Girl in the Cellar Read Online Free Page B

that perhaps had a darker side than the hours merely spent alone in her mother’s flat or shut in her room while her parents argued. It was one exposed when police from Task Force Natascha were handed a set of four colour photographs of Natascha as a child. This was shortly after she disappeared. But these were shockingly different to those of Natascha at her first Communion, or the smiling school photographs that adorned the Missing posters pinned up around the city.
    Almost naked, with thigh-length boots and a riding crop, and a tiny top that only reached part of the way to her stomach, she looks uncomfortable as she stares off to the left at the floor. In another she is naked on the bed, wrapped only in a fake fur stole.
    The pictures were reluctantly handed over byNatascha’s mother after they were seen by someone close to the story from day one, who borrowed some of them and passed them on to the police and to an expert psychologist in child abuse. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the person who found the pictures told the authors:
    There were pictures of Natascha in a box of family snaps, and I was leafing through them as I chatted to Natascha’s mother.
    I was shocked when I saw them, and asked her what they were, and she seemed embarrassed, and dismissed them as family snaps taken by Claudia. She had promised to let me have some pictures, so I asked for them. She refused, and so I asked her: ‘What are they, harmless, or not harmless? If they are harmless, surely I can have them?’
    She agreed, but I could see she was uncomfortable. I gave them straight to police and an expert on child abuse, who immediately came back to say he was very concerned about them.
    But the police expert, Dr Max Friedrich, charged with leading the medical team looking after Natascha in the first weeks following her escape, said the pictures were not criminal.
    Dr Eva Wolfram-Ertl, another psychiatric expert trained to aid child victims of sexual abuse, also saw the photographs. She said, unequivocally, that they showed a child of around five years of age and that they were sexual innature. Dr Wolfram-Ertl said that she and her colleagues all agreed that these pictures ‘left no room for interpretation.’ As she told the top Austrian magazine Profil in 1998: ‘Taking the pictures raises serious questions about sexual abuse. These poses, a small child wouldn’t adopt such poses on their own. This is not about the child, her well-being, her development or her needs, it is just about the needs of the grown-up who certainly animated the child into such postures.’
    According to Dr Wolfram-Ertl, children have their own eroticism and exhibitionistic phases in their development, but an act of abuse begins when adult persons with paedophile tendencies use children’s sexuality for the satisfaction of their own perverse desires.
    From a psychoanalyst’s point of view, Dr Wolfram-Ertl said at the time that she would like to eliminate any link between the photographs and the disappearance of Natascha. Dr Wolfram-Ertl wanted a thorough investigation into any men who may have met Natascha, for example friends of her mother or father. She also mentioned Natascha’s symptoms—wetting the bed, poor performance in school and the oscillating weight—as sometimes related to a sexualised atmosphere at home, which the photos suggested.
    When contacted for this book about the remarks that put her at odds with one of Austria’s most famous psychiatrists, Dr Wolfram-Ertl declined to comment further. Her interview at the time remains her sole analysis of the pictures.
    As for Professor Friedrich, it was his expert opinion that her disappearance could not be connected to paedophile pornography that had stopped the police investigation from following this line of inquiry.
    He was asked this question at a press conference shortly after Natascha was freed: ‘Is it right that you have written an expert