Bizarre Tom Smart Statement On Larry King Show

GRACE: Well Tom, I would have to agree with you. If police are searching the area with helicopters looking for this guy, that leads me to think that he's got some very important information that they want.

"This sounds much too specific to be taken as literal knowledge. More likely it's a strategic ploy calculated to help the girl."

That's a good point and a possibility. However, it still is a strange statement to make about a stranger who is a kidnapper of a child. An act which, in most instances, does not end up with the child being safely returned.

If that was his purpose, it is a clever statement. Final analysis, we have to reserve judgement at this point in time.

I have to make a comment about 9 year olds and sketch artists, because unfortunately this is something I actually have first hand knowledge of. When I was 9 a man broke into my bedroom, jumped on top of me, and started strangling me. My parents heard him screaming and when they came running down the hall he fled. At that age I was very afraid of the dark and always slept with the room fully lit, so I had a good chance to see the guy. However, I was too busy screaming and trying to fight him off to take any note of his appearance other than his race and the color of his shirt. I was so freaked out that I couldn't even enter my bedroom without jumping out of my skin and having a flashback for at least a week. The police asked me if I thought I could provide enough of a description for a sketch artist, and I honestly and regretfully had to tell them that I couldn't. Even at that age I did not want to take responsibility for introducing vague or inaccurate information into the situation. I was given the choice and there was never any question of either the police or my parents making this decision for me. That is a lot of pressure to put on a little kid. When you are nine years old and you wake up to find a strange man in your bedroom, you go into pure instinct mode and you are not calmly taking note of the person's appearance for when you file the police report.

However, I do find it extremely curious that she waited to wake her parents. When you are in that child instinct mode you do not lie around weighing your options, you get hold of your parents as fast as you can and let them deal with it. My parents told me that I was screaming for them louder than they ever heard me scream, despite the fact that I was being strangled by a big man and it felt to me like I was barely getting any sound out. Even if the girl honestly believed she had to refrain from waking her parents for their or Elizabeth's protection, I just don't think she'd have the self-control to do so, if this were a straightforward case of a stranger barging in. She'd be too freaked out, she'd run to Mommy as soon as the coast was clear. Calm acquaintance molesters may try to manipulate kid's minds, but when it's a stranger doing a violent assault in the middle of the night, there's no time for conversation. At least that is what I think based on my experience. I don't know what you all will make of it.

Well, what really prompted me to delurk was the way everybody is assuming that the decision to use a sketch artist would be made by anybody other than the person who would be responsible for the sketch's content, even if that person is a child. Made me doubt how much insight people really had in other aspects of their conjectures, my indignation on the child's behalf aside.

But I think most people do realize that the sister not waking the parents up is weird. Either she wasn't really afraid - like it was an assisted runaway - or the assailant was somebody well known enough to her to conduct a convincing conversation on the topic in such chaotic circumstances. Of course it's not completely impossible that it was a stranger who threatened her and she unquestioningly obeyed, but if so I would say that the very fact of a 9 year old girl being that stoic in the face of trauma would point to something not quite right in the family.

I have no interest in maligning anyone, just in maligning faulty thinking based on misinformation (if you check back you'll see I was just as quick to pat PJ-Comix on the back for an insightful comment -- post #110 on thread http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/698159/posts). My comment was in response to your (Iwo Jima's) post #96:

Wow! This guy is a real headcase. If he is the leader and spokesman for the family, then the rest must be really bad off. For the first time, I am willing to consider that Elizabeth might have run away. I think that I might run off if I had to put up with such loonies.

... in which it appeared that you were buying into a fictional notion that there is some Mormon principle of the eldest brother being the "leader" of a family to whom the rest must submit, being promoted by PJ-Comix in his post #1:

Somehow Tom Smart has the veto power in that family, even on life and death issues

and again referred to in his post #26, and which originated early in the FR discussion of this story, with someone claiming to "know" that in Mormon families the eldest brother is the leader and the rest of the family (including his married younger brothers' families) has to do what he says, despite the fact that there is no such Mormon belief or cultural practice whatsoever. This "fact" has been cited over and over again on these FR threads, usually in support of conspiracy theories involving this uncle, and it's getting tiresome to see it repeated in various permutations and built upon.

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