The Missing Nine Months

By Jodie Morse

The three soggy campers had wrapped themselves in garbage bags and were huddled under a rickety awning, waiting out the downpour. They were spotted by Ryan McKenzie, 19, who had spent the morning of March 4 rock-climbing with two friends high in the coastal mountains, 35 miles north of San Diego. Ryan was retreating from the rain when he saw the trio and offered them a lift back to civilization. The six packed into a 1990 Subaru, and Ryan's friend Becca was worried that there weren't enough seat belts to go around. "I hope the cops don't find us," she said. Everyone shared a laugh.

During the ride, the man did all the talking. He told them his name was Peter and that he had grown up in a small town in Maine. He was on a religious mission with his wife and daughter "Augustine," who had just graduated from high school. Their next destination was Las Vegas. About 40 minutes into the trip, "Peter" inquired whether they could be dropped off at a grocery store. "They didn't ask us for any money," recalls Ryan. "They just said they were going to depend on people like us to get them from place to place. We're Christians too, so we thought we'd give them a hand if they were really doing something for the Lord."

Little did they know that the "father," Brian David Mitchell, 49, thought that he himself was divine. He had spent the past five or so years wandering the streets of Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife Wanda Barzee, dressed up like Jesus and spouting biblical prophecies. They were just a pair of eccentrics until Mitchell had a revelation that transformed his earthly mission. He was directed, as Barzee told a mental-health advocate last week, to collect seven new wives. And lacking volunteers willing to join a polygamous union, Mitchell allegedly resorted to kidnapping. His first quarry was Elizabeth Smart, then 14, whom he took from her home to a nearby primitive campsite. There, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, a self-styled "marriage" ceremony took place. Smart's cousin was next on his list, but he failed in that attempt.

Mitchell and Barzee were deep within their newly concocted universe last Wednesday morning as they walked along a highway in Sandy, Utah, just south of Salt Lake. They wore crowns of flowers in their hair, and they had a young girl dressed in a long robe and white veil in tow. Recognizing Mitchell's face from a recent episode of America's Most Wanted, passersby dialed 911. When police officers arrived, the girl was trembling. Three times she told them her name was Augustine. "I know who you think I am. You guys think I'm that Elizabeth Smart girl who ran away," she told the cops. They separated her from the couple and held up a flyer with her picture on it. "We think this is you," said one officer. She responded, "Thou sayeth."

The arrests of Mitchell and Barzee concluded the strange nine-month odyssey that began last summer amid a string of high-profile kidnappings that had set an already jittery nation on hyperalert. Smart's abduction was every parent's worst nightmare: she was plucked from the safety of her own bed, with a sister watching and her parents sleeping nearby. Though the 24-hour media vigil had long ago moved on, the family never gave up hope; Elizabeth's uncle Tom was even quoted in the paper on the very morning of her rescue, castigating police for slowing down the search.

In their close-knit Mormon community, the Smarts' joy at Elizabeth's return was everyone's. Yet even as the Smarts feted their daughter, the grim epilogue to her ordeal was beginning to unfold. For now it remains a swirl of dark allegations and questions. How could police, who twice had nabbed Mitchell on petty crimes, not have seen the kidnappers living so conspicuously in their midst? "All we had was a description and a sketch," said Salt Lake police chief Rick Dinse at one point. And, perhaps most confounding, how did this young girl with the toothy, all-American smile grow so attached to her unhinged captors?

Mitchell was a local, born and raised just a few miles from Elizabeth Smart. A so-so student at Skyline High School, he lost himself in hobbies like model rocketry before launching himself into drugs and alcohol. At 19 he married and had two kids with a woman named Karen, but the two split up. Soon afterward, he became active in the Mormon church. There he met Debbie, whom he married in 1980. According to Debbie, the David Mitchell she fell in love with was a gentle, deeply devout man. But she says he soon became controlling; he banned bright colors from her wardrobe and, she alleged in interviews last week, sexually assaulted her children. After a few years Debbie divorced him.

