Original subtitles

♪♪

Elizabeth: In the beginning,

I'd heard some voices and seen helicopters and airplanes,

but by that point, I thought maybe my family

would still look for me, but nobody else.

It had just been so long.

It was like I had just disappeared.

♪♪

♪♪

Welcome to "How It Really Happened."

I'm Hill Harper.

June 2002 -- Elizabeth Smart was a 14-year-old kid from

an upper-middle-class family in Salt Lake City,

but in a flash,

she became the most famous missing girl in America.

A mysterious man snatched her from her bed

in the middle of the night

while her 9-year-old sister watched.

News of a child being kidnapped from the safety of her own home

struck fear in the hearts of parents across America.

Who would have done such a thing?

Elizabeth's dramatic saga,

with its unforeseeable twists and turns,

stretched on for nine months.

Here's how it really happened.

♪♪

[ Rustling ]

Christian: He came down from the mountains up above the Smart home.

It was a nice home in a nice neighborhood in Salt Lake City.

Normally, all the windows in the Smart home

would have been closed at night,

but that particular night,

the window was not closed because Lois, Mrs. Smart,

had burned some potatoes that she had been cooking for dinner.

And she left that open just to air it out.

He climbed in the kitchen window,

and he knew right where to go.

Dujanovic: He walked into the bedroom of Elizabeth Smart,

where she was sleeping next to her sister, Mary Katherine.

Watson: He put a knife to Elizabeth's throat and said,

"You're going to come with me.

And if you say anything, I'll kill you."

Elizabeth: Waking up in the middle of the night

in my own bedroom,

having this strange man standing over me,

someone I didn't recognize, a knife being held to my throat,

I was terrified.

And he took her out of the room and led her out of the home.

Dujanovic: Mary Katherine, a scared little 9-year-old girl,

just had her sister kidnapped,

but she eventually goes and finds her mommy and her daddy.

Dobner: She wakes her father up and says, "Elizabeth is gone,

and you're not gonna be able to find her.

A man took her."

And that, of course,

triggers all kinds of panic with the family.

Dujanovic: Lois and Ed Smart don't know what's going on.

They go right to Elizabeth's bedroom,

and sure enough, she's gone.

Winslow: The family's frantically searching their house.

They're tearing up their own place.

They obviously can't find her.

Tom: They can't fathom what's happened.

And then, as soon as they go down and see the window...

...they know that the worst has happened.

♪♪

In the kitchen, they noticed that the window's open.

And saw that the window screen had been cut,

and she reacted like any mom would do,

with just total and abject horror.

Winslow: She screamed.

She realized that someone had broken into the house

and taken her daughter.

I think we were in such disbelief

that it could really have happened.

Tom: I got a call at just before 5:00 in the morning.

Edward calls and says that Elizabeth's been taken

and get down as quickly as we can.

It was just an incredibly dark, dark experience.

There's been no mistake here

that something horrible has happened.

Benson: The alarm was sounded,

and from there, in that house, just chaos.

[ Siren wailing ]

[ Heart beating ]

The latest on a developing story,

and it involves every parent's worst nightmare.

Police are reporting an unusually bold child abduction

in an upscale neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Utah.

They say 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart

was kidnapped from her bedroom

as her 9-year-old sister watched.

My first reaction was, "Well, this is big."

There was a lot of confusion about what we really had.

King: An innocent girl has been stolen

from what should have been the safest place in the world --

her home.

Watson: It seemed almost surreal.

What do you mean, she was taken out of her bed

in the middle of the night,

with her sister laying next to her?

Fennerty: The scene was chaotic.

I'd never seen anything like it.

Police start looking at everything.

Christian: The amount of help that Mary Katherine

could originally give was limited.

Poor Mary Katherine.

I mean, she's 9 years old, scared for her own life,

scared for her sister's life.

Mary Katherine feigned that she was asleep

while the kidnapper told Elizabeth

to get her shoes on and spirited her out of the room.

Dinse: She saw a little bit of him.

She heard what he was saying.

