by Ed Smart
The story of Elizabeth's kidnapping has been a mystery—complete with suspects, detectives, and a surprise ending—and even now it is still unfolding. It is a dark, disturbing tale. It is a journey of hope and faith, an odyssey filled with good and evil, shadow and light. It is a story we hope people will still be talking about one hundred years from now—not because it is about our daughter, but because it is a story about all of us. It is a remarkable saga of a community and a country banding together in collective prayer and coming together with a common goal: to bring Elizabeth home.
So many people shared their thoughts and prayers with our family when Elizabeth was kidnapped. It came to feel as if the entire world was praying for our daughter. We received tens of thousands of letters from people who said this story impacted their lives. Perhaps our mission is to help bring people closer to one another—and closer to God—through the telling of our experience. The letters we received during the nine months gave us strength and helped us remember that we had the faith of all of you to carry us through. These letters were amazing. They began arriving from people all over the world before we had any idea that our story was global. The unified sentiment was to “keep the faith.” And we did. Thank you to all of you who took the time to write to us and share your thoughts, feelings, and heartfelt prayers. Your letters were truly a priceless gift to us.
There is nothing as pure as the faith of a child. Among these many thousands of letters, incredibly it was the letters we received from children that most reminded us not to give up hope. Children have an unbelievable gift. Their thoughts are so honest and untainted. Of course Elizabeth would come home, they felt. It was their expectation. One of our young nieces said to us, “They stole her body but not her soul.” How profound and true. It filled our hearts to read those letters and be reminded of the beautiful simplicity of that pure faith.
We've had to make numerous difficult decisions in our lives, but none as hard as the ones we've made over the past year and a half. To understand our choices, we feel it is important that you know how we came to make them. We are deeply religious people. We have raised our children to believe in the same core beliefs that we both grew up with. It is relevant and essential to learn some of the foundations of our religious beliefs so that our story transcends the boundaries of religion and stretches into what became a stronger belief in a higher being and a better understanding of our faith. To us, the best and most effective way to share our beliefs is to live them.
As with all religions, there are certain basic tenets that constitute the core of our faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Our faith is founded on a belief in God—that we are all His children and that He is always there for us. Beyond the basic doctrines of the church, we often create our own individual codes of conduct based on what brings us, as individuals, closer to God. As church members we are taught to study things in our own minds and to rely on personal revelation. We are given commandments and basic guidelines of conduct by the Lord, but the details of how we interpret and carry out those principles are between us, our families, and the Lord. As Latter-Day Saints, we have a language that is specific to our beliefs, so throughout this book, some of the terms we refer to may not be immediately familiar. We will make a point to explain those terms so that you'll know what we're talking about. For example, we refer to our home church congregation as a “ward.” Wards are groups of members who are led by a bishop, his two counselors, and other ward leaders. It's a lay ministry. Each ward is given a name that is unique to its area. The ward that we attend is the Arlington Hills ward. Its members make up our ward family. While Elizabeth was missing, members from our ward and other wards from all over Utah and surrounding states came out in strong support to help our search effort.
Our community in Salt Lake City is made up of faithful people—faithful people of all religious backgrounds, not just Mormons. We were amazed by how quickly our community, and so many others, stepped up to help with our search efforts, donating food, water, tents, flashlights—and most of all, their time. In addition, many organizations and clubs allowed us use of their planes, helicopters, search dogs, and horses in our search. We marveled at how everyone came out to show support and lend a helping hand. Our oldest son, Charles, often pointed out that people he would have never expected to see were turning up day after day to help look for his sister. We had always thought of ourselves as little pebbles in a huge lake. We thought that nobody really knew us and that we were just an average family leading an average life. The first day we searched for Elizabeth, more than a thousand people turned out to help us look. By the following Monday, there were over eight thousand searchers! There couldn't have been more love anywhere in the world that day than there was in Salt Lake City.
The mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is to “invite all to come unto Christ” (D&C 20:59) “and be perfected in him” (Moroni 10:32). We study scripture from the Bible, including the Old Testament and the New Testament, as well as the Book of Mormon and other scriptures, which represent the continuing of Revelation. The Book of Mormon is a companion volume and a second witness of Christ.
Pray in your families unto the Father, always in my name
that your wives and your children may be blessed.
—3 NEPHI 18:21
Our beliefs place a tremendous emphasis on families and family life. The first commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve pertained to their potential for parenthood as husband and wife. Husbands and wives have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and for their children. As parents, we have been taught to raise our children in love and righteousness and to teach them to love and serve one another. Happiness in our family is achieved through the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is achieved and maintained on the principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, and work.
To have a family member go missing was excruciating for us, as it has been for so many other parents. Because we believe that marriages and families have an eternal bond, extending beyond death, we are considered to be a family for all of eternity. Husbands and wives who marry in the Temple are sealed together. Children who are born to parents who have been married in the Temple are likewise considered to be part of the eternal family unit. We make a special point of sharing this with you because it played a big part in helping us, as Elizabeth's family, cope with her disappearance. The belief in an eternal family gave us great hope that we would one day be reunited with our daughter—whether here on earth or in the hereafter.
