“I decided to live.”

I’ve been a collector of true crime stories for a long time now. It’s a morbid hobby, I know, but I figure it’s something that tends to go with the turf of having your very own childhood friend get kidnapped, raped and murdered. So it was that I turned my attention last week to the Elizabeth Smart testimony transcripts as they were released.
It is not light reading. We all knew that her tale would be a dark one, one that would probably include a whole lot of rape and religious manipulation, but it’s still shocking to hear it for the first time, and Elizabeth does not play delicate with the details. She describes her “sealing” to her kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, on the first day of her captivity followed immediately by the first of hundreds of rapes. She talks about how Mitchell would tell her it was time to play “Adam and Eve in the Garden” and walk around the camp naked along with his wife, Wanda Barzee. Eventually he introduced oral sex into the abuse, and at different points in time, Mitchell and Barzee subjected Elizabeth to alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, and pornography, all under the idea that “we have to descend below all things before we can rise above it.” It sounds like Mitchell enjoyed staying “below all things.” A lot.
It’s a sobering, chilling account for any parent to read. Mitchell apparently made up his mind to take Elizabeth after a chance panhandling encounter with her and her mother on the streets of Salt Lake City wherein Lois Smart gave him five dollars and offered to give him some work at their home. He would later use the job at their home as a chance to scout out the premises and plan for the abduction. The Smarts were fairly affluent and had a big house with an alarm system. If this could happen to them, it could happen to anyone.
Also chilling is the fact that Mitchell insisted on stalking young LDS girls because they were more “malleable.” Granted, 14 year-olds in general are pretty “malleable,” but Mitchell believe that only the LDS ones had the prerequisite religious background to pull off his manipulations. Mitchell had hoped that Elizabeth would come to believe in his prophetic claims and willingly accept her place as his “wife,” a hope that was ultimately dashed to pieces when Elizabeth manipulated him into returning to Utah where he was more likely to be caught.
While the tale of Elizabeth’s descent into “nine months of hell” (as she put it) might be shocking, what really surprises me in all of this is Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth Smart has exceeded my expectations for her on multiple occasions—first and foremost by not being dead. Even when she was found alive, I figured that she was doomed for a life of depression, addiction, and counseling. Yet here she is today, attending a university that I happen to think is a pretty decent one, serving a challenging LDS mission to France, and getting on the witness stand to tell the world about the horrifying details of her captivity, all with remarkable serenity and composure. I can’t say what life is really like for her behind the scenes, but my hope for her is that she really has found healing and restoration in God’s hands.
In describing her feelings after the initial rape, Elizabeth said:
“I decided my parents would always love me despite what he did to me,” [Elizabeth] told the jury. “I hadn’t changed. I was still a person of worth … I decided to live.”
I recognize that Elizabeth’s story is so much more complicated than most rape accounts—not that I think those are ever “simple.” Nevertheless, I hope that she inspires other victims of this horrible, underreported crime to see their own worth and take their lives back. I hope she inspires them to not give up on life.
My own husband served his LDS mission to France from 2000-2002. I asked him what he thought of Elizabeth’s call to serve in a nation where the people are generally disinterested in religion and missionaries are seeing so few results.
His reply? “Maybe Elizabeth Smart is exactly what the people of France need to see: a miracle.”

