Bringing Elizabeth Home

by Ed Smart

  At the roll call hearing in July, Ed pleaded with Ricci's wife, Angela, for the truth. Angela expressed her sincere grief over Elizabeth's disappearance. Ed asked Angela to talk to Richard to see if there was anything he could tell us to help find Elizabeth. He took her by the hand and said, “We have got to find our daughter.” He pleaded with her. Angela insisted that Ricci was not involved in the kidnapping but promised to talk to her husband anyway.

  But did he take Elizabeth?

  The Richard Ricci saga was one of the most difficult aspects of the investigation. The media was obsessed with what we thought about Ricci's case. We didn't want to comment. When we went to the courthouse for the pretrial hearing, there were so many reporters that there was literally no room for us to sit in the courtroom. We were a bit surprised. Someone from the court finally came out and said that only one of us could go inside. We felt it was best for Ed to go, but we were later told that we could both attend the hearing. We had no idea it would be such a big deal. This was just a pretrial hearing. If this was the coverage for the theft charges, we could only imagine the media circus that would follow for a kidnapping trial.

  We wanted to sit in on the trial to hear Ricci tell his story, in his own words. Maybe we were looking for a sign that he knew where Elizabeth was—or perhaps we wanted to stare him in the eyes and try to get a read on his alleged innocence. We were seeking the truth—regardless of how upsetting it could have been. There was a motion for a continuance from Ricci's lawyer, who wanted an opportunity for further discovery. What in the world were they looking for? He admitted to taking Lois's jewelry. He stole from us. That was a fact.

  After the first day of the hearing, microphones were shoved in our faces by reporters wanting to know how we felt, what we thought, and if were we satisfied with the outcome. Our publicist, Chris Thomas, scurried us through the crowd and told us not to talk to anyone. We were getting used to the crowds, but we never seemed to get comfortable with the attention.

  While the investigation into Richard Ricci was still ongoing, we received an e-mail from an anonymous person who claimed to have seen Ricci working on a fence in Wyoming. Somehow, that e-mail got erased. We were just sick over losing that correspondence. We eventually made a public plea to whoever sent the e-mail to resend us the information. We never heard from that person again. We find it hard to believe that any one person can be alone in this world. Someone somewhere knew who sent us that e-mail, just as someone knew whom Richard Ricci met the night he returned the Jeep to Neth Moul's garage. A friend, a neighbor, a family member—someone knew. The Jeep remains a mystery. There was a rumor that someone in Cedar City was able to vindicate Ricci, but we have yet to hear a confirmation of that. Ricci's attorney is bound by client/lawyer privilege, so he cannot reveal Ricci's whereabouts the night Elizabeth was taken.

  We never understood why Ricci wouldn't clear his name with respect to the kidnapping allegation. What could be worse than that? And then the unthinkable happened. We received a phone call from Cory Lyman, the lead investigator on Elizabeth's case at the time, informing us that Richard Ricci had suffered an aneurysm in his prison cell and it looked as if he would not make it. Ricci never regained consciousness, and he died on August 30, 2002. The police had placed so much emphasis on Ricci, and there is no faulting their efforts to prove his guilt. They had gone to southern Utah to interview some of his cohorts. They reinterviewed his wife. They did a lot of work, but at the end of the day, it would be all for naught.

  School was starting and it was time to resume family life. It was time we faced that Elizabeth might actually be dead. As hard as it was to bear, the thought was becoming difficult to dismiss. We faced that possibility from very different perspectives.

  Chapter 14

  THAT SEPTEMBER Elizabeth should have been starting her first year of high school—an important milestone for every child. Instead, we had to prepare ourselves for the end of the “summer of missing children” and move forward with the beginning of fall. Whether we were prepared for it or not, this was a new start for all of us. Ricci's death marked a fork in the road for both of us in terms of how we handled the situation going forward.

  As painful as it was, we had to get the children ready to go back to school. At this time of year, our daughters were always excited about shopping, while the boys were always indifferent. We feared that the children faced having to answer lots of questions from curious classmates. How were we supposed to prepare our children for the questions we had spent the summer protecting them from? Mary Katherine was of special concern. How would she handle children asking her about being the only witness to her sister's kidnapping? Could their questions be harmful to her memory or her well-being? We sought out expert advice to be certain we had the right answers to these questions. We spoke to the school principals about how to handle the children, especially Mary Katherine. Her principal assured us that the subject of Elizabeth's kidnapping would not be brought up. We can't think of a single incident where a child teased Mary Katherine or made some kind of cruel remark. That in itself was miraculous. She continued to do well in school and socialized very nicely with her friends and teachers. It's amazing how children had more softness in their hearts than did many members of the media. Our other children dealt with the issue as it came up. Andrew goes to the same junior high Elizabeth attended, so the kidnapping came up a little more in his daily conversations than in Mary Katherine's. Charles, being in high school, felt he could handle whatever came his way and never gave anyone a chance to broach the subject. He wanted to be known not as “Elizabeth Smart's brother,” but as someone with his own identity. We respected his attitude.