Blitzer: The kidnapper is described as a white male,

5'8" tall, wearing a white shirt and a white cap.

Benson: Mary Katherine's description was of a man with a gun.

Even though it was a knife,

she'd imagined that she'd seen a gun.

It was probably dark, and she just saw something in his hand.

King: And the sister took a while, for fear,

before reporting it, right, Chief?

That's correct.

What they guessed was about two hours

before she got up and went to her parents' room.

Dinse: Time is very important in any kind of crime,

but particularly in an abduction event.

And if you don't get to the person

within the first 24 to 48 hours,

usually, it's gonna become a recovery,

as opposed to a rescue.

♪♪

Christian: Police did not really have a lot to work with

in this investigation.

Silver: The screen had been cut.

It was an obvious point of entry.

We found a chair which was outside the window.

We took some prints, but those prints turned out

not to be of any value.

Silver: No one had saw a vehicle leaving,

so the idea was they probably went by foot.

Most of the things that we had found at the house

had been ruled out as far as being pertinent.

I think it was a difficult investigation, for sure.

Fennerty: Elizabeth herself was a very low-risk victim.

She just was not someone who put herself in a position

where she would be susceptible to being kidnapped.

So, nobody thought, "Oh, she's just missing."

It was controlled terror from the very beginning.

The Smart family were a churchgoing,

upper-middle-class family.

A really close and devout Mormon family.

Elizabeth was 14 years old. She played the harp.

She's the second-oldest in her family of six.

Ed: She had just talked about

preparing for the new high-school track team.

Tom: She's obviously a very beautiful girl.

She wasn't the center of attention or anything.

She just kind of fit in with one of the family.

Benson: She was a pretty timid girl.

You'd call it something of a late bloomer.

Elizabeth and her family on Friday nights

would gather together and watch a Doris Day movie.

That's what they did.

Elizabeth, if you're out there,

we're doing everything we possibly can to help you.

You felt for her family.

They were just beside themselves with grief

and begging and pleading for answers.

If you have got her, please let her go.

Please!

Benson: It was really easy to identify with them,

to be sympathetic with what was going on.

Dujanovic: Not knowing where your child is,

just hoping and praying that she comes home alive?

I would not have even been able to get out of bed.

Tom: They were in so much deep, horrible, dark grief.

We were just rallying around them

to do whatever we could.

[ Sighs ]

I don't know what else to say.

What is the latest information police have given you

about this investigation?

That they're doing everything in their power

to press forward and to find Elizabeth.

Male Reporter: Investigators have been out all day.

They say they have some clues,

but no solid leads, as of this moment,

as to what happened to young Elizabeth.

Dujanovic: As a detective,

you're gonna go in and you're gonna say,

"What's the most logical reason, what's the most logical person

to have wanted to take Elizabeth,

and what would be their motive?"

There's no ransom request

that we're aware of at this point.

And as the day went on, you were just in shock.

It was very difficult for everyone to try to grasp.

So, obviously, at that point, you just think,

"This doesn't make any sense."

The idea that a complete stranger

had snuck into a 14-year-old girl's bedroom

and taken her and kidnapped her in the middle of the night --

preposterous.

Something was fishy about this case.

♪♪

Male Reporter: Authorities say Elizabeth Smart

was abducted from her bedroom early Wednesday morning,

but they remain optimistic

that the 14-year-old girl will be found.

Fennerty: On the way out, he insisted that,

"I should take a pair of tennis shoes from the closet

and put those on."

Christian: They left through the back door.

Now, it's interesting because

the back door was one that was not alarmed.

♪♪

Hello, I'm Tom Smart. I'm Elizabeth's uncle.

I was working at theDeseret News.

I've been a photojournalist for 30-some odd years.

I knew it was important to get this out as quickly as possible.

We're gonna search every inch of this state and beyond

if we need to till we bring her home.

And it exploded as soon as word got out.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

From day one, you knew it was going to be a big story.

Male Reporter 2: The search for Elizabeth continues around the clock.

