Bringing Elizabeth Home (6 page)

The media converged on our front yard early that morning. My sister Angela called two close friends, Ruth Todd and Kim Johnson, local Salt Lake City news anchors whose interest in finding Elizabeth went beyond simply “getting the story.” They were definitely part of the original thrust that quickly pushed this local kidnapping into national news. We are so grateful for the kind consideration those women gave to our family that morning and all during Elizabeth's disappearance. When the morning news came on, Elizabeth was the lead story on every station. Morning commuters heard the news that Salt Lake was missing one of its children.

The police brought us to my parents' home by about nine o'clock that morning. My parents had arrived home from Lake Powell by this time. We weren't able to go to our house, because it had been sealed as a crime scene. We decided to assemble our own search team. Our oldest son Charles went on a search with our home teacher, driving around our neighborhood and through the hillsides and foothills of the area.

Everything felt surreal. I was in a total state of disbelief. Lois was shaking uncontrollably—it was painful for me to see my wife like that, because she is the strongest woman I know. It might have appeared that I was the strong, fearless patriarch of our family, but we both had to be strong and rely on each other in our ups and downs. We were in a situation that we had never anticipated. We could never have gotten through this nightmare without each other.

These are the types of situations that destroy marriages and families. But our marriage became stronger, our relationship grew stronger, and our family became closer. We both realized that we wouldn't have been able to survive had it not been for the strength we brought to each other. There were plenty of days when if one of us felt blue, the other would buoy up. We got through this by being best friends. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—that helped us more than relying on each other and believing that we had the necessary faith and trust in God. If we hadn't stayed positive about the outcome or outlook of the situation, that would have directly impacted and affected our other children. Even though Elizabeth was missing, we had a family to look after and be there for. Lois realized that necessity long before I did.

The statistics are staggering when it comes to a crime such as Elizabeth's abduction. There are 800,000 missing-children cases a year in this country, or about two thousand children a day. Forty-eight percent of the time a child goes missing, particularly a white girl from an upper-middle-class family, the culprit is a close family member or friend. Lois and I couldn't imagine who would do something like this—certainly not anyone in our immediate family. No one came to mind.

It was reported that this was considered to be the most publicized kidnapping since the Lindbergh case. The summer of 2002 became the summer of missing children, with Elizabeth just one of many. Statistically there were no more kidnappings than usual that summer, just a heightened awareness because of the massive media coverage. That new awareness brought to light the need to have a unified nationwide alert system to aid families of missing children in their search—something both Lois and I became extremely passionate about while Elizabeth was gone, and are even more so now that she is home.

It is important to note that as we write this book, one year after Elizabeth was kidnapped, we have heard very little about missing children, even though we know there are just as many families as ever out there who are in the same painful situation we were in.

The hours were passing, and still no sign of Elizabeth. Later that afternoon, a member of our ward phoned to tell me about a wonderful organization, the Laura Recovery Center Foundation
.
Based in Friendswood, Texas, the Laura Foundation was established by members of the Friendswood community after twelve-year-old Laura Kate Smither was abducted near her home on April 3, 1997. A nationwide search was immediately launched, and more than six thousand volunteers searched round-the-clock until her body was recovered some seventeen days later. Today, the Foundation functions as a volunteer response team, conducting ground searches and distributing educational materials such as the
Laura Recovery Center Manual
. The manual serves as a comprehensive text containing everything people need to know in dealing with abductions, from organizing search patterns to effective phone bank operations. In 2002 alone, the Laura Recovery Center helped 160 families search for a missing child. The sister of one of the Foundation's volunteers lived near us. She was at our service almost immediately upon hearing the news about Elizabeth. The same day, other volunteers flew to Salt Lake to help set up the Elizabeth Smart Search Center. The Abby and Jennifer Recovery Foundation, Inc. also came from Grand Junction, Colorado, to offer its assistance and was just as helpful as the Laura Foundation. The Abby and Jennifer Recovery Foundation handled most of the out-of-city searches, which meant coordinating airplanes and helicopters for aerial searches, as well as organizing the forest teams and the mountain searches. They did an excellent job managing information coming in and going out as a result of their search efforts.

