Bringing Elizabeth Home (10 page)

The next day, we awoke to a horrifying headline in one of our local papers,
The Salt Lake Tribune:
“Police Eye Relatives in Probe.” We were horrified and angered to discover that the police again believed the kidnapping had been an inside job. We had been through every test imaginable, and there was no evidence to support the salacious headline. The article pointed the finger at a member of our extended family. It was based on four unnamed sources, all of whom declined to be identified for the article. The article went on to make the claim that the window screen that had been sliced open in our kitchen had been cut from the inside, which suggested that someone had intentionally cut the screen to allow access to the home, misleading the investigation. The idea was to make the crime look like a break-in. It was later determined that Mitchell cut the screen and entered our home through that window—a window investigators believed was too narrow for a man to enter. Ed's brother Chris, who is an average-size man, easily passed through the window when he attempted to prove to investigators that it was possible. The issue of the cut screen remained a point of contention throughout the investigation.

We were certain of one thing: Someone was purposely leaking information to create these firestorms. Was it the police? Was it an investigator? Why did the
Tribune
have the story when the
Deseret News
didn't have any of the same information? Was a conspiracy brewing?

The day the
Tribune
article ran, our frustration was deepening and Ed's brother David spoke on behalf of the family. David said that we understood the police had a job to do. If they had not investigated the family, they would be remiss in doing their job. However, the time had come to shift that tide. It didn't help that later in the day Chief Dinse said that the police were not eliminating anyone at that point.

Mary Katherine should have been a key element in satisfying police that a family member was not responsible for Elizabeth's kidnapping. If she had recognized someone, she would have spoken up. She had been extremely forthcoming about the details she remembered from that night. We decided to issue a public statement challenging the
Tribune
article. It was highly speculative and was diverting the public focus and attention from the ultimate goal—finding Elizabeth. Lois's brother publicly concurred that the family put no credence in the story.

Shortly after Elizabeth disappeared, Marc Klaas showed up in Salt Lake offering to help us in our plight. Marc had become a public advocate for missing children after his twelve-year-old daughter, Polly, had been abducted from her bedroom and murdered in 1993. He tried to convey to us what we needed to do to move forward—to keep the story in the press. We had been grateful to meet him, knowing he would understand the pain we were in. We wanted to hear what he had been through so we could prepare ourselves and understand what to expect, knowing that the day might come when we'd have to hear the news that Elizabeth was dead. We also understood that we would have to move past that moment, because living for Elizabeth's kidnapping would not allow us or our family to have a life. Fox News also taped a short interview with us.

Though we hadn't originally thought of bringing in a sketch artist to work with Mary Katherine, Marc suggested that we place a call to Jeanne Boylan, a famed forensic sketch artist who had worked on several high-profile cases, including the Oklahoma City bombing. Best known is her hooded portrait of the Unabomber, which helped the FBI identify Ted Kaczynski. She had helped produce a sketch of Polly's kidnapper, and Marc felt she could be extremely helpful to us. He even offered to have Fox News pick up the cost. Unable to reach Boylan directly, we left a message on her machine to call us. But it would later become a controversy in the media that investigators initially chose not to use Boylan, and though we were very interested in having her involved, we decided to back the investigators' decision.

The following week, Tom's daughters, Amanda and Sierra, appeared on
The O'Reilly Factor,
with Marc Klaas also a guest on the show. The Jeanne Boylan issue was raised as the first topic, and our choice to back the investigators was hotly debated. Tom, especially, was strongly criticized. O'Reilly questioned the girls about what they knew regarding the investigation. O'Reilly pushed hard, suggesting that it was strange for the girls to have nothing to add about the details, as “the Smarts are a very close family.” At the end of the show, the girls wound up leaving the studio in tears.

Elizabeth's abduction remained a topic on
The O'Reilly Factor
for several days that week (as it was on many cable talk shows), even though there was little new information. It hurt us deeply that our choice to follow the investigators' advice was so roundly criticized and that we were being compared in some places to Susan Smith, who had killed her two young sons a few years earlier.

Chapter 13

B
RIAN DAVID MITCHELL
had gotten away with kidnapping Elizabeth, but she was never convinced that God was in any way protecting
him
. It seemed as if he was getting away with everything, and he used this to try rationalizing her captivity to her. He paraded her through downtown Salt Lake City without being recognized. She could hear people calling her name in the mountains, but no one ever found them. Would he have killed her if she didn't obey him? Fortunately, this is a question that will forever remain unanswered.

Mitchell and Barzee tried to strip Elizabeth of everything—her identity, her family, her entire person—so that she would no longer be Elizabeth. They even started referring to her as Augustine. Mitchell certainly had a plan in which Elizabeth played a part, and he spoke to her often of how corrupt the world was and how he had been sent to save her from evil. She believed that he would kill her family if she tried to flee or was not cooperative, but she never accepted that he was a messenger of God. People ask us all the time why Elizabeth didn't try to escape—why she didn't try to break free. The answer is simple. She did try, and she couldn't get away. She was never left alone. When the three walked together, Brian and Wanda were on either side of her, holding her hands or otherwise making sure she knew she couldn't run.

When he started bringing her down the canyon, she was forced to wear a robe and veil, which covered her entire face except her eyes. Her face had changed from constant exposure to the sun, wind, and rain. She had grown taller. No one seeing her on the street would have viewed her as a girl in distress, which in itself is remarkable. She went so deep into hiding—for her own safety as well as for ours, she believed. She told us later that she could not live in fear, because to her if she did, her worst fears would come to fruition. She chose to survive. She had no way of knowing whom she could trust.

