Elizabeth Smart Kidnapping - Abduction

Abduction

Ed and Loise Smart resided in the affluent neighborhood of Federal Heights in Salt Lake City, Utah with their six children. On the evening of June 4, 2002, the family attended an award ceremony at Elizabeth's school. After the family returned home and got ready for bed, Ed made sure the doors were all locked, but he did not turn on the alarm. "If the children got up and moved, it would set the alarm off. And so we just said we're not going to bother with it," Lois later explained.

In the early hours of the morning, Brian David Mitchell broke into the home and came to the bedroom that Elizabeth shared with her 9-year-old sister, Mary Katherine. While Mary Katherine pretended to be asleep, she watched the abduction, and later gave these statements as to what happened:

• A white man about the height of her brother Charles (5 ft 8 in) about 30 or 40 years old, wearing light-colored clothes and a golf hat. (He was actually wearing black, did not have a golf hat and was 49.)
• He had dark hair, and also dark hair on his arms and on the back of his hands.
• The man threatened Elizabeth with a knife.
• When Elizabeth said "ouch" after stubbing her toe on a chair, Mitchell said something that sounded like: "You better be quiet, and I won't hurt you."
• She heard Elizabeth ask "Why are you doing this?" and though the answer was not clear, Mary Katherine thought the answer might have been "for ransom."
• Mitchell was soft-spoken — even polite, calm, and nicely dressed.
• Although Mitchell spoke to Elizabeth quietly, Mary Katherine thought Mitchell's voice seemed somehow familiar, but she couldn't pinpoint where or when she had heard it.
• She never got a good look at Mitchell's face. This fact was kept a secret by the police during the investigation.

By listening to the creaking floor as Elizabeth and Mitchell walked, Mary Katherine thought she could tell where Mitchell and Elizabeth were. So when it seemed safe, Mary Katherine hopped out of bed to tell her parents. But she froze in terror when she nearly ran into Mitchell and Elizabeth as they seemed to be looking into her brothers' bedroom. Fearful that she had been spotted by the abductor, she crept back into her bed. "I thought, you know, be quiet, because if he hears you, he might take you too, and you're the only person who has seen this," Mary Katherine said in a later interview. "I was, like, shaking." She hid for an undetermined amount of time. Investigators later concluded that she may have been hiding over two hours before she felt safe enough to come out.

Just before 4 a.m., Mary Katherine came to her parents' bedroom and woke them up. She told them Elizabeth was gone, but her parents thought she was having a bad dream. Ed went from room to room, and didn't find her. Mary Katherine told him, "You're not going to find her. A man came and took her. He had a knife." Still, the parents found this hard to believe until Lois spotted a screen window downstairs that had been cut with a knife.

That morning, Ed went on television and asked the kidnapper to return his daughter. A massive search for Elizabeth began.

According to Smart's October 1, 2009 US federal court testimony, after Smart had gone to bed on June 4, 2002, a man Smart identified as Brian Mitchell had entered her bedroom and had "placed his hand on my chest and then put the knife up to my neck. He told me to get up quietly and if I didn't then he would kill me and my family. He was whispering, but it was still loud enough it could wake someone. He was dressed in sweats, sweatshirt, stocking cap, tennis shoes." After Smart had been led to Mitchell's camp in the woods, a woman Smart identified as Wanda Barzee "eventually just proceeded to wash my feet and told me to change out of my pajamas into a robe type of garment. And when I refused, she said if I didn't, she would have Brian Mitchell come rip my pajamas off. I put the robe on. He came and performed a ceremony, which was to marry me to him. After that, he proceeded to rape me."

It was later revealed during court testimony that Mitchell repeatedly raped Smart, sometimes multiple times daily and forced her to watch pornographic films. He often forced her to drink alcohol to lower her resistance.