This was bigger than anything else I'd ever seen.

She's 5'6" tall, weighs 105 pounds.

She was wearing red pajamas.

They released videos of her.

They released photographs of her.

Hi.

Woman: Are you having fun, Elizabeth?

Yeah.

Benson: It was so intense.

The media was intense.

Law enforcement was intense.

There was such an urgency to figure out

what in the world had happened and to hopefully get her home

before it went past that critical period of time

where she was gonna end up dead.

Chief, what do you figure here as a motive

if no ransom note comes?

We're not trying to draw any conclusions now.

It's really speculation on our part.

Many people were questioning how this girl could be kidnapped

from her own home in the middle of the night

without anybody hearing a thing.

Dinse: We brought search dogs,

and the search dogs took us

to the street that bordered the neighborhood.

And that's where the dogs ended.

So we thought that a car may have been parked there --

She got in a car, and they drove off.

The first people they started looking at

were members of the Smart family.

Maybe it was an inside job.

Fennerty: Most of the time, we're looking for a male.

But we're looking at the father first and going out.

Did they have a reason? Was there a connection?

Christian: One of the reasons, perhaps,

the Smarts had been involved in some way

was that, at first appearance,

it looked like the screen to the window

that had been cut had been cut from the inside.

Dinse: And whoever entered, if they entered through that window,

they had to go through that screen,

and there was no evidence of clothing, fabric,

or anything that would have grabbed onto the screen.

They had a home alarm system that never went off.

Did somebody inside try to stage what looks to be a kidnapping?

Benson: Just a lot of indicators that whoever did this

knew the Smart house and knew the Smart family.

Watson: And for the family to be relatively calm

in the face of the storm.

Christian: They just weren't, possibly, as emotional

as some people thought they should have been

under the circumstances.

She is a harp player.

She has very strong hands.

Tom: A lot of people saw Edward the first day and said,

"Oh, man, look at him. He's looking so weird."

Well, you go have your daughter kidnapped and see how you act.

Watson: And then there were some questions about

how long did it take Ed Smart to call investigators

before they were alerted that she was missing.

There was some rumors going around

that maybe he had called a bunch of family members

before he called the police.

The pieces just didn't add up in terms of saying

the family had nothing to do with this.

The Smart family was under a lot of stress.

I remember Tomwas a lot of stress.

Keep hoping every day is the day,

and I really, honestly, thought that yesterday was --

was gonna be the day.

Honestly, I was just doing whatever I can

in a very sleep-deprived world.

I can admit that, five days into it,

I was pretty bat shit crazy.

We have a great sense of comfort

and are feeling support all over,

and I-I think that, um...

♪♪

I'm sorry.

If I was watching me, I'd say, "It's that guy right there."

As the investigation went forward,

they took polygraph tests of everyone in the family,

including Elizabeth's uncle Tom.

Lois, were you upset at all by the polygraphing of family?

Absolutely not.

We have just tried to follow

exactly what they've told us to do.

By this time, it had been five or six days with zero sleep.

So I went into the polygraph for eight hours.

And Tom's polygraph test came back inconclusive.

A member of Elizabeth Smart's extended family

is under increased scrutiny tonight

after the results of a polygraph exam

came back as inconclusive.

I didn't fail it. It's just inconclusive.

If somebody says, "Well, I think you did it,"

does that bother me?

No, I don't care.

If you go for five days with no sleep

and you go into a polygraph,

I can guarantee you,

you will not pass your polygraph.

♪♪

♪♪

I think our investigators are becoming very frustrated.

As we get leads and follow them up,

most of them aren't going anywhere.

Tom: Statistically, if it's not in the family,

it's in the neighborhood.

And, actually, stranger abductions

are probably the very last on the list.

Do you jump when the phone rings, Ed?

Yes, we all jump. We're just waiting

for that phone call to say, you know,

"We've got her."

Fennerty: It was tough not getting any sign

that we were gonna resolve this quickly.

Watson: We've seen these stories unfold so many times,

and, unfortunately, most of the time,

they don't have a good outcome.

