ELIZABETH SMART STORY

From its shocking, high-profile beginning to its unexpected closure, the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart touched a nerve nationwide. Now, with details never before revealed to the public comes the true story of a family bound by an unimaginable nightmare—and the young victim who never gave up hope.

It begins with an act of charity when Lois Smart (Lindsay Frost, The Ring) offers a zealously religious panhandler named Emmanuel (Tom Everett, Pearl Harbor) a job working as a handyman for her husband Ed (Dylan Baker, Spider-Man II) and their family. The job is only temporary, but Emmanuel reappears eight months later at the Smarts’ suburban Salt Lake City home. This time it’s in the dead of night to steal his way into the bedroom of the Smarts’ fourteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth (Amber Marshall, The Christmas Shoes) and kidnap her at knife-point as her younger sister Mary Katherine watches in terror. By the following day, the family is thrown into turmoil, and the search for Elizabeth Smart begins. So do the endless questions as Ed and Lois confront the nightmare of a vanished child.

What no one fathoms is that Elizabeth is hidden in plain sight—only miles away—the victim of the self-proclaimed man of God and his female companion Wanda (Hollis McLaren, Atlantic City). Newly christened Augustine, Elizabeth is to be taken as a plural wife. She’s veiled, threatened with death, lives hand-to-mouth with her new “family,” and is brazenly paraded in the streets. Yet no one recognises the most famous missing person in the country. While Elizabeth survives in fear and endures in silent dread, the Smarts never lose hope, navigating their way through the complicated justice system, the suspicions of authorities, and the scurrilous accusations of an increasingly frenzied media storm. After weeks turn into months, coast-to-coast searches prove futile, leads result in dead ends, profilers, cold case experts, and the FBI exhaust every possibility, the Smarts are left to their own devices to find their daughter. Their boundless hope would unfold as one of the most remarkable, unexpected, emotional, and bizarre true crime stories ever told.

The Elizabeth Smart Story is a thrilling movie straight from the pages of the headlines that captivated the world.