My Story (7 page)

It might be twenty years, or maybe thirty, but one day they were going to die.

And when they did, I would be free of them. And I could go back to my life.

About the same time that I came to the determination that I was going to fight to survive, my parents were being interrogated by the local police.

Their morning had been nearly as terrifying as mine. After being woken by my younger sister with the simple words “Elizabeth is gone,” they had frantically searched through the house. Not finding me, but seeing the open kitchen window and the cut in the screen, my father had called 911.

Their ordeal had begun.

After calling the police, my parents started calling other members of our family, friends, neighbors, people in our church, anyone who might help them. It was a series of very difficult calls to make, full of the most desperate words a parent may ever have to utter. “My daughter has been taken! We need your help!”

The police arrived at 4:13. Our neighbors and close friends were right behind, some of them arriving by 4:15. News of my abduction quickly spread throughout our neighborhood. It was panic and chaos, with people starting to jam into our house. The police made the mistake of not declaring our home a crime scene and closing off the premises, thereby contaminating any evidence that might have been left behind. Shortly after arriving, the police separated my parents, keeping them from talking to each other. They took Mary Katherine up to the second floor, making her repeat her story again and again. Not wanting her memory to be tainted by other sources, they kept her isolated and alone. It bothered my parents a great deal that she had been cut off from our family. After my mother had insisted, they finally allowed my grandmother to sit with my sister through the questioning.

Meanwhile, my dad continued calling family and friends, asking for their help. All of them were willing. But what were they to do? No one really knew. For hours, there was no direction on how to proceed, no real movement toward organizing a search, notifying the media, putting out any kind of alert. At one point, my dad called our neighbors across the road who had young daughters, warning them that they might be in danger and to check on them too. He thought maybe someone had taken me for ransom and that he might have taken other children too.

Eventually there were so many people coming to volunteer that the police forbade any more of them from entering our house. Finally, the police secured the scene.

By six o’clock, small groups of volunteers were canvassing the neighborhood, knocking on doors, talking to neighbors, explaining what had happened, asking if any of them had seen or heard anything. Apparently, no one had.

My mother was in shock. Someone offered her some kind of sedative, but she pushed it away.

By six-thirty, my parents and older brothers were taken to the police station for questioning. Mary Katherine was taken to the Children’s Justice Center. My parents and my brothers, who were twelve and sixteen years old at the time, had to travel to the police station in separate cars. All of them were suspects. As were my uncles and other members of my family. Everyone was guilty until they could prove that they were not involved.

Separated and alone, their reactions caught on video and observed by who knew how many people, my parents and older brothers were interrogated. “What kind of girl is Elizabeth? Is she promiscuous? Into drugs? The occult? How does she do in school? What about your friends? What about a boyfriend? Does she sneak out at night? Did you kill Elizabeth? Do you know who did? Did one of your friends kill her?”

It was a terrible ordeal, brutal and humiliating. After living through the shock of losing their daughter and sister, it’s horrible to think that my family was treated this way. But the truth is, the police had no choice. More than half of all middle-class abductions are carried out by someone who is a family member or close friend. They would have been derelict if they had not looked at every possibility. But that didn’t make it easier or alleviate the pain. Nor did it help to bring me back, which is what my parents were fighting to do. My dad was going crazy, wanting to get home to organize a search, talk to the media, and get my name and picture out there—anything to help find me.

By nine-thirty, the police allowed my parents to go to my grandparents’ house. The questioning of my brothers had also ended. But it would be a long time before my family would be together again. My younger siblings ended up staying with my grandparents for almost a month. My older brother had to bounce around. It seemed there was nowhere for him to go. All of my family were considered suspects, their routines utterly torn apart. For weeks, our home remained a crime scene, my bedroom coated in fingerprint dust and other hallmarks of an investigation. (Months later, in an effort to make it easier for Mary Katherine to feel comfortable in our room, it was redecorated with new wallpaper, paint, and bedding.)

After being questioned by the police, one of my older brothers, along with an adult friend from our church, immediately started searching throughout our neighborhood for any clues. Other search parties started combing through other neighborhoods and the foothills around my home. More and more people showed up, many of them strangers. But still, there was little organization to their efforts.

By early morning, an alert had gone out to the media. Information regarding my abduction began to crawl across the bottom of the local television screens. Radio stations began to relay the information. Soon after, the media were camped in our front yard. Many of them were to stay there a very long time. The national media soon picked up the story. Hundreds of volunteers were searching for me now. I suppose that most of them didn’t understand how crucial the first twenty-four hours of an abduction always is. Law enforcement could have told my parents that if an abductor intends to kill his victim, they usually do it within the first three hours. If a child is taken for ransom, they usually make contact within the first day. I don’t know if they shared this information with my parents. I hope they didn’t. I don’t think it would have helped.

By the end of the first day, several family members and friends were working on a Web site with my picture and information about the search parties that were being organized. Within a short time, it was getting more than one million hits a day. A $10,000 reward was offered for any information that led to my rescue. Within a week, it had grown to $250,000, all of the money contributed by private donors. On the second day, hundreds more volunteers showed up to look for me. The search expanded beyond my neighborhood to the city and the state. Over time, this number swelled to thousands. Individuals and businesses contributed food and supplies for the effort: flashlights, food, water, maps, batteries, coffee, doughnuts, communications gear. Volunteers with bloodhounds came down from Montana. Helicopters were used to search the mountains around my home. Hundreds of posters with my picture on them were distributed to law enforcement officers throughout the inter-mountain region.

On the afternoon of the second day, my father faced the media for the first time. It was an incredibly stressful and emotional experience, but one he would be forced to repeat on an almost daily basis as my parents struggled to keep the search going. Thousands of posters were placed around the city. Eventually, hundreds of thousands were distributed nationwide. Light-blue ribbons and buttons with my picture began to appear from California to Maine.

