Taken From Home

By Belinda Luscombe Monday, June 10, 2002
    • Something like 4,600 children are abducted by strangers each year. It's a horrifying figure, but usually the parents' and child's hideous ordeal is short-lived. According to organizations that help find missing children, only about 200 to 300 are kidnapped in the traditional sense, that is, taken by strangers for a long time, for ransom or worse reasons. About half of those never come home.

    To which category Elizabeth Smart belongs was unclear last week. In the early hours of Wednesday the 14-year-old disappeared from her bedroom in the most agonizing of circumstances. Her abductor crept into the seven-bedroom home in the woodsy Federal Heights area of Salt Lake City, Utah, after midnight and took Elizabeth at gunpoint, as her terrified sister Mary Katherine, 9, looked on. He didn't seem to know the house or Elizabeth. He allowed her to put on a pair of canvas shoes before they left. But he told Mary Katherine that her big sister would come to harm if she made a noise. So the little girl waited, frightened, hearing the grandfather clock chime the hours away. It wasn't until about 4 a.m. that she sought her parents out.


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    Most people think their children are angels, at least some of the time. But Elizabeth Smart fits the storybook image better than many. She's a good student and athlete. Tall and willowy, she had played harp at her grandfather's funeral two days before she disappeared. She favors pale blue. Her cousin has heard her say idiot once. On the surface, there was no reason she should have been singled out by anyone.

    Yet her case seems to echo so many others this year. Two girls — both 13--from the same apartment complex in Oregon City, Ore., were abducted on their way to the bus stop, one in January, one in March. Danielle van Dam, 7, was kidnapped and murdered near San Diego in February. The trial of her alleged killer, a divorced engineer who lives two houses away and had a passing acquaintance with her mother, made parents mentally check their own vigilance. And bizarrely, even as police and volunteers searched frantically on Wednesday for Elizabeth, an eerily similar drama was unfolding 210 miles north, in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

    According to Bonneville County sheriff Byron Stommel, a 14-year-old girl who had been sleeping with her sisters on the family's backyard trampoline was abducted at gunpoint during the night by Keith Glenn Hescock, 42. After allegedly assaulting her at his home and chaining her to a bed, Hescock went to his day job as a traveling tool salesman. The girl found a nearby fire extinguisher, beat at the chain for several hours to break it, freed herself and then, perhaps because her family's home line was busy, called her parents' office. The employee who answered picked her up and took her home. Police staked out Hescock's house, but after engaging them in a car chase and shoot-out, Hescock shot himself in the head.

    Across Utah, people are praying that the Smarts will also be reunited with their daughter. Elizabeth's father Edward, a mortgage-investment broker, who looked increasingly worn and baffled all week, collapsed and was hospitalized by week's end. Although locals were phoning in tips at the rate of one a minute, police captain Scott Atkinson said on Friday that none had provided solid leads. Family members have not been ruled out as suspects, but police say they have been extremely cooperative.

    The Smarts' house, which was recently renovated, has been on the market for $1.19 million. Police are interviewing the few who had seen it and the builders who worked on it. Within hours of Edward Smart's 911 call, a Rachael alert — named after another Utah kidnapping victim — had been activated. By about 7:30 a.m., all Utah radio and TV stations had been given Elizabeth's description to broadcast. On Friday, nearby Emigration Canyon was cordoned off after one of the hundreds of volunteer searchers saw a man fitting the kidnapper's description — white, with dark hair and a pale top — and shots were reportedly heard. But police could find no one. Even the $250,000 reward (originally $10,000, but swelled by donations) has flushed nothing out.

    As time passes, things look grimmer for the Smarts. The number of children killed after being abducted is small — about 100 a year, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. But most of these are killed within three hours of being taken. On Friday, when Elizabeth would have graduated, her school was covered with pale blue ribbons, tied to all the fences and lining the aisle she would have walked to collect her diploma.