Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 489 - Taken from Her Bed: The Elizabeth Smart Abduction

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

In the middle of the night, a man with a messiah complex and a god-sized ego walked into a suburban Utah bedroom and stole a fourteen-year-old girl from her family. What followed was a nine-month nightmare of psychological torture, cult-style control, and one of the most chilling cases of child abduction in modern American history. This is the true story of Elizabeth Smart - and the monster who tried to make her his “wife.”Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You wake up in the middle of the night. It's June. It's a nice warm out and you're 14 years old. Just a couple of hours ago, you would set out your running shoes for the next morning. You'd plan this summer to run every day to give yourself the best shot of making the high school track and field team in the fall. You're just going to be starting high school. You're going to be a freshman. Surrounded by new teachers, new classmates, all of the anxiety that comes with not knowing where

or if you're going to fit into your high school's social hierarchy. You're excited, but you're worried, hopeful but scared over. how it all might go. But right now, you're not thinking about any of that. Right now, you're scared for an entirely different reason. In the dim bedroom, you share it with your nine-year-old sister, you see a figure, not your parents or any of your siblings, but not entirely a stranger to you either. You recognize him, but just barely. You're not sure from where. And you're not sure if it matters, because you don't know if you're going to live long enough to be able to identify him. He tells you to get up, stay quiet, put your shoes on if you don't want to be able to

want to get hurt. You obey his commands with trembling fingers. Your little sister stirs in bed, and you don't know if you want to wake her up. If by waking her up, she might make him angry or afraid, make him do something terrible. Or if this is your only shot for someone to see you and get a glimpse of the man who's kidnapping you from your childhood home. A man who you will soon find out want you, a child, to be his second wife. The first and what he hopes is a very long line of child brides. A moment later, and he's steering you down the hall, out the door, and towards the rust-colored, scrub-dusted hills behind your house.

Soon, your terrified sister will get up. She was awake when he came into your room, and she'll go tell your parents that she just saw you get kidnapped from your bed. One of every parent's worst nightmares. One of the things they fear the most, and perhaps paradoxically, might think is the least likely thing to happen of all the worst fears they have about their children. They'll mobilize neighbors, police officers, and eventually the FBI, they'll search for any sign of you plastering storefront windows with posters of your face and that single chilling word missing most people in salt lake city will know your name in mere hours most of the world will know it in a matter of days elizabeth smart kidnapped from her bed in the middle of the night at only 14 years old the surreal story of elizabeth's kidnapping and the very very strange monstrous person behind it right now on another true crime missing person definitely

culty episode of TimeSuck. This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to TimeSuck. You're listening. Happy Monday. Welcome or welcome back to the cult of the curious. I'm Miles Garrett. Defensive end for the Cleveland Browns, who just set the record for the most sacks in a single season.

Yes. I'm pretty excited about that, actually. Probably unless you don't care. But they've had so little to root for. Very, very happy. Before this recording, literally just minutes ago, he just set the record. Um,

Documents. Suckmaster, lone wolf Gonzalez, admirer, professional mush mouth, and you are listening to TimeSuck. Hail Nimrod, Hail Lucifina, praise be to good boy, Bojangles, glory be to Triple Him, and seriously, congrats to Miles Garrett.

What an accomplishment. I hope you're doing good. I hope you're having a good start to the year, crushing your resolutions if you made them, enjoying your life. And just like last week, let's jump right in. What do you know about Salt Lake City?

Maybe you know, perhaps from episodes, We've covered here that Salt Lake City has been the headquarters, for lack of a better term, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Moments, or the Moments, or the Mormons, since Brigham Young led them to Utah in the mid-19th century. You may also know from recent mega hits, like the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, and the secret lives of Mormon wives that Salt Lake City is pretty damn cosmopolitan, full of trendy restaurants, boutiques, hair salons, everything else that makes the influencer economy thrive. It's a beautiful area. It's a beautiful city. It's surrounded by, I've loved going there many times over the years. It's surrounded by numerous ski resorts. Tons of multi-million dollar homes, the Salt Lake City area home to a bunch of huge corporate campuses for companies like Adobe, home to headquarters for others like Beyond Incorporated Qualtrics. But that's Salt Lake City now. What about before? Back during the in-between times, right? After it ceased being a theocratic frontier town, but before it entered the modern age, what was it like in the 1950s?

often thought of as the golden age of family life in America. In the 1950s, Salt Lake City felt more like a large town than a modern metro area of to many. The city's population hovered around 180,000, so I mean, sizable. Most daily life revolved around a tight grid of neighborhoods anchored by churches, schools, and local Monpaw shops. Downtown was busy during the day, especially along Main Street and nearby Temple Square where the Salt Lake Temple rose high above the nearby buildings with its six towering white spires, but became noticeably quiet after dark. Store funds closed early,

streets emptied, and the city had a reputation for being very orderly and calm, even by mid-century standards. Of course, much of this was due to religion, especially the LDS Church, which shaped life the same way it shaped public behavior. Neat, predictable interactions.

While I can't find exact census records, numerous websites, estimate that at least 70% of Salt Lake City residents in the 1950s were LDS members. the real number probably closer to 80% than 70%. We learned from our episode on Beatrice Sparks, that bullshitting author, the being a Mormon isn't simply about going to church on Sundays.

It's a whole catalog of weekly required church activities like youth programs, choir rehearsals, family nights, these various sports leagues and more. Church wasn't a way of life, it was life. It was what you did in some form most days of the week. For many Salt Lakers, church structured, I don't think that's what's all the city people call themselves, but I just do it out there. Church structured all facets of life.

You'd meet your friends there, the person you might marry, make job connections. Once all that was established, if life progressed well along traditional lines, you'd probably move at some point to the new subdivisions spread an outward. Modest ranch-style house, maybe, with a neat lawn and a carport. But of course, we know from previous episodes, this isn't the entire picture of how Mormonism can shape life. we've now covered numerous fringe groups to come out of the LDS church, like the FLDS, known for practicing polygamy, living in isolated communities like Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. And for every fringe group, there have been countless fringe individuals,

like Charles Bruce Longo, aka Emmanuel David. That fucking bearded weirdo we covered back in episode 211. The guy whose wife pushed several of their children off an 11th floor International Dunes Hotel balcony, now a holiday inn, and convinced at least the at least the three oldest children to jump before her to their deaths. Well, actually one kid lived.

Another more recent weirdo we looked into in episode 378 was Chad Daybell who convinced a woman named Lori Vallow that several family members of hers were dark zombie demons that needed to be killed. We've covered less of these types of people, but they're always very interesting. While the church, you know,

has emphasized obedience, correlation, hierarchy, some members often low status, low income, socially isolated. have latched on to older folk versions of Mormonism, clinging to the doctrines of being able to receive personal revelations directly from God, apocalyptic thinking, visions of angels and demons, you know, prophetic callings that have bypassed church leadership decisions. Economically, many of these families have struggled.

They often couldn't or wouldn't fit into the church's upwardly mobile ideal of steady work, clean respectability, and social polish. These people weren't usually loud or openly defiant, not until their final insane acts at least. They lived in ordinary neighborhoods, attended meetings irregularly, and often slid in and out of church discipline. They might talk about dreams and time signs,

secret knowledge being chosen for a special role to mainstream LDS families. They were seen as off or unstable largely, but not necessarily dangerous, mostly just embarrassing, right? People to be avoided or pitied. This is exactly the kind of home that shaped today's villain's life.

Brian David Mitchell, a shadow world inside a highly ordered society made up a people who sought the spiritual meaning and purpose Mormonism provided without its restrictions of structure. Scholars sometimes call this the religious periphery or marginal religious expression, referring to unofficial or divergent interpretations of the same traditions, including personal revelations, local practices, or herodox beliefs that existed adjacent to and sometimes in tension with the official church. I should have said heterodox. I don't know what word I said. In the 1950s, Salt Lake City's intense emphasis on order, morality, and upward mobility meant peripheral families often had pretty low social capital and only decreased as they got more fringe, which meant fewer people to notice or intervene when behaviors became extreme. Combined with a father-knows-best attitude that kept family life private, a child like Mitchell could grow up never really realizing an alternative existed.

and his family in turn would have little sense of how their environment was shaping him, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of isolation and internalized extremism. All of this put together made for a belief system that was extremely hard to track and understand, and it would go on to create a crime that was just as inexplicable to investigators. After all, who breaks into a house in the middle of the night? A house they've only been to once before, and manages to wake up a child sleeping next to their sister and get that child out the door and into the woods before anyone else in the house can raise the alarm.

Who decides that they want a young captive bride and simply takes her from an upper middle class home in a suburb instead of any number of teenage girls, sadly walking around on the streets of America's downtowns? Where does that potent combination of insane desire and ability to follow through on that insane desire come from? Let's dive deeper into Brian David Mitchell's childhood to find out in today's time-suck timeline. Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-suck time. line. Brian David Mitchell was raised in a ramshackle home by a broad shoulder handsome father named Cheryl Mitchell. Like Shirley, but without the why.

A social worker with Salt Lake City Family Services, which is fucking crazy considering what his beliefs were, as we'll see. And Irene Sidwell Mitchell, who worked as a school teacher. Irene seemed a lot more stable. Seems like a pretty solid couple judging from their professions, but what were they really like? well let's start with shirle the more interesting of the two according to his obituary he passed away in 2012 shirle had shirle it's a name that doesn't really roll off my tongue growl shirle had had a pretty happy and interesting early life

born on march 26 1923 in salt lake city he grew up loving to sing apparently had a beautiful tenor voice sang in school choirs won multiple lead parts in east high school's musicals a school that fucking loved musicals random trivia most of the distance channel movie High School Musical starring Zach Ephron and Vanessa Hudgens was filmed at East High School in Salt Lake City and the opening scenes of its first sequel, High School Musical too, also filmed there.

Also, comedian and sitcom star Roseanne Barr went to East High School. Did you know she grew up in Salt Lake City? I don't know why I feel like I knew some stuff about her, but not that. She also grew up Mormon, kind of, keeping her Jewish heritage a secret from neighbors and friends. She would attend LDS services

and also go to synagogue. And while she was going to East High School, a couple decades after Sheryl, she was hit so fucking hard by a car of the hood ornament pierced her skull and her behavior changed so radically thanks to a traumatic brain injury that she spent eight months institutionalized at the Utah State Hospital. Again, random trivia. After graduating, Sheryl worked for a while, doing welding at some naval shipyards in San Francisco. Found some time there to sing in some opera choruses. When World War II broke out, it became an instrument repair technician for military planes in England. and following the war he returned to Salt Lake City to attend the University of Utah

where he would get a BA in philosophy and that was where he would meet Irene Sidwell and who was Irene? Well, Irene Sidwell was born June 3rd, 1925 in Salt Lake City just like her future husband. She attended South High School or she was a member of the yearbook staff not as many notable South High alumni out there but I found one who really cracks me up.

This guy actually seems like a really cool dude. Just very interesting. Dan Housel a 10th degree black belt grandmaster of Shoren Ryu karate Shoran Ryu or Shoran Ryu Karate and an author of more than 600 publications on geology including books, maps, professional papers, and magazine articles. That is not a combo you see every day.

That is not a combo I've ever seen before. Dude loves rocks and karate kicks. It feels like he has the type of life that an eight-year-old boy envisions. What do you want to do when you grow up? Danny? I don't be karate master who writes about rocks. Well, good for Danny. He fucking pulled it off. Back to another South High graduate now. A tragedy found Irene at a young age. Her mom was diagnosed with cancer and Irene found herself caring for both her mother and her two younger siblings had to grow up fast.

When Irene's mother passed away at the young age of 43, Irene became the family's de facto mother. After gaining a lot of experience and helping develop young minds as she herself was still growing up, Irene decided to get a degree in secondary education in English from the University of Utah. And there she met Cheryl, and the two bonded over their ultimate goal, attaining careers that would help people. They married on November 23rd, 1949, and had two children before Brian came along. The family lived just a few miles from the base of the Wasatch Mountains. God, those mountains are fucking beautiful rising up from Salt Lake City's eastern border in a community of low, low, slung houses, and curving dead-end streets. Brian was born on October 18th,

1954, his complicated delivery during a home birth put a strain on Irene's health. While Brian did have many of the trappings of a regular 1950s childhood, he played Little League, he joined the Cub Scouts, went swimming at a local pool, built toy rockets, and launched him nearby.

It was also marked by some tumultuousness. The family initially went to a local Unitarian church, where Brian was actually baptized, according to his dad. Not sure why they left the LDHA. church they both grew up in, I believe. The Unitarian Church is very different than the LDS Church. It's a very liberal religious community based on spiritual growth and inclusivity as opposed

to scripture or dogma that welcomes a very diverse set of beliefs, including atheist, agnostic, Christian, Buddhist, etc. Without creeds, emphasizing personal experience, reason, and compassion, and working to make the world a better place. It's barely a church in the way most of us think of a church. And eventually it just didn't work out for the mission. because Sheryl craved more creed and more structure. He grew tired of the, quote, smoking and the coffee drinking of the Unitarians.

He couldn't think of a more wholesome environment for raising a family in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Of course, the LDS Church prohibits smoking, drinking coffee or alcohol, and swearing and teaches a strict obedience to authority, all of which appealed to Cheryl. The family made the switch to their local ward, the Canyon Rim Fourth Ward. and there, Cheryl would not be a typical, you know, quietly listen and obediently follow member. Mormonism insult his issue, issues with the culture and how his family was being raised, but when it came to his own beliefs, he still wanted to figure some shit out for himself. Sounds like ideally he would like some mix of Unitarianism and Mormonism, or probably just to have his own church.

Struggling with spirituality, been a lifelong problem for Cheryl. Five years before he had married Irene, he began working on what would become a nine-hundred, page thesis on religion and philosophy called spokesman for the infant god or goddess okay so so he was that guy imagine a friend told you that that was what they've been working on in their free time a massive tomb called spokesman for the infant god or goddess if one of my friends said that i think the first thing i would do was laugh

because i would assume that they were joking you know just around just being absurd and if they didn't laugh i probably think oh looks like someone's going fucking crazy time to try and help them and if they don't want help maybe time to find a new friend I mean who knows maybe they have

maybe they would have some really cool thoughts about theology and philosophy but also could just be batched insane in the text he wrote show represented himself as a divine emissary naturally and at some point told his wife this is what makes you think this is just fucking nuts

and at some point he told his wife that he didn't want to work anymore and he wanted instead to devote his time all of his time to writing about his theological musings. Ah, here we go. Oh, my God. The shit people deal with in some marriages. I mean, I've been married, but, you know,

some of my second marriage, it's not like I haven't dealt with some stuff that I didn't care for. But some of the stuff, I'm just like, what? That's something that people I had to deal with. If we needed her income to make ends meet, and Lindsay, my wife told me that she just didn't want to work anymore because she wanted to focus all of her time on her spiritual musings.

That would not go well. It wouldn't go well vice versa either. But that we met with like, okay, you know what? You're your own person and you get to make your own choices. But I do too. And I do not want to be married to someone that fucking selfish. So you either work on your spiritual writings when you're not working for some money or use whatever funds the divorce attorney has left you with to cover your bills while you fucking, you know, listen to God and dictate essays from the fucking spirit world or whatever.

That's insane. So selfish when money is tight and you're raising kids. so poor Irene, right? That's as ridiculous to me as being like, hey, babe, work doesn't really fulfill me, but video games do. So here's the deal, okay? I'm done working. I'm going to play as many games as I can, as much as I can before I die. Tell the kids I'll be in the basement if they need me, but also tell them not to fucking bother me. I don't really want to raise the kids either. It's hard and annoying. And it's not as fun. It's gaming. So what were Cheryl's writings? In total, they would come to encompass two separate large volumes of densely written, often sexually explicit text. a text that bizarrely denounced marriage as an unnatural convention that organized religion forces on people.

I mean, okay. So it wasn't really that he wanted to focus on his spiritual understanding. He probably just wanted to fuck other people. So you know what? Just get a divorce, dude. Go be a single swinging dick. You cower the motherfucker. Or go find somebody who wants to be in an open marriage, you know?

They exist. But nope. He wanted to keep the life he had, but also have his other life. The marriage contract is a literal agreement for, copulative acquiescence and is an often abrogated agreement, Cheryl wrote in the subheading of one chapter. And another, he declared the erotic and sexual play of contemporary human teenagers and adults

to be maximally contraceptive and minimally reproductive. Why does it weird me out that he writes human teenagers? You can just say teenagers. Are you worried that somebody would think you weren't talking about humans? Is he talking about human teenagers or cat teenagers? I'm confused. No clue if he thought that was a good thing or not, but I guess he did. These writings would be accompanied by more than 30 pages of charts alone.

30 pages of charts that described the relationships between men and women. And all of this, at least according to Sheryl's claims, was ultimately born in the same impulse that guided his social work when he was working. He wanted to help people understand each other on a higher level. Uh-huh. Get the fuck out of here. Just go have your fucking hippie compound, buddy. That's what you really wanted, but he didn't have the ballast you go get it. The members of his ward, who Cheryl began to share his dad.

new teachings with were not into it. They thought this was fucking strange. They thought he was strange because he was. He thought he understood God on a higher plane than everyone else, said Robert Swenson, an official at the Canyon Rim, fourth ward, who grew up alongside the Mitchell game. As years went on, Cheryl got weirder. That's usually how it works, I think. He was increasingly moody, unconventional, and at times megalomaniacal.

For a while, he made his family adhere to a strict vegetarian diet, also began to socialize with other members of the ward less and less and shouted at his wife and their eventual six children more and more. Sometimes Irene couldn't take his fucking crazy shit anymore. She'd kick him out of the house, who could blame her, only to let him back a couple weeks later, though. Sometimes Sheryl would leave on his own, but he would always come back.

And none of this was, of course, good for their marriage or their family. While Irene was known as a creative and intelligent woman, the social stigma of having an unstable husband eventually wore her down. Cheryl's pension for peeking in other women's windows at night trying to peep on them while they were naked didn't do wonders for her mental health either. Yep, he did that too. He was a fucking creepy peeper.

A guy who didn't want to hang out with the dirty smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. Unitarian crowd. No, sir. But hiding out in the neighbor's yard while stone sober, watching his buddy's wife get undressed in her bedroom and beating off in the bushes. You know, that's cool.

Apparently the habit had started when he was a kid and it just, quote, got to be an addiction. In his own words. also not that's a weird thing to be addicted to I mean I'm not saying you can't be addicted to that I know you can't you definitely could but it's fucking weird kind of there's a part of me that really doesn't like him

frame this as an addiction even though I know it can be an addiction but it feels like pushing blame outside of yourself well I mean I listen I didn't want to be jerking off in the fucking bushes staring to my neighbor's tits you know while she was just you know thinking that she was alone in her own house but I'm an addict

but also a creep but also you are creep. He also acknowledged having now reached into a young into a young girl's panties at one point. Not sure what age he was when he did that, but I'm guessing he was an adult. He would force his sexual appetites on his wife, too. Then he would claim that he, uh,

though he would claim that he never physically abused her, he would admit that he forced himself on his wife while he was, quote, all riled up from a peeping Tom experience. Okay, so he did abuse her. He said he came home, gulped a glass of wine, uh-oh, and quote, jumped her bones. and then she later drew a large poster accusing him of abuse

that was unclear if she put the poster up anywhere. I wish I had more info in that poster. That's different. And all this was what made up young Brian's home life. And who knows how much more went on that was not revealed to psychiatrists during the forensic panel report that was written up on Brian following his arrest when these interviews were done. Guessing a bunch of creepy shit that dad did never made it into any reports.