Ye are commanded in all things to ask of God, who giveth liberally.
—D&C 46:7
We know that to some of you the ideas and principles associated with being members of our church may seem unusual—maybe even hard to understand. For us, they are a way of life. We have lived as members of our church our whole lives, and we are grateful for our heritage, beliefs, and relationship with God. Ours is a religion that emphasizes freedom of choice. We are not perfect people. We are two humans who continue to grow on a daily basis, making choices along the way that we can live by.
Did we ever ask why this was happening to us? All the time. We had many more questions than answers. We're not sure that we expected an actual answer to “why” Elizabeth was taken from us, but through those kinds of questions we were summoning spiritual strength and pleading for the power to endure. Enduring, on some levels, meant that we had to accept that the situation was out of our hands. We were doing everything we could to bring Elizabeth home. Scriptures teach us that there are many things we can do to improve the line of communication between ourselves and the Lord. These include fasting and praying. Fasting is a practice whereby your spirit becomes more in tune with God. It's a form of self-discipline. Your spirit is in control, not your body. Your body needs food for nourishment. Your spirit needs a different kind of nourishment gained through a strong relationship with the Lord. Fasting invites the spirit of revelation. Through prayer and
fasting, our faith was significantly strengthened, and we were more at peace knowing that this was bigger than we were and that it was in the Lord's hands and out of our control.
There are numerous passages in scripture that emphatically remind us there is indeed soul-strengthening power that comes from impassioned prayer. Our prayers were constant and ever-present. We often prayed that God would soften the hearts of Elizabeth's abductors. We prayed for Elizabeth's protection. We prayed for her safe return. We were not certain of God's plan for us or Elizabeth, but we knew that it was not God who took Elizabeth—so how could we place any blame on Him?
Free agency is the concept that individuals should be free to make decisions that affect their own lives, even if those decisions are wrong. Elizabeth's captors, Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee, acted on their free agency the night Brian broke into our home and stole Elizabeth. Though they have the ability to freely choose their actions, they are not free from the consequences. Subsequently, neither are we—nor is Elizabeth. We are all accountable for our own actions, right and wrong.
We both are uncertain how we would have survived Elizabeth's abduction had it not been for our strong faith and beliefs. More important than that, we don't know how Elizabeth would have survived. We have raised her with the ability to think freely, make good choices, and to believe in a loving Heavenly Father. She is so strong, and we are extremely proud of her. We felt certain that Elizabeth had the inner strength to get through an ordeal such as hers. We knew, without a doubt, that her faith was unshakable. Like Job, she descended into hell and surfaced.
Chapter 4
LOIS
For if there be no faith among the children of men
God can do no miracle among them . . .
—ETHER 12:12
I COME FROM A very large family, the second youngest with five brothers and three sisters. In my family there is a long tradition of strong women, women such as my grandmother, Genevieve Pettit, who grew up on a farm in Arizona. Even as a four-year-old child she had many responsibilities. Every morning she would go with her father to milk the cows, carrying tiny buckets to collect the stripping, which is what butter is made from. One morning when the cows had broken out of the corral, her father went ahead to collect and bring them back, leaving her to walk alone along the long path from the house to the corral. Her mother encouraged her to hurry but to stay on the path so as to not get lost. Along the way, Grandmother stopped abruptly when she saw a rattlesnake coiled up alongside the path. Before she could back away it attacked, biting her on the knee. When her mother saw her sit down on the ground, she realized something was wrong and raced out to help her. Back then a rattlesnake bite was invariably fatal. Her mother carried her to the yard and placed her in a hammock that hung between two large trees next to their home. Her leg turned black from the poison. When nearby Hopi Indians heard that a child had been bitten, they came to see her and offer remedies and gifts. The Indians were kind to the family, but they were also certain my grandmother was facing death. Her parents placed poultices on the wound and prayed over her knee, staying by her side through the day and night. The next morning, to everyone's surprise, the venom was oozing out of her knee. Grandmother was weak from the bite for months after, and couldn't walk for a while, but she lived and eventually was completely healed. She had a strong will to live, and this has been passed along to the women in my family for generations. Elizabeth is certainly no exception to this trait.
The Francom family has always been one of strong faith. From the time I was a child, and all throughout my life, I believe I have witnessed many miracles. Through scripture, the Lord makes it very clear that faith is not developed by miracles, but that miracles are a result of great faith. Miracles are around us every day, but we need to learn how to see them. In life, there are no coincidences. Things that seemingly happen “out of the blue” are never really just random. When I was a child, our family would take vacations that usually involved all eleven of us piling into the family station wagon. One time while driving to Lake Tahoe, we were running very low on gas and my father looked desperately for a gas station, but there was none to be found. My mother studied Dad's trusty map and thought she'd found a shortcut to the next town. Soon after taking this new route we realized it was not a shortcut at all, and we indeed ran out of gas at the top of a large hill. I remember my father saying a prayer and then letting the car coast down the hill. At the bottom of the hill, he steered the car around a bend in the road, and there we found a man sitting in his truck with a barrel tank of gas in the back, complete with a nozzle and hose. The man readily filled our tank, and when my father tried to pay he refused to accept even a dime. I have no idea what the driver was doing out there in the middle of nowhere, but there he was, just sitting at the bottom of that hill waiting for us. We marveled at the notion that God heard our prayer—and answered it with a tank of gas in the middle of nowhere.
