanted a piece of her.
This famous vision of her being her coming out with a blanket over her head from the police station.
Everybody wanted to interview her.
She desperately did not want to be interviewed because she wasn’t ready to speak.
She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say.
Um she did speak.
Everything was misinterpreted.
She was then demonized.
People said the most horrible things about her.
Um and if you meet her, she is just such a composed person.
And she was so composed.
And because she was so composed and was able to analyze, she was able to already analyze and speak about and interpret her experience just, you know, a matter of days and weeks after she had been released.
And so, people thought, “Okay, you must have been in on this.
” So, she she wasn’t the perfect victim for armchair experts, so Um yeah, exactly.
She wasn’t the perfect victim.
She wasn’t crying and she wasn’t broken and she wasn’t, you know, I think they thought she was somebody who probably had spent 8 years being beaten up, which is which is true, but that wasn’t constant um and sexually abused and and thought she should come out looking more like a victim and behaving more like a victim and crying and being a broken person.
But, she had held herself together for those 8 years and more power to her.
It’s really ugly, I think, looking back at a lot of that commentary.
It was even coming from politicians.
Oh.
Who were criticizing her and judging her story.
And this was a 10-year-old girl Mhm.
who spent 8 years in captivity >> Mhm.
and has been miraculously found alive.
It actually blows my mind that society Mhm.
and the media treated her like that.
>> Mhm.
It wasn’t that long ago.
>> No, it wasn’t that long ago at all.
It wasn’t at all.
It’s just appalling.
She was a young woman.
She did not deserve that.
Hopefully, we would not do that to someone today, but then there are the, you know, internet trolls.
So, you know, they’ll do it to anybody.
But, it was horrendous what happened to her.
I think I think it was so hard for her because again, she is so smart.
She’s so incredibly intelligent.
She held herself together.
Good on her for holding herself together.
She was the person she was because she always wanted to be that person.
She wanted to be strong and she was strong.
And so, she was criticized for that.
Did she tell you how all of that coverage made her feel? Horrible.
She said it was horrible.
She said the entire experience was so horrible.
She she didn’t didn’t want to do it, did do it, and then just copped everything that she could ever have feared and way, way worse.
Tell me about the decision to buy the house.
So, the house she was kept in, 2 years after she kind of came back into society, she decided to buy the house.
Why? So, the house was very important It was very important to her that the house would be controlled by her.
Um there are many reasons.
The reason that she gave to us was that she didn’t want it turned into a theme park.
And by that, she meant she didn’t want people coming through.
She felt somebody would buy it and people would honestly pay to go through and have a look at the place that she was held hostage and where the worst things you can imagine happened to her.
She said later that it was such a part of her formative years that she also wanted to keep it for that reason.
And when we saw her, she was still going back there every week and cleaning the house from top to bottom.
I mean, maybe that was somehow therapeutic for her because she’d done it for so many years.
Well, I found it fascinating watching your interview with her and she turns around and asks if you’re okay.
That was one of the weirdest moments.
That was one of the weirdest moments and I have recounted that so many times >> so calm in that moment.
So calm.
And she’s concerned for you.
Are you feeling okay coming in here? I’m fine.
How are you? I’m awesome.
Me, too.
So calm.
>> locked in a basement for 8 years.
>> I was not locked in a basement.
No, no.
She was she’s I should also say she’s a really lovely, genuinely lovely, compassionate person.
Um and really kind and um we we bonded in the time um before we got to the house.
It was It was quite a long drive from where we where we were staying.
And it turned out that she loves Abba and um I had recently interviewed the members of Abba and she was fascinated by that.
And it was so cute because she became like a teenage girl and she was asking all these questions and and then we started singing Abba songs on the way to the house where she had been held hostage all these years, the house where I had done a piece to camera just a few years before.
And it it it’s just it was just so bizarre.
And then we get to the house and she turns to me and says, “Are you okay?” I said, “Yes.
Are you okay?” And she’s like, “Yes.
Like, of course I am.
” And yeah, she had no issues walking inside, but I guess that was the place that she lived.
There were very bad memories there.
There were probably some good memories and there were was a lot of familiarity.
Um and that was the place that she had lived longest in her life.
How did you find being in that house? Was it weird at all? It was so weird.
