Abduction seemed a 'nightmare,' Elizabeth Smart says

SALT LAKE CITY - Elizabeth Smart remembers not being able to make out the threat, only the feel of a cold knife at her neck.

As the girl, then 14, lay in bed alongside her baby sister, the man repeated: "Don't make a sound. Get out of bed and come with me, or I will kill you and your family." She was his hostage, he told her.

"I was shocked. I thought I was having a nightmare. It was just indescribable fear," Smart, now 23, told jurors yesterday on the first day of testimony in the federal trial of Brian David Mitchell, 57, the man accused of kidnapping her in June 2002.

That night, they fled up the hills above her home.

Her younger sister rushed to their mother, telling of the kidnapping. "It was utter terror," Lois Smart testified earlier in the day. "It was the worst feeling, knowing that I didn't know where my child was. I was helpless."

Nine months later, Elizabeth Smart was spotted walking in a Salt Lake City suburb with Mitchell.

His attorneys did not dispute the facts of the abduction. But during opening statements they said the prosecution's allegation that he was a calculating person who planned the kidnapping was wrong.

Known as a homeless street preacher named "Immanuel," Mitchell was influenced by a worsening mental illness and religious beliefs that made him think he was doing what God wanted, his attorneys said.

Mitchell, who has a long graying beard to the middle of his chest, was again removed from the courtroom yesterday for singing hymns, so he's watching and listening from a holding cell.

Smart's mother testified that she and her children had run into Mitchell downtown and that she offered him a job doing handyman work at the family's home.

Elizabeth Smart said she and Mitchell hiked three to five hours over a mountain to a campsite. When he shed the stocking he used to cover his face, she remembered him as the handyman. Mitchell's now-estranged wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee, embraced Smart and took her into a tent. Smart said Mitchell married them by twisting lines from Mormon religious rites into a marriage ceremony, known as a sealing. She said he raped her and shackled her ankle to a heavy cable attached to a cable strung between two trees so that she could not escape.