My Story (2 page)

Kneeling down, I closed my eyes.

I didn’t know how to say it, but I did the best I could. “God, I’m here,” I said. “I’m only fourteen. I know I’m just a little girl. But I’ll do whatever it is that you want me to do. I really do want to serve you. But I’m not sure that I know how.”

I waited a moment. Maybe I was waiting for something to happen. A vision. A revelation. Some kind of sign from God.

But nothing happened.

So I got up and didn’t think about it again.

At least not until two days later, when Brian David Mitchell took me from my house and forced me to start climbing up the mountain in the middle of the night.

Struggling up the side of the hill, breathless and terrified, a bearded man behind me and a long knife to my back, with scratched arms and my silky red pajamas clinging to my legs, I couldn’t help but wonder,
God, is
this
what you had in mind?

I was so confused and so afraid.

I don’t understand!
I did what you have asked me! This can’t be what you wanted!

And it certainly wasn’t. I know that now. Being taken captive was not part of some great, eternal plan.

But the confusion was overwhelming. My mind tumbled in sheer terror:
This doesn’t make any sense! I’ve never done anything wrong!

And though it would take a while, the answers to my confusion eventually settled in my mind.

I don’t think what happened to me was something that God intended. He surely would not have wished the anguish and torment that I was about to go through upon anyone, especially upon a child.

But since that time, I have learned an important lesson. Yes, God can make some good come from evil. But even He, in all His majesty, won’t make the evil go away. Men are free. He won’t control them. There is wickedness in this world.

Which left me with this: When faced with pain and evil, we have to make a choice.

We can choose to be taken by the evil.

Or we can try to embrace the good.

Brian David Mitchell began his journey to my bedroom many years before he actually found himself standing beside my bed in the middle of the night.

Indeed, the evil that grew inside him was planted very early in his life.

But before I go any further, I’d like to make it very clear that Brian David Mitchell’s life isn’t something that I want to understand. It’s not something I have studied, or spent even a moment trying to figure out. Knowing him and his background is like learning about the devil. But I wasn’t given any choice. I had been thrust into his life. Because of the situation in which I found myself—the abduction and then the seven-year trial—I have been forced to come to know him in ways that no else could.

I know about his teenage conviction for pedophilia after exposing himself to a child. I know about his three marriages. The thirteen children and stepchildren. More charges of child abuse. I know about his various stages of activity in his church, just enough to help him get the vernacular and religious customs down. More charges of abuse from his stepchildren. Threats of violence against his family. An urgent marriage to Wanda Barzee on the very day that the divorce from his second wife had been finalized. Barzee giving up all parental rights to her six children in order that they could marry. The growing realization that religion could be used to get what he wanted, whether from Barzee or someone else. The transition from a relatively quiet man to a controlling and abusive husband. Twisted relationships with other women, including invitations for them to become polygamous wives. An intense and sudden interest in Satan. Barzee feeling rejected because of his constant invitations to other women. A sudden surge of religious revelations that told him that he was chosen. Barzee accepting his lustful eye. The emergence of the Davidic king. Separation from, and then the eventual severing of his relationship with, other members of his family. His own mother having a restraining order placed against him. Drugs and alcohol and pornography. The prophet Immanuel taking to the city streets. No more jobs. No more money. He and Barzee hitchhiking across the country with nothing but what they had in their backpacks. The writing of the Book of Immanuel David Isaiah (a compilation of Mitchell’s spiritual revelations). The decision to take me and make me his second wife.

These are the defining moments of Brian David Mitchell’s life.

For me to have to wander through this web of darkness is very difficult. And to crawl inside his head can be terrifying, for it is a closed and evil place.

But again, I had to understand him. I wasn’t given any choice.

It’s also important to realize that understanding Brian David Mitchell is made very difficult by the fact that he is a master manipulator.

To this day, he will rant and rave in gibberish, then suddenly pull into himself, holding his cards very close to the chest. It’s as if he’s always evaluating his next move, weighing the odds, trying to figure out the best way to control the situation. Even when he isn’t ranting, meaningful conversation is utterly impossible unless you are a prison guard or someone else who can give him something that he wants. He is selfish and angry. But he’s also very smart, far more intelligent than most want to give him credit for. That is important to remember. This is not a foolish man. Some say that he is brilliant. Indeed, this proved to be part of his power, the ability to appear harmless and unassuming, even while he was plotting and demeaning and raging inside.

Throughout the ensuing investigation, his family has cast very little light upon my capture, perhaps partly because they don’t want to talk, and perhaps mostly because they simply don’t understand him. He’s had very few friends, and those few people he was ever close to were forced to abandon him as they realized what a wicked man he was.

But though he has always refused to talk to the authorities, and his background is depressingly convoluted, Brian David Mitchell has not hidden everything beneath his deceptions and his lies.

Indeed, the trial of Brian David Mitchell for my kidnapping and criminal sexual assault left few stones unturned. Though I would happily have withdrawn myself from the process, I couldn’t, for I was the central figure in the case, the most important witness,
the
reason for it all. Everything that was said or done during the trial had to be focused to some extent on me.

But I also understand that thousands of hours have gone into building the prosecutor’s case. Dozens of investigators, police officers, attorneys, doctors, judges, psychiatrists, mental-health officers, criminal forensic specialists, jurists, and advocates helped to pull the various pieces together, each of them having a bit of the story to tell.

Press reports provide thousands of pages of additional information. Indeed—and I say this with very mixed emotions—few stories have so captured the nation’s attention as did my case, the abduction and trial being covered extensively among the local, national, and international press.

But while these sources may be helpful in understanding Brian David Mitchell, the real story can only be told by those of us who were there.

