Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart | part one

0:00Rebecca Lavoie:I'm Rebecca Lavoie and this is You Can't Make This Up.

0:14Rebecca Lavoie:You Can't Make This Up is the podcast where we uncover the true stories behind your favorite Netflix documentaries and films. On today's episode, we take a closer look at the Netflix documentary film Kidnapped Elizabeth Smart. When I made my bid for freedom, I wanted it to be a sure thing. I was going to do whatever it took to escape. Today, we're talking to director Benedict Sanderson and executive producer Claire Goodlass. In 2002, after 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was snatched from her bedroom, police were stymied by clues that sent them in opposite directions. And when their lead suspect died in custody, investigators thought the answer to the kidnapping died with him.

0:57Rebecca Lavoie:They had no idea that only a few miles away, two people were holding Elizabeth captive in the woods. The young woman had to endure a violent existence at the hands of her abductors, all awaiting for the right moment to escape. The Netflix documentary film Kidnapped Elizabeth Smart goes deep inside the famous crime with the stories of those who were there, including Elizabeth herself. She talks in detail about her abduction, the abuse she suffered, and the lengths she went to stay safe in captivity. We also hear from her family about how they kept the search going to have that reunion with their missing loved one.

1:32And I said, Elizabeth, is it really you? And then she goes, yes, dad.

1:50Rebecca Lavoie:And I'm joined now by director Benedict Sanderson and executive producer Claire Goodlast. Welcome to You Can't Make This Up. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, yeah. Ben, there have been a lot of treatments of the Elizabeth Smart story, including a book she wrote herself. I'm curious what you thought you wanted to bring to this story that would be different for viewers on Netflix. Well, I think it's a story that's incredibly well-known in the US, but actually, as you can hear from our strange accents, we're in London in the UK, and we knew it a little bit, but actually here it's less well-known.

2:21And so I suppose, first and foremost, it was to bring it to a global audience. I mean, it's an extraordinary, twisty, compelling, and ultimately quite inspirational story. So there was that. I think also it had been told several times and it had been written about, and obviously there's been a couple of documentaries. What we were keen to do with this and what Elizabeth was actually really keen to do is to not shy away from some of the, well, her horrendous experience, to actually go into more detail about it. So she would talk not just about the physical abuse she suffered, but also the psychological abuse.

2:58The kind of, it was quite a sort of complex array of things she suffered daily. She was obviously physically abused, but also, yeah, she goes into a lot of detail about how she was demeaned. She was threatened daily, so repeatedly traumatized. Her family was threatened. And so I think what the result of that is, is that perhaps some of those stranger aspects of the story, Elizabeth coming down into Salt Lake and being questioned by police and not saying it's her. I think we start to understand the, just the level of control that Brian Dave Mitchell was able to exert on her, the complexity of abuse.

3:37And yeah, that was something she was really keen that we get across. And that was our sort of goal too. So that was one of the main things we hope that will differentiate this from previous media about it.

3:47Rebecca Lavoie:Claire, there are several members of the Smart family interviewed for the documentary. Can you talk about the process of getting a family like this? It was such a high profile case and received so much criticism for the case. What's the process in getting them comfortable telling the story so candidly on camera? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, once Elizabeth had decided to work with us and to make this film, obviously, you know, having her not only kind of supporting the film, but contributing so significantly, immediately, there is kind of a door is open there on the conversation with the wider family.

4:22and really it was a lot before anyone sits down in the chair the team just took an abundant amount of time talking to Mary Catherine talking to Uncle Tom talking to Ed talking to Elizabeth's Uncle Dave like they spent time getting to know each other building that trust the team proving that they had done their research and understood this story intrinsically so that actually when someone sits down in the chair and starts talking and the camera's rolling that trust and that relationship is already there. And there's an understanding that we are going to go to really difficult places, but we're going to do it safely.

4:59We're always going to be led by that family member, by Elizabeth, by Mary Catherine, by Ed. And together, we're going to navigate that really tricky conversation. And I think what Benedict and Gabby, our producer, did in those conversations is really quite remarkable, especially when you know this story has been told before, but everyone felt a desire to kind of go deeper and share more.

