Elizabeth Smart: ‘Evil and Twisted’ Wanda Barzee Can’t Be Freed
The now-72-year-old kidnapper is set to walk free this week after Utah officials found that her prison sentence had been miscalculated.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast
In a new interview, Elizabeth Smart—who was rescued in 2003 after she was kidnapped and held captive for nine months at the age of 14—told CBS This Morning host Gayle King that she believes one of her captors is a danger to the public and should be kept in prison.
Wanda Barzee, now 72, was convicted for her role in the kidnapping with her husband, Brian David Mitchell. She is set to walk free Wednesday following a determination by Utah officials that her prison sentence had been miscalculated.
Smart said the anticipation of Barzee’s release has been “a rollercoaster.”
The now-30-year-old said she has spent the last 15 years of her life trying to move forward and follow her mother’s advice “in not allowing these people to steal any more of my life away from me.”
Even still, Smart believes Barzee is a dangerous and “evil” person.
"I have been informed on who the agent is, who the federal agent is, who will be supervising her. And I do believe that he will do the job to the best of his ability. I have faith in him. I just lack faith in her." -- Smart on Wanda Barzee's release https://t.co/BXJXFDDRQl pic.twitter.com/yAKblFUhHE
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) September 18, 2018
“I am very concerned—for the community, for the public, as much as I am for myself,” she said. “That first morning when he brought me into the camp and told me I was now his wife and kept telling me it was time to consummate our marriage, I just—at first, I didn’t know what he meant.… And I was raped. And, I was raped every day after that, multiple times a day.”
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“She would encourage him to rape me. She would sit right next to me. Like, the side of her body would be touching me,” Smart said. “While he was raping me.”
Photo Credit: Salt Lake County Sheriff
Smart said the couple used to force her to drink alcohol when she was just 14.
“I ended up throwing up and then passing out in it,” she said. “Both of them just let me lie there all night, and when I woke up the next morning, I mean, my face and my hair were completely crusted to the ground. And they both laughed. She laughed.”
An attorney for Barzee did not immediately respond to phone messages left by The Daily Beast on Tuesday.
But Smart claimed she was more worried because her law-enforcement sources—which were not verified through CBS News—told her Barzee is also carrying a “book of revelations” that Brian Mitchell wrote, which allegedly contains instructions to kidnap Smart and other girls.
“Clearly, she hasn’t let it go.”
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