Elizabeth Smart: Hope Faith and Charity

by Cathy Scott

I’m proud of Elizabeth Smart. This week, in U.S. federal court, she faced her kidnapper for the first time since being rescued and told him she's living a good life despite the horrors surrounding what he did to her.

At the sentencing hearing for street preacher Brian David Mitchell on Wednesday, May 25 (which, coincidentally is National Missing Children’s Day), Elizabeth told her captor she believes he’s well aware that what he did to her was wrong. He snatched her at knifepoint in the middle of the night from her bed, dragging her from her family’s home in Salt Lake City, Utah, to a nearby mountain. He raped her continuously over the ensuing months as he held her captive. Those nine months, Elizabeth told Mitchell, are forever lost. But he has not stripped her of her future.

"I want you to know that I have a wonderful life," Elizabeth, now 23, told Mitchell. It took just a minute for Elizabeth to give her short speech as she stood tall and proud, unafraid of her kidnapper.

It brings to a close the saga that began in 2002, nine years ago when, at age 14, Mitchell held Elizabeth against her will in a rustic camp with Mitchell’s wife, , who was convicted of the crime in 2009.

She has moved on. Elizabeth, a harpist, has two semesters to go at Brigham Young University before graduating with a degree in music. Also, she recently returned from a two-year mission in France with the Church of Latter Day Saints. And she works as an advocate for children and victims of crime, especially kidnapping. And she has started the Elizabeth Smart Foundation with her first goal to get a program called RADkids into public schools. RAD, which stands for "Resist Aggression Defensively," teaches children specific techniques to get away from would-be attackers. Through the program, she told CBS affiliate KUTV, "I hope it gives others hope that they can speak out and not be scared to face their captor."

To a waiting crowd outside the courthouse, Elizabeth said, "Today is the end of a very long chapter and the beginning of a very beautiful chapter for me."

The day also marked the first time Elizabeth had directly addressed Mitchell, 57. She spoke at his trial in 2010, but he'd been removed from courtroom because of his disruptive behavior. This day, however, Brian David Mitchell was in court, and he heard Elizabeth’s words loud and clear before he was ushered, in shackles, back to a federal penitentiary—where he belongs—to serve out a life sentence.

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Elizabeth Smart: A Woman To Look Up To

by Cassie Nelson

Everyone has someone they would want to meet given the chance. Usually it's a famous athlete, celebrity, or politician like the president of the United States. But I'd rather meet someone far stronger than athletes who are constantly battered during games; celebrities ducking omnipresent paparazzi, or a president constantly attacked by one side or the other for every decision he makes.

I would want to meet Elizabeth Smart, a woman who has endured more than most will in a lifetime. Six years after her rescue, Elizabeth holds her head high as she reveals details of her capture for the first time. She walks with poise; looking fearless and determined. She's determined not to let the horrors she endured during her captivity destroy her future. She's determined not to let the man responsible for those horrors avoid punishment. She's determined that her survival be an inspiration for women and girls similarly abducted and held, among them Jaycee Dugard.


Three years ago, Elizabeth’s abductor, Brian Mitchell, convinced a judge that he was not competent to stand trial. Last week, Elizabeth Smart testified in detail about Mitchell’s abuse and behavior during her captivity to prove he knew exactly what he was doing then and was manipulating the system now. I can’t imagine the courage it must have taken to publicly describe her experience, especially in front of her parents, who never pushed her for details. Knowing she would be confronting her abductor for the first time since her rescue on March 12, 2003, in Sandy, Utah, she did not hesitate.

Perhaps Elizabeth Smart is able to talk about her ordeal, rather than be consumed by it, because she maintained her inner dignity and belief in a better future through the worst of  her horror. Even when she was being raped as often as four times a day, Elizabeth never lost herself. She kept a diary, writing nice things about her captor in English, while scribbling her true feelings in French underneath. Not only did she refuse to give in to despair; she looked for a way to escape.
Mitchell had told her he would kill her if she tried to escape. She figured her best chance at rescue would be back in Utah and not in California, where he had taken her. Somehow, without making him suspicious, she convinced Mitchell to return to Salt Lake City. The plan worked, and she was spotted on a street outside of Salt Lake City.


Elizabeth was 14 years old when she was abducted. She is 21 now, officially an adult. Like other young  women her age, Elizabeth is preparing to begin an independent life. She plans to move to Paris soon for the 18-month mission served by many young members of the Mormon Church. The commitment to helping others sustained her through the aftermath of her abduction and now propels her forward. As Elizabeth said in an interview recently, “I want people to know that no matter what happens in their lives, there is nothing too difficult to get through.” 

