3096 Days

An Austrian girl kidnapped when she was 10 and kept in a basement dungeon in a Viennese suburb for 8 years is finally revealing her horrific ordeal of imprisonment and vicious beatings by the man she was forced to call "my lord." Natascha Kampusch's body was a mass of bruises from repeated beatings that broke bones and caused her excruciating pain as she was handcuffed in bed next to her attacker. Despite the stunning cruelty of her kidnapper, she was "still a child" and sought some human contact and warmth, and finally convinced attacker Wolfgang Priklopil to hug her, she reveals in her new autobiography, 3,096 Days. Kampusch, now 22, said shortly after she was kidnapped, Priklopil told her: "You're no longer Natascha. Now you belong to me." When she cried from her beatings, "he hated it," she writes in an excerpt in the Daily Mail. "Then he'd grab me by the throat, drag me to the sink, push my head underwater and squeeze my windpipe until I almost lost consciousness." She said she tried several times to commit suicide, and finally managed to escape at the age of 18. Priklopil killed himself before his arrest.