by Ed Smart
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
THE 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 try
ing 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?
Our family and some of our close friends became extremely involved in the Elizabeth Smart Search Center, organizing many of the local donations we needed to keep the center running and the volunteers working. If it was too hot to stand in the sun, they made sure canopies were brought in. Numerous stories were relayed to us about the many times the phone would ring at the center and it would be someone offering whatever we needed at that moment free of charge: food, water, thousands of posters, flashlights, batteries, communication devices, and so on. There were so many acts of such kindness. People were hand-making buttons with Elizabeth's image and a caption that said, “Pray for me.” People started to wear light blue ribbons on their lapels. When Elizabeth missed her graduation from junior high school, her teachers and friends made a sign out of blue ribbons and tied it to the chain-link fence; it read, “We h You Liz.” Eventually companies offered to manufacture the buttons and ribbons for us. Charles, in a sign of solidarity and hope for his sister, wore three blue ribbons around his wrist with a heart-shaped bead on each. He wore the ribbons until Elizabeth came home, and then for a few months after, until they became so frayed and worn that he finally cut them off at the one-year anniversary of Elizabeth's kidnapping. He even wore a button on his tuxedo lapel when he attended the junior prom.
We made a point of trying to get to the search center every day to thank the volunteers, but we want to be sure that everyone who donated their time, supplies, and services knows how truly grateful we are for all you did. You will never know the depth of our appreciation. Your generosity overflowed, and our hearts were deeply touched by all of you.
Within the first week, an additional $250,000 reward was announced, raised from private donations. The reward would be given to any person with information leading to the rescue of our daughter. Their generous contributions were one of our greatest blessings. Their gift made possible what we could not do on our own. Police Chief Rick Dinse appointed Don Bell to head up the investigation, along with Salt Lake law-enforcement officials and members of the FBI.
Shriner's Hospital was the first official search center site to be set up after Elizabeth's disappearance. Shriner's Hospital has always been kind to our community, and their allowing us to set up the search center there was very generous. Located just down the road from our house, it had the available space to handle the onslaught of volunteers who came by to help. The morning of June 6, we stopped by to thank everyone who'd interrupted their lives to aid our search. It had been only twenty-four hours, but it felt as if a lifetime had passed. We knew in our hearts that this was the best way we could bring Elizabeth home. As gut-wrenching as it was, we had to keep the search parties going out and the volunteers coming in. We had to be there to support those who came out to give so generously of their time.
The first few days always began with appearances on the morning talk shows. We tried to maintain our composure morning after morning as we made a national plea for the person or persons who had our daughter to bring her home. The morning of June 6, Lois fell apart during an interview on the Today show. Normally a pillar of strength, the thought of Elizabeth being lost was more than she could bear, but she was willing to go through anything to bring Elizabeth home. Together we were two halves of a complete whole. The balance worked for us—it helped save our spirits.
Since we had never had a need for a publicist prior to the kidnapping, it was hard to imagine that Elizabeth's abduction warranted hiring one. Yet the media coverage became so dense, the family simply could not handle the load. People were calling for interviews, statements, exclusives, and appearances. Neither of us had the savvy to understand how to make the media work to help us in our situation, but we certainly knew we couldn't bring Elizabeth home without it. We found true friends in Chris Thomas and the Intrepid Group, a public relations firm based in Salt Lake City, which had been referred to our family through Tom. The first few months were donated free of charge, but when the workload became a full-time job, Chris was handed the account. He managed our media, sometimes eighteen hours a day, for nine months—until Elizabeth came home.
Chris played a very important role in helping direct our family, especially Ed, through the media frenzy that seemed to be feeding on our misfortune. He was with our family so often that Lois came to refer to him as her fifth son. Ed felt as if he had found another brother in Chris. He acted as a buffer between the press and our family. There were many times that Ed simply wasn't able to face the cameras. Chris was there for the family. Chris understood the importance of working the press to keep the search for Elizabeth alive. He protected all of us from the media when sleep deprivation and our emotions became burdensome and we stopped making sense. He felt as if the Lord had sent him to help us—and looking back, he was a tremendous help. Chris prepared us to go in front of the media, working with focus points we had prepared beforehand during family meetings. He helped Ed focus on the message he needed to get out in his two-minute segments on the talk shows or during the daily press conferences.
Investigators continued to interview Mary Katherine, being extremely cautious not to push too hard so that she didn't have to relive the horror of witnessing her sister being stolen. Our family was deeply concerned for her well-being. We had received helpful advice from trauma counselors about how to reduce the stress she might have been feeling in coming up with details of that fateful night. There was a chance that she would completely shut down from too much questioning, rendering her unable to recall any specific details.
Mary Katherine stood firmly by her story of what happened the night that Elizabeth was taken. At one point, a specialist tried to hypnotize her—but still she wouldn't budge from what she saw. Now, it is important to point out that what Mary Katherine recalled was not necessarily what happened. The police were careful to avoid letting all of the information about the break-in go public. Mary Katherine believed that she saw a man take Elizabeth at gunpoint. Initially, I understood that he tapped Mary Katherine on the shoulder, and when she turned over she saw Brian looking at her nightstand. Then she saw Brian pull out what she believed to be a gun and point it at Elizabeth. Elizabeth said, “Why are you doing this?” Mary Katherine thought she heard Brian say “ransom” or “hostage.” Elizabeth stubbed her toe in the darkness of the bedroom and said, “Ouch.” She heard Brian say to Elizabeth, “Be quiet or I am going to kill you.” At this point Mary Katherine was feigning sleep. Brian told Elizabeth to get some shoes. For a moment a light went on in the closet where Elizabeth would put on her running shoes. Mary Katherine believes that Brian walked with Elizabeth down the hallway and looked into her brothers' bedrooms. They walked down the stairs and out of the house through the back door. Mary Katherine never knew which door they went out. A few seconds after that, she heard Elizabeth say “ouch” a second time; she believed Elizabeth had fallen. Only seconds later, Brian and Elizabeth would fade into the night. As this is being written, there
are other details that we are not at liberty to talk about because of the pending trial.
Mary Katherine is a very strong little girl, but outside of these investigation interviews we realized that she wasn't talking about Elizabeth at all—not even the good times they shared. Mary Katherine was afraid that people wanted to talk to her about the kidnapping all the time, and it frightened her. Lois reassured her that it was okay to talk about Elizabeth without talking about the kidnapping. With a little encouragement, Mary Katherine slowly started bringing Elizabeth's name into conversations. She'd talk about the trips we'd taken, sleeping in the same room, and the sisterly bond they shared. Mary Katherine wanted to focus on the wonderful, happy times we had together as a family, and this helped her tremendously to bring Elizabeth back into our home while she was gone.