The abduction of Elizabeth Smart has once again made its way back into the news, this time due to Netflix’s new documentary film, Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart.
Elizabeth’s case became massive nationwide news in the United States when she was kidnapped in front of her sister Mary Katherine’s eyes, before being found nine months later.
Mary Katherine Smart was just nine when her sister was abducted, witnessing a man break into their house and take Elizabeth Smart away with a knife to her throat.
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Speaking in Netflix’s Kidnapped, which released today, she revealed how reading through a Guinness World Records allowed her to figure out who it had been.
After Elizabeth was taken, much of the focus of the investigation was on her nine year old sister, particularly because she said she thought she recognised the voice of the kidnapper.
Speaking in the Netflix documentary, Mary Katherine explained how she was able to eventually help find the man who kidnapped her sister, Brian David Mitchell.
She said in the new film: “After my sister was kidnapped I was very frightened to go to sleep, my dad would have to come in and tuck me in and while I was waiting for him I would be looking at books or racking my brain about who could have taken Elizabeth.
“One particular night, four months after Elizabeth had been taken, I was flipping through the Guinness World Records.
“For some random reason in that moment the name popped into my head and I knew immediately who was in my bedroom June 2002, that’s the man who kidnapped Elizabeth.”
Her dad Ed Smart said: “Lois and I had gone out for the evening and when we got home Mary Katherine had said ‘I think I know who it is, and she said it was ‘Immanuel’.”
Immanuel was the preacher’s name Brian sometimes went by and had met their mother Lois whilst preaching in town as a homeless man.
She gave him Ed’s business card and suggested he could help work on the house, an offer he took them up on.
Mary Katherine had been reading the Guinness World Record book when he had done work on the house and so returning to reread it had jogged her memory of him.
Whilst police were initially sceptical, believing that a prior suspect who had died in custody was behind the kidnapping, it turned out she was right and ‘Immanuel’, aka Brian David Mitchell, was the man responsible.
The family eventually released a sketch of Brian, leading him to be spotted and arrested by police.
Elizabeth was held in captivity for nine months in which time she was raped, forced to drink alcohol until she threw up, and was ‘married’ to him in a bizarre ceremony.
24 years on from her abduction she speaks bravely in the documentary about her harrowing experience, telling Netflix’s Tudum that in earlier versions of the doc she could tell the filmmakers didn’t want to retraumatise her.
She said: “They wanted to be so sensitive to me. Well, I didn’t go on vacation, I definitely wasn’t just sunbathing up in the mountains waiting for someone to come and rescue me.
“When I saw the final cut [which includes her discussing the details in graphic accuracy], I was like, ‘Thank you’, [The filmmakers] made me proud. They did justice to my story.”
Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart is available to stream on Netflix now.
Topics: TV and Film, Film, Documentaries, True Crime, US News
Michael Slavin