Story Description:
St. Martin’s
Press|October 7, 2013|Hardcover|ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
For the first
time, then years after her abduction from her Salt Lake City bedroom, Elizabeth
Smart reveals how she survived and the secret to forging a new life in the wake
of a brutal crime.
On June5,
2002, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart,
the daughter of a close-knit Mormon family, was taken from her home in the
middle of the night by religious fanatic, Brian David Mitchell and his wife,
Wanda Barzee. She was kept chained,
dressed in disguise, repeatedly raped, and told she and her family would be
killed if she tried to escape. After her
rescue on March 12, 2003, she rejoined her family and worked to pick up the
pieces of her life.
Now for the first
time, in her memoir MY STORY, she tells of the constant fear she endured every
hour, her courageous determination to maintain hope, and how she devised a plan
to manipulate her captors and convinced them to return to Utah, where she was
rescued minutes after arriving. Smart explains
how her faith helped her stay sane in the midst of a nightmare and how she
found the strength to confront her captors at their trial and see that justice
was served.
My Review:
When Elizabeth
Smart was just fourteen-years-old she was taken at knife-point from her bed in
the middle of the night by Brian David Mitchell.
Mitchell was an
evil, religious fanatic, pedophile who thought he was a prophet and that he was
doing God’s work. Even as a teenager he
was convicted for pedophilia after exposing himself to a child. He attended Mormon churches just long enough
to get the language down in order to fool people while preaching and conducting
sermons. He made threats of violence to
his own family and married his current wife, Wanda Barzee the same day his
divorce from his second wife came through.
Wanda Barzee was
as crazy, disturbed, manipulative, and depraved as Mitchell. She gave up all parental rights to her six
children in order to marry Mitchell.
Mitchell believed he had been chosen by God. Mitchell’s own mother was so frightened of
him that she took out a restraining order against him. All Mitchell was interested in was
pedophilia, drugs, alcohol, and pornography.
He called himself the Prophet Immanuel David Isiah.
June 4, 2002 was
the night Mitchell cut a screen in a window and gained access to the Smart’s
home. In total darkness he fumbled his
way up the stairs and found Elizabeth’s room.
Upon awakening her, he held an eight-inch serrated edged knife up to her
throat and told her: “Don’t make a sound.
Get out of bed, or I’ll kill you and your family.” Elizabeth was frightened, her heart began to
race and she fought the urge to scream for fear he would kill her family if he
hadn’t already.
The words “I will
kill your family” kept echoing in her ears and she had no doubt that he would
carry through on his threat. Mitchell walked
Elizabeth up the mountain behind her home in the pitch black night to a camp he
had readied and where Wanda Barzee waited.
From that first day, Elizabeth’s descent into hell began. She was raped every single day and subjected
to perverted acts that we don’t even want to think about or imagine. She was chained around the ankle with the
other end tethered to a tree. She could
only move about twenty feet in any direction.
Although this was
a terrifying and horrifying ordeal for someone her age to go through, Elizabeth
had made up her mind that somehow she would survive. She was not going to allow Mitchell and
Barzee to drag her down. Elizabeth had
days where she cried and cried and cried as it was the only way she could
relieve the immense pressure of the stress she was under, but with his usual
controlling ways, Mitchell told her she wasn’t allowed to cry anymore. The one thing however, he could not take away
from her was her conversations with God.
She prayed regularly and knew and felt that God was with her every step
of the way.
MY STORY, written
ten years after her ordeal reveals how she survived and the secret to forging a
new life in the wake of a brutal and utterly horrifying crime.
No comments:
Post a Comment