Elizabeth: How he used me as a sex toy to act out his sick 'Adam and Eve fantasies'

Elizabeth Smart’s nine month kidnap ordeal ended not with gunfire and drama but with just three words: ‘I am Elizabeth.’

With this, she reclaimed her life after an abduction that horrified the nation in a harrowing tale told for the first time in her memoir published on Monday.

Now, in her book, ‘My Story,’ Elizabeth reveals the life of abject horror into which she was plunged on the night of 5 June 2002 when she was snatched from her bed by Brian David Mitchell. And she has shared previously unseen pictures of her life as she rebuilt it.

In her own words she recalls how her captor and his wife, Wanda Barzee, claimed her as their ‘handmaiden’ – a sex-object for him, a slave for her.

She was forced to endure a ‘wedding’ ceremony to Mitchell, now 59. At just 14 Elizabeth was ‘a little girl really,’ who, stripped of the red pyjamas, had her innocence taken in the most brutal way.

Speaking to Meredith Vieira on NBC she recalled: 'I remember him forcing me onto the ground (and) fighting the whole way. And then when he was finished he stood up and I was left alone feeling absolutely broken, absolutely shattered.

'I was broken beyond repair.'

After that Mitchell raped her daily, often many times over. He presented himself as a ‘prophet’ and espoused twisted biblical notions. Once he told her they were to be ‘naked as Adam and Eve in the garden,' and forced her to watch as he performed ‘anatomy lessons’ on Barzee.

It was a nightmarish induction to Mitchell’s make-shift camp in the mountains high above her hometown of Salt Lake City. By day she was tethered to trees by a steel cable, wrapped so tight round her ankle that she can still feel its cut to this day.

During those early days, unable to roam more than 20 feet, she could hear helicopters beat overhead as officers desperately searched for the blonde teenager. At one point she caught her uncle’s voice, calling her name.

Mitchell took the knife he had held to her throat to silence her the night he took her. He brandished its long serrated blade and told her if her uncle found the camp he would ‘stick him’ with it.

Mitchell used the constant threat of killing her family to control and silence his victim.

He tried to strip her of her identity, break her spirit and sever every link to the life from which she had been snatched. 

He took away her name – telling her that, as his ‘wife’ she was called ‘Shearjashub,' while Barzee was 'Hepzibah' and he, 'Immanuel.' He forced the devout Mormon to look at pornography and to drink alcohol, something forbidden by her faith.

'He knew what he was doing,’ she writes. He made her drink beer until she was sick. On another occasion she had to drink cup after cup of wine, in a perverse Eucharist staged by Mitchell. 

‘To this day,’ she writes, ‘The smell of wine will almost instantly make me sick.'

He starved her and subjected her to abuse that, even now, she cannot fully describe.

Now 25, Elizabeth recalls her hellish existence with compelling clarity: ‘My life pretty much consisted of three things: getting raped, being forced to drink alcohol, and sitting on a bucket in a clearing in the trees.’

At times Mitchell and Barzee argued viciously but Elizabeth never saw Barzee as anything other than a willing co-conspirator to her husband. Barzee watched without compassion as Elizabeth was raped and degraded.

The only emotion Barzee ever showed was jealousy – jealousy for Elizabeth's youth and that her husband chose the teenager's bed over her own.

To Elizabeth, Barzee is ‘a wounded evil woman.’ The moment she felt the older woman’s touch as she pulled her into Mitchell’s camp and ordered her to undress she writes: ‘I knew that my world was about to come apart.’

Cut off from the outside world, Elizabeth had no way of knowing how high profile her case had become. But this was the stuff of nightmares and it mesmerised and horrified the nation.

Here was a child, ‘safe’ in her bed, 'secure' in her suburban home, her sister sleeping alongside her, her parents and her little brother just along the corridor. If defied comprehension that a stranger should have violated this sanctuary to snatch her away in the night.

Elizabeth's younger sister Mary Katherine was the only witness to the crime. She had watched in terror pretending to sleep and conscious that her account alone might save her sister.
Today Elizabeth recalls that awful moment: 'I woke up with my little sister sleeping beside me, a dark man standing over me, and a knife to my throat...the stranger leaned over, his dirty beard against my face. "I have a knife to your neck," he whispered..."Don't make a sound."'

Mitchell had chosen Elizabeth in a chilling act of premeditation several months earlier one day in November 2001.

She, her mother and her little sister had just left a store in Salt Lake City. There was a beggar on the street, a young man who seemed, ‘down on his luck’ as Elizabeth’s mother later testified in court.

In an act of charity she gave him $5. Elizabeth looked him straight in the eye, and the family moved on. The beggar was Mitchell and that second their eyes briefly locked he decided that Elizabeth was ‘the one.’

