Remembrance of (Weird) Things Past

Last updated on: December 17, 2018 at 2:51 pm by Dan Peterson

Remembrance of (Weird) Things Past 2018-12-17T14:51:59-07:00 Dan Peterson

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The Federal courthouse in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I testified in the competency hearing for Brian David Mitchell and then, a year later, in his trial. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

It seems that CNN is in the process of producing a two-hour documentary on the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case, to appear sometime next year on its HLN channel.

I’ve just returned from being interviewed for slightly more than an hour by CNN’s field producer on the project.

It has been literally years since I’ve thought seriously about the Smart case, and I told CNN’s representatives that in advance. After all, the competency hearing for Brian David Mitchell, Elizabeth’s kidnapper, took place in late 2010, and his federal court trial was almost exactly a year later, in 2011, and I was more than happy to move on thereafter. (Instead of focusing on the Qur’an and on texts by Plato, Aristotle, Philo Judaeus and various other Middle Platonists, Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, al-Kindi, al-Razi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and al-Kirmani — my professional research foci — I had spent the better part of two years poring over the somewhat less rich works of “Immanuel David Isaiah.”) So, in order to help me refresh my memory of the details, they sent me the following links:

NBC News: “Expert analyzes religious text in Smart case: BYU professor likens street preacher’s manifesto to student’s ‘term paper'”

CNN: “Documents trace strange odyssey of suspect in Smart kidnapping”

New York Times: “End of an Abduction: The Overview; Suspect’s Wife Is Said to Cite Polygamy Plan”

ABC News: “Elizabeth Smart Tells Court Brian David Mitchell Would Pray for Sex”

Washington Post: “Polygamy Cited as Motive in Kidnapping”

And those articles did, in fact, pretty much get me back into my 2010 and 2011 mindset. (I offer them here in case anybody is suffering from nostalgia for hearing again about Brian David Mitchell and his works.)

The topics that CNN’s field producer had told me that we would discuss were, in fact, the principal subjects for the interview today:

Brian David Mitchell’s background
What he believed about himself/what he believed God was calling him to do
What is the Book of Immanuel David Isaiah
What motivated Brian David Mitchell’s actions
Your opinion of Mitchell’s intelligence
Mitchell’s beliefs compared to LDS church
Your opinion of Mitchell’s competency

I’ll be interested to see how the documentary turns out. Of course, I’ve been around the block enough with such things to know that my interview will probably get at most about fifteen seconds in the final product. But it was fun, and, in a weird way, I somewhat enjoyed reminiscing about the episode.

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