November 15, 2002
Elizabeth Smart abduction still a mystery to stunned family,
police
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- For a while, every time the phone
rang, Ed and Lois Smart jumped, overwhelmed by hope and dread.
Often, the calls would be from police alerting them to grisly
discoveries that might be linked to their missing daughter,
attempting to warn them before the findings hit the news.
At times,
the news beat them: Hands and feet had been found up a
canyon, reports said, bones in the desert.
Then, the Smarts called police: Is it true? Is it Elizabeth?
Every time, the answer has been no. And now, nearly six months
after a gunman stole their 14-year-old from her bed in the
middle of the night, the Smarts say they accept such calls
as part of their strange new life, where their vanished daughter
is everywhere, yet nowhere.
"Every day is a struggle," Lois Smart said during
an interview
this past week. "It would be very easy for me to stay
in bed,
never leave."
But the Smarts have five other children, ages 4 to 16, who
need their parents to figure out how to live without Elizabeth
so they can, too.
"They take their cues directly from us," Lois said.
"As long
as we are able to function, so are they."
The frenetic pace of the summer -- when the Smarts held
twice-daily news briefings for local and national reporters,
helped coordinate massive volunteer searches, heard from or
called investigators several times daily -- has slowed.
Search efforts have been decentralized, with groups forming
independently and communicating via a dedicated Web site;
regular briefings were suspended Sept. 17, in favor of intermittent
news conferences on specific topics.
Late last month, Ed Smart arranged a briefing to urge support
for the nationwide Amber Alert proposal now before Congress.
His own effort, he said, would be his gift to Elizabeth for
her
15th birthday on Nov. 3. He wept, his sorrow engulfing the
small knot of Salt Lake-based reporters who have covered the
case from the start. Some of them cried, too.
Smart says he will continue to seek media attention, always
to keep Elizabeth alive in the public mind, hoping for the
one tip yet to come that will break the case. He is willing,
in exchange, to put up with people following him around in
public, pointing at him, getting in his face. "But I
can't keep reliving the trauma," he said.
Whirl of Activity in Early Hours
During these past months, the Smarts have remembered more
about those early hours -- and forgotten some, too. Time was
elastic immediately after Elizabeth disappeared, they agree
-- even as they disagree about how long after the abduction
they talked with their 10-year-old daughter Mary Katherine
about what she saw in the dark on June 5, or how long it took
police to arrive that morning after Ed's first, frantic call.
But of some things, they are certain. It was 3:58 a.m. when
Mary Katherine, then 9, came into her parents' bedroom. Ed
remembers looking at his digital clock.
"She wasn't hysterical," Lois said. "She came
to my side. She had her blanket around her. She just said,
'Elizabeth is gone.' " Ed got up and checked the other
kids' rooms. He and Lois went downstairs to look for Elizabeth.
Lois saw the window screen near the back door had been cut,
and became hysterical. Ed called 911.
The responding police officer could hear Lois screaming in
the background. Ed remembered that 10 years earlier, there
had been an attempted abduction at their neighbors' house
across the street. He ran to their door, pounded on it. It
took forever for them to answer. He warned them, then roused
other neighbors.
Lois doesn't remember how many came to their home, or when.
"It seems like they were there fast. Everyone got there
fast," she said.
The police log for June 5 states the call came in at 4:01
a.m.
About 2 a.m., it says, a man 5 feet, 8 inches tall, wearing
white pants, a white ball cap and a light jacket, entered
the home through a kitchen window and took Elizabeth at gunpoint
from her bedroom.
"The suspect threatened the younger sister, and after
about two hours, she ran in and told her parents. The parents
contacted several neighbors and then contacted the police,"
it says.
Sue Ann Adams, the first neighbor to arrive, remembers it
differently. When she got to the Smart home a little after
4 a.m., she said, "there was a police officer in the
kitchen, and another just outside his car on the driveway."
Police Admit Mistakes
Salt Lake police last month acknowledged they hadn't properly
secured the Smart home, letting people into a crime scene
that forensic investigators hadn't searched for evidence.
The admission, though late, was welcome, the family says,
because for too long news reports cast blame on Ed Smart by
repeating early police assertions.
Nor was it true that the abductor threatened Mary Katherine,
the sole witness to her sister's kidnapping -- a misstatement
Salt Lake City Police Chief Rick Dinse corrected two weeks
later. Police Capt. Cory Lyman, who heads the Smart case investigation
task force, said neither his department's decision not to
secure the home as a crime scene nor the initial report that
Ed called neighbors before police should be considered a blunder.
"Officers responded. What is their first priority?"
Lyman said. "Their initial response is always preservation
of life. ...
they had a greater responsibility than to seal that scene."