Initiating the search teams became very important. Volunteers and offers to help were pouring in. We knew every passing hour meant that Elizabeth was getting farther and farther from our reach. A neighbor's son-in-law helped to quickly get the Elizabeth Smart Web page up and running, and my brother David took over the day-to-day operation. David then spent many hours developing it into an interactive site that allowed searchers to log their progress and make note of any significant developments. It allowed people to get instant updates on the case and to send in any information about Elizabeth's disappearance. Considered to be very progressive, it will be used as a prototype for future kidnapping and missing-children situations, and today the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is considering using it with other cases. The site at one point was receiving more than one million hits a day. Unable to handle the load, Intel later donated a host site to us. People wrote to the site asking for more frequent updates. They wanted up-to-the-minute information. Search information that offered instructions on how to search and what to do with the information was posted on the Web site. The site organized people from all over to help in our efforts to look for Elizabeth.

Chapter 9

He is always near me, though I do not see Him there.
And because He loves me dearly, I am in His watchful care.

—“IF THE SAVIOR STOOD BESIDE ME,”
WORDS AND MUSIC BY SALLY DEFORD

T
HE NIGHT ELIZABETH
was kidnapped, we later learned, she had been forced to march up Lime Kiln Gulch to Dry Creek Canyon, a three-mile hike from our home. Brian David Mitchell told her that he would kill her family if she didn't do what he said. All the way up the canyon, he told her that God had commanded him to take her. Elizabeth hadn't yet registered who this man was. She had seen him for only a few minutes when she first met him at the crosswalk outside the mall, and then briefly at our home. Brian looked totally different; he now had a long beard and long hair, but Elizabeth somehow gradually was able to make the connection. “Didn't you help my dad do some work on the roof? Why are you doing this to me?” Elizabeth asked. Brian repeated, “God has commanded me to do this.” That's all he would say. The hike took many hours, with a difficult steep incline before they reached the top of the canyon. It was dark, and the night air was chilly. Elizabeth was still wearing her red silk pajamas and the pair of running shoes she had been allowed to take.

It appeared that Brian had spent months preparing for the kidnapping. He was carefully building a campsite that was mostly hidden by the trees and the thick brush of the mountains behind our home. He was still working on the site after he kidnapped Elizabeth. The shelter was a trench about twenty feet long, with logs for a roof, laid over with thick plastic garbage bags and a tarp and camouflaged with dirt, leaves, and sticks on top. This structure was not where Elizabeth was held captive for two months; rather, it was in a tent next to it, tethered between two trees on a cable that ran along a line, allowing her some movement, but only as far as the cable reached. Needless to say, she had no privacy.

She was treated like a slave, forced to wait on Brian and Wanda like a servant. They had given Elizabeth a paring knife to use when she cut vegetables. On many occasions when she was able, she tried to use the small knife to cut through the metal cable, but she was able to shred only the plastic covering and not the cable itself. Wanda and Brian argued all the time, and were constantly ranting and raving. During one argument, Elizabeth realized that Brian had forgotten to connect her to her cable. Seizing the opportunity, she tried to escape, but Brian immediately saw her trying to run. “Where do you think you're going?” he said, catching her. Elizabeth, who had been a very good runner before she was taken, simply didn't have the strength to outrun Brian; whereas Brian was somewhat of a health fanatic and exercised constantly to keep fit.

As search teams combed the area, Elizabeth later said, she could hear the sound of people calling her name, especially one of her uncles, whose voice was familiar and seemed very close. Hundreds of people were within hailing distance, but she was unable to cry out for help, unable to escape. Brian brandished his knife to remind Elizabeth what he was capable of doing. She was profoundly frightened, convinced that Brian would hurt her or her family if she disobeyed his orders to keep quiet. She was right there—but no one knew just how close. She may as well have been invisible.