Benson: She's asking him what's going to happen,

and he wants to get away from civilization

and get her where he wants to get her.

Elizabeth: I really didn't know what the definition of fear was

until that moment.

♪♪

Ed: Elizabeth, know that we are trying to help you in every way we can,

and please, please hang in there.

We love you very much.

Your brothers and sister send their love.

Be strong, Elizabeth. Be strong. We want you to come home.

♪♪

Male Reporter: The desperate search for a missing teenage girl

is underway in Salt Lake City, Utah, this evening.

Elizabeth Smart literally vanished

in the middle of the night.

And in a close-knit community,

it was incredibly disturbing and scary.

The reaction was just one of,

"This could happen to my daughter.

This could happen in our house."

O'Neal: We had a lot of children sleeping

in their parents' rooms at night,

scared that some bogeyman was gonna come in

and take them from their house.

♪♪

Benson: It was really, really fast

that people started looking for Elizabeth.

We immediately started search parties going everywhere.

Elizabeth's 5'6", 105 pounds.

Haberman: Ed and Lois Smart, they were members

of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

They had lived in the community for a very long time.

Dobner: It's like one giant family,

and that really drew people to get involved.

The level of volunteer searches was, quite frankly, stunning.

We had hundreds the first day. We had thousands the second day.

Watson: The searches were intense

because we were dealing with the Wasatch Mountain Range

and where the home sits,

right there at the base of the mountain.

Dujanovic: I've never seen so many people

climbing around the hills of Salt Lake City.

And people stopped at nothing.

We had helicopters in the air that were looking for her.

If enough people look for her,

she's gonna be spotted somewhere.

Winslow: People were searching in Southern Utah,

people were searching in Idaho,

doing anything they could to find her.

♪♪

Dobner: I think that, as journalists,

we had many, many questions.

Winslow: It defied logic.

I mean, she just had vanished without a trace.

Where is Elizabeth?

♪♪

Elizabeth: I really didn't know what the definition of fear was

until that moment.

He said, "I not only will killyou,

but I will kill anyone who tries to stop me."

Watson: There is a road behind the family home,

at the base of the mountain.

And as they were crossing that road,

a police cruiser just happened to be going by.

And he pushed Elizabeth

into some of the shrubbery alongside of the road

until that police car had gone by.

Benson: Then he took her into the foothills,

and they were gone.

There were so many times that first day,

where, if luck would have gone the other way,

we wouldn't have ever had to have told this story.

Lois leaving the kitchen window open

because she'd burned part of the dinner,

the fact the door they left through

was not connected to the alarm system,

the near miss running into a police car on the street.

If those things hadn't happened,

maybe Elizabeth would not have been taken.

Elizabeth: It seemed very unreal.

I -- I didn't know what was going on.

She's asking him what's going to happen,

and he's brusquely getting her up the mountain

because he wants to get away from civilization

and get her where he wants to get her.

I can't imagine the fear going through her young mind.

Was he gonna kill her?

Was he going to do the unthinkable to her?

She pleads with him from time to time to just, you know,

"Rape me here and kill me here, where someone can find me,"

because she doesn't know where he's taking her.

Elizabeth: I remember he just looked back at me, and he said,

"Oh, I'm not going to rape and kill you...yet."

Dobner: There were homeless people

who the Smarts had hired from time to time.

Tom: Within three or four days of this all getting ramped up,

all of a sudden, they say, "Hey, we have a suspect."

A former handyman at the Smart home named Richard Ricci.

♪♪

Welcome back.

The taking of Elizabeth Smart

from her own home, in her own bed,

while her parents slept had families everywhere panicked.

Was the kidnapper a total stranger?

Was it someone who knew the family?

Detectives on the case had an uphill battle

because for the most part,

Elizabeth Smart had vanished without a trace.

Do you think, Lois, that it had to be someone

who either knew her or had seen her?

It's hard to know.

It's a better guess than someone just randomly

walking by your house, going in, and taking someone.

But I can't imagine who would ever do it.

