First of all “stories”; true life or true crime stories or completely fictional stories - the type of stories that make for and eventually become movies; the story or “narrative” is often edited, compressed, details omitted or extra story material added or changed to make it fit the movie story telling medium. You of all people, as a writer who has worked in the movie industry should know this. Real life on the other hand does not always have such a neat narrative or fit the classic story telling arch and isn’t so easy to condense into a script that after filming and editing can be compressed into a 2 hour run time that people who have short attention spans and like neat endings will plunk down $8 to $10 to watch in a theater or will buy on Blue Ray. Nor is it like Law & Order or NICS or any number of crime dramas on TV; you can’t depict a crime, the police investigation and trial in 60 minutes less time for commercials. But I would expect you already (or should) know that.
I’ve just looked on the internet and seen that there are others who have questioned the Elizabeth Smart narrative. It seems that there are even more holes in her story than I realized. Take a look.
So? I can look on the internet and find all sorts of people who claim that the Moon landing in 1969 was faked, that 9-11 was an “inside job” and that the WTC towers were pre-rigged with explosives, I can also find on the internet all sorts of people who claim they were abducted by aliens in UFO’s, claim to have lived past lives, claim to be psychics, etc. We’ve even had a few threads posted here at FR (and many of them thankfully pulled) citing “infowars”, “naturalnews” and “beforeitsnews” and other such kook conspiracy sites banned as sources by JR himself, that made claims that Sandy Hook and even the Boston Marathon bombing were all staged events and that all the “supposed” victims were merely paid crisis actors. They all claim to have compelling evidence but on closer inspection they are connecting dots where there are no dots exist or are completely making “stuff” up out of their deranged minds. Some internet site contain good information, some not so much, a few blogs are with reading but most (as I’m sure humblegunner will agree) are a complete waste of time.
I did a search on the internet on “Elizabeth Smart did not tell the truth” and it turned up a few hits, but those were mostly of “bloggers” with no background in criminal investigations and little actual knowledge of the crime and the trial that followed, merely “opinion” pieces and a few of those are by people with gripes against the Mormon Church, claiming it was a frame up and cover up. And FWIW, I’m neither defending nor disparaging the beliefs of Mormons, I think some of their beliefs are odd but then I also think that some of the beliefs of many more mainstream religions are just as odd; but if anything derogatory can be said of Elizabeth Smart’s parents related to their daughter’s kidnapping, it could be said that even if their intentions were good - to help and give a hand up to the less fortunate buy giving them some odd jobs, they were way too trusting and way too gullible for their own good.
Hello, they were Mormons, which means they were already nutty. The weird guy was in their home - the father had hired him. Teenaged girls are very impressionable, especially over-protected girls who are emotionally twelve.
Well, there you go. I suspect that what you really have is a preconceived negative bias against Mormons and that because of their “nuttiness” or your perception of their level of “nuttiness”, they got just what they deserved. You also seem to underestimate or overestimate teenage girls of 14 years old. But it should also be mentioned that there are a number of people (liberals or self admitted former liberals like yourself) who think that fundamentalist Christians and Roman Catholics are just as “nutty” too, and then there are those nutty “home schooling” families, or Christian families with lots of children (Duggers) and those nutty families who don’t let their 14 year old daughters dress like hookers or give them access to birth control or abortions, those “nutty” families who make their kids go to church, don’t allow their kids to listen to certain types of music with suggestive or sexual lyrics, watch movies or TV shows with objectionable content; those poor over-protected girls who are “emotionally twelve” because, well some are actually twelve year old or near to it, but in your opinion being under the thumb of oppressive and over protective parents, those who don’t allow their kids to run around like feral animals, those poor impressionable and obviously miserable teenagers like those being raised in a home with strong morals, that would make any such girl just up and leave her home in the middle of the night to take up with a stranger and fabricate a story about being kidnapped? And if you were really all that well versed about her abductors, Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Ileen Barzee and their backgrounds you would know just what they were capable of. And you would also know that with even the most impressionable teen, it would take some time, a lot more time than a few brief encounters to indoctrinate her into joining their two person “cult” which wasn’t even really a “cult” but two very sick and demented persons looking to abduct a child of a prominent Mormon family because they had a gripe against the Mormon Church for excommunicating them for their extreme nuttiness.
The first thing she said to the police when found was, ”you think I’m that.girl who ran away...”
And do you think perhaps that during her 9 months of captivity, her abductors didn’t repeatedly tell her (in addition to telling her “we will kill your family, your parents, your little sister”) that they also told her that no one would believe her and “everyone, even the police and your parents thinks you are a run-away”? That BTW is how pedophiles work and get away with their crimes; that is what Jerry Sandusky told the kids he molested – “if you tell, no one is going to believe you”, “if you tell, very bad things will happen to your family”.
This same sense of story was what got me to change from remaining a liberal - the way I was raised - to becoming conservative.
If it was merely your sense of “story” that got you to change from remaining a liberal to becoming a conservative, I think you might want to reassess what being conservative actually means.
I wonder why questioning a narrative that doesn’t have much supporting evidence is so upsetting to you.
To start at the end of your message - my statement that realizing the story was wrong is an excellent way of describing coming out of liberalism into conservatism. And the Smart case is a good analogy. Liberalism is a construct of fictions that don’t make sense - even as fiction. So when I began to see the difference between what I had been told and the information that was in conflict with that narrative - like Duranty’s massive deception about the Ukrainian famine - I began to question the validity of the narrative and the credibility of the people and institutions that I had been told were the good guys. Eventually the entire false structure came tumbling down. Once it came down, I was able to see, from a logical, objective perspective that the people I had been told were the bad guys were the ones on the side of truth and justice, even if many of them were not cosmopolitan, drank bad coffee, had terrible taste in interior decorating, and little to no interest in culture. They were the ones who supported the truthful accounts of history, and whose policies were based on those truths.
Your deliberate re-casting of my saying that I found contradictory evidence about the Smart case in newspapers and magazines available online to wallowing in oddball blogs about ufos is a smear tactic that doesn’t merit a response.
Re the way narratives are condensed for dramatic purposes - the narrative of a crime cannot do that, because in that context, to simplify is to lie. There are a lot of loose threads in this story, and there has been significant misrepresentation. At the time of the disappearance, Mitchell looked nothing like how he looked when arrested.
I think the accounts from the friend who accompanied Smart to see Mitchell several times outside her home are credible. The report that she said, ”you think I’m the girl who ran away” to the police is credible. The photographs of her at a party with Mitchell are indisputable. The fact that the parents, who had hired Mitchell to come into their home, did not mention him as a possible suspect to the police raises a huge red flag. Anyone who would hire strange men with credentials to work in their home around young daughters is a nut.