Elizabeth Smart Testifies in Alleged Kidnapper's Trial

(Nov. 8) -- Elizabeth Smart took the stand today in the federal trial of her accused kidnapper and described how she awoke in the early morning hours of June 5, 2002, to feel a knife at her throat. The man holding it threatened to kill her and her family if she did not come with him, she said.

"He said he was taking me hostage, for ransom," Smart, now 23, testified, according to The Associated Press. "I was shocked. I thought I was having a nightmare."

Smart was the third witness to testify in federal court in Salt Lake City in the trial of Brian David Mitchell. The self-proclaimed prophet "Immanuel" is accused of kidnapping Smart when she was 14 and repeatedly raping her during a captivity that lasted nine months.

Wearing a red jacket and black and white skirt, the blond young woman recalled the night she was abducted from the bedroom she shared with her little sister, Mary Katherine, then 9.

"I remember him saying that 'I have a knife to your neck, don't make a sound, get out of bed and come with me or I will kill you and all your family,' " Smart testified.

Smart testified that the kidnapper ordered her to put on some shoes and then they left the house and walked for several hours until they reached a campsite, where Mitchell's wife, Wanda Barzee, washed her feet and made her take off her pajamas and robe and then ordered her to take off her underpants.

"She said if I didn't take them off she would have the defendant [Mitchell] come in and rip them off," Smart testified, according to the Deseret News.

She said Mitchell performed a sort of wedding ceremony and then, despite her protests and attempts to fight him off, he raped her.

"I begged him not to. I did everything I could to stop him. I pleaded with him to not touch me, but it didn't work," she said, according to the Deseret News.

Smart did not have to look at Mitchell during her testimony. U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball ordered him removed from the courtroom for singing a hymn. Mitchell is able to view the proceedings remotely from another room, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

Earlier, Lois Smart recalled the "utter terror" she felt when her younger daughter told her Elizabeth had been kidnapped during the night.

"Elizabeth is gone," Lois Smart said 9-year-old Mary Katherine, looking like "a scared rabbit," told her parents.

"My heart sank, and I called out to [husband] Ed, 'Call 911,' " Lois Smart testified, according to CNN. "It was utter terror. It was the worst feeling, knowing that I didn't know where my child was. I was helpless."

In opening statements earlier today, public defender Parker Douglas told jurors that Mitchell was driven by escalating mental illness and extreme religious beliefs. Mitchell faces life in prison if convicted.

Testimony got under way today after a federal appeals court in Denver on Friday denied a defense request to move the trial out of Utah, The Associated Press reported.

Mitchell's attorneys had argued that pretrial publicity had tainted the jury pool and that empaneled jurors already believed Mitchell was guilty in a case that made national headlines.

His lawyers say they plan to use an insanity defense for their client. Mitchell claims to receive visions from God and has been repeatedly removed from the courtroom for loudly singing hymns.

Elizabeth Smart flew from Paris, where she was on a Mormon church mission, to Salt Lake City late last month for the trial of her accused captor, who once worked as a handyman for the Smart family.

During the government's opening statements last week, Assistant U.S. Attorney Felice Viti told jurors that Elizabeth Smart was dragged from Utah to California to Nevada and back again during a "nightmare" in which she was constantly raped and drugged and forced to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and watch Mitchell and Barzee having sex.

In the weeks following her abduction, the girl was held between two trees by an ankle cable and given a bucket to relieve herself in.

"The once limitless horizons of Elizabeth's world went no further than the length of the cable," Viti said, according to court transcripts posted by the Tribune. "She was nscri ordered to strip, was told she was married to a man she didn't know, raped and tied between two trees ... and told that this was her new life. That tent was her new home. That bucket her new bathroom."

Elizabeth was rescued in March 2003. She was found wearing long robes and wandering in a Salt Lake City suburb in the company of Mitchell and Barzee.

Barzee's case had been delayed for years after her attorneys claimed she was incompetent to stand trial. A Utah judge approved forcibly medicating her with antipsychotic drugs, and she pleaded guilty to kidnapping charges in November 2009. She is serving a 15-year sentence.