by Ed Smart
The evening of June 4, 2002, Elizabeth was scheduled to play her harp at an awards ceremony for Bryant Intermediate School, her junior high. It was the year-end awards program, where Elizabeth accepted several awards for her outstanding work.
Around five o'clock that afternoon, Ed was driving home from work and pulled onto our street, where he saw Elizabeth and Mary Katherine jogging. Elizabeth was training for the high school cross-country track team, which she planned to join in the fall. He stopped to say hello and ask where they were going. They were on their way to run around the reservoir near our home. They asked for a ride over, and he jokingly told them that if they were going for a jog, they were actually supposed to do it! “If you want to be a track star, Elizabeth, you'd better get going,” he said, and sent them on their way.
Everything seemed so rushed that night. We always ate at six o'clock. By six-fifteen, Elizabeth still was not home and we were eating dinner. We were supposed to be at her school by quarter to seven. I became concerned that if we were late to the ceremony, Elizabeth would be unable to play her harp as scheduled—and I was right. Elizabeth missed her performance. However, we managed to make it to school in time for Elizabeth to receive her awards that night, and we all beamed with pride each time she came off the stage.
Since I had frequently been away from home spending time with my father, I was looking forward to spending lots of quality time with my family that summer. Elizabeth had been asking if she could go for three or four days with her friend's family on vacation the day after school let out. I was reluctant to say yes. I had missed being with my children while my father was ill, and I didn't feel it was necessary to allow Elizabeth to go away. I wanted her home, and besides, we were planning to go on our own family vacation later that month. But she wanted to go so badly that Ed and I agreed to talk it over, and just before bed we told Elizabeth she could plan to go with her friend. We said good night. That was the last conversation we had before she was kidnapped.
Chapter 8
ED
Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.
—PROVERBS 3:5–6
EARLIER THAT NIGHT Lois had prepared a special dinner for everyone as a way to get back to our family unity. There had been so much going on with her father's illness that we just wanted to regroup. Sit-down dinners are important to us, because that is the only real daily family time we have together. It is the time when we can gauge how the family is doing and hear about one another's day. Lois opened the tall kitchen window over the sink to get some air flowing because she had accidentally burned the potatoes. It is a fairly narrow window, about sixteen and a half inches wide. It cranks open, and it has a screen. I am certain the window was still cranked open when we went to bed, since we used to leave windows open all the time. We live at the end of a cul-de-sac, and we never felt it was unsafe to leave a window open.
When we returned home from the awards ceremony, Lois asked me to check the doors and make certain they were all locked. I hadn't yet taken the harp out of the car, so I knew I had to go out to the garage anyway to carry it into the house. Before I closed things up, we gathered to have our nightly family prayers. I said good night to the children and went off to secure the house. I checked the front double doors, the sliding doors off the kitchen, and the back door, then I headed into the garage to make sure that the door was secure. It had been open most of the day with a piece of cardboard obstructing the laser, keeping the door from closing. I went back to check the doors on the mezzanine, which were hardly ever used. This might sound like a lot of checking, but the nightly routine took only a few minutes. We thought all of our doors had chimes as part of the security system. Unbeknownst to us, they did not—two doors and the back kitchen door were not functioning properly. These doors were missing the magnets that made contact to make the doors chime.
At the time, we were thinking of moving permanently to our cabin, so our house was up for sale. The children really love being up there, where they can go outdoors and do the activities that they love—like skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, and hiking. We liked the idea because we wanted to keep our family tight and together. I was working nonstop and felt it was time to reevaluate our priorities. It felt as if we were all moving so fast through life, and we wanted to slow down a little and enjoy the time we had together while the children were still home. It wasn't so much the cabin that was the pull; it was the idea of being in a place that had a slower pace.
At about ten-thirty Lois and I finished talking with Elizabeth about her trip. We kissed her good night, and she went off to bed wearing her favorite red silk pajamas. Charles had been up working on a paper for school and went to sleep around midnight. We were all exhausted from the funeral and from the awards ceremony. Our children were especially worn out from all the running around we'd been doing and from staying up later than usual several nights in a row. William, our baby, wound up sleeping with us in our room.