Brian was a third of six, a classic middle child who got lost in the shuffle, he started to crave attention, either positive or negative, and by five years old, he had developed a rivalry with his younger sister, Lori, who was two. He would pick on his sister, then wait for the punishment Irene would deal out. Any reaction was better than none at all. This kind of behavior continued at school, and soon other kids knew to stay away from him. Around the age of seven or eight, he started lobbing rocks at fellow classmates, which got him even less friends and sent to the principal's office. Things did not get better after that. In fact, it got worse when Sheryl noticed Brian's budding interest in sex.

Sherle would show his son a medical book with graphic pictures of male and female genitalia, as Cheryl would later say, quote, the kids will play a doctor, and the other kids would run home and complain about Brian to their mothers. The fuck? By play doctor, are you admitting that Brian was molesting neighborhood kids? I think you are. And I think Dad knew that.

I wonder if he watched. I feel like Cheryl was super fucked up after going through all this research. This continued into Brian's teenage years at age 15 or 16. Brian was at home when a young girl from the neighborhood, no older than four, wandered over to the house. Brian exposed himself to her and she ran back home terrified. Other sources say he lured her to his house and insisted she touched his penis. Dad and son, both petos. Got it.

Girls' dad called police. Brian was arrested, taken away for a stint at a juvenile detention center. When he came home, he transferred from Skyline High School to East High School, Dad's alma mater. But records do not indicate that he actually ever went. apparently by this point he's behaving in quote cruel and sadistic ways towards his family according to later psychologist notes he frequently called his mother a bitch said he wanted her dead accused his mom of poisoning him on at least one occasion he told her he wanted to quote screw her eyes out and i don't think that means like you know actually literally pop her eyes out i think you wanted to fuck his mom

also broke his brother's collarbone beat his siblings quote about the face and dragged his sister not sure which one probably the younger one he had the rivalry with around by the hair soon he became so difficult he was sent to live with his grandma, but she was a full-time nurse and couldn't look after him or didn't want to because he's a fucking psychopath. When nobody wanted to look after him, he started staying in Sandy, a suburb of Salt Lake City with other troubled boys. He met in Jube, and that was when he started to drink and do some drugs. By the age 19, he was living in a directionless life, drifting from one place to another, got his high school diploma through a GED program, began to take courses at the University of Utah, but that only lasted a few

semesters before he quit. Around the time he got his girlfriend's 16-year-old Karen Charnetsky pregnant. They got married on August 13, 1973, when Karen was 17, Brian was 18, and a couple months later, their son, Travis Mitchell, was born. Their marriage would be very short-lived. Like his father, Brian was very controlling. He told Karen, she should only eat wheat bread, and he would yell at her when he would catch her eating candy. This escalated into abuse. Karen would later claim that he, quote, forced himself on her just two days after she gave birth. to their second child, Angie, another time she said he choked her until she blacked out,

and this possibly led to him getting arrested for assault. The two would end up getting divorced in 1975, with Brian telling his family that she was an unfit mother who, quote, had a past history of severe emotional problems and had, quote, left their children alone for hours at a time. Perhaps because of an extra marital affair on Karen's part, Brian would win full custody of his kids in 1976 and then quickly lose custody in 1977,

seven after he missed a court hearing. But instead of turning his kids over to their mom, he kidnapped them, at least legally, he did. He left the state with the kids in a new Mazda that he could not afford the payments on. The family of three would live in New York City for several months residing in a tenement in Harlem, and there Brian would get into frequently tripping on LSD.

Damn of Brian! Why do you have to drag LSD into this and tarnish his name? When he met a new girlfriend, the family decamped to New Hampshire, where Brian would spend the next two years studying to become an auto mechanic, but never finished training. need to become an auto mechanic. Some sources say he lived for a little while in a Harry Krishna commune. That feels right.

Around this time, he had a vision that changed his life. He was on acid. A trip to the bathroom, let him be looking in the mirror. And in the mirror, God spoke to him, looking like himself. God told him that he needed to head out west like the Mormons had before him and become a man of God. So, you know, it sounds like he got himself some good acid. Brian arrived back home in 1980, not entirely sure if 1980 was when.

his kids were reunited with their mom or if they came home before he did. Either way, everyone was back in Salt Lake City now in 1980. In his absence, the Mitchell family had left him behind. All five of his siblings had developed stable lives. The other Mitchell boys, Kevin and Tim, had gotten steady jobs. His sisters had all gotten married. Two of his siblings had even started work in his marriage counselors. And that spurred Brian to change his life as well.

So the black sheep stopped doing drugs, started attending LDS services, which he had never been very interested in before, and began going to single dances in his ward. That same year, another Mitchell changed her life as well, Brian's mom, Irene. She filed for divorce. Though she eventually recalled the paper, she would file again,

and the marriage would be dissolved in 1982. While Cheryl was stewing about the betrayal, his middle son's life had never seemed better. Brian seemed like a totally new person, genuinely interested in other people, not acting selfishly or antisocially like he had in the past, happy, regularly employed, a quick sense of humor,

didn't drag anybody around by the hair, it seems. Probably didn't have any kids touch his dick. Then he met Debbie Kravitz, described as a pretty blonde woman with three daughters at a lecture being given by W. Cleon Scowson, an LDS writer who was lecturing on the Old Testament. Cleon, or actually, Scocon, excuse me.

Scocon. Cleon Scocon. That's an unusual name. I looked into him, and he's every bit as fucking weird as I was hoping he would be. His full name, Willard. Willard Cleon Scocon. That is a name. And when I found some picks of him, my first thought was, yep, he looks like a Willard, Cleon Scocon.

In addition to being a big LDS theologian, also a big conspiracy theorist who wrote about shit like the New World Order. In the 1960s, he had founded a radical right group called the All-American Society, obsessed with the belief that Jewish bankers and shadowy communist figures were controlling the world and secretly trying to take over America, right? Same kind of shit conspiracy nuts fucking rant about today with the same amount of evidence, which is fucking none. He was very political in his speeches, advocated repealing the minimum wage, eliminating all unions, nullifying all anti-discrimination laws, selling off all public lands and national parks.

Cool. Eliminating income taxes and estate taxes, removing any and all walls, separating church and state, and ending the federal reserve system. Okay, so he's a fucking whack job. He was also in 1970s against the Mormon church allowing African-American men into the priesthood.

Right? He's an extremist radical right lunatic. And both Brian and and Debbie chose to attend his lecture. Which, you know, says quite a bit about their headspaces at this time. And before we learn more about Brian and Debbie's budding romance, that will for sure work out very well for both of them. Time for today's first to two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, please sign up to be a space lizard on Patreon. Help us make monthly charitable contributions.

Get the catalog ad free. Get episodes three days early and more. Thanks for listen to our sponsors. Hope you heard a deal that you like. and now let's return to 1980. Check back in with Brian and his new love Debbie. Debbie was thrilled to meet a handsome, clean-cut man, now newly working as a teacher at a Montezuri school

who seemed to adore her little girls. Of course he did. Uh-oh. How many girls did he molested that school? Even though he was living with his mom, he seemed like the kind of guy who could build a stable life with her, and that was why she overlooked some of his weirder habits,

like his strange frugality. He refused to take her out to eat. Instead, they would eat in his car. and oftentimes he would ask her to bring food for them, to eat in the car. God, there's just no shortage of fucking weirdos in the world, is there? Other times he would bring his own food, a kind of rock-hard bread. He would bake himself using wheat sprouts. He'd grown at home.

He would then layer apple slices on the bread and offer them to Debbie, who thought it was fucking disgusting. Despite Brian's peculiarities in November of 1980, Debbie and Brian got engaged. I guess Devy was desperate. They would announce it to the Mitchell family, on Christmas Day, presenting themselves as a loving couple excited to get their lives together started. Brian had an alternative reason to get married.

He wanted to show family court officials he had created a stable home so he could regain custody of his two kids, Angie and Travis. Brian and Debbie would get married in February of 1981. And just like that, the mild-mannered Debbie, excuse me, the mild-mannered man that Debbie knew would transform. On the wedding night, they honeymooned in a cabin in Heber City, a rural town about 35 miles from Salt Lake City. Brian told Debbie to bring along some of her two-year food supply which the Mormon church tells members to keep in case of emergencies Debbie was hungry the whole way there

but Brian wouldn't let her eat anything finally he consented to her getting a small a small meal from KFC then when she tried to kiss him he got angry, literally shoved her away telling her to quote not be the aggressor and again this is on their wedding night

despite this very weird fucked up beginning. They tried to make a life together with her five collective children, and then Debbie got pregnant within the year after righteous patriarch Brian initiated taking her bike out for a spin, as God intended, not vice versa, giving birth to her son Joseph, and then she would give birth to a daughter, Sarah. But instead of going out, providing for his family as Mormon doctrine teaches, Brian left his job and stayed at home during the day while Debbie would work at a job at the state government, with the state government. And I'm not surprised. So many righteous patriarchs. I've fucking met these guys in real life and had awkward conversations with him.

I'll say that. These guys who are like, you know, I just want a fucking, you know, lady just, you know, isn't so modern. We have some of these guys around here. You know, they want this traditional life. It's like, okay, well, are you going to fucking then follow the traditional part and do all the providing? They seem to be very bad at that part. They're not all like this, you know, but a lot of them are just, they're fucking losers. They're just fucking idiots. like Brian. Yep, very good at enforcing the submissive woman does as her husband instructs part of the deal, but not good at the providing for the family part of the deal. Brian not working. Was just about the least to Debbie's worries, though. Early on, Debbie told Brian about her fear of mice,

and so what did he do? He came home one night with a live mouse in a jar and no lid, and just watched her scream uncontrollably and seemed to love that reaction. Another time, as she cleaned the stove, one Sunday, she opened up her oven to find 50 fucking dead mice laid out neat rows on a cookie tray. And you know what? Points for creativity. But if she was truly terrified of mice, that's fucked up. Brian was also conventionally cruel as well, dictating exactly what clothes his wife should wear,

slinging insults at her, eventually hitting her so hard she blacked out. And that's usually how it goes, right, with these controlling types. They don't just stop, you know, at the verbal. They almost always go physical and once they become physically abusive, it just gets worse.

1983, Brian was somehow awarded custody of Angie and Travis from his ex-wife. I'm guessing he, well, he's, I say guessing. He's a very manipulative dude who can pull it together when he used to be and I'm sure that's what he did

with the court. But then just months later with the house growing crowded Brian put 10 year old Travis and eight year old Angie into foster care because he's a piece of shit. Took his kids away from their mom

and then just a few months later he was like, I don't like this. Nah. Parents are, this is hard. This is hard. How can I get rid of him? Where can I drop him off?

The next year, Brian and Debbie would divorce in the filings. Brian turned it around saying that it was Debbie who abused the kids somehow like before, right again, he's fucking manipulative. He got custody and it would not go well.

Nearly a year after the couple split, Debbie began to worry about their three-year-old son after he behaved in a sexual way with their daughter, Sarah. When she asked Joseph what he was doing, he said he had learned it from his debt. Ah, fuck. Debbie called social services on Brian June 7, 1985, but they couldn't find concrete evidence of sexual abuse. They did say that Joseph seemed too interested in sex for his age and recommended only supervised visits with Brian. Around the same time, Debbie's 12-year-old daughter, Rebecca, would tell her mom that her ex-staffed dad had sexually abused her for years, beginning when she was eight years old.

Right after Brian and Rebecca got, right after Brian and her got married. He and Debbie, he had threatened her saying that if she told anyone, he would do the same to her sisters. Right. Fuck this guy. Not confident in the police, Debbie brought it to the LDS authorities, and they didn't do anything. And I'm not surprised. Most churches historically really not good. when it comes to dealing with sexual predators, like really, really aggressively not good.

If only prayer could actually cure pedophilia. And I would love that to be true, by the way. And if it was true, there was evidence out there that it was, I would be promoting religion as a cure for that evil all day long every day. But it's not. So now Brian's an unpunished pedophile who still has access to little kids. Meanwhile, things were not going well financially for Brian. He had worked a series of low-paying jobs here and there during his two marriages.

as a janitor, carpenter, construction worker, frequently getting fired. You know, he doesn't last very long or anywhere. He doesn't have the money he needs to make child support payments to Debbie. He was borrowing money from his dad, Cheryl, for that. I wonder if Brian learned his sexually predatory ways from dad. Maybe dad felt some sympathy for his son's plight. Brian also started going to group therapy after his divorce,

and this is where he will meet a woman named Wanda Barsey Thompson. Once, Wanda had been an eager, well-groom graduate of South High School's 1964 class shown in her yearbook with a helmet of Auburn hair and a quiet prim demeanor. As the middle of three daughters born to Marvin and Dora Barsey, she was close to her sisters, and they would often stay up all night laughing until their dad a master organ builder threatened to come up and spank them. A master organ builder. What a very specific trait. I love it. Wanda grew into a spiritual young person who doted on her family and prayed dutifully. She got good grades. Always did what her parents told her to do. Although her son,

would later say there was a darkness to that. According to him, Wanda was molested by her fucking dad, Marvin, who died of cancer in 1970 at the age of 54. God damn it, Marvin! Fuck you and fuck your organs. Poor Wanda found solace in music. Started playing piano at a young age, would apparently have to be forced away from it

so her siblings could practice. In high school, she never dated. No, it was probably because she was being fucking molested. But she wouldn't end up marrying a man named Talmadge Thompson, 19 years old after. meeting him at an annual church conference. Wanda would then have three kids in three years, and after a fourth year,

it came along a few years later, she had severe postpartum depression. But Talmadge didn't care. He pushed for more kids, believing that a healthy woman could and should kick out a kid every year. I fucking hate every single guy who's shown up in this episode so far.

He also beat up his wife. Of course, Tommage did, and he beat their children, and he didn't make enough money to support the large family he wanted. These fucking clowns are all the same. So predictable. I wish you could push some kind of magic button that would just cause all of them,

wherever they happen to be in the world, at whatever age they are, to just start burning alive. That would be the most satisfying button ever. Could somebody please start working on that button for me? You know what? I'll take the moral responsibility. You just designed the magic fucking fire button.

I'll be the one who pushes it. By September of 1983, poor Wanda was in the middle of a nervous breakdown. And at a meeting of her local relief society, a Mormon women's group, Wanda snapped. She started to shout at the other women that she felt she had been

stomped on by in the community the entire time she'd been in the ward. Instead of ever helping her, they just treated her like garbage. Of course, this polite group of women who were probably completely worthless when it came to doing anything but offering hollow platitudes, they were, you know, put off by this outburst, and nobody reached out. Wanda would finally divorce Talmadge in 1984. He got custody of the kids while Wanda tried to recover from her breakdown at her parents' house, and she had a hysterectomy, and she was prescribed psychotropic medication, but didn't take it. She did, however, go to therapy, and eventually she moved into a little duplex near the LDS 10th ward. This poor woman, likely, very likely, almost certainly sexually abused by her dad growing up, then abused by her husband,

started at the age of 19, is now trying to put her life back together at the age of 40, or really just put it together for the first time. And in late 1984 or early 1985, she meets 32-year-old Brian David Mitchell. God damn it. Right? We all know now that her shitty life is just going to get shittier. Brian seemed at first like the man of her dreams By late 1985

The two were engaged Then they were married on November 29th of that year Same day Brian's divorce from Debbie came through They would now proceed to live by the strictest LDS teachings Stuff like no swearing Turning off the TV if something sexual comes on And then just like before after the marriage Brian changes He doesn't hit her but he screams at her and throws things

He finally agrees to go to couples counseling around the same time that Wanda's youngest three kids, Derek, Mark, and Lou Rhee come to live with them. The kids soon notice that their mom has developed some weird habits with Brian. Like caring for dolls the way a little kid will, you know. She'll wrap dolls up in blankets, prop them up in chairs, talk to them like they're alive. Jesus Christ, even bringing them with her while she goes out. So that's concerning.

That's concerning. Her mental health is not, it's not in tip-top shape. Brian was even weirder. at this point he's getting really into hypnotism that made me laugh out loud when I first found out about it it's just it's so random and yet also perfectly tracked somehow I just picture they're at home

you know mom's talking to the fucking doll sitting in the high chair dad's like just quiet I'm working on my hypnotism he would also padlock he started to padlock the family TV at night so nobody could turn it on he would literally lock the TV up so his mind's working very well

These are, this is a power couple. Brian will yell at the slightest provocation. The couple also becomes more and more socially isolated, which is not good. Within the first few years of their marriage, they had written a blistering letter to every other member of the Mitchell family, saying they were no longer going to associate with him, so that's cool. And then things get weirder still, though Brian seemed to sum around this time to be professional, like a level-headed guy. He was actually making okay money, working as an office messenger for a jewelry-making firm.

At home, things were different. Brian would often try to get alone to spend, you know, time alone with Wanda's daughter, 12-year-old Doree, bursting in on her when she was changing or trying to tuck her in at night with a hug and a kiss, then angry that a fucking 12-year-old is rejecting his sexual advances. He decides to punish her. He'll get her to sit down for a big chicken dinner one night, and then after she has done eaten, he will reveal that the meat, not chicken. It was actually her pet bunny, Peaches, whom he had killed earlier that day.

Oh, and around this time He also shot Wanda's son Mark's pet dog In the fucking head on a hunting trip Where's my fire button? God, I will go to whatever church You want me to go to for the rest of my life I'll never doubt you If you just give me the sorcery

To burn these motherfuckers alive If you let me fucking murder Tens of millions of thousands of millions of people I will go to church every Sunday Please and thank you I'm serious I'll fucking do it You let me fucking kill most of

You know what, I'm gonna take it up further Because I know that once I start making out my kill list It's going to get a lot longer. You let me kill 90% of the people on Earth. Oh, I'll be great. I'll be on the straight and arrow after that. Despite all this, Wanda stuck by Brian, even when 18-year-old Derek couldn't take to live with Brian anymore,

moved out, even when 15-year-old who left the house to live with her dad to escape Brian's advances, poor Mark was the only one that remained, and he wasn't happy about it. He got pretty freaked out when the couple woke him up one morning to tell him that they had just seen some angels. So that's cool. by the mid-1990s

walking advertisement for abortion, Brian, was a regular at political meetings, of course, of course, for local anti-government fringe groups. Yep, that tracks, in part emboldened by the candidacy of Bogritz, a decorated Vietnam vet, survivalist and libertarian,

also a dude who continually traveled in white supremacist circles and was fucking insane. I've read a lot about him before. Brian now believed that income taxes were unconstitutional, that people didn't have to pay him. In fact, Brian maintained

there was a legal procedure to be declared exempt from them. So he's a sovereign citizen moron. Also, what kind of income? Is he fucking worried about? I feel like most of these people who are like all fucking amped up about stop taking my money, government.

