Later, Ricci had abused alcohol and prescription drugs. He also had a strange compulsion to sneak into children’s rooms and steal worthless items that they might easily have assumed they had simply misplaced. He was closer to the height of the man Mary Katherine had described. Investigators discovered that he worked for a local nursery and the day of the abduction happened to have been his day off. Ricci apparently knew that he would be a person of interest in the case. He told a neighbor that the police would be coming to see him because he had once worked at the Smarts’.
Ricci declined legal representation, and he and his wife allowed the police to search their house without a warrant. Inside, the authorities found a light-colored hat and a machete. In the garden, they found trinkets stolen from the Smarts’ home. Although there was no direct evidence to connect him to the kidnapping, Ricci was held on a parole violation charge.
Eventually, Ricci was brought to court on burglary charges. While Ed and Lois had found it hard to believe that Ricci was responsible for the kidnapping, they came to believe that he knew something about it; perhaps he was even in league with the perpetrator. They attended court in the hope that he might give them some sort of sign, but he avoided eye contact with them.
That evening, Ricci collapsed in his cell. He was rushed to the hospital, where it was discovered he had a brain hemorrhage and he fell into a coma. Doctors tried to operate, but he died. Any information he did have about the kidnapping was then lost.
As the police could not rule out the possibility that the kidnapper was one of the Smarts’ extended family, all the male relatives were asked to take a polygraph test that lasted up to eight hours. This, again, led nowhere.
Then Mary Katherine remembered something. Suddenly, four months after the abduction, she recalled that the man who had taken her sister was a homeless drifter who had done a day-and-a-half’s work on the house the year before. The man had called himself “Emmanuel.” However, the police still considered Ricci their man. When they searched the police database for the alias “Emmanuel,” nothing had come up. They did not realize the name “Emmanuel” was on the system—Brian David Mitchell had recently been arrested for shoplifting.
The Smarts contacted John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted, who had already devoted some airtime to Elizabeth’s kidnapping. He broadcast an update on the case. Then Walsh was asked about Elizabeth Smart on Larry King Live, and he mentioned Emmanuel.
By chance, Ed Smart bumped into sketch artist Dalene Nielsen and persuaded her to produce a new artist’s impression of Emmanuel. This was then shown on America’s Most Wanted, along with a description of the kidnapper. Derrick Thompson was watching the show and recognized the culprit. He called his brother Mark, who confirmed his suspicions. The man was their stepfather; Derrick and Mark were Wanda Barzee’s sons.
Brian David Mitchell was born on October 18, 1953, in Salt Lake City. He was the third of six children born to Mormon parents Shirl and Irene Mitchell. Shirl, a social worker, and Irene, a schoolteacher, were vegetarians and raised their children on a regular diet of whole wheat bread and steamed vegetables. The family was described by neighbors as being odd but decent.
Brian was a normal kid, joining the cub scouts and playing Little League. Irene was a caring mother, but Shirl had some distinctly odd ideas when it came to raising children. He tried to teach his son about sex by showing him explicit pictures from a medical journal. Other sexually explicit material was available around the house. Shirl also liked to test his son’s initiative by dropping him in unfamiliar areas of town to see whether he could find his way home. Constantly being put to the test, Brian became aggressive and withdrawn.
At sixteen, Brian exposed himself to a child and was sent to juvenile hall. After he returned home, he was constantly fighting with his mother, so his parents sent him to live with his grandmother. Not long after the move, Brian Mitchell dropped out of school and began using alcohol and drugs regularly.
Mitchell was nineteen when he married sixteen-year-old Karen, after she discovered she was pregnant. They had two children together—a son named Travis and a daughter named Angela. When they broke up, Mitchell was granted custody of the children due to Karen’s alleged infidelities and drug abuse. She remarried and petitioned for her kids to be returned to her. Rather than give them up, Mitchell fled to New Hampshire. After a period as a fugitive, he decided to accept the court’s decision and returned the children to their mother.
