Against Their Will

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Heidnik became paranoid about the women listening to him moving around the house. He tried to drown out the sounds of his movements with more loud music. But later, he took more drastic action. He tied the girls to a beam and punctured their eardrums with a screwdriver. Only Josefina was spared. The other girls then resented her more, but Josefina did not care. She had a plan.

  Although her children had, in reality, been adopted long ago, Josefina had said that she had three children at home when she had first come to Heidnik’s house, as an excuse to get the sex over with. On March 24, 1987, four months after she had first been taken captive by Heidnik, she persuaded him to let her go home and visit these phantom children. In exchange, Josefina promised to return with a new woman for Heidnik’s harem.

  Heidnik drove her downtown and dropped her off near her home. He was confident that she would return. If she did not, it did not matter much. In his eyes, she was a simple-minded black whore. If she went to the police, no one would listen to her wild accusations.

  When he dropped her off, they agreed to meet at Girard and Sixth Street, around midnight. Again she promised that she would come with a fresh woman for him.

  As Heidnik drove off, Josefina was seized with fear and panic. She ran back to the apartment where she used to live with her boyfriend, Vincent Nelson. The night before Thanksgiving, when she had gone out to pick up her deadly trick, they’d had a terrible fight. She had been missing for four months now. What must Vincent be thinking? It did not matter. There was nowhere else to go.

  She beat on his door. When he opened it and saw her, he was angry. Where the hell had she been? She began babbling.

  “She came in,” he said, “and as we were walking up the steps, she was rambling on, you know, talking real fast about this guy having three girls chained up in the basement of this house and she was held hostage for four months… She said that he was beating them, raping them, had them eating dead people, just like he was a cold-blooded nut. Dogs in the yard were eating people’s bones. I just thought she was crazy. I really didn’t believe her, and I still don’t believe this shit.”

  None of what she said made any sense to him, but he took her in. Her sheer terror impressed him. Plainly, she needed help.

  After a couple of hours, he realized that, whatever she was talking about, this Heidnik guy was responsible for giving her a hard time. He promised to sort him out. At midnight, he went with her down to Girard and Sixth. But on the way he began to get cold feet. What if some of the things Josefina had said about chains, torture, and murder were true; this freak could be dangerous.

  Just one block short of the gas station, Vincent stopped at a pay phone and called the police. He put Josefina on the line. The desk sergeant found her story hard to believe, but he said that he would send out a patrol car anyway.

  The car picked them up at the phone booth. Vincent ran through Josefina’s story of girls chained in the basement, being raped, being fed dead bodies. He said that he himself did not believe it. Nor did the cops. But they took her to the precinct. It was only when she showed them the scars and bruises on her body, and the shackle marks around her ankles, that they began to concede that there might be something to her story.

  A patrol car was sent over to the gas station at Girard and Sixth. There was a white and gray Cadillac waiting there, just as Josefina had said there would be. The officers pulled their guns as they approached. Heidnik was not alarmed when the police ordered him out of the car at gunpoint. He asked whether they were arresting him for not paying his child support. But why the guns? They handcuffed him and took him in for questioning.

  Meanwhile, another squad was sent to North Marshall Street. They banged on the door. No one answered. They had no search warrant, so they just had to sit there and wait until someone got one.

  More than four hours later, the warrant came. The police crowbarred open the metal door. In the front room, they found a huge collection of pornographic videotapes and erotic books, all containing pictures of naked black women.

  In the basement, they found two naked black women huddled under a blanket. They screamed as the police came in, but they were shackled and chained, and could not run away.

  Once the police had calmed them, the women pointed to large sacks in the middle of the floor. The police had heard Josefina’s stories and feared that the sacks could contain a dismembered body. The girls quickly indicated that they should move the sacks. Under them were boards. When the police lifted them, they found a shallow pit with another naked black girl squatting in it. She had her arms handcuffed behind her and was chained and shackled.

  All three were starving and filthy. An ambulance was called to tend to them and take them to the hospital. Then an officer looked in the fridge. He found a human rib.

  Heidnik was charged with indecent exposure, simple assault, aggravated assault, issuing terrorist threats, reckless endangerment, unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, criminal solicitation, indecent assault, rape, involuntary deviant sexual intercourse, murder, and the possession and abuse of a corpse. He cheerfully admitted to several other murders.

  Within hours of his arrest, Heidnik was attacked by another prisoner. This would be the first of a number of attacks in jail. Heidnik also tried to commit suicide but was caught before he could go through with it.

  In court, his defense made what it could of the antagonism between the surviving victims. The other three girls still did not trust Josefina, who they thought had sided with Heidnik against them. And in her three-hour testimony, Josefina was almost sympathetic to Heidnik because “the city was always taking his babies away.” The same thing had happened to her.

  Jacqueline was so small that Heidnik had used handcuffs to shackle her ankles. Much was made of the fact that she was given extra long chains on her manacles. Was she not the one who was given special favors?

  “He did that so I could open my legs for sex,” she said. And she sobbed while she described the beatings and the deviant group sex that the girls had been forced into.

