Allan Hall – författare

On 28 August 1984, Josef Fritzl drugged his teenage daughter with ether and imprisoned her in an underground bunker behind eight locked doors. Over the following twenty-four years, he raped and abused her, never letting her or the children she bore him out of the dark, windowless cellar.Based on 150 new interviews with psychologists, neighbours, colleagues and friends who knew Fritzl, as well as the insight of his own chilling confession, Allan Hall reconstructs the monstrous personality behind this hideous crime. He exposes Josef Fritzl's dark past in Nazi Austria, his previous conviction as a rapist, the appalling conditions in which Elisabeth and her children were kept and her astonishingly brave conduct while held prisoner. Including exclusive photographs and previously unseen evidence, this is a truly heart-stopping record of one of the most elaborate and disturbing cases of abuse in modern times.

One monster. Three innocent girls. Ten years in captivity.22 August 2002: 21-year-old Michelle Knight disappears walking home. 21 April 2003: Amanda Berry goes missing the day before her seventeenth birthday. 2 April 2004: 14-year-old Gina DeJesus fails to come home from school. For over a decade these girls remained undetected in a house just three miles from the block where they all went missing, held captive by a terrifying sexual predator. Tortured, starved and raped, kept in chains, Captive reveals the dark obsessions that drove Ariel Castro to kidnap and enslave his innocent victims. Based on exclusive interviews with witnesses, psychologists, family and police, this is an unflinching record of a truly shocking crime in a very ordinary neighbourhood.

When Natascha Kampusch made her bid for freedom on 23 August 2006 after eight years held captive in a seemingly ordinary Austrian suburban house, her story horrified and astonished the entire world. How did she survive a childhood locked in a cellar? What sort of young woman had emerged? What kind of man was Wolfgang Priklopil, her abductor - and what demands had he made of her? As the days and weeks passed and Natascha's TV interview failed to quell the curiosity, so the questions began to change. What exactly was the relationship between abductor and hostage? Why had Natascha waited so long to escape when it seemed there had been other, earlier opportunities? Did Natascha's parents know Priklopil before he kidnapped their daughter? Allan Hall and Michael Leidig have tracked the story from the days of the 10-year-old's disappearance. They have spoken to police investigators, lawyers, psychiatrists, and to the family members closest to Natascha. They have come as close as possible to uncovering the full, shocking story. It is a story that tests the limits of our understanding of how human beings behave - and makes our hearts bleed for the plight of an innocent child caught up in a horror story almost beyond our imagining.