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Yes, you are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good Evening.
Chris Thomas is not yet thirty years old when he finds himself managing the immense pressure, eccentric personalities, and extenuating circumstances of an international story where one small misstep could adversely impact the search for a missing teenager and a reputation of her family. Now twenty years later, Thomas takes readers behind the scenes, providing new details, perspectives, and commentary
on finding Elizabeth Smart. In the process of reflecting on Elizabeth's search and rescue, Thomas discovers how growing up in the culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints commonly known as Mormon, helped push him to develop the exact kind of intuition needed to manage Elizabeth's kidnapping and rescue and do so while the world watched.
Unexpected juxtaposes crucial events from the Smart case with Thomas's experience growing up in the latter day Saint culture, including coming to understand the secret of a broken war hero before it was too late. The book that we're featuring this evening is Unexpected, the backstory of finding Elizabeth Smart and growing up in the culture of an American religion, with my special guest, author, speaker, and communications profession you know,
Chris Thomas. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Chris Thomas, Thanks Dan, it's a pleasure being on. Thank you so much, and congratulations on this extraordinary book.
Yeah, it's been quite the journey and it's always you know, for me, this was a first and seeing it come to life has been a real thrill.
Let's talk about this extraordinary book project. With this book,
you have the forward, written by Elizabeth Smart herself. It's somewhat brief, but she writes that when she was abducted in two thousand and two, she didn't believe she'd live another year, let alone twenty, and she spent countless hours and imagining what it would be like to be rescued and how it would happen, and what it would be like to reunite with her family when it finally did happen, a whirlwind of names, places, and so many feelings regarding
this unknown Only a few people stood out in her memory from shortly after, and one of those people was you tell us about where you were, what position you were in, what was your background, and how you came to be involved with the Elizabeth Smart Search and rescue.
So Elizabeth's cousins started an internship with my public relations firm a couple of weeks before the abduction, and so when Elizabeth was abducted, we volunteered to help. Initially, they said we've got it. Elizabeth's uncle is a photo journalist, so he had some media savvy. But as the media contingent swelled, they welcomed our health and we got involved, thinking it would be a few days, they'd find her,
we'd celebrate and go back to our day jobs. And my partners ended up going back to the agency and I stayed with the Smart family for the next nine and a half months. So in long History, and I was managing the media initially, was handling all the communications efforts with a team and then over time grew to be a close confidant of the family and was involved in so much more.
You take us right, just again briefly to the first time you lay eyes on Elizabeth Smart and the circumstances in which you end up being at the Smart home.
Yes, So, that day of her rescue, I actually had seen Elizabeth at the police station. There had been some issues with victims rights. John Walsh, the post of America's Most Wanted had reached me. We'd worked very close and I took his call and he had asked me to pass on some information about how Elizabeth should be treated,
and they were doing the exact opposite. And when ed Smart learned that, you know, they were violating her victims rights, he became very upset, to the point where he had to be restrained and I was called down to the police station. So the first time I saw Elizabeth was when I got out of the elevator and she was coming out of an interrogation room. I didn't see anything to her at that point. I felt it just wasn't appropriate to talk to somebody who had been in captivity
just a few hours earlier. Later that night, when I went up to the house to touch base and planned for media for the following day. As I approached the doorstep, Elizabeth and her siblings were in the background and her parents were at the door talking with some neighbors. And as I got out there, Elizabeth gave me this strange look, like who is this? She obviously didn't recognize me from the police station. And fortunately Ed caught that glimpse and
he said, Elizabeth, you don't know who this is. He said, this is Chris. I consider him like a brother. You should too, And I just wept. It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life, and for that reason, I start the book with that experience and then go back through the story, coming back to that day toward the end.
Now tell us about the conversations you have, the job that you have at this public relations company that's been recently formed not too long before this, but also tell us about who Tom Smart is and some of the concerns from the family regarding Tom Smart.
So Tom Smart is elizabeth uncle who's the photo journalist, and in fact his daughter was Sierra was the one who started the internship with my firm. And Tom has an interesting story. He is one of the most passionate, iconoclastic people I know. And after Elizabeth was abducted, Tom didn't sleep for more than one hundred and fifty hours, and the longer he didn't sleep, the more his faculties
were compromised. And as he was interfacing with the media, he started to say things that were pretty erratic, and we had to try to pull him away from the media. But Tom was this force throughout the book where he was doing everything he could to find Elizabeth, and many of the things he did were instrumental in her rescue, and in other places he created some challenges as well. And Tom and I have an interesting interplay as trying to respond to the media and respond to his lack of sleep.