  She and the other surviving victims expressed their distrust of Josefina and her motives. But this squabbling made little difference to the jury. They dismissed any attempt to show that Heidnik was insane after his financial advisor from Merrill Lynch was called to testify. Heidnik, said the broker said, was “an astute investor who knew exactly what he was doing.” The figures spoke for themselves.

  Heidnik was found guilty of the first-degree murders of Sandra Lindsay and Deborah Dudley. He was also found guilty on six counts of kidnapping, five counts of rape, four counts of aggravated assault, and one count of involuntary deviant sexual intercourse—all the charges except for involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with Josefina Rivera. The jury gave no explanation for their acquittal on that count.

  Heidnik was given two death sentences. The victims were awarded $34,000 each. Mrs. Heidnik—aka Betty Disto—and her son received $30,000 from Heidnik’s estate.

  When Heidnik’s father heard that his son was a sexual deviant and murderer, he was sympathetic to the victims. “I hope he gets the chair,” he said. “I’ll even pull the switch.”

  Throughout the whole ordeal Josefina Rivera had been extraordinarily resourceful. After it was over, she was stoic. She said later, “It’s something that happened. I won’t forget it. But I don’t dwell on it.”

  Heidnik tried to kill himself again in January 1999 with an overdose of the drug Thorazine, which he had been prescribed. He was executed by lethal injection on July 6, 1999; he was the last person to be executed by the state of Pennsylvania.

  Chapter 5

  Elizabeth Smart—The Knifepoint Disciple

  ON THE EVENING OF JUNE 4, 2002, Ed and Lois Smart had attended an award ceremony at their fourteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth’s school in Salt Lake City, Utah. They returned to their home in the affluent neighborhood of Federal Heights, where they lived with their six children. Ed locked up the house that night, but he did not switch on the alarm.
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  “We never set the alarm at night when we were all home,” he said later. If the children got up during the night, they would set it off.

  The family said their prayers together. Then Ed and Lois kissed the children good-night.

  “I just remember her coming over and giving me a big hug and a kiss and saying good-night, and the two girls [Elizabeth and her nine-year-old sister Mary Katherine] going off into their room, and that was the last time I saw her,” said Ed.

  In the early hours of the morning, Mary Katherine awoke to find Elizabeth was no longer in the queen-size bed they shared. She was up and there was someone else in the room. It was a man, but he was not their father or one of their four brothers.

  “He placed his hand on my chest,” Elizabeth later said in court, “and then put the knife up to my neck.”

  The intruder came around to Mary Katherine’s side of the bed and tapped her on the shoulder. Sensing danger, the little girl pretended to be asleep. She heard Elizabeth stub her toe in the dark and say: “Ouch.”

  “He told me to get up quietly, and if I didn’t, then he would kill me and my family,” said Elizabeth. “He was whispering, but it was still loud enough it could wake someone. He was dressed in sweats, sweatshirt, stocking cap, tennis shoes.”

  Elizabeth then asked: “Why are you doing this?”

  The reply was indistinct, but Mary Katherine thought he said, “For ransom.”

  The nine-year-old opened her eyes enough to see the man. It was dark and she wasn’t able to see much detail. However, she remembered that he had black hair on the back of his hands and was wearing a light-colored hat. Mary Katherine thought he was carrying a gun.

  When she thought they had gone, Mary Katherine got out of bed to go and tell her parents what had happened. In the hallway, she saw Elizabeth and her captor. Fearing that if he saw her, he would take her too, Mary Katherine returned to bed and pretended to be asleep again.

  Eventually, she got up, wrapped herself in a blanket, ran into the master bedroom, and shook her father.

  “She’s gone,” she said. “Elizabeth is gone.”

  It was 3:58 a.m.

  Ed got up and went to look for Elizabeth. She sometimes slept elsewhere in the house if Mary Katherine had been kicking in her sleep. But Mary Katherine was insistent. A man had come with a gun and taken her sister away.

  At 4:01, Ed called the police, begging them to hurry. Lois had discovered an open window where the screen had been slashed with a knife. It became clear that the terrible tale Mary Katherine was telling was no bad dream. By the time the police arrived twelve minutes later, Ed had alerted the neighbors. He told them to check their kids. Family and friends rallied around, forming ad hoc search parties.

  Elizabeth was not the type to sneak out with a boyfriend. Indeed, she was angelic—she played the harp and was a featured soloist at a concert for the Paralympics at the 2000 Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City.

  Somehow, the kidnapper had managed to leave without stepping on the creaky floorboard that Ed always heard when the kids moved around at night. The intruder had taken Elizabeth out through the kitchen door, leaving the cut in the screen as the only clue to his crime.

  No one on the quiet cul-de-sac where the Smarts lived had heard any suspicious traffic that night. A neighbor’s security videotape showed no activity before the police arrived. It looked as though the kidnapper had taken Elizabeth on foot up through the backyard toward the mountains beyond. However, police dogs could only follow her scent for a few yards beyond the house.

  As the searchers spread out, they asked early morning joggers and dog walkers if they had seen anyone answering Elizabeth’s description. No one had. There was no sign of her. Some had intended to search the old lime kilns established by Brigham Young’s Mormon pioneers back in the nineteenth century, but the police asked them not to. Later, the police took a dog team there, but found nothing.