In 1980 Mitchell’s life changed after his brother returned from a religious mission and the two began to talk. Brian stopped using drugs and alcohol, and returned to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. The following year, he married his second wife, Debbie, who had three daughters from a previous marriage. They had two children together. According to Debbie, Mitchell, who had at first been gentle, became controlling and abusive, dictating what she could wear and eat. His interest in Satan disturbed her, though Mitchell claimed he was simply learning about the enemy. But it was Mitchell who filed for divorce in 1984, claiming Debbie was violent and cruel to his children, turning them against him.
After they separated, Debbie reported her concerns that Mitchell may have sexually abused their three-year-old son. While it was not possible to prove that Mitchell abused the boy, the court recommended that his future visits be supervised. Then Debbie’s daughter accused Mitchell of sexually abusing her over a period of four years. Debbie reported this to the church, but LDS leaders advised her to drop it.
Debbie also saw the episode of America’s Most Wanted and recognized Emmanuel as the man she had once been married to. She called the police and told them about Mitchell, including the sexual abuse of her daughter. She said that while she believed that Mitchell could have kidnapped Elizabeth, she felt he would not have killed her.
The day Mitchell divorced Debbie, he married forty-year-old divorcee Wanda Barzee. She had left her six children with her ex-husband, but when she remarried, some of them moved in with the newlyweds. They found Mitchell’s behavior increasingly strange and threatening.
Mitchell worked as a die-cutter. But at home, he often flew into a rage, particularly at Barzee. His religious views became increasingly eccentric. He claimed to speak to angels. The children began to move away. By the 1990s, Mitchell had begun calling himself “Emmanuel.” He grew a long beard and regaled people with his prophetic visions.
Barzee called herself “God Adorneth” and the two of them were seen tramping the streets of Salt Lake City dressed in long robes. The residents of Salt Lake City referred to them as “Joseph and Mary.” They lived by panhandling. Occasionally, Mitchell took a job to make ends meet, even shaving off his beard and cutting his hair if necessary. The Smarts regularly offered odd jobs to people down on their luck and, in November 2001, Lois Smart gave Mitchell a few hours’ work around the house. It was then that he met Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Smart lived in Mitchell’s makeshift camp from June 5 to August 8. “Joseph and Mary” were now seen with another follower in tow. Both Barzee and Elizabeth covered their faces with veils so no one would see that this new hobo in a grubby white robe was the sweet blonde-haired kidnap victim whose picture graced posters across the state. Besides, there was no reason to imagine that this new follower was a kidnap victim. The three of them could be seen gorging themselves on the salad at all-you-can-eat buffets in cheap fast-food restaurants. Elizabeth would go alone to replenish her plate and return to the table without any visible coercion.
By the time Mary Katherine had realized that Emmanuel was the one who had kidnapped her sister, Mitchell, Barzee, and Elizabeth had left Utah and moved to Lakeside, California. Fifteen miles inland from San Diego, Lakeside had a large population of transients, so the three travelers fit in easily. However, Mitchell drew attention to himself by preaching in the shopping district and the police had to ask him to move on.
Mitchell now had two wives, but he wanted more. He spotted the twelve-year-old daughter of an official
named Virl Kemp at a local Mormon church. So he tied back his hair, dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, and went along to Sunday service. Mitchell introduced himself as Peter and asked questions about the church. Kemp invited him home for dinner, but it soon became clear that Mitchell knew more about the church than he let on. He was, of course, merely casing the house. Later, he returned to break in and kidnap Kemp’s daughter. Fortunately, the house was secure and Mitchell could not gain entry.
By the time the crucial edition of America’s Most Wanted aired on February 15, 2003, Mitchell was already in custody. A resident of Lakeside had reported seeing a man in long johns breaking into a preschool at Lakeside Presbyterian Church. The police arrived and found Mitchell asleep on the floor. He gave a false name and date of birth. However, he was identified by his fingerprints. He had already skipped a court appearance for shoplifting in Utah, but that was a misdemeanor and did not show up on the computer. That he was being sought in the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case had not made the system yet. Nevertheless, he was held over the Presidents’ Day weekend.
