Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart is the 2026 true-crime documentary film streaming on Netflix that takes us back to the frantic months from June 2002 to March 2003, when young Elizabeth Smart, a girl from Salt Lake City, Utah, remained missing. After the sudden disappearance of Elizabeth from her home in the posh Federal Heights neighborhood of the city, most of the Smart family members feared they might never get to see her again. Kidnapped partly focuses on the immense bravery of the young girl, as well as the immense help that the public can often provide in such cases, making it quite an intriguing watch.
Who is Elizabeth Smart, and what happened to her?
Elizabeth Smart was born to an affluent family in Salt Lake City, Utah, in November of 1987, the second child of Ed and Lois Smart. Although the couple went on to have four more children—three sons and a daughter after Elizabeth—they always had a special fondness for her, simply because she was their first daughter. From a very young age, Elizabeth had an extremely likable, outgoing personality, and she learned to play the harp. As the Smarts were Mormons and belonged to a very tight-knit religious community, the young girl was also naturally very involved in church events and other community activities. She was loved by everyone in the Federal Heights neighborhood, where the family had moved to when she was about four years old. Most of all, Elizabeth was the closest to her younger sister, Mary Katherine, who looked up to her in every aspect of life.
Therefore, what happened on the night of June 5th, 2002 shook the close-knit family to the core and particularly left Mary Katherine traumatized, as she had just witnessed the abduction of her beloved elder sister. Around 3:58 am, as Ed recalls, Mary Katherine walked up to her parents’ room and told them something bizarre—a man had walked into her and Elizabeth’s room, held her elder sister at knifepoint, and taken her away. Despite initially feeling that the young girl must have had a bad dream, Ed and Lois got up to check on the matter and indeed found their elder daughter missing from the house. The net on a window in the kitchen had been slashed, and the window was wide open, making it evident that someone had indeed entered and then left the house through it.
The police were informed within the next few minutes, and a wide search for the missing girl began the next morning, one that would unfortunately go on for many more months. One of the earliest clues for the police was the fact that a chair had been propped up against the wall of the house just outside the kitchen window, which confirmed that the perpetrator must have entered through it. Strangely enough, a similar intrusion was attempted at the house of one of Ed’s brothers, where Elizabeth’s cousin, 18-year-old Olivia, was targeted in the same manner. But in this case, the perpetrator was unable to abduct the girl and simply fled through the window. When little Mary Katherine was questioned by the police, she revealed that she had heard the perpetrator threaten Elizabeth to keep quiet and follow his instructions, as he was already holding a knife at the throat of the 14-year-old girl. Crucially, Mary Katherine claimed that she had heard the voice of the man some time in the past, which meant that she and Elizabeth must have come across the perpetrator before.
How did the initial investigation go?
From the beginning of the investigation, the police force gave immense importance to Mary Katherine’s statement, as she was the only one to have seen the kidnapper, even though she could not see his face or remember his features much because of the shock and trauma. Based on the information that the kids had met the perpetrator earlier, the police started to take a closer look at every person who had visited the Smart house in recent months. The wealthy family often got renovation work done at their house, which meant that such workers, and also other men who were involved with Ed’s business or the church that the family was an important part of, kept coming to the house. But before the police could make any significant breakthroughs, they considered a different theory, one that was, and still is, fairly common in many child kidnapping cases.
In cases of kidnappings where a child had been abducted from inside their own house, it generally turned out to be someone from their family who was the perpetrator, and so the police decided to take a closer look at the Smart family. They interrogated the family members over an extended period of time, trying to find anything unusual or suspicious about their stories, and then asked them to take lie detector tests as well. Despite the implication of this request, which could have been taken wrongly by some, Ed and Lois willingly and readily agreed to polygraph tests so that the police could carry out their investigation correctly and reunite them with their missing daughter at the earliest.
Although the parents and other uncles and aunts passed the polygraph tests, one of Ed’s brothers, Tom, failed to do so, mostly because of his somewhat erratic behavior. As the family had been regularly appearing on news programs, making pleas to have their daughter safely returned to them, Tom was seen on many of these programs as well. Because of his neurodivergence, the man wrongfully seemed suspicious to many, including some of the police detectives. However, he was finally able to convince the police that he did not have anything to do with his niece’s disappearance. Despite the media having already reported how the police had been suspecting a few members of the Smart family, the latter simply refused to be distracted by these less-significant matters, and instead came together to search for the missing Elizabeth. The police also soon dismissed the theory of an internal conspiracy and instead started to look for anyone suspicious among the people who had visited the Smart house recently.
This was when they came across Richard Ricci, a handyman by profession who had recently visited the Smart house and done some renovation work for them. Interestingly, Ricci had had a disagreement with Ed Smart over the payment for this work, which made him a possible suspect in the kidnapping, and when his house was searched, the police found some pieces of jewelry that belonged to the Smart family. This confirmed that the man must have sneaked around the house to steal the jewelry, and so it seemed very possible that he knew how to enter through the kitchen window. Around the time of the kidnapping, Ricci had driven his van around for a few hundred miles, meaning that he had gone on a very long drive, but he refused to give the police any details.
This made him seem all the more like the kidnapper, as he could have easily abducted Elizabeth and then driven her to some safe location away from Salt Lake City. Ricci even had prior arrest records, and the police were now confident that they had found the perpetrator, even though the only witness, Mary Katherine, was confident that he was not the man who had entered her room on that fateful night. The police’s theory was rattled when the attempted kidnapping of Olivia took place at a time when Ricci was being held in prison. Only a few weeks later, Richard Ricci passed away from heart failure while in prison, without revealing anything, which only suggested that he had not actually done anything to the girl.