By trying to destroy everything she connected with her past life, Brian Mitchell thought he could force his beliefs onto Elizabeth until she was, in a sense, reprogrammed. The only other person Elizabeth had contact with in those nine months was Wanda Barzee. Elizabeth was in public many times but never uttered a word. Brian always spoke for her. Many people have asked if Elizabeth suffered from Stockholm syndrome, which is a phenomenon where victims begin to identify with their captors as they fear for their own lives. The personalities of Stockholm syndrome victims do not really disappear and are pretty much the same after the ordeal as they were before. Elizabeth exhibited some of the traits of Stockholm syndrome, but unlike most victims she never bonded with her kidnappers. She did what they said in order to survive. She was never fooled by their diabolical and distorted views. Elizabeth was not the same person physically when she came home—but our daughter still very much existed as we remember her. We believe she did what she had to do to survive.

In Elizabeth's mind,
she chose life over death; life over herself.
She was forced to live a life that wasn't her own. She didn't believe anything her captors said except for the threats of killing her and us. She knew she didn't want to die. She had no way of knowing if there were other people involved. In her mind, Brian had followers watching the house, following our every move. She was led to believe that if she slipped up, we would be harmed. She had to live with that threat every day she was gone.

Elizabeth never left the campsite—her prison—until early August. After her return, people remembered seeing a strangely dressed man and woman with a young girl shrouded in white robes all over Salt Lake. Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee had gotten so brazen and confident they would never be found that they started parading Elizabeth throughout the streets of her hometown. To be sure, there must have been some fear that they'd be caught, since Mitchell insisted she cover her face, leaving only slits for her eyes. They had been in plain sight, but who would have known it was Elizabeth? The outfit of white robes was mysterious but not strange enough to prompt anyone to question it. We can only guess that people thought that Elizabeth and her captors were part of a religious group.

The hunt for Bret Michael Edmunds ended on June 21 when Edmunds checked himself into a hospital in West Virginia for an apparent drug overdose. He had given a false name when he registered at the hospital, but had used his mother's real phone number as his emergency contact. He was in critical condition, so a hospital worker contacted his family in Utah. A relative called the sheriff's office, igniting a sequence of phone calls between police in Utah and the hospital in West Virginia to confirm that the patient was Edmunds. When the police were certain they had their man, investigators flew to West Virginia to question him. They were able to recover his car, tow it from the hospital, and arrange for a warrant to search it.

We were unaware of Edmunds's arrest until later that day. The news was encouraging, but we didn't want to get our hopes up too high, since Elizabeth had yet to be found. We prayed that Edmunds would cooperate and reveal any information he had about our daughter. The following day, we were hit with our hardest knock from the media to date—make that the tabloid media. The
National Enquirer
came out with a story that sent a crushing jolt through our entire family. At the time, we declined to acknowledge the scandalous report, and we still feel strongly about not commenting. All of the legitimate media covering our story refused to give credence to the story. Many stores in Utah showed their support for our family by pulling the
Enquirer
from its shelves. It was an extremely cruel report that we chose to deal with only after Elizabeth had been returned safely. Five weeks after Elizabeth came home, the
National Enquirer
issued a retraction of its story, admitting it was false and settling an out-of-court agreement with our family.

What became most troublesome to us were not just the articles that were being written, but the continuous leaks that seemed to flow from the Salt Lake Police Department to the media, especially to two reporters working for the
Salt Lake Tribune.
Information was being provided by unnamed sources in law enforcement, and stories were emerging that were filled with accusation, finger-pointing, and bald-faced lies. Further, their indiscretion in selling that information to tabloid newspapers proved to be very damaging to the investigation. There was evidently a need to make news about our family when the story was about our missing child. Why couldn't the focus of the case stay on bringing Elizabeth home?

We could take up several pages in this book lambasting the lack of journalistic integrity of those two
Tribune
reporters, but we have decided, as a family that has endured hurtful and painful lashings in the press, not to put those reporters through what we have been through. These two men have families—wives, children, relatives—all innocent people who would be negatively impacted by the choices those two reporters made throughout the investigation. Enough said.

On the night of July 24, a strangely familiar terror would hit another member of our family. A niece was asleep in bed when she awoke to the sound of picture frames crashing from her windowsill onto the floor. It was a hot summer night and she had gone to bed with her window open. Her family had installed a stop on the window so it could be opened only a few inches. It was open when she went to sleep. She awoke to see an arm poking through the screen. She thought she saw a gun. She sat up in bed, watching in horror as the arm quickly pulled back and disappeared. Her father, Lois's brother-in-law, heard the loud noise and was startled out of bed. He rushed to her room, where he was met by his frantic daughter. He searched the house and found a chair outside the window, propped up against the wall in exactly the same way as was the one that was found outside our home the night Elizabeth was taken. He called the police, who arrived within minutes. Police looked at the window and saw cuts in the screen just like the ones at our home—vertical and horizontal. The police dusted for fingerprints but came up with no solid leads. The police didn't put very much emphasis on the striking similarities of the two break-ins. They stayed at the house for a while but turned up nothing unusual, and after an intense two-week investigation by the FBI, they concluded that the incident was probably a prank by teenage boys. We were not as certain as the police that there was no connection to Elizabeth's kidnapping. It was only after Elizabeth came home that we discovered that Brian David Mitchell had planned to kidnap one of Elizabeth's cousins. He had a list of girls he wanted to kidnap to complete his plan of having seven wives. Brian's mother lives in an adjoining neighborhood as our niece's family. When Brian told Elizabeth that he was familiar with that area, Elizabeth mentioned she had a favorite cousin who lived there. Elizabeth had no way of knowing that Brian was plotting another kidnapping. In the end, Elizabeth hoped and prayed that their dog would be out and scare him away.