ALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — Elizabeth Smart’s new book and documentary detail her healing process after she was kidnapped as a child.
In the early hours of a June night in 2002, a 14 year old girl was taken from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, and the search that followed became one of the most closely followed missing person cases in the country.
A new documentary premiering January 21, 2026, on Netflix revisits her disappearance in 2002, detailing the nine months she was kept away from home by Brian David Mitchell, a self-described street preacher, and Wanda Barzee, who assisted him, and her recovery on March 12, 2003, in Sandy, just a few miles from where the search began.
The documentary is told through Elizabeth’s own recollections and includes archival footage, along with interviews involving her family, who were treated as suspects during the early stages of the investigation. I’ve been waiting for a comprehensive look at this case for nearly twenty years, and I can’t wait to watch this one.
Smart’s story captivated the nation’s attention in 2002. She was taken from her Salt Lake City home in the middle of the night and endured months of abuse.
“I did what I had to survive,” Smart said in an interview with our Criminally Obsessed team. “This is trying to acknowledge that everybody has a story and that, you know, life doesn’t, I think, ever go exactly the way you plan it.”
Her book “Detours” pinpoints the steps she took to heal.
“I don’t want anyone else to feel like they can’t move forward with their life or that they have to live in fear or that there aren’t good people in this world or that they did something wrong,” she said. “I had no choice in anything that happened to me.”
Her documentary is scheduled for release in January.
“I have learned over the years how powerful stories are,” Smart said. “I feel like it’s one of the most effective ways that we learn because it’s easy to forget statistics and numbers. … I have been asked so many times, ‘Why didn’t you run? Why didn’t you scream? Why didn’t you escape?’ And I feel like in the documentary I tried to explain it,” Smart said.
The Netflix documentary “Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart” will premiere on Netflix on Jan. 21.
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