And as his prisoner she saw first hand how meticulously he had planned her abduction because she witnessed with horror as he prepared for two further attempts to claim 'a wife.' Neither were successful.

On one occasion he threatened to kidnap Elizabeth’s cousin, Olivia, who lived near Mitchell’s mother. On another he and Barzee spent several weeks preparing their camp for another victim camouflaging it with brush and branches and getting an egg-carton case on which the victim would sleep.

With a flash of humour that shows the spirit Mitchell could not break, Elizabeth recalls Mitchell announcing that his next wife would be called Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz Rebeckah Isaiah. ‘Holy cow, I thought. That’s a worse name than Shearjashub.’

During her months as his prisoner, Mitchell and Barzee’s cruelty – both physical and mental – never once relented. But with time he became less cautious. Confident that his threats of violence to her family had tamed her Mitchell began taking Elizabeth on excursions into town.

He said he was a preacher. He dressed in robes and insisted on his wife and ‘daughter’ dressing similarly. Elizabeth wore a burqua style veil over her face which, he claimed to any who asked, was to save her modesty.

Mitchell’s behaviour on these trips was breath-taking. He stole, plundered trash cans and drank heavily. On one trip he crashed a student house party drunkenly ‘preaching’ at party-goers until all three were thrown out.

On another the odd trio drew the attention of a cop. The station had received calls from people suspicious that this veiled child was, in fact, Elizabeth Smart.

Mitchell insisted she was Shearshajub his daughter and that their religion forbade the removal of her veil. The officer was unconvinced. He asked Elizabeth her name.

But weeks of brutalising, isolation and convincing her that her family’s safety depended on her silence had taken their toll. She could not speak.

Elizabeth is very clear that it was fear, never the strange dependent loyalty of Stockholm syndrome, that stopped her speaking out.

She absolutely rejects any suggestion that she felt ‘emotional ties’ or experienced  ‘traumatic bonding’ with Mitchell or Barzee.

As the months went on she came close to resigning herself to simply outliving her captors, telling herself she would go back to her life ‘in thirty years or so.’

Instead she proved the architect of her own freedom. Mitchell and Barzee had taken her to San Diego to escape the harsh Utah winter. Elizabeth persuaded them to return.

Months with Mitchell had taught her how to be devious, how to manipulate. She appealed to his ego. She claimed she felt they should return to Salt Lake City, but that she was uncertain.

'I turned my eyes on Mitchell,' she writes. 'My voice soft and sincere, "Do you think you could ask God if we should go back...? I know He will answer you! You are His prophet!"'

The flattery worked. Mitchell prayed and returned to announce that God had indeed spoken and that they should return to Utah.

They hitched cross country drawing suspicion and stares with their strange clothing and Elizabeth's odd disguise - she had a grey wig and sunglasses. As a trio they ‘just didn’t fit in.’

And once back in Utah, less than 20 miles from her home, it was clear that the search for Elizabeth Smart had never ended as she often feared. On 12 March 2003, the suspicion of strangers in Sandy, Utah changed everything.

Elizabeth recalls the flicker of hope she felt as she saw a police car pulling over as they shuffled along the sidewalk.

She recalls the terror that rose once more as an officer asked her repeatedly to tell her his name. Then he leaned towards her and said: ‘Are you Elizabeth Smart? Because if you are your family has missed you so much…They want you back. They love you. They want you to come home.’

‘I am Elizabeth,’ she responded. She was found.

It was almost eight years until Elizabeth saw Mitchell again, as he stood trial in 2010. His hair was still long, his beard a little fuller but the most significant change of all, Elizabeth realised as she faced him, was that when it came to his fate, she ‘really didn’t care.’

Happily ever after: Elizabeth's marriage last year was filled with happiness she had once hardly dared to hope for in the dark days when she thought her only escape would be to outlive her captors

Elizabeth’s life since her abduction has been remarkable. She established the Elizabeth Smart Foundation dedicated to preventing predatory crimes.

She re-entered her life without counseling or therapy and refuses to let her captors claim any more than those nine months of her life.

On February 18, 2012, she married Matthew Gilmour a fellow Mormon and missionary from Scotland.

Now, inspired by her faith, she believes she could forgive her kidnappers one day. 'He was a nightmare,' she says. 'But it was over. I had woken up.'

On 21 May, 2010 Wanda Barzee was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for her role in the kidnapping and sexual assault of Elizabeth Smart, as well as one to 15 years at the Utah State Prison for the attempted kidnap of Elizabeth’s then 15-year-old cousin.

On 15 May 2011,having been convicted of the kidnap, hostage-taking and sexual abuse Brian David Mitchell was sentence to life without parole.

-DAILYMAIL