![]() "I don't have it in me to try and make this harder than it is for her. No one ever identified her as the girl that thousands of hometown volunteers had searched for last summer.Now that Elizabeth is home, investigators and family may slowly unveil what her life was like for 280 mysterious days.'Tried not to force things' "I have not tried to force things out of her, to question her to pieces," Elizabeth's father, Ed Smart, said Thursday, hours before the family held a belated 15th birthday party for her. One sympathetic person put them up for a week last fall in his downtown apartment, a block from the police station.But Elizabeth was dressed in robes and a veil across her face when she was with Mitchell, a bearded street preacher known as Emmanuel. They were photographed at a bustling party late last summer.Unknowing Good Samaritans gave them rides. They were caught on a home video at a picnic table in the same park. They appeared at an impromptu "drum circle" of musicians in a downtown park. They were seen - but not recognized - several times. Eyewitnesses had spotted one of the suspects, Brian David Mitchell, 49, on the street in a suburb south of Salt Lake.Last summer, Mitchell, his wife, Wanda Ilene Barzee, 57, and Elizabeth Smart had mingled in the street culture of downtown Salt Lake City. They returned to Utah early Wednesday, only hours before police detained them. But Salt Lake City police announced Thursday that the trio had traveled only to San Diego last fall, where they stayed through most of the winter, camping out. There is even talk of a link to the accused kidnapper's belief in polygamy, a now-shunned practice by Utah's Mormon pioneers.Early reports said the girl's captors had taken her to numerous out-of-state locations, including Southern California, Nevada, Atlanta and Seattle. Why she was abducted also remains a mystery, though her alleged captors had referred to her as their daughter. ![]() It is still not known whether she tried to escape or was threatened or abused. She was cloaked in scarves and veils that covered all but her eyes whenever they took her out in public.As details slowly trickle out about Elizabeth's strange odyssey, more questions than answers emerge. She was in the constant presence of the cultish street couple accused of kidnapping her. SALT LAKE CITY - Elizabeth Smart was hidden in plain sight for more than nine months.The young teen apparently lived a vagabond but captive life after she was snatched from her bedroom at knifepoint in the middle of the night June 5. ![]()
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