When Mary Katherine came into our room and told us that Elizabeth was gone, I thought she had just had a bad dream—until she told us Elizabeth had been taken at gunpoint. When Mary Katherine said, “You won't find her. She's gone,” I could tell she was genuinely terrified. I jumped out of bed and started checking all the bedrooms, starting with hers. Elizabeth wasn't there. Elizabeth had been asking us for her own bedroom, and I thought that perhaps she was sleeping in the bed in the guest room on the main floor. Sometimes she'd even sleep in William's room, especially on the nights he slept in our room.
All I could think as I was running around the house was “Is this really happening?” Lois turned on all the lights in the kitchen. That's when I heard her scream for me to call the police. Lois and I were standing in the kitchen, Mary Katherine trailing us, still wrapped in her blanket. She whispered, “You're not going to find her. She's not here.” The horror of what was happening was incomprehensible, yet it was quickly seeping in that our daughter had been taken from us. I was consumed with thoughts of how someone got in and out of the house without us hearing any sign of him, no creaking step, no door chime.
I called 911 at 4:01 A.M. and explained that someone had broken into our home and had taken our daughter. (Some reports in the media have said that I called 911 after I called several friends, but phone records show that my 911 call was placed first.) My parents were out of town, so the first phone call I made after that was to our home teacher, a very close friend who lives nearby. A home teacher is a member of a ward who is assigned to check on a family and is there to be a source of support and help in any way a family might need. This man is someone our whole family is very close with. We were definitely in need of his help. Lois called her mother, then we placed calls to some of our close friends, neighbors, and other members of our ward. Twelve minutes after my call to 911, the police arrived. Our first friends arrived around 4:15.
One of our neighbors had been the victim of an attempted abduction in 1992. I am not sure why this went through my mind, but I instinctively ran to their house and pounded on the front door. I wanted to be certain that none of their girls had been taken with Elizabeth. It took what seemed like forever for them to answer. When they did, I explained that Elizabeth had been kidnapped and I wanted to be certain that they checked on their children. I ran back to our house, got on the phone, and called more family members and friends, ward members—and anyone else I could think of—to start to pull together several search teams.
My brother Tom had been in a deep sleep induced by a sleeping pill when he received my first phone call. He was groggy, didn't register what I was telling him, and didn't even realize what time it was (afterward, he mistakenly thought that I had phoned him at 3:30). Later, when Tom still hadn't arrived at our home, I phoned again and got his wife and explained the situation. She roused Tom from his sleep. Tom is a photographer for The Deseret News in Salt Lake. I really wanted him to be there to help, especially s
ince he had excellent connections with the media and I knew he could get Elizabeth's photo circulated within minutes. Tom arrived around thirty or forty minutes later and collected several family pictures we had of Elizabeth. Joy Gough, a local photographer, had taken several photos of Elizabeth playing the harp the summer before. These photographs were included in the photos Tom got to the news wire services and posted on the Internet. By early morning, Elizabeth's photos had been placed in every medium imaginable.
By then our neighborhood had been alerted that an intruder had broken into our home and Elizabeth was missing. The news of her disappearance had quickly traveled through the streets of Federal Heights and beyond. The police separated Lois from me and took Mary Katherine to another floor so that her recollection of what had happened would not be tainted in any way. I stood in the kitchen with our home teacher and some other friends from the ward, and together we placed calls to our entire ward directory to enlist help. Mary Katherine was alone with the police. Lois was concerned for her, since she was clearly traumatized, and asked her mother and sister, who were now at our home, to sit with Mary Katherine to comfort her.
I remember feeling as if the police didn't have control over the situation. It was as if they were waiting for something to happen or someone to come and tell them what to do. I was bothered that they weren't out there looking for my daughter. By the time my brother David tried to get into our home, less than an hour after I called 911, the police wouldn't let him up because there were too many people in the house. The house had not yet been sealed as a crime scene, which was confusing and troubling to us. Looking back, this turned out to be a huge oversight on the part of the police. It wasn't until Sergeant Don Bell showed up that the house was finally secured.
