That a beautiful teenage girl could be kidnapped from her
comfortable home in an outrage that generated hour after hour of
television coverage and galleys of newsprint and yet be spirited
around the nation for nine months without being noticed is a
measure of the great disconnect that is now the community of
America.
Within the lifetimes of a lot of living citizens this could not
have happened. I refer to the Town America which has now passed, a
town in which everybody knew everybody else, or at least knew
somebody who did, knew more perhaps than was comfortable for some,
but in that skein of knowledge produced something that went with
the town, security.
No widow then could lie dead for weeks in an apartment,
unnoticed. No child, veiled or not, could be escorted through the
city unremarked. The idea that humanity was nobody’s business was
an alien thought, only naturalized over recent years. In hard
times, work-seeking men would gather in hotel lobbies looking for
rides from travelers in the hope of finding “something” in the next
town. They would get rides, too, aided by hotel clerks who would
button-hole salesmen checking out for the road.
The saga of Elizabeth Smart speaks of how far we have come on
the way to a cloister in which each looks at his keyboard. She was
taken June 5, 2002, from that plush Salt Lake City home, from a
family that had hours of video of a Hollywood-pretty girl, at the
beach, at the harp she played, at family outings. And it was all
played and played in America’s living rooms, for weeks. It is all
playing again, now that Miss Smart, a year older at 15, is back
with her family. Police cheered. A Salt Lake FBI agent going by the
name of “Chip” actually launched a press conference cheerleader
style. The police chief, Rick Dinse, spoke glowingly and frequently
evoked the Smart family’s stoic faith.
Chief Dinse, like another chief, Charles Moose of Montgomery
County, is trailed by an unpleasant memory. His white box
truck, the vehicle that led Moose and company astray in the search
for the snipers of last fall, is the ghost of a handyman, Richard
Ricci. You remember him; the handyman who did work for the Smarts,
stole a few items from them (Ricci had a lengthy criminal record),
became the suspect in the Elizabeth abduction, and then, last
August, died of an aneurysm. Through it all, the only witness to
the abduction, Elizabeth’s younger sister, Mary Katherine, insisted
Ricci was not the man she saw that night, the one who threatened
harm if she told what was happening.
Last October, Mary Katherine came to her father with another
recollection. The man that night resembled another fellow who had
done work in the house also, an Emmanuel. Ed Smart went to the
police. Emmanuel tuned out to be a drifter named Brian Mitchell,
known around town as a street preacher.
But where was America now? Did you see or hear much or anything
about any Emmanuel? In December there was a brief piece on the
abduction on cable. America’s Most Wanted’s John Walsh
tried to keep the Smart case alive. Ah, but hadn’t Ricci’s death
just about closed the case? The Smarts didn’t think so. Irked that
police would not give up on Ricci, they held another press
conference February 3rd of this year and offered $10,000 to anyone
who could clear Richard Ricci! The sketch of Emmanuel brought forth
his sister and some ex-stepsons with photographs of Brian Mitchell
in his various shaved and unshaved guises.
Wednesday’s edition of the Salt Lake Tribune carried
Tom and Ed Smart’s interview in which the brothers criticized
police for not pursuing Mitchell more vigorously, the first public
family break with authorities still chasing the ghost of Richard
Ricci. In fairness, police were trying to find some trace of
Mitchell, thought he might be in Florida.
Turns out he was a few miles away, on State Street in Sandy, the
suburban town adjacent Salt Lake City. A couple spotted a strange
looking man walking along with two women who seemed concealed in
mufti. A woman got out of her car and got a closer look and decided
it was the fellow the Smarts were looking for, called police on a
cell phone, and the story began to end. The smaller woman was
Elizabeth.
Over time we shall hear all of it, or some of it. The best
information is that the abductor took Elizabeth that night up into
the hills above the Smarts’ home. Whether Mitchell’s alleged woman
companion, Wanda, was with them then is not known. There were other
reported travels, to San Diego, California, perhaps to the East
Coast. And there are photos of the trio taken at functions in Salt
Lake City over recent months. But, nobody called.
Nobody, that is, until the nosy couple on State Street, who
stopped the car, got out and looked, defying all the modern tenets
of isolate living: judge not, know not, look not. It was bad luck
that Elizabeth Smart was gone so long. She had faded from the
screen.
It was her parents’ dogged determination that saved her. And the
recurring memory of her little sister.