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Criminal Profilers Don't Profile on TV

by Pat Brown

The Sandra Cantu case took a bizarre twist today with the arrest of a female suspect. A 26-year-old Sunday school teacher, Melissa Huckaby, (pictured left) has been charged with kidnapping and murder. I am more than glad there has been arrest in this case and that there will be some justice for the family of Sandra.

But, as I was reading comments posted about this morning's news story, I noticed quite a few haranguing criminal profilers and police experts who had appeared on television for theorizing the crime was committed by a male sex offender (A similar bashing occurred after some television talking heads (not me) said they thought that an angry white man was responsible for the string of shootings eventually linked to John Muhammad and Lee Malvo) This time, the posters are claiming the experts are sexist; always blaming men for violent crime and they also accuse profilers as profiling the crime incorrectly. Criminal profiling is said to be bunk, and talking heads are brainless morons.

Let me address the issue of being sexist first. Sorry, guys, but most violent offenders are men, and that is a fact. Yes, women do commit crime, and women do kill, but the majority of violent criminals are men. It is just biology-- get over it.

Now, to profiling the Cantu case wrongly.. No one on television profiled the Sandra Cantu case. Experts were asked questions about what they thought might be possible, based on publicly released information (and often this is misinformation). The experts responded with a 30-second answer--on a good day, maybe a whole minute. They addressed some probability based on what they heard five seconds ago from a reporter's update on the story. A good portion of the time, a talking head is unable to provide in-depth commentary, and so the viewing public only gets a quickly tossed out idea; a thought which can stir interest in the topic and add to the discussion, but can hardly be considered a scientifically derived, carefully analyzed explanation of the events.

The Sandra Cantu case is a perfect example of this. I did a lot of interviews this week for CNN. Not one time during the last seven days did I ever give a profile of the child's murder or a profile of the killer. How's that, you say? Didn't I hear you give an answer when the host asked you to profile the homicide or the offender? Yes, I gave an answer, but it wasn't a profile. It was commentary. A profile is something one spends hours working on, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. A profile require access to all the case files, all the crime scene and autopsy photos, all interviews and reports. One doesn't profile a case and hand over to law enforcement an analysis that isn't based on evidence and scientific methodology (well, one shouldn't anyway). The final criminal profile should have each inference explained carefully and supported by the facts. Investigative avenues are then suggested based on the conclusions the profiler has arrived at. The profile should never infer that investigators not pursue all leads-- even those not aligning with the profile. Any profiler's theory, like any detective's theory, can turn out to be wrong (which is why it is called a theory) because certain evidence was unavailable, a piece of evidence was tampered with, or because there could be two explanations for the same evidence. The profile is to be an aid, a tool, and not an absolute.

One cannot profile on television because one has such limited information, and a good portion of it often turns out to be untrue. Even when one is profiling a case for law enforcement, a new piece of information can completely change the theory of what occurred. So you can imagine how difficult it is on television to be one hundred percent correct with one's conclusions.

Here is what I said about the Sandra Cantu case:

The killer lived in the trailer park. I based this conclusion on the abduction, the body dump site, and the suitcase. Sandra was unlikely to have left the park on her own, so her killer had reason to be there. The body was dumped just down the road, meaning the panicked killer wanted to get rid of her body quickly, but didn't want to go to take too long to do it. The killer also wanted to be comfortable dumping the body in a familiar area. The killer did not abduct Sandra using his car because if she had been killed in the car or at some outside location, the killer wouldn't have needed a suitcase to transport her; he would have just opened the door and pushed her out.

The accused killer of Sandra did live in the park. Melissa Huckaby was living in a trailer with her grandparents, the pastor of a local church and his wife. Her daughter also lived in the trailer home and often played with Sandra. Sandra was not pulled into any car, but visited the Huckaby home. Melissa Huckaby was the last person to see her and told the police that Sandra had stopped by to ask to play with her daughter, but she had told Sandra her daughter had some chores to do and she couldn't play right then.

Next, I said the killer likely killed Sandra within an hour of her going missing. I based my statement on two points. The first one is a general truism: when a child is abducted by a sexual predator they are almost always killed within an hour or two and sometimes within minutes. The assumption by almost everyone at that point in the news cycle was that Sandra had been abducted by a child predator because almost all little girls who go missing are killed by serial killers. The other reason I believed Sandra was dead within a short period of time was because she was fully clothed. I surmised the killer might have lost control of Sandra for some reason and tried to subdued her or lost control of his emotions and was too rough with Sandra. Sandra might have been killed without a sexual assault ever happening.

I felt the offender was not all that experienced and did not plan the crime. The offender was sloppy and careless and it seemed like the dumping of the body was out of panic and not particularly well thought out. It seems Ms. Huckaby possibly went off on Sandra for some unknown reason at her home, killed her, and then hurriedly got rid of her body.