By six o'clock that morning, friends were canvassing the neighborhood, knocking on every door and asking if anyone had seen or heard anything that might lend a clue in helping to find Elizabeth. One neighbor said he thought he had heard a female voice crying out around two in the morning. At the time, we didn't know if the voice was Elizabeth's. It turned out to be the voice of a girl traveling with a group of young motorcyclists. The neighbor had heard dogs barking and checked on his dog to make sure everything was okay. When nothing suspicious turned up, he went back to bed.
Around 6:30 in the morning, Lois, Charles, Andrew, and I got dressed and were taken to the police station. The police had informed me that we would have to go in for questioning. As the police chief would later say, “Everyone is a suspect.” Lois and I were taken in one police car, and Charles and Andrew in another. Lois and I were told not to speak to each other. Mary Katherine would later be taken to the Children's Justice Center, escorted by Lois's mother and sister. William and Edward went to a neighbor's home. When we arrived at the station, Lois and I were separated for questioning. Charles and Andrew were being questioned in another room. We were being monitored by video cameras. Lois wanted to get through whatever we needed to do and go home to be there for Elizabeth. We had nothing to hide. I was anxious because I felt time was slipping away and I simply wanted to get out of the station and look for Elizabeth.
When the police started questioning us, their first goal was to try and get a handle on who Elizabeth Smart was. What kind of girl was she? Did she have a boyfriend? Was she promiscuous? Did she experiment with drugs? Was she into the occult? Could she have run away? How was her relationship with her mom and me? How did she get along with her brothers? Did she spend a lot of time on the Internet? Fingers were quickly pointed in the direction of the victim. As frustrating as those questions were, they were a necessary part of the investigation, because the truth is, often those questions are relevant to the case. Every year, 203,900 children are abducted by family members and more than 200,000 missing kids are runaways.
When it came to Elizabeth, none of those possibilities was at all true. She was a very young fourteen-year-old. To make matters worse, our other children were also closely scrutinized. Charles was brought in for questioning, and he too was barraged by insulting personal attacks. “Did you kill your sister?” “Did a friend of yours kill your sister?” The disappearance was hard enough, but this questioning made it worse. We were in complete shock. We were grieving and feeling a kind of pain that is indescribable, and the allegations made during questioning were insufferable. As if our world hadn't been rocked already by Elizabeth's disappearance, they tried to rip apart everything we held near and dear. Our marriage, our children, our integrity, our faith—all of it was put to question after Elizabeth's kidnapping.
Several hours had passed from the time Mary Katherine awoke Lois and me to when Don Bell officially turned our home into a crime scene—at 6:54 that morning, nearly six hours after Elizabeth went to bed and nearly three hours after my call to 911. People were buzzing all over our home, street, and neighborhood. Police would later describe allowing all of those people into the home as a giant mistake on their part. Unfortunately, so many people had been through the house by the time they sealed the scene that any clues or evidence that may have been left behind were thought to be tainted.
Until that morning, I had no awareness of the Rachael Alert, which is essentially what has come to be called the Amber Alert. Created in 1996, the Amber Alert stands as a legacy to nine-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped while riding her bicycle in broad daylight and was later found brutally murdered. This innovative early warning system utilizes the Emergency Alert System (EAS), formerly known as the Emergency Broadcast System, which allows broadcasters and law-enforcement agencies to distribute urgent information once it is confirmed that a child has been abducted. These bulletins can contain descriptions of the abducted child, the suspected abductor, and the suspect's vehicle. Within hours, television stations and various cable networks begin running “crawls” on their transmissions containing information about the crime, and since then, some states employ traffic billboards to disseminate information to drivers. Radio stations play an important part as well, interrupting local programming to announce alerts. By eight o'clock in the morning, the Rachael Alert on Elizabeth had gone out.
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 necessar
y 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.