SALT LAKE CITY — Watching Elizabeth Smart step onto the witness stand and testify with grace and dignity this week brought back great memories of the happiest ending a nightmare ever had.
When Smart was delivered out of the hands of Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee Mitchell and into the arms of her father, Ed, at the Sandy police station in March of 2003, it was the fantastic conclusion to the impossible dream. For nine months and a week, her family, her city, her state, her world pulled for her to come home — and then couldn't quite believe it when she did.
Admit it. Eight years and a million evasive legal maneuvers by Mitchell's attorneys later, there is still a sense of incredulity that that is really her: young, beautiful and composed — and sitting in a court of law pointing her finger directly at the man who kidnapped her.
All bad things don't end badly, and here is living proof.
What chills me to this day, though, is how precarious her rescue was; how convinced police and FBI agents leading the investigation were that Elizabeth would not be found in the clutches of the crazed purported religious fanatic.
A little-known detail that was not widely publicized then or now is that on Mar. 12, 2003 Ed Smart had been summoned to Sandy, 20 minutes from his home in the Salt Lake foothills, so yet another false lead in the kidnapping case could be dismissed.
The Salt Lake City police detectives who called Ed and ordered him to drive to Sandy did not expect he would soon be hugging his daughter. The detectives, who were on the scene and looking right at her, believed the homeless girl traveling with the bearded man and haggard woman — the three of them detained by Sandy police — would turn out to be nothing more than a homeless girl traveling with a bearded man and haggard woman.
The quickest way to positively prove that it wasn't Elizabeth was to have her father drive out and say so.
It was the reason Ed went alone and his wife, Lois, wasn't with him.
Fortunately, the Sandy police had not formed tunnel vision on the case — nor had the two couples who called 911 that morning after recognizing Mitchell from episodes of "America's Most Wanted."
The Salt Lake police, on the other hand, were long invested in their pet theory that former Smart handyman and ex-con Richard Ricci was the kidnapper — a secret they were sure Ricci had taken to his grave. He died of a brain aneurysm six months earlier after being held at the prison in maximum detention. Conventional wisdom was that his confession died with him.
So convinced were those directing the Smart investigation that Ricci was their man that they displayed tepid, at best, interest in this Brian David Mitchell character when he made his way into the case on the strength of a delayed recollection from Elizabeth's younger sister, Mary Katherine, the person who lay terrified in bed next to her sister the night she was abducted.
Despite the eyewitness identification, the police shrugged. They had their man and he wasn't going anywhere.
The fixation on Ricci played a hand in how every non-Ricci lead was handled. It explains the non-aggressive behavior of detective Jon Richey, who testified in court this week about confronting Mitchell, Wanda and a veiled Elizabeth in the Salt Lake library two months into her captivity, and then letting them go. Of course he let them go without lifting the veil; the police already had their man. It also seems to explain why Richey, who was part of the Smart search task force, didn't raise alarm bells six months later when Mitchell's identity — kooky robe-wearing behavior and all — came to light... . There are only two explanations. Either the veteran detective forgot what he'd seen in the library — or the police still had their man.
Ultimately, it was the Smart family going rogue — they held their own non-police-approved press conference — that brought Mitchell's identity to public view.
And it took an FBI agent acting on his own to get Mitchell's identity on television on "America's Most Wanted."
Finally, it took Sandy police not invested in a "theory" to ask Elizabeth the questions that got her to admit who she was and rescued from her captors — even before her father made it to Sandy.
Euphoria over Elizabeth's return obfuscated, for the most part, the SLCPD's myopic rush to judgment and refusal to consider alternatives, but the haunting reality is that the Smart case was solved in spite of the official investigation, not because of it.
I, for one, have never looked at a police pet theory the same ever since.
Seeing a vibrant, very much alive Elizabeth Smart on the witness stand this week pointing her finger at a shackled Brian David Mitchell brought all that home again.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com