Beginning today, the Deseret Morning News is publishing four excerpts from the book, "In Plain Sight: The Startling Truth Behind the Elizabeth Smart Investigation," authored by two of its staff members — Lee Benson and Tom Smart.
First excerpt in a series of four.
The lead-in to Tom Smart's narrative: Tom, a photographer for the Deseret Morning News, receives a frantic phone call from his brother, Ed, in the early morning hours of June 5, 2002.
When the phone rang in our home sometime between 4:15 and 4:30 A.M., I did not look at the clock or even budge. After getting home from a late assignment and getting to sleep after midnight with the help of an Ambien sleeping pill, a quick reaction wasn't possible. My wife, Heidi, answered. Ever since our three daughters were small the phone has been on her side of the bed; she's the night watchman and mother superior at our house. A marshmallow could fall on the driveway at four in the morning and Heidi would hear it. She picked up the phone after one ring.
"Elizabeth has been kidnapped at gunpoint!" Ed told her.
"What?" said Heidi.
"Elizabeth has been kidnapped at gunpoint," he repeated, at which point Heidi handed me the phone. Fighting to wake up as Ed spoke the awful words yet again, I mumbled, "How can we help?" Ed told me to please come over, and hurry. Then he hung up.
Heidi and I just lay there as if we were paralyzed. We'd just received the proverbial phone call in the middle of the night. It was not unlike the shock of getting drenched by a bucket of cold water.
We had hardly moved when the phone rang again. It was Ed. Sensing my grogginess on the first call, he was calling back to make sure I had heard him correctly. "Haven't you left yet?" Ed said. "Please come, please hurry." The panic in his voice was now even thicker. ...
Ed called all his siblings within the first hour. In every instance, it took a moment for the news to register. Part of it was the early hour, but the bigger part was the shock. "Elizabeth has been taken at gunpoint!"
Once reality did sink in, we all went into action. My brother Chris grabbed his gun, a ZA nine-millimeter, semiautomatic — a serious handgun. Before he left his house, he put it in the car, locked and loaded.
The phone ringing in the early morning dark hadn't initially alarmed Chris. As an engineer who buys energy for Duke Energy, he's used to fielding phone calls at odd hours. But the look on his wife Ingrid's face as she handed him the phone did alarm him. "I'll be right over," Chris had told Ed as he leaped out of bed. Ingrid wasn't as fast. "I was scared," she remembered. "If I went over (to Ed's house), it would be true and, more than anything, I didn't want it to be true. I heard Chris fiddling in the study. 'What are you doing?' I asked. 'Getting my gun,' he said. 'If I see him, I'm going to kill the son of a bitch.' " Within minutes, Chris and Ingrid left their house in Centerville, about fifteen miles from Ed and Lois's, hugging their eighteen-year-old daughter Alicia on the way out, and asking her to watch their younger kids.
My sister Angela and her husband, Zeke Dumke III, likewise left teenagers, their seventeen-year-old daughter, Elise, and sixteen-year-old son, Mitchell, in charge. Their oldest son, twenty-year-old Zeke IV, was in Bolivia waiting for the rest of the family to join him. Zeke and Angela had arranged a family trip to Bolivia to help build a well in a poverty-stricken village as a summer service project. They had their shots, their passports, and their airline tickets. They were supposed to leave the next day. Now Angela and Zeke were driving through the dark to Ed's house, flashlights beside them.
"I got the call a little after four and you could just hear the fear and the panic in Ed's voice," Angela said. "It was very palpable. I knew it wasn't something little. 'Elizabeth has been taken at gunpoint,' Ed said. 'Get up here and bring a flashlight.' I kept thinking something's not right. I knew it was Ed. I knew it was fear. There was such great angst in his voice. But it didn't make sense that someone came into their home with a gun and then Ed called me to come look for Elizabeth in the mountains. So we checked on all our kids first because I had the thought that somebody might be trying to get us out of our house. I checked all the doors. Even though Zeke and I are fanatic about locking the house, I found doors were unlocked. It was probably because I was gardening so late, but later, when I heard people criticizing Ed for the open window, I thought, nobody's perfect."
As Zeke and Angela were driving, Ed called them again to make sure that they were on their way.
My sister Cynthia didn't jump when the phone rang. Cynthia is a pediatrician; it wouldn't have been the first time a patient called her at 4:30 A.M. "I got the phone and it was obviously Ed," Cynthia remembered. "He said 'A man has taken Elizabeth.' I said, 'This is a dream, right?' He said, 'No, someone came and took Elizabeth at gunpoint.' So I said, 'She's gone?' I kept answering his statements with questions because it just didn't seem possible. We decided to have Doug (Cynthia's husband, Doug Owens) go over to help and hopefully find her. It made more sense for me to stay with the kids, at least until they woke up. The first thing Doug and I did was kneel down and pray. I was crying. Doug said, 'Do you want me to get the gun for you? He has a magnum. I said, 'Oh yeah, I'll either end up shooting myself or the kids.' I remember taking Emmeline — she was two — from her bed early that morning. We have a strict policy, the kids sleep in their own beds, but boy, I picked her up and I just held her next to me in our bed, and I thought I just couldn't handle it if it was one of my children."
My brother David answered the phone. His wife, Julie, remembered how quickly the atmosphere in the bedroom changed. "David's back was toward me when he answered the phone," Julie said. "I heard him asking questions about a 'her.' I thought it was my mom he was talking about, because she's diabetic. Then he said, 'They can't find her?' and his back started moving quickly and his breathing got heavier and heavier. 'I'm going to Ed's,' he said after he hung up. 'Elizabeth has been taken at gunpoint.' And I remember thinking: our world has just changed. The unimaginable has just happened."
Coming Tuesday: A mother's awful grief.
Readers wishing to order "In Plain Sight: The Startling Truth Behind the Elizabeth Smart Investigation," can log onto the Web site at www.ipgbook.com/showbook.cfm?bookid=1556525796&userid=73646112.