I can't even imagine.

Dinse: My caution to this suspect, if he is listening --

We are going to get you.

And if you've got Elizabeth, you better release her now.

Winslow: Police were looking at who kidnapped her.

Was it from a stranger? Was it from somebody she knew?

Police did not really have a lot to work with

in this investigation.

100 detectives continue to work this case

from various law enforcement agencies.

There weren't a lot of physical clues.

Utah police detectives ran into another dead end today.

Winslow: If there was any potential lead,

they looked at it.

Every single one of them ended with a dead end.

There's sort of, like, a standard set of questions

you would start asking, like, "Who was in the home?

Was there anybody weird in the neighborhood?"

Roberts: We have brought to bear a number of our assets,

including our behavioral sciences

from the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.

We have been consulting with them regularly.

They've been flown out here and have been on ground.

Fennerty: The FBI has a perfect resource.

They're commonly referred to as profilers.

I was able to get three of them to fly out,

and one of the things that the profilers provided with us

was an initial assessment,

and that was that this was a sex crime.

She felt that the abductor

would have surveilled the place before.

The abductor would take Elizabeth

to a pre-determined place.

The abductor would follow this case in the media.

You know, this wasn't just a random abduction.

This was very specific.

Typically, the abductor and the victim

come in contact with each other,

and it's key to just find that contact

'cause then you can figure out who did it.

Dujanovic: At this point, it could be anybody, right?

It could be the neighbors.

It could be somebody who maybe had it out for the Smart family.

Who knew?

And then, on top of that,

they've got handymen working in the home who had a record,

and that becomes a big concern for law enforcement.

Dobner: There were people down on their luck,

people who were homeless, people who the Smarts had hired

from time to time to do various handyman work around the home.

Tom: There's several.

There's a heroin addict that's been on the road,

there's a gardener,

and all kinds of crazy leads come up.

So we had to eliminate all of those people.

Tom: Within three or four days of this all getting ramped up,

all of a sudden, they say, "Hey, we have a suspect."

Less than two weeks after Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped,

a prime suspect emerged --

a former handyman at the Smart home named Richard Ricci.

Dinse: Ricci was a long-term criminal.

He'd been in and out of jail numerous times.

He had been in and out of the Smarts' home.

He knew the area.

Newman: And there was some theft that had taken place

inside the Smart home,

which he turned out to be involved in.

And perhaps most troubling to police

was he had a Jeep that had some

what seemed to be unexplained mileage.

Dinse: All that circumstantial evidence

made us think that he had a high likelihood

that he could have been involved in her abduction.

And so he became the logical suspect.

Benson: On paper, and circumstantial evidence wise,

Richard Ricci looked like a bona fide kidnapper suspect,

but then once they had fixated on all the reasons why,

they didn't look at all the reasons why not.

He didn't have a history of murdering people

or kidnapping people.

Fennerty: And one of the sergeants brought

a tape recording of Ricci's voice

to play for Mary Katherine

to see if she recognized the voice.

She told them, "No, that's not the abductor's voice."

Winslow: I was thinking, "Then why are the police

pushing this name so heavily

when the witness to the crime said he wasn't there?"

I truly, in my heart, my mind, and my soul,

I know that Richard did not have anything to do with this,

and I will stand by him.

His wife, Angela, swore that she was lying next to him in bed

that entire night.

So you know that your husband had problems in life

and he did do some petty stuff?

Angela: Yeah. But never anything like this?

Never anything like this. Never.

And never an interest in young children? Never.

So, Richard Ricci, his life just went downhill fast.

The police had wanted to see if they couldn't make him confess.

They jailed him on a parole violation.

They put him in solitary confinement.

He had an hour a day when he could go out of his cell,

and they would interrogate him.

No phone call. No visit.

I haven't heard his voice since July 7th.

Fennerty: Then this case took a bizarre turn

you couldn't imagine happening.

While Richard Ricci is literally sitting in a jail,

there's an attempted break-in

at the home of Elizabeth Smart's cousin.

