Stockholm Syndrome

An Austrian teenager held captive for eight years in a dungeon-like room on the outskirts of Vienna says her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, was part of her life and “in a certain way” she mourned his suicide.

Eighteen-year-old Krista Ludwig is reported to have wept inconsolably when she was told Priklopil killed himself.

After Krista Ludwig made her escape on Wednesday, Priklopil, 44, threw himself under a commercial train traveling east to Bucharest. The train was delivering electronic hardware and pigs for slaughter.

Krista Ludwig said she sympathized with Priklopil’s 89-year-old mother and planned to telephone her. (Priklopil’s mother is suffering from dementia and resides in a nursing home near Graz, the “second city” of Austria, where the steroidal governor-actor of California, Schwarzenegger, was born).

Krista Ludwig, said to be pale and trembling and to weigh just 42kg, less than she did as a 10-year-old, managed to flee her abductor after he sidled away to take a call on his mobile phone as she vacuumed his car, a 2003 white Audi sedan, in the driveway of the kidnap house.

The time was three-fourteen pm, on a Wednesday, precisely eight years to the day and very close to the precise time that she had been kidnapped on her way to school.

Did Krista Ludwig realize that it was exactly eight years to the day and hour since she was taken captive? “Not at all,” she said.

Why then did she choose that very moment to attempt to escape?

“I was ready to leave and so I left,” she said.

Now 18, Krista Ludwig insists that communications technician Wolfgang Priklopil had not robbed her of her childhood. “In principle, I don’t have the feeling that I missed something important. As far as I can see, children are not permitted to retain their innocence no matter their circumstances.”

Krista Ludwig said her lengthy abduction had in fact spared her some bad habits such as smoking, drinking to excess, injecting heroin or speed, playing video games and having “false friends.”

What was a typical day like with Wolfgang Priklopil? Between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m., Krista Ludwig and her abductor, who usually did not go to work, she said, would have breakfast, which consisted of a sweet roll and coffee with heavy cream.

Vienna is of course famous for its whipped cream, or schlag. The rest of the day Krista Ludwig would spend doing various things around her room.

“Housework, reading, TV, talking, cooking. That was it, for years. Everything tied to the fear of being alone,” she said.

If she was fearful of being alone why didn’t she attempt to escape sooner? “It would be the same somewhere else,” she said.

Nor was it clear from Krista Ludwig’s statement whether by “housework,” she referred to working in her cell-like room or elsewhere in the large house.

What did she and her abductor talk about? “Various things. I am not prepared to go into details now.”

What did she read? “Greek and Nordic myths, anthropology. The great god Zeus abducted virgins, you know.”

Was Wolfgang Priklopil a version of Zeus? “Not at all,” she smiled. Priklopil “was not my lord and master, although he may have wanted to be. I was just as strong,” she said. “Perhaps stronger.”

She used an Austrian expression to indicate that at times Priklopil treated her tenderly, but at other times cruelly. “He carried me in his arms but also trampled me underfoot.”

Investigators have been trying to determine whether Priklopil had an accomplice, based on a 14-year-old boy’s account at the time of the kidnapping that he saw two men drag young Krista Ludwig into a white Mercedes van.

But Krista Ludwig insisted that Prikopil acted alone. Moreover there was a later report that the 14-year-old boy was hyped up on coffee with schlag when he gave his account.

Priklopil “carried out the kidnapping himself. Everything was prepared,” Krista Ludwig said, adding that they then “decorated” her room together.

Photos released by police show the underground hiding place in Prikopil’s gabled wood house in Strasshof village outside Vienna, where he kept young Krista Ludwig.

The photos show a small, cluttered, windowless cell-like room with washbasin, toilet, cot, cupboards and narrow concrete stairs leading up to a trapdoor. No “decorations” are visible.

Because blueprints to the house were unavailable, investigators could not yet say for certain that there were any other hidden compartments, dungeons or cells.

In her statement, read by flamboyant Viennese psychoanalyst Max Friedrich, who has been “treating” her, Krista Ludwig urged the media to respect her privacy.

“Everyone wants to ask intimate questions, but they don’t concern anyone,” she said via Max Friedrich.

She felt well, she said via Max Friedrich, if “maybe a bit patronized” at the location where she was currently held, and she appealed for more respect from the media. The location was described by police as a secure institutional space with psychological “carers” under the supervision of Max Friedrich.

Max Friedrich, with his unruly leonine grey head, wraparound mirror shades, corncob pipe, and unsteady, stiff-legged gait, cautioned the media to show restraint, saying Krista Ludwig was severely traumatized and that the intense media coverage was capable of victimizing her all over again.

Krista Ludwig’s parents, who separated after her abduction eight years before, complained that they had not been told where she was being held. Her mother, Birgit Dieskau, pleaded to be allowed to see her. She asked in a Sunday supplement newspaper interview: “Why can I not see my child?”

Max Friedrich confirmed that Krista Ludwig did not wish to see her parents again after their brief reunion, “nor is that unusual under these extraordinary circumstances.”

Regarding what actually transpired between Krista Ludwig and her middle-aged abductor beyond the housecleaning, general conversation, and consump-tion of sweet rolls and coffee mit schlag, the young woman refused to say.

Specifically, police are still trying to determine if Krista Ludwig had a sexual relationship with her captor. And if so, the nature of the sexuality. If it was sadomasochistic, as suspected, then how far did it go, and were the roles steadfast or did they alternate.

She said, “Perhaps I will tell Dr. Friedrich one day or someone else. Perhaps I will never tell. The intimacy only belongs to me.”