My Story Read Free Page A

he did on the day he came to take me. I know how he planned it, where he walked, and what he ultimately had in mind.
    I know that he decided to take me after seeing me on that November afternoon, when I had been shopping with my mother in downtown Salt Lake City. I know that he plotted from the beginning, offering to rake leaves and repair my father’s roof in order to find out where I lived. I know he manipulated his way into my home in order to note the location of my bedroom and my sleeping arrangements. I know what he did to prepare for the kidnapping, staking out the mountains high above the city in the months and weeks before that fateful night in June. I know that he bought the hardware he would need: steel cable, bolts, a couple of padlocks and orange-handled bolt cutters. I know he moved his and Barzee’s summer camp, trudging higher up the mountain, where it would be more difficult to be found. There, at the upper camp as they called it, he expended enormous effort to excavate a dugout among the trees, cutting thick logs to make a roof and leveling the hill in order to provide a shelter where he intended to spend the winter with Barzee and his new wife.
    I know he didn’t spend all his time living like a hermit on the mountain. He told me how he frequently walked the streets of Salt Lake City, bumming for alcohol, looking for a party, stealing from the local market, begging for food. I know that he was lazy; feeling too entitled to really work, preferring to hang out on the streets. He liked to call it “ministering,” but his life was bumming and nothing more.
    I also know that, as time went by, he slipped deeper and deeper into his caricature of a prophet. But none of it was real. Brian David Mitchell is not insane. The professional analysis is clear.
    He is a manipulative, antisocial, and narcissistic pedophile. He is not clinically psychotic or delusional. He is just an evil man.
    Brian David Mitchell slipped too easily in and out of prophecy for it to ever be his actual state of mind. He simply used the culture and language of religion to manipulate people in order to get what he wanted. I witnessed it again and again. When he really needed something—knowing that prophets were difficult to take seriously—he could turn the switch off and act very rational. When the situation required it, he could act very sane.
    Still, as the night of the kidnapping grew near, he decided that the persona of a modern-day prophet was the way to go. Way less work. Way more opportunities for mischief and manipulation. And the ability to claim that he was a man who spoke to God was pretty exciting. It carried a little punch. A bit of power. It got him attention and helped to explain some of his unconventional behavior. So he lost the Levi’s and started walking around in robes and leather sandals. But even then, his intentions were only to manipulate. For example, when running around the mountain in sandals and dirty sheets proved to be impractical, he started stashing his sandals in a hollow oak he called the shoe tree. When he went down into the city, knowing that other people were going to see him, he’d bring out the sandals. Hiking back up to the mountain, knowing that no one else would be around, he’d stop at the shoe tree and put his hiking boots back on.
    As I have already testified in court:
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