Greg Pilling

Elizabeth Smart was 14 when a man chained her to a tree in the mountains and r*p*d her every single day for 9 months. On the very first night she begged him: if you're going to k*ll me, do it here, so my parents can at least find my body. He smiled and said: "Not yet." Hours earlier she had been asleep in her own bed, next to her little sister. She woke up to a knife at her throat. It was June 5, 2002, in Salt Lake City. A stranger climbed into the house through a window, held a knife to Elizabeth's throat and whispered that if she made a sound, he would k*ll her and her family. In the video below, Elizabeth tells it herself, 20 years later. I've gone through dozens of abduction cases for this account. The 9 months aren't what haunt me about this one. It's how many times she almost got saved. 1. Her 9-year-old sister saw the whole thing. She pretended to be asleep in the same bed. But for months police focused on a different man, a former handyman named Richard Ricci. He died in custody and was never charged. The real kidnapper was walking around free. 2. The kidnapper wasn't a stranger to the house. Brian David Mitchell, a street preacher who called himself "Emmanuel," had been hired by the family to work on their home months earlier. They let him in, paid him and fed him. 3. That fall, a detective walked up to Mitchell and a girl in a veil inside the Salt Lake City library. Mitchell said she was his daughter and that their religion didn't allow her to show her face. The detective walked away. The girl under the veil was Elizabeth. 4. At the first camp she was so close to home that she could hear searchers calling her name. People always ask: why didn't she run? Here is the answer I think everyone needs to hear. He told her he would k*ll her family if she tried. And after what he did to her, she believed nobody would want her back. Years later she explained that she had been taught a girl who loses her purity is worthless. She said she felt like a piece of chewed gum. That's what predators count on. Not just chains. Shame. What finally saved her wasn't the police. It was her little sister. Four months in, she suddenly remembered where she had heard that voice before: Emmanuel. The family released his sketch, and in March 2003 people on the street recognized him walking with two veiled women. One of them was Elizabeth. Her father then pushed for a national AMBER Alert law, and it passed within weeks. Mitchell got life. His wife walked free in 2018. My takeaway from this case: the most dangerous person is rarely the stranger in the dark. It's the one you've already let inside. Who did you let in?