My abduction was to become the most publicized case since baby Charles Lindbergh had been taken from his crib.

I don’t know what it was that drove so many people to try to help me. It’s beyond my ability to comprehend why so many good people were willing to work and to sacrifice for me, a little girl they didn’t even know. All I know is that I am more grateful than words can express. And to this day I remain the luckiest girl in the world!

I don’t remember being thirsty on that first morning in the camp. I don’t remember being hungry. During the first week, I don’t remember feeling anything at all. Well, that’s not quite true. I felt pain. And I felt fear. But those are the only feelings I remember during that time.

I hadn’t yet begun to accept what had happened to me. If fact, it took a long time to accept it. It was just too crazy. I mean, I had gone to bed just like every little kid, only to be wakened with a knife at my throat. I had been taken from my home, which was supposed to be the safest place on Earth. How did this happen? How had this man been able to break into my impenetrable fortress and steal me?

I couldn’t quit thinking about my family. I couldn’t imagine how they were feeling. Were they okay? What was going on at home? I particularly worried about my mom. I pictured her driving around our neighborhood, looking for any clues. I loved my mom so much and couldn’t imagine how worried she must be. I thought back on the time when my little brother had dislocated his arm (it really wasn’t my fault, family legend aside) and my poor mom, who had just returned home from running errands, became almost overcome with worry and rushed him to the hospital. My brother was fine once the nurse popped his arm back into its socket. But thinking back on that, I knew she wasn’t going to handle my disappearance very well.

I felt deeply homesick. I tried to remember what our living room looked like, with its decorated walls and intricate rug. I knew my parents had been thinking of putting our house up for sale. What if they moved? How would I find them if they were gone?

But surely, I thought, my parents were looking for me by now. Others were probably looking too. Someone had to be close. I mean, it wasn’t like we had hiked to Wyoming. I wasn’t that far away! Maybe they would rescue me!
Surely
they would find me. Eventually I would be found.

But they hadn’t found me yet.

And since they hadn’t, I had to find a way to live.

I looked at my surroundings inside the tent. Thick pads for the man and the woman, a thinner pad for me. Horrid flower-print sheets. A dirty plum-colored comforter with dark fabric on one side and a lighter shade on the other. (I decided then and there that I didn’t like the print one bit.) Two feathered, poufy pillows. Two hard cot pillows stuffed along the top of the tent.

This was my new home.

The thought made me feel sick.

It was getting very hot now, the tent holding in the sunlight like a greenhouse. Lifting up the cable to keep from tripping, I followed it out of the tent. My two captors were there. I looked around. No one spoke to me. I was still dressed in the linen robe. Still bleeding and in pain.

I examined the steel cable, looking for any means of escape. Unlike the night before, I wasn’t waiting any longer for God to part the trees or move the mountain. Given the slightest chance, I was going to run. But the steel cable was now tight around my ankle. I examined it more closely. Wound steel. Tight. Strong. Thin as a pencil. The cable was tethered to another steel cable that had been bolted between two trees, allowing me a little bit of movement around the camp, just enough to stretch between the fire pit on the up-canyon side and the depressing dugout on the other. Maybe twenty feet of movement in any direction. In that space there was one tent. A couple of rubber basins. Buckets. A couple of coolers filled with food and containers filled with water. The cable wasn’t long enough to reach more than a few feet into the dugout. There was a hole in the ground on the other side of the fire pit that a bucket, used as a latrine, was dumped into.

Twenty feet. One tent. This was now my world.

My captors continued to ignore me. Moving carefully, I walked over to another upside-down bucket and sat down in the sun. I was crying again, huge tears running down my face. Neither of them tried to comfort me. I cried on.

“This is your time to cry,” the woman eventually said. “This is your wedding day. So go ahead and get it out. But know this: you can’t go on and cry forever. Pretty soon, you’ll have to stop.”

So I sat on the bucket and cried all morning long.

At one point, I remember looking at a tiny branch of a mountain oak. Sometime before, the man had taken an ax to clear the campground, cutting back a couple of small trees and branches. A stump had been left jutting out of the bare ground and the man had used it to tie down one of the corners of the tent. A small sapling had started to grow out of the side of the stump. A few leaves. A single branch, smaller than my pinky finger. I stared at the sapling as it struggled to find a place to grow. Over the summer, I would stare at that tiny tree for hours, admiring its determination. Its mother tree had been cut away, leaving it as the only spot of green surrounded by bare dirt and plastic tarps and tents. Its bed was hot and dry and dusty. Yet it kept on fighting to survive.

I resolved once again:
Whatever it takes to survive!

Eventually, the man looked at me. “You will call me Immanuel,” he said. He nodded to the woman. “You will call her Hephzibah.” I turned to look at her. It was an ugly name. Harsh and unnatural. It seemed to fit.

“Shearjashub,” he called me, pointing in my direction.

“My name is Elizabeth Smart,” I answered.

The man ignored me and started talking. Soon I was to learn a couple of things. First, my captor had many names. Second, he liked to talk. A lot. About his life. About his writings. About his purpose. Anything about himself. He and Hephzibah had kept extensive records of “the path they had taken,” and it became obvious that I was going to hear it all.

I didn’t know who he was, I didn’t know his real name, but I recognized him. I remembered he had come to our house to help with some repairs. My parents had tried to help him. Over time, I learned that my captor had changed his name from Brian David Mitchell to David Shirlson and finally to Immanuel David Isaiah. Although I was told to simply address him by Immanuel. The woman had gone from Wanda Barzee to Elladah Shirlson to Hephzibah Elladah Isaiah.