Bringing Elizabeth Home (4 page)

O, remember my son, and learn wisdom in thy youth, yea, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God. Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support; yea let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goest let it be in the Lord; yea let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea let the affections for thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever. Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings, and he will direct thee for good; yea when thy liest down at night lie down unto the Lord, that he may watch over you in your sleep; and when thou risest in the morning let thy heart be full of thanks unto God; and ye do these things, ye shall be lifted up at the last day.

—ALMA 37:35–37

That passage left an indelible mark on me. It speaks to how important prayer is and to being thankful for what you have. When Elizabeth was taken, it was one of the passages that offered Lois and me much comfort. How could I have ever known at age twelve that my grandpa was passing on scripture that would impact me deeply in my time of need?

Like most young men of our faith, I went on a mission when I was nineteen years old to serve the Lord by sharing the gospel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I spent two years in Arizona spreading the word of God. While on my mission, I shared the principles of the gospel as we understand it, and what it meant to me in my life. It was important for me to show people that they had to have their own personal relationship with God. Prayer is a large part of those teachings. People have to find out on their own what that means for them. For us, prayer needs to be personalized. We pray as if we are actually speaking to the deity—with reverence. It's something from your heart.

I, like everyone, make choices in life, both good and bad. The faith I've developed over the years has been a result of the example set before me and my personal experience. Life, for the most part, has truly been sweet to me. I have been tremendously blessed with a wonderful family, an extraordinary life and wife, and wonderful parents and parents-in-law. My family means everything to me. It always has and always will.

Chapter 6

When ye are in the service of your fellow beings,
you are only in the service of your God.

—MOSIAH 2:17

I
N THE DAYS
before the kidnapping, we were driving in the car together and saw people on the street who seemed down on their luck. They looked homeless. We talked about who these people were and where they had come from. What had happened in their lives that they had come to this point? Wasn't there anyone in this world who loved and cared for these people? We talked about how we could make this a better world for them and what we could do to help lighten their load. We talked about what a harsh world it can be and just how easy it is to lose everything. In a minute, life can change.

In our effort to reach out to these people, it was not unusual for us to hire a local homeless person to do a little yard work around our home. We have done that for years. That is how we met Brian David Mitchell. Lois, Charles, Elizabeth, Andrew, Edward, Mary Katherine, and William first came upon him as he was panhandling in front of a local mall. Lois handed him five dollars and asked him if he was looking for work. He was very clean-cut and dressed in clean clothes. He did not appear to be homeless. Lois gave him our telephone number and told him to speak to Ed. We had Mitchell to the house only that one time. He came for four or five hours. He mostly worked on the roof with Ed, who struck up limited conversation. He said his name was “Immanuel,” though Ed was certain that was not his given name. He saw the children for only a few minutes that day—and as far as we know, until the morning of June 5, 2002, that was the only time he had ever been to our home.

Who are we to judge anyone? We all make mistakes. Sometimes people just need a fresh start to get things moving in a positive direction again. That's why we have hired the homeless over the years. We believe that there are far more good than evil people out there. Those who are having a hard time still find the will to carry on and persevere. They want to do something good. We never questioned where anyone came from or if they had a checkered past. Maybe we should have, but we didn't. We brought these day workers home but never let them inside the house. Our children had very little, if any, contact with them. They usually helped for a few hours doing yard work and landscaping.

We hired Richard Ricci, who was not homeless, in March 2001 for some long-term projects at the suggestion of a contractor friend who had picked up his name from a job referral service. The contractor wasn't able to use him because his staff was primarily Spanish-speaking and Ricci spoke only English. The contractor said Ricci seemed to be a capable worker, so we thought we'd give him a try.

At our suggestion, Ricci initially went to our neighbor's home, since they also needed work done around their house. During the time of his employment there, someone (we later learned it was Ricci) broke into their home late at night. No one realized they'd been robbed until the next morning. Money and jewelry were missing, but the police couldn't find a connection to anyone who'd recently been in the house. After finishing his work with our neighbors, Richard started working for us on a day-by-day basis. He was always likable, always asking how we were, how our weekend was. Small talk. He really couldn't do the kind of finish work we needed around the house, but he was always a willing candidate. We decided to start him out on yard work.

After his first week on the job, Ricci started talking about buying a car. He had been getting a ride to work every day from his girlfriend. We had a 1990 Jeep Cherokee we were trying to sell, and after talking it over, we decided to give Ricci the car in exchange for his work. We wrote up a contract that specified he was to work forty hours a week, a certain portion of which would go toward the purchase of the Jeep. He agreed to work five days a week. Ed helped take care of the registration and insurance and then gave him the Jeep. When Richard didn't show up to work for several days, we both had a bad feeling, so we decided to find Ricci and get the Jeep back. We want to trust that people are basically good, but it seemed that the faith and trust we had put in him had been misplaced.

Ed found Ricci and took the car back home. A few days later, Ricci showed up for work and it appeared as if everything was back on track. We gave him back the Jeep, hopeful that he was not taking advantage of our kindness. But this time we put our name down on the title as lienholders. Although he could have not shown up again, Ricci reached out to us and came back, worked, and finished paying off the car. We were relieved that this time he had kept his word. One of his jobs was painting the hallway in the entry of our home, so there was no way we could fail to interact with him. He was always talking about his girlfriend, Angela, and how they wanted to get married. Lois felt somewhat uncomfortable having him or any virtual stranger in our home, especially around the children. Ricci was an especially friendly guy who talked to our sons about motorcycles and snowmobiles—but still, something seemed out of place.

