Kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart

The Kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart began on June 5, 2002, when fourteen-year-old Elizabeth was taken at knifepoint from her bedroom in Salt Lake City while her parents slept elsewhere in the house. The abduction became a national news story, and a large search failed to find her or identify her abductor. For nine months, the public feared she had been killed; her eventual return alive reversed that expectation. The case was also a story of prior access and calculated religious manipulation: Mitchell had met Elizabeth at her family’s home, then treated her as the object of a divine command, while Barzee helped hold her under his control.

Access to the Smart Household

Mitchell’s connection to the family began in November 2001, about seven months before the abduction. He had adopted the name Immanuel and presented himself to Lois Smart, whom he met outside a downtown shopping mall, as a pious man in need. She gave him five dollars and offered him odd jobs at the family’s home. On the resulting visit, he spent about five hours working alongside Ed Smart, patching the roof and raking leaves at the family’s large Salt Lake City residence. There he met Elizabeth, and, in the account of the episode, became fixated on her and decided that God intended her to be his plural wife.

That visit gave Mitchell a direct connection to the house and to the girl he had selected. In the following months, he watched Elizabeth from the lower slopes of the Wasatch Range above the family’s neighborhood. His religious claims had developed before he met her: he and Barzee had embraced Mormon Fundamentalism and been cast out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mitchell had said that he received a revelation commanding him to take seven additional wives, and he claimed a special role as a divine spokesman in the Last Days. These claims framed the kidnapping not as an ordinary crime in his own account, but as part of a supposed religious mandate.

The Abduction and Immediate Search

Around two in the morning on June 5, Mitchell entered the house through a small first-floor window that had been left ajar. He placed a chair beneath it, cut through the screen, and made his way through the 6,600-square-foot home to the upstairs bedroom Elizabeth shared with her nine-year-old sister, Mary Katherine. He woke Elizabeth and told her to put on shoes. Mary Katherine also woke, but, frightened, remained still and watched the intruder in the darkness. She heard him threaten Elizabeth as he led her past the room where their parents were sleeping and out of the house.

Mitchell marched Elizabeth four miles into the foothills west of the home, to a secluded campsite in Dry Creek Canyon. There, he and Barzee carried out a self-styled marriage ritual intended to bind Elizabeth to Mitchell. The episode describes the ritual as a means of presenting his claim over her in the language of plural marriage; Elizabeth was fourteen. Mitchell sexually assaulted her. The religious framing and Barzee’s participation made the campsite the beginning of a captivity in which religious language was used to impose and reinforce control.

At the house, Mary Katherine waited at least two hours before summoning the courage to wake her parents. Horrified, Ed Smart called the president of his local stake even before calling the police. The church leader organized a search party of trusted members, who began looking through the neighborhood, but found no sign of Elizabeth. The immediate search thus started with a family still trying to understand how a child could have been taken from her bedroom, while the abductor and Elizabeth were already concealed in the foothills.

Captivity and Religious Control

For at least two months after the kidnapping, Mitchell and Barzee kept Elizabeth at a succession of campsites in ravines near her home. The distance did not mean safety: she was close enough to hear rescuers calling her name, yet remained under the abductors’ control. At times, she was kept in a hollow covered by a lean-to; on other occasions, an ankle was chained to a tree. The account describes Mitchell using threats against Elizabeth and her family alongside his command of fundamentalist rhetoric to make her submissive and deter escape.

The manipulation drew on religious material familiar to Elizabeth from her upbringing. Mitchell invoked teachings associated with Joseph Smith to press his demands, while the white robes he and Barzee wore—and made Elizabeth wear—resembled temple clothing she had seen with her family. The contrast mattered: garments and scripture that belonged to a familiar religious world were recast as tools of an unauthorized claim. Debbie Palmer, who knew the coercive power of fundamentalist culture from her own upbringing in Bountiful, argued that Elizabeth’s religious background had made her especially vulnerable to Mitchell’s use of it. The kidnapping’s coercive force therefore depended not only on physical confinement, but on Mitchell’s ability to distort recognizable religious authority.

Once Mitchell believed he had secured Elizabeth’s psychological compliance, he sometimes took her into public places. He concealed her blond braids beneath a head scarf and her face behind a veil. In September, he brought her, disguised, to a crowded party in downtown Salt Lake City attended by more than a hundred people. A guest photographed her without recognizing her. On another occasion, Mitchell left her alone for much of a day; according to one of her uncles, she did not try to run away. These episodes show how the captivity continued beyond hidden campsites: concealment in public and the control Mitchell had established helped keep Elizabeth from being identified or reaching help.

Discovery and Public Reversal

The search continued without locating Elizabeth through the summer, and many people assumed the worst. Nine months after her disappearance, she was found alive, a turn that surprised almost everyone. Her return came in the days just before the invasion of Iraq, when national anxiety made the news especially welcome to many Americans. President George W. Bush called her father to convey the country’s relief, and Ed Smart described her safe return as a miracle. The public story moved abruptly from presumed death to reunion, though that reversal did not undo the months of captivity and abuse.

Within hours of Elizabeth’s rescue, news reports disclosed that her abductor was an excommunicated Mormon. Dan Lafferty, watching the story on a small television in his cell at Utah State Prison, said he immediately guessed that the man was probably a fundamentalist and that the case involved polygamy. His reaction connected the widely followed kidnapping to the book’s broader account of religious fundamentalism, but the event’s central facts remain particular to Elizabeth: Mitchell had first gained access through a job at her family’s home, then used religious claims to justify taking and controlling her. Her survival and return brought the search to an end, while the circumstances of the crime exposed the danger of turning religious authority into a license to dominate another person.