Elizabeth Smart is once again revisiting her infamous kidnapping case.
The new Netflix documentary “Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart,” released Tuesday, unpacks the June 2002 night that Smart, then 14, was kidnapped from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, Utah and what ensued during the following nine months until her rescue.
Elizabeth, 38, looks back on the crisis alongside her sister Mary Katherine Smart, dad Ed Smart, uncles Dave and Tom Smart, and the cops who were involved in the case.
Her mother Lois Smart, who got divorced from Ed in 2019, did not participate in the doc.
“My mom, she played a huge part in helping me process what happened,” Elizabeth said in the doc. “But now she’s ready to leave it in the past.”
Elizabeth was kidnapped by Brian David Mitchell and became a sex slave to Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee. She was rescued by police on March 12, 2003.
Mitchell, 72, was sentenced to life behind bars, while Barzee, 80, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. She was set free five years early in 2018.
Here are the biggest bombshells from “Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart.”
Elizabeth’s family were considered suspects in the case
Police looked at Elizabeth’s family members as her possible kidnappers after she went missing.
“Statistically, more often than not, the perpetrator of this type of crime is a parent or a family member,” Detective Cordon Parks explained. “So we started looking very hard at them.”
Parks noted “there were a couple things” that made them suspicious of the Smarts.
“I was told that the alarm had been inadvertently left off,” he said. “And the window. When I looked at it the first morning, there were no scuff marks on the outside wall. Even if you step up on a chair, you’re going to make a scuff mark. I did not see any. My initial assessment was that maybe this wasn’t the point of entry. Maybe it was a staged one.”
Elizabeth’s family did “in-depth interviews” with police and took polygraph tests. Ed passed his test, but his brother Tom’s test came back as inconclusive.
Tom became more suspicious to police and the public when he did an interview at the time where he expressed sympathy for his niece’s kidnapper and called the case “a wonderful story in a lot of ways, because it’s about, foremost, a beautiful little angelic girl.”
In the doc, Tom said, “Anybody who watches that interview will think, ‘Tom Smart is a crazy son of a b–ch, and maybe he did do it.’ We came out of that interview and my wife turns to me and says, ‘You f–ked the family.’”
“Finding Elizabeth was the only important thing,” Tom added. “We were never waiting for them to tell us we were cleared. I mean, who gives a s–t? We knew we were clear.”
Elizabeth’s dad went to a psychiatric ward after her kidnapping
Ed struggled not only with Elizabeth’s disappearance, but also with becoming a suspect in the case.
“I had a call from Lois, and I got down there and I saw this tear. And she basically said, ‘Law enforcement don’t believe you’re telling the truth. That you’re hiding something,’” Ed recalled.
“I was overwhelmed to the point that I was shaking,” he continued, “and I couldn’t stop shaking. I had absolutely nothing to do with this. And my father said, ‘If you don’t calm down, I’m going to commit you.’ So he took me over to the hospital and put me in the psychiatric ward, and I cried that whole night.”
Elizabeth recalled the horrific night she was kidnapped
Elizabeth gave a detailed recollection of what she went through, starting with the night she was taken.
“That night, I remember a man’s voice. ‘I have a knife on your neck. Don’t make a sound. Get up and come with me,’” she said. “I was terrified. Was he going to hurt me? Was he going to kill me?”
“He led me up through my backyard. We started up this trail, and I remember thinking, ‘Where is he taking me?’ I was so worried that I was missing my chance for escape. I asked him if he was gonna rape and kill me cause I thought that must be what he’s going to do. I wanted him to do it as close as he could to my house so that my parents could find me.”
Elizabeth said that when they arrived at a campsite, they were greeted by Barzee who hugged her.
“And she took my shoes off and then she started washing the dirt off my feet,” Elizabeth recalled. “And then she started to try to undo my pajamas.”
Elizabeth also recalled Mitchell’s “exact words” to her that night: “I hereby seal you to me as my wife before God and his angels as my witnesses.” After she screamed, Mitchell threatened to kill her.
“It didn’t matter what I did. Ultimately, he raped me,” she recalled. “And I remember being in a lot of pain. I remember begging him to stop. “And then when he was finished, he got up and he kind of smiled like it wasn’t a big deal to him and he walked out of the tent. And I just was left on the ground.”