  To preserve any evidence of a trail, the police also asked Elizabeth’s friends and family not to search the mountains beyond. All the family could do was support each other and organize fliers and a reward. The police offered $10,000; private donations raised that to $250,000. A hundred policemen joined the search, and helicopters scoured the surrounding area.

  The Smarts’ house was sealed as a crime scene at 6:54 a.m. By 7:30 a.m., local TV and radio stations were broadcasting missing person bulletins. Ed Smart broadcast his own appeal, asking the kidnapper directly: “Please let her go.”

  The Smart family were Mormons, and members of their church rallied around them.

  The police examined the Smarts’ home computer in case Elizabeth had met a sexual predator in an Internet chat room. In recent months, Ed had been renovating the family’s $1 million home in preparation for sale. The police compiled a list of contractors, workmen, and real estate brokers who had been at the house, so they could be interviewed. One of them was Brian David Mitchell, but it would be months before he became a suspect.

  Mitchell was a Mormon, who at one time had been second counselor to the bishop in a Salt Lake City ward, but he and his wife, Wanda Barzee, had been excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints because of their “activity promoting bizarre teachings and lifestyle far afield from the principles and doctrines of the Church.” Mitchell had written a bizarre manifesto outlining his beliefs called “The Book of Immanuel David Isaiah.” It said that Mitchell was a “ministering angel” who was sent to Earth to correct the Mormon church and restore its fundamental values, such as polygamous marriages.

  Although the Mormons had officially ceased to practice polygamy in 1890, Mitchell believed it was wrong to have done so. He was determined to have multiple wives, if not by consent then by force. In section four of the manifesto, dated February 17, 2002, he wrote: “And thou shalt take into thy heart and home seven times seven sisters, to love and care for…and thou art the jubilee of them all, first and last, for all are given unto them, for thou art a Queen, Oh Hephzibah!” Apparently, Hephzibah was Barzee, who was to accept and care for Mitchell’s forty-nine additional wives, while remaining his lead wife.

  On the night of the kidnapping, Mitchell took Elizabeth on a four-mile hike up to Dry Creek Canyon, where he had built a hidden shelter for his new wife. It was a twenty-foot ditch with a lean-to over it. Barzee was waiting at the campsite and tried to force Elizabeth to bathe.

  “She eventually just proceeded to wash my feet and told me to change out of my pajamas into a robe type of garment,” Smart recalled. “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.”

  She was kept tethered to a tree by a cable and raped as many as four times a day. It was plain that he wanted her for sex, though he often talked about religion.

  “He used religion to get what he wanted,” Elizabeth said.

  He forced her to consume drugs and alcohol, and showed her pornography, which was intended to lower her resistance. On one occasion, he forced her to drink so much that she threw up, so he made her lay face down in her own vomit all night.

  As his bride, he renamed her Augustine and starved her when she was not compliant. Once, to fight off his sex attacks, she bit him.

  “He said if I did that, he would never have sex with me again and I would be the most miserable woman in the world,” she said. “He said that, but it didn’t stop him.”

  While Elizabeth was being held at the camp, the police were following other leads. A milkman who delivered to the Smarts’ cul-de-sac each morning said he’d seen a green car cruising past their house at 7 a.m. on June 3. The car drove passed him, then doubled back. Fearing that he was going to be robbed, the milkman wrote down the license plate number and called the police. The driver had been wearing a light-colored hat.

  On Sunday, June 9, a vigil was held for Elizabeth in Liberty Park. A police officer not
iced a green Saturn in the parking lot with the license plate number 266HJH. This was not an exact match to the number that the milkman had written down, but it was close. The police staked out the car, but when the driver returned, he leaped into the car and drove away before they could stop him.

  Later that day, a small boy found some license plates abandoned near his home. They carried the number 266HJH. A fingerprint on them came from Bret Michael Edmunds, a twenty-six-year-old man who was wanted for assaulting a police officer. But Edmunds was six foot two; Mary Katherine had said the intruder was the same height as her sixteen-year-old brother Charles, who was five foot eight. However, Edmunds had done some work for people in the neighborhood and the search was on.

  Ten days after the police started looking for him, Edmunds checked into a hospital in Martinsburg, West Virginia, with a damaged liver caused by a drug overdose. He had given a false name, but the name and phone number he used as an emergency contact belonged to one of his relatives in Utah. Edmunds was in a bad way. One of the hospital workers called the emergency number, and the relative, knowing the police were looking for him, called them.

  Federal marshals found the green Saturn in the parking lot of the hospital. By the time investigators turned up from Utah, Edmunds was barely coherent. But it soon became clear that he knew nothing about Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapping and there was nothing in his car to link him to her abduction.

  Another early suspect was Richard Albert Ricci. He was on the list of people who had worked on the Smarts’ home. In the spring of 2001, he had done some painting and work around the yard. Outgoing and talkative, he got on well with his employers. However, when the police checked him out, they found he had a long criminal record. A former heroin addict, he had stolen to support his drug habit. In 1983, he had shot a policeman in Salt Lake City after robbing a pharmacy, and he was a four-time parole violator.