Free Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer Page B

boasts Lafferty, “I immediately guessed that he was probably a fundamentalist, and that Elizabeth was somehow involved in a polygamy situation.”
    Lafferty was soon proven correct. The man who kidnapped Elizabeth turned out to be a forty-nine-year-old Utahan named Brian David Mitchell. Although he was indeed a Mormon Fundamentalist, he was not affiliated with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the faction that holds sway in Bountiful and Colorado City—Hildale) or any other established sect; he was a so-called independent, of whom there are untold multitudes currently practicing polygamy throughout the western United States, Canada, and Mexico. Thanks to the torrent of publicity generated by his 2001 trial and imprisonment, polygamist Tom Green had been the most widely recognized independent fundamentalist. But that was before Mitchell was arrested for kidnapping Elizabeth Smart and became a fixture in the news.
    Mitchell was not born into fundamentalism. He’d spent most of his life as a dutiful Latter-day Saint, and for three years he’d actually worked at the Salt Lake Temple, the epicenter of the establishment church, where he performed in ritual reenactments of sacred history. His wife, Wanda Barzee, was an upstanding Saint, as well, who for a period had played organ at the Mormon Tabernacle. One of Barzee’s music teachers described the couple as “the epitome of righteousness, fulfilling every church duty and assignment.”
    Mitchell’s unflagging zeal raised eyebrows even then, however. During his tenure as a temple worker, his job was to act the part of Satan in staged religious dramas. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Mitchell was so convincing in the role that “he made church officials uneasy.” Inevitably, his religious ardor brought him in contact with the fundamentalist fringe, which has a ubiquitous, if shadowy, presence up and down the Wasatch Front. By the mid-1990s Mitchell had grown firm in his conviction that the church leaders had erred, ruinously, more than a century before when they’d let the federal government force them to renounce polygamy. He and Barzee embraced Mormon Fundamentalism as passionately as they’d previously embraced mainstream Mormonism, and were officially cast out of the LDS Church.
    On Thanksgiving Day 2000, Mitchell announced to Barzee and anyone else who would listen that he had received a revelation in which the Lord commanded him to take seven additional wives. Subsequent divine commandments revealed that Mitchell’s name was actually Immanuel David Isaiah, and that he had been placed on earth to serve as a mouthpiece for the Lord during the Last Days. Mitchell stopped shaving and cutting his hair, dressed in billowing robes fashioned after the garb of Old Testament prophets, and gained a reputation throughout the Salt Lake Valley as an eccentric but harmless street preacher. He often introduced himself as “God be with us,” and Barzee as “God adorn us.”
    A year after determining that God wanted him to marry a plurality of women, Mitchell crossed paths with a wealthy Mormon housewife named Lois Smart outside a downtown shopping mall; he told her his name was Immanuel. Smart, who had a soft spot for the destitute—particularly those as pious as Immanuel/Mitchell appeared to be—gave the robed holy man a five-dollar bill and offered him employment doing odd jobs around her lavish Salt Lake City home. Thus, in November 2001, did Mitchell end up working half a day at the Smart residence, helping Lois’s husband, Ed Smart, patch their roof and rake leaves in their yard. During the five hours he spent on the $1.1 million property, Mitchell met the Smarts’ fourteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, and became infatuated with her angelic features and innocent demeanor. He decided that God intended her to be his polygamous wife.
    Over the months that followed, Mitchell obsessively stalked Elizabeth, spying on her from the lower