When Mitchell did not return to their camp in the woods, Barzee grew frantic. Leaving Elizabeth behind, she went to an altar that Mitchell set up called Golgotha to pray for his safe return. Elizabeth was left on her own, but again she made no attempt to escape.
In court, Mitchell—who insisted his name was Michael Jenson—explained that he had broken into the preschool because he was drunk. He was fined $250 and given three years’ probation.
Two weeks later, when America’s Most Wanted aired another update on the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping, the program showed photographs of Mitchell that had been provided by Barzee’s sons. A viewer in Lakeside called in to report having seen a man answering to Mitchell’s description, traveling with two women who wore veils over their faces.
In the Lakeside Library, the librarians saw the three of them wearing the dirtiest street clothes they had ever seen. They had no idea that the man, woman, and girl were the robed people who had been seen around town for the past four months. The girl was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of oversized sunglasses. The older woman had hold of her wrist, while the man studied a map that a librarian had found for him.
The library manager, Dusty Harrington, said, “We just thought they were a homeless family, and my first thought was, ‘Why isn’t that kid in school?’”
It seems that Mitchell was studying the map because he intended to go back to Utah. On March 4, the threesome were seen by rock climbers near Escondido, twenty miles north of Lakeside. Mitchell again introduced himself as Peter and said he was on his way to Las Vegas with his wife and daughter. They were wearing robes and veils.
A week later, near the I-45, North Las Vegas police officers talked to three robed hitchhikers who were heading for Utah. They gave their names as Peter and Juliette Marshall, and their daughter Augustine. The transients had no identification, but the police had no reason to detain them.
The following day, when Ryan Johnson picked them up from a Springville McDonald’s, they were dressed as they had been in the Lakeside Library, though Elizabeth now wore a gray wig. In the rear-view mirror, her eyes seemed to want to say something, Johnson said. But no words came from her mouth until she got out. The door handle came away in her hand and she said: “I’m sorry.” Nothing more.
Mitchell had said that they were going to Salt Lake City. So Johnson dropped them at the bus stop on the road to Provo and gave Mitchell all the quarters he had in his ashtray, about $5 worth. When he got to work, he thought he ought to call the police and report the strange family he had seen. In his haste, he dialed the wrong number. When there was no reply, he gave up.
At a bus stop outside Utah Valley State College, less than forty miles from Salt Lake City, Mitchell got involved in a heated argument with a recently returned LDS missionary who wanted to know why blonde hair was poking out from under his daughter’s gray wig. Mitchell stormed off, but returned to get on the bus to Salt Lake City.
The three alighted in the suburb of Sandy around noon on March 12. They used the restrooms in a Walmart, then began walking toward the Salt Lake Temple, which was no more than twenty miles from Elizabeth’s home. Carrying tarps and packs, they attracted attention. Almost simultaneously two couples in passing cars recognized Mitchell as the man they had seen on America’s Most Wanted. They dialed 911.
Within two minutes of the call from her dispatcher, Officer Karen Jones pulled up beside the three in a patrol car. She got out and asked who they were. Mitchell repeated the regular story that they were Peter and Juliette Marshall and Elizabeth was their daughter Augustine. When asked for identification, Mitchell said they had none, and no possessions, as they were the messengers of God. Jones then addressed Elizabeth directly. She confirmed that the girl was the couple’s daughter, Augustine Ann Marshall.
A second patrol car arrived. Officer Troy Rasmussen got out. The first thing he said was, “That looks like Elizabeth Smart.” Jones agreed.
Jones returned to her car and ran the names she had been given through the dispatcher. There were no matches. She came back to Mitchell and said: “You people don’t exist.”
Mitchell explained that there was no record of them because they traveled around a lot and had given all their worldly goods away. He was asking them if they accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior when a third cop arrived. He recognized Elizabeth and Mitchell. He had watched America’s Most Wanted. Nevertheless, Elizabeth stuck to her story.
