Girl in the Cellar by Allan Hall Read Free Book Online Page A

a girl and hold her hostage—but at the time when other lads his age were dancing and dating girls, or at the very least dreaming of dating them, he had formed views on the opposite sex indicating his warped persona. He told a friend that ‘all girls are tarts’ and added: ‘They don’t interest me. I want a partner who will understand when I want to be alone, who can cook well, is happy to be only a housewife, who looks good but does not consider looks important. I want a woman who will simply support me in everything I do.’
    Kurt Kletzer, a Vienna psychotherapist who is working on a detailed study of Wolfgang Priklopil and his adolescent slide into the mind’s danger zone, said it is possible now that his school or family doctor might have picked up on his problems. ‘But in the 1960s and early 70s being a quiet lad who liked to shoot birds wouldn’t necessarily have marked him down as being a potential threat to other humans,’ he said. ‘But even then, there is not much beyond monitoring and medicating that could have been done. His mental make-up was formed. Probably, at best, society could have hoped merely to keepWolfgang Priklopil at bay. ‘Was he a genuine psychopath genetically hard-wired to act as he did or was he a neurotic and a victim of the environment that raised him?’
    Psychopathy is a term derived from the Greek psych (mind) and pathos (suffering), and was once used to denote any form of mental illness. These days, psychopathy is defined in psychiatry as a condition characterised by ‘lack of empathy or conscience, poor impulse control and manipulative behaviour’.
    It is unclear at what stage in his life his obsession to kidnap and detain a young girl for his pleasure developed. Naturally it has drawn parallels with Frederick Clegg, the strange and withdrawn ‘collector’ of the John Fowles book of the same name who, no longer content with butterflies, ‘collects’ art student Miranda Grey—he is fixated on her—and keeps her captive in his Sussex house. Fowles’s compelling psychological study charts a battle of minds and wills which, in addition to its fascinating and terrifying account of a psychopath, lays open to display the powerful condition of attachment.
    There is a common trait among psychopaths and neurotics—the need to hide things or characteristics in order to appear normal. Marc Dutroux, the Belgian paedophile, built himself the same kind of underground dungeon that he needed to carry out his crimes as Priklopil. Certainly his relationship to his father—and more significantly to his mother—made him the creature he became.
    â€˜I subscribe to the theory he was actually more of aneurotic than a psychotic personality,’ said Kurt Kletzer in an interview for this book.
    Was he psychotic with an inbuilt genetic need to behave as he did [Kletzer asks], or was he a neurotic who was forced by the society and the world and the circumstances into which he was born to act as he did? I believe in his case it is the latter which played a greater role in making him what he was.
    He has been called a kidnapper or criminal in all that has been written about him, but he was not born a kidnapper or criminal; a person can be born a duke or lord, but you are not born a kidnapper. There are some studies that indicate a genetic predisposition towards certain types of antisocial or criminal behaviour, but there are many people who may have these genetic traits who do not become kidnappers or criminals. What is vital to know in his case is what influenced him after he was born.
    What role did genetics play, and what role did his upbringing play? What was his relationship to his mother and father?
    What is certain is that there was something in his life which forced him to become detached from the real world and obsessed with his own inner world and a fantasy view of life. Typically it can be a very dominating