Elizabeth Smart Says She Was Raped Daily

I agree with you except that drowning them is mean.

I guess I'm just a mean man. I have always thought that what is good for the goose, is good for the gander. Why is it a psycho can torture his victims to death over minutes, hours or days; but he can demand a quick and easy death? I see nothing wrong with drowning them; let them feel the fear of the inevitable, the struggle to live, the horror of knowing that you have to breathe sometime - after all, they had no problem introducing horror, fear and pain on their victim.

I wonder how she kept from getting pregnant.

My guess is that this has more to do with Mitchell than with Elizabeth -- even though when she was first kidnapped she didn't look physically mature enough to be menstruating, she did when she was found 9 months later.

Mitchell had two children in his brief first marriage that ended when he was about 21. With all the delving into his background, there hasn't been so much as a whisper of any subsequent offspring, even though we've heard plenty about his subsequent relationships and marriages through the 25+ years between the end of his first marriage and his abduction of Elizabeth, including at least one to a woman who was still of child-bearing age and whose young teenage daughter from a previous marriage he was "molesting" (presumably raping) for at least a couple of years. I think he's infertile for some reason, though I doubt he would have had a vasectomy. It's not terribly uncommon for middle aged or older men to be infertile -- it's usually something easily fixable with a minor medical procedure, but Mitchell wouldn't have been likely to pursue diagnostics and treatment.

I certainly hope Elizabeth was as "fortunate" in the STD department as she was in the pregnancy department. STDs are a major cause of infertility in men, and Mitchell seems very likely to have contracted one or more along the way, and not to have gotten prompt (or any) treatment for it.

Grind the bastards into hamburger meat and feed them to the alligators in Florida. They aren’t worth any more than that.

At least for Mitchell, skip the grinding and just hand him over to the alligators, kicking and screaming. He deserves to see those jaws coming at him -- finally, a creature he can't manipulate.

I think Wanda is seriously mentally ill, and she seems to be responding to medication, and being cooperative. Keeping her permanently ensconced in a secure psychiatric institution is good enough for me. From Elizabeth's testimony, it sounds like Wanda was being manipulated and exploited by Mitchell, much as Elizabeth was. They were both mentally weak -- Wanda because of mental illness, and Elizabeth because of youth, inexperience, trauma, and we learn now, forced drug and alcohol intake as well -- and Mitchell was a determined and experienced exploiter.

Really, I read by 1981 he was married to his second wife, Debbie Mitchell, who had three daughters from a previous marriage. With Debbie's three children and Brian's two children, the Mitchell's had their hands full, but that did not stop the couple from having two more children soon after their marriage.

On the same day that Mitchell and Debbie divorced, Mitchell married Wanda Barzee. Barzee was a 40-year-old divorcee with six children, who she left with her ex-husband when she left the marriage. I would have thought that a lack of children with Barzee would likely have been caused by her age (over 40) and not with Mitchell who was 32 years old at the time and had already fathered four children.

Link

Thanks for the link. I hadn't seen mention of those children in a couple of bios I checked before I posted. And it's odd that this one doesn't even mention whether the other (besides the little boy who may have been molested) was a boy or girl. Still, that was around 20 years before he abducted Elizabeth, and his wives have certainly not been his only sexual liaisons. Who knows. There may have been a bunch of abortions and/or a few babies born to short-term flings of his, who don't know who their father is and whose mothers don't want to bring it up. Not at all surprising that Wanda didn't have more children with him at 40+. I still suspect he's infertile. He's just the sort of guy to come down with an STD -- even the kind that can be treated successfully with antibiotics -- and let it linger longer enough to cause blockage in the relevant ducts. His lifestyle and sexual propensities make it unlikely that he hasn't had STDs in his lifetime, and he doesn't strike me as having had a lifestyle where he would have run to a doctor at the first sign of trouble to get treatment. Thankfully for Elizabeth, he still doesn't show any signs of AIDS after all these years, so presumably he didn't have it. Hopefully he didn't have herpes, which is still incurable. Even though it's effects are relatively mild in most cases, it would be a horrible reminder for Elizabeth to have to deal with for the rest of her life -- she'll have enough trouble establishing a normal sexual relationship when she gets married, without that. If Mitchell transmitted one of the bacterial STDs to her, it would be curable, but might have left her unable to get pregnant naturally (both while in captivity and subsequently) -- not as big a deal as something like herpes, with modern reproductive technology available.

I just hope she's really doing as well as she appears to be doing, and that she can continue keeping this horrible experience more or less in a separate compartment of her mind, not interfering with the rest of her life.

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