The Missing Nine Months

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In their close-knit Mormon community, the Smarts' joy at Elizabeth's return was everyone's. Yet even as the Smarts feted their daughter, the grim epilogue to her ordeal was beginning to unfold. For now it remains a swirl of dark allegations and questions. How could police, who twice had nabbed Mitchell on petty crimes, not have seen the kidnappers living so conspicuously in their midst? "All we had was a description and a sketch," said Salt Lake police chief Rick Dinse at one point. And, perhaps most confounding, how did this young girl with the toothy, all-American smile grow so attached to her unhinged captors?

Mitchell was a local, born and raised just a few miles from Elizabeth Smart. A so-so student at Skyline High School, he lost himself in hobbies like model rocketry before launching himself into drugs and alcohol. At 19 he married and had two kids with a woman named Karen, but the two split up. Soon afterward, he became active in the Mormon church. There he met Debbie, whom he married in 1980. According to Debbie, the David Mitchell she fell in love with was a gentle, deeply devout man. But she says he soon became controlling; he banned bright colors from her wardrobe and, she alleged in interviews last week, sexually assaulted her children. After a few years Debbie divorced him.

Almost immediately after the two split, Mitchell met Barzee at a church function and moved in with her and her three children. In this third family circle, Mitchell's behavior grew increasingly bizarre. He spoke often of visitations by angels and cornered his stepchildren with impromptu sermons. Last week in a series of television interviews, Barzee's daughter Louree Gaylor alleged that Mitchell was "always hugging me the wrong way." Once Gaylor moved out, the couple claimed to have received a divine direction to sell off all their belongings. At one point, Mitchell and Barzee were both excommunicated by the Mormon church, possibly for promoting polygamy, which is outlawed. "I watched these people go down," says Cornelius Samuel West, a naturopathic physician, who invited Mitchell and Barzee to sleep in his basement. "At first he was clean-shaven and coherent. Then he grew the beard and went into his Jesus act." One day, after the two men argued about Mormonism, the couple suddenly left without saying goodbye.

Sometime in the late 1990s, Mitchell and Barzee became fixtures on the streets of Salt Lake. They kept a high profile, dressing in robes and wheeling their possessions around in an elaborate handcart Mitchell had crafted. The stained-wood vehicle, clearly modeled on the carts pushed by the early Mormon pioneers, had a sloping canopy and rested on bicycle wheels.

In the fall of 2000 Mitchell received a second revelation, telling him to gather "seven young wives." Mitchell later detailed the vision in a 27-page religious tract, "The Book of Immanuel David Isaiah," in which he extolled the "blessing" of polygamy and called himself a "just and mighty" deity. "Somewhere along the line, he decided he was God," says Pamela Atkinson of the Volunteers of America homeless-outreach program, who counseled Mitchell during this period. "He comes across as gentle in his preaching."