>> Was it? It was so weird.
>> to the listeners, when you look at the house, it’s actually quite a nice like it’s a very old-fashioned in terms of its decor, but it’s very big.
It’s got like airy rooms.
The lounge room looks quite nice.
Yeah.
>> a It’s not a dilapidated No.
It It was a little bit more dilapidated than it looked in our story.
Um I would say the first thing about it was it was cold.
It was really cold.
And the coldness struck me not just because it was I mean, it was a cold day, but it wasn’t that cold.
But there was just this eeriness about it.
You walk in the door and I think the coldness was both the coldness in the air and just this freaky feeling of walking into this house and the minute you walk in the house, the second you walk in the house, you just think, “Oh my god, what went on here?” >> Really? >> And yes, you walk in the corridor.
I walk past the bathroom and I just looked at the bathroom and I was like, “That That’s the bathroom he used all the time.
” And then that was one of the first things we passed and then we were in the living room and she very casually described all her experiences in the living room and cleaning the living room and how she would be in this living room and it would be as she would be having an enjoyable time, but then she would know his mother was coming over, so she’d be bundled downstairs and back up again, but it was so creepy.
And then when she took us to what has now been filled in, the stairs that went down to the cellar, that was just bizarre.
But she’s so matter-of-fact about it.
She just stands there and says, “Yes, this is it.
This is Yep, it was filled in.
I didn’t want it filled in, but the council said it had to be filled in and and I was saying, “What How does it feel?” And she’s like, “Yep, fine.
You know, why do you keep asking me how I feel?” >> [laughter] >> Mentally strong.
That girl is very mentally strong.
Very very very mentally strong.
She obviously managed to find joy in those 8 years.
How How did she stay so mentally strong? She used her imagination a lot.
She has a very vivid imagination.
She thought about the outside a lot.
She thought about her life on the outside and what life could be like outside.
She watched a lot of television.
She learned English from watching television.
She watched a lot of TV shows and at first she had a radio only and then she got a TV, but she was only allowed to watch and listen to recorded things because he didn’t want to know her to know the full extent of the search for her.
>> Right.
Um but later on she was allowed to watch all sorts of American shows and it’s pretty funny when she lists off the American shows that she was watching cuz this is her view of the world and this is how she became a woman, went from becoming a child to a woman through watching American TV shows.
>> Like what? Do you remember? I can’t remember, but they were really like All in the Family or I don’t know, really odd old shows.
>> Like sitcoms and Old sitcoms, really weird old sitcoms and and you know, dramas and stuff and just seemed so weird imagining this kid.
That was her whole life was watching these TV shows, but I think she got through it because she is so strong within herself.
She is such a strong person.
I think it would have broken 99.
9% of people being locked in this cellar.
I don’t think I would have survived that.
>> I don’t think I would have survived that and fearing that he’s not going to come back because he’s going to get hit by a car, but also fearing he’s going to come down and he’s going to do things to you and you’ve got so much going on, yet she’s still thinking positive.
And again, when you meet her and you spend time with her, you totally get that.
You totally get that.
That is her through and through.
She is one strong woman.
I do want to back up a bit because listeners might have been like, “What do you mean she had to fill in the basement? Like why is it the council’s business?” I can’t remember exactly, but from what I remember, it was just a building thing, a structural thing.
Like that shouldn’t have been there.
The basement and all of that was was not structurally sound and initial reports said that it was because they didn’t want the scene of a crime to be available, but from what she explained to me, I think it was just it just wasn’t like, you know, it wasn’t up to code.
>> [laughter] >> And she said it wasn’t appropriate cuz she didn’t want to fill it in cuz she said she wasn’t ready to fill it in.
So just as she needed to go upstairs and and just as she needed to be in that house and revisit it, I think she probably wasn’t ready to say goodbye to that place that was truly her home, her sanctuary for those 8 years.
Which is It should have been her right to decide when.
I guess it should have.
I guess it should have, but councils and building codes apparently the same the world over.
That decision as well added to this controversy around Natasha, didn’t it? The The fact that she bought this house, she’d visit this house.
And it’s like people that don’t understand Natasha like you do or have watched the documentaries on her and understand who she is, they just didn’t get it.
They didn’t get it at all.
