Unlike most, Tom Holbrook doesn't follow the trial of Elizabeth Smart's kidnapper. It's too painful and stirs up too many conflicting feelings, so he doesn't watch the evening TV reports or read the morning newspaper accounts. Which is ironic.
Because he provided the case-breaking clue that led to finding Elizabeth Smart.
There are many unsung heroes in the recovery of Elizabeth Smart. Her sister Mary Katherine. The relentless FBI agent, Mick Fennerty. Elizabeth's uncles and extended family. John Walsh of America's Most Wanted. And then there is Tom Holbrook.
He insists he is no hero and wants to remain unsung. He credits his role in helping crack the case to divine intervention, not to anything he did. And there is this awkward fact: He is the brother-in-law of the accused kidnapper himself, Brian Mitchell, aka Emmanuel.
"I'm just an ordinary guy who has lots of flaws, but tries to do the right thing," Holbrook says over lunch at the LDS Church Office building, where he has worked for 27 years.
Deseret News staffers Lee Benson and Tom Smart — who also is Elizabeth's uncle — wrote a book called "In Plain Sight: The Startling Truth Behind the Elizabeth Smart Investigation." Of all the many people they met in their exhaustive research, they were most impressed with the character and humility of Tom Holbrook.
"As good and sincere a guy as you'll ever meet," says Benson, a Deseret News columnist. "He's salt of the earth."
Fate or providence or both put Holbrook in the middle of the kidnapping case. In the spring of 2002, he happened to be working at a Salt Lake mortuary during the funeral for Elizabeth Smart's grandfather. Aside from his full-time job, Holbrook occasionally works in his brother's mortuary business when the latter needs help. He met Ed and Lois Smart that day and remembers seeing both Elizabeth and Mary Katherine as they were preparing to play their harps in honor of their grandfather. Later, as Holbrook worked in the mortuary office, he could hear them playing their instruments.
A few days later — June 5, 2002 — Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped. Holbrook didn't make the connection until a week later when one of the TV reports mentioned that Elizabeth had attended a funeral shortly before her abduction. It was this connection that caused Holbrook to follow the story in the news in the coming months as the mystery of Elizabeth's disappearance dragged on.
Hopes for finding her seemed to be waning by February 2003. Holbrook was laid up at the time, recovering from surgery. He doesn't normally watch TV on Sunday unless it's to watch a family-friendly Hallmark special, and this happened to be one of the exceptions. During a commercial break, he saw a promo for the 10 o'clock news announcing that the Smart family would hold a press conference the next morning.
"I had a very strong impression that I needed to find out what that was about, although I have no idea why," he recalls. "It was unique for me to feel compelled to follow a press conference."
But the next day he felt so sick from the lingering effects of the surgery that he forgot about the press conference and stayed home from work. On Wednesday, he turned on his computer for the first time in days and again was overcome by a feeling that he needed to read about the press conference that had been held two days earlier. But then a family member called him away from the computer to do something, and he forgot about it.
By Friday he was able to return to work for the first time since the surgery. As he was getting ready to leave the office at the end of the day, he again remembered the press conference. He sat down at the computer and searched the Deseret News archives for coverage of the event. The article reported that Mary Katherine had suddenly remembered where she had heard the voice of the man who had threatened and kidnapped her sister. There was a sketch of the suspect, but it meant nothing to Holbrook. Then he continued to read the story. The suspect was described as a homeless man who called himself Emmanuel who the Smarts had hired to work on the roof of their house. He was a known panhandler.
"I knew who that was," says Holbrook. "The sketch confused me — it didn't look like him — but the description sounded like Brian."
He printed the story and took the bus home. The first thing he did when he entered his house was hand the printout to his wife, Lisa, who was in the kitchen. "You need to read this," he said. Strangely, one of his children asked, "Is that anything to do with Brian?" Holbrook was stunned by the comment, but said nothing. His wife read the story and then walked down the hallway to the couple's bedroom, with Holbrook following.
"Do you think this is Brian?" she asked when they were alone.
They discussed it the rest of the night. Could Lisa's brother have done this? What should they do? They didn't believe Mitchell was guilty, but they felt they needed to identify the mystery suspect for the Smarts and police so they could eliminate him as a suspect and find the real kidnapper. They could provide his real name.
The Holbrooks hadn't seen Mitchell in months, but that was not unusual. It was difficult to panhandle during Utah's winter months, so he often migrated to warmer climates and returned in the summer. The last time they had seen him was two months before the kidnapping when police served Mitchell with a restraining order forbidding him to be near his mother. As he left his mother's house with the police watching and his wife, Wanda Barzee, in tow, he screamed at Holbrook and his wife as they sat in a van on the curb. Minutes later the Holbrooks saw the couple board a south-bound bus.
