Many had simply assumed she had been murdered. For more than eight years, nobody had heard anything from Natascha Kampusch. A massive investigation following her abduction on March 2, 1998 had turned up nothing. The 10-year-old had simply vanished.

Until Wednesday. Now 18, the girl was found in a garden not far from Vienna having finally escaped from her kidnapper. She calmly identified herself as the girl who had disappeared in the spring of 1998. The hunt for her abductor ended when he comitted suicide on Wednesday night.

“The case of Natascha Kampusch, who disappeared eight years ago, has come to a happy end,” said Herwig Haidinger, the head of Austria’s Federal Criminal Police Office. While DNA results are not back yet, Natascha's parents have positively identified her and there is little doubt about her identity.

Kampusch disappeared on her way to school in Vienna. While investigators embarked on a massive man hunt, there hadn't been a trace of the girl since her kidnapping. She was apparently held in a cramped car service pit -- used by mechanics to access the underside of cars -- under a garage in the Austrian town of Strasshof. Kampusch said she finally managed to escape.

Her suspected kidnapper, a 44-year old electrical engineer named Wolfgang Priklopil, threw himself in front of a train in Vienna at 9 p.m. on Wednesday night, according to a report by the Austrian news agency APA. Tests were planned to confirm his identity, but evidence at the scene suggested it was Kampusch's kidnapper.

Police described Kampusch as being pale and shaken, but in good health. She is currently undergoing medical and psychological treatment. Kampusch said that during her years in captivity, she had been permitted to listen to the radio and read the newspaper. A police spokesman told Austrian public television network ORF that the kidnapper also appears to have home taught the girl. The kidnapper had been a remote acquaintance of the family and had also been questioned by police at the time of Kampusch’s disappearance.

Reuters reported police as saying that the woman had been allowed occasional outings with her captor but that she had not attempted to flee because they believed she suffered from “Stockholm Syndrome,” a survival mechanism in which long-held captives begin to identify with their kidnappers. Police also stated they believe she suffered both physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her kidnapper.

For eight years, police investigated Kampusch’s disappearance and the case gripped all of Austria in 1998. There were a number of serious leads, but none carried the case any further. In 2004, officials even began investigating whether Kampusch’s disappearance might have been connected to French serial killer Michel Fourniret, who admitted he had killed several girls in Belgium and France.