Almost immediately after the two split, Mitchell met Barzee at a church function and moved in with her and her three children. In this third family circle, Mitchell's behavior grew increasingly bizarre. He spoke often of visitations by angels and cornered his stepchildren with impromptu sermons. Last week in a series of television interviews, Barzee's daughter Louree Gaylor alleged that Mitchell was "always hugging me the wrong way." Once Gaylor moved out, the couple claimed to have received a divine direction to sell off all their belongings. At one point, Mitchell and Barzee were both excommunicated by the Mormon church, possibly for promoting polygamy, which is outlawed. "I watched these people go down," says Cornelius Samuel West, a naturopathic physician, who invited Mitchell and Barzee to sleep in his basement. "At first he was clean-shaven and coherent. Then he grew the beard and went into his Jesus act." One day, after the two men argued about Mormonism, the couple suddenly left without saying goodbye.

Sometime in the late 1990s, Mitchell and Barzee became fixtures on the streets of Salt Lake. They kept a high profile, dressing in robes and wheeling their possessions around in an elaborate handcart Mitchell had crafted. The stained-wood vehicle, clearly modeled on the carts pushed by the early Mormon pioneers, had a sloping canopy and rested on bicycle wheels.

In the fall of 2000 Mitchell received a second revelation, telling him to gather "seven young wives." Mitchell later detailed the vision in a 27-page religious tract, "The Book of Immanuel David Isaiah," in which he extolled the "blessing" of polygamy and called himself a "just and mighty" deity. "Somewhere along the line, he decided he was God," says Pamela Atkinson of the Volunteers of America homeless-outreach program, who counseled Mitchell during this period. "He comes across as gentle in his preaching."

It was just such an affable preacher that Lois Smart says she met in downtown Salt Lake in November 2001. He introduced himself as Emmanuel and asked her for money. She gave him $5 and offered him a day's work repairing the roof of her house and raking leaves. This didn't seem unusual to her husband Ed, a real estate broker who often helped people with temporary work. He labored in tandem with "Emmanuel" on a roof project and described the man as genial and soft-spoken. After four hours the Smarts told "Emmanuel" he was welcome to come back and help out on future home improvements. The Smarts didn't hear from him and assumed they never would again.

But Mitchell allegedly came calling once more, on the evening of June 5, 2002, when he cut a hole in a window screen in the Smarts' kitchen. He plucked Elizabeth at knifepoint from the bedroom she shared with her sister. Who knows whether Elizabeth recognized the man who had worked once on her family's house and now led her through her backyard up into the Wasatch Mountains. Police say the trio spent its first three months camped in the maze of gullies and canyons just a few miles from the Smarts' home.

Elizabeth was so close she could even hear rescuers, including her uncle, calling out her name. Chief Dinse said last week Elizabeth had suffered a "strong psychological impact" that may have overwhelmed any impulse to escape. Having secured his first new bride, Mitchell made a move for another. Police suspect that on the evening of July 24, he climbed atop a chair and carved a hole in the screen of the bedroom window of Jessica Wright, Elizabeth's 18-year-old cousin.

At the time, though, police thought they had already nabbed their man: Richard Ricci, another former handyman to the Smart family, with a 30-year rap sheet, who had inexplicably logged more than 500 miles on his Jeep Cherokee in the days just following Elizabeth's disappearance. Arrested on June 24 for an unrelated parole violation, Ricci denied any involvement in the Smart kidnapping. He would not get a chance to prove his innocence. On Aug. 27, he suffered a brain hemorrhage in his jail cell and died three days later.

Around this time, the trio vacated its mountain hideaway. And as the Smarts continued to hold twice-daily press briefings about their missing daughter, Elizabeth and her captors began living openly in the streets of downtown Salt Lake. With their eccentric dress--all three wore billowy robes, and the women adorned their heads with burqa-like coverings--the threesome was hard to ignore and at times seemed to flagrantly court attention. On Sept. 27, Mitchell had the first of two brushes with law enforcement when he was picked up for shoplifting batteries, gum, a flashlight and a beer from a supermarket. His name, he told police, was "Go with God."