Elizabeth’s kidnapper planned to take more girls
“He told me God commanded them to kidnap seven young girls,” Elizabeth recalled of the night she was kidnapped. “I was the first of the seven. He said my sister would probably end up one of his wives. Or my cousin Olivia. I was horrified.”
Elizabeth heard a search party looking for her
Elizabeth was nearly found by a search party while she was held by Mitchell and Barzee at an encampment in the mountains.
“I remember faintly hearing my name,” Elizabeth said. “It was faint but I could still hear it. [Mitchell] took me inside the tent, pulled out his knife [and said] ‘If anyone comes into this camp, this is the knife I’m going to use to kill them, and it’ll be your fault.’”
“I only heard my name called a few times, and then it faded away,” she added, “and I didn’t hear it again.”
Elizabeth’s sister helped identify her kidnapper
Mary Katherine shared a room with Elizabeth in their family home and witnessed her older sister being taken. But she couldn’t see Mitchell and initially could not help police with the investigation.
“I tried to remember who it was who’d taken Elizabeth. I knew I’d heard the voice, I just couldn’t remember where I’d heard it from,” Mary Katherine said. “I wanted to help in any way that I could. They even tried to hypnotize me at one point. But there was pressure from everyone. It was a lot for a 9-year-old.”
Four months after Elizabeth was kidnapped, Mary Katherine remembered a man named Immanuel who she associated with the voice of the person who took Elizabeth.
Immanuel was actually Mitchell, who met Lois, Elizabeth and Mary Katherine when he was begging for money on the streets. Lois gave him money and Ed’s phone number, and the Smarts ended up hiring him to do work at their house, which is why Mary Katherine recognized his voice.
Sketches were made of Mitchell and he was recognized from an episode of “America’s Most Wanted” by his brother-in-law, who called Tom and told him Mitchell was likely Elizabeth’s captor.
How Elizabeth was rescued
After Elizabeth was taken to San Diego, she used God to convince Mitchell and Barzee to go back to Salt Lake City.
When the trio arrived in Sandy, Utah on March 12, 2003, a person recognized both Mitchell and Smart and called the police. Authorities arrived and took Elizabeth aside and asked her if she was Elizabeth Smart.
“My captors were just right there,” she said. “I was terrified. I needed the safest answer I could possibly give.” Her response to cops was, “If thou sayeth.”
Sandy City Police Sgt. Victor Quezada recalled telling Elizabeth, “For the sake of this nation and for your family, just tell me you’re Elizabeth. And she looked at me and said, ‘Thou sayeth.’ I’d never heard those words in my life. I said, ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’”
Why Elizabeth decided to testify against her kidnapper
Despite being arrested in 2003, Mitchell did not go to trial until 2010. Elizabeth said she “didn’t want to face” Mitchell in court, but was determined to testify so that he wouldn’t get out of jail and “go after another young girl.”
“It felt like the system was rigged against me and I thought, ‘This has gone on for almost a decade. It needs to end. I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care if I have to sit in the courtroom every day for months on end. If this is gonna bring it to a close, then that’s what I’m going to do,’” Elizabeth shared.
“When the verdict finally came in as guilty, it was just like, ‘It is about time. Thank goodness. It’s done and I can leave it in the past now,’” she added.
Mitchell was found guilty of kidnapping and transporting a minor across state lines with intent to engage in sexual activity. He’s serving his life sentence at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Barzee served time at a federal prison in Forth Worth, Texas and then a state prison in Draper, Utah before her 2018 release. She was arrested in May 2025 for violating her sex offender probation by visiting two parks in Salt Lake.
How old is Elizabeth Smart now?
Elizabeth Smart is now 38 years old. She’s married to Matthew Gilmour, whom she met on a missionary trip. The couple tied the knot in Hawaii in Feb. 2012 and share three children: Chloe, 11, James, 8, and Olivia, 6.
Elizabeth has become an advocate for survivors of sexual violence and a child safety activist through her work with the Elizabeth Smart Foundation.
She released a book about her kidnapping, titled “My Story,” in 2013.
“Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart” is streaming on Netflix.
Read the full article here