The day after her husband presented the story of the press conference to her, Lisa called police. Initially, police couldn't find Mitchell in the system, but eventually they realized there was a discrepancy in the spelling of Emmanuel and Immanuel. Police records indicated Brian David Mitchell had been picked up for shoplifting. Holbrook expected police to call again to ask more questions, but it didn't happen.
The Smart family was increasingly frustrated with the direction the police were taking their investigation. They were largely uninterested in the Emmanuel lead and still believed the late Richard Ricci, an ex-con who looked nothing like Mitchell, was the kidnapper. Even after Mary Katherine's disclosure about Emmanuel, even after Lisa called, police continued to believe that Ricci was their prime suspect and did little to pursue Emmanuel.
Six days after Lisa's phone call, a policeman casually mentioned to Fennerty, the thinking-outside-the-box FBI agent, that they knew the identity of Emmanuel. Fennerty got the name, and after a discussion with Tom Smart he decided to ignore orders and go public with the name. He leaked Mitchell's name and photo to John Walsh of America's Most Wanted.
For his part, Holbrook still couldn't believe Mitchell was the kidnapper until Benson called him and they compared notes. The more they talked, the more both of them began to suspect that Mitchell was the culprit. Everything fit — the homelessness, the panhandling, the camp in the mountains above Salt Lake City, the handyman work he performed for hire, his self-annointed alias.
Then Tom Smart called Holbrook, and they talked for an hour. At one point, he asked Holbrook, "Do you think she's alive?" Holbrook replied, "Yes, if Brian took her, she is alive." That response sent chills down Tom Smart's spine.
Within days after America's Most Wanted aired photos and information about Mitchell, citizens who'd seen the show spotted Mitchell with two women in Sandy, and they were picked up by police. Holbrook was attending a conference in San Jose, Calif., standing next to a man on a cell phone. As soon as the man hung up his phone, Holbrook overheard him tell a third party, "They found Elizabeth Smart."
Holbrook checked his cell phone and discovered that it wasn't receiving service. He ran out onto the street and his phone worked again. Finding four voicemail messages waiting for him, he called home and confirmed that Elizabeth had been found – and that Mitchell was with her.
Holbrook returned to his hotel and turned on the TV to watch news of the discovery. What he saw caused him to fall to the floor on his knees and sob. As he recalls, "I felt so many emotions – grateful that she was alive, horror that it was Brian." He tried to call the Smarts, but couldn't reach them, so he left a message and apologized.
In the weeks that followed, many filed claims for the reward money; Holbrook was not one of them, although others applied for him. The $250,000 eventually was divided among eight claimants; he refused the money. "How can you be paid a reward after something so heinous that your brother-in-law did?" he asks.
Certainly, he could have used the $31,250. He and Lisa have 10 children, ranging in age from 10 to 30. Lisa doesn't work outside the home. The 53-year-old Holbrook, who has an engineering degree, works for the LDS Church in the audio-visual department. The family is deeply in debt, thanks in part to the expense of six weddings. They are frugal and never have money left over at the end of the month. They have always owned only one car; Holbrook takes the bus to and from work every day, an hour-long trip each way.
"Yeah, we definitely could have used the money," he says, smiling wryly. "Thank goodness for credit." But he doesn't offer this as a complaint, merely an observation. After detailing his financial challenges, he concludes by saying, "We have been very blessed." His life, he says, is family, church and work.
Lisa doesn't want to speak to the media and didn't want her husband do to so either. "She has handled this remarkably well," says Holbrook. They tell their younger children not to talk about their uncle or the Smart case at school because they worry about "guilty by association."
He has still never met Elizabeth, although he and his family have sent her a birthday card for years to wish her well. They sign it, "Love, the Holbrooks." She hasn't responded.
Holbrook has continued to stay in touch with Benson and Smart. "He called me and said let's have lunch on the anniversary of when Elizabeth was found," says Benson. "He said we have this bond and we ought to keep it up. He's the kind of guy you can't make up. He's the real deal."
Holbrook looks back at the entire saga and his role in it and concludes, "The whole thing is a story of faith and prayers and miracles. Mary Katherine remembering Emmanuel. The answered prayers of many people. The people at America's Most Wanted. The fact that Brian never found out they were looking for him even after America's Most Wanted aired. The impressions I had to learn about the press conference. No one would have figured out that was Brian from the sketch. It took The Spirit tapping me on the shoulder. I was nothing but a tool in the Lord's hand."
e-mail: drob@desnews.com