I am skeptical about that Elizabeth Smart was snatched from her home by a guy acting alone, unaided by someone related to her or her family by blood or friendship. Kidnaping of children by strangers is rare, as crimes against children go (between 200-300 kids per year are kidnapped by a non-relative, most in public venues). Dr. Loren Brooks was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly June 10. She is a kidnapping expert with the Leadership Consulting Group, a firm specializing in threatening situations and potential violence. According to Brooks, the motives of such kidnappers are almost always sexual predation or a desire to integrate the child into their own families. Ransom demands are rare.
O'REILLY: OK. How unusual is it for somebody to just to break into somebody's house and snatch a child, particularly a 14-year-old child, you know, and Danielle Van Dam was 7? These kids can put up a fight. They can scream.
BROOKS: Yes, it's quite rare. You know, there are about 800,000 individuals that go missing each year, and of those, about 85 to 90 percent are juveniles. And of those, about 200 to 300 are stranger-abducted, sometimes taken off the street. But the out-of-the-home abduction only occurs about 45 to 65 times a year, so it's a low-frequency event, but it's extremely traumatic, of course, for families and communities.
So a case like Smart's happens, but very rarely. And in this case, something doesn't click in the facts of the case as they have been revealed to the public.
Remember Susan Smith? She was the South Carolina mother who strapped her two small children into the back seat of her Mazda and drove the car into lake. They drowned. She claimed a black man had hijacked her car with the kids in it at a traffic light. She finally confessed to the crime; the car was recovered with the bodies still inside.
As it turned out, the investigators were privately convinced from the first that Smith was complicit in the disappearance of her children because certain details of her story could not be true, and the cops knew it. I was on the staff of US Army Criminal Investigation Command at the time, not as an investigator. I got quite an education from CID's highly trained investigators. An accomplished Army polygrapher never bothered with the Smith case's details. He watched Smith's appearance on The Today Show in my office and said, "She's lying. She killed them. When you have examined as many liars as I have, you can tell."
According to ElizabethSmart.com, the girl was kidnapped by a man with the following description, supplied by Elizabeth's nine-year-old sister: caucasian man, 30 to 40 years old, 5' 8" to 5'10", dark hair, hair on arms, hair on back of hands, light jacket, light golf hat or English driving hat, dark shoes. Another description released by police adds that he held a small gun and was wearing tan pants and dark shoes.
It's the description that bothers me.
The sister saw the man enough, at night, to note such details as hair on his hands and complete details of his clothing, but she says she did not see his face. And yesterday police said that the sister waited two hours before telling her parents, a new revelation.
And the garage door was left unlocked that night, so I recall - by accident, natch.
Sorry, this whole thing smells. It just smells, and when it smells like that, something is almost always rotten.
Yesterday, Salt Lake City Police Chief Rick Dinse said the investigation was "concentrating on the central area around the house and the people associated with that house. . . . We believe that this person may be a trusted person in the neighborhood or in the community. [It] might be someone ... that had reason to be here, that had reason to come across the family."
Well, in for a penny, in for a pound: this strikes me as an arranged disappearance, not a home-invasion kidnapping as we usually think of it. What motive there is I cannot fathom. This wasn't random. Someone close to Elizabeth Smart isn't clean in this. I don't know who.
And I could be wrong.
But it still smells.
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