But haunting questions remain about how Elizabeth was treated by her captors–and why she didn’t escape. What kind of “brainwashing” did Brian David Mitchell use? His ploy may have been to exploit her religious beliefs. As an excommunicated Mormon, Mitchell could speak her language. His references resonated with the Scriptures that Elizabeth would have learned in Primary classes. Changing her name (she initially told police she was “Augustine”) and dressing her in white robes were acts that mirror sacred Mormon practices. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wear long, white robes in the temple, and they are given new names (not used outside the temple) when they wed. As a predator, Mitchell would have been uniquely able to spin his own blend of perverted Mormon doctrine in persuading Elizabeth to become his “second wife.” (The LDS church has considered polygamy ground for excommunication since 1890.) Mitchell would have made her believe that he was “not only her savior, but her spiritual leader, husband, father and lover,” says John Llewellyn, a polygamy expert and former Salt Lake City sex-crimes investigator. Elizabeth, an obedient child, would have been particularly susceptible. “She was a remarkable girl, but with a passive personality,” the family’s Mormon bishop, Dave Hamblin, said two weeks ago, “which has led to some of these issues with not being able to get away.”
But it seems Elizabeth wasn’t the first girl Mitchell approached. Nearly two years ago, Julie Adkison, then a 20-year-old girl who had recently left the polygamous community in which she’d been raised, says Mitchell proposed to her. “Seek ye to be one with Immanuel,” Mitchell apparently told her in a handwritten letter dated March 1, 2001, “that ye may also be one with me.” Adkison met Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee, when she approached him outside the Salt Lake mall shoe store she worked at. Although she had since joined the Mormon church, she was interested in his religious views. Mitchell was interested in her background as well. “When he found out that I had come from a polygamous group, his face just lit up,” Adkison told NEWSWEEK. In the weeks after the initial meeting, Adkison spoke with Mitchell several times, and even agreed to meet with him–despite her co-workers’ warnings–outside work at a nearby park. She was drawn to him, she says, because “everything he said was stuff I was raised on.” Adkison says Mitchell told her that God had revealed that she was supposed to be his second wife. Although she had no intention of accepting his proposal, she stayed with him for nearly six hours, mesmerized by his talk about Mormon doctrine and history. “I stayed so long,” she says. “I wanted to leave for hours, but I just sat there.”
The techniques Adkison says Mitchell used to keep her in the park–expounding on LDS doctrine and claiming personal revelation from God–would have been effective with Elizabeth as well because they echo fundamental Mormon beliefs. The church was founded after Joseph Smith, the church’s first prophet, claimed to have received a revelation from God in 1820. Mormons believe that modern prophets are also privy to revelation. Even at 20, Adkison found Mitchell hard to resist. Had she been a young teenager like Elizabeth, “There’s no telling what I would have done,” she says.
In Elizabeth’s case, prosecutors believe Mitchell coupled psychological control with physical abuse. Prosecutors say Elizabeth was raped that first night, nearly four miles from her home (and again at least one other time), and was held for months at makeshift campsites in the mountain with little food or water. At times, she was tied to a tree with a cable. Mitchell and Barzee were charged last week with six counts, including aggravated kidnapping and sexual assault. They face life in prison. Their victim, meanwhile, faces the task of reclaiming her true beliefs and identify from the distorted, destructive ones they imposed on her.
