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Minutes after 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was snatched from her bedroom in the dead of night in June, 2002, a police cruiser idled by along a neighbourhood street as she was forced to the ground at knifepoint. "Move and I will kill you!" her captor hissed.
It was one of several fleeting times that Smart watched a rescue slip away during her nine-month ordeal, she recounts in her book My Story.
She was so terrified of the street preacher who kidnapped her that when she was rescued by police in a Salt Lake City suburb in March 2003, she only reluctantly identified herself.
Between the heartbreak of missed chances, Smart writes, she was treated as a sex object by Brian David Mitchell and as a slave by his wife, Wanda Barzee. She says they denied her food and water for days at a time.
A US lawyer called it one of the kidnapping crimes of the century. Smart, a quiet, devout Mormon who played the harp and loved horses, vanished without a trace from her home high above Salt Lake City.
Smart, now 25, is married, finishing a music degree at Brigham Young University in Utah, and travelling across the US giving speeches and doing advocacy work. Her Elizabeth Smart Foundation highlights predatory crimes against children. The book was a form of closure.
Smart says she doesn't want to understand Mitchell, yet her book opens a window on his personality. He was a Salt Lake City fixture in a robe and sandals who met Smart when her mother offered him US$5 and work at the family home. At that moment, he resolved to take her as the second of a hoped-for five wives, he later told Smart.

	Why didn't I cry out for help? [It] comes down to fear

	KIDNAP VICTIM Elizabeth Smart
Smart says Mitchell believed that anything was his for the taking, and that he was a man who never cared for anyone even as he ranted about God. Smart calls him a "manipulative, antisocial and narcissistic paedophile".
Her book reveals another near-rescue. Only days into the kidnapping, a helicopter hovered over the makeshift camp in the mountains 8 kilometres from Smart's home where she was kept tethered to trees by steel cables. She was forced inside a tent as the helicopter's rotors bent trees around them, then watched it slowly glide away.
"Why didn't I cry out for help?" Smart reflects. The answer "comes down to fear".
Mitchell is serving two life terms after he was sentenced in 2011. A year earlier, Barzee was given 15 years for kidnapping and sexual assault.
Smart was finally found when police stopped the odd-looking trio, a middle-aged couple and young girl wearing filthy clothes, a grey wig and dark sunglasses, walking along the street. Smart says that before she identified herself, police seemed to know they had found her, asking: "Are you Elizabeth Smart?"


Kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart recounts her ordeal in new book