5:23Rebecca Lavoie:I'm curious, Ben, what was the energy like during those conversations? Because these are heady topics, but also it's so clear that this family really wants to get, you know, a version of the story out there that's meaningful. So what was the energy like in the room with them? They were incredibly open. Like Claire said, we didn't rush into anything. So we met everyone first. And that's like, I mean, we all try and do that, you know, always. And I think that massively pays dividends. So you meet first with, there's no pressure, there's no camera. You're not asking anything of that person in that instance.

5:55So we formed a relationship. And then when we sat down with them, I think because of that, they were relaxed, you know, and they were sort of very open and forthcoming. But even though it was, it was sort of 20 or so years ago, this was such a horrific incident for Elizabeth, but also those around her who kind of lived these sort of nightmare nine months that it still felt very raw for them. And, you know, you can see that emotion, I think, in the film, you know, beginning with Mary Catherine, for example, when she gets upset. I miss not having my sister. She's my best friend.

6:34I think you're asking me, have I dealt with it? I think it's something I still deal with. We guided them chronologically through the night and the months that came afterwards. We were always led by them. We took regular breaks, you know, just these are sort of obvious things, but we just wanted to make the experience as easy and comfortable as possible.

6:56Rebecca Lavoie:Let's go back to the beginning, June 5th, 2002. What did Elizabeth's sister, Mary Catherine, say she saw that night in the bedroom that they shared? Yeah. So Mary Catherine, so she was nine at the time. June 5th, 2002, she woke up. She's sharing a bedroom, but also a bed with Elizabeth. And she woke up and she saw a man crouching over Elizabeth, threatening her with a knife in his hand and encouraging her to get up out of bed. I mean, it's just a sort of nightmarish experience, isn't it? And she sort of talked us through this again. It's clearly, as I said, sort of very raw still. And Elizabeth went.

7:37And of course, as she's nine, She said she waited to make sure she wasn't going to be taken. There was no one there. And then she ran in and told her mom and dad. I remember specifically at 3.58, Mary Catherine came into the room saying that somebody had taken Elizabeth. I thought, you know, you've just had a bad nightmare. Elizabeth is probably somewhere in the house. But as we went room to room, the anxiety started rising. Ed and Lois, I think first of all, thought she'd had a bad dream, as you would. You'd expect the kind of standard response. And it took a few goes and eventually he got up.

8:14Mary Catherine said, Elizabeth's missing, so a man has come in and taken her. But he thought maybe she's asleep downstairs on the couch. So he checked upstairs, he checked downstairs. And then I think they went into the kitchen and suddenly they saw, they'd left the window that opened that night. I think the mum had burnt potatoes, you know, like we often do, right? But the screen was cut. And that was the sort of, I think, the first moment for Ed, as he describes it, that he believed his daughter and he understood that Elizabeth had in fact been taken.

8:46Rebecca Lavoie:Yeah. It's interesting, Claire, because investigators come on the scene and they start observing things, you know, that the family is not thinking about necessarily at the time. Can you just talk about those first few hours, you know, especially what the investigators saw they were looking at versus what the family said they were experiencing? Yeah, that is everyone's worst nightmare. You know, the idea of waking up and your child being gone from the house is just absolutely terrifying. And certainly that the family banded together in that moment. And I know the uncles came over immediately and everyone was just in disbelief, really, that this could have possibly happened.

9:23The investigation started. The police arrived. Information was taken from the family. obviously all the all the family members were interviewed and the search for Elizabeth began but I think what was amazing really is so quickly after she was taken that community around the family mobilized and you suddenly saw this amazing effort on the part of the family and the wider community to find their girl so concurrently you've got a kind of community effort and the police. And in those moments, you know, everyone was just singularly focused on finding Elizabeth.

10:01Rebecca Lavoie:We heard from police captain Corey Lyman that part of any kidnapping investigation is to examine the family. Ben, can you talk about some of the clues that initially pointed toward it being somebody who was close to Elizabeth Smart? I mean, the very fact that the rest of the family was in the home when she was taken seems extraordinary that no one woke up apart from her little sister who's in the bed for a man to have, or someone to allegedly at that point have broken in, come up the stairs, talk to Elizabeth, forced her to get out of bed and then gun downstairs and out the back door. But there was a few other things.

10:35I believe the alarm that was usually set wasn't set that night. So that seems odd initially. There was a chair outside the window where the screen had been cut. And I think when Corey first looked at that, he actually thought, they did some analysis actually on the cut within the window. And it actually appeared, the expert analysis came back and it appeared that it may have been cut from the inside. So quite a number of things that suggest, you know, this might not be someone coming in from the outside and taking her, or it might be more complex. And also, I think, as Corey outlines, often in these cases, it is someone very close to the victim.