It's like, motherfucker, you haven't had a stable job in eight years. Why are you the one complaining? He also didn't want to pay his ties to the LDS church. The church cut ties with him. He was also against modern medicine. From now on, he and Wanda

would only use herbal cures. When Wanda's stepdad, Glenn got diagnosed with prostate cancer, Brian decided to transform himself into a spiritual healer. He quit whatever fucking part-time job he had, and as he became a healer, he started to eat nothing but fruit, which didn't last forever because I'm guessing diarrhea interfered with that plan. Brian circulated through his Mormon friends' houses now trying to sell them on... Trying to sell them on a, quote, $350 donation to support his new identity as a spiritual

healer. come on man give me 350 bucks and i'll lay my hands on you whenever you get sick they unsurprisingly turned him down like all of them did so now brian and wanda i wonder if she's still carrying it all around like like it's a real child now they began to sell off most of their possessions probably kept the dolls though uh brian briefed he got a job uh at an ironworks then quit and announced to his family that he wanted to be called david as in king david from the old testament so he's doing could be doing better. 1995,

Hintwanda got rid of their home and bought a fifth-wheel trailer, which they drove to Heber City before proceeding to somewhere in rural North Idaho when their ties to the Heber city community soured. Their destination in Idaho would be

one of Bo Grits' survivalist compounds. But they'd only be allowed to live there for a few months because Grits' followers thought they were too radical. Also, within weeks of leaving that camp, their trailer was repossessed because Brian hadn't made any payments on it. And now they're truly homeless.

and honestly, after the fucking choices these two have made, they should have been homeless. Now Brian and Wanda, neither one's taking care of their kids at this point, would proceed to hitchhike back and forth across the country, carrying bedrolls and thumb and rides. I do feel bad for her more than him. I feel like she's probably just mostly suffering from mental illness. They made whatever they could begging on the street corners on the east coast before heading back west California, somehow making it over to Hawaii at one point and Alaska, finally returning to Salt Lake City in 1997. now Brian's new life plan is to live in a teepee up in the Wasatch Mountains

all part of his new religious ideas oh man Brian never had any good plans but he had no shortage of ideas right he was an idea guy while staying with Wanda's mother Dora she must have been so proud of her son-in-law he started to draft his new religions founding texts

and when Dora finally told him that he couldn't just keep freeloading off of her and that he needed to go get a job in late 1997, well, then he and Wanda, they'd had enough for shit and they left. For the next part of their plan, they will need Brian's dad, Sheryl, to drive them up to the Wasatch Mountains into a canyon

just behind the Federal Heights Ward. Cheryl agreed, and he made several trips to help Brian set up his teepee. Cool. So just a bush-beaten window creeping fucking creep, helping his 43-year-old Pito son set up a teepee on land he did not own

for him and his wife to live in where he can work on his new religion. What a family. Oh, man, if I had the fire button, I would burn them all. I would go back in time and burn them all. Brian was no longer going by David now. He was not going by Brian either.

No, now he was going by Shurlson, as in Son of Shirl. And he declared that he and Wanda needed to start wearing robes. Fuck yeah, bro. Yes, I love it. I mean, if you're going to be Shurlson, that is a dead.

giveaway, you're going to be wearing a robe. Every day. I love it. I love it. I mean, if you're going to go live in the woods in a tepee, as a white man, no less, work on your new religion, and you've started to insist that people call you, Shirlson, how could you also not start wearing a rope? It's the only outfit that works. I mean, if you do all that and you wear a track suit, fuck you. If you wear work boots, jeans, and a flannel shirt, what kind of half-ass fake prophet lunatic are you? Take it all the way or fuck right off?

Wanda would make her in Shurlson's robes using her mom's sewing machine. Just picture her and baby doll sitting by the sewing machine making cult robes. One sets purple to signify royalty. Brian, of course, would wear the purple robe. Other one is white to signify purity. That's for Wanda. These robe wearing weirdos didn't live in their Canyon TV full time. Sometimes they would live at Brian Mom's Irene's house.

Other times they would live on the streets of downtown Salt Lake City or just lay out in the hills somewhere. Circle of Salt Lake County. Sometimes they'd also sleep in a pioneer-style covered wagon that Brian had built. Did I mention he built a pioneer wagon? Or sometimes they would just stay in cardboard boxes. He didn't build a boxes, I don't think. During the day, Brian, I mean Charleston, would frequently be seen panhandling outside of a Kinko's. Just off a Main Street.

Why does Kinko's make it so funny? I just picture some guy, you know, normally going in to make his copies. Brian's like, hey, Brad, more copies today? Okay, good seeing you, Charlson. Keep up the profit work. To many, he is now simply known as the Jesus guy. Despite social workers' efforts to get him and Wanda into homeless shelters, Brian always refuses. He'll also often introduce himself as Emmanuel and his wife as Ila.

Now, so many names. It's hard to keep track of. Some social workers, once these two or later arrested, realized they never knew their real names. On Thanksgiving Day 2000, God gave Brian. I mean David. I mean, Sherylson. I mean Emmanuel. A message, according to him. But you know what? It probably was God. I mean, he does seem like a trustworthy source.

God told Brian, when they for sure spoke to one another, that he was the true prophet. He was Emmanuel David Isaiah. And his wife was Hefzeba Elada Isaiah. Fantastic. That's great that each have three names. Normal, not crazy sounding at all American names. Just a couple of well-adjusted patriots. The couple was, as God demanded, to take seven new brides for Brian, who would all be sister wives to Wanda

and those brides were to be young of course but not for listen not for creepy sexual pito reasons no get your mind out of the gutter no it's so they wouldn't be set in their ways so Emmanuel David Isaiah could make them more god and righteous and stuff and wholesome

Ryan had never indicated before apparently that he had approved of polygamy but now Wanda was on board with this I guess perhaps she consulted her baby dolls and they were like look at this way mom the more other wives he has the more time you can spend playing with us. And she was like, thank you, my precious babies.

That's why I can never leave you. I can never replace your wisdom. Despite this new godly decree that was mostly about name changes in teen brides, Brian would put his plan on the back burner when 9-11 happened. Yeah, the World Trade Center, Twin Towers, weren't the only precious things those terrorists

destroyed that day. They also fucked up God's plans for Brian. God damn, you bin Laden. After the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks, there were several months during which Brian and Wanda shed their robes in favor of regular old street clothes and tried to act like normal people. Brian trimmed his hair, shaved his beard, looking almost exactly as he had before his latest big revelation. Apparently somebody had told him, you like Osama bin Laden, and he feared the growing

backlash against Muslims that would prompt someone to attack him in Wanda. So the two would now alternate between camping in the woods around Dry Creek Canyon and staying with Irene, where Brian kept working on his new text, by the way. By working on his text, I mean plagiarizing other texts. One text he plagiarized was C. Samuel West's book, The Golden 7 Plus One. He also was intrigued by a life after death book called Embraced by the Light and two other books written by excommunicated Mormons. Let me read you a bit from the introduction of the Golden 7 plus 1

to give you a taste of the kind of insanity that Brian was digesting. As a result of an invitation from Dr. Raymond Ballinger, MD, president of the Eighth International Congress of Lymphology. On September 22nd, 1981, Dr. West presented the one basic formula, upon which this book is based to some of the top medical research scientists and lymphologists in the world. By accepting this invitation, Dr. West put this formula in seven years of his life to the acid test. The power of this basic formula is that it reveals what can and must be done to prevent and, if possible, reverse the destruction that is now being caused by the crippling and killer diseases.

We do not have time to lose. Cancer is now killing more children between the ages of 3 and 14 than anything else. It is affecting 2 out of 3 families. One out of every 5 deaths is caused by cancer. The atomic bomb killed about 70,000 people. Cancer is killing over 400,000 men, women, and children every year in this nation alone. Heart disease is killing over 1 million a year.

One out of every 2 deaths in the United States is now caused by heart disease. One out of 1 is everyone. It is evident that the time is soon coming. There's a lot of exclamation points. It is evident that the time is soon coming when the only ones who will be saved from death and destruction by disease are those who discover and obey the laws of health.

The one basic formula reveals what these laws are. The one who made the body made the basic formals for life and death at the cell level. With his help, we have finally found them. And this is the power behind this book. If any of that made sense to you, if those stats seem correct to you,

please, please make an appointment to meet with the therapist immediately so they can start trying to figure out what serious mental illness you're battling. On February 15th, 2002, Brian's little sister, Lori, died of a rare cancer, leaving behind six sons and a husband. They lived in Washington, a little town in southern Utah, and though Irene and others in the Mitchell family went down to visit her husband and those kids, Brian would stay behind. He simply had too much important work to do.

He's working on his Bible. Not the Bible, no his own Bible. Less than two months later, On April 7th, Brian will put the finishing touches on his 27-page book, the book of Emmanuel David Isaiah. What an incredible name. In it, he outlined a new covenant called the Seven Diamonds Plus One Testament of Jesus Christ. Almost like you plagiarized that title from the Golden 7 plus one.

Brian's Plus One was the quote, inspired sacred music and song and the testimonies of all the humble followers of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Ghost. Okay. On page 23 Were three sentences It seemed almost like an afterthought Wanda was to take

Quote into thy heart And home seven sisters And thou wilt recognize them Through the spirit As thy dearest And choicest friends From all eternity Those sisters were to bring

Hefzeba great joy They would then deliver copies Of this weird pamphlet To everyone they knew You can find copies Of this shit online And it is every bit As insane as you would expect

Here's an excerpt I would provide context, but it's pretty hard to figure out what the fuck he's talking about the entire time. As I was administering in the Holy Temple of God, performing the ordinances of the Holy Endowment, the Lord God spoke unto me, saying, my precious daughter, Iela, thy sins are forgiven thee. For I have seen the faithfulness in testifying of me and in doing all that I have asked of thee. I say unto thee, Elada, that thy thy. My offerings and thy sacrifices are accepted of me, and thou art found worthy, through the blood of the spotless lamb to do a far greater work than that which thou hast hitherto alone.

Yay, I have called thee, and chosen thee, from before the foundation of the world. For even as I chose Sarai, and named her Sarah, even so I have chosen thee, Elada, my daughter, and I named thee Hefzeba, Illa, Isaiah. which name being interpreted means my delight is in thee. He fucking loves to write thee. God adorneth, the Lord is salvation, signifying that thou art highly favored and blessed among women, and thou wast for ordained to be the mother of Zion and the New Jerusalem, and of the kingdom of God.

In this, the dispensation of the fullness of times. Then I cried out, oh Lord, how can this be? For I am unlearned. And I have been hated and despised among the children of men ever since my birth. And the Lord answered me, saying, of a truth, Hes Zibar. My delight is in thee, and I say unto thee. Thou art the most cherished angel in the heavens, and thou dost not need an earthly school, for I will be thy teacher, and heavens will be open to thy view,

that thou mayest be taught from on high. And lo, Satan has hated thee from thy birth, for he knoweth thy calling, and he has sought every means to destroy thee, and he has tempted all those whom thou lovest most to turn against thee, to destroy thee. Nevertheless, Satan's bounds are said, and he cannot pass beyond them, for I have long heard thy prayers, my daughter Hefzeba, which have ascended up to me from the deep wellspring of thy tender heart upon the fountain of thy tears, and I am moved with all the hosts of heaven to plead fervently in thy behalf before the throne of mercy,

justice and grace. And know this, my daughter, that all thy suffering and anguish of soul has been for thy good and has given the experience and thou hast learned to detect the very most subtle appearances of evil, and to put all thy trust in me, therefore my daughter be patient with those who do not understand thy colleague. For in a future day, they will understand, and thine own mother shall weep upon thy neck and plead for thy forgiveness. What the fuck? 27 pages of that insufferable, nonsensical thee and thou bullshit. The circus music made it just barely tolerable.

A few days later, on April 18th, Irene reached her breaking point. Her son and his wife were scaring her. She had been trying to leave the house, but they literally would not let her. They kept insisting that she needed to hear more of that manifesto. stuff I just read. So they're both definitely not mentally ill. They're both doing great. Irene called the police who came and took a report when Deputy Troy Naylor

asked Brian what had happened. Brian just started preaching him. Just started reading some of the shit that I just read. And I bet Deputy Naylor could not leave fast enough. Irene was started procedures for a restraining order against in that same day. She told them they had to leave the house immediately and furious they told her, you will be destroyed. Your family will be destroyed. Your home will be destroyed.

I love that Brian threatens his mom. with the destruction of her family as if he is not in his mom's family. This would be the last time that Brian and Wanda will ever be given shelter by any of their family members. And now let's back up a few months before moving forward and check in with the smart family. But first time for today's second and two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors.

Hope you heard some deals you liked. Now let's head to November of 2001 with Elizabeth's mom Irene meets Brian Mitchell. One day in November of 2001, the previous fall, a panhandler had approached Louise. smart. Elizabeth Smart's mom in downtown, excuse me, Lois, not Louise, Lois Smart, in downtown Salt Lake City. He was thin and clean-shaven with a crown of dark hair

and said his name was Emmanuel. He said he was a preacher staying in SLC with his sister and that he needed some help. Lois sized him up. Her husband, Ed, often hired homeless people to do odd jobs around their house in the affluent Federal Heights neighborhood, and Lois told Emmanuel that he could come by the house and see if Ed had any work for him. And with that, Lois went on her way and basically forgot about it. She was a busy woman. Her husband, Ed, was a son of a prominent oncologist, and he had become a very successful mortgage broker who owned two real estate companies in town. He had just put their $1.19 million home on the market.

That left Lois with the tasks of packing up, taking care of their six kids, keeping track of their social calendar and their religious obligations and making sure that everybody got what they needed. She had a lot of shit on her plate. When Emmanuel came over the next day, he and Ed went up to the roof to fix some leaky skylights and Ed was impressed. This guy worked hard. He seemed serious about preaching and he assumed probably he'd had a hard life. He offered him more work the next day but then Emmanuel never showed back up. And I'm guessing he assumed that was the last time he would ever see this guy or hear about him, right? If only that was true.

The rest of the year would pass with more of the same for the smart family with six kids between the ages of 15 and three. The smarts were busy living the kind of life that both Lois and Ed had grown up in. affluent, connected, deep Mormon roots. For them, family was the most important thing always. This was brought in a sharp belief that spring when Lois' father, the respected typesetter, Myron, Frankum, fell terminally ill. For three months, Lois took the kids to visit their granddad at his house and a holiday every single day.

And the smart kids weren't only content to just visit their grandfather. They raked his yard, did chores around the house, planted a new flower garden. When he died on June 1st, 2002, Lois was hard. heartbroken and so were her kids. But her kids being kids, they also quickly started to think of other things. By June of 2002, 14-year-old Elizabeth was thinking about school. She's ready to be done with eighth grade, right? She already had her mind fixed on a spot on the high school track team. She met with the coach for East High School who gave her a summer training schedule and instructed her to run two miles a day, which she started to do. Her new coach picked up on what Elizabeth was trying to hide that she was daunted by the prospect of high school and wanted something to give her direction and social group. shy but determined that was Elizabeth.

Born on November 3rd, 1988, Elizabeth was a second of Ed and Lois's six kids and the eldest daughter. Elizabeth, her sister, and her four brothers were a playful, rowdy gang, also they're just excellent kids, always respectful of their parents and other adults. Indeed, Elizabeth seemed to be enamored with life in her hometown. Would you know it's not always the case with teens? In assignments for school, she would write poems about mountain air, horseback rides, homemade bread and roasted marshmallows. she adored her family and her family's lifestyle.

At a time when Paris Hilton was regularly making the tabloids for partying for days at a time, nothing about the world of big cities and pop culture seemed to interest Elizabeth at all. She was an old soul, did not find makeup or new hairstyles, interesting, didn't even use the internet or have an email address. Instead, she spent most of her time with her family, including her extended family,

which boasted 76 first cousins between the two sides. Holy shit. Right before 9-11, her grandparents, Dorothy and Charles Smart, took the entire family, over a hundred of them, when the cousin's parents were factored into New York to the birthplace of Mormonism. Every year, the smarts would vacation in Montana at a massive family homestead

that looked more like a fancy summer camp with the boys in one cabin and the girls in another. Her best friend was her nine-year-old little sister, Mary Catherine, the two shared a bedroom, and despite the five-year age gap, they were inseparable. They often curled up in the same bed and fell asleep holding hands. Come on!

just the most adorable wholesome family ever. Mary Catherine, in turn, idolized her older sister and would join her on runs that is so fucking cute through the neighborhood in the late spring of 2002. Mary Catherine also wanted to learn how to play the harp. Elizabeth specialty. Yes, she played the harp, loved her family, loved her town, didn't cause trouble, often fell asleep,

cuddled up with her little sister slash best friend holding hands. She might actually be an angel. This is like the most fucking wholesome family. family. Elizabeth spent up to three hours practicing the harp every day. Her specialty was the canteena song from Star Wars. I love it. One day she thought she might go to Juilliard, but in the meantime, she's getting paid work for her playing at weddings, funerals, even local concerts. She would play to her grandfather's funeral on June 3rd, sending him off with a beautiful harp solo that drew tears from the crowd. She's a special kid. The next day, June 4th,

Elizabeth and Mary Catherine, set out for another jog. Then that evening, this March, loaded Elizabeth harp into the car and headed for Bryant Intermediate School. This was a year-end awards program and Elizabeth was supposed to play but they were late for some reason I don't know, maybe traffic and she missed her performance. Still she beamed and she picked up honors for her schoolwork

and physical fitness. And then the family headed home. Once back in their cul-de-sac, Ed Smart opened the garage door hurried out of the car. Elizabeth's harp was very heat sensitive and very expensive and he was rushing to get it back inside the house. He would later recall that he had pressed the button to close the garage door behind

him, but it shut halfway and then sprang back up again. Something must have blocked the door's sensor. Ed thought as he continued into the house with the harp, he meant to go back out to check, but then got distracted. That night, the family said their evening prayers at the top of the stairs. Before they turned in, Lois asked Ed to go check the door locks, and he suddenly remembered the open garage door and went back downstairs. Check three sliding doors at the front of the house and the kitchen door as well. And out in the garage, he found a tarp blocking the door's sensor. Maybe just an accident, maybe not. he moved in it uh moved it hit the switch and the door closed as it should have upstairs the only smart kids still awake was 15 year old charles who was studying for an exam uh elizabeth and her dark red sat in pajamas climbed into bed or had climbed into bed her white polo running shoes tucked into her closet for tomorrow then a few hours later mary katherine woke up to what felt like a nightmare but was all too real and now we're back to where this episode began be quiet or i'll kill you the man said

He was holding what she would later remember as a gun, but would turn out to be a knife. She didn't move a muscle as her sister Elizabeth got out of bed on the man's orders. Mary Catherine couldn't see his face, but she noticed that he was of medium height about the size of her brother Charles. I should say he couldn't see his face clearly. The man ordered Elizabeth to grab a pair of shoes. Why are you doing this? Elizabeth quietly asked as she put on her white tennis shoes, but no answer came. And then the man steered her out of the room and into the dark hallway. then Mary Catherine got up

She wanted to run and tell her mom and dad But when she looked out the man was still in the hallway This time she at least got a better look at his face He's taking his time As he peered into the smart kids room So scared Little Mary Catherine slipped back into her shared bedroom And waited until he left

Then faded into Ed and Lois's bedroom It was now 358 a.m. And Elizabeth was gone. Ed sprang out of bed hoping his 9-year-old daughter He just had a nightmare. Then he went door to door through the bedroom thinking Elizabeth had to be somewhere, but each kid's room only revealed its usual occupant,

Charles, Edward, Andrew, and William. In their shock and disorientation, the smart parents thought that maybe Elizabeth had gone jogging. But then when they went downstairs, Lois noticed that a window screen had been cut. That was when she literally started screaming. When the horrifying reality of what had happened truly sank in, the call to 911 was put out at 401 a.m.,

then Ed immediately started to call anyone who he thought might be able to help, his older brother, Tom, other relatives, neighbors, friends of the family. When the first of these folks began to arrive, they and others started to walk the streets at Federal Heights, knocking on doors, telling parents to keep their kids inside. The police arrived at 4.13.

