Bringing Elizabeth Home

by Ed Smart

  I turned around, took a good look at the panorama of the mountains that surrounded me on the top of the trail, took a deep breath, and began to cry. As difficult as it was to allow my mind to go there, it was time to accept the possibility that Elizabeth was dead.

  For Elizabeth to survive, some part of her had to shut down. Our situations paralleled each other quite a bit. Until she left for San Diego, Elizabeth had great hope that she'd be found. She was so close. I had held on to the same hope, thinking that somebody would surely see her. Somebody would recognize her. There were Missing posters everywhere. You couldn't go anywhere in Salt Lake without seeing Elizabeth's face. Ironically, my letting go coincided with Elizabeth's departure from Salt Lake to San Diego. We both changed from that point forward. I had to let go so that my other children could go on. It's not that I didn't want her to come home. It's not that I didn't have strong faith. Of course I wanted her to come home. Naturally I had strong faith. But we were becoming unrecognizable as a family. It was the hardest decision of my life—like Elizabeth, I chose life over death; life over myself.

  Chapter 15

  Lead, kindly Light, amid th'encircling gloom, lead Thou me on!

  The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead Thou me on!

  Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

  The distant scene; one step enough for me.

  —JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

  RICHARD RICCI'S DEATH and diminished media attention coincided with the decision to try to move on with our lives. We hadn't given up hope. Lois focused on family and rebuilding our lives, while Ed put his attention toward keeping Elizabeth's name in the media, lobbying for the Amber Alert bill, and keeping the investigation open. He used the one-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks to draw attention to the importance of security in our homes and our families. He spent more time trying to help get the Child Protection Act through Congress, a much more comprehensive bill, of which the Amber Alert was only a part. When it became clear that it was going to be harder and take longer to pass the Child Protection Act, we focused on just the Amber Alert. The Child Protection Act would require the FBI to create a national response center to rapidly investigate child abductions. The bill also directs the Justice Department to create a nationwide database of sex offenders that would be posted on the Internet. The bill, if passed, would help to prevent child abductions and would allow potential kidnappers to know the serious ramifications of their crimes. The bill was being heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee in mid-September of 2002 but was unlikely to move forward.

  While Lois intentionally started to fade into the background, Ed was ever-present. These roles were fully supported by our respective families. Though our faith was constantly being tested, we remained true to our belief that Elizabeth could still be alive and that if she was, we would find her. By the end of September, our family press conferences were down to once a week. News was scarce.

  In early October, we made the first of many trips to Washington, D.C., to meet with President George W. and First Lady Laura Bush. We were there to attend the first-ever White House Conference on Missing, Exploited, and Runaway Children. No explanation was necessary when our eyes met those of the President and First Lady. On our lapels, we wore the buttons with Elizabeth's face. We know the President and Mrs. Bush took notice.

  “God bless you both,” President Bush said as he held our hands with genuine sincerity.

  Then we stood listening to the President address the room. In attendance were Erin Runnion, the mother of Samantha Runnion, who had been abducted from her home in July, and Patty Wetterling, whose son Jacob was abducted at gunpoint in 1989 and has yet to be found. Hundreds of us listened as the President described our plight as every parent's nightmare—a nightmare he said too many Americans are experiencing. It was an infamous group that we didn't want to be a part of but were, sadly, now connected to forever.

  The President spoke about a child's life, liberty, and innocence being taken away and what a terrible loss it is for the families as well. To our delight, he said the White House was making the issue of missing and exploited children a priority. For example, the President was urging the House of Representatives to pass the National Amber Alert Network Act—what we had been hoping for since Elizabeth's disappearance. Later that day, we were scheduled to meet with the sponsors of the Amber Alert bill: Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kay Hutchinson and Representatives Martin Frost and Jennifer Dunn. We also met with our local leaders: Senators Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett and Congressmen Jim Matheson and Chris Cannon. We were so impressed with each of them and couldn't see any excuse for this not to succeed. It was a no brainer: everyone was in favor of it. We needed to send a message to people who prey on children, and this was a good start. President Bush ordered the creation of a national Amber Alert coordinator in the Justice Department, providing for $10 million in funding to implement the system. Although the Senate has passed it almost unanimously in the fall, it had to be reinstated for the new Senate, and in January it was unanimously approved again, 92–0. That our daughter's disappearance made a difference, and that our efforts in Washington had an impact on the passage of the bill, meant for us that we had achieved a small victory over the crime.

