The man who would rename himself Emmanuel stands in the back row — a slight, dark-haired man, wearing a dark suit, exactly like the other men posing for the picture of the LDS stake high council. It is the early 1990s.
Searching his face now, 10 years and a world-famous kidnapping later, it is impossible to see in the Salt Lake County Jail booking photo of Brian David Mitchell any indication of a man on the verge of slipping into fanaticism and beyond.
Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Ilene Barzee, are jailed for investigation of aggravated kidnapping in the abduction of Elizabeth Smart, who was found Wednesday walking with the couple on a State Street in Sandy.
But the picture that is now emerging of Mitchell — as the nation's media try to unravel the history and the motivations of the ragtag, self-proclaimed preacher to the homeless — is one of a complex man, characterized as both gentle and explosive, boy-next-door and eccentric.
The pictures of Mitchell include a skinny little boy in Miss Larson's fourth-grade classroom at Canyon Rim Elementary, where former classmate Sharon McGough remembers a "mean-spirited, very difficult child" who once threw rocks at her on the playground.
"He was kind of a loner," McGough remembers. "He couldn't really play in groups. He was out in the hall a lot because he was disruptive," refusing to participate in class activities. "I remember him always being odd man out. I don't remember him having friends."
"There are certain kids that evoke memories," says another former classmate. "He was one of those boys who had 'cooties,' one of those boys who was just odd." It pains her now to remember the way he was rejected, she says.
Even back then, she says, "his eyes were kind of haunting."
McGough remembers that Mitchell's father left the family and that his mother, Irene, "had a timid, deer-in-the-headlights look. She couldn't handle those boys at all." Mitchell is the third of six children.
Mitchell went on to Wasatch Junior High and then to Skyline High, where his 10th-grade yearbook, in 1969, lists him as one of the handful of sophomores not to have a photo taken. According to Granite School District records, Mitchell transferred to East High School, but the Salt Lake School District has no record of him except a 3-by-5 registration card. He is not pictured in subsequent East High yearbooks, and there are no further records of his attendance there or at Skyline.
His father, Shirl Mitchell, told the Associated Press that his son was a mediocre student with few friends. He spent his time building contraptions in the back yard and shooting off model rockets, he said. He went to church, according to his father, but wasn't active.
Shirl Mitchell said his son became heavily involved in alcohol and drugs, married a 16-year-old girl when he was 19, divorced a few years later, then married his second wife, Debra. They had two children. By the mid-1980s, Mitchell was the father of two more children, was divorced again, and had married Barzee, who was six years older than Mitchell.
The LDS Salt Lake Park Stake photo albums include a picture of Wanda in 1993. She is wearing a big smile and is seated at the piano, playing for her ward's 50th anniversary. According to her family and friends, Wanda Mitchell was a concert pianist and organist who studied with a Mormon Tabernacle organist.
Truman Leishman, a former neighbor of Wanda's in the early 1970s when she was married to her first husband, Talmadge Thompson, remembers her as an upbeat, kind woman.
"She just wanted somebody to love her," said Leishman, who moved to St. George in 1975. He and his wife maintained contact with Wanda after the move but haven't heard from her in the past five years.
"She was never told she was loved," Leishman said, adding that Wanda "went into a major depression after her fourth child was born." Wanda's first husband "always pitted her kids against her. He told them she was worthless."
Cynthia Marsh of Draper remembers that after Wanda and her first husband divorced, Wanda stood up in Relief Society, as she was getting ready to move from the ward, and "ripped the entire ward. We were all sitting there thinking the same thing: 'This woman has serious mental problems.' She was just saying how much everyone had done her dirt and just made her life hard and treated her terrible, when we all knew we'd gone out of our way."
Vicki Cottrell, who has known her for 28 years, said Wanda was hospitalized for a time during the mid-1980s. "I remember she said, 'They gave me medicine, but I'm not going to take it.'
"If I were to guess, and that's all I'm doing, I would say she has schizo-affective disorder, which is basically bipolar with delusional features," said Cottrell, who is executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Utah. During manic periods, she said, Wanda would sometimes stay up for several days straight playing the piano.
Wanda left her husband in 1983 because she was in an abusive relationship, Cottrell said, and had her children live with her on and off until they said she "disowned" them when they became adults. "In my estimation, desertion was not in her head, it was survival. She carried guilt for leaving her children for so many years. I believe that's why she carried those dolls around." Wanda was frequently seen walking downtown streets with Mitchell, cuddling doll babies.
