He was his number-one priority, followed by sex, drugs, and alcohol, but he used religion in all of those aspects to justify everything.
Nine months of living with him and seeing him proclaim that he was God’s servant and called to do God’s work and everything he did to me and my family is something that I know that God would not tell somebody to do. God would never tell someone to kidnap her at knifepoint from their bed, from her sister’s side … never continue to rape her and sexually abuse her.
Nor would God tell him to kill me. But that’s what he was prepared to do.
4.
Dark Night
June 4, 2002
The mountains east of Salt Lake City, Utah
Having walked the trail many times now, I know that Brian David Mitchell must have moved very quickly down the mountain, which is surprising, given the fact that it was a very dark night. I remember even now how the heavy trees that lined the narrow path sucked up most of the moonlight. The mountains are full of coyotes—I heard them almost every night once we were in the upper camp—and it is likely that some of them watched him from the ridge as he made his way toward the city. The maples and oaks along the trail are very thick, with occasional outcroppings of granite that drop into narrow depressions where the winter snows melt off, but it was early summer when he came to get me, and the ground was dry and packed. A gentle stream, hardly more than a trickle, ran through the bottom of the canyon and he would have been forced to move among the peppermint and watercress in order to follow its path.
As he moved down the mountain, no man saw him pass.
Behind him, high up on the mountain, the other one was waiting to receive me with a dirty bed and clean linen robes.
Coming down the mountain is pretty easy, and can be done in as little as an hour. You follow a narrow canyon that drops sharply from the east to join a well-established trail that runs for about half a mile toward the city. But although you can come down from the mountain fairly quickly, going back is much more difficult and the going is always slow. The mountain is very steep and the way is not well marked. So Brian David Mitchell was in a hurry, for he knew that on that night, it would take us many hours.
For one thing, it would still be dark. And he would have to guide me, knowing I would be looking to escape. He knew that he could make me hold the flashlight, allowing him to keep the knife at my back, but it would be awkward to move together, keeping his hands gripped tightly around my arm. Worse, he knew we could not go back up the same trail that he had used to come down. We’d have to go on the backside of the mountain. There, the mountain was very steep and, without a trail to follow, the brush and trees would be so thick we’d end up crawling on our hands and knees.
Yet it was absolutely essential that we make it back to camp before the sun was up. Before the darkness gave way to the summer light, he would have to have taken me up to where I could be hidden and no one could hear me if I screamed.
*
A little after one A.M., Mitchell neared the bottom of the mountain. There, the trail widened, allowing him to move more quickly.
Everything he wore was black: black sweats, black gloves, black stocking cap and beard. All of this allowed him to blend into the darkness like the shadow of a ghost.
He balanced two military-green sacks across his back. I remember them very clearly. They were tied together with a strand of material and bounced uncomfortably as he moved. As he came off the Wasatch Mountains, the lights of Salt Lake City would have slipped into view. From my house, the valley spreads south and west, neat rows of streetlights that line up in an almost perfect grid. Brigham Young was nothing if not a visionary, and the city is designed along streets that run in neat north-south and east-west rows. To the north, an edge of the mountain to the west hides the northern portion of the valley. As he hiked down, Mitchell surely had to stop to take a break. He was not a young man. And though he seemed to be a fanatic about exercise, he suffered from poor nutrition and inferior hygiene. He and Barzee had skipped many meals, leaving him a little thin. And the alcohol and drugs he had pounded into his body would not have helped him catch his breath. But as tiring as it was to come down from the mountain, it would be much worse climbing back up. It seemed we would stop every few minutes so he could urinate and rest.
Breaking from the streambed, he would have been able to quicken his pace. Here, the lights of the city would have helped illuminate his path, and the moon wouldn’t have been so obscured by the thick trees. Just before two A.M., he stood on the empty streets above the city.
He was almost to my house.