  In August, in an effort to keep the investigation moving in a forward direction, we wanted to bring a fresh set of eyes to Salt Lake City to look at the evidence and determine if there was something we had all been missing. Henry Lee is a world-famous forensic evidence expert who consulted on the Chandra Levy case, JonBenét Ramsey's murder, and the O. J. Simpson trial. It was hard for us to comprehend that our missing child would now be viewed in the same context as those other high-profile cases. Originally, authorities didn't think it was essential to bring Lee in because the investigation was still focused on Richard Ricci. Investigators eventually agreed to allow Lee to take a look at the evidence, but interestingly, he was sworn to absolute confidentiality with regard to his findings—meaning we were not likely to hear his thoughts or findings about the case. Cory Lyman was an immense help in arranging for Henry to come, but he emphasizzed that Lee had to come at the request of the police department, not at our request. We had been lobbying for Lee, willing to pay for his services out of our own pocket. We were once again out of the loop, though we were hopeful that he could shed light on things and recommend other steps we could take.

  When Lee came to our home, he quickly decided that someone could not easily find their way around our house, especially late at night. When Elizabeth was taken, our home was like a fishbowl. We enjoy incredible views from our home. The children had blinds in their rooms, but the house had no other curtains, blinds, or shades. It would have been simple for anyone to observe the home from the brush that surrounded it. To show how easy it would have been to get into the house, Lee placed a chair outside the kitchen window and showed us why he believed a chair had been a possible method of entry. The chair he used left no marks on the stucco wall of the house when he placed the chair against the house, which seemed to call into question the police's misleading belief that a chair would have made some kind of mark on the wall. Finally, Lee climbed on the chair and demonstrated how far up someone of average height could have cut the screen. Lee appeared certain that a chair and the window were a possible method of entry used by the kidnapper. A forensic study done on the screen had determined that it had been cut from the outside and the inside of the house, by a single intruder who had cut vertically down, then reached inside and cut horizontally across to the other cut with a knife, but that information was never released in the investigation.

  We went out to dinner with Lee. He told us that he thought the investigators were doing a good job. We derived a lot of comfort from his declaration, but months had passed and the evidence was still inconclusive to the investigators. And why had it taken so long to bring in someone with the skills of Henry Lee? Even after Lee left town, the information he provided would never go public.

  Chapter 16
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  OCTOBER 2002

  No matter how serious the trial, how deep the distress, how great the affliiction, God will never desert us. He never has, and He never will.

  —GEORGE Q. CANNON

  I think it might be Immanuel.”

  It was unbelievable to hear Mary Katherine utter those words. None of our children had seen the man she named for more than a few minutes. We are certain that Mary Katherine received divine inspiration in uttering the name “Immanuel.” How on earth could she have come up with his name on her own? We asked Mary Katherine what made her think of Immanuel, and she told us that she'd been reading the Guinness Book of World Records. She saw a photo of a very muscular woman, and something triggered her memory of who took her sister the morning of June 5. It's strange, because Brian David Mitchell was a thin man. His pants looked as if they would fall off, so why the name came to her when she was looking at a muscular woman is unclear to us.

  Mary Katherine held the secret of who took Elizabeth for a long time, but finally the long-awaited missing piece surfaced. We were adamant about protecting her from feeling any guilt or shame about Elizabeth's kidnapping. She is a hero in so many ways. As the only eyewitness to the crime, Mary Katherine had been unknowingly traumatized more than we can ever imagine. The police questioned her over and over again, but she never wavered from her story. The mind is a mysterious wonder. As a possible method of self-preservation, Mary Katherine blocked out what she had witnessed.

