Elizabeth Smart Testimony: Victim Calls Accused a Hypocrite on Third Day on Stand
SALT LAKE CITY (CBS/AP) After three days, Elizabeth Smart's testimony concluded Wednesday in a federal court in Utah with a 15-minute cross-examination where she called Brian David Mitchell, the man accused of kidnapping her, a hypocrite.
"Nine months of living with him," she said, "and seeing him proclaim that he was God's servant and called to do God's work and everything he did to me and my family is something that I know that God would not tell somebody to do."
"God would never tell someone to kidnap her at knifepoint from their bed, from her sister's side... never continue to rape her and sexually abuse her."
Smart told the jury Monday about the "indescribable fear" she felt when she realized that the knife at her throat when she was abducted was real, saying she immediately "knew how deadly the situation was."
Prosecutors say Mitchell broke into the Smart home June 5, 2002 by cutting a screen on a kitchen window. He then held a knife to Smart's throat and whispered threats that made her get out of her bed, put tennis shoes on and follow him out of house, leaving her 9-year-old sister, Mary Katherine, behind to alert their sleeping parents.
Smart told the jury that she and Mitchell left the house and hiked three to five hours up a hill to a campsite, where Mitchell's now-estranged wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee, took her in a tent, sat her down on a bucket and washed her feet, Smart said.
According to Smart, Barzee told her to take off her pajamas and underwear and put on a robe or "she would have the defendant come in and rip them off."
Smart said that Mitchell then came into the tent and performed a "wedding" before raping her for the first time.
In the second day of testimony, Smart talked about a frustrating encounter with a Salt Lake City detective just months after she was abducted. Smart testified that she was sitting in a library reading room with Barzee and Mitchell, clothed in the robes and veils Mitchell forced her to wear, when a detective approached her and asked to look under her veil.
"He said he was looking for Elizabeth Smart," Smart said. But instead of lifting her veil and winning her freedom Smart testified that she found herself frozen with fear as Barzee squeezed her leg in warning to keep quiet.
"[Mitchell] told me that if I tried to run away, I would be killed," Smart said.
When the detective approached her and asked to look under her veil Mitchell got in between them, Smart said. "He said that it was not allowed in our religion and that only my husband would ever see my face." The detective pressed the point but Mitchell stood firm and the detective relented and walked away, Smart testified.
She told jurors she blamed herself for that missed opportunity. "I was mad at myself, that I didn't say anything," she said.
At the end of the day Tuesday Smart told the jury that, remarkably, she had actually conned her captor into returning to Salt Lake City from San Diego just weeks before she was rescued, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
She told Mitchell that God had told her they should return to Salt Lake City and that he would then be able to "plunder" the girls' camps in the mountains for brides to fulfill his revelation that he was to take seven wives in seven years, and then multiply that number sevenfold.
But even though she set in motion the events that led to her rescue, Smart was so afraid of Mitchell that it wasn't until she was in the back of a police cruiser, separated from Mitchell and Barzee, that she finally let herself think "This is it, this is over."
Once at the station she took off the disguise she wore - a gray wig and sunglasses - and finally admitted she was, indeed, Elizabeth Smart. Her father, Ed Smart, soon arrived.
"How did you feel?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Felice Viti asked.
"I was so happy," came Smart's barely audible reply as court ended for the day.
Mitchell, 57, faces life in prison if he is convicted of kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor across state lines with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.
COVERAGE OF ELIZABETH SMART ON CRIMESIDER
