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

other children were also closely scrutinized. Charles was brought in for questioning, and he too was barraged by insulting personal attacks. “Did you kill your sister?” “Did a friend of yours kill your sister?” The disappearance was hard enough, but this questioning made it worse. We were in complete shock. We were grieving and feeling a kind of pain that is indescribable, and the allegations made during questioning were insufferable. As if our world hadn't been rocked already by Elizabeth's disappearance, they tried to rip apart everything we held near and dear. Our marriage, our children, our integrity, our faith—all of it was put to question after Elizabeth's kidnapping.
    Several hours had passed from the time Mary Katherine awoke Lois and me to when Don Bell officially turned our home into a crime scene—at 6:54 that morning, nearly six hours after Elizabeth went to bed and nearly three hours after my call to 911. People were buzzing all over our home, street, and neighborhood. Police would later describe allowing all of those people into the home as a giant mistake on their part. Unfortunately, so many people had been through the house by the time they sealed the scene that any clues or evidence that may have been left behind were thought to be tainted.
    Until that morning, I had no awareness of the Rachael Alert, which is essentially what has come to be called the Amber Alert. Created in 1996, the Amber Alert stands as a legacy to nine-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped while riding her bicycle in broad daylight and was later found brutally murdered. This innovative early warning system utilizes the Emergency Alert System (EAS), formerly known as the Emergency Broadcast System, which allows broadcasters and law-enforcement agencies to distribute urgent information once it is confirmed that a child has been abducted. These bulletins can contain descriptions of the abducted child, the suspected abductor, and the suspect's vehicle. Within hours, television stations and various cable networks begin running “crawls” on their transmissions containing information about the crime, and since then, some states employ traffic billboards to disseminate information to drivers. Radio stations play an important part as well, interrupting local programming to announce alerts. By eight o'clock in the morning, the Rachael Alert on Elizabeth had gone out.
    The media converged on our front yard early that morning. My sister Angela called two close friends, Ruth Todd and Kim Johnson, local Salt Lake City news anchors whose interest in finding Elizabeth went beyond simply “getting the story.” They were definitely part of the original thrust that quickly pushed this local kidnapping into national news. We are so grateful for the kind consideration those women gave to our family that morning and all during Elizabeth's disappearance. When the morning news came on, Elizabeth was the lead story on every station. Morning commuters heard the news that Salt Lake was missing one of its children.
    The police brought us to my parents' home by about nine o'clock that morning. My parents had arrived home from Lake Powell by this time. We weren't able to go to our house, because it had been sealed as a crime scene. We decided to assemble our own search team. Our oldest son Charles went on a search with our home teacher, driving around our neighborhood and through the hillsides and foothills of the area.
    Everything felt surreal. I was in a total state of disbelief. Lois was shaking uncontrollably—it was painful for me to see my wife like that, because she is the strongest woman I know. It might have appeared that I was the strong, fearless patriarch of our family, but we both had to be strong and rely on each other in our ups and downs. We were in a situation that we had never anticipated. We could never have gotten through this nightmare without each other.
    These are the types of situations that destroy marriages and