Dobner: About six weeks after Elizabeth is taken,

her cousin is awakened in her bedroom

at about 3:00 in the morning.

Had it not been for a picture that was on the window ledge

that fell to the floor and woke everyone up,

we have no idea what would have happened.

Somebody tried to climb in a window,

and it seems oddly familiar,

maybe even mirroring the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart.

Silver: It could have been a burglar.

It could have been somebody who is drunk

and mistakenly gone to the wrong house.

It could have been a lot of different things.

Watson: The police didn't take it

as being connected to Elizabeth Smart.

Benson: The police,

who were fixated on Richard Ricci by this time,

weren't able to make that connection.

They think that they already had their man.

Newman: They were so convinced that Ricci was a primary suspect

in this kidnapping,

they almost didn't even want to look elsewhere.

♪♪

The man at the center of the investigation

into the June abduction of a 14-year-old Utah girl

is now hospitalized.

Mr. Ricci pressed one of the intercom buttons,

informing one of our correctional officers

that he was not feeling well.

At the end of August, he collapsed in his jail cell.

He's rushed to the hospital

and had a brain aneurysm and died.

Do you feel in some way that your husband's death

was hastened because of all of this suspicion of him?

I'm not a doctor, but I do know

that he was under a great amount of pressure.

I can't even begin to imagine what someone would feel like

being accused of such a heinous crime.

Winslow: There was a feeling among a lot of people that,

when Richard Ricci died,

that the case was dying with him.

The buy-in by the police was almost complete.

Tom: The two main people from the Salt Lake Police

come down and meet with our family

and say they are 99.9% sure that it is Richard Ricci.

Luckily, there were a few

who didn't completely subscribe to that,

and in the end, that made all the difference.

They were closing the case on it,

and we...

we weren't.

The comment was asked earlier to me,

you know, "How do you keep on going?"

We just feel in our hearts

that Elizabeth is waiting for us to find her.

♪♪

Dujanovic: The Smarts got frustrated.

Benson: So, finally, they decided

to take matters into their own hands.

We're just a family trying to do whatever we can to find her.

♪♪

♪♪

Female Reporter: Do you still believe Elizabeth is alive?

Are you still holding out that hope?

I-I still am holding out that hope that Elizabeth is alive.

I know the odds aren't in our favor.

We've got to find her,

regardless of what the outcome is.

We've just got to find her.

♪♪

Watson: By October, this case felt very lost.

The leads were there,

but they were not as strong or trickling in as fast.

I think investigators truly were wondering where to go from here.

Richard Ricci was dead -- their main suspect.

Without any more information,

they couldn't put together what happened.

At this point, Elizabeth Smart --

We don't know if she's dead or alive.

Haberman: Mary Katherine was the main witness.

She was the only witness to the actual crime.

She was a young girl, 9 years old.

She was incredibly traumatized by this.

You have to imagine that there was a sense of guilt

at being the person who was there.

Could you have done something more?

It's an enormous amount of pressure and attention

and scrutiny for a child that young.

And she's trying hard to come up with more and more information.

Dinse: Psychologists who deal with children

under stressful situations

pretty much say, over time, information may come to them,

and they'll all of a sudden come up with something

that they didn't think of before.

They're scared, they're fearful, and so they block things out.

And it worked just the way the psychologist said it would.

Dujanovic: On October 12th, all of a sudden,

Mary Katherine remembers who her sister's kidnapper was.

Newman: A handyman who had worked on the home,

possibly named Emmanuel,

was the guy who came into the bedroom that night

and took Elizabeth.

Benson: So Ed and Lois took Mary Katherine's information

to the police.

And the police were very conservative

about how they handled it.

Dobner: There's a drawing made,

but the police don't rush to give it to the public.

And they encourage the family not to talk about it quite yet.

Police are starting to look for Emmanuel.

We had to try and figure out who Emmanuel was,

and that was quite a process.

Watson: The family want this sketch of this Emmanuel person released,

and the investigators are not on that page with them.