Helicopters scanned the terrain behind our house, and volunteers arrived from Montana with bloodhound teams that would sniff the entire area. We had given searchers clothes, pillowcases, and other items with Elizabeth's scent. None of the search dog teams were able to pick up a scent that led very far. One dog caught a scent just outside our home and followed it up a trail behind our house until it stopped at the upper road. We now realize that this trail was correct, but why the dogs never picked up a scent that continued up the hill behind our home is still baffling to us—Elizabeth and Brian walked the entire way up the canyon. One theory had been that Elizabeth may have been put into a car that had been waiting to take her away. For days, search groups headed up every trailhead near our home, searching the hills for a clue.

Posters with Elizabeth's image and the words “Pray For Me” and “Missing” across the top started going up all over Salt Lake City. Ed's sister Angela went to a nearby Kinko's and quickly printed up thousands of posters. A $10,000 reward was already being offered by the Salt Lake police for anyone with information leading to Elizabeth's return.

We wanted the police to expand the search beyond Salt Lake, beyond Utah, and into neighboring states, such as Wyoming, Idaho, and even Oregon, where two teenage girls had been abducted and killed earlier in the year. The Utah Missing Persons Clearinghouse was a big help, distributing several hundred fliers to law-enforcement and schools in neighboring states. The word was spreading, and our local story was quickly turning into national news. We are particularly indebted to a local printer who donated hundreds of thousands of copies of the flier that was seen around the country.

On the afternoon of June 5, Ed decided to face the media for the first time after Elizabeth was reported missing to give the first of what would become twice-daily press conferences. Unable to hold his head up, begging and pleading with whoever had taken Elizabeth to bring her home.

“Elizabeth, if you're out there, we're doing everything we possibly can to help you. We love you. We want you to come home safely to us.

“To the person who has our daughter, I can't imagine why you took her to begin with. There is no reason that you should have taken her. Please let her go. Please! Elizabeth! Elizabeth!”

He tried to choke back his tears, but his grief was obvious and painful for everyone who watched Ed that afternoon.

We were all traumatized. The police had informed us that the first twenty-four hours are the most crucial in searching for a missing child. Most children abducted by strangers are victims of pedophiles, and most often if the abductor intends to murder their victim, they will do so in the first three hours. If a kidnapper is seeking ransom, there is usually some contact from the kidnapper within the first twenty-four hours. We had heard nothing, but we were certain Elizabeth was out there somewhere. Unable to sleep, we fasted, prayed, and kept searching for Elizabeth.

Our other daughter, Mary Katherine, the other victim and the only witness to this crime, was being questioned about what she saw. Police and investigators spent much of the early-morning hours trying to glean as much information as they could from our traumatized daughter. By nine o'clock, more than one hundred people were searching for Elizabeth, including family, friends, ward members, law-enforcement officials, and other Salt Lake Good Samaritans. The only information they had was the description Mary Katherine offered of a white man about five feet eight. He was wearing a light-colored jacket and a white golf-style hat pulled over his eyes. He was armed with what Mary Katherine believed to be a gun. Mary Katherine loved her sister dearly. She would have done anything to help bring her home, speaking openly to the police and trying to give as many details as she could remember. It was difficult for her to talk about the experience, but she spoke to whoever needed to garner information from her.

There are so many things that come up after a child is abducted that are not part of parents' initial comprehension. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children instituted the Team Adam Project (named for John Walsh's son, who was kidnapped and killed) as a team specializing in abductions. When a child goes missing, his or her information goes to a national information bank that services law-enforcement agencies and the FBI. Team Adam and Project Alert have teams of specialists to help assess the situation. They can play a key role in helping families get through the experience. The organization has incredible teams of experts trained with amazing resources, available for anyone who goes through a missing-child crisis. However, many law-enforcement agencies are unaware of how to handle missing-children cases. Organizing a search, dealing with the media, handling the investigation—how in the world does a family know where to begin when they aren't thinking clearly from the very beginning?