When my younger brother was eighteen months old, he contracted meningitis and encephalitis. I was three years old at the time, but I can remember the profound effect it had on our family. We prayed for him constantly. Fearing the worst, the doctors had told my mother to go home and tend to her other children. They didn't think my brother was going to pull through, and if he did, he'd certainly live the rest of his life with physical challenges. Yet my mother wouldn't leave his side. She had eight other children to tend to, but she couldn't leave my brother alone to die. The faith she had was incredibly strong. She knew he'd be healed through the blessings he received—and in the end, he was. He is alive today and is a brilliant, successful married man and father who survived his illness with no side effects whatsoever. The family faith overpowered the medical prognosis. That, to me, was another miracle.
Because faith is so strong in my family, it was vitally important to me that I marry someone whose faith matched my own. I had serious doubts as to whether I would ever be able to find the right person, but when I met Ed, something just clicked. I was twenty-seven and he was twenty-nine. I had traveled a lot, and I was working and enjoying life. Ed was working in real estate, buying and selling properties. We both knew what we were looking for, and we found it in each other. There was no use in wasting any more time. We were engaged after twelve dates and married a month later, in December 1984.
Elizabeth has followed this example with a strong faith of her own. When she was eight years old, she was baptized as a member of the church. She had been taught that she could pray anytime, anywhere, and that a loving Heavenly Father would hear her prayers. At that time we took a weekend trip to Ed's parents' mountain cabin, located not too far from our home in Salt Lake City. It was springtime, and everything in the mountains was in full bloom. Elizabeth loves horses, and she was eager to go for a ride. It's often been said that she plays the harp like an angel and rides a horse like a cowboy. That completely captures the spirit and essence of our daughter.
Her grandpa enjoys taking all of the children riding. His favorite trail, called “The Salt Trail,” winds its way up the mountain to a meadow, where the children could stop to let the horses graze and rest. Especially at that time of year, the view down at the canyon and meadows overflowing with blooming wildflowers is spectacular. Elizabeth dismounted her horse but didn't have a tight hold on the reins. Her horse pulled the reins from her hands and bolted back down to the pasture, leaving Elizabeth standing horseless at the top of the trail. Grandpa often said that you can never let the horse think he's the boss, because if you do, it's hard to break him of that habit, so it was important to find the horse. Since it was spring, there was no trodden-down path for her to follow. Elizabeth got lost and couldn't find her way back, and she thought for certain she would be in big trouble if she didn't find the horse. Despite her panic, she had the presence of mind to kneel down and pray. She asked our Heavenly Father if He'd help her find the horse and allow her to find her way back to the cabin. Soon thereafter, a rider came up the path and gave her a ride back. Her horse had returned s
afe and sound and was eating grass in the pasture. That is typical of Elizabeth's faith and prayerful way. It is also indicative of her survival instincts.
I am honored and proud to be Elizabeth's mother. She's a wonderful girl who has been able to set an example that tells so many people to never give up hope. She has lived her entire life as a truly fine daughter of our Heavenly Father. She is exactly how we believe a daughter should be and act. She's considerate, strong-willed, a good student, an accomplished musician, and has a mind of her own. There is a real bond between us—and it's not always the case that a teenager wants to hang out with Mom. We genuinely like spending time together. She tells me she wants to be just like me when she grows up, and I truly appreciate hearing that—I'm not sure it'll always be that way, but for now I'll take what I can get!
Elizabeth enjoys going horseback riding, playing her harp, running, skiing, and watching movies. She loves hanging out with her brothers and sister, but she's a teenager and really loves being with her friends. She has an especially close bond with Mary Katherine. Despite their age difference, Elizabeth seems to enjoy being with her. Before the kidnapping, the girls shared a bedroom, arguing only when Mary Katherine's things spilled over onto Elizabeth's side of the room. That problem has since been taken care of now that they have their own rooms. Likewise, Mary Katherine looks up to her big sister and wants to be like her in every way. She learned to play the harp to follow in Elizabeth's footsteps, starting right around the same time Elizabeth learned to play—five years of age. By the time Elizabeth reached middle school, she had become a talented musician and performer. She worked very hard to master her skill, and she hopes to someday attend the Juilliard School in New York City. Anyone who really knows Elizabeth recognizes her playful, mischievous side. She has a quick wit and a great sense of humor, and if she is inspired, she can quote long passages from her favorite Sandra Bullock movie, Miss Congeniality.