Smart Abduction Still Unsolved Despite Tips, Leads

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- For a while, every time the phone rang, Ed and Lois Smart jumped, overwhelmed by hope and dread.

Often, the calls would be from police alerting them to grisly discoveries that might be linked to their missing daughter, attempting to warn them before the findings hit the news.

At times, the news beat them: Hands and feet had been found up a canyon, reports said, bones in the desert.

Then, the Smarts called police: Is it true? Is it Elizabeth?

Every time, the answer has been no. And now, nearly six months after a gunman stole their 14-year-old from her bed in the middle of the night, the Smarts say they accept such calls as part of their strange new life, where their vanished daughter is everywhere, yet nowhere.

"Every day is a struggle," Lois Smart said during an interview this past week. "It would be very easy for me to stay in bed, never leave."

But the Smarts have five other children, ages 4 to 16, who need their parents to figure out how to live without Elizabeth so they can, too.

"They take their cues directly from us," Lois said. "As long as we are able to function, so are they."

The frenetic pace of the summer -- when the Smarts held twice-daily news briefings for local and national reporters, helped coordinate massive volunteer searches, heard from or called investigators several times daily -- has slowed.

Search efforts have been decentralized, with groups forming independently and communicating via a dedicated Web site; regular briefings were suspended Sept. 17, in favor of intermittent news conferences on specific topics.

Late last month, Ed Smart arranged a briefing to urge support for the nationwide Amber Alert proposal now before Congress.

His own effort, he said, would be his gift to Elizabeth for her 15th birthday on Nov. 3. He wept, his sorrow engulfing the small knot of Salt Lake-based reporters who have covered the case from the start. Some of them cried, too.

Smart says he will continue to seek media attention, always to keep Elizabeth alive in the public mind, hoping for the one tip yet to come that will break the case. He is willing, in exchange, to put up with people following him around in public, pointing at him, getting in his face. "But I can't keep reliving the trauma," he said.

Whirl of Activity in Early Hours

During these past months, the Smarts have remembered more about those early hours -- and forgotten some, too. Time was elastic immediately after Elizabeth disappeared, they agree -- even as they disagree about how long after the abduction they talked with their 10-year-old daughter Mary Katherine about what she saw in the dark on June 5, or how long it took police to arrive that morning after Ed's first, frantic call.

But of some things, they are certain. It was 3:58 a.m. when Mary Katherine, then 9, came into her parents' bedroom. Ed remembers looking at his digital clock.

"She wasn't hysterical," Lois said. "She came to my side. She had her blanket around her. She just said, 'Elizabeth is gone.' " Ed got up and checked the other kids' rooms. He and Lois went downstairs to look for Elizabeth. Lois saw the window screen near the back door had been cut, and became hysterical. Ed called 911.

The responding police officer could hear Lois screaming in the background. Ed remembered that 10 years earlier, there had been an attempted abduction at their neighbors' house across the street. He ran to their door, pounded on it. It took forever for them to answer. He warned them, then roused other neighbors.

Lois doesn't remember how many came to their home, or when. "It seems like they were there fast. Everyone got there fast," she said.

The police log for June 5 states the call came in at 4:01 a.m. About 2 a.m., it says, a man 5 feet, 8 inches tall, wearing white pants, a white ball cap and a light jacket, entered the home through a kitchen window and took Elizabeth at gunpoint from her bedroom.

"The suspect threatened the younger sister, and after about two hours, she ran in and told her parents. The parents contacted several neighbors and then contacted the police," it says.

Sue Ann Adams, the first neighbor to arrive, remembers it differently. When she got to the Smart home a little after 4 a.m., she said, "there was a police officer in the kitchen, and another just outside his car on the driveway."

Police Admit Mistakes

Salt Lake police last month acknowledged they hadn't properly secured the Smart home, letting people into a crime scene that forensic investigators hadn't searched for evidence.

The admission, though late, was welcome, the family says, because for too long news reports cast blame on Ed Smart by repeating early police assertions.

Nor was it true that the abductor threatened Mary Katherine, the sole witness to her sister's kidnapping -- a misstatement Salt Lake City Police Chief Rick Dinse corrected two weeks later. Police Capt. Cory Lyman, who heads the Smart case investigation task force, said neither his department's decision not to secure the home as a crime scene nor the initial report that Ed called neighbors before police should be considered a blunder.

"Officers responded. What is their first priority?" Lyman said. "Their initial response is always preservation of life. ... they had a greater responsibility than to seal that scene." They had to find Elizabeth.