Who were the real perpetrators?
It was only many months later, towards the end of 2002, that Mary Katherine could suddenly remember where she had heard the voice of the perpetrator, and she immediately told her parents about it. While going around the city with her family, Mary Katherine had come across a man named Emmanuel, who begged at a certain corner of the street. Emmanuel was also extremely religious, as he spread the word of God in exchange for whatever people gave him, and so Lois had asked him to meet her husband. Emmanuel had therefore visited the house once and had even gotten some brief work from Ed, and this was most possibly when he had targeted the 14-year-old Elizabeth. Emmanuel, whose real name was Brian Mitchell, had allegedly sexually assaulted children before, and he had severed all ties from his family in recent years to apparently go around the country preaching the word of God with his wife, Wanda Barzee.
Both as a result of his drug abuse and also his genuinely devilish intent, Brian Mitchell started to consider himself a prophet of God, and claimed that he received divine messages from heaven. According to him and his wife, he had received one such order from God himself, which stated that he was to find seven young girls, all virgins, and marry them in order to protect humanity from Satan. Therefore, he kidnapped Elizabeth from her house by threatening her at knifepoint and took her to his camp in the hills. There, he forced himself upon the girl numerous times every day, essentially to satisfy his criminally perverse urges, but used religion to shield himself from his conscience. Wanda Barzee, who was also seemingly suffering from some delusion or simply drugged out of her wits, supported her husband and forced Elizabeth to give in to his demands.
During the nine months that Elizabeth was forced to live with her kidnappers, she heard Mitchell preach his sermons on an almost daily basis, in which he mentioned how he had been chosen by God to save humanity. He also told the girl that he would soon kidnap and bring Mary Katherine or her cousin, Olivia, to the camp. With resources running dry, Mitchell then started taking Barzee and Elizabeth to the city, making them cover their whole bodies with white cloth, but during one such visit, they were stopped by a police officer who wanted to check the girl’s face. Although Mitchell avoided getting caught by claiming that it was against his religious beliefs to let any man see the face of his teenage daughter, he was very spooked and quickly moved to San Diego. But it was ultimately Elizabeth’s extremely intelligent decision to pretend she too was now receiving messages from God that turned the case around. The girl claimed that God had suggested to her that they move back to Salt Lake City once again, and Mitchell did not only agree but was impressed at how his victim was now giving in to his beliefs.
How did the public play a significant role in the girl’s rescue?
Right as Mary Katherine managed to remember the man who was her sister’s kidnapper and told her parents about it, the police were informed by the family in the hope that they would finally arrest the man and bring their daughter back. However, the police did not take the matter seriously, as they believed that Emmanuel could not have been the perpetrator, since he had worked at the house only for a few days, that too many months before the kidnapping. They remained confident that Richard Ricci had been the perpetrator, and also refused to let out any information to the public about Emmanuel, or Brian Mitchell, as his real name was. The police feared that revealing this information to the public would also scare Mitchell and make him do even more rash things to the kidnapped girl. Therefore, the information was withheld for weeks, until the Smart family decided that the police department was incompetent and revealed details about the possible kidnapper to the press and the public themselves.
The effect was almost instantaneous, as numerous people reported having seen the man with two suspicious-looking females in the city, with the latter completely covered in white robes. When the family inquired at a nightclub that Mitchell had supposedly frequented with the two females, the servers told them that they could somewhat see the face of the younger female, and she did resemble Elizabeth. Around this time, Mitchell also moved back to Salt Lake City after having temporarily shifted to San Diego, only because of Elizabeth’s clever decision to convince him of a divine message. On the 12th of March, 2003, a woman rang the police and informed them that she had just seen Mitchell and two women in disguise at Sandy in Utah, which was once again possible only because the public had information and details about the perpetrator. Multiple teams of Utah police rushed to the scene and finally arrested Brian Mitchell and Wanda Barzee, also rescuing Elizabeth Smart in the process.
Where are Elizabeth Smart and her kidnappers now?
Once the police interrogation began, neither Brian Mitchell nor Wanda Barzee cooperated much, as they pretended to be, or really were, lost in their delusions of being prophets of God and safekeepers of all humanity. Most people, including the lead detective in the case, Cordon Parks, believed that Mitchell was simply pretending to be mentally ill so that he would get reduced punishment for his abhorrent crimes. It seemed to work as well, as the trial was repeatedly delayed by the district court judge on the basis of the possibility that Mitchell was mentally ill. Irrespective of whether he did suffer from mental illnesses, the man had been capable enough to kidnap a 14-year-old girl and assault her repeatedly for months, and so he deserved severe punishment. As the case dragged on for years, Elizabeth decided to attend one of the trial sessions and testify against her kidnapper herself in the hope of forcing some result in the case.
Finally, in December 2010, the jury found Brian Mitchell guilty of kidnapping a minor for sexual activity, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the chance of parole. His wife, Wanda Barzee, pleaded guilty to the same charges and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. According to the latest reports, Wanda was released from prison in 2018, after her sentence had been served, but she was arrested again in May of 2025, after visiting two public parks in Salt Lake City, which sex offenders in Utah are prohibited from doing. She is 80 years old at present. Meanwhile, Brian Mitchell is still serving his life sentence at the high-security federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, and is about 72 years old at present. Even after being rescued from her kidnappers and being reunited with her family, Elizabeth Smart had to struggle with the after-effects of the harrowing and traumatic experiences, but eventually as an adult, she decided to come forward and tell her story to the world in order to provide help and inspiration to others. She now works as a public speaker and activist, running the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, which advocates for survivors in the fight against sexual violence.