They thought it just added to the whole notion that she was a freak, that she was a liar, that you know, she was messed up in the head.
Like what kind of person does that? That was the place where she was victimized and how could she do it? But yeah, she was demonized for it, but I can completely understand because she guards her privacy so much.
She just did not want people walking through there as we did.
Um and With permission.
With permission with her, obviously.
Yeah.
It’s I think it’s just such an interesting way to look at society though because it’s like what right do people have to judge an experience that you could never understand.
Well, we’re a very judgmental society.
We are a very judgmental society.
It’s happened from, you know, Lindy Chamberlain, well, long before that, but >> coming up in my head every time I heard about that Lindy would pop into my head.
Once again, she wasn’t the perfect victim.
She wasn’t the perfect victim.
And just like Peter Falconio’s disappearance, Joanne Lees, his girlfriend, she she was the same.
She didn’t act like the perfect victim and so people judged her.
We love these kind of situations.
People love to judge people and when there are big stories like this, this gives them a big nice chance to get in there and be very very judgmental.
Apart from all of the noise, how did she go reintegrating? Not only back into life, but back into a family that had kind of moved on without her.
Reintegration for her has been and continues to be very very difficult.
Her family life, as we discussed, her family life wasn’t great before she went into this place.
She had made comment that at times being in the basement and living there had been better than where she’d come from.
She later retracted that and I think that’s all to do with the very complex relationship she has with her mom.
>> Yeah.
Um when she got out, her mom the relationship with her mom remained very difficult.
And I think that’s the difference.
That’s one of the differences between her and Elizabeth Smart.
I’m sure we all remember the case of Elizabeth Smart who disappeared for years and then people never thought they’d see her again.
She’s the American girl and she escaped, but she came back to to a very strong religious family that that took her into their arms and and guided her and protected her.
Natasha didn’t have the same relationship with her family and also she had grown into a very different person.
I think Elizabeth Smart had a very different relationship with her parents before she went she was kidnapped and I think Natasha turned into her own person.
She had no choice but to become her own person and that person wasn’t willing to accept what her family was offering and she would suggest that her family was not offering what she needed in any way, shape or form.
And that turned her into Well, it’s probably a wrong turn of phrase.
That meant that life for her was very very difficult in the years that followed.
When we first met her, she told me that she didn’t have any friends, that it was really hard to make friends.
She didn’t know how to make friends.
Like we all learn how to make friends.
We go to school, we do We socialize with people.
>> Even people who don’t who are homeschooled, like we you know, people are socialized and we learn this is how you form a relationship.
Don’t come on too strong.
Don’t come on too weak, you know.
And she just had no idea and she still with social skills and she she discussed the first time and more so the second time when we spent more time with her that she really studied people and how they behaved and how they responded to other people because she was still trying to learn how to respond to people, how to interact with people, how to form basic relationships with people on a day-to-day basis.
Her best friend probably was this man who was her manager who wasn’t a manager at all.
I think he had been I can’t remember what his position was exactly.
Like he had edited one of her books or he’d been involved in marketing one of her books or something and just realized how vulnerable she was and had kind of adopted her into his family and became this kind of manager of sorts just to try to help her navigate her way through the world.
>> Wow.
But again, she was just friendless and she was having so much fun with us because she is suspicious of everybody.
She thinks everybody wants something from her.
>> Understandably.
And yeah, and she thinks everyone wants to judge her or is trying to take her money or whatever.
She She She doesn’t know how to judge people cuz again, she was locked up for so many years.
So she doesn’t have many people she can interact with.
In our relationship, she could understand that we were doing a story on her.
It was for the purposes, I believe for the second time, it was the purpose of publishing her book and and promoting her book.
So she understood the terms of the relationship and for her that’s really important to understand exactly what is going on at all times.
And so because she understood the terms of our relationship, we were a camera crew there to interview her.
She was going to be interviewed by us.
It was all on the table.
So, it was really easy.
So, she let her guard down and she relaxed and we had fun and we laughed and we went out and ate and had fun and yeah, we had a we had quite a nice time and formed a nice friendship.
Um and so, I’m really saddened Yeah.
to hear that things have not improved for her.
Is she working at all or She tried to work.
She had her own, oddly, she had her own talk show.
She was the host of a talk show.
Wow, okay.