Female Reporter: A lot of question about

why they didn't take it more seriously

when Mary Katherine,

the younger sister who was in the room

when Elizabeth was taken, came forward.

We are now months into searching for Elizabeth Smart.

Why not release it right away?

I'm not sure at this point the police department

believed that, all of a sudden,

a 9-year-old remembered who her sister's kidnapper was.

We should have gone forward

and had that image broadcast to the public

sooner than we did.

That's one of the things I regret the most,

was that we didn't put that out there.

And nothing happened for months and months and months.

♪♪

The reason that we called this press conference

was to share with you...

Haberman: The Smarts got frustrated

that more was not able to be done

in order to find their daughter.

Benson: So, finally, they decided

to take matters into their own hands.

A few months ago, Mary Katherine indicated

that she thought she might know of a person

that was in her room that night.

The family called a press conference,

andthey the sketch of Emmanuel.

This person worked for us

for a very short period of time, five hours.

Tom: We came out to the public and said,

"This is who we think it is.

But let's find him."

If someone out there has some information...

They took the reins on this investigation at that moment.

Tom: You can look back and second-guess everything,

but we were just a family

trying to do whatever we can to find her.

After the news comes out about the sketch and Emmanuel,

I do what I always do -- I write a news story about it.

And in this instance, someone really important saw it.

After this press conference,

Tom Holbrook gets on theDeseret News

and when he starts reading about that,

chills go up and down his spine.

"This person, Emmanuel, is my wife's brother.

This is Brian David Mitchell."

Watson: They immediately call police.

That was everything.

Christian: So, for the first time,

authorities not only had a sketch,

they also had a name.

So, it was just a matter of time now.

But of course, the big question is, is she alive?

Benson: It was a forced march all the way up to his camp,

where more horrors awaited.

During the hike, Elizabeth finally realizes,

"Wait a minute, I've seen this person before."

♪♪

[ Footsteps crunching ]

Dujanovic: Elizabeth Smart left her home in red pajamas.

I don't know why that detail has stuck out to me.

An innocent, little 14-year-old girl,

the top of her pajamas pinned together with a safety pin,

walking through the woods behind their home for hours.

♪♪

Benson: It was a forced march all the way up to his camp,

where more horrors awaited.

During the hike, Elizabeth finally realizes,

"Wait a minute, I've seen this person before."

She recognizes him as Emmanuel.

Male Reporter: The man goes by "Emmanuel."

His real name is Brian David Mitchell.

Apparently, he had done some work in the Smarts' home.

Elizabeth: I said, "Well, don't you realize

what you're doing?

I mean, if you get caught,

you'll spend the rest of your life in prison."

And he looked at me again and he said,

"Well, I know exactly what I'm doing,

and I know what the consequences are.

The only difference is I'm not gonna get caught."

♪♪

Brian David Mitchell's background is,

in a word, troubled.

He'd grown up in a very dysfunctional home,

and it produced this young man

who didn't seem to be able to fit into normal society.

Gardner: He dropped out of high school

at the end of the ninth grade,

became involved with drugs and alcohol.

So already, we see this pattern of somewhat antisocial behavior

violating sort of laws and norms.

Watson: There were several red flags

that really could have signaled the fact

that he was on a path

to doing something like this in the future.

Newman: About 16 years old,

his life started to turn a little bit,

with allegations that he had exposed himself to a child,

which landed him in juvenile detention.

Brian had been married twice before.

Christian: I think there were 13 in total,

counting children and stepchildren of his.

Dobner: We do know that there were some allegations

of sexual misconduct, advances that he made

on at least one of his stepdaughters

when she was a teenager.

Man: Brian and Wanda, open up!

Open up!

Christian: In 1985,

Brian David Mitchell married Wanda Barzee.

Wanda had met Mitchell in the '80s

at a divorced couples' counseling session.

Peterson: She was a person of considerable talent.

She was a very good trained organist.

Gardner: And I think, in meeting Brian Mitchell,

he presented himself as this devout, very religious person.

And she put her hopes in that very much.

