Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

slopes of the Wasatch Range, which rises directly above the Smarts’ affluent Federal Heights neighborhood. Around two in the morning on June 5, 2002, Mitchell placed a chair beneath a small window that had been left ajar on the first floor, sliced through a flimsy screen, and squeezed through the opening into the Smarts’ kitchen. Making his way through the vast, 6,600-square-foot house, he located the upstairs bedroom Elizabeth shared with her nine-year-old sister, Mary Katherine, and woke Elizabeth. Unbeknownst to Mitchell, he also woke Mary Katherine; feigning sleep, the younger girl stole a furtive glimpse at the intruder in the darkness and heard him threaten her sister. After telling Elizabeth to put on some shoes, Mitchell hustled her past the bedroom where the Smart parents were sleeping soundly, and exited the house.
    Mitchell marched Elizabeth at knifepoint four miles into the foothills west of her home. Upon reaching a secluded campsite in Dry Creek Canyon, he and Barzee conducted a weird, self-styled wedding ritual to “seal” the girl to Mitchell in “the new and everlasting covenant”—a Mormon euphemism for polygamous marriage. Barzee then demanded that Elizabeth remove her red pajamas. When the girl balked, Barzee explained that if she refused to cooperate, Mitchell would forcibly disrobe her. Faced with this prospect, Elizabeth complied, whereupon Mitchell consummated the marriage by raping his fourteen-year-old bride.
    Back in the Smart household, sister Mary Katherine had remained in her bed, too terrified by what she’d witnessed to get up and alert her parents. At least two hours passed before she finally summoned the courage to go to their bedroom and wake them. Horrified and trying to comprehend how his eldest daughter could have been snatched from her own bed, Ed Smart, even before he called the police, phoned the president of his local LDS stake, who in turn mobilized a search party of trusted Saints. Searchers immediately began combing the neighborhood for Elizabeth, but found no sign of her.
    For at least two months after her abduction, Elizabeth was held at a series of campsites hidden in a labyrinth of scrub-choked ravines above her home, close enough to hear would-be rescuers calling her name. Sometimes she was kept in a subterranean hollow covered with a lean-to; on other occasions her ankle was chained to a tree. Using his gift for fundamentalist rhetoric and adroitly manipulating the religious indoctrination Elizabeth had received since she was old enough to talk, Mitchell cowed the girl into becoming an utterly submissive polygamous concubine—buttressing his powers of theological persuasion with threats to kill her and her family. Raised to obey figures of Mormon authority unquestioningly, and to believe that LDS doctrine is the law of God, she would have been particularly susceptible to the dexterous fundamentalist spin Mitchell applied to familiar Mormon scripture. The white robes Mitchell and Barzee wore, and forced Elizabeth to wear, resembled the sacred robes she had donned with her family when they entered the Mormon temple. When Mitchell bullied Elizabeth into submitting to his carnal demands, he used the words of Joseph Smith— words she had been taught were handed down by God Himself—to phrase those demands. “Being brought up as she was made her especially vulnerable,” says Debbie Palmer, who is intimately acquainted with the coercive power of fundamentalist culture from her own upbringing in Bountiful. “Mitchell would never have been able to have such power over a non-Mormon girl.”
    Once he’d gained psychological control of Elizabeth, Mitchell felt sufficiently confident that she wouldn’t flee or try to alert the police that he often took her to public places, albeit with her blond braids covered in a head scarf and her face hidden behind a burqa-like veil. In September, Mitchell even brought Elizabeth, thus disguised, to a lively, beer-fueled party in