  When Mary Katherine came forward with her identification of Brian David Mitchell, it was incredible to us that she had come up with his name, Immanuel, * especially given her very brief exposure to him. But she always contended that Richard Ricci was not the kidnapper. “Immanuel” was the only person she ever singled out. As the sole eyewitness, her coming forward with a name—any name—ought to have held some weight with the investigators, but because she was not absolutely certain, they didn't take her identification very seriously.

  Mary Katherine was interviewed yet again at the Children's Justice Center, a place that became all too familiar to our family. After hours of questioning her, the police agreed to try and track Brian David Mitchell at various homeless shelters around Salt Lake to bring him in for questioning. Since it was not his given name, when they put the name “Emmanuel” into the police database, not surprisingly, it turned up no matches. Brian David Mitchell's police record had failed to appear because of a misspelling of his name—“Emmanuel” as opposed to “Immanuel.” We never expected that the name “Immanuel” would turn up a clue, because we knew it was an alias. What we needed was his real name. Once I asked Cory Lyman, who took over as head of the task force from Don Bell, when we were going out with the story of Immanuel. He told me, “Probably never. What do we have to go on? An alias name? Three sketches from members of your family that don't look alike. And Mary Katherine isn't absolutely sure.” Nothing supported the notion that Brian David Mitchell was the right man. The police remained focused on Richard Ricci as the kidnapper. It was so unlikely that Brian David Mitchell, who had been to our house only one time, for a few hours, could possibly have known the layout of the house well enough to pull off such a crime. Statistically speaking, he was right.

  Looking back on it now, we know that much of the description that Mary Katherine had given up to that point was wrong: the clothing, the cap, the beard. It was so astonishing that she'd come up with the name, but the police didn't put much credence in her identification. The man who came to our home was clean-cut, well-groomed, and clean-shaven. Could Mary Katherine have subconsciously been describing the man Lois met on the street because she recognized the voice? When Mary Katherine uttered the name “Immanuel,” everything changed. The case had to be rethought. It was yet another turning point.

  Don Bell's assumption that Ricci was 99.9 percent guilty divided the police and law-enforcement agencies working on the case. It seemed as if half of the investigators supported Bell's theory that it was Ricci and half thought it was possible that someone else may have taken Elizabeth.

  Every turning point in the case was very much a gift. Each one unfolded this journey in a time frame that, although excruciating and nightmarishly long, had it changed at any one of the seminal moments, we cannot be certain that Elizabeth would be home today. Richard Ricci's death was the biggest defining moment for both of us. That is when Lois decided that her attention needed to be focused on our other children, and Ed, feeling unsettled and without resolution, decided he could not give up his search. Looking back, we know we both could have taken on either role. It just happened that the roles we took on answered the needs of our family.

  We had been dragged down about as far as we thought we could go. In life, you can't move on if you are in a deep emotional hole. In our minds, it was in God's hands. We never wanted to think about Ricci again. The police had tried to convince us that Ricci took the secret of Elizabeth's whereabouts to his grave and had encouraged us to accept that he was the perpetrator and try to get on with our lives. Time and time again, we were told by law-enforcement officials that Elizabeth was dead.

  When the notion of “Immanuel” came up, it opened our hearts and our minds to a possible light at the end of the tunnel. Beginning to identify Brian David Mitchell gave credence to the idea that perhaps everyone was wrong about Ricci, and that meant having to go back to square one.

  We were cautious to withhold this new information from the media until we were absolutely certain that there was some validity to what Mary Katherine said. The police learned that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints security center had several photographs of a man who went by the name “Immanuel” who had been a nuisance at Temple Square. When we looked at the photos, we didn't recognize anyone. The police then showed the photos to our sons Charles and Andrew at their schools and asked them if they could identify anyone in the photos. The boys couldn't. Lois had absolutely no recollection of what Brian looked like, so she could offer no assistance in the process. We were looking at a long-haired vagabond, not the clean-shaven Immanuel we remembered.

