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Sign out side of school Alexis attends(Hi-Mount Elem. 49th Garfeild) Created by Jason Heisler & Kelly Turcotte of West Bend, Wisc..Welcome Visitor #.
Posted on 07/28/2002 1:31:05 PM PDT by Palladin
Sunday, July 28, 2002
Smarts' lives revolve around the search
Elizabeth's parents remain hopeful — and frustrated By Michael Janofsky
Edward and Lois Smart had planned to be on vacation with their six children around now. Instead, they are at a news conference, appealing for people with helicopters to join the search for their daughter Elizabeth, 14, who was taken at gunpoint from her bedroom on June 5.
Previous plans for a West Coast vacation are not in the picture for Lois and Ed Smart in what has seemed like a summer of child abductions across the nation.
In what has seemed like a summer of child abductions, kidnappings in California and Pennsylvania have ended, tragically in the first instance, happily in the second.
Yet another girl, a 6-year-old in suburban St. Louis, vanished from her home on Friday morning. Her body was found less than a mile away that afternoon. Through it all, the Smarts have remained in a limbo of anxiety and fading hopes.
So much for soccer games, movies and other staples of normal life. The family's days now consist of prayer meetings, public pleas for help and updates from investigators.
"This is the summer that wasn't," Edward Smart said as he and his wife sat in a small room at the LDS church they attend near their neighborhood of big houses and quiet streets. "We had plans for the California coast, ending up near Seattle, the San Juan Islands. We've been there before. Everyone in the family was looking forward to that."
The Smarts are not alone in their anguish. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit organization in Alexandria, Va., partly financed by Congress, theirs is one of 103 unsolved cases of nonfamily abductions since 1990.
Ernie Allen, president of the center, said that half of the children on the list at any time were under 13, and that two-thirds were girls. Allen described the typical victim as an 11-year-old girl from a stable middle-class family whose initial contact with the abductor occurred within a quarter-mile of home.
Abductions tend to take place in warm-weather states like California and Texas, he said, although no state is immune. According to Allen, 91 percent of children taken by strangers are recovered, although 20 percent are found dead.
In many ways, Elizabeth Smart is typical. Less typical is the enormous attention her case has received. After seven weeks in the spotlight, the Smarts seem bewildered by it all, overwhelmed by so much news coverage and public support, and painfully aware they may be awaiting an unhappy ending.
"We're still very hopeful; we are," Lois Smart said in an interview. "They haven't found her body. The fact they haven't found her body only makes us believe otherwise."
Her husband, a mortgage broker and real estate developer, had a faraway look in his eyes. "It has been a long time," he said, barely above a whisper. "It has been a long time."
Their strongest fiber of hope is information their 10-year-old daughter, Mary Katherine, gave to investigators. She was sharing a bed with Elizabeth the night of the abduction. Mary Katherine gave a description that led the authorities to Richard Albert Ricci, 48, a handyman who worked for the Smarts last year and received as payment a Jeep Cherokee that the family had once used.
Ricci is now in jail on charges unrelated to the abduction. Investigators have told the family that he could become a prime suspect because of questions about his whereabouts the night of the abduction and the days that followed.
Despite daily contact with the authorities and the lingering interest in Ricci, the Smarts are frustrated at the investigation's pace, other family members say. "They won't say anything critical," said one. "They can't. They need the police."
Edward Smart has been particularly careful with his words. "I know they're doing all they can," he said. "I know they do have lots of leads." His wife has been slightly less diplomatic. "We support them 100 percent," she said. "But it's not going fast enough. I don't think anything they do is fast enough for us."
At home, they said, their phone rings constantly, a mix of people with tips and good wishes but also crank callers. Hundreds have sent messages by mail and by e-mail, and many more have followed the search on a Web site, ( www.elizabethsmart.com). "It's just amazing," Edward Smart said.
The abduction also has linked the Smarts, at least by circumstance, with other families of abducted children, including some whose children's names have been removed from the list kept by the center for missing children.