11:15And so it is actually standard procedure to thoroughly investigate the family to rule them out first statistically more often than not the perpetrator of this type of crime is a parent or a family member so we started looking very hard at them we brought members of the smart family in we did in-depth interviews and there were a couple things that came up that made us go huh Yeah, so I think it's understandable, but we also, I think in the film Explore, we hear that from Corey and then we sort of flip to the father Ed's perspective. And can you imagine your daughter, I mean, I became a dad like to daughter about six months ago and your daughter is kidnapped.

12:02You could imagine the emotions connected with that and then you become the prime suspect. I mean, unimaginable.

12:08Rebecca Lavoie:Claire, can you talk about that? Because we hear quite a bit from Ed Smart and clearly he's very cooperative. Clearly he's completely invested in helping the police and everything they need in this investigation. But that was crushing, right? The insinuation that he may have been responsible. Absolutely crushing. Yeah. And I'm really, you know, Ed articulates this really well in the film. In that moment, it was kind of impossible to process. and he had to take some time away and then come back and be able to kind of live with that scrutiny. And, you know, he did. I had absolutely nothing to do with this.

12:45And my father said, if you don't calm down, I'm going to commit you. So he took me over to the hospital and put me in the psychiatric ward and I cried that whole night. And like the police clear up really quickly that, you know, they checked out all the alibis, they looked at all of the information and there was nothing that was, you know, once they had done their checks, there was nothing that continually connected the family to Elizabeth's disappearance. But yeah, I mean, the idea of just living through that is hell. And as Ben said earlier, Ed was really generous. And even though it was 20 years ago that this happened, that emotion was still really present, really raw.

13:28And he was really generous and kind of detailing what that was like.

13:31Rebecca Lavoie:Can you talk a little bit about Tom Smart, Ben? Because he's in the documentary, we should mention. But he, if you were inclined to suspect somebody in the family, his interviews at the time certainly didn't help the public look in a different direction. I think it was obviously not intentional. But can you just talk about that situation? yeah definitely and i think he'd be the first to say that now and and by the way it's worth saying that that they were such a lovely family to spend time with and he was so sort of like forthcoming and open with us and you know i think sort of yeah we're sort of happy to go into that yeah i mean look at his sort of media experiences so he's at there was actually i believe a photo journalist for the deseret news and he'd done quite a lot of sort of um famous sort of sports photography as well.

14:15So he actually took charge of, I think, the sort of media campaign, if you like, early on, or at least sort of like liaising between the family and the media, because I think that he sort of seemed like he thought that he knew, you know, how to handle that. But as it went on, and they just weren't getting any sleep, he just started to make less and less sense. We all have issues. If you've, anybody who's taken, they, we've been ripped apart to the core, and we understand that everybody has issues. This is a wonderful story in a lot of ways, because it's about foremost a beautiful little angelic girl.

14:50And I suppose if you, you know, coming to it fresh and just seeing him on the television and not knowing that he was sleep deprived, yeah, I think he just started to look more and more suspicious. You know, lots of people, I think, started to suspect him, the people filming him, the sort of presenters who were there every day and then obviously people watching at home. But he was off, you know, as Claire says, they were all cleared actually relatively swiftly.

15:13Rebecca Lavoie:Of course. Yeah. And Claire, with some time and looking at what he actually said, it seems to me like he was following probably the advice we hear all the time, which is try to humanize the person who may be responsible. Right. Because you hear him saying, I'm sure this wasn't a bad person. And you're like, OK, but but you kind of get a sense that it was well intentioned, the things he was saying. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think it was five days since Elizabeth had been kidnapped and it was five days until he did that interview. And, you know, the adrenaline of the first day, the adrenaline of the second day, the energy of the community mobilizing, no sleep at all.

15:52You can totally understand. It's completely logical that that kind of logical, coherent thought process would go out the window and panic might set in and just disbelief and all of those overwhelming emotions that would impact how you give an interview, really. And I think looking with the space of 20 years since it was over 20 years since that was recorded, I think you can totally understand.

