Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer Page A

downtown Salt Lake attended by more than a hundred revelers (most of whom were not particularly pious), where she was photographed by one partygoer but not recognized. On at least one occasion while Elizabeth was under Mitchell’s control, according to one of her uncles, for the better part of a day Mitchell left the girl “completely by herself, but she didn’t try to run away.”
    On July 24, acting with customary brazenness, Mitchell attempted to kidnap a fifteen-year-old cousin of Elizabeth’s. Resorting to the same method he’d used previously, Mitchell placed a chair beneath an open window, cut through its screen with his knife, and was preparing to crawl into the girl’s home when he inadvertently knocked some framed pictures onto the floor, creating a racket that woke up the household and caused him to flee. Because the police were convinced at the time that they already had the prime suspect in custody—another former laborer for the Smarts, Richard Ricci, who had a fishy alibi and a voluminous criminal history going back thirty years—it didn’t occur to the cops that the sliced screen and chair left at the scene of this attempted break-in were significant clues. They failed to give serious consideration to the possibility that Elizabeth’s abductor might be someone other than Ricci and might still be on the loose, attempting to kidnap other girls.
    Late one night in October, Mary Katherine—the younger sister who was the only outside witness to the crime—abruptly told Ed Smart, “Dad, I think I know who it is.” She was pretty sure that the person she had seen abducting Elizabeth was the small bearded man who had helped fix the roof—the self-proclaimed prophet who had called himself Immanuel. Smart reported his daughter’s belated disclosure to the Salt Lake City police, but because Mary Katherine had waited four months to identify the perpetrator, detectives didn’t give it much credence. They nevertheless worked with the Smart family to produce three composite sketches of Immanuel, based on their hazy memories of what he had looked like when he’d worked around their house in November 2001. The Smarts thought the last of these renderings was a reasonable likeness and wanted to go public with it, but the cops refused, arguing that it wasn’t accurate enough and would only inundate them with false leads. Besides, they still thought Ricci (who had died in jail on August 27 of a brain hemorrhage) was the culprit.
    Frustrated, the Smarts took matters into their own hands. In early February 2003 they held a press conference during which they released the best police sketch to the public. Soon thereafter a woman who saw the composite drawing called to report that it bore a resemblance to her brother, a man of strong religious views named Brian David Mitchell who referred to himself as Immanuel. She sent in a photo of Mitchell, which on February 15 was broadcast on the television show America’s Most Wanted, along with photos and videotape of Elizabeth and footage of Ed Smart pleading with viewers to help find his daughter.
    On March 12, 2003, an alert motorist who had watched the America’s Most Wanted segment spotted someone who resembled Mitchell in the suburb of Sandy, walking down State Street, a busy, six-lane thoroughfare that is one of the main north-south arterials in Salt Lake County. The Mitchell look-alike was dressed in seedy robes and sandals and was accompanied by a middle-aged woman and a teenage girl, who were similarly attired. The motorist dialed 911-
    A pair of police officers, Karen Jones and Troy Rasmussen, pulled up in a squad car and stopped the oddly dressed trio. The man, who had a bushy salt-and-pepper beard and wore flowers in his unkempt hair, gave his name as Peter Marshall and insisted on speaking for the two females, who were wearing sunglasses and cheap gray wigs in an apparent attempt to disguise their identities. When questioned directly, the teenager denied that