The most recent was Samantha Runnion, the 5-year-old from Stanton, Calif., who was found dead on July 16, 50 miles from her home. She was listed until Monday, when Alejandro Avila, 27, a factory worker, was arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping and sexual assault.
Another little girl quickly took Samantha's place. Witnesses in Philadelphia told the police that they saw two men grab Erica Pratt, 7, on Monday and drive away with her. She turned up on Tuesday after escaping from the abandoned building where captors had imprisoned her.
But others remain unaccounted for, and their cases have faded from public view. Morgan Nick was 6 when she disappeared seven years ago from a park in Alma, Ark. Jacob Wetterling was 11 in 1989 when a man in a ski mask snatched him off a rural road at gunpoint in St. Joseph, Minn. Neither child has been found.
"They have some kind of closure," Edward Smart said of the families of Samantha Runnion and Erica Pratt. "In this situation, we're still waiting."
Few around Salt Lake City are unaffected by Elizabeth's disappearance. Parents say they watch their children more closely. Home security companies have been busier than usual. Public schools are changing their approach to children's safety.
"The message this time is, 'Don't go willingly. Go kicking and screaming,' " said Karen Derrick, a member of the Salt Lake City District Board of Education.
Judy Eror, a past president of the Parent Teachers Association at Bryant Intermediate School, which Elizabeth attended, said: "A couple of years ago, when we looked at child safety, we talked about drugs and watching both ways when you cross the street. Now, it's not enough to tell our kids if you're where you're supposed to be, you'll be safe. It's simply not always true."
According to Allen of the missing children's group, greater vigilance by parents and children is a major cause for a decline in abductions by strangers in recent years, in addition to tougher laws, like those requiring sex offenders to register with authorities, and better coordination among law enforcement agencies.
For now, the five other Smart children are almost constantly surrounded by one another, by cousins and friends in a world that adults around them are trying to keep as normal as possible.
"The kids are like us," Lois Smart said. "They have good days and bad days. Our youngest, William, asks us when Elizabeth is coming home. He thinks she is having an extended harp lesson. But all the kids are hopeful; they talk about her coming back."
Without a body there no grounds for saying she's been killed. She may have been sold, for all you know.
There are people who are buying, out there.
Guess these families didn't have the clout this family has.
The only case I would consider a total stranger abduction was the Runnion case. (which was similar to the Klass case).
The other cases the media have been following either have salacious details and or many unanswered questions.
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Great! Isn't this the same PD that dismissed the vietnamese boy that DAHMER was in the process of killing?
Thanks for the website.
In a country of almost 300 million people, this is a small number. That means each year the number is far less than one in a million.
That one is way too many, but think about it. How many perverts would you expect to find in a group of 300 million people?
Hi Bella. You're right, this case is weird. In the Runnion case, sketch was on the wires within hours and the perp apprehended when someone who recognized him called in. It's almost (?) as if the Smart's don't want the perp caught. No doubt that they want their daughter back, but whatever are they thinking? Whatever are the SLC LEOs thinking? Anything?
And it's really tough toeniails about their vacation. What a strange "news" report. It almost sounds like a message to Elizabeth designed to make her feel guilty about lousing up family plans.
The Salt Lake Tribune -- Utah's Statewide Newspaper
Child Sex Predators Get Stung, Officers chalk up Internet arrests
Sunday, July 28, 2002
BY MICHAEL VIGH
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
"Mercenary75030" initiated a sexually explicit conversation early last year in an Internet chat room with "leslielea4" -- whom he believed was a 13-year-old Utah girl.
During dozens of conversations, Michael Joseph DeForest, 50, e-mailed her a picture of himself, along with two photos of his genitals, from his laptop computer. On July 15, DeForest allegedly traveled from his home in Rowlett, Texas, to Sandy's South Towne Center Mall to have sex with the girl.
But when DeForest arrived, he was arrested by the same undercover officers he had been unwittingly communicating with for more than 18 months.
Lt. Ken Hansen -- who directs the Utah Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force -- said its 10 officers arrest, on average, two pedophiles a week who attempt to set up meetings for sex with Internet chatters they believe are children. Two men were arrested Thursday night in Salt Lake City after traveling to Utah.