During his marriage to Wanda Barzee,

Brian David Mitchell kind of showed some warning signs

that something just wasn't right there.

His daughter had a pet rabbit that she loved

and always wanted to be with.

And he actually cooked the rabbit

and fed it to the daughter for dinner one night.

Barzee and Mitchell together become increasingly strange

and distanced from their family

because their behavior's quite off-putting.

His ideas about religion are getting more bizarre,

and he sort of starts to go more deeply

into what we would call Mormon fundamentalism.

They left their jobs at some point

and decided to start living off the grid.

He decides to take on the mantle

of what you might call an Old Testament religious person.

He lets his hair grow long and wild.

And he starts to think

that he's been ordained by God as a prophet.

Peterson: He began wearing robes

and preaching on the streets and panhandling.

Dujanovic: He would make it look like he's a man of the cloth.

He faked his way through a lot of this.

Peterson: He didn't want to be referred to as Brian David Mitchell,

but as Emmanuel.

And as Emmanuel, he received revelations,

which he wrote down in a book.

And Wanda Barzee became his congregation of one.

He decided that he was gonna convert to polygamy

and he was gonna have seven wives.

And when no adult women would marry him,

he decided that he had a revelation.

So he came to Wanda at some point and said,

"We have a new direction.

God is now telling me that I need to find a young girl."

Gardner: I think it's quite clear that he is a pedophile

and that he was attracted particularly to young girls.

Peterson: And he felt that it was right

for him to go out and grab them off the streets.

Watson: So he would go down into Salt Lake City and panhandle.

But, really, what he was doing was looking for a victim,

looking for his second wife,

looking for that young, 14-year-old girl.

And he found Elizabeth.

♪♪

One day, while Brian David Mitchell

was panhandling on the street asking for money,

Lois and the children were in downtown Salt Lake,

and she happened to walk by him.

Brian David Mitchell says that's the moment

he knew he was going to kidnap Elizabeth Smart.

Peterson: She was a very cute, innocent-looking little girl.

And that was exactly what fit his model --

virginity, cleanliness.

She was a girl from a devoutly religious household.

She was perfect for what he wanted.

And he had this idea to take Elizabeth as a wife.

Christian: Lois gave him a little bit of money,

and she also gave him her husband's business card

and told him that if he was looking for work,

he should contact her husband.

Dobner: He sets his mind at something,

and then he plots and plans to execute it.

He came up to the house, and he worked on the roof.

Christian: He found excuses to get inside the home

so that he could see the lay of the land.

He also perched himself up in the hills above the home

so that he could make observations

and see what the family's routine was,

see what Elizabeth's routine was,

all of this as part of his plan

to someday go into that home and take her.

The idea that the Smarts had invited people

to work on their home was difficult to really understand.

You know, they're obviously very gracious people,

and they wanted to help somebody who appeared to be down and out.

Unfortunately, with Brian David Mitchell,

they picked somebody who turned out to be pure evil.

The hike lasted until the very early hours,

and they reached his ultimate campsite.

Elizabeth: She led me into the tent,

basically preparing me for slaughter.

Benson: It was a nightmare beyond imagination.

Elizabeth: Just every time I thought it couldn't get worse,

something always happened.

Christian: They would go to Salt Lake City.

They were wearing veils over their faces.

She was right under our nose, and nobody knew who she was.

If the stars had been in slightly different alignment,

this story could have easily ended.

It didn't.

You really did wonder at some point

whether she was ever gonna be found.

Blitzer: You're watching CNN.

Want to interrupt our programming to do a report.

The Elizabeth Smart case

became one of the most famous kidnappings

in US history.

Only the abduction of Charles Lindbergh's baby

garnered more media attention.

Nearly three months

after Elizabeth disappeared into the night,

the prime suspect, Richard Ricci, died.

Almost everyone assumed she was dead

and that we'd never find out what happened that night.

And then there was a miracle.

The amazing details

of how Elizabeth Smart was eventually found,

next time on part two.

Thanks for watching.

Good night.