  Family became our number-one priority. We both come from such wonderful families, who were there every step of the way to prop us up when necessary. They were a tremendous support system—so many people don't have that to fall back on. We were sincerely blessed to have such a strong sustaining force. It's easy to get wrapped up in life and lose perspective on your priorities and what's really important. Business, bills, everyday life goes on—even when the world feels frozen. We had lost Elizabeth. But life had to go on.

  We decided it was important for Ed to go back to work three months from the time Elizabeth had been taken. People helped us out, but it was important, especially for Ed, to take his energy and put it toward something positive outside of the search for Elizabeth. He had been at an emotional standstill, and work provided a welcome break and a familiar sense of normalcy. It was a healthy distraction that helped both of us pick ourselves up and try to go back to the roles we had played before the kidnapping. Work had been a priority for Ed his whole life. The lessons garnered from our experience boiled down to not taking anything for granted. Ed works at home, but he spends a lot of time away from home with clients. Ed's business is one filled with peaks and valleys. When business is good, he's got to capitalize on it so that when things slow down we don't face financial challenges. Ed is an extremely driven man, so when Elizabeth was taken, it was hard for him to function at a level that he was accustomed to. There were numerous distractions that took his time and focus away from his work. Title and mortgage companies, and fellow Realtors, stepped in to help when Ed simply couldn't handle the workload. They made earning a living possible when things became difficult.

  For us, Elizabeth's disappearance was a huge wake-up call about life's priorities. Making that one extra deal was no longer as important as getting home to have dinner together as a family. We wanted to be there—to hear how the children's day was, what they did, whom they saw, catching as much of their lives as possible. We held our children a little closer. We told them we loved them all the time. We never expected to hear it back as often as we said it, but the impact on our children was noticeable. They were kinder and more thoughtful to one another. When birthdays came around, they each wanted to do something more special than they had on the last birthday. There has always been a genuine loving feeling in our home, but Elizabeth's absence was a re
minder to all of us to be even more peaceful and loving. Life is not all about work and money. Success is not something that is achieved only in the workplace. Life is about living. If you're not out there living it, you're losing out. That point was driven home each and every day Elizabeth was gone. Life is filled with checkpoints that are times to reevaluate how we are doing. We asked ourselves, “Is there anything that we should be changing?”

  LOIS

  I didn't want to believe Elizabeth was dead. I absolutely believed we would one day be reunited—I knew without question that we would see Elizabeth again. I am her mother—I carried this child in my womb next to my heart for nine months. There is no replacing that. How could I ever accept that she was gone—I mean, really gone? I didn't. Not inside. But I knew I still had to be a mother to my five other children. If I wasn't strong for them, I would lose everything I had lived for. I was among the living. I was not dead. I had to endure the pain and suffering of thinking Elizabeth might be dead—but not knowing for certain. Equally hard was the thought that she was living and how horrible things might be for her. Of those two choices, it was easier to think she was dead and with our Heavenly Father in a much better place. The maternal instinct defies explanation. If you are a mother, you know what I am talking about. It comes naturally. It made the hair on my neck stand up when people would say to me, “I'm going through the same kind of pain.” Unless you've been through this kind of loss, you cannot imagine what it feels like for a mother to lose a child at the hands of an abductor. Pain comes in layers, and mine was to the deepest part of my core. Your pain belongs to you—not your children, not your husband, not your friends or family. No one else can feel it the way you do. To be honest, after several months of agony, I didn't want to feel that pain anymore. It was unbearable to think that someone had my daughter. Taking care of my family was the only way I could go on.

  ED

  There was a point when I said to my wife that if she felt so strongly that Elizabeth was dead, we needed to have a funeral. I was feeling so incredibly down, and when speaking with John Walsh, as I had done at times in the prior months, I expressed my need to have a memorial service. John told me that the likelihood was that she was dead and I had a wife and five other children to live for. I explained to him how I couldn't leave her behind; nothing was telling me she was dead. Lois was vehement that we not have a memorial service (which seemed diametrically opposed to her need to carry on with life), and I couldn't see how I could even come close to moving on until there was one. Throughout the previous months I had been driven and comforted by dreams of Elizabeth walking back into our lives. What incredible elation I felt at those times. It gave me great hope and peace.

  Over the months we met other families that had missing children. These families remained traumatized—in many cases for years after the kidnappings. I couldn't imagine life going on like that. I could not tolerate the idea that the monster who took Elizabeth could take us all down—destroy our entire family. I was no longer willing to accept that as a possibility. I don't believe the media always portrayed us that way. Lois is the reason we survived. She is my best friend, and we were in this ordeal together—we would get through it together. There was no way I could have handled this on my own. We are a couple with conviction and devotion to one another, and above all we possess a will of spirit that brings us together. Lois wore a protective coat of armor so that nothing else could get in and hurt our family. She protected her heart, and in the process she protected all of us.

