Her captivity lasted approximately nine months before she was discovered in Sandy, Utah , approximately 18 miles 29 km from her home. Smart was abducted at knife-point by Mitchell, while her younger sister, Mary Katherine, pretended to be asleep.
Mitchell, who claimed to be a religious preacher , [ 1 ] held Smart at a camp in the woods with Barzee, where he repeatedly raped her.
During her captivity, Smart accompanied her captors in public on various occasions dressed head-to-toe in white robes and went largely unrecognized by those she came in contact with. Since her abduction and rescue, Smart has become an advocate for missing persons and victims of sexual assault. Barzee was sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison in for her role in the abduction, although she was granted early release on September 19, , for previously uncredited time served.
Extensive disputes over his competence to stand trial lasted several years before he was deemed mentally capable in ; he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in His mother was a teacher and his father was a social worker. In order to teach Mitchell about sex, his father reportedly showed his adolescent son explicit photos from a medical journal, and, in order to teach him about independence, would drive him to unfamiliar parts of the city, drop him off, and leave him to find his way back home.
At age 16, Mitchell exposed himself to a child and was sent to a juvenile hall. At age 19, he married sixteen-year-old Karen Minor, with whom he had two children. After their divorce, Minor was awarded custody of both children, after which Mitchell temporarily fled with the children to New Hampshire. Mitchell had a history of drug and alcohol abuse in his adult life; upon returning to Salt Lake City, he was inspired to seek sobriety by his brother, who had recently returned from an LDS Church mission.