On another September evening, the trio wandered into a party in downtown Salt Lake, an area populated by the city's hipster crowd of musicians, artists and indie rockers. While the two women mingled with the other guests and smiled politely at small talk, Mitchell "was such a spaz," says Anne Elizabeth Maurer, who snapped a picture of him and Elizabeth. After getting into a tense theological argument with another partygoer, Mitchell began shouting "Jesus lives!" so loudly that he was asked to leave.

But Mitchell could be equally ingratiating, according to Daniel Trotta, who was host to the threesome for a few days in October in his one-bedroom apartment a block from a Salt Lake police station. The guests kept to themselves, eating vegetarian meals and sampling Trotta's immense record collection. The two women slept in one bed together, fully clothed and veiled even at night, while Mitchell slept elsewhere in the apartment. "They just looked like a family," said Trotta. And like any father, Mitchell doted on his putative daughter. When Trotta asked her name, Mitchell chimed in: "My Joy in Her." Though Elizabeth hardly spoke throughout her visit, she listened to Trotta's jokes, and he detected the faint outline of a smile beneath her veil.

Sometime in late October, as the trio traveled by bus to San Diego, Mary Katherine Smart, 10, had a revelation of her own. The sole witness to her sister's kidnapping walked into her parents' bedroom and blurted out, "Dad, I think I know who it might be." The culprit? "Emmanuel," the man who had helped repair their roof. Though investigators composed three sketches based on Mary Katherine's recollections, they did not release any of the drawings. As late as Feb. 12, Mitchell was arrested by the San Diego County sheriff's office for breaking a church window but was released after his name did not pop up on any national crime databases. On Feb. 15, America's Most Wanted first publicized Mitchell's identity.

Though much less is known about the six months the trio spent touring San Diego County, there is some evidence that Elizabeth was falling further under Mitchell's sway. While in Salt Lake, Elizabeth had freely roamed the aisles of the Wild Oats supermarket in which Trotta worked, but Mark Arabo, the manager of Wrigley's Market in Lakeside, Calif., observed a much more chastened customer. Over the four months that the three patronized his store, Arabo said, they always stuck to the same pattern. The two women walked meekly behind the man and never grabbed anything from a shelf. "Their behavior stood out more than their dress. It was like they weren't human. They acted like robots," says Arabo. "It was like they were subservient."

When police stopped them last Wednesday in Sandy, Utah, they found Elizabeth in a similarly deferential state. She insisted that she was traveling with her parents. And after finally surrendering her identity, she cried, "Are they going to be O.K.?" How could Elizabeth feel such warmth for her tormentors? Psychologists say it would be almost abnormal if she did not. "If you're in a situation where someone threatens your life and you can tell they're deliberating and they decide not to kill you, you're very gracious, and you start to form this bond," says Mark Zelig, a forensic psychologist in Salt Lake City.

Once reunited with her parents, Elizabeth spent the week nurturing familial bonds. She belatedly celebrated her 15th birthday and modeled her brand-new wardrobe for friends and family. But even as she reacquainted herself with conventional teenage life, investigators were worried about the battery of questions they would soon have to ask, broaching such grownup topics as polygamy, sexual assault and religious fanaticism. On Friday evening several thousand people flocked to Liberty Park for a citywide celebration of Elizabeth's return. She did not attend but sent along an autographed poster with the message "I'm the luckiest girl in the world!" It was a moment for laughter and celebration. There would be a lifetime for seeking answers. --Reported by Pat Dawson and Peta Owens-Liston/Salt Lake City, Jill Underwood/San Diego and Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Pat Dawson and Peta Owens-Liston/Salt Lake City, Jill Underwood/San Diego and Andrea Sachs/New York Harriet Barovick, Andrea Sachs