By that time, there were already more than a dozen cars on the cul-de-sac, full of people ready to search for Elizabeth. By 6 a.m., the search was fully on, and a neighbor would tell police that he had heard what he thought was a female voice crying out around 2.30. Everyone was confused. Why Elizabeth? Why the smart family? when there were so many other big families on the block,

who had taken her, what did they want with her? These questions are more tortured Elizabeth's parents and siblings. And my God, would a terrible, painful thing for all of them to endure. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was hiking. Her white shoes turned orange as she walked up into Dry Creek Canyon, a four-mile climb in chilly morning air. The man she would come to know as Emmanuel was firm. If she didn't keep moving, he was going to hurt her family.

And she believed him, right? She's truly just a kid, a very sheltered kid, who couldn't have imagined anything like this could ever happen to her. After a steep climb, she found a fully constructed hideaway about 20 feet long, built out of a hollowed out swath of earth. The logs used to make the roof were camouflaged by mounds of dirt and twigs. Thick plastic garbage bags were laid under the dirt, keeping it from falling through the spaces between the locks.

And then she saw a woman. Wanda approached her and tried to take off her pajamas. When Elizabeth resisted, Wanda threatened her and said that if she didn't let her, the man would have to do it himself, and Elizabeth gave in. For the next nine months, she would mostly wear a white ankle-length robe, a headscarf, and two veils across her face. Before she put that robe on, Wanda began to wash her feet.

Brian then burned her red pajamas and performed a, quote, marriage ceremony, and then within hours of taking her, he raped her for the first of many times. Meanwhile, earlier that morning, at 7.21 a.m. Salt Lake residents driving to work heard a bulletin over their car radios. The state's new Rachel Alert, a message system named for Rachel Marie Runyon, a three-year-old Utah girl who's abducted and killed in 1982 after a stranger snatched her from a playground was activated for the first time on local radio and TV stations. A baritone voice said a young girl was missing, Elizabeth Smart, and that everybody should be on the lookout for her. As the morning progressed, bloodhounds circled the smart home. One of the dogs caught a scent just outside the house,

but lost it near some bushes. Neighbors tromped into the lookout. the hills above the home, including, it's bummer about that bloodhound. My brain is distracted with that. Like, God dang, if that dog could have just, like, stuck on the trail. Brian got so fucking lucky. Neighbors tromped into the hills above the home, including worried classmates of Elizabeth who had been looking forward to joining her in high school that fall. Now it wasn't clear if that would happen.

Inside the house, Lois and Ed, prayed and fasted, taking phone calls from well-wishers, including the president of the LDS Church, Gordon B. Hinkley. He would end up having bulletins issued to LDS churches in five nearby states. not knowing, of course, that Elizabeth was just four miles from her house. Damn it. They would end up mobilizing another Mormon institution as well, Deseret News, Salt Lake City's daily paper. And by the way, Deseret News is a great source. I have used them so many times over the years I find them to be very well-written informative articles.

Elizabeth's Uncle Tom, her dad's brother, had worked for the publication. He knew how to organize the media that was descending on the house, hungry for answers, producing theories that risk distracting from the facts, had Elizabeth met someone on a chat room, maybe, was she a runaway? That afternoon, Ed Smart came out of his house and gave what would become the first of twice daily press conferences held throughout the summer. Elizabeth, if you're out there, we're doing everything we possibly can to help you, he said. We love you. We want you to come home safely to us.

He spoke to the strange man as well, saying, I can't imagine why you took her to begin with. There's no reason that you should have taken her. Please, let her go. Please. man, the pain and the fear he and his family must have felt. Meanwhile, that evening, as the temperature began to drop in the canyon where Elizabeth was chained up, she heard a voice. Not Brian's, not Wanda's, but her mother's brother, David's voice.

He and hundreds of others were hiking into the desert, screaming Elizabeth's name in the hopes that she would hear them. And she did. She just didn't respond. She was too afraid to. She was terrified. She had little food or water. The temperature of the mountain was dropping. She would later say she was sleep deprived, that you couldn't think.

to answer their calls or thought maybe she was just imagining them, and so they didn't find her. Next day, June 6th, the family announces a reward of a quarter of a million dollars, $250,000. Overall, the mood was not as bad as it could have been, or at least that's what the family was trying to maintain. Ed declared that he had had a good feeling that it would be the day that Elizabeth would be found.

They went on the Today Show, begging to get their daughter back. What they were really hoping for was a ransom note. After all, the family had money, a lot of money. So it wouldn't be completely unbelievable to think some, Somebody did this because they wanted to milk them for cash. They hoped that was the reason. But no ransom demand came in. And so the questioning pivoted inwards.

Had it been one of Elizabeth's family members? Someone she knew closely. Most kidnappings, after all, are not random. They're people the child knows quite well, typically family members. And so a bit of paranoia sets in. Also, more than 2,000 volunteers would spend the day canvassing the area, bringing back anything, a scrap of cloth, a piece of trash that they thought might have something to do with the case.

nothing turning up further reinforced the police's belief that the call was coming from inside the house, so to speak. And when June 6th did not prove to be the day that Elizabeth came home and the police started to focus inwards, the relationship between the smart family and investigators became strained. The police felt they had good reason to look at the family, possibly not even the extended family, but the smarts themselves. After all, why had they invited so many neighbors over so quickly?

Why had they muddied the crime scene? why, which hadn't been secured until nearly seven that morning. Why had they contacted neighbors first and then the cops? That was not actually true, but the police thought it was true based on the fact that the neighbors arrived before the police. The questions for the police kept coming. Why had the smarts been so eager to control the media via Ed's brother Tom? The police would re-interview Ed and Lois that day not hearing until later that during a search in Pinecrest Canyon around dusk, the 22-person search group saw a man wearing a look like a white t-shirt and a white baseball.

ball cap, exactly what Elizabeth's little sister and roommate Mary Catherine had said the man had been wearing. Also had a tattoo tinned with red, blue, and green on his right shoulder, and he was pacing back and forth like he was waiting for someone or something. And when someone called out, he sprinted away. The volunteer investigators then heard what sounded like gunshots, and then nothing. The man was gone. By that night, Ed was a ruined man. He was so stressed, so exhausted, so sleep deprived, he collapsed. and he would be hospitalized the next morning, June 7th. He would return from the hospital later that day, only providing a brief message to the public

that he was confident Elizabeth was still alive. And with many of Salt Lake City's residential neighborhoods covered, the search now turned to so-called hobo camps, shanties hidden and dried out riverbeds or under bridges, and many of them were in the shadows of the Wasatch Mountains. In fact, many homeless people would actually join in on the search and help, according to outreach worker Pamela Atkinson. They worked alongside doctors and lawyers, even vacationers,

who had interrupted their time off to look for the missing girl. But nothing turned up that day either. Feeling like they were hitting dead end after dead end, because they definitely were, the police now released a description of Elizabeth Sneakers, one of the only pieces of evidence linked to the crime since there was no blood found at the scene, no hair, nothing. They were white with blue trim and suction cups on the soles. Meanwhile, reinforcements arrived in the form of two FBI.

I'm guessing tiny little suction cup, like patterns, not actual suction cups, by the way. If you're like, what the fuck got a shoes with those? Meanwhile, reinforcements arrived in the form of two FBI profilers from Quantico, Virginia to review all of the interview tapes the police had made so far. By Saturday, four days after the kidnapping, the search was still going strong. And that morning would see a new development in the case. Police gave out a composite sketch of a man who had spoken with Elizabeth

at a, quote, social function shortly before she disappeared, and they wanted to talk to him. He was in his late 30s to 40s, wore a beret, and one of his front teeth was missing. By that afternoon, the police had found him, and it was, of course, another dead end. That night, America's most wanted would air a segment on Elizabeth.

This beautiful girl was taken from her home at gunpoint by a kidnapper who went into the house through a window, host John Walsh said, and he begged the audience for tips. And soon they started to roll in, a lot of them, thousands, and it would take a lot of time to investigate them all. In the meantime, professional fuckhead,

Brian Mitchell, was living his best dirtbag life. He had started making occasional trips into the valley, maybe get a feel for what the search for his captive was like. He was also probably getting provisions. After all, he had another mouth to feed now. His new wife, at least that's how he saw her. One day in town shortly after Elizabeth's kidnapping, a Deserette news staffer said she saw him trying to rip down a missing poster.

When she told him to stop, he said, they found the guy. Too bad that interaction did not lead to his arrest. However, someone working on the case did make an interesting connection. Rowena Erickson. was in her office a few days after the kidnapping when she got a call from Utah State Senator Ron Allen. Erickson, an executive with the nonprofit, tapestry against polygamy, knew Alan well.

He had submitted a bill a year earlier to crack down on the practice of taking young girls as brides. Amid opposition from polygamous groups, the bill was watered down. For fuck's sake. I fucking hate it so much when politicians make concessions to these pieces of shit like, or pieces of shit like this.

But the bill eventually passed in 2001. Erickson considered Alan a friend of the movement and she was happy to talk to him. On the phone, Senator Ron Allen asked Rowena if she had said anything publicly that raised the specter of polygamy in connection with the Elizabeth Smart case and she said that she hadn't.

Thought hadn't even crossed her mind that the kidnapper wanted a wife. After all, she was an expert on polygamy and knew that most polygamous looked for young women in their own communities. In other words, girls socialized to believe that polygamy was normal, who would accept male control over their lives.

And when polygamous do get them, it's not exactly a kidnapping, more like a negotiation with the family to give them over. Rowena would later say that Alan asked her to give a formal statement saying the smart case was not related to polygamy, but she turned him down. There wasn't a clear reason for the abduction yet, and she wanted to feel things out. Alan would later remember things differently. He'd say he'd got many calls from people around Utah who were becoming convinced that Elizabeth had been taken by a polygamist and that he considered them wackos, like the people making the complaints. He didn't want to make the movement against polygamy

lose credibility over some rumors. Okay. But others were more convinced that this was about polygamy. In Phoenix, Arizona, Flora Jessup was fielding calls from reporters and members of the general public about whether Elizabeth Smart's disappearance had something to do with an element of Mormon life that few Mormons wish to talk or think about its polygamist past.

Once it hit the nationwide news that Elizabeth Smart was raised in a Mormon family, polygamy started to pop up more and more. And Flora wondered if it did have something to do with it. Florida had actually grown up in Hildale, Utah, one of the state's biggest polygamous communities at the time, home of that sick, pathetic fuck, FLDS cult leader, Warren Jeffs. We don't have time to get into the differences between the FLDS and the LDS church. Now, we have a whole episode on that previously,

but for this, it's important to know that FLDS consider themselves the true Mormon church based on how they follow 19th century doctrine, and the LDS Church considers the FLDS Church to be illegitimate. Legitimacy, however, has never quite mattered when it comes to having sex with young women and girls. And Flora knew that even if Elizabeth was rich, she was likely still absorbed into a culture that taught her to follow men's leadership, to give them what they wanted. In other words, her socioeconomic status, her good parents, that still did not prevent her from being the perfect child bride. She had still been raised to think of herself as the property of a future husband in some ways.

That was still part of the culture of the LDS faith, and it still is today. now Flora wondered had Elizabeth been taken back to some isolated FLDS type community somewhere with their own businesses schools, even post offices or was it a lone wolf situation a guy with an entourage of maybe three or four

women, dozen kids who kept his head down, tried to blend in for now these questions were just theories no one had any evidence to indicate the kind of man Elizabeth's kidnapper was. On Sunday, June 9th, four days after Elizabeth was taken, the Mormons across the state dressed for church.

Her father Ed would gear up to take another step. Investigators wanted him to take a lie detector test. Once again, he insisted that he had nothing to hide. And at that evening's candlelight vigil at Liberty Park, Ed's voice shook as he offered a prayer for Elizabeth. Still, the couple seemed strong. They insisted Elizabeth would come home soon. And that seemed to have an effect on the police.

On Monday, they ruled out the possibility that Elizabeth had run away and faked her own kidnapping, which I guess is one of their considerations. but though they had moved their suspicions away from the immediate smart family now, they would focus on Tom Smart, Ed's brother. His other brother, David, would have to take a lie detector test as well, and both men would later say they were raked over the coals. On Tuesday, June 11th, six days after the kidnapping, police finally found something concrete.

They had gotten a tip from a milkman named Charlie Miller. Fucking milkman! I just was talking about milkmen. Last week, apparently there was a real-life milkman. in Salt Lake City Not that long ago Anyway, this fucking milkman Charlie Miller

Talked him about a strange car That he had seen Being driven around The cul-de-sac A few days before Elizabeth went missing I was a Nissan or a Honda And Charlie grew suspicious As it began to follow his truck

Worried he might be in danger Of being robbed Charlie jotted down The license plate numbers And he said The driver wore a white baseball cap Huge tip, right? Well, sad to the number Did not end up matching anything

Charlie had gotten part of it wrong but police believe the first three numbers, 266,6 were legit. And they found a car, a green four-door saturn with plates bearing 266. And when the police tried to approach him, the driver hit the gas, sped off down a side street, and actually lost them. Later that night, a little boy playing in the ditch full of cattails,

found abandoned license plates, took them home to his dad, called the police, and the plates both numbered 266 H.J.H. They had been reported stolen. Police had enough evidence, possibly from fingerprints on the license plates, though to come up with the name Brett Michael Edmonds. Edmonds was a 26-year-old drifter. He had a rap sheet. He was wanted on two outstanding warrants, one for fraud, another for assaulting a police officer, and search dogs turned up his scent in the canyons where volunteers were looking for Elizabeth. But Edmonds was six-two, way taller than the man Mary Catherine described. Still on Wednesday, June 12th,

police went public with his name saying they wanted to talk to him. And they also had another suspect, a local handyman named Richard Albert Ritchie, a felon with a 30-year rap sheet and a shaky alibi for the night of June 5th. And thank you, Nimrod for continuing to send dicks into these sucks. Your blessings do not go unnoticed by this humble servant. On June 13th, eight days after Elizabeth went missing, a bombshell sent the smart family reeling.

Police-eye relatives in probe blared the cautiously worded front-page story in the Salt Lake Tribune. The article claimed that cops believed the kidnapping was likely an inside job involving a member of Elizabeth's family. The smarts were outraged by the story. They thought they were done looking at the family. The papers said the story was based on info provided by four different sources, all of whom asked not to be named.

The article's biggest piece of evidence was that family members had been asked to sit down for polygraphs. There was history working against a smart family as well. Another supposed abduction, six years earlier in 1996, six-year-old John Bonae Ramsey, another previous time-suck topic, had been found brutally murdered in her family. family sprawling Boulder, Colorado home on the day after Christmas. Similar to the smart, neighbors had arrived before the police, trampling through evidence, and signs in the investigation

seemed to point to one or more of the Ramses. It was a confusing time for the media and for a nation that wanted to find Elizabeth. As the papers pointed at the smart family, the police were racing to find Brett Edmonds. And soon someone else would come along and complicate things further. Child Protection Advocate Mark Class. Class had become a national figure when his 12-year-old daughter, Polly, had been abducted from her California bedroom on December 4, 1993, during a slumber party with friends as her mom slept in the next room. Polly Class of disappearance had spurred the largest manhunt in American history, with thousands, including actress Winona Ryder, joining the search for the girl.

Sadly, Polly was found dead 65 days after her kidnapping, and her murder by felon on parole prompted Mark to become a spokesman for missing kids. Mark Klass showed up in Salt Lake shortly after Elizabeth Vannished, offering to help the smarts with their ordeal. What he failed to mention, though, the family later claimed, was that he was also in town working as a paid commentator for Fox News. Class would claim that the family always knew he was working with Fox.

Class asked to do an interview with Ed and Lois, and he wanted his crew to film the meeting, but Tom Smart, who was under suspicion himself, and knew how the media worked said no way. Class and his producer were now upset, and Fox pressed the issue, and Tom finally relented. Ed and Lois agreed to meet with class for 15 minutes and that Fox could tape for the last five of those minutes.

During that meeting, he would press the smarts to meet with Jeannie Boylan, the forensic artist who made the famous sketch of the Unabomber. Boylan's methods were unusual. Instead of simply talking about details about a person's face, she would focus on the witness's experience of the crime, searching out characteristics of both the suspect and the person who saw him. Ed called Boylan and left a message on her answer machine. When she got back, Boylan spoke to Tom.

who said they weren't sure about the police what they wanted to do in regards to how they wanted to preserve nine-year-old Mary Catherine's memory. And so they were going to hold off for now as far as the sketch. This also annoyed class who encouraged Ed and Lois to override the police and work with her anyway, but they held off instead. The next week on Foxes the O'Reilly Show, class would then brag that the smart family had been exceptional in pursuing his recommendations, but they really needed to talk to Boylan. Then he dropped this. Tom has been a challenging individual. O'Reilly then grilled Tom's 17 and 21-year-old daughters, who were subbing in for him,

since he was also near collapse now, about what the problem with their dad was. Class finally diagnosed it. It's almost interference. We've encouraged Ed and Lois to talk to everybody at every possible opportunity, and once we think we're getting towards that direction, Tom then will come in and sort of play things around a little bit,

so that might not occur. At the end of the taping, Tom's daughter stormed off. Now the damage was done. The media was focused on the smart family interference. Why did Tom appear to be leading the investigation? Not Ed or Lois. What were the smarts hiding? Meanwhile, police were questioning Richard Ritchie, stocky balding, handed man with a ring of black hair. Dude's physical description literally makes him sound like an actual penis. Bald, thick, ring of black hair around the base of the shaft, I mean around the base of his head. Anyway,

to investigators, Richard looked perfect. He knew the smart children by name from doing work around their house. He had a history of heroin and alcohol addiction, and he had helped fund his habit by stealing from homes where he worked. He would also target children's rooms when he stole stuff, thinking the parents would believe the missing items had been lost by their kids. Ed had even fired him on the suspicion that he had stolen, though he'd ended up hiring the handyman again with the deal that he'd give the Ritchie his 1990 white Jeep Cherokee in exchange for work around the house. And there was something darker in Dick's past. In 1983, Richard had attempted to rob a pharmacy, which had led to him shooting a police officer, and that had gotten him a prison sentence for attempted murder.