Mitchell’s wife, Wanda Barzee, is one of those. And she wasn’t an innocent bystander. She is a wounded and evil woman—a mother who once secretly fed her daughter her own pet rabbit, watching her eat it with a smile—who must accept her share of the blame. But at least she has been somewhat willing to discuss the events that took place.

Of course, there is also Brian David Mitchell. But once he was finally captured, he went from incessant talking to not speaking at all.

Which leaves the keys to the story lying in my hands.

I am the one who lived through nine months of hell. I am the one who was forced to lie beside Mitchell every night. I am the one who had to listen to his stories, including long and wandering tales that revealed some of the most intimate details of his life. I am the one who felt his hot breath on my face, hiked with him atop the mountain, washed with him, ate and napped with him, hid behind Dumpsters and in the mountains with him, hitchhiked and rode on a cross-country bus with him. I am the one who was forced to watch things between Barzee and him that no one should ever be forced to see. I am the one who witnessed Mitchell turn away Barzee’s jealous rage with nothing but a soft word about his weaknesses and a blessing upon her head. I am the one who had to listen to his incessant talking, sometimes interrupted only long enough that he could rape me before going back to sharing his insights once again. I am the one who saw him play other people like a fiddle, watched him deal with police and investigators—people who were trained to spot deception—as if they were nothing but children in a game of hide-and-seek. I saw his calm. I saw his cool. I saw him constantly pull the wool over other people’s eyes.

I saw all this, and more. Which is why I know Brian David Mitchell better than any other person in the world. Believing I would be his wife forever, he told me about it all.

I know his comings and goings in the months leading up to the night when he snuck into my room. I know what he did on the day he came to take me. I know how he planned it, where he walked, and what he ultimately had in mind.

I know that he decided to take me after seeing me on that November afternoon, when I had been shopping with my mother in downtown Salt Lake City. I know that he plotted from the beginning, offering to rake leaves and repair my father’s roof in order to find out where I lived. I know he manipulated his way into my home in order to note the location of my bedroom and my sleeping arrangements. I know what he did to prepare for the kidnapping, staking out the mountains high above the city in the months and weeks before that fateful night in June. I know that he bought the hardware he would need: steel cable, bolts, a couple of padlocks and orange-handled bolt cutters. I know he moved his and Barzee’s summer camp, trudging higher up the mountain, where it would be more difficult to be found. There, at the upper camp as they called it, he expended enormous effort to excavate a dugout among the trees, cutting thick logs to make a roof and leveling the hill in order to provide a shelter where he intended to spend the winter with Barzee and his new wife.

I know he didn’t spend all his time living like a hermit on the mountain. He told me how he frequently walked the streets of Salt Lake City, bumming for alcohol, looking for a party, stealing from the local market, begging for food. I know that he was lazy; feeling too entitled to really work, preferring to hang out on the streets. He liked to call it “ministering,” but his life was bumming and nothing more.

I also know that, as time went by, he slipped deeper and deeper into his caricature of a prophet. But none of it was real. Brian David Mitchell is not insane. The professional analysis is clear.

He is a manipulative, antisocial, and narcissistic pedophile. He is not clinically psychotic or delusional. He is just an evil man.

Brian David Mitchell slipped too easily in and out of prophecy for it to ever be his actual state of mind. He simply used the culture and language of religion to manipulate people in order to get what he wanted. I witnessed it again and again. When he really needed something—knowing that prophets were difficult to take seriously—he could turn the switch off and act very rational. When the situation required it, he could act very sane.

Still, as the night of the kidnapping grew near, he decided that the persona of a modern-day prophet was the way to go. Way less work. Way more opportunities for mischief and manipulation. And the ability to claim that he was a man who spoke to God was pretty exciting. It carried a little punch. A bit of power. It got him attention and helped to explain some of his unconventional behavior. So he lost the Levi’s and started walking around in robes and leather sandals. But even then, his intentions were only to manipulate. For example, when running around the mountain in sandals and dirty sheets proved to be impractical, he started stashing his sandals in a hollow oak he called the shoe tree. When he went down into the city, knowing that other people were going to see him, he’d bring out the sandals. Hiking back up to the mountain, knowing that no one else would be around, he’d stop at the shoe tree and put his hiking boots back on.

As I have already testified in court:

He was his number-one priority, followed by sex, drugs, and alcohol, but he used religion in all of those aspects to justify everything.

Nine months of living with him and seeing him proclaim that he was God’s servant and called to do God’s work and everything he did to me and my family is something that I know that God would not tell somebody to do. God would never tell someone to kidnap her at knifepoint from their bed, from her sister’s side … never continue to rape her and sexually abuse her.

Nor would God tell him to kill me. But that’s what he was prepared to do.

June 4, 2002
The mountains east of Salt Lake City, Utah

Having walked the trail many times now, I know that Brian David Mitchell must have moved very quickly down the mountain, which is surprising, given the fact that it was a very dark night. I remember even now how the heavy trees that lined the narrow path sucked up most of the moonlight. The mountains are full of coyotes—I heard them almost every night once we were in the upper camp—and it is likely that some of them watched him from the ridge as he made his way toward the city. The maples and oaks along the trail are very thick, with occasional outcroppings of granite that drop into narrow depressions where the winter snows melt off, but it was early summer when he came to get me, and the ground was dry and packed. A gentle stream, hardly more than a trickle, ran through the bottom of the canyon and he would have been forced to move among the peppermint and watercress in order to follow its path.

As he moved down the mountain, no man saw him pass.

Behind him, high up on the mountain, the other one was waiting to receive me with a dirty bed and clean linen robes.