Media Beat - June 20, 2002
Little Girl Lost
by Paul Swenson
I was in a New York hotel room when I saw the first report of Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapping on CNBC, which was promoting the Utah story with images from a now overly familiar Smart family home video in which the mild but playful Elizabeth is mugging for the camera during a family cookout at a beach.
The story was getting equal billing in the news hour with an interview with tinhorn Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, who was supposed to provide “insight” into the current difficulties of the troubled FBI from the perspective of an ex-agent during the agency’s tough-guy, J. Edgar Hoover-era. Liddy is making his living these days posing as a journalist, and the fury I felt on that June morning was a mixture of the despair that devolves from living in a world where violence and fear invade a quiet Salt Lake City neighborhood and from seeing the fake rehabilitation of a cheap criminal like Liddy as a patriotic media star.
In watching the CNBC coverage of the at-gunpoint abduction, which included an account by KUTV’s Elizabeth Dannheim, and an outdoor news conference in the leafy-green Arlington Hills neighborhood where the kidnapping occurred, I was struck by the contrasting descriptions of the missing victim by the young TV reporter and by Salt Lake Police Chief Rick Dinse. Dannheim referred to the 14-year-old Smart as a “young woman,” while the silver-headed Dinse (obviously from another generation) designated her a “little girl.”
The “little girl lost” tenor of some of the coverage, with its images of beautiful blond daughters of a once unruffled and now shattered family in an upscale neighborhood, played to sentimental biases—not only to those Utahns who regard teenage females as uniquely vulnerable—but apparently hooked national audiences as well. It ran cross-grain, however, to family and police appeals designed to hopefully empower the missing teen (should she be listening) as a survivor, and to her physical characteristics (a 5-foot-6 teen female is not “little”).
En route back to Salt Lake from Manhattan, I caught up with front-page stories on the abduction in USA Today and the Denver Post. In Utah, after plowing through accumulated local papers, I perused New York Times coverage, which proved informative in such small details as specifically naming the crime-scene neighborhood (Arlington Hills rather than the more generic Federal Heights, used in the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News).
The initial Times story, under the byline of Nick Madigan, noted the odd circumstance that the Edward Smart family lives across the street from Brent and Bonnie Jean Beesley, the target family in a foiled 1992 plot to kidnap one of the Beesley children for a $3-million ransom—a fact first reported in Derek Jensen’s and Pat Reavy’s June 5 Deseret News piece and omitted from Salt Lake Tribune reports. Bonnie Jean Beesley told the Times that in the middle of the night after the intruder had disappeared with Elizabeth, Ed Smart “came over and banged on our door and asked if our kids were all right. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
Almost a week of stories indicating the police investigation had made little progress—particularly Kevin Cantera’s June 11 report in the Salt Lake Tribune, headlined “Smart Case Stumps Police”— may have gotten under the department’s skin. That same day, Chief Dinse called another press conference (local media have swallowed the “news briefing” public relations lingo to describe these events) to announce what sounded like a first break in the case—although hedged with enough ambiguity to suggest the chief may have been trying to deflect heat from investigators.
Derek Jensen’s Deseret News piece—phoned in on deadline after the press conference with the tabloid headline, “We are going to get you”—concluded that Dinse’s announcement contained “a major development.” Police were narrowing the investigation to neighborhood individuals who may have had contact with the family at the time of the kidnapping.
Cantera’s Tribune report the next morning played it safer. “We don’t have an identified suspect but we do have an analysis of what the suspect is like” was the Dinse quote played most prominently.
That afternoon, however, Jensen and Jose Carvajal wrote in the News that the kidnapper may have watched his victim for weeks before taking her (citing a former FBI profiler), and said police sought to question Bret Michael Edmunds, 26,—wanted on earlier warrants and believed the driver of a suspicious car seen in the neighborhood by a milkman before the abduction. The News used a police photo of Edmunds on the jump page of its page 1 story, and by evening, TV news (“Tune in at 10 to learn if he has a police record”—KTVX, Channel 4) had also pounced on the photo.
As theories continued to fly, Cantera and Michael Vigh reported on June 13 that the Tribune had learned that police were postulating Smart may have been taken by a member of her extended family, who staged it to look like the work of an outsider.
For a period following the abduction, one salutary effect on local TV’s early morning and noon news shows of being forced to deal with a close-to-home story of tragic dimensions was the sobering up of such characteristically shallow and frivolous news teams as Ron Bird and Mary Nichols on Channel 2. For a few precious days, at least, the joking stopped.