So he certainly seemed to many like the type of man who could pull off, who would pull off a kidnapping. And his actions backed on, back on June 5th, were suspicious. Early on the day Elizabeth vanished, Ritchie was digging into the dirt along the side of his mobile home in the Salt Lake suburb of Cairns when his neighbor, Andy Thurber, stuck his head out the door of his own trailer. He asked Ritchie why he was digging. Ritchie said he wanted to keep the cats out from under his house. Then the two men got to chat in about a little. Elizabeth, who was already all over the news, and Ritchie mentioned that he thought he would be implicated because he'd worked at the house. When investigators questioned his wife, Angela, though, she adamantly believed he did not do it.

Ritchie may have been a career criminal, she said, but his own nine-year-old son had been killed by a drunk driver on 1985. He would never take away someone else's child, she claimed, and added that he was at home with her the night that Elizabeth went missing. FBI's not convinced, though, and they will raid the Ritchie's trailer, and in it they will find several things that belong to the smart family, jewelry. perfume bottles, a wine glass decorated in seashells, also found a white cap and a machete. Easy to see why they now felt a dick was their man. On June 14th, Ritchie is arrested on a parole violation related to his previous attempted murder conviction. Angela and Richard were sitting on the front swing, excuse me, when the police came to get him. Richard got up, did not fight being arrested, and one of the six officers present handcuffed him.

It seemed to the smarts like the man responsible for kidnapping Elizabeth had been apprehended. ended. The obvious question now was, where was she? The FBI had rated Ritchie's parents and Angela's parents' homes. Nothing turned up there. Ritchie admitted to stealing from the smarts but denied kidnapping anyone. Still, there was other incriminating evidence. He had borrowed a car around the time of the kidnapping, and he had put roughly a thousand miles on it before he returned it. Where did he go? Finally, through the media, Ed begged that Ritchie tell the truth. Soon after that, Ritchie issued the following statement. First, I want to say I have no knowledge of Elizabeth Smart's abduction, disappearance, or whereabouts.

I want to say to the smart family from my family, Angela, my stepson, and myself. I, too, lost a nine-year-old son in an accident in 1985, and I know what Ed and Lois are going through. For the rest of the summer, he would be questioned extensively again and again and again, but he would never break. And of course he wouldn't. He didn't have any fucking idea what had happened to the Smart's daughter. On June 21st, 2002, 16 days after Elizabeth had gone missing, Brett Edmonds turned

up at a hospital way out in West Virginia, this other suspect. He had checked himself in under a fake name, apparently due to a drug overdose that it damaged his liver. A hospital staffer used the number he had provided to call his family, who then called the police in Utah where the media circus had not died down. While police worked to get Brett extradited, the National Inquirer got in on this game, and they published a lurid story that apparently emerged from what investigators had found

on the smart family computer. It was their July 2nd issue in the story under the headline, Utah cop's secret diary exposes family sex ring citing investigative sources said that Ed, Tom, and David were all involved in homosexual activity that their wives

knew about. Okay, the inquiry will end up retracting that claim. They retracted it probably to limit financial liability. Meanwhile, you know, that they would face if they were sued over this. I'll touch back on that story

much late in this episode, though. Not entirely nonsensical. Meanwhile, it's becoming increasingly clear that Brett knew nothing about the missing girl. This further convinced the police and FBI that Ritchie was in fact their guy, and with a clear suspect in mind, the official task force started to shrink. Even though Elizabeth still hadn't been found, and there was absolutely no indication of where she might be. Only one ransom request had come in by then. It was an email sent to America's Most Wanted demanding $50,000. Called for the money to be dropped off at the Mormon Temple, spelled M-O-R-M-A-N.

police believed correctly it was a hoax and July would bring nothing new to the investigation and now the media attention started to dwindle after all it was more likely than not that Elizabeth was dead it had been two months now since a man came into the smart family home and kidnapped their 14 year old daughter at knife point man how well would you be holding up at this point if that's your daughter I honestly do not know if I would be able to be

a functioning fucking humor at this point I hope I never find out, you know, I hope nothing similar like this ever happens. I feel like I can completely pour myself into work just to try and distract myself from all the pain. Or I would be out knocking on doors and searching the surrounding woods full time and just not working at all. Or, I don't know, alternate between searching and just fucking breaking down and sobbing. Man, they had so many other kids they had to keep raising during this. Imagine being one of the other kids feeling guilty if you just wanted to go hang out with your friends or watch a movie or do anything other than constantly try and find your sister. I mean, the more I think about it, the more hellish it sounds.

Ed and Lois were still working full-time to find their daughter at this point. They did not think she was dead. They would spend a lot of time in July appearing on various TV shows, talking to people like Larry King about Elizabeth and updating the public about, you know, how the family's doing. They told the public that all five of their other kids now slept on the floor of their bedroom every night, like the parents' bedroom, but that overall they were all staying strong. Meanwhile, being held in jail, Ritchie is sticking to his story in a story in a of course he is, it is the truth.

Though he is facing multiple theft charges, there is not enough evidence to stick him with the kidnapping because he didn't do it. Then on July 24, 2002, something new happens that shakes up the investigation. 18-year-old Jessica Wright, Elizabeth's first cousin, was asleep in her bed in the middle of the night

when she was awakened by the sound of some framed pictures that sat on top for dresser crashing to the floor. She sat up, looked over towards her window, saw something long and thin, poking through the blinds, then all of a sudden, right before her eyes, it was pulled back and disappeared. She started to scream, jumped out of her bed, ran into her dad, Stephen, just as he was coming out of her, or into her room. He also heard the noise, and Jessica told him what she had seen.

Stephen immediately sent the family's Labrador Retriever out into the yard to try and track whoever had been trying to break in. The lab immediately ran below Jessica's window and started to bark. Stephen ran after the dog, rounded the corner, and saw it. A chair had been pushed up against the side of the house. whoever had tried to get in was gone, but it was clear they had just been there. And Stephen thought that whoever did that was probably the person who had kidnapped Elizabeth.

Just miles away, Stephen's niece, Elizabeth, had been stolen away by a man who had also slid a window screen and climbed in. Also had used a chair. I don't think I mentioned that as a perch. Stephen Wright called the sheriff's department, and deputies arrived within minutes. They looked at the window, saw cuts to the screen,

vertical and horizontal, as if somebody had been trying to peel it back. deputy sent a canine dog to the back of the house where it sniffed from Jessica's window and then ran to a backyard fence and then stopped. Dog picked up the scent again on the other side of the fence, tracked it to the front, another yard, but then the trail disappeared to the curb. Had the same man tried to come for Elizabeth's cousin? Or was it simply a prank? Well, it was not a prank. Indeed, Brian Mitchell, Shurlson, son of Shurl, New King David, Emmanuel David Isaiah, had wanted another captive bride.

The months of June and July had been hell on earth for Elizabeth. She was being raped daily, sometimes up to three or four times, and kept tied up in that crude dugout. When he was not assaulting her, Brian was preaching at her, claiming to be both an angel and a Davidic king, who would, quote, emerge in seven years, be stoned by a mob, lie dead in the streets for three days and then rise up and kill the Antichrist. Totally.

Elizabeth Smart, Mitchell, insisted was the first of many virgin brides. He planned to kidnap, each of whom would accompany him as he battled the Antichrist, which makes sense. I mean, how could one possibly defeat the Antichrist? If one didn't have a bunch of virgin brides alongside him. I mean, think about it, dummy. If you showed up with a bunch of shitty old non-Virgin brides, the Antichrist would laugh in your dumb face.

Oh, you think you're going to defeat me? Would that fleet? Arrusty old bikes? Yeah, right. Not a chance, bud. Not a chance. I'm real scared of you when those clearance rack brides you brought. Ha! Ha! Ha! Sike! that's how the anti-Christ talks in my mind like a fucking broie douchebag

who still says stuff like psych! Occasionally. Brian being the man of God he was. Showed Elizabeth's pornography. Tried to get her to drink alcohol, use other drugs, lower her resistance to his sexual advances. Other times he starved her as punishment for resisting. Sometimes he fed her garbage.

Only brief respite she ever got from Brian's advances was when Wanda, I mean Hefzeba, Ilaida, Isaiah. We get mad at Brian for being more interested in Elizabeth than her. again, she's in hell. Later, she will testify that Brian wanted another wife, and he had chosen Elizabeth's favorite cousin, the one closest to her in age,

but he had picked the wrong window. The rights had redone their house, and Jessica's little sister was now in a different bedroom. Sadly, all Brian's attempted break-in did was make the police look more closely at Elizabeth's family. They found it very suspicious that things kept happening to members of her family, and felt her family was acting shady

when it came to cooperating with the investigation. And the media was all over this angle as well. They questioned Elizabeth's uncle, Stephen Wright, heavily asking him if he had slit the screen himself. For Elizabeth's parents, what happened to Stephen Wright's house signaled to them that the person who had done it probably was not Richard Reitchie, who was locked up at the time of the attempt to break him. And by probably not, I mean, fucking definitely not. I mean, he was locked up. I don't know why I said probably that. Also made them think that whoever the real kidnapper was, he's probably still in the area.

And that meant that maybe Elizabeth was too. Though Ed and Lois were frustrated with how all this was going, they did not dare criticize. the police publicly, they knew nothing good would come of that. They would maintain the strategy they had said at the beginning, frequent updates to the public about the status of the investigation, maintaining support from the LDS Church, and using Tom Smart's media connections to keep Elizabeth's case in the public eye. They normally spent August at their cabin in Brighton, but they would now stay home in Federal Heights for the month trying to give their kids at home.

Whatever semblance of normalcy, they could while the search still rage for their sister. The news of the attempt to break in on Stephen Wright's house. would hit the papers a few weeks after it happened on August 9th. By this point, the smart family was thinking that if Ritchie did have something to do with it, right, he clearly had to have an accomplice. After all, there was a certain amount of logic to that, beyond the fact that just a, that Ritchie was in jail during the time of breaking, right, to get into a house, to go up to a bedroom, to take a girl, silence another one, get away,

would be an extremely difficult task for one person, not to mention, you know, keeping them captive for weeks. So here, they were on the right track, but just on the wrong train. around that time local Salt Lake City man Del Blair's wife came home one afternoon and told him an interesting story she had been in downtown Salt Lake just a few blocks in her house and saw the guy they referred to as Joseph a homeless man in flowing robes who usually had a woman next to him this time though he had two women by his side

one was cloaked by a makeshift white veil and smudged white robes all Del's wife could see were her eyes over the coming weeks others would see these people too on the streets at a strip mall in restaurants, even walking past windows with Elizabeth's missing poster taped to the glass. They went to all you can eat restaurants or food fairs where there was a lot of food and didn't cost much. One of their favorite places was super salad in Midvale, about 10 miles from SLS, S S S S S from Salt Lake City, where an unlimited meal cost just five bucks back then. Sometimes they stopped at the Crown Burger. Sometimes they stopped at Wild Oats Market,

a health food chain with a store in downtown Salt Lake City. The three would pile their place with salads and pizzas saving leftovers to take with him. Sometimes, as he usually did, the Jesus guy preached on street corners while the two women stood beside him. Fucking holy shit, hiding and plain sight. Nobody thought to ask who this girl was. After all, these were drifters with transient lives. When hikers saw them camped out in the Wasatch, they didn't think anything of it.

The drifters weren't bothering anybody, aside from maybe stealing food every now and then. And the new girl never went to anyone and said her name. And so the search continues. And it gets weirder. In late August, some psychics from an organization in Seattle called SciTech. Perfect. Descended on this is the place State Heritage Park and Immigration Canyon behind the smarts home. The park has a vault that serves as an American Indian burial ground,

and some of the company's psychics had had a vision that Elizabeth was inside of it. They had pinpointed her location in midsummer, weeks after they reported on their website that Elizabeth was not alive anymore. When Sytech's psychic showed up at the crypt, state archaeologists would not let them in. Authorities were called, and they did come and check it out. And of course, Elizabeth, not there. And now the psychics would fly home as failures, which of course they saw coming. Do not doubt their psychic powers.

And so the new school year begins, without a break in this case. It was back to school for the smart children and for all of Elizabeth's classmates who had to figure out what a world without Elizabeth might look like. How surreal. then on August 27th suspect, Prime suspect, Richard Ritchie, collapses in his cell. He'd been in court that morning on burglary charges, but around 7.30 he found he couldn't catch his breath.

Had a bad headache, too. And by the time guards arrived, they could only watch as Richard tumbled into his bunk, or onto his bunk. Paramedics tried to revive him. He was brought first to the prison infirmary, then by helicopter to university hospital where he was put on life support.

Doctors would spend hours trying to get fluid out of Richie's brain. When news of this got back to the smarts, they were devastated. They still hope that Ritchie had something to do with it. And if he didn't, or if he died, well, now they might never know what happened to Elizabeth. By the next day, the 28th, the doctors had discovered that Ritchie had suffered a brain hemorrhage. And that evening, when the doctors told Angela that her husband had brain damage, she made the decision to take him off of life support. So now Richard Ritchie is dead. And the smarts will give condolences to his wife, Angela, but privately they're devastated. trying yet another avenue they will contact Henry Lee, a forensics expert, to take a fresh look at all the evidence, right? Let's start over.

They wanted Henry to look at the attempted break-in at the right home, too, which police still do not think was connected, for some reason, to Elizabeth's case. Ed Smart also pressured Congress to pass the Amber Alert, a nationwide system that would alert Americans via radio and phone of kidnapped children, their descriptions, and any identified information about the person who took them. In October, Lois and Ed would meet President George W. Bush at the President's first White House. conference on missing, exploited, and runaway children where Bush committed to creating the National Amber Alert system. They had no idea that Elizabeth had never been more than an hour's drive from them the entire time, that she was currently being held in downtown Salt Lake City now, staying in a small studio apartment, just a single block from a police station. How the fuck did that happen? Well, during his trip to the Wild Oates Market before the kidnapping,

Brian Mitchell had befriended Daniel Trotta, a 24-year-old cashier at the store. And one day, near the end of September, Mitchell showed up and asked Trotta to meet him outside after work. There, Mitchell asked Trotta if he had a place they could crash for a little while. And Trada said, sure, they could come stay at his studio apartment. What the actual fuck. And that's exactly what they did. For nearly a week, four people, Mitchell, Elizabeth Smart, Juan de Barsey, and Trada lived in a small studio apartment on Oxford Place. They played music and ate.

When Trada asked a teenage girl's name, Mitchell would interrupt and say, just call her my joy in her. Okay. Daniel Trotton might be a very sweet man. A great guy, helpful guy, but holy shit is he coming across fucking dumb as a pile of rocks right now. Elizabeth's disappearance was all over the news that summer

in Salt Lake City. Pictures of her are literally posted all over town. Probably almost certainly there were flyers posted at the grocery store he fucking worked at. And he still doesn't connect the dots? Jesus, dude. Got a fucking cloud of weed. Was he just like perpetually living it?

Found a picketrotter from a story CBS ran about Elizabeth's kidnapping. I mean, he looks like a normal guy. You know, he's sitting on his bed next to a vinyl record player, a bunch of records, big Joy Division poster on the wall. I mean, great band. But his mind could not have been working very well. I mean, he invited a dude pretending to be a prophet, begging for change on the street to share his studio apartment for a few weeks

or a week or whatever, didn't connect a missing girl to the girl that the dude had with him. the girl he was secretive about, the girl whose face he had to have seen at least once. During their stay at Trotta Studio, Mitchell asked his new friend, if he might be able to help them find a house in the city. While the summer camp out was decently comfortable,

winter was approaching, and they needed some place to say. Trada asked around, but he couldn't find anything. Mitchell said that was fine. They would just head over to California. In the meantime, they would spend their days roaming around town. It's just fucking crazy that this whole time they're in Salt Lake City. They'd spend their days roaming around town,

occasioned being approached by curious onlookers who never got a good look at the teenage girl next to Mitchell. If they tried to talk to her, Mitchell would immediately interrupt diverting the conversation to the topic of religion. And now check out how crazy this is. That same summer, Brian, Wanda, and Elizabeth all went to a college party together.

They went to a fucking house party, a kegger. At a house on the corner of 10 east and two south. The trio just wandered in and the drunk college students assumed they were in costumes. A couple even snapped up some photos of them. the three stayed at the party for about an hour until Mitchell's pontificating reached a loud, feverish pitch.

He spent the entire time in the house telling people about his religious beliefs and at one point shouting, Jesus lives! And then they were asked to leave. A young woman named Pamela Ene would walk Mitchell to the door, but for some reason the women,

the women with him, didn't follow her. Pamela was only focused on the hymn and once she got him out, she turned to the veiled women and asked if they were okay and if they needed help. The women did not answer. God damn Elizabeth is so scared that if she says anything

Brian's going to hurt her family Instead of saying something Juan and Elizabeth Just walk outside the house silently to find Mitchell Who then stood on the lawn and began a chant As witnesses later described it screaming that people needed to repent Or the house they were partying in would be destroyed Okay

Then Mitchell suddenly stopped and the three walked off into the night How fucking weird for the people this party When the truth is revealed later about Elizabeth Right? They're just thinking about how they partied with a kidnapped girl and her insane fucking kidnappers that summer. That's wild. Brian would soon be found again

this time by law enforcement on September 27th he walked into an Albertsons on 200 South, the supermarket, picked up a flashlight, some batteries, some gum and some beer. His odd dress and scraggly appearance caught the attention of a store clerk who watched as a wannabe Jesus

tucked his supplies into his backpack. The employees, some of the manager who called the police. After a search of his pack, Mitchell was arrested for stealing $52.39 worth of merchandise. When police officer Robert Randall asked his name, Mitchell replied,

Go with God. Okay? He also gave the alias, Luel. All right. His birth date, Mitchell told Randall, was, quote, sometime after Christ.

I mean, he's technically not wrong. He was truly born sometime after Christ. On the way to the police station, Mitchell finally gave police his real name. He listed his mom, Irene's phone number, as his emergency contact. the driver's license he produced listed his address is homeless. He'd be issued a citation given a court date, which he would skip.

Nobody knew that they had one of the area's most wanted men in their grasp. A few days later, outreach worker Pamela Atkinson saw Mitchell on the street in Salt Lake. He was alone in panhandling, getting some money to head to the West Coast. In mid-October, 2002 now, Henry Lee, the forensics expert, who had consulted on the John Bonnet case, and actually O.J. Simpson's trial, arrived to, to, talk to the Elizabeth Smart Task Force. Lee combed through Elizabeth's bedroom and examined the kitchen window where the cutscreen had been. He poured over investigative reports, had dinner with the smarts, the police, some FBI agents.

But since he was bound by a confidentiality clause, his findings have never been released. Safe to assume he didn't find shit that blew the case wide open, though. But somebody else nearly would. A few days later, now 10-year-old Mary Catherine, Elizabeth's little sister, her best friend, the only person to see her kidnapper, take her, said something shocking. dad i think i know who it is mary catherine have been leaving through a guinness book of world records book i mean i love those books as a kid uh when something jogged her memory and the gears locked in place and it's man so funny how our brains can work this way this made me think about how like uh sometimes i'll be

trying to to remember the name of somebody i knew briefly many years ago just you know i haven't stayed in touch with and it just will not come to me no matter how hard i concentrate but then like weeks later out of nowhere It'll just pop into my head mid-conversation when I'm not thinking about that person at all. I don't know, just something will happen, I guess. I won't even know what the connection is that allows my brain to re-release that info. Mary Catherine, I love that name combination, by the way,

put down the book, went into her parents' bedroom, and gave them a name, Emmanuel. She was talking about the guy who'd worked at the house almost a year earlier, the guy who had pulled weeds and worked on the roof. Investigators will be made aware of this new suspect, October 13th, and two days later, would be interviewed at the Children's Justice Center.

