10 Shocking Bombshells from Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart (Including How She Was Nearly Rescued Months Earlier) By Lynsey Eidell

Elizabeth Smart became a household name after she vanished from her bedroom on the night of June 5, 2002.

The then-14-year-old was snatched from her Salt Lake City home while she slept by Brian David Mitchell, who, at the time, was a man claiming to be a prophet named Emmanuel. Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, held Elizabeth captive for the next nine months — subjecting her to horrific abuse, including daily violent sexual assaults.

But on March 12, 2003, Elizabeth and her kidnappers were spotted walking in Sandy, Utah. Despite wearing a disguise and giving police a fake name, she was ultimately saved by authorities and reunited with her family, who had searched tirelessly for her while she was missing.

At the time, Elizabeth’s kidnapping and unlikely rescue gripped headlines around the world. In the years since, her story of survival has been retold in documentaries and TV movies. But now, Elizabeth is opening up about her ordeal like never before in the Netflix documentary Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart.

In the documentary, which began streaming on Jan. 21, Elizabeth — now a mother of three — tells the story of her abduction in unfiltered detail. The documentary includes never-before-seen archival footage, as well as first-person accounts from members of her family and the law enforcement officers who worked her case.

From missteps in the police investigation to the harrowing details of Elizabeth’s time spent in captivity, here are 10 shocking bombshells revealed in Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart.

Ed Smart said he was admitted to a psychiatric ward in the days following Elizabeth’s kidnapping

One of the police’s earliest working theories about what happened to Elizabeth was that her parents — particularly her father, Ed Smart — were involved in her disappearance. Within days of her going missing, police zeroed in on Ed as a suspect and the revelation left him devastated.

“I was overwhelmed to the point that I was shaking and I couldn’t stop shaking,” Ed shared in the documentary.

Ed was so distraught that his father brought him to the hospital, where he was placed in the psychiatric ward.

“I cried that whole night,” Ed recalled. “To have your daughter go missing is horrendous. And then to be a possible suspect — I was beyond words.”

Tom Smart, Elizabeth’s uncle, said he was “hearing things” when he failed a polygraph test

Police also considered Ed’s brothers, Tom and Dave Smart, as potential suspects in Elizabeth’s disappearance. Tom came under particular scrutiny after he gave an interview to CNN’s Nancy Grace a week after Elizabeth vanished.

In the interview, Tom referred to Elizabeth’s kidnapping as a “wonderful story” and alleged that the person who took her was “not a bad person at all” — rather, “somebody who actually likes Elizabeth.”

In addition to the troublesome interview, Tom also failed a polygraph test. But in the documentary, Tom explained how the strain of Elizabeth’s disappearance affected him mentally.

“In a situation like a kidnapping where it doesn’t seem like there’s much you can do other than keep turning over stones, neighborhoods, people,” Tom said, “After three or four days of that, with no sleep, you tend to collapse on yourself.”

He continued, “When I’d been polygraphed, it’d been five and a half days into it. I mean, I was hearing things.”

The family claimed the cops’ focus on them was detrimental to the search effort

While the authorities were investigating the Smart family, both the media coverage and the public response toward them shifted, according to their accounts in the documentary. As a result, they claimed the community effort toward finding Elizabeth dropped dramatically.

“It was dumbfounding as to how long it took the police essentially to clear the family,” Ed said. “And as the finger was pointed at us, we saw a real drop in people that were coming to help us search.”

Dave added, “The numbers just took a dive. I don’t think those reporters realized the impact that they had.”

The Smart family was eventually cleared by the police. Cory Lyman, the lead investigator in the case, defended their scrutiny of the family.

“There’s a standard in these kinds of cases. The families get looked at, and it’s really, really tough on them,” Lyman said. “But their alibis checked out, and with all of the computers we’d seized, emails we’d looked at, we did not find anything suspicious.”

Elizabeth’s sister Mary Katherine told police that their prime suspect, Richard Ricci, didn’t do it

Cops zeroed in on Richard Ricci, a man with a lengthy rap sheet who had done contracting work on the Smart home, after they learned he had had a dispute with Ed over wages. A subsequent search of Ricci’s home uncovered stolen jewelry items of Elizabeth’s mom Lois. On the night of the kidnapping, police learned that Ricci had driven hundreds of miles with no explanation.

“We had reports that someone had seen him removing digging tools out of the vehicle at that time,” Lyman revealed, which led police to develop the theory that Ricci had abducted Elizabeth and disposed of her body hundreds of miles away.

While the lead seemed promising, there was one major issue.

“The police said we’re 99.9% sure we’ve got our man,” Tom said. “But here’s the thing: The only eyewitness said it wasn’t him.”

Mary Katherine Smart, Elizabeth’s sister who witnessed the kidnapping and heard the abductor’s voice, insisted that Ricci was not the perpetrator. But despite her confidence that Ricci was not the man who took her sister, police were “convinced Ricci was the prime suspect,” Ed shared.

“Mary Katherine had been asleep. She would have been groggy,” Cordon Parks, a detective on the case, explained about why they didn’t take her statements seriously at the time. “The reports we had said she kept her eyes shut during the abduction. Maybe she didn’t really realize it had been Ricci.”

Ricci was kept in custody until he suffered a brain aneurysm and fell into a coma, CNN reported. He died on Aug. 30, 2002. When Ricci died, police were concerned that their hopes of finding Elizabeth had died with him.