The last answer I gave on Friday night was concerning the suitcase Huckaby claims she had left outside in the driveway and which was stolen. During the interview I was led to believe that a report had been made to the police concerning the suitcase theft on the day Sandra went missing. This bit of misinformation prevented me from considering Huckaby as a suspect. If Huckaby had used the suitcase to dump Sandra's body, she would NOT have reported it missing to the police. She did not expect the suitcase to be found, and she would not want to draw attention to her home. Until she thought the suitcase could be linked to her, she had no need to mention it.

So, based on the "fact" the suitcase had been reported missing and was the suitcase Sandra was found in, I surmised three things. One, Sandra definitely was dead quickly on the day she went missing (because someone needed a suitcase THAT day); two, the killer did not plan the crime; and three, the killer was inexperienced and not all that bright. I said something to this effect on CNN Headlines: "He probably grabbed her, something went wrong, he killed her, and now he had a body in his house and no way to get it out without being seen. He remembers seeing a suitcase out by the Huckaby house and thinks, yeah, okay, I will grab that (and psychopaths often do things impulsively because they see something or think something will be useful to them or because they find stealing not a big deal). So he jumps in his car, snatches the suitcase, comes back, puts Sandra's body in it, and zips out of the park to get rid of her body.

Well, that probably would have been the scenario IF the story about the suitcase theft being reported had been true. The next morning, I learned that Huckaby had been arrested, and that she had not reported the suitcase missing, or even mentioned it, until after the suitcase was found and the police were ripping apart the Huckaby home. THEN she realized (if she is guilty of this crime) that she needed a good story as to why Sandra's body ended up in her suitcase, so she came up the suitcase theft story. Huckaby also gave a number of stories with conflicting information in police interviews, which no doubt made them focus on Huckaby as Sandra's killer.

So this crime turns out allegedly not to have been committed by a male nor a sex crime (that we know of). The case is an anomaly, much like the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping in Utah in 2002. The Smart case created a monster: families of missing children now believe their children will be found alive because Elizabeth Smart was. Proof that a child can be found alive after such a long time has created a huge amount of false hope and expenditure. And after she was found, television got raked over the coals for believing she was dead. An anomoly like Elizabeth may be wonderful for that particular victim and family and an anomly like the Sandra Cantu case may be fascinating and eyeopening, but we shouldn't base our law enforcement and criminal justice decisions on the extremely rare cases rather than the overwhelming number of cases to the contrary. Television commentators, while they realize anomolies exist, cannot add a disclaimer on each and every statement they make on air (considering the fact they already have such a short window of time to speak). Even a profiler doing true criminal profiling of cases using specific individual case evidence (and not just general statistics), will encounter the occasional case where all the evidence points to a male and not a female, or to a husband instead of a stranger, or to one race and not the other. And because of these anomolies, we have a court system that requires us to prove through evidence that the suspect is absolutely guilty. Even then, sometimes the anomolies slip through.

If Huckaby is convicted, Sandra Cantu will be the poster child for children getting kidnapped and murdered by women. Even if she is only one out of a thousand cases, every time a child is abducted in the future, we are going to be reminded it could be a woman "just as much" as it could be a man. No, this is not true; in almost every case in the future where a child is abducted by a unrelated adult, it will be a male. Sorry, guys. Women may drown their own children in bathtubs, dump them into ponds to run off with their boyfriends, smother baby after baby following their births, kill their patients at the hospital, and steal little babies just because they want one, but abducting little girls is just not something that is a popular female crime.

Finally, I repeat, profiling doesn't happen on television. Experts are just speculating based on the limited information thrown out, and commenting in the minuscule amount of time allotted. Comments are "for entertainment only" and are meant to educate and inspire the individual to want to learn more. Television is a sound bite world, and one should expect to get sound bite quality of information.

So why do I do television if I cannot really profile there and sometimes have to end up feeling like an idiot (and getting emails calling me such)? Because television, in spite of its flaws, is a great way to reach out to citizens. It is a wonderful tool for encouraging discussion about crime, sex offenders, safety, parenting, and, even though it is a bit risky, a way to show how criminals operate and cases are analyzed.

The Tracy PD did a fabulous job with this investigation. They got their man (oops...woman). They likely thought it was a male sex offender themselves in the beginning, but they focused on the evidence and when it led them to a different theory and a female suspect, they didn't ignore the facts. They changed their theory when new evidence came to light. They should be commended for their fine work.

Meanwhile, enjoy television for what it is: news and entertainment with a bit of education thrown in. But do not, I repeat, do not think you are being provided with true investigative and profiling analysis. Also, when you see me do my next television interview on the Sandra Cantu case, you will see me try to answer why I didn't "profile" the case correctly, and why I didn't consider the killer could be a female. I will try to explain it...in 30 seconds.

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