>> Um yeah, that didn’t work out amazingly well.
And then she had all sorts of grand plans.
She wanted to She had thought about becoming a doctor at one point.
There were There were multiple careers that she had contemplated.
And when we saw her, she was talking about she was going to go to university.
She was going to study something.
She wanted to do something.
I don’t think that ever happened.
Um I think she had tried to do some study in the past but found it really difficult.
The discipline of the study was quite difficult, which is odd with her behavior cuz she she seems to be quite disciplined but again, when you’ve been kidnapped for 8 years, I guess everything is a little bit difficult.
Um and so, she was pretty much doing nothing but she was she was making money out of media interviews as well.
So, I think that was one of the reasons that she had done stuff like that.
But no, very little work, very little to keep it going, very little to do during the day and this this wonderful man who had taken her in, who was effectively her manager, said that that was one of the things that he found most difficult was that she just had nothing to do all day.
Yeah.
>> nothing to occupy her time.
It’s really sad to hear that because with a story like this, you kind of want to have it tied up in a neat little bow that she survives and she goes on to live her life and in this instance, Natasha has really struggled to do that.
Yeah, and it’s I guess it’s the converse of what people thought when she came out.
She’s too composed.
She’s too okay.
She’s too fine.
Well, you know, look at her nearly 20 years later.
She’s not fine at all.
She’s not fine at all.
Her family says that she’s gone into her own little world, which is something that she did when we were there.
You could see her going into her own world.
She’d kind of go into this playful mode.
She’d become childlike and then sometimes she would just stare off into the distance.
She’d just stare for ages at nothing and you could see her going into her own head.
It was yeah, it was it was really really sad and so, her family says that’s pretty much where she is now inside her own head and I’m not surprised because that’s probably her only happy place.
That’s where she spent 8 years of her life, inside her own head.
And so, it’s her happy place.
It’s the place where she feels comfortable.
It’s the place where she feels she can have a solid relationship with herself in her head.
It’s the only relationship she understands.
It’s it’s so devastatingly sad.
I think even when we met her the first time, she was clearly uncomfortable and she was cagey and she was stubborn and all of those things but she was very young and she was hopeful of being able to go on to live what we call a normal life.
I mean, what’s a normal life? Um but she was hopeful of going on to form friendships, I guess, and maybe a romantic relationship and and having a job and and the things that people do in normal life and um that really hasn’t happened and I don’t think it will happen for her because of all these issues with her personality and with her struggle to understand society and with her hyper-intelligent brain working a thousand times an hour to, you know, study how you’re responding to the person next to you so she can work out how to do that next time.
Well, she’s obviously not succeeded and just retreated into her own brain if her family’s stories are true because she hates being spoken about um as though she is understood when she has not spoken the words herself.
>> Right.
Lastly, I know that you have had such a big career.
You’ve interviewed so many survivors and victims.
And your interactions with Natasha were quite a long time ago now.
How do you think about those interactions in relation to all of the stories that you’ve done and all the cases you’ve covered? Does it stick with you? She’s one of the stories that has remained with me the most.
>> Right.
That has really remained with me and I have thought about her so many times.
The very first time I met her, she I was so struck by her and her case and I often wondered about her and I was so happy that we got to go back and interview her again.
Um and yes, of all the people I’ve interviewed, she’s definitely right up there as one of the most intriguing and one of the ones that really sits in my heart because she’s such a lovely person.
She’s such a kind and compassionate person as I mentioned.
She’s so she’s so nice.
Like she’s so funny.
She’s so sweet.
Again, she can also become quite brittle at times if you rub her up the wrong way but such a fantastic person with so much potential.
And her life was ruined by this man and it’s not going to I I don’t think that it’s possible to recover from that.
I don’t think anyone could.
But but I would say Natasha has certainly done her absolute best.
She has done more than anyone on the planet, I think, to try and recover her life and I just only wish the best for her.
Thank you to Rani for helping us to tell Natasha’s story.
You can find more links to Rani’s work in our show notes.
True Crime Conversations is hosted by me, Gemma Bath.
Our senior producer is Tally Blackman.
The group executive producer is Elaria Brophy.
There’s been audio designed by Jacob Brown and video editing by Julian Rosario.
Thanks so much for listening.
I’ll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.