Comments

“I decided to live.” — 13 Comments

  2. “I decided my parents would always love me despite what he did to me,” [Elizabeth] told the jury. “I hadn’t changed. I was still a person of worth. . . .”
    Part of the miracle of Elizabeth Smart’s return was the sense of worth her parents had given her. Like you, I hope her example will inspire other girls to recognize their own worth–and that no one can take that from them.
  5. I, too, was so impressed after I read about her trial this week. I remember hearing the news on the radio the day they confirmed that she’d been found. What a strong, faithful woman she is.
  7. I read part of the first transcript when it was first posted, but couldn’t get through it.
    It is sometimes difficult to remember now that nobody (well, few) expected Elizabeth to be found alive. I remember exactly where I was when I heard about her safe return. Not only did she survive, she seems to have transcended. A miracle, indeed.
  8. I read all three day’s testimony. What I find interesting is that it contradicts the theory that religion played a part in Elizabeth’s inability to escape. Many believed that Mitchell was successful because he was able to warp the mind of a young LDS girl who already had the religious background to be susceptible. But according to Elizabeth, she did not believe any of the religious additions that he tacked onto his Mormon faith, such as the idea that he was a prophet. What she did believe was that he would kill her if she tried to run or kill her family and that even if he was captured he had friends that she didn’t know who would come and kill her or her family if he couldn’t. What with her being a young girl who had been successfully kidnapped, tethered to a tree, raped, and threatened with death, Mitchell found that he could control her even in crowds of people and even when faced with police questioning. This wasn’t Stockholm Syndrome so much as pure fear. The fact that she was LDS did not affect his ability to do this. He could have done it to any girl.
  9. RollingForest ~ I was interested in that as well. For a long time now people have been suggesting that perhaps Mitchell actually converted Smart after capturing her through some twisted combination of Stockholm Syndrome and manipulating her Mormon background. I’d personally wondered if he had raped her from the start or waited until she became convinced that she really was his bride. I guess we know the answer now.
    I was surprised by how not-religious Mitchell came off in her account. I realize that there’s a prosecution play going on against a sort of “religious insanity plea,” but a guy who uses such cheap rationales as “we’re going to sink beneath it all so we can rise above it all” is obviously just using a thin religious veneer to do whatever the hell he wants under the cover of false piety. I’m no psychologist, but I’m inclined to believe that he isn’t really crazy and he completely deserves to spend the rest of his life in a prison cell rather than an institution.
    I think he definitely overestimated how much picking a Mormon girl was going to help. Sure, Mormon girls know about prophets and revelation and sealings, and they might even know that polygamy was once practiced, but none of that is going to okay them with being kidnapped at knife point and raped by a smelly man in a white robe. The average Mormon teenager doesn’t know that 19th century brides could be as young as 14, so that sure as hell isn’t going to help.
    However, there have been some true crime cases where Mormon women were targeted by sexual predators because their Mormon background made them too naive to know better. See John Story, John Parkinson and LaVar Withers.
  11. Yikes. I can under *why* you followed this type of case after what happened to your friend, Jack. Something like your childhood friend happened to a Supervisor’s daughter’s friend.
    The Polly Klaas kidnap, rape, & murder incident took place only a few hours from here, and the murderer’s trial was here in San Jose, due to change of venue.
    Elizabeth has sure painted quite a grim picture of Mitchell in her amazingly strong Court statements, so his defense to going to be tough. I think I’ll just stick with the News summations for. I almost was put on a Jury for a sexual abuse case once. I could have had nightmares or emotional breakdown if I had served on that Jury.
    Jaycee Duggard was kidnapped by someone claiming to be a religious type, though no LDS ties ins in that case. I was amazed both her & Elizabeth Smart came back alive. Both of those incidents also had a kidnapper’s spouse go along with what happened.
    And people thought my pipeline safety activism is strange! Something about seeing the smoke from a neighborhood burning down, with a couple of people killed, by an easily avoidable pipeline failure changed me.
  12. Thanks for posting the transcripts, Jack. I’ve been so impressed by what a strong young woman she is.
  13. There might be something a little off about Mitchell, but not enough to affect the result of the case. He is obviously highly functioning. A bipolar person wouldn’t be excused from a murder just because they forgot to take their medicine. He should be held to the same standard.
    I think he was obviously taking advantage of loopholes in his religious beliefs to drink, smoke, and look at porn. He may have created these beliefs specifically so that he could take advantage of them while still feeling righteous. He was obviously a hypocrite, but to be fair, many people do this. For example, most are horrified by the idea of genocide and will declare that they would do everything in their power to stop it if it were happening today. Yet they find it easy enough to ignore the genocide in Darfur because it is far away happening to people in another culture. Closer to home, I’ve heard stories of people who protested at abortion clinics, later got pregnant, got scared, had an abortion, and then went right on back to protesting abortion without mentioning their abortion to anyone. This is not to excuse Mitchell of his actions, but just to point out a larger human failure in regard to hypocrisy.
    I do believe, though, that while he was obviously looking out for his own good, he also seemed to believe what he preached. He practiced his “bouncing” technique as if he believed it worked and he did pray a lot, something he wouldn’t waste time on unless he truly believed that God was calling him to do it. He was obviously asking for justification for what he did when he first took Elizabeth. Before they’d even gotten across the street, they were faced with a cop car. Mitchell asked God to let the police car go by if it was His will that Elizabeth be kidnapped. When the police patrol didn’t see them, Mitchell viewed this as God’s support for his plan to kidnap and rape Elizabeth. The fact that he seemed secular other times doesn’t mean he was lying about his faith. Even the most religious people of today don’t talk about religion all of the time. They talk about other things as well.
    I’m interested in reading more about his early life and how he came to get these beliefs, which should come out as the trial goes on. I saw a picture of him on the Salt Lake Tribune’s website from when he was younger without a beard. He looked amazingly normal, which surprised me, though it shouldn’t. Whenever someone commits a horrid crime, people say that they are monsters as if they are a separate species. But this makes it easier for others to commit the same crime again since people never expect it to come from people they interact with since they consider those people to be normal. Only when we come to think of criminals as warped human beings instead of a unique evil will we be able to notice the signs of an impending crime before it’s too late.
    So I don’t think Mitchell is all that crazy. I just think he has religious beliefs that make him dangerous. There are similar examples of this elsewhere, from religious people who feel that we don’t need to protect the environment because the world will end soon anyway to terrorists who are willing to be suicide bombers to kill civilians in the name of Allah. Mormonism, Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, ect are not dangerous in and of themselves. But there are forms of them that are and we need to make sure to make that distinction.
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