Cottrell believes that Mitchell suffers from schizophrenia. "This is what people with schizophrenia do. They think they're God or Noah or Moses."
But in the beginning of their marriage, according to people who knew them at church, Wanda and Mitchell were a normal couple. After they married in 1986 — in the Salt Lake Temple — they moved to the Ninth and Ninth area of Salt Lake City where they attended the LDS Salt Lake 1st Ward and later the Princeton Ward.
"He was a real nice guy, easy to get along with," remembers Dru White, who served with Mitchell in the Salt Lake Park Stake in the mid- to late 1980s. White was stake mission president and Mitchell was a counselor. Mitchell later served on the stake's high council.
"He was very conscientious about his church responsibilities, very reliable," White said. Another ward member recalls Mitchell as "a clean-cut boy next door."
White remembers "quite a lot of activity among Mormon fundamentalists in the stake. They were recruiting members to keep their affiliation secret." It's possible, says White, that Mitchell's eventual shift to a fundamentalist biblical stance started at this time.
In the early 1990s, Mitchell worked as a die-cutter at O.C. Tanner, making recognition pins and pendants, remembers co-worker Garth Bruner. "He was a kind, gentle guy. Very friendly." But Bruner also remembers Mitchell as someone who loved to debate religion. "He would just push his beliefs on people who didn't care to listen. He drove people away, but it was nothing dangerous."
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement Thursday saying the Mitchells have been excommunicated from the church for "activity promoting bizarre teachings and lifestyle far afield from the principles and doctrines of the church." The statement did not say when the excommunication took place.
Around the mid-1990s, the couple became involved with groups that advocated not paying income taxes, and they eventually moved to Idaho to live with survivalist Bo Gritz and his followers, according to Wanda's mother, Dora Corbett. A year or so later, she said, they sold their belongings and took off across the United States, living in homeless shelters.
The couple apparently survived on panhandling, the kindness of strangers and odd jobs that Mitchell occasionally took on, including the roofing work he did for the Smart family in 2001.
"Being the type of man he was, it wasn't hard for him to get donations," says Dr. C. Samuel West, a Utah County naturopath. West let the Mitchells live with him in the mid-1990s after they had been kicked out of Mitchell's mother's home, according to West — who on one occasion let them build a small covered wagon on his back porch. The wagon was outfitted with two bicycle wheels and was big enough to sleep two.
But the naturopath and the Mitchells had a falling out in 1998 when the Mitchell suddenly began wearing long robes and "started talking about his being a religious leader." By then Mitchell had dubbed himself Emmanuel and had named his wife Eledah. "They got angry if you didn't call them by the names they had concocted up," Wanda's mother remembers.
Mitchell had written a 27-page book full of his religious ideas, a book that some have described as his version of the Book of Mormon.
According to Mitchell's stepson, Derrick Thompson, Mitchell told him he had taken "10 hits of LSD and talked to God out in the desert" several years ago.
Even though by the time he was spotted with Elizabeth Smart on Wednesday Mitchell had become a strange and familiar figure on Salt Lake City streets, preaching his view that everyone should become beggars, the people who knew him, said West, found him to be "always kind and sweet" and were shocked to learn of his involvement with kidnapping case.
Court documents, however, reveal a more confrontational Mitchell.
Mitchell's mother, Irene Sidwell Mitchell, began legal proceedings against the couple April 18, 2002, after Mitchell and Barzee threatened her at her house, near 6700 South and 1500 East, as she was trying to leave. The couple refused to let her leave, saying that they needed to talk to her about his 27-page collection of religious ramblings, court documents state.
"I said that I had to leave and tried to leave . . . Brian and Wanda then stood in front of me each clasping one of my arms very tightly," court documents state. The couple was visibly angry and told her, "You will be destroyed. Your family will be destroyed. Your home will be destroyed."
They finally let go of her arms, and she rushed to her car and drove away, according to the court documents. Irene Mitchell said she had been threatened in a similar manner in the past.
Mitchell and Barzee were due in court May 2, 2002, to respond to Irene Mitchell's case but failed to appear. She won a default judgment. Brian Mitchell and his wife, who have lived on and off with his mother for the past six years, are restrained from threatening to abuse his mother. They cannot directly or indirectly contact her, court documents state, and must be accompanied by police to collect their belongings from Irene Mitchell's home.
According to homeless advocate Pamela Atkinson, Mitchell expressed no interest in getting into any kind of treatment, even though "his fanaticism had become a delusion."
Contributing: The Associated Press, Jennifer Toomer-Cook, Laura Hancock and Lois Collins.
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