In the past two years alone, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Salt Lake City has prosecuted more than 70 Internet sex cases -- including possession or manufacture of child porn, child molestation and traveling with the intent of having sex.
"Chat rooms are the park and the playground of 10 years ago," said Utah's U.S. Attorney Paul Warner. "As the Internet has become more common in homes, we have seen more and more of these kinds of cases."
Hansen said there is no set profile of an online predator. They "come from all walks of life; I'm always surprised when we catch another one," he said. Three recent cases highlight the disparate offenders:
* Last year, a former LDS bishop from Hyrum -- who posed as a teenage member of the Mormon church on the Internet to lure a 17-year-old North Carolina girl to Utah for sex -- was sentenced to serve nearly 2 years in federal prison. A few months after an initial February 2000 conversation, Gordon Brent Bodily invited the girl to Utah, telling her parents she would be coming to look at colleges and visit Mormon landmarks. The two had sex at a Salt Lake City motel several times from June 13 to June 16, 2000.
* Two years ago, Thomas Jared Pearl, a former Kennedy family aide, was sentenced to more than 8 years in prison for attempting to have sex with "Kami," a fictitious 12-year-old girl. Pearl had sexual conversations, sent lewd pictures and agreed to meet the girl -- who was actually a Logan police officer -- in Utah. Pearl was arrested at the Salt Lake City International Airport in May 1999.
* In late 2000, a former Salt Lake City pediatrician was sentenced to more than 1 year in prison for using an Internet chat room to try to solicit sex with a 13-year-old boy. But Brent Blackburn did not know he was corresponding with a Salt Lake City police detective. Blackburn was arrested when he showed up at an arranged late-night meeting behind a Salt Lake area high school.
And while Hansen says women generally do not go online looking to meet children, he points to the case about five years ago of a Florida woman who repeatedly chatted online with a 14-year-old Salt Lake County boy.
She sent him sex toys so he could prepare for a future encounter.
She was arrested by police in Florida when she sent him a plane ticket.
Police say it is difficult to say if most pedophiles are caught by police before they victimize children, but Hansen said he hopes so. "I would love to work my way out of this job -- that would be a real success," Hansen said.
While early Utah prosecutions usually involved child victims, recent cases are generally the result of police stings, Warner said.
Warner and Hansen said undercover officers are extensively trained to avoid entrapping online chatters. It is the suspects who begin the sex talk, and ask to set up meetings, police say.
"We're not out on a fishing expedition," Warner said. "We're not going to initiate anything."
"We're really careful," Hansen added. "The predator is the one who has to lead the chat to cybersex or make arrangements to travel for sex -- the officer does not."
Pearl argued unsuccessfully that police tried to persuade him to come to Utah, with over 70 e-mails inviting him to the state to meet the girl.
Counters Warner: "Nobody put a gun to his head and forced him to get on that plane" from Washington, D.C.
Salt Lake City civil rights attorney Brian Barnard agreed that if police are not initiating the conversations, there is nothing wrong with using online decoys.
"If an officer is on the Internet and says 'I'm a 13-year-old girl and golly gee, this Internet thing is fun' and somebody hits on them, I don't see any problem with that [police technique]," Barnard said.
Warner warned would-be sex predators that police officers are on the Internet watching for them.
"This conduct hurts children in the worst way," Warner said. "We make no bones about it, we're out there and we're going to try to stop it."
Don't forget, Mary Katherine reportedly saw dark hair on the abductor's arms, too, even though he was wearing a jacket. Oops.
I've done that, myself. :)
"I thought you were saying that there was an attempted kidnapping near you,"
There was, this morning, but I live in a suburb of Detroit. I don't think this guy was in SLC. I'm sure that he lives in my own area; wouldn't doubt it.
The last time I had a chance to look, there were 88 sex offenders in my 24 sq. mile small town. But, since it became unconstitutional to show the Michigan sex offender registry online, (on June 3rd,) I can't check anymore. It was a good way of keeping track of these idiots, too.
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