Three months after we hired Ricci, Lois noticed that she was missing a bracelet. It was a very beautiful and expensive bracelet, but it was particularly valuable to Lois for sentimental reasons. When it was discovered to be missing, it didn't matter who was working in the home. Everyone was excused from their jobs, including Richard Ricci. We called the police and gave a detailed report, including the names of all workers who had been at our home in recent weeks. The police assured us they would check out people who had been working for us at the time—but later they reported that they had found nothing. Then we discovered that there were many other items missing.

Ed did a little investigative work on his own to see if he could turn up anything in Ricci's background. It wasn't until after Elizabeth was kidnapped that we discovered he was a convicted felon. How could this not have surfaced in the police investigations? We later learned that Ricci had been released from jail less than a year before he came to work for us. He had been sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison for shooting a police officer following a robbery. We didn't know any of this when we hired him. The police had checked out Ricci, but for a second time (the first was when our neighbors were robbed) they came up with none of this, which in hindsight was an ironic precursor of the investigation into Elizabeth's kidnapping.

Ricci worked for us for approximately three months. He was in and out of the house all the time. The children knew him, and he knew our home. He knew where spare keys were hanging, he had access to the house, and he knew that we had an alarm system we never used. He called us in September 2001 to ask whether the title for the Jeep had been sent to us. It had come in mid-July, but at the time we didn't know where to find him or how to forward it. Ed suggested he come by the house to pick it up. When Ricci arrived, he made a point of adamantly denying stealing Lois's bracelet, even going so far as to tell us that he went to the police station to take a polygraph test to prove his innocence. We appreciated this attempt to ease our minds, but something inside told us he wasn't completely innocent.

That was the last time we saw Richard Ricci. His name was never uttered in our home again until after Elizabeth was kidnapped.

Chapter 7

L
OIS

Wherefore, be of good cheer, and do not fear, for I the Lord
am with you and will stand by you . . .

—D&C 68:6

O
UR FAMILY WAS EXHAUSTED
on the night Elizabeth was taken. Sadly, my father had passed away a few days before. He had never been sick a day in his life, but at the end of February 2002 he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctors hadn't given him a good prognosis, but they believed he had longer than the three months he actually had left to live. I spent every day of those three months at his side, doing whatever I could to offer my mother and him help, peace, and comfort. He had always been strong and hardworking. He was the picture of health and very active until those last months.

Dad was a devoted spiritual leader and was called to be a Temple president in the Philippines when he was in his seventies. Dad loved doing church work, just as he loved to get out on his property and shovel, plant trees, and tend to his flowers to keep himself busy. My parents' home was an oasis for their entire family (especially for their fifty-one grandchildren), and we often gathered to have parties there. All of our children loved my father, but Elizabeth and Mary Katherine had very special connections with him. My father always enjoyed planting his garden in the spring, but when he became too ill to plant, the girls offered to do it for him. They planted corn and peas just a few weeks before he died. I know it meant so much to him that they were able to do that.

It was during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City that we first noticed my father was sleeping a lot more than usual, and that he had started walking with a bit of a shuffle and would occasionally stumble. The family kept thinking it was just old age setting in and surely nothing to be too worried about. But when his difficulties continued, we decided it was time to take him to the doctor, thinking that maybe he had developed diabetes or something else treatable. It never occurred to us that our patriarch was seriously ill. It took several weeks before the doctors diagnosed the brain tumor. They felt the situation was severe enough to operate on him as soon as possible. Before they did so, my sister was able to fly in from her home in Virginia, and we spent the weekend together as a family, fasting and praying in a conference room in the hospital. There were seventy people altogether, praying for my father.

Dad had an incredible memory. He never forgot a thing. Just before he went for his surgery a few days later, he was beautifully reciting passages of poetry from “Little Boy Blue,” “The Highwayman,” and “Gunga Din.” Afterward, he was remarkably coherent and could communicate easily. We felt confident that he was going to make it. Though still in the intensive-care unit, he seemed to be doing great. We all thought that he was going to recover and live another twenty years.

That optimism faded a bit a few hours later when Dad slipped into a comalike state. Unless he started to show improvement, the hospital had to release him. We agreed it was better for him to go home. We were uncertain as to the best way to take care of him there, but that is where we knew he would want to be. Ed's father, a cancer specialist, helped us with the arrangements for taking care of him at home. Despite our concerns, Dad improved with every passing day. He could sit up and feed himself, and all indications were that he was on the road to recovery. By the end of May, however, Dad took an unexpected turn for the worse. Something changed. We had a sense that his time had come. For some inexplicable reason, my father needed to pass on.

My father was a protector in every sense of the word. When I was in my twenties and working as a first-grade teacher, I would sometimes have to work late, and my father would meet me in the parking lot of the school and follow me in his car just to make sure I made it home safely. That's the kind of dad he was. Though we had no way of knowing it at the time, my father had to pass on when he did so that he could protect Elizabeth. He died on May 28. His funeral was June 3. At his service, Elizabeth and Mary Katherine played a duet on their harps of one of Dad's favorite songs, “Silent Night.” My father's death had a profound impact on me—though I would barely have time to recognize just how important an event it would be after Elizabeth was abducted. Two days after we buried Dad, on the morning of June 5, Elizabeth too was gone.