Smart Case Marked By Missed Chances

Looking back now, she was so close, so many times.

In the foothills behind her home, listening to searchers shouting her name. At a party where a concerned reveler asked if she needed help. On the floor of a basement apartment, a block away from the police station.

In the end, there would be one more missed opportunity — and then a miracle.

Nine months after Elizabeth Smart disappeared from her bedroom, hope had almost died. When children abducted by strangers are gone for a long time, they usually don't come home.

Back in June, Elizabeth's disappearance was the latest in a disturbing string across the country.

Ed and Lois Smart and their six children lived in a seven-bedroom estate, worth $1.1 million. Police say a man crept into Elizabeth's bedroom on June 5, took Elizabeth, then 14, as her sister, 9-year-old Mary Katherine, cowered.

Soon after, hundreds of volunteers fanned out in the foothills behind the Smart home.

As it turns out, authorities say, Brian David Mitchell, 49, and his wife, Wanda Barzee, 57, a pair of drifters, were hiding Elizabeth in the hills just three miles away. Once, she even heard rescuers, including her uncle, calling her name.

Mitchell, a self-proclaimed prophet, was well-known around town as a panhandler and rambling preacher.

He'd married Barzee in the mid-1980s. In 1998, the pair told relatives that God told them to sell their belongings and preach to the homeless.

In November 2001, Lois Smart, Elizabeth's mother, was downtown when she bumped into Mitchell, who now called himself Immanuel, Hebrew for "God with us." She gave him $5 and invited him to come by her home if he wanted work.

The next day, Elizabeth's father put him to work hammering shingles. After five hours, Smart paid him $50 and never saw him again.

Mitchell spent the next few months writing a dense, 27-page religious manifesto. He declared he was a messenger from God, in the line of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church.

He said having multiple wives was God's true intention for his followers. And he had a special prophecy for Barzee: she would welcome "seven sisters" into her home.

Soon after Mitchell completed his tract, Elizabeth vanished.

A few weeks later, detectives revealed they were questioning a convict who'd worked as a handyman at the Smart home more than a year before the kidnapping. Richard Albert Ricci was arrested on an unrelated parole violation, and eventually pleaded guilty to unrelated burglary and theft charges. But he maintained his innocence in the Smart case up until his sudden death of a brain hemorrhage in jail in August.

During the focus on Ricci, police now believe Mitchell was trying to abduct another Smart relative — Elizabeth's 18-year-old cousin, Jessica Wright. On July 24, a window screen at the home was cut, but the intruder fled.

Three months after the disappearance, the girl and the two drifters descended from the hills and began roaming the streets of downtown.

In late August or early September, Mitchell and the two women strode into a party at a local hangout, where he drank beers and spouted his teachings. The two women, obscured by cloths pinned across their faces, said little and stuck closely to him.

Pamela Ian noticed them immediately. She asked the women if they were OK, and the girl looked away.

A group of partygoers grew annoyed by Mitchell's ramblings. Ian, 30, escorted Mitchell to the door and asked the women a second time: "Do you need help?"

On Sept. 27, Mitchell was caught shoplifting from a downtown grocery store, but skipped out on his arraignment two weeks later.

By October, the weather had turned chilly. Daniel Trotta, 24, was a cashier at the health-food store when he met Mitchell and his two companions. He invited the group to stay in his basement apartment, a block from the Salt Lake City Police Department.

At one point, he said, he asked Elizabeth for her name. "Just call her my love and joy," Mitchell said.

After a week at Trotta's, trio went west to San Diego.

Unknown to them, investigators had just gotten a major clue: While reading one day, Mary Katherine had an epiphany — the man who'd taken her sister might have been "Emmanuel," the man she'd seen helping her dad months before.

The Smarts went to the police and hired a freelance sketch artist to draw the suspect's picture. Authorities were skeptical.

Frustrated, the Smarts held a press conference in early February to publicize the sketch. One of Mitchell's sisters called police and provided her brother's real name.

As the family stewed, Elizabeth and the pair of drifters were becoming a familiar sight in Lakeside, 25 miles outside of San Diego.

On Feb. 12, Mitchell was arrested a second time, for breaking into a church. For six days, he was behind bars. Not knowing he was a suspect in the Smart case, authorities let him go.

Just before Mitchell was released, "America's Most Wanted" aired a segment on Emmanuel.

A few weeks later, police said they likely encountered the trio Tuesday when they questioned three "transient" people outside a Burger King in North Las Vegas, Nev. The restaurant is near Interstate 15, the most direct route between San Diego and Salt Lake City, some 400 miles to the north.

According to police, the three didn't provide identification, but gave their names as Peter Marshal, Julitte Marshal and Augustine Marshal. Those names — with slight variations in spelling

are the same aliases Mitchell, Barzee and Elizabeth would use in a later confrontation with police.

The following morning, Ryan Johnson took a break from his job in Springville, outside of Salt Lake City. At McDonald's, he saw a strange couple and a young girl.

It was the girl, with an obvious gray wig and green cloth looped over her head like a bandanna, who really caught his eye.

Johnson offered them a ride and dropped them off at a bus station. But he thought the girl in the rear-view mirror looked vaguely familiar.

Back at work, his suspicions still nagging, Johnson flipped open a phone book for the Provo Police Department, but the number he dialed rang unanswered. He would later find he'd called the department's credit union.

Later that day, Alvin and Anita Dickerson were driving in Sandy, just south of Salt Lake City, when they spotted the bedraggled threesome. Anita Dickerson told her husband to pull into the parking lot — that was the man they'd seen on TV.

She got out and felt for her cell phone in her purse. Just before she dialed, Rudy and Nancy Montoya, who had just walked out of a copy store, were doing the same thing. Police arrived moments later.

Officer Troy Rasmussen told the girl he thought she was the missing teenager. She insisted she wasn't, but he could see her heart pounding through her T-shirt.

The officers held up a picture next to her face and asked her again if she was Elizabeth Smart.

"Thou sayest," answered the girl. She burst into tears.

Elizabeth Smart had been found.