Testifying for a second day, Elizabeth Smart today described how alleged kidnapper Brian David Mitchell sought to cut her off from her family in Salt Lake City and reduce all sense of self.
Nine months after her abduction, police surrounded her and her two abductors as they walked in a Salt Lake City suburb, she said. But she was so afraid Mitchell would kill her that even after police separated them, she felt she couldn't tell police who she was.
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The Elizabeth Smart Case
"I was very scared. I knew the threats that I had been told for nine months and I knew what they were and I was afraid," Smart testified, according to transcripts in The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News.
Mitchell, 57, is being tried in federal court in Salt Lake City on charges of kidnapping Smart, now 23, from the bedroom she shared with her little sister. Smart spent nine months in captivity, often staying in makeshift camps, before being found in the company of Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, in March 2003.
Smart testified that on the day she was found, she at first told police she was Augustine Marshall, the daughter of traveling preachers. This was the story Mitchell had told her to tell if she was ever questioned.
Smart said she was still very frightened of Mitchell and confused when police separated her from the two adults and placed her, handcuffed, in the back seat of a police cruiser.
"I didn't know why I was being handcuffed [like] I had done something wrong, that I was guilty. And at the same time I thought that this is it. This is it. I'm done, this is over," she said.
She was driven to a police station, where finally she admitted she was Elizabeth Smart. Then police called her family, and her father, Ed Smart, rushed to the station.
"I was so happy," she said.
On Monday, her first day of testimony, Smart recounted how, as a 14-year-old girl, she awoke in the predawn hours of June 5, 2002, to find a man holding her knife to her throat.
She said Mitchell -- who had once worked as a handyman for the Smart family -- threatened to kill her if she did not come with him. She said she left the house with him and they walked several hours before they met up with Barzee at a remote campsite. There, Smart said, she was forced to put on robes and Mitchell "married" her in a bizarre ceremony before raping her for what she said would be the first of many, many times.
In her second day on the stand, Smart said Mitchell and Barzee burned the pajamas she had been wearing and threw away her sneakers because they did want her to have anything from her past life. She hid a piece of rubber from the sneakers and a safety pin from her pajamas.
"I didn't want to let go of my family, of my life," Smart said.
Mitchell gave her a biblical name, Shear-Jashub, which he told her meant "the remnant will return," Smart said. Later, her permitted her to choose the biblical name Esther, but she could not call herself Elizabeth or Ann, her middle name.
The young woman testified that in late July 2002, several weeks after her kidnapping, Mitchell "decided it was time to go and kidnap another little girl to become another wife."
The victim he targeted, Smart said, was her cousin, Olivia Wright. She said Mitchell went to the Wright home and tried to break in, but he told her that he ran away when he knocked over some objects and woke up people inside the house.
Smart said Mitchell once took her to a "rave-type" party where he was invited by a grocery store worker who helped him steal food. She said she was made to wear a veil and robes to conceal her identity, and Mitchell warned her not to try to ask anyone for help.
"He told me not to talk to anyone. He told me to stay right next to him and his wife. He once again threatened me with my life," she said.
Mitchell also became very jealous when the grocery worker tried to talk to her, she said. "He said this is my daughter and she can't talk to you."
Smart described a scene months before her rescue when a police detective approached them as they were sitting in a library. The detective said he was looking for Elizabeth Smart and asked if he could see the girl's face behind her veil.
Smart testified that Barzee gripped her leg under the table, which she interpreted as a warning to stay silent. Mitchell said the veil was part of a religious requirement and refused to let the detective see the girl's face, and the detective went away.
"I felt like hope was walking out the door. I was mad at myself that I didn't say anything," Smart said. "I felt terrible that the detective hadn't pushed harder, that he had just walked away."
She said she was too frightened of her captors to speak up.
"I felt upset with myself that I hadn't done anything, that I hadn't taken a chance, that maybe something would have happened to me or happened to my family, but that something might have happened" to rescue her, she said.
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She said Mitchell and Barzee took her by bus to California because they were afraid someone would recognize her in Utah. "I felt like I was being sentenced to 20 more years. I felt like the chances of me being found in California had just dropped a lot," she said.
The defense has said it plans to use the insanity defense and that Mitchell, a self-proclaimed prophet who calls himself Immanuel, was in the grip of a religious mania. But in her testimony, Smart described how Mitchell forced her to look at pornographic images and made her drink alcohol.
If he is convicted, Mitchell will face life in prison. Barzee earlier pleaded guilty to kidnapping and is serving a 15-year prison sentence. She is expected to testify against Mitchell.