Between October 21st and November 18th, police would try to track down the one-time roofer at homeless shelters across Salt Lake. They check surveillance videos of places where this Emanuel guy was known to hang out. And most likely, they also put his name into databases of aliases, which should have turned up the name

that Brian Mitchell gave when he was arrested for shoplifting, but that officer had written down his alias as Emmanuel I-M-M-E-N-U-E-L with an I, not an E. And thanks to how databases has worked back before AI could help with searches. That was enough to have the right guy not pop up. Also, some would wonder later if the police did not look too hard into Mitchell because they were skeptical about this story.

It still seemed way more likely that a man named, excuse me, that a man like Richard Ricci, somebody who had been to the house many times before and knew its layout well enough to steal objects from it, had committed the kidnapping, not somebody who was just there one day for a few hours. Meanwhile, Elizabeth, Brian, and Wanda arrived by bus and lakeside, an unincorporated area in San Diego County. Small town lies, you know, it's a town, even if it's not incorporated, lies 25 miles east of San Diego, less than an hour's drive from the Mexico border.

Unknown at the convenient location was part of some plan to perhaps leave the country, or if Brian just wanted someplace with a good climate, large transient community, which Lakeside had back then. Probably does now. But what Lakeside did not have was a community of people used to a fucking lunatic screaming about Jesus, or at least not this crazy guy, though he and his veiled wives may have blended in a little bit in downtown Salt Lake City, and Lakeside they stuck out and soon people got annoyed.

The sheriff's office would soon become aware of Mitchell. In late October, they got a call complaining about a guy in a robe, standing on the corner of Winter Gardens Boulevard, and Woodside Avenue screaming some stupid shit. The deputy went to check it out, found a guy dressed, found a dude dressed in a white robe flanked by two women, also in robes with covered faces. When the deputy asked Mitchell to move, Mitchell agreed. surprised by his easygoingness,

the deputy talked to him for about 10 minutes, recognized that some of what he was saying came from Mormon doctrine. When he asked Mitchell if he was Mormon, Mitchell replied that he had rewritten the book of Mormon, correcting it in places. Towards the end of their conversation, the deputy turned to the veiled women.

Sorry to talk to them, but Mitchell interrupted. Shane didn't let them speak to anyone. Also, he said that he covered their faces to cloak them from the atrocities of the world. The deputy looked into the women's eyes, searched for fear, but didn't see any, just saw blank stairs and never ended up writing a report on the encounter

with these three transients. And so Mitchell is still free. And Elizabeth still kidnapped. For most of the next four months, Brian will set up campsites where he will stay with Elizabeth and Wanda. One is made a, he found a ramshackle, abandoned trailer left in the middle of a green hill

overlooking El Capitan High School. The interior of it was filthy. The tile floor strewn with glass, strips, wood, nails, broken cabinets. Man, how extra sad. that the great student and athlete who should have been in high school instead is watching high schoolers

from an abandoned trailer where she is being raped by a fucking maniac with a god complex. Brian later built another camp in an area known to Lakeside residents as the river bottom, hollowing out a bushy area, creating a separate compartments for each person to sleep in,

along with a couple of rooms for keeping provisions, cooking, and cleaning. Also built a makeshift altar where he and Wanda will pray. The two will call it Golgatha, the name of the place where Jesus

was crucified. After night's rest at their so-called condo, as the locals nicknamed it, the trio will spend their days panhandling outside of local markets. They'll eat on picnic benches around Linda Lake. Brian told anyone who asked that Wanda was his wife and the young girl was their daughter. On Thanksgiving Day, November 28th,

they all had a turkey dinner at a lakeside homeless shelter. Just a few weeks earlier, November 3rd, Elizabeth turned 15. The Smarts had decided to spend her birthday making happier memories, and they took their three younger children, William Andrew and Mary Catherine to Knott'sbury Farm in California. Their eldest son Charles had a dance that weekend, wanted to stay in Salt Lake City.

But the rest of the family headed to Disneyland after Knott's two of Elizabeth's favorite places. On the evening of Elizabeth birthday, Ed and Lois sat for an interview with Larry King on CNN. They had no idea that their daughter was in the same state as them about 100 miles away, or that she will be there for the rest of 2002. Now, let's skip ahead to early January 2003. It was sometime around then when Lakeside resident Robert Smith noticed that Mitchell was suddenly walking alone on Wildcat Canyon Road, the path of took him from downtown Lakeside to their quote-unquote condo. By this point, Robert had seen the trio walk to and, you know, to town and back almost daily, but now suddenly Mitchell is alone.

And he will be alone for so many days straight that Smith eventually decides to ask him about it. Brian tells him that the two women with him, his wife and daughter, are staying with other disciples, adding we have got hundreds all over the U.S. It's unclear where Elizabeth was during this time, most likely just, you know, with Wanda. Though Mitchell had orchestrated and perpetuated the kidnapping and was the one who desired another wife during her captivity was actually Wanda, with whom Elizabeth would spend most of her time. Hopefully Elizabeth got to at least experience a couple of weeks without constant sexual abuse around this time. Meanwhile, her parents earned a different kind of help. One morning in January, Ed and Lois Smart stood for their usual Friday press conference. they were there to talk about Elizabeth,

but they were also there to talk about money. They were raising the reward for information about Elizabeth. The smarts would offer another $250,000 from donations that had come to them privately, so half a million now. By now they said instead of the money going to anybody who came for with credible information that would lead to Elizabeth's whereabouts, they would also pay for credible information that would lead to her body. Ed was still hopeful that his daughter was alive,

but statistically he knew it was not likely, and he began to have doubts. I mean, how could he not? I would guess it probably all of her family members. Wanted if she was dead by now. I mean, they still hadn't, you know, heard from anybody coming forward, saying that they had actually seen her life, not anybody credible. The rest of the month would pass quietly. Meanwhile, Brian Mitchell's life was changing.

Let's back up a little bit. December 8th, he appeared at the Santee Third Ward of the LDS Church on Lake Jennings Park Road in Santee, California looking very different. Not wearing a robe. Instead, he was wearing jeans and a blue checkered shirt. His hair was slicked back into a neat pocket. ponytail. His beard was tied in a rubber band. It looked like any other kind of crunchy California Mormon.

He didn't act weird. He clearly knew the word to every hymn, which told people he'd grown up Mormon, but nothing else about him offered any insights. Even went to one of the ward member's houses for dinner, asked totally normal questions about Mormonism and polished off two servings of each dish and then accepted a ride

home. The ward member, Furrell Kemp, would give him a book of Mormon in the Bible before dropping him off and was shocked six months later to get a call from a reporter for the Deseret News asking him if he knew that Mitchell had tried to kidnap his 12-year-old daughter, that motherfucker. He said, no, he had not known that. Pretty interesting how Brian could completely pull himself together when he needed to, right? Was he crazy? Did he actually believe he was a prophet, or was all of that just an act to get the one thing he really wanted, right?

Sex with teenage captives. Mitchell would try to break into Verl's home later that winter, but then left when he found it locked up tight. Back another bit to check in on the smart family. In the Christmas of 2002, Don Cold and Snowy for them back in Utah. Missing posters of Elizabeth were still up, but nearly all of the media attention had faded, leaving the smarts, you know, a quiet, grim holiday. The police's attention to turn elsewhere. Also, leaving only about five full-time FBI agents and officers on the case. In the beginning, there have been about 100.

And the remaining officers were making zero progress tracking Elizabeth down. While the smarts would take Mary Catherine to a forensic sketch artist to draw the man she had said was a manual, the police didn't think releasing that illustration was a good idea. Either it would muddy the leads they were currently pursuing by drawing bogus tips, or if the man did have Elizabeth, seeing his face on a wanted poster might prompt him to do something drastic. By February, the smarts decided they had to do something, though. Elizabeth had now been gone for eight months. On February 3rd, Ed, Lois, and Tom held a press conference where they described the roof of Brian Mitchell to the public for the first time.

They told the reporters that they were looking for a handyman who had worked at their house for about five hours. had his own interpretation of the Word of God and went to different homeless shelters preaching it. But the smarts didn't know that they had seen Emmanuel in a very specific presentation. Clean-shaven, well-groomed, and normal Western work clothes, not the robes he was known for wearing around Salt Lake City.

They also described him as soft-spoken and nice, but anyone who had interacted with Brian David Mitchell out on the street would be more likely to remember him screaming scripture at them. Would their description help find their daughter? Yes, actually. On February 8th, 8th, 8th, Once again, after Elizabeth had been taken, the Salt Lake City Police Department got a call from someone who thought they knew who Emmanuel the panhandler was. This person, an unnamed relative of the person of interest, gave the police one name the correct one, Brian David Mitchell.

Soon the police pulled up Mitchell's file, and there he was, arrested for shoplifting last September with the bench warrant out because he'd never showed up for his court date. The weird thing was he didn't have any violent or sexual offenses on his criminal record. nothing to suggest he might be a predator, right? That's shitty he did before, just never fucking made it to his record. Still, this was a lead, and his leads went. It was pretty solid. The hard part would be finding him. The Mitchell family did not know where he was,

and nobody had seen him at his usual hangouts around Salt Lake City in months. A few days later, some other officers will find Brian. Around 5 in the morning on February 13th, a noise from across the street awakened a housewife on Channel Road in San Diego that will help the investigation. She looked out the window, saw a man in Grimy Long John's trying to pry open a window to one of the preschool classrooms at the lakeside Presbyterian Church. He forced it open, put something in the frame, looked like cardboard, crawled inside.

The housewife, of course, called the police. Mitchell was sleeping on the floor of the classroom when the police entered the church. When they handcuffed him, he told police that his name was Michael Jensen, that his birthday was October 17th, 1954. But his fingerprints taken to the station would reveal his true name, Brian David Mitchell. However, police in San Diego had no idea what is. he was wanted for since his bench warrant was for a misdemeanor, it did not show up in national criminal records. Fuck.

To the SDPD, he looked like just another vagrant. That same day, America's Most Wanted would inform the public that the man wanted, and Elizabeth Smart's disappearance was a roofer calling himself Emmanuel, potentially Brian David Mitchell. But none of the deputies who had arrested him saw it. That scumbag just keeps getting lucky. Also, where the hell is Elizabeth at this point in the story? Well, she's with Wanda.

The two were at a campsite and Lakeside when Mitchell was arrested. When Mitchell didn't return that night, as he usually did, Wanda became worried, and her worry intensified when he didn't come back the next day or the day after that. Terrified that he might have died, she left Elizabeth alone at the campsite to go pray at Golgotha in their condo. Wanda will later say that she prayed and cried for several hours at the altar, waiting for a sign from God. She was eventually visited by attending angels who helped her through the night, including her father, her grandfather, and Johann Sebastian Bach. Oh, holy fuck. Again, Brian might not have been insane, but Wanda definitely out of her mind.

The next morning, after being consoled by Johann Sebastian Bach during his angel era, Wanda went back to Elizabeth, who was still at the campsite, told her she was going to go look for Mitchell, and Elizabeth would stay put, right? This poor kid, she is just a kid, has been so brainwashed. Six days after he was arrested, Mitchell will attend a sentencing hearing for breaking into Lakeside, Presbyterian via closed circuit cameras with his court-appointed lawyer David Lamb by his side. He'll plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of vandalism. Superior Court judge Charles Irvin put him on probation for three years and released him from custody. In addition, he is told to pay a $250 fine.

Then he made it back to the campsite where he told Wanda that he had had another revelation. What? God told him to go back to Utah now. God told him that if he stayed in Lakeside, they will be arrested by the... evildoers. That sounds like God. Hey, bro, this is God. I might want to take your terrified kidnapped teen bride and skid-addled back to Salt Lake for these pigs.

Put you in jail, yo. What God did not tell Brian was the back in Utah bunch people were looking for him now. People like Elizabeth's uncle, Tom Smart, who started checking health food markets for any sign of Mitchell, who had heard that the last time people had seen him, he'd had two women with him. Wanda's grown children were also trying to find him. scouring bus terminals and malls to find the stepdad that they fucking hated. Then another call came in that intensified the search for Brian Mitchell.

Debbie Mitchell told the smarts that she thought her ex-husband could very well be the man with Elizabeth and filled them in for the first time on Mitchell's sexual predatory behavior with girls. Debbie also said that she was confident that if Mitchell had Elizabeth, she would still be alive. As more information came in about the one-time roof or things were starting to add up, unlike they had with Richard Ritchie, Mitchell had a history of sexual abuse. He had been seen into King Coast near the smart home when the afternoon Elizabeth was abducted.

He was known to camp sometimes near the smart home, and he had left the area, which meant he had, you know, likely he had something to hide. On March 1st, 2003, America's Most Want to aired another segment on Mitchell, complete with photographs of Mitchell both groomed and unkempt. At the same time, authorities put out the first nationwide bulletin to be on the lookout for Brian David Mitchell,

a.k.a. Emmanuel. And now credible tips started to pour in. One was from Lakeside, California, and said they had seen a man matching the description in the area. And he had been with two women. The question was, were they still there? They were actually. The filthy trio had made a trip that week

to the Lakeside branch at the San Diego County Library where Dusty Harrington, the manager, had often seen them passing out religious pamphlets. Though they usually wore flowing robes on that day, they were in mud-splattered jeans. Mitchell had asked Dusty for an of the U.S. saying he was particularly interested in Arizona. Okay? On March 4th, the local skateboarder

who would spend the morning rock climbing with friends about 35 miles north of San Diego saw the travelers this time in robes waiting along an isolated country road. It was pouring, so the young man offered them a ride. The man called himself Peter, said he was with his wife and daughter, Augustine. He also said they were headed to Las Vegas to spread the word of God there. Come on, I thought God told Brian to go to Salt Lake City. The trio made it to Sin City.

not Salt Lake City on March 11th, which was when some employees that a North Las Vegas Burger King reported three panhandlers standing outside the restaurant. When the cops showed up, the trio was gone, but the police caught up with them down the road. When asked for identification, they didn't have any, but the man said his name was Peter Marshall. His wife was Juliet Marshall and daughter was Augustine Marshall. The cops then set them on their way. They watched the group ahead for Interstate 15, the main route running from California through Las Vegas and straight to Utah.

The next day, Brian Mitchell was once again drawn to a fast food joint this time, McDonald's in Springville, Springville, Utah. Okay, cool. They are still following God's plan

for them to return to Utah. Okay, good, that's a relief. Brian struck up a conversation with the man named Ryan Johnson, who offered to give the man and his family a lift to a nearby bus stop. He thought they were a little weird. One of the women was wearing a gray wig,

although she was clearly very young. Mitchell turned him down. He had a plan. and his next stop was Provo. On March 12th, 2003, Thomas Smart, again Elizabeth's uncle, came out swinging. In an article published in the Salt Lake Tribune, he accused local police of not doing nearly enough to find Brian David Mitchell. He accused them of over-indexing on Ritchie, saying that hanging the responsibility

for the kidnapping on a dead man was a way to, quote, cover their asses. At that point, the FBI was tracking the siding of Mitchell in Miami, Florida, a place he was definitely not, and Tom accused them of blatant incompetence. unbeknownst to Tom, the police were currently working diligently on the real trail. That morning, the Santee, California Sheriff's Department got a call from Salt Lake City investigators about Immanuel, possibly being in their area. When the Santee PD downloaded the picture of Mitchell from the America's Most Wanted website, there was no doubt about it. This was the drifter they had spoken to a dozen or so times in the past four months. They would spend that afternoon taking Mitchell's picture around town looking for anyone who had just seen him.

But by the end of the day, thankfully, there would be no neat. At 12.52 p.m. on March 12th, over nine months after Elizabeth had been taken, Nancy Montoya and her husband, Rudy, sat in their car watching a man in a green t-shirt and a brown hat with flowers on it, walking in front of two women in robes near the South Town Mall and Sandy, Utah. Nancy quickly dialed 911. She was an avid America's most wanted viewer, and she was almost positive she'd just seen some dude from the program. The three travelers carried filthy bed rolls in a Walmart shopping bag as they made their way down the street, not knowing that at that moment they were the subject of not one but two 911 calls from Nancy and from another woman named Anita Dickerson who had spotted them while driving with her husband, Alan. Both women were so focused on the man's face, the one they had seen on TV, they didn't even register the roved women at first. Officer Karen Jones will be the first to respond to the calls.

When she spotted the trio near a bus stop at 104 south and state streets, she pulled up to the curb, immediately recognized the man's face. Gotcha, motherfucker. Did God tell you this is going to happen? She quickly detained them. Once again, the man said his name was Peter Marshall, that his wife was Juliet and his daughter was Augustine. He insisted they did not need ID because they were, quote,

messengers of God free of all worldly things. And confronted with this fact, Officer Karen Jones had no choice but to let them. them go. You cannot detain. Messengers of God. You can't. You can't. They're free of all worldly things. And they are above the laws of man, forever and ever amen. No, she of course kept them detained. As Jones pressed him, another officer, Troy Rasmussen arrived on the scene. And he would be the one to recognize that the girl with the grimy couple looked just like Elizabeth Smart. The girl claimed that she was 18-year-old Augustine and Marshall from Miami, Florida.

But she couldn't answer any questions about her so-called parents' identity. She said they were her step-parents. When asked about where she grew up in Miami, she said the Dade County area. Miami is in Dade County, but she couldn't give a zip code. Zip code. Finally, when the officers told her that everyone missed Elizabeth Smart and loved her and hoped she would come home and that she was safe now, she started to cry. Finally, she climbed into Rasmussen's car, sobbing the entire way to the station. Elizabeth Smart had been found, and she's going home. Hail Nimrod. Ed Smart was in his office at home when he got the call, he came to, got the call to come to the Sandy police station right now. They did not tell him what was waiting for him there. Was it a clue, a body? He had no

idea. He and his wife had been asked to identify at least three bodies, presumed to belong to Elizabeth, but none of them had been hers, thankfully. When Ed got to the police station, he half expected to be asked to identify Brian David Mitchell, but instead a 15-year-old girl is waiting for him? And he immediately broke down. Is it really you? He asked through a cascade of tears. And for the first time Elizabeth acknowledged her identity, simply saying yes. Soon the family will reunite at a Salt Lake City police station while Brian and Wanda are initially held at a sandy police station before being taken to the Salt Lake County Adult Detention Center, where Mitchell will give his address as, quote, heaven on earth.

Want to guess who he listed for his emergency contact? When I first read this, I fucking bust out laughing by myself in a public coffee shop. So fucking funny to me. He said God. listed God as his emergency contact. Imagine doing that at the doctor's office or someplace. Just to put your emergency contact down as God and your address as heaven on earth. All of Salt Lake City, meanwhile, is rejoicing.

