How Was Elizabeth Smart Kidnapped?
In fall 2001, Smart, her mother, Lois, and her younger sister, Mary Katherine, encountered a clean-shaven man panhandling in downtown Salt Lake City. Lois offered the man, who identified himself as "Emmanuel," (sometimes spelled "Immanuel"), five dollars and a chance to earn additional money by working on the roof of the Smarts' house. He spent a few hours there, and they didn't see him again.
"What I didn't know—what would later learn—was that he had been watching me very carefully as we walked toward him," Smart later recounted in her memoir, titled My Story. "He had taken the opportunity to study me further as my mother searched through her purse."
Months later, around 1 a.m. on June 5, 2002, Smart awoke to the man—whose real name is Brian David Mitchell—in her bedroom, pressing a knife to her neck and ordering her to come with him. Prosecutors later said Mitchell entered the Smart home by cutting through the screen of a kitchen window.
Smart shared a bedroom with Mary Katherine, who woke up to Mitchell's voice but pretended to be asleep as Elizabeth was taken. She got up to see Mitchell leading her sister down the hall and, frightened for her own safety, quietly returned to bed. After two hours had passed, Mary Katherine informed her parents.
9 Months of Captivity
Smart recognized her captor as "Emmanuel," who now had a beard. Mitchell walked Smart over the foothills near her home to a campsite, where he performed a ceremony to "marry" him and Smart. Mitchell then proceeded to rape her. And did he so nearly every day, sometimes multiple times a day, for the next several months, according to media reports. Smart later said she was frequently drugged, tied to a tree and denied food for days at a time.
Mitchell's wife, Wanda Barzee, was at the campsite throughout the ordeal. According to Smart, Barzee called Elizabeth her "handmaiden" and encouraged her husband to rape her.
"Everything that my captors threatened to do to me or wanted to do to me, they did," Smart told ABC News in 2023. "And nobody was there to protect me."
In public, Mitchell required Smart to wear white robes and a face-covering veil to conceal her identity.
Within two days of Smart's abduction, her family offered a $250,000 reward for her safe return. (Community donations significantly boosted the original reward of $10,000.) Lois and her husband Ed, a real estate and mortgage broker, held press conferences asking for the public's help.
"In the months after Elizabeth's disappearance, thousands of people on foot and horseback, or in planes and helicopters, combed hills and valleys around the state," The New York Times reported.
Why did Smart's kidnapping generate so much attention? Perhaps because of all the unanswered questions and frightening circumstances surrounding the case, CNN correspondent James Hattori told the Washington Post in 2003.
Some newspapers, including The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, questioned whether the media prioritizes coverage of cases involving white victims. The paper published an editorial asking, "Why haven't the reporters descended on Milwaukee to tell the nation about Alexis Patterson?" referring to a 7-year-old Black girl who disappeared on her way to school.
The Search for Suspects—and a Suspicious Break-In
After Smart was taken, police questioned Richard Albert Ricci, a handyman who once worked at Smart's home and had a 29-year criminal record. Days later, Ricci was arrested for a parole violation and later charged with burglary and theft for stealing jewelry from the Smarts and another local residence.
With Smart still in captivity, Mitchell and Barzee attempted to break into the home of Smart's relatives just after 3 a.m. on July 24, 2002. Smart's cousin, Jessica Wright, awoke to noises and noticed somebody cutting through her bedroom window screen. The entry attempt was unsuccessful.
As for Ricci, he was still a "top potential suspect" when he suffered a brain hemorrhage while in prison in August 2002. He fell into a coma and died three days later.