Reports on Ed Smart's actions were skewed when his brother Tom Smart said he'd been phoned at 3:30 a.m., Lyman said -- a mistake made in the confusion of the moment by a man awakened from a dead sleep by shocking news. Then, media reports fused the two, saying the scene wasn't secured because Ed had called others before he called police.

Lyman said police were slow to correct the record because "we didn't want to correct until we were sure."

Ed and Lois Smart say they still aren't sure what the gunman said in the girls' room. At investigators' request, they haven't questioned their younger daughter on what she told police. Children have malleable memories, and they don't want to taint her as a witness.

They do talk to her if she brings it up. Their understanding is that as Mary Katherine feigned sleep, Elizabeth stubbed her toe, and the man said either "if you don't scream, I won't hurt you," or "be quiet or I'll hurt you."

Mary Katherine got out of bed to follow them. But when she stood in her doorway and saw them looking into her brothers' room, she went back to bed, her parents say.

Police say she waited two hours before telling her parents. But that may not be true, Lois said. The little girl said the clock rang four times. But it rings every 15 minutes, and wasn't running properly.

Experts say that the first hours after an abduction are the most critical. But the Smarts say their daughter's caution was crucial.

"Mary Katherine was brave, courageous and strong that night," Lois Smart said. "She saw a gun and him checking the other rooms. She did the right thing. I want the world to know that."

FBI agents stayed in the home with the family for two weeks after Elizabeth disappeared. Police parked their cruisers at the bottom of the driveway for a month, protecting the Smarts from reporters or other intruders.

The Smarts continue to keep their home off-limits to anyone but family.

Following-up Leads

Police have documented and followed up over 16,000 leads from the public -- most of them dead ends, some of them strange, others intriguing.

Brett Michael Edmunds, a transient who fled to West Virginia when police sought him for questioning, turned out to know nothing.

A report from Lincoln, Neb., of a girl in a van who looked like Elizabeth was a false alarm.

Police have gotten specific tips about some of Utah's 20,000 open mine shafts, and have gone with search and rescue units into the dangerous abandoned mines to look for Elizabeth. Most of those calls were from hoaxers, Lyman said.

A man in California who had been in Utah around the time of the kidnapping has been cleared. An 18-year-old man from South Carolina who claimed to be Elizabeth's kidnapper is now in federal custody after repeated attempts to extort money from her parents.

The "top potential suspect" in the kidnapping, former handyman Richard Albert Ricci, died last month of a spontaneous cerebral hemorrhage. Police still search for information on his whereabouts between May 30 and June 8.

"Over the months, Mr. Ricci has remained at the top of the list of people of interest," Lyman said. At the same time, investigators aren't totally convinced he was the abductor, or acted alone, he said.

"We have no evidence that Elizabeth's not alive out there," Lyman said. "There's obviously some information still missing. It could come in tonight, or it could be a long time."

The Smart family wants to know more about a July 24 attempted break-in at the Cottonwood Heights home of Jeannie and Steve Wright. Jeannie Wright is Lois Smart's sister. County sheriff's deputies reported the screen covering the window of the Wrights' 15-year-old daughter was cut and a chair was found beneath it -- a scene similar to that found at the Smarts' kitchen window on June 5.

They also want to know more about a man who fled after witnesses saw him digging a grave-like hole under some bushes in Sanpete County on June 9. He was described as 5-foot-8, with dark hair, wearing blue jeans and a white or light-colored baseball cap -- a description close to Mary Katherine's witness statement.

"There have been false sightings all over, in several states," Tom Smart said. "There are clues, but there are no traces. It's crazier than any fiction. "I still believe they'll solve it," he said.

Police and family alike continue to be inundated by calls from psychics. Ed Smart's exasperation showed when he said hundreds of thousands of psychics have reported in; Lyman said close to 600 psychics have contacted police, all with different dreams.

It would be tempting to ignore them. But even the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children warns against disregard, because psychics' purported dreams or visions may be a truth told by someone unwilling or afraid to get involved directly.

And though the same experts claim no missing child has ever been recovered with psychic information, Elizabeth Smart's family and investigators are bound to check out each one.

That's why, a week ago, Elizabeth's uncles Tom and Dave Smart walked along desolate railroad tracks near the town of Lark, long abandoned to the poisonous remains of Bingham Canyon copper mining west of Salt Lake City.

A psychic had told them Elizabeth's body lay near those tracks. She remains missing.

(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)