16:19Rebecca Lavoie:So, Ben, the world remembers Mary Catherine as this nine-year-old witness to a crime. She's an adult now. What was it like hearing her? And, you know, what did she have to say about her experience in the initial days of the investigation, including the pressure put on her, a child, to remember something so vital, you know, through the child's lens? Right. I mean, what was that conversation like with her now, the adult Mary Catherine? I think the experience was still quite raw for her as it was for all of them. And it's understandable, isn't it? The sort of the intensity of the whole experience and the sort of whirlwind of emotions she must have been feeling, I think still quite sort of fresh for her.

17:01She was, I mean, wonderful in the interview. She was really open with us, like the rest of the family. The police officers didn't want me talking to anyone because it would possibly influence my memory. so I was on my own lonely island if you will wanting to know trying to sneak and hear tidbits of things that happened but people shutting me out you know she did get upset as we were going through and we definitely had you know sort of took our time with the interview because um she was incredibly close with her sister. I mean, like literally, like, I think you see in some of the imagery, you know, they're wearing the same things.

17:45And obviously this is, you know, lots of sisters are like this, but so people will understand nothing. And it was like a best friend that just sort of was suddenly taken. And then not only that, but she was sort of, I think, aware that somewhere she might hold the key to getting her back. I mean, imagine the sort of pressure, like for anyone as an adult, that'd be horrendous, wouldn't it? But for a nine-year-old And she was repeatedly interviewed. And I think the police and experts tried all sorts of things. But the answer just wouldn't come. She recognized the voice of the person in the room who took Elizabeth, but she just couldn't remember who it was until four months later.

18:25Rebecca Lavoie:Tell us about Richard Recy and how he ended up in the frame. Yeah, Richard Recy came to the police detention quite early, I think. Once they dismissed the family, they started looking at who else had been through the house, because I think they realised that whoever took Elizabeth, it wasn't the family, they must know the layout of the house, it must have been inside. and Ed, I think, had been building, the family had been building that home. So he'd moved them in early and then sort of finishing building work around them. So there'd actually been quite a lot of contractors in and out of the home.

18:55And a handyman that had done quite a lot of work was a guy called Richard Recy. And the police started looking into him and it turned out that he had a record. He'd actually, I think Corden Parks, the second officer who we interviewed, actually says that he actually had shot a colleague, another police colleague. So he was known to police, appeared to be quite violent. But actually, interestingly, that didn't square with the Smart's experience. Children loved him. He was a very nice, friendly guy. There had been a sort of a bit of an argument with Ed. And so there was perhaps grounds for, you know, a bit of a grudge or something.

19:32But obviously with a lack of leads, you know, he becomes the main suspect. What do you know about the kidnapping? I don't. Oh, shit. You couldn't live in this valley for the last two and a half weeks and not know something about the kidnapping. I'm not playing games. I'm not saying tell me why you did the kidnapping. I'm saying tell me what you know about it, what you've heard on the news, what you've seen in the press. I broke into the smarts' house. Okay. Took Elizabeth. Okay. Now I'm the number one suspect. There were some suspicious miles on his Jeep the night or the day after Elizabeth was kidnapped.

20:09And what was quite strange about that was that he just refused to explain why that was, where that had come from. And so that immediately looks incredibly suspicious. Even with the promise of immunity. So the police had actually said to him, they took him into interview and said, And short of kidnapping and homicide, tell us what you were doing to spend those miles on your car on that evening and we will offer you immunity. We just need to know where you were driving, what you were doing. And they were taking that under advisement with his attorney when obviously his health deteriorated and he sadly passed away.

20:52Rebecca Lavoie:the film takes a big turn when you bring in elizabeth to tell the story from her point of view ben what were your first impressions of elizabeth smart when you met her i mean she's an astonishing woman i mean we we were keen to meet her without any cameras initially obviously to sort of build that relationship to get her comfortable with us and the experience And she was like very relaxed, very lovely. And we sat and we just sort of talked through how it might work in our home. And then on the day of filming, actually the interview stretched across two days. We went through everything very slowly, chronologically.

21:28I remember a man's voice. I have a knife at your neck. Don't make a sound. Get up and come with me. I was terrified. was he going to hurt me was he going to kill me we were very much led by her particularly uh when it came to talking about the really sensitive really you know the horrific experiences in the in the forest but yeah she's she's amazing she was very measured she talked so clearly and was still so open with us obviously the you know this is really incredibly difficult stuff to talk about some of it, but she didn't shy away from that. And she was actually keen that we went sort of deeper than she'd done so before, I think, talking about the different kinds of abuse.