  We decided to reveal a key piece of information about the night of the kidnapping. We divulged to the Deseret News that a wrought-iron chair that had been moved from our patio had been found by police beneath the kitchen window with the cut screen. This information hadn't been made public before, but we felt it was relevant because it linked the break-in at our niece's home the previous month with Elizabeth's abduction. If no one knew about the chair, how come the break-in had been set up exactly the same way it was at our home the night of Elizabeth's disappearance? With Richard Ricci dead, there were still too many unanswered questions. We wanted to bring as much public pressure as we could to solving those puzzles. We couldn't accept letting the case die with Ricci. We wanted—needed—answers.

  To some degree, we felt at peace when Ricci died. At the very least, there would be no trial. We would not be forced to relive Elizabeth's nightmare if he was in fact the kidnapper. If he didn't abduct our daughter, what was it that he was hiding right up to the day he died? Who picked Ricci up at Neth Moul's shop? Where did Ricci go from May 28 to June 5? What about those unexplained miles on the Jeep? There had been several sightings of the Jeep in the midwest desert of Utah. Offering a reward for answers, even after Ricci died, had not turned up a single credible lead. We were definitely frustrated.

  LOIS

  As hard as it was for me to accept, the realization that Elizabeth might be dead continued to set in. It was time to resolve my internal conflict so that I could be a wife and mother to my five other children. In order for this to happen, I had to separate myself from the grueling, sometimes gruesome, daily routine of dealing with the details of the investigation. Our family had already been put through enough in the three months that had gone by. I could see the responsibilities I needed to attend to, I knew I would have to move on to do so, but it took a very long time to even approach the idea that Elizabeth would not be coming home.

  We held out hope for her safe return. We prayed, fasted, and looked to God for guidance. This was my daughter. She was the beautiful child whose tears I wiped when she skinned a knee and whose pride I shared every time I heard her play the harp. We had (and still have) a very special mother-daughter bond. That never goes away. Not even in the absence of your child. I would always feel connected to Elizabeth, whether here on earth or in the hereafter. My mind and my heart were dueling over the right thing to do. No one tells you what it's like when you lose a child. I found comfort in reading scripture and other books of inspiration, but mostly I had to come to this decision on my own, and accept that what I was doing was truly the right thing for my family.

  Like Elizabeth, I enjoy horseback riding, especially in the mountains above Salt Lake. I enjoy getting on the back of a horse and feeling the open space and fresh, crisp, fall mountain air. It's a time for reflection. On an early-September morning, I drove up to Ed's parents' cabin and decided to ride up the Red Cliffs trail with Ed's father. This was the same trail Elizabeth had ridden so many times before. I hadn't been riding for more than a year. We did most of our riding in the summer. I wanted to go on this ride for Elizabeth. I got her riding boots, her spurs, her riding gloves, and her cowboy hat and wore them on this ride.

  At the top of the trail there is a geographical marker that had been placed there several years ago. This place is tied to some very happy moments in my life. We rode our horses to the top of the trail, dismounted, and contemplated the situation our family faced. How were we supposed to move on with our lives? We had no answers. There was no certainty that Ricci had kidnapped Elizabeth. I looked into the valley below and wondered if Elizabeth was somewhere down there. I was weeping. I thought about my role as a wife and mother of our household. It was my role to pick up the pieces of our broken family, but my heart was itself shattered into a million tiny pieces. I grieved every single day, but I had no need to publicly share my torment more than we already had as a family. My way of handling adversity is to do it in the privacy of my own home and heart. For the bulk of the summer, the focus of the investigation and media coverage had been so heavily placed on our family. That added an unexpected pressure to deliver some nugget of information, true or otherwise. It was my opinion that if there was nothing to say, we were better off saying nothing. I didn't feel I needed to be a part of the daily briefings. Everybody wanted to do an interview with the family, but I felt that the less exposure the children had to the media, the less they might realize how big a news item Elizabeth's disappearance had become. I didn't want
their lives to be changed more than they already had been.

  I was happy that Ed was out there fighting the fight and facing the frenzy. It allowed me to be home. Going to the market was hard. Buying a carton of milk or picking up the dry cleaning meant facing the eyes of wondering friends, strangers, or maybe even Elizabeth's captors, watching, stalking, and planning their next attack. I could feel people staring, wondering what it was like. Wondering how I was doing. Judging. Analyzing. Always reaching out to offer comfort. In a way, Elizabeth became the entire country's daughter, but she was also my daughter. I missed her. I desperately wanted her home. But every night, her bed remained empty.

  It was time.

  I had to put on a protective coat of armor to safeguard our family—and that coat needed to be big enough to fit all of us inside. I needed to see to it that whoever had taken Elizabeth from us didn't succeed in taking all of us. The situation was incomprehensible. Our family couldn't continue to go through this process of living in the unknown. There were birthdays to celebrate, the start of a new school year was upon us, and there were school plays and recitals to attend. Life was marching on. There is nothing more precious than the bond between a mother and her children. I would never lose that bond with Elizabeth. I wanted to believe with every ounce of my mind, heart, and soul that Elizabeth was still alive and that she'd someday come home. I could not let this destroy our family. Losing Elizabeth had brought us to our knees. The time had come to get back up. I knew what I had to do.