They had to find Elizabeth.
Reports on Ed Smart's actions were skewed when his brother
Tom Smart said he'd been phoned at 3:30 a.m., Lyman said --
a mistake made in the confusion of the moment by a man awakened
from a dead sleep by shocking news. Then, media reports fused
the two, saying the scene wasn't secured because Ed had called
others before he called police.
Lyman said police were slow to correct the record because
"we didn't want to correct until we were sure."
Ed and Lois Smart say they still aren't sure what the gunman
said in the girls' room. At investigators' request, they haven't
questioned their younger daughter on what she told police.
Children have malleable memories, and they don't want to taint
her as a witness.
They do talk to her if she brings it up. Their understanding
is
that as Mary Katherine feigned sleep, Elizabeth stubbed her
toe, and the man said either "if you don't scream, I
won't hurt you," or "be quiet or I'll hurt you."
Mary Katherine got out of bed to follow them. But when she
stood in her doorway and saw them looking into her brothers'
room, she went back to bed, her parents say.
Police say she waited two hours before telling her parents.
But that may not be true, Lois said. The little girl said
the clock rang four times. But it rings every 15 minutes,
and wasn't running properly.
Experts say that the first hours after an abduction are the
most critical. But the Smarts say their daughter's caution
was crucial.
"Mary Katherine was brave, courageous and strong that
night," Lois Smart said. "She saw a gun and him
checking the other rooms. She did the right thing. I want
the world to know that."
FBI agents stayed in the home with the family for two weeks
after Elizabeth disappeared. Police parked their cruisers
at the bottom of the driveway for a month, protecting the
Smarts from reporters or other intruders.
The Smarts continue to keep their home off-limits to anyone
but family.
Following-up Leads
Police have documented and followed up over 16,000 leads from
the public -- most of them dead ends, some of them strange,
others intriguing.
Brett Michael Edmunds, a transient who fled to West Virginia
when police sought him for questioning, turned out to know
nothing.
A report from Lincoln, Neb., of a girl in a van who looked
like
Elizabeth was a false alarm.
Police have gotten specific tips about some of Utah's 20,000
open mine shafts, and have gone with search and rescue units
into the dangerous abandoned mines to look for Elizabeth.
Most of those calls were from hoaxers, Lyman said.
A man in California who had been in Utah around the time of
the kidnapping has been cleared. An 18-year-old man from South
Carolina who claimed to be Elizabeth's kidnapper is now in
federal custody after repeated attempts to extort money from
her parents.
The "top potential suspect" in the kidnapping, former
handyman Richard Albert Ricci, died last month of a spontaneous
cerebral hemorrhage. Police still search for information on
his whereabouts between May 30 and June 8.
"Over the months, Mr. Ricci has remained at the top of
the list of people of interest," Lyman said. At the same
time,
investigators aren't totally convinced he was the abductor,
or
acted alone, he said.
"We have no evidence that Elizabeth's not alive out there,"
Lyman said. "There's obviously some information still
missing. It could come in tonight, or it could be a long time."
The Smart
family wants to know more about a July 24 attempted break-in
at the Cottonwood Heights home of Jeannie and Steve Wright.
Jeannie Wright is Lois Smart's sister. County sheriff's deputies
reported the screen covering the window of the Wrights' 15-year-old
daughter was cut and a chair was found beneath it -- a scene
similar to that found at the Smarts' kitchen window on June
5.
They also want to know more about a man who fled after witnesses
saw him digging a grave-like hole under some bushes in Sanpete
County on June 9. He was described as 5-foot-8, with dark
hair, wearing blue jeans and a white or light-colored baseball
cap -- a description close to Mary Katherine's witness statement.
"There have been false sightings all over, in several
states,"
Tom Smart said. "There are clues, but there are no traces.
It's crazier than any fiction. "I still believe they'll
solve it," he said.
Police and family alike continue to be inundated by calls
from psychics. Ed Smart's exasperation showed when he said
hundreds of thousands of psychics have reported in; Lyman
said close to 600 psychics have contacted police, all with
different dreams.
It would be tempting to ignore them. But even the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children warns against disregard,
because psychics' purported dreams or visions may be a truth
told by someone unwilling or afraid to get involved directly.
And though the same experts claim no missing child has ever
been recovered with psychic information, Elizabeth Smart's
family and investigators are bound to check out each one.
That's why, a week ago, Elizabeth's uncles Tom and Dave Smart
walked along desolate railroad tracks near the town of Lark,
long abandoned to the poisonous remains of Bingham Canyon
copper mining west of Salt Lake City.
A psychic had told them Elizabeth's body lay near those tracks.
She remains missing.
(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights
Reserved.)
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