More police officers turned up. Elizabeth was taken aside. She was asked again for her name. She said, “Augustine Marshall.”
One of the detectives had been on the team investigating Smart’s disappearance. He said that there was one way to find out if she was Elizabeth Smart. He phoned Ed Smart and asked him to come to Sandy Police Station. Now beginning to panic, Elizabeth blurted out: “You think I’m that girl who ran away, but I’m not.”
The police then assured her that they had never stopped looking for her. Her parents would be anxious to see her and she was not in any trouble. They were there to protect her. But still she was afraid. For the past nine months and one week she had been repeatedly raped and abused. Mitchell and Barzee had made her sleep in the cold, starved her, stolen her privacy, dressed her in strange clothes, and covered her face. And all the time they had told her that she was evil, her family was evil, everything around her was evil, and they had used the scriptures to terrorize her.
An officer arrived with a missing person’s flier, showing Elizabeth’s picture. There was no mistaking her. Tears welled up in her eyes.
“Are you Elizabeth?” she was asked.
“If thou sayeth,” was her whispered reply.
The police took this as a yes, handcuffed all three, and put them in separate police cars for the short drive to the Sandy Police Station. Elizabeth’s father was already on his way.
When he arrived at the police station, Ed Smart recognized his daughter immediately, despite the radical change in her appearance. They hugged.
“Is it really you?” he asked.
“Yes, Dad,” she replied.
That night, she returned to the same queen-size bed she had been taken from months before.
Brian Mitchell and Wanda Barzee were indicted by a Utah grand jury, but were found not mentally competent to stand trial. They were to be held until they were deemed fit. Barzee refused to take medication; a bill was passed through the Utah state legislature to allow forcible administration in such cases.
In October 2009, Barzee was found competent to stand trial and, on November 17, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for her role in the kidnapping.
Hearings about Mitchell’s mental competence continued. Those who examined him began to reach the conclusion that he was faking psychiatric illness and that he was a psychopath who could manipulate people into thinking he was incompetent. Finally on March 1, 2010, he was found fit to stand trial.
Nevertheless, at the federa
l trial on kidnapping charges that began on November 8, 2010, the defense argued that Mitchell was insane at the time he committed the offense. But his two stepdaughters testified that he had abused them before he called himself Emmanuel and claimed to be a prophet. On May 25, 2011, Mitchell was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Chapter 6
Sabine Dardenne, Laetitia Delhez, and the Belgian Pedophile Ring
BELGIAN SCHOOLGIRL SABINE DARDENNE was twelve years old when she was kidnapped on her way to school in Tournai. Her father saw her off that day. He watched her ride her brand new bicycle, a green Dunlop Viking, as far as the nearby motorway underpass. There, she gave a little wave and rode out of sight. The journey to school took between ten minutes and a quarter of an hour. Usually Sabine met her friend Davina along the way, and sometimes Davina’s little brother would ride along with them.
But on May 28, 1996, there was no sign of Davina or her brother. It was possible that their mother had taken them to school in the car. Or Davina might have decided not to wait and to ride on ahead. Or she could have been simply running late. In any case, Sabine decided to head on alone that day.
She was riding past the high wall of the local football stadium when she heard the sound of a vehicle coming up behind her, so she pulled to the side. She was fifty yards beyond Davina’s house, passing a house with a high hedge, when a rusty old camper van pulled up beside her. The side door slid open. A man leaned out, plucked Sabine from her bike, and threw her in the back. It was all over in a split second. Apparently, her kidnappers had been planning the snatch for weeks.
Sabine tried to fight her abductor off, but she was just four foot nine and weighed only sixty-eight pounds. She was small for her age, more like a ten-year-old than twelve, she said later. He was a full-grown man. He shoved some pills in her mouth and wrapped her up in a blanket. He told her to shut up and nothing would happen to her. But Sabine was a fighter. She had no intention of shutting up. Who were her attackers? She wanted to know. What were they doing? What about her bike? Didn’t they realize that she was going to be late for school?
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