Neighbors lined the smarts cul-de-sac, honking from their cars, holding up signs, welcoming Elizabeth home. People were actually holding up signs like that all around town. At home, Elizabeth's siblings and friends gave her all the gifts she had missed from Christmas in her birthday. They kept them ready for her, along with an impromptu birthday party. she got to watch movies, all her favorites, read emails sent by well-wishers. She met her family's two new dogs, played her beloved harp,

slept in her bed, the same one she'd been taken from. She painted her nails, had her hair cut by a family friend, and soon she and her family will receive a whole shit ton of therapy to help them heal, to try and help understand

what the fuck had happened, how to come back from it. And now the question is, what's going to happen to Brian Mitchell and Wanda Barsey? Well, I was able to push that button and they were burned alive. No, they were released.

They were released. They do not abide by the laws of man, praise be. No, they were both initially charged with aggravated kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault, and aggravated burglary on March 18, 2003. How will they fare in their trials? Well, it's going to take a while. It's time to go to trial because it's difficult to find out how sane or insane they are. Brian seemed insane, and yet he planned to kidnapping,

deliberately targeted a victim, kept her quiet as he shuffled her from, you know, out of the house, used an accomplice, prepared her area to keep her in. Could he stand trial? Was he competent enough to assist in his own defense? While awaiting a competency evaluation, Mitchell was incarcerated at the Utah State Hospital. Stephen Golding, a psychologist hired by the defense, claimed that there were two ways to believe you were a prophet, zealous belief and delusioned. And concluded that Mitchell's beliefs transcended zeal and were in fact delusional. Golding said that Mitchell was not competent to sand trial, but the court will overrule this evaluation. And with that, plea negotiations can begin.

Mitchell indicated that he was willing to plead guilty to kidnapping and burglary for a 10 to 15 years since, but only in the condition that Elizabeth will not testify. This also involved the sexual assault charges being dropped. Thankfully, the prosecution were like, go fuck yourself. By October 15th, 2004, plea negotiations were still stalled with both Mitchell and Barzie. Jennifer Scheme, a psychologist who had initially

stated that Mitchell was competent, interviewed Mitchell again at the defense's request in February of 2005. After this interview, Heidi Bushey, Mitchell's attorney filed a brief stating

that Mitchell was no longer competent stand trial. Mitchell subsequently began to act out in court, jail staff observed no changes in his behavior outside of court, Orne's thought processes.

In other words, seemed like it was all a big act. However, ultimately, Judge Judy Atherton agreed with the defense asserting that Mitchell's behavior reflected psychosis. The defendant reentered Utah State Hospital August 11, 2005, will remain there until 2008. And while he's in the hospital, no staff member will observe Mitchell being paranoid in a pathological sense. That's sneaky fucker.

Then in February of 2006, a bill went before the Utah legislature to allow prosecutors to apply for forcible medication for defendants in order to restore their competence to stand trial. In other words, they decided you couldn't just refuse medication. you know, refuse medication your way out of pain for your crimes. Interestingly enough, though, this will not apply to Mitchell. It was for Wanda Barsey, whose forceful medication was approved in June of 2006. She will eventually plead guilty in 2010 to charges of kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor and be sentenced to concurrent terms of 15 years in state and federal prison, a lenient term given that she agreed to testify against Mitchell.

And I do actually think she's truly insane. She was also given credit for around seven years of time already served. Mitchell, meanwhile, was still declared incompetent thanks to an incident back in December 18, 2006, when he screamed at a judge in a hearing to, quote, forsake those robes and kneel in the dust. Prosecutors were not able to get him to be forcibly medicated. And in October 2008, his case was transferred to the federal U.S. District Court for the District of Utah. That court held an evidentiary hearing on Mitchell's competency on October 1, 2009, again on November 30th through December 11th of that year, much to Mitchell's displeasure, Elizabeth Smart would end up testifying.

The now 22-year-old would describe him as smart, articulate, evil, wicked, manipulative, sneaky, slimy, selfish, greedy, not spiritual, not religious, not close to God. Fuck that motherfucker. A 206-page report discussed in the hearings would diagnose Mitchell with a non-exclusive pedophilia, anti-social personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, malingering, and alcohol abuse. In other words, somebody who should be burned to life. An opinion by psychologist, Noel Gardner, would argue that Mitchell used his religious expression to convince people that he was less high function than he actually was. His defense, on the other hand, argued that even if he was competent now, back when he had

committed the crimes, he was delusional. Well, finally, Mitchell was deemed competent to stand trial, March 1, 2010. And his trial would begin November 8th of that year. the defense acknowledged that Mitchell was responsible for the crimes, but again, content that he was legally insane at the time of the crimes should therefore be found not guilty by reason of insanity. Would that strategy work? Nope.

God decided to fuck over his chosen prophet. God tricked him. God's tricky. God told him to do all that crazy shit. And now God was like, nah, you're going to take the fall. I was fucking around. I was kidding. Harsh.

You know, harsh guy, but I like it. December 11, 2010, the jury found him guilty of kidnapping and transporting a cross-state lines with the intent to engage in sexual activity. Judge Dale A. Kimball sentenced Mitchell to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Mitchell was serving a sentence at U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute. At the U.S. penitentiary, I think that's how you, that word always fucks with me. In Terre Haute, a high security federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, until just recently. He's now 72 years old.

He was staying there until just recently. It's not like it was a prison until just recently, if that was confusing. he's now 72 years old. And this past October 30th, oh, very satisfying. A few, very satisfying, but sadly, hard to find articles were published online, stating that he was being transferred to a different facility after barely surviving two serious assaults, at least two. Kind of sounds like he's been getting his ass beat regularly in prison for a long time. So great.

Both recent times, he was attacked by other inmates in protected areas of the prison. Staff allegedly did not intervene as a prisoner assaulted Mitchell in a recreation area, known as the West Yard back on May 26th, according to four people who witnessed the attack. The guards just watched. And I love it. I hope they laughed too. I got up and walked over expecting the guards to come out running,

but they never did. Prisoner Keith Grace, some piece of shit in prison on an 85-year sentence for manufacturing child pornography, wrote in a letter to WFIU News. He found Mitchell kneeling on the ground, blood pouring from his head, and he said,

I wasn't sure if he got stabbed or what. The attacker gays said initially, told him to mind his own business. But back down and left after Gase refused to leave Mitchell's side. I told him, I'm not watching you beat up a hundred pound 70-year-old, he said. Well, good for you finding morals, you fucking child pornography producer. Gase wrote that the... I'd still burn your life.

Gase wrote that the attacker had time to wash Mitchell's blood off his hands and walked past two guards standing by at the guard at the yard's gate. Oh, fuck yeah, bro. Three other witnesses confirmed Gase's account. Robert Jones, another inmate and another huge piece of shit, serving a life sentence for sexually abusing teenagers and young children, claimed that Mitchell was uniquely vulnerable, given his advanced age and smaller size.

Who cares? Something else that makes him vulnerable, according to Jones, is his refusal to report attacks to prison staff, viewing the violence as divine judgment. When I asked him about being previously assaulted and stabbed, he said, the Lord is passing judgment upon me here in this life for the things I have done.

I deserve this. I will be with him after this life. Eh. Soon after that first assault, Mitchell was attacked again, according to two people who were being held there at the time. The individual that you asked about is actually not far from me. James Dennis, an ex-gang member who was being housed in the same area after being attacked himself, wrote in a letter that described the sounds of the assault

echoing throughout the facility. I believe his previous cellmate attacked him more than once. I was, however, too far to see I could only hear, he wrote. A second prisoner reported the same thing, telling fellow inmates in the unit Mitchell previously occupied that he was found in a pool of blood. after recovery, Mitchell began working as an orderly, fellow prisoners said. They said he refused to go back to his previous unit.

In late October, guards transported Mitchell to the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, where he stayed for a couple days before he was shipped out to the Federal Correctional Institute in Louisburg, a medium security prison in central Pennsylvania. I think he's still there, but I'm not sure I entered his name in a Federal Bureau of Prison's inmate locator database and just couldn't find him. Hopefully, wherever he is, God is still punishing him with regular Bloody beatings. On September 19th,

2018, CNN reported that Wanda Barzzi was released from prison. Smart was at that point 30 years old. She urged officials not to release her. Wanda's now 72.

But Wanda's lawyers argued that she was no longer a threat to society. She was banned from ever contacting any member of the smart family, had to register as a sex offender,

and had to undergo monitoring and regular mental health treatment, and was put on supervised release for five years. Just three months later, it was reported she was living near assault,

Lake City Elementary School. There were apparently no restrictions on how close she could live to a school, even though she couldn't go on school property. And then just last year, May 1st, 2025, she was arrested for visiting parks in violation of Utah law restricting sex offender movements. Apparently, she said that, quote, God had urged her to visit Liberty Park and Sugar House Park in Salt Lake City, sit on benches and feed the ducks. Totally. That sounds like priority for God. Yep, that's something that God's going to take some time to talk about. Hey, I need to go. Wanda, I need you go feed those ducks now. Wanda was later released on judicial orders, and the SLCP stated that they would continue monitoring the situation, and now let's focus on the person this story is really about Elizabeth Smart. Incredibly, and this is so incredible. She started her sophomore year at East High School in August of 2003 just five months after her rescue in March of that year.

That's fucking intense. So brave, strong, and badass. Hail Nimrod, Lucifina, Triple Mim, Mimbojangles. You know she got so many stairs when she went back to school. That's so many classmates and staff were gossiping about her. She still walked in, she sat down in class on the first day of sophomore year, and she stayed at that school until she graduated. And then she would stick around in the area to go to college.

She went to Brigham Young University, earned a degree in music. Still plays a badass harp. Also quickly became an advocate for victims of sexual abuse and kidnapping. On March 8, 2006, three years after she was found, she spoke before Congress to support sexual predator legislation and the Amber Alert System. She was also on a five recovered young adults who contributed entries to the 2008 book, You're Not Alone, which was published by the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2011, Smart founded the Elizabeth Smart Foundation,

which aims to bring hope and end the victimization and exploitation of sexual assault through prevention, recovery, and advocacy. And work hasn't stopped there. July 7, 2011, ABC News announced she would work, as a commenter for them, commentator, excuse me, mainly focusing on missing persons. She would also drill down into some things about her own culture that had prevented her from healing or perhaps even from getting away from Mitchell in the first place like Mormon's belief in women's sexual purity. Right, the whole fucking bicycle shit.

On May 1, 2013 in a speech at a human trafficking conference at John Hopkins University, Smart discussed the need to emphasize individual self-worth in fighting human trafficking. Having been raped by her captors, she recalled the destructive impact of absexuals, abstinence-only sex education, especially an exercise in which a woman's body is compared to a piece of gum, aka how it's not desirable after it's been, quote, chewed up. Oh, this is so fucked up. I thought, oh my gosh, she said, I'm that chewed up piece of gum. Nobody rechews a piece of gum.

You throw it away. And that's how easy it is to feel like you no longer have worth. You no longer have value. Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? your life still has no value. It's fucking exactly. Why I think an intense focus on women's chastity is so absurd and damaging.

People should be viewed as that fucking people, people who are far more than their sexual identity, far more than sexual objects alone that is actually a pretty fucking small piece of life when you really think about it. And people can possess so many different types of values, right? I want another button. I want another button. I want one where I push it and all that old just, you know, patriarchal bullshit is

blasted out of people's minds forever. And if they try and put it back into their heads, well, then I push the first button, the fire button. Give me my fucking buttons, God. Elizabeth remained Mormon after her rescue, and has stated that religion has brought a lot of good into her life. In 2009, she served as a missionary for the LDS Church in Paris, where she met a man from Scotland named Matthew Gilmore.

The two courted for about a year before getting engaged, got married in February of 2012 at a private ceremony at the Lai, Hawaii Mormon Temple, and would go on to have three children with a couple making their home in Wasatch County close to nearly all of Elizabeth's family and the community that rooted so hard for her safe return. She has functioned so well

and outwardly seemed so healthy and seemed so healthy nearly immediately after returning home. Some might have thought that she just kind of shrugged off what happened to her. Nope. She talked about how she dealt with her abduction and its aftermath back in 2013. Actually, she talked about it a whole bunch of times.

But the following comes from an interview from 2013. She said that shortly after her capture with her future prospects so grim that she dared not to contemplate them, she chose to reflect on what had been good about her short life. I realized that I had had had a happy life and so I tried to remember those times, she said. She also had heard somewhere that the first thing you forget about someone is the sound of their voice. For smart, there was only one voice she cherished more than all others, the voice of her mom. And in trying to remember the sound of her mother's voice, it's timber and tone, her mother's pet phrases she discovered a reason to survive. She said, I was thinking about all the things she had said to me, just trying to remember what she sounded like when she said them. And I remember her saying, Elizabeth, there are two opinions that matter. One is gods, our heavenly father, the other is mine. I am your mother, and nothing can ever change that. I will always love you no matter what.

She added, I decided that no matter what happened, if it was another two or three days, or if I had to wait for my captors to be dead and buried, I was going to survive and I was going to get back home. Maybe nobody else would accept me, but my family would. That's what kept me going. She also acknowledged that the scars from what happened to her will never fully heal, but that she has not only survived what she has went through, but she's thriving and living a happy, fulfilling life.

What I went through wasn't easy, she said. It's not like turning the light switch and the darkness disappears, but there is hope. You can get through it. That's my message. While Smart said it would be crazy to say that she was grateful for her ordeal, she could also appreciate the opportunities that emerged as a result. Let's face it, she told an audience she was speaking to in 2013 team when she was the guest speaker at Financial Concepts, kindness, uh,

Raser kickoff dinner. Uh, she can, she said, uh, sorry me, excuse me. The financial planning firm welcomed more than 500 clients at dinner, uh, which it used to celebrate the company's 25th anniversary and launch a campaign based on random acts of kindness. And she said, without it, I would just be another blonde girl from Utah. So I'm grateful for what has been able to allow me to do, to have a voice and to make a difference.

And the blonde girl from Utah continues to make a difference. In 2018, she published. where there's hope, healing, moving forward, and never giving up, a New York Times best-selling memoir about her inspiring life post-abduction. And she published another book just a few weeks ago. Detours, hope and growth after life's hardest turns. And here's a description. In detours, Elizabeth Smart explores how trauma can derail one's path in life and shares her struggles with captivity, reintegration, and resilience. Using the metaphor of life as a road, Smart introduces four key rest stops for navigating life's detours, grieving lost paths, and

embracing change, seeking connections, and redefining destinations. I love it. Through themes of hope, community, and self-discovery, she inspires readers to find strength and their own journeys towards healing. She's still very active in raising awareness and money to combat sexual trafficking and finding missing kids. She still gives presentations about it. You can reach out via context, a mission form at elizabasmart.com to hire her.

And you should because she's fucking awesome. And I can go on and on about her many other ventures and into the world of reporting, true crime self-defense advocacy but i think you've heard enough for our purposes here today she's kicking a lot of ass and her captors not so fucking much for such a tragic story it does have a pretty good ending and that's it for the timeline good job soldier you've made it back barely before closing things out with uh mostly some more nice words about elizabeth uh let's first laugh at some dumb pieces of shit who have not had nice things to say about elizabeth namely some idiots of the internet of the internet.

On January 31st, 2014, the TEDx YouTube channel posted Elizabeth's TEDx talk called My Story, roughly 11-minute presentation about what happened to her, how she got through it, what she learned from it. About 90% of the over 2,000 comments posted

beneath the video are very positive, which is fantastic. The other 10% or so, posted by either dumb kids, I'm guessing, or adults who have never evolved out of being dumb kids. For reasons, I don't fucking care about. Here's what some of those shitheads took the time not just to think, but to actually write and post.

At Sergeant Butternut 7255 posted, I know this isn't the most proper community standard thing to say. Lizzie is top shelf booty. If you want to meet me, Liz, I understand. You are banging. I do mean that in the most respectful way. Seriously, dude? After what she spoke about, being raped as a kid for nine months straight, that's what you fucking write? Your mom needs to take away your computer.

At Sega Boy, 70BF, posted. Why do people or women in general talk about men like we are rapists and have to feel like rapist? Sounds like you're a rapist, bud. Or at least a dude, women worry about being a rapist. Most of us guys don't get accused of that. This isn't a women in general problem. This is you problem. And speaking to you, fuck you.

At Sacred Drop for you posted. It seems like she planned it with this man. Once he become the roofer dude for that day, she planned this for him to come get her because this ain't normal. Yeah, it's not normal shit for brains. Knowing things getting taken out of your home at 14 is fucking normal. Also, how many 14-year-olds

do you know who are out planning shit with 48-year-old strangers? I'm guessing you've been told some version of this before, but in case you haven't, you're dumb as fuck. Dashy Tag 1824 posted, was that a dream?

I cannot believe such a thing happened in USA or an English-speaking country. Uh, what? You're already on the internet, fuck, okay? Just Google her name. if you doubt this.

And why would you think kidnapping is like this can't happen where people speak English, person who doesn't speak English very well? Oh, wait, I know because you're stupid. At Dying Boy from Heaven, 4962 posted, scary story. Crime is wrong. Going missing from the girl's bedroom is real.

Who knows where they go? Are the FBI heroes with big, strong, kind people? Praise you, Elizabeth Smart. I'm not going to say anything bad about you, dying boy, because it seems like you might actually have a traumatic brain injury or some shit. and you know what, I agree with you. It is a scary story, and crime is wrong.

Thanks for pointing that out. Finally, at the outlier, posted the following edited comment. I'm sorry, I just can't take this person serious. I get the trauma, but for real, she was 14 and had so many chances to escape that I can't have the sympathy I'm supposed to. It doesn't add up. I'm sorry, and yeah, I haven't been through it, but I can assure you I would have escaped, given the opportunity she had to.

I'm not saying it is her fault. or she did anything wrong, but I am saying she isn't as smart as her name implies, so anything she has to say is not productive to anyone, in my humble opinion. Again, she was going, I, to high school, not grade school. What? How fucking dare you criticize someone else's intelligence at the outlier?

You fucking mental patient. You took the time to write something, you posted it, and then thought, no, that's not quite right. And then you edited it and thought, yep, That's what I want to say. And then you posted that shit? You would not have escaped. You dumb motherfucker.

You would have probably never recovered because you're not 10% as strong or as smart as Elizabeth Smart. She would never write something like that. She's better than you. She's a hundred times a person you are. She's out there changing lives, raising kids. What are you fucking doing? Just editing and posting hateful, ignorant drivel.

I shouldn't say this, but I hope you get kidnapped. And if you get kidnapped and if you go through some version of what she went through and you survive, I want to message me. And I want you to let me know. if you still stand by this comment, you idiot of the internet. Idiots of the internet. I'd like to think those are all bots, but probably not.

So Elizabeth's smart, smart enough to not only survive that ordeal, but to thrive afterwards. Though we told a couple kidnapping stories on TimeSuck here before, like the one about the deranged asshole Ariel Castro, right? Or Cameron Hooker, who abducted Colleen Stan, this one feels different.

Those kidnappers, relied on trust, a ride, an invitation to a home, but Brian David Mitchell went straight for the kidnappers' Olympic gold medal, pulling somebody out of their house in the middle of the night, in a suburban neighborhood where anybody could have been awake and could have stopped him. But nobody did.