Police doubted Mary Katherine when she remembered the name of Elizabeth’s kidnapper

Mary Katherine had insisted since her initial interviews with the police that the voice of Elizabeth’s kidnapper was familiar to her. Around four months after Elizabeth’s abduction, Mary Katherine suddenly remembered the name of the man’s voice that she had heard that fateful night: “Emmanuel.”

“Emmanuel” was a homeless person whom Lois and the children had encountered around a year prior in downtown Salt Lake City. When they witnessed him preaching, Lois gave him her husband’s card and told him to reach out for work. Ed hired “Emmanuel” to do a few odd jobs around the house, which is where Mary Katherine had previously heard his voice.

But while the Smarts viewed Mary Katherine’s recollection as a major breakthrough in Elizabeth’s case, the police were skeptical.

“I was not convinced,” Lyman said in the documentary. “Emmanuel had not appeared on any of the lists of the people we were investigating. He was there for three hours one day and then didn’t even come back to get paid.”

Parks shared similar thoughts. “Quite frankly, her memory of Emmanuel being the kidnapper came under some disbelief on the part of the investigators,” he said. “There was some speculation that her memory might not be accurate.”

This was met with great frustration by the Smart family. “I mean, for heaven’s sake, what more do you need?” Ed said. “You have this child, who is sitting in this room watching her sister being taken, that comes forward and says, ‘This is who I think it is.’ ”

Elizabeth was left bleeding and unconscious after Mitchell raped her for the first time

Elizabeth opened up about the details of her sexual assault in the documentary, describing in harrowing detail how Mitchell raped her for the first time after kidnapping her, taking her to a desolate encampment deep in the woods, and marrying her in a makeshift ceremony.

“I remember thinking, ‘If I can hold him off just long enough, someone will rescue me,’ ” Elizabeth shared about the initial assault. “But he pushed me onto the ground and, like, I had led such an innocent life. I thought that if I rolled onto my stomach, that he wouldn’t be able to rape me.”

She continued, “It didn’t matter what I did. Ultimately, he raped me. And I remember being in a lot of pain. I remember begging him to stop.”

When it was over, Mitchell smiled at her “like it wasn’t a big deal” and left her on the ground of the tent. But Elizabeth was physically and emotionally traumatized.

“I just remember hurting so much physically,” she recalled. “I remember looking down, and I could see blood running down my thighs. And then I must have passed out.”

Elizabeth worried her family wouldn’t want her back if they knew she’d been raped

Mitchell continued to force Elizabeth to have sex with him regularly throughout her nine months in captivity.

“I had gone from not even holding a boy’s hand to being raped every day, multiple times a day,” she recalled in the documentary, describing how it was not “uncommon” to wake up to Mitchell raping her.

Because of her strict religious upbringing, Elizabeth shared how she felt a lot of “shame” surrounding being raped, so much so that she even believed she was better off never being rescued.

“No one had discussed with me the difference between, like, consensual sex, intimacy, versus rape,” she explained in the documentary. “I felt like I was filthy. I thought if my family knew what had happened to me, would they still want me back? Maybe it would be better if nobody ever found me.”

Mitchell would walk Elizabeth “like a dog” to humiliate her

In addition to being raped regularly, Elizabeth was tormented by her captors — including being chained, tied up and forced to drink alcohol.

“Every day, he would humiliate me,” she described. “When he took me down to the spring where we would collect the water from, he would hold on to the cable and basically walk me like a dog.”

She continued, “I was forced to drink beer after beer until I finally threw up, and he just left me there, face down in my own vomit.”

Mitchell would also withhold food if she didn’t comply with his orders and threatened to kill her or her family if she disobeyed him.

“I’d been extremely abused for months,” she said of her time in captivity.

Elizabeth was almost rescued months earlier, but her kidnapper convinced a homicide detective to leave them

In August 2002, “Emmanuel” and “Hephzibah,” Wanda’s alias, got in a fight, Elizabeth claimed, that resulted in the three of them leaving the mountains and heading down to Salt Lake City. While the three were in a library looking at maps, a homicide detective approached them.

He introduced himself and said he needed to see Elizabeth’s face, which was covered, to make sure she wasn’t the girl the police were looking for.

“Emmanuel was like ‘I’m sorry, but no. That would be against our faith, against our religion. The only people who will see her face are her future husband and myself, her father,’ ” Elizabeth recalled.

Though she wanted to yell out, Hephzibah grabbed her leg as a warning sign, scaring Elizabeth into silence. Eventually, the homicide detective bought the story and walked away.

“I didn’t feel safe enough crying out, and that lifeline disappeared,” she said.

Parks believes Mitchell faked his insanity defense

Despite being captured and arrested in March 2003, Mitchell didn’t face trial in the case until March 2010. The seven-year-long delay was the result of several competency hearings held to determine if Mitchell was mentally fit to stand trial — a tactic Parks believes Mitchell used intentionally.

“I found him very crafty,” Parks said. “Brian David Mitchell is a terrible pedophile who justifies himself through God and he’s capable of anything.”

Parks continued, “I don’t think he was mentally ill at all. I think he was playing for a mental health issue and it worked. The district court judge delayed the trial and delayed the trial.”

Though the delays were frustrating, there was one silver lining to the time that passed: “time to heal” before Elizabeth and her family had to face Mitchell in court, Ed said.

If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.