It was outside the courthouse in Salt Lake City and the woman was Elizabeth Smart, 23, plucked from obscurity and into national fame by one of the most horrific kidnappings in US criminal history. The story of that crime, which saw a 14-year-old Smart held captive for nine months and forcibly "married" to a man who considered himself a Mormon prophet, stunned America in 2002.
The bizarre details of the incident have finally emerged. Smart last week gave three days of testimony in the trial of Brian David Mitchell, a former street preacher who crept into her bedroom and spirited her away into the mountains at knifepoint.
All week Smart's story gripped Salt Lake City, dominating newspapers and TV shows, and was followed across the US. "There is tremendous interest about this case. It is every parent's worst nightmare: your child abducted in the dead of night. It's the script of a horror movie," said Paul Cassell, a law lecturer at the University of Utah.
Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, say they kept Smart prisoner out of a belief that God had ordered him to kidnap young girls to be his brides. Smart has told how she was raped almost daily as she was transported from Utah to California and back. At one stage they kept her tied to a tree and almost always lived rough in the mountains, setting up camps.
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| Elizabeth Smart |
Eventually Smart was rescued as the trio walked down a suburb in Salt Lake City with their victim so traumatised she first denied who she was. But to some, the Smart kidnapping is more than just a horrific crime. It appears deeply tied up in the history and culture of the Mormon religion, whose founders came to Utah and Salt Lake City in the 19th century to escape persecution of their new and controversial faith.
Elizabeth Smart
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