By all accounts, nothing about this kidnapping should have worked. And yet it did. Mitchell slipped by undetected, hiding in plain sight for over nine months after he took Elizabeth. That's a long time. Months are going into various restaurants, sleeping in campgrounds, preaching on street corners, hitchhiking, staying in some dude's studio apart.

for a while and doing most of that in an area covered with missing posters put up of Elizabeth. My God, crazy. But no one suspected the obviously unhitched holy man of being capable of something like that. It's a special kind of devious, right? Illustrates how fringe individuals can be very, every bit as terrifying as fringe groups. More terrifying sometimes. We tend to think of fringe religious groups as places where anything goes, but that's not necessarily true.

Even the most extreme groups have constraints, right? Their desires must be measured against doctrine. they have to maintain some internal harmony so the group doesn't collapse so members don't revolt. That's why long-lasting fringe groups usually operate under the radar with members committed to protecting the group's secrecy and autonomy. Fringe individuals, on the other hand, don't have such limitations. Their belief systems can morph into whatever justifies what they want to do at any given moment. They can use those beliefs as cover without maintaining any secrecy at all. Indeed, Brian David Mitchell was free to proclaim himself God to anybody who would listen.

He only had to keep one follower close to him, wife, and really, even if she would have bailed, he still could have kept dragging his captor around. That's what makes him so unsettling. In polite society, there's no better way to avoid scrutiny than to become something people don't want to deal with. You don't have to hide if you can make people avert their eyes. And when you're looking for suspects, well, who do you overlook first? The guy who blends in or the one who seems too obviously sketchy to be real. All of this in the end is kind of an interesting reversal of the classic true crime tale. After all, so many of us come here wanting a narrative, a family secret that isn't revealed until the case cracks it wide open,

an old vendetta that explodes into an act of violence. We want a who-done it, a story where the perpetrator is the person you least suspect, but sometimes it truly is the blatantly insane motherfucker hiding in the bushes. Time now for our takeaways. Time shock. Top five takeaways. Number one, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah. abducted from her bedroom in the middle of the night, leaving only one witness her little sister and best friend, nine-year-old Mary Catherine.

Nobody put together at the time that the man who'd come into their house had stolen Elizabeth was a homeless preacher of sorts, whom Lois had referred to Ed, since he sometimes hired drifters to do work on his house. Mary Catherine, by the way, lives in Utah now with her husband, John Paul O'Brien, whom she married in 2020, is focused on a career in applied behavior analysis after earning a master's degree working with special children

with special needs. Good on her. Number two, Elizabeth Smart was taken to a secret hideout where Mitchell lived with his wife, Juan de Barsey. The three would ultimately spend nine months together, nine months during which Elizabeth was repeatedly raped, forced to consume drugs and alcohol, and assume the identity of Augustine,

Mitchell and Barsey's fake daughter. Over those nine months, Elizabeth would be marched from houses to Havels, mainly in Salt Lake City, and in California, often appearing in public in disguise. Nobody had any idea that the girl following the Jesus guy around was the person a nation was. searching for. Speaking of the search, number three, Elizabeth's case drew national attention quickly with missing person

posters, media coverage, and volunteer searches across Utah. Except for a few blips, the smart family managed to keep the coverage focused on Elizabeth thanks to Tom Smart's media training, but it proved to be an uphill battle as the police's focus shifted towards someone inside the family. The smart for their part were focused on handyman Richard Ricci and his abrupt death left them confused and looking for an answer where there wasn't one. Number four, luckily Mary Catherine Smart eventually realized where she'd heard the voice in her bedroom before. It was a manual, a man who had come to do work on their house months earlier. Despite knowing about the new suspect's identity as early as November,

Elizabeth was not rescued until March 12, 2003, when some passing motorists in Sandy, Utah identified Brian David Mitchell. And number five, new info. Remember that stuff about the National Inquirer saying that Ed, Tom, and David were involved in a homosexual activity that their wives knew about. Though they ultimately retracted that story, their source was something that had been discovered on the smart's home computer, nearly 17 years later,

in 2019, 64-year-old Ed Smart, father of six, came out as gay. I was praying that I was not gay. I didn't want to believe that I was, Smart told CBS this morning. But how do you cure being gay? There is no cure. And for all of those out there that are struggling in the same spot,

there is no cure. He and Lois divorced in August of 2019 He would leave the LDS Church Which considers same-sex attraction to be a sin He told Gayle King that he never wanted to identify as being gay Because he was raised to believe that gay people were deviant And that something about them needed to be fixed He decided to come out publicly

Because he wanted people to know there was nothing to fix about being gay Elizabeth said shortly after this news broke While I am deeply saddened by their separation Nothing could change my love and admiration for them both Their decisions are very personal as such I will not pass judgment and rather am focusing on loving and supporting them and the other members of my family

Ed would later say that he is focusing on his personal fulfillment now he told a reporter for CBS I plan on being happy and I plan on having a very full life and I want each one of my children to be happy and I want lowest very much to be happy pretty evolved

the angelic smart family while they look a bit different now are clearly everybody is loving as good as they've ever been maybe even better. Time suck. Top five takeaways. Taken from her bed, the Elizabeth Smart Abduction

has been sucked. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for help making time suck. Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins, running everything in the background, giving me the hours to focus on these episodes.

Thanks to Logan Keith, helping to publish this episode and designing merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com, where there is still new merch. I don't always talk about it like I used to, but it's there. Thanks to Sophie Evans for her research.

Also thanks to the all-seen eyes, moderating the cult of the curious private Facebook page, the Mod Squad making sure Discord keeps running smooth, and everybody over in the Time Sucks subreddit and Bad Magic subreddit. And now let's head on over to this week's Time Sucker Updates. Get your Time Sucker updates. I'm going to start off with another message from an Ultra Runner.

I've been so surprised by how many of these we have gotten. I did not know the Ultramarathon community was very big and didn't expect such crossover. But endurance champ and admitted masochist, MeatSack, Brendan Macy is here to at least partially explaining connection. He sent in an email to Bojangles at Timesuckpodcast.com with the subject line of Frozen Ed sent me. Hi, Dan, longtime Midsack first-time updater here.

It warmed the few remaining cockles of my long-dead heart to listen to the short-suck episode that covered the Barclay Marathons. As sadistic as last is, his races provide outlets for masochists like myself who need these kinds of outlets to maintain our sanity. The episode, however, reflected a clashing of worlds that is more aligned than you likely know. I listen to times suck on my weekly long runs,

anywhere from two to six hours, and while competing in races, anywhere from 50K to 200 plus miles, to keep my mind, God, to keep my mind occupied and awake in the most crucial moments of these efforts. The comedic interludes and repeating bits alongside educational of dark content

really helped the miles go by, much easier. And thank you for all that you and the cats of bad magic do. Endurance sport is comprised of high functioning professionals and recovering addicts, myself included, at a very high percentage, and we are fully aware of how insane we must look to others. These races are our opportunity to attempt to find our limit and to shed light in the darkest, most raw elements of our existence. We rather see the opportunity to answer the question what if and to dispel fear around what it looks like to be at the very limit of physical and mental capability and exhaustion. Lazz has some other incredibly interesting races and formats, including Big's backyard.

He touched on this in the episode, named after his dog, and the last annual heart of the south. Backyards are four-ish-mile loops run every hour on the hour until one person completes a lap. Everyone else gets a DNF, did not finish. Heart of the South or Hots identifies the finish line and draws a 400-mile radius around that point. Runners are dropped off somewhere on that circle, given some directions and left to their own devices to get to the finish line. The man is uniquely gifted with ways to test the human spirit and we love him for it. Anywho, thanks for showing a bit of the outside world what we do and reminding us that it is a little bit crazy. The spaces are community and the ultra community have a lot more in common than most probably realize.

And I wanted to say thanks for your work and supporting both even if unknowingly. Brendan and Colorado Springs. 200 plus miles, Brandon, you run 200 plus miles in one event. I think that might literally fucking kill me. I do not understand how that's possible. hurts my back and my knees just to imagine trying that. So kudos to you. That is beyond impressive.

Also, that heart of the South race is wild. 400 mile radius. It's not like something out of the hunger games. Good on you, Brandon, for finding something healthy to really test yourself with. Something to inspire others with. Something to, I imagine, feel so intensely alive when you do it. Something to force you to be so very present, right? Live fully in the moment.

I imagine it's quite beautiful that way. flattered to have that community and this one crossover, right? Similar weirdos, similar curious people, I guess. Thanks for listening, and I hope you crushed some more races that would kill me this year. Now for a message that I promise I'm not sharing just because they share some kind of some kind words about me. I'm sharing it because I'm guessing parts of this message, very relatable to a lot of others listening. Full Circle Sack Thomas Pike wrote a message with the subject line of, Thank you for making my brain itch.

Dear Dan, forgive me for forgoing the custom of addressing you by your numerous titles. I anticipate this email being long. I've been without my ADHD meds for four days now. And I wanted to preserve the initial moment of seriousness to simply say thank you and let you know that when people ask about personal heroes, you are often a name I give. That's beyond flattering. I have found myself relating to you often.

I have worked and continue to work with young people who have mental health struggles. I've dabbled and open mic comedy nights, love horror and my dad is also a prolific serial killer. Regardless of whether you read the rest of this email or not, I just want to say thank you for being a quality meat sack and encouraging kindness and wisdom. If you are able or choose to share this at any point, please feel free to summarize or editorialize anything here

as I know I tend to be verbose. All I ask is that you do not exclude my dad's reign of terror and join me in getting this vile man on the dad watch radar. Anyways, I've been thinking these thoughts for a while, but I just finished your end of the year suck and felt compelled to finally share. Storytime. Under comedy after falling in love with stand-up as a form of escaping my traumatic childhood.

Christopher Titus's Norman Rockwell is bleeding. It's a great special. Gave me so much hope as a young man in a deranged family. I had copies of Revenge of Near and Crazy with the Capital F. On totally legal purchased, definitely not downloaded and burned onto a CD in my first car back in the early 2010s. At the time, I was heavily involved in Christianity, was going to a Bible college in the Midwest to become a youth pastor. I made my classmates, listened to your comedy, traumatized some young people who were fresh out of their homeschools. there was a part of me that was always aware of the systemic issues with religion,

but I carried an attitude of, well, I'll fix it from the inside. And not all churches are like that. The truth is, going to church saved my life. It was the first time I encountered adults who genuinely made me feel cared about. In my youth, when I was dealing with suicidal thoughts, I wanted to pay that good, back to the world, and help kids like I was helped. I was passionate and committed to my faith as anyone. I struggled through learning Greek, studying the Old Testament,

writing extensive papers on theology, all while dealing with my own mental health struggles in my early 20s. I graduated Bible College in 2016, had been serving as a youth pastor at a church. I listened to Time Suck and your stand-up, and you were regularly on my Spotify and Pandora rotations. Then you did your episode on the transgender debate. I remember listening to that episode,

and just looking for reasons not to agree, looking for holes in your arguments, and anything else that would validate, not what I believed, but what I felt I had to believe because I had believed it for so long, and was surrounded by people who believe those things. It made me uncomfortable. I had this information in front of me, data and truth and research, and then I had these

beliefs that I had accumulated and held on to. So I did what so many people do when presented with new information that conflicts with their beliefs. I stopped listening. Life happened fast in the years after that. I ended up losing my job of the church, in part for standing up for a transgender individual who was attending our youth group. I got married in October of 2019, then COVID hit, and before I knew it, my marriage was dissolving. I came back to TimeSuck when I was going down a rabbit hole on QAnon, Pizza Gate, and Tifa. Funny how some of that feels like a lifetime ago. I caught up on episodes fast and it resumed listing faithfully, and I'm so glad I did. I've learned so much thanks to you and your team of

wonderful researchers and scared to death has been my obsession since I discovered it. Looking back on my experiences, I wanted to simply share my perspective for those in the culture of the curious who may feel like things have changed or are conflicting with their personal beliefs. I get it. I didn't know it then, but I know it now. That really weird, itchy feeling in your brain when your beliefs conflict with data and research being presented to you. That, my friends, is cognitive dissonance. It's okay. We all experience it. Here's what I know. That discomfort is not something we should run from. If I could go back and have a redo, I would encourage my younger self to sit with that discomfort longer, examine how the ideology I'd adopted was harmful and change it. Ignoring, blocking it out,

or using dogmatic arguments is not how we become better meat sacks. I hope this reaches some of those who may be feeling alienated by the discomfort some of the topics you've covered this year is given them. It's human nature to want to be right, not to have to change or admit we're wrong, but damn if we aren't all wrong more than we're right, that's okay, sit with it, break out of the echo chamber, learn, change, and hail Nimrod. Whether you are a religious time sucker who is challenged with facing some of the difficulties associated with your religious beliefs, or more politically conservative time sucker, who feels under the microscope with some of the uncomfortable confrontations with the current political conversations,

Or if you're one of those weirdos who didn't enjoy the relaxing sound of a man servicing himself during a recent podcast, I just want to encourage people to sit in their discomfort and ask themselves something I was afraid to do. What if I'm wrong about this? If you've made it this far awesome, I've never had to apologize for length or girth in my life, and I won't begin now. If you have the time and capacity to do me one more solid, and if this is being read on air, give a shout out to one of my all-time favorite meat sacks Phoebe. We connected to one of the timesook Facebook pages while we were, We were both navigating some difficult life things, and she's quickly become a dear friend and

important confidant in my life. Phoebe is one of the kindest, most resilient, most thoughtful meat sacks I've ever encountered, and I hope that maybe if she hears some of that hype from you, our dear cult leader, she'll believe it a little bit more and continue to accept that she is a good one. Three out of five stars, please don't stop making brains itch, much love Thomas. Well, wow, Thomas, thank you. What a journey you've been on. And thanks so much for sharing some of the cliff notes of that journey.

you seem like you're in a really good place now a strong humble settled examined place i like that place it's a great place to start feeling a very authentic grounded just you know deep kind of happiness and i hope you can stay there or at least return quickly when life shakes that foundation again which i i think it almost certainly will as it does for all of us curious folk here and there i really loved your sentiment of but damn if we aren't all wrong more than we're right that's okay sit with it I get pretty hard of myself for being wrong, to the point that I won't want to share

what I think is right anymore because I feel like I've lost credibility, that having been wrong in the past invalidates any future truth I might want to share, and that's nonsense. To be wrong is to be human. Beware of the person who acts like they are never wrong because they are always full of shit,

looking at you cult leaders and certain politicians. And Phoebe, you are a good one. Your resistance to thinking that is further proof of it. I'm afraid. The good ones in my experience tend to experience much more self-doubt and are far more critical of themselves than the problematic eggs, right? The arrogant,

self-righteous, overly confident, often cruel and dismissive aches. They don't seem to doubt themselves much at all, which unbeknownst to them is their biggest problem and not just their greatest strength, but their greatest weakness. Hail Nimrod, Thomas, I wish you fucking nothing but the best on your journey forward. And now one more, some interesting discussion fodder from an interesting sack Jory or possibly Yoree, I'm sorry, Lumger, if I get your name wrong, J-O-R-I, who wrote in with the subject line of vigilantism changed Blue Cross's policy.

Dear Suckmaster and Bringer of Knowledge, I just finished listening to your episode 486. Thought I'd share us some interesting news. I remember reading this last December, link at the end of the email. Just prior to the healthcare CEO's murder, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield had been moving towards reducing or outright removing coverage of anesthesia in some states. In the wake of the act of vigilantism, and in seeing the public support of it, they chose to reverse those changes asap. I am not intending to condone murder as a means of bringing about societal change, just wanted to point out something positive that seemed to come out of it. I really enjoy both times suck and scared to death. Your content's a constant companion during my workday.

The episodes have helped me through a divorce as well as my father's passing. Your short suck number two is one of the final things I talked to my father about before he succumbed to ALS. hope you continue to put out wonderful content it's extremely refreshing to find well researched and thought out opinions especially lately and not to mention the humor I've been caught laughing at seemingly nothing too many times at work with your podcast

and my earbuds thanks again Jory well Jory thanks again for just being kind thanks for writing in a second sorry to I think I forgot to say first but anyway sorry to hear about the passing of your father and your divorce both intense losses I'm glad you seem to be doing pretty well now and yeah

while I'm not condemned owning what Luigi allegedly did either, sometimes it has, you know, it does take extreme acts. Historically, oftentimes, it has taken violent acts to enact positive change. And to anyone having a knee-jerk negative reaction to that statement or sentiment, America would literally not be here

if it were not for a violent reaction to British rule. Most nations would not be what they are currently without violent reactions in their pasts. I think it's pretty funny how we will universally understand violence when it comes to like nation-building but universally or nearly universally condemn it when it comes to say corporate violence, you know, or violence in the corporate space, rather.

But what if corporate actions directly lead to avoidable deaths? Is Luigi, allegedly, monstrous? Again, it's very interesting to think about, isn't it? And while I don't love ending on that note necessarily, I don't have anything else I wish to add right now. So off we go. Next time, suckers, I needed that. Well, thanks for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast.

Be sure in rate and review time suck if you haven't already. Please don't kidnap any child brides this week. If you're thinking about kidnapping a child bride, can you do something for me first? Can you cut your dick off? Actually, can you do two things? Can you cut your dick off and then throw yourself off of the roof of at least a 10-story building? I don't want you to keep on sucking. We all just want you to go away.

And Magic Productions. And now, how about a bit more spiritual enlightenment? from the book of Emmanuel David Isaiah, as written by God's favorite prophet, Emmanuel David Isaiah. Mixed in with maybe a few new verses written by me, I bet you won't be able to tell who wrote what. All women are given special gifts to nurture,

teach, and love my children. But each of my daughters must, with great care, protect and develop these gifts, or they will be lost. I, the Lord God, created man and woman to be one flesh, that they as one might bring forth children and raise them up unto me. Wherefore, it is to fulfill the measure of their creation that a man and woman are joined together.

And if they are faithful and obedient in all things and are valiant in the testimony of Jesus Christ and they receive all things from my hand, even from those having this authority, they are sealed up together as one throughout all eternity. This is the new and everlasting covenant of marriage, according to the order of the highest degree of the celestial kingdom in the holy Melchizedek priesthood of God. This is in fulfillment of the promise I gave unto Abraham. And unto all the house of Israel, and unto all the children of the promise, whether by blood or adoption, all our heirs, who receive me and keep all my commandments, saith God, even Jesus Christ, who speaketh unto you. This is the covenant and promise of eternal life, even eternal lives,

even endless lives, for they have no end. Wherefore I speak of these things out of the heavens, of which I have spoken up before, that ye may know that the hour has come, and is at hand that I now make bear my holy arm in the eyes of all nations, yea, the day of my power is at hand double yea for double power sayeth thee double your pleasure double your fun with double mid doublement doublement gum yea yea so saith thy thee god and thou hast knoweth what is cometh forth you yea not nay holy holy holy holy molly guacamole rimes with anchovy yeh thee hark the herald angel sings dingling ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding day nay thee thou thou is thou yeas shamamala ding dong my my my my Music hits me so hard, makes me say, yay.

Oh, my Lord. Thank you for blessing me, yay, with a mind to rhyme and two hype feet. Not nay, yay, it feels good when you know you are down. A super dope homeboy from the Oak Town, yay, and I'm known as such. And this is the beat that you can't touch. Yay, motherfucker. Yay, yay, yay! Which one was me?

Which one was him? I'll let you try to figure it out.