Bringing Elizabeth Home by Ed Smart, Lois Smart Read Free Book Online

summer before. These photographs were included in the photos Tom got to the news wire services and posted on the Internet. By early morning, Elizabeth's photos had been placed in every medium imaginable.
    By then our neighborhood had been alerted that an intruder had broken into our home and Elizabeth was missing. The news of her disappearance had quickly traveled through the streets of Federal Heights and beyond. The police separated Lois from me and took Mary Katherine to another floor so that her recollection of what had happened would not be tainted in any way. I stood in the kitchen with our home teacher and some other friends from the ward, and together we placed calls to our entire ward directory to enlist help. Mary Katherine was alone with the police. Lois was concerned for her, since she was clearly traumatized, and asked her mother and sister, who were now at our home, to sit with Mary Katherine to comfort her.
    I remember feeling as if the police didn't have control over the situation. It was as if they were waiting for something to happen or someone to come and tell them what to do. I was bothered that they weren't out there looking for my daughter. By the time my brother David tried to get into our home, less than an hour after I called 911, the police wouldn't let him up because there were too many people in the house. The house had not yet been sealed as a crime scene, which was confusing and troubling to us. Looking back, this turned out to be a huge oversight on the part of the police. It wasn't until Sergeant Don Bell showed up that the house was finally secured.
    By six o'clock that morning, friends were canvassing the neighborhood, knocking on every door and asking if anyone had seen or heard anything that might lend a clue in helping to find Elizabeth. One neighbor said he thought he had heard a female voice crying out around two in the morning. At the time, we didn't know if the voice was Elizabeth's. It turned out to be the voice of a girl traveling with a group of young motorcyclists. The neighbor had heard dogs barking and checked on his dog to make sure everything was okay. When nothing suspicious turned up, he went back to bed.
    Around 6:30 in the morning, Lois, Charles, Andrew, and I got dressed and were taken to the police station. The police had informed me that we would have to go in for questioning. As the police chief would later say, “Everyone is a suspect.” Lois and I were taken in one police car, and Charles and Andrew in another. Lois and I were told not to speak to each other. Mary Katherine would later be taken to the Children's Justice Center, escorted by Lois's mother and sister. William and Edward went to a neighbor's home. When we arrived at the station, Lois and I were separated for questioning. Charles and Andrew were being questioned in another room. We were being monitored by video cameras. Lois wanted to get through whatever we needed to do and go home to be there for Elizabeth. We had nothing to hide. I was anxious because I felt time was slipping away and I simply wanted to get out of the station and look for Elizabeth.
    When the police started questioning us, their first goal was to try and get a handle on who Elizabeth Smart was. What kind of girl was she? Did she have a boyfriend? Was she promiscuous? Did she experiment with drugs? Was she into the occult? Could she have run away? How was her relationship with her mom and me? How did she get along with her brothers? Did she spend a lot of time on the Internet? Fingers were quickly pointed in the direction of the victim. As frustrating as those questions were, they were a necessary part of the investigation, because the truth is, often those questions are relevant to the case. Every year, 203,900 children are abducted by family members and more than 200,000 missing kids are runaways.
    When it came to Elizabeth, none of those possibilities was at all true. She was a very young fourteen-year-old. To make matters worse, our