Nine Months Of Hell

A harrowing docudrama recounts the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart

- Caren Clark

In June 2002, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was asleep in bed at her home in Salt Lake City, Utah, when Brian David Mitchell, who had briefly worked as a handyman for the Smarts, broke in and kidnapped her at knifepoint.

Religious fanatic Mitchell took her to a tent in the woods where he was living with his wife Wanda Barzee. For the next nine months, as an intense search was carried out for the missing Elizabeth, she was starved, drugged, repeatedly raped and forced to take part in religious rituals.

Now, in a moving docudrama, Elizabeth gives her own account of what happened, while actress Alana Boden portrays her in dramatised scenes of the events she describes.