  The police then suggested that we work with a forensic artist to help us come up with a sketch. They had brought in a forensic artist to work with our sons Andrew and Charles, but when we saw those renderings, Ed didn't think they looked anything like the man he recalled in his mind. Andrew's looked too young, and Charles told us that he wasn't getting anywhere and quit. We were baffled as to why the police didn't want Ed to give his input; he was the one who had spent three hours on the roof with Brian David Mitchell. He spent more time with Mitchell than anyone else in our family had. It made no sense and added to our frustrations. Ed initially had a vivid recall of what Brian David Mitchell looked like, but as time passed, he feared that he would not be able to help create a strong likeness. One day, in frustration, Ed called Cory Lyman and asked, “Why don't you have me work with an artist?” That morning, artist Dalene Nelson from Moab had walked into the Salt Lake City police station looking for work, although she did not have forensic experience. She spoke to Cory Lyman, and he decided to have her work with Ed for a day. They worked together for a few hours before Ed had to leave for a business appointment.

  When the question arose of bringing Mary Katherine into the process, we decided it was more important to protect her. It made no sense that she came up with the name after looking at a large woman, and Lois didn't want to subject Mary Katherine to anything that would harm her if she was wrong about the name. Mary Katherine had already been through the pressure of trying to identify the kidnapper by working with Jeanne Boylan in August. Their efforts were admirable but did not produce a sketch we could use. It was such a long shot, we weren't willing to sacrifice her for this. The children had made progress getting back into a more normal cycle of life. They were back in school. They were sleeping in their own beds. We were unwilling to take a chance of upsetting the routine we were falling back into.

  Ed was frustrated that he and Dalene didn't get as far as
he'd hoped. The sketch wasn't totally accurate, but he felt they would get there if he had more time. Dalene was leaving for Moab and wouldn't be back in Salt Lake for at least another week. That was eating away at Ed as he drove to his appointment. He couldn't wait another week. Ed called Cory Lyman, the lead investigator, from the road and told him that we'd pay to keep Dalene in Salt Lake City until she could finish. We'd put her up in a hotel and do whatever it took to finish that drawing. It was an important piece of evidence. So much was riding on getting it finished.

  Dalene agreed to stay. She slept at a friend's home that night and came up to the house the next morning. Ed and Dalene worked several more hours, and though the sketch wasn't perfect, it somewhat captured the man we were now looking for. We thought the investigation had all but died, but this new lead encouraged police to take the composite to several homeless shelters around Salt Lake, hoping that someone would recognize the man. Even though Brian David Mitchell eventually turned out to be someone many people in Salt Lake knew, most everyone knew him with long hair and a beard. We had met him looking very clean-cut, so our drawing didn't show a man anyone else could easily identify, which meant our search was once again coming up empty-handed.

  As Utah's 2002 hunting season was about to open, we made an appeal to the thousands of hunters to keep their eyes open for Elizabeth or any signs of her. We and some family members attended a press conference and handed out printed fliers with photos of Elizabeth and pleaded with the hunters to take note of anything unusual. We urged them to be watchful, call out Elizabeth's name, do whatever they could to help our family.

  Four or five weeks had passed since we had first told the police about Brian David Mitchell. We called and asked what was happening all the time, and they assured us that they were doing all they could. The investigators continued to circulate the sketch to some of the homeless shelters around Salt Lake. The decision to not go public with this information was frustrating at first, and neither one of us fully understood why the police were hesitating. They believed that the allegation was speculative at best—there was no evidence pointing to Mitchell. They had an eyewitness in whom they placed very little faith. They told us they were afraid to release the information for fear of scaring him away. Time was passing, and it felt as if nothing was coming from the sketch that had, until this point, been quietly circulating. It felt as if there was very little we could do to once again make Elizabeth's kidnapping a priority for the police.