Minutes after 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was snatched from her bedroom in the dead of night, a police cruiser idled by along a neighborhood street as she was forced to the ground at knifepoint. "Move and I will kill you!" her captor hissed. It was one of several fleeting times Smart watched a rescue slip away during her nine-month ordeal, she recounts in My Story, a 308-page book released by St. Martin's Press today. She writes that she was so terrified of the street preacher who kidnapped her that when she was rescued by police in a Salt Lake City suburb in March 2003, she only reluctantly identified herself.
More near-rescues:
- A homicide detective once questioned kidnapper Brian David Mitchell at a downtown Salt Lake City library. From under a table, his wife, Wanda Barzee, clamped "iron" fingers into Smart's thigh. Smart, disguised in a dirty robe and face veil, kept her silence as she remembered the couple's repeated threats to kill her family if she tried to save herself.
- Only days into the kidnapping, a helicopter hovered over the makeshift camp in the mountains just 5 miles from Smart's home where she was kept tethered to trees by steel cables. She was forced inside a tent as the helicopter's rotors bent trees around them. After an eternal minute, she watched the helicopter slowly glide away.
"Why didn't I cry out for help?" Smart reflects. The answer "comes down to fear." The young girl believed Mitchell invincible. Click for
more from the book. (More
Elizabeth Smart stories.)
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