Tell us about this board and the Smart family and the actually the the Church of Latter day Saints and all of the people involved in organizing and strategizing the very first steps towards the search and rescue of Elizabeth Smart.
And one thing that was remarkable about the search for Elizabeth Smart is just the level of organization and detail and the resources that were available. Now, the Smarts were portrayed to be very affluent, and they weren't necessarily really wealthy, they definitely were gutter off than most people. At the same time, they were very very well connected. So Elizabeth's
grandfather had been head of the National Cancer Institute. Was this incredible man who actually kind of led the efforts at seventy six years old, and he had done amazing service around the country. So people came out of the woodwork to help him. In addition to that, the culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints is one of service, and you know, we're taught from a very young age to serve others, and there's a need,
you rise to the occasion. And that first week Elizabeth was missing, more than ten thousand people came out to search for her. And to provide some context, the next closest search for a missing child in recent history was four thousand people over several weeks. So the church played a significant role in organizing that. Now these weren't all church members. This was very much a community effort, but was organized at the church and very much by Elizabeths congregation.
And I get into the culture of the church a little bit in the book. It's not necessarily a religious book, but to understand that effort and to understand a lot of what went into rescue Elizabeth. It's important to understand
that culture. You asked about the board. So elizabeth aunts and uncles were all pretty esteemed people, physician, a lawyer, and there were others in kind of their inner circle, and a tech entrepreneur, the former mayor of Salt Lake, and they formed this group that more or less was a board. I couldn't think of a better word than
a board to use for them. I don't know that it was formal, but they met together twice a day to work on the investigation and to figure out how best to assist law enforcement, to assist the search effort, and to take care of the family. And very early on I was introduced and made a member of that group, which was a little overwhelming in that I was twenty nine years old and had a bachelor's degree and nearly everyone in there was ten at least ten years older
than me and had many graduate degrees. But I learned so much from them. It was tremendous experience.
And we talk about this Elizabeth Smart Search center that's set up, But also what did the family really need from you in your mind, and what did you and your team bring to them in terms of this, but also how did you arise as a for better term, a leader or a spokesperson for this group.
Sure there was intense media attention and la and that really is credit to Tom Smart, who made Elizabeth a household name overnight. There's a lot of attention and he really fed that and worked a lot of his media contacts around the country. Once that attention was there, it was figuring out how best to work with the media. The media is a two edged sword and one way they can be your best friend, can really help to get the word out, and on the other they can
cut you personally pretty deep. And we had a very personal discussion with the Smarts about the media early on and said, you need to understand what you're getting into because this is not going to be rosy. They are going to take shots at you, They're going to dig into your background. Are you willing to do this and to what degree? And they said, we want to do anything it takes to find Elizabeth. We don't care what they do or say. We want to go full bore.
So at that point my team and I were really working to be as organized as possible and how we worked with the media. We were very fortunate that the extended Smart family was large and they were articulate and willing to do interviews. It was at that point that we were working to make sure that they were well coordinated, that they were consistent in how they were answering questions, and that we were providing the media with you know, as much content and with good commentary that would make
for good stories. So really trying to manage that initially, and then as things got more pointed and more negative, it was managing those issues and crises within the abduction and the search.
What was your relationship with Tom Smart and how did you manage that relationship or attempt to.
So Tom was really the only person that I had known prior with him being a photo journalist. I had worked with him on a number of stories. He also one of my business partners. He was like an uncle to him. So I knew Tom pretty well. And initially, you know, Tom and I felt Tom and I and our team we were just part of the team, and
he was he was kind of leading that. But as he had to be pulled off because of his lack of sleep, changed his role a little bit and we stepped up and Tom was Tom's kind of a cowboy. He is a cowboy, really loves horses, and very much has this renegade approach to things, and so there was this amazing enthusiasm and passion and spirit with Tom. Sometimes it was just working with him to make sure that
we were being productive with that. And then there were challenges throughout throughout the situation where at times things got a little off the rails and we had to work to bring those back.
This book, not to take it off on a tangent, but part of this story includes you growing up in the Church of Latter day Saints and how that culture shaped you with the experiences that you did have not only with the church culture, but also this interesting and fascinating and important figure in this book named Baker. Just tell us briefly who this person is before we get back to handling this case and Tom Smart and Bill O'Reilly and Fox.
News absolutely so. Baker was one of the most unlikely teachers in my life. He was an alcoholic who lived next door to me. We had a very acrimonious relationship. He was verbally abusive. At one point we got in a fight. He threatened to shoot me. Several times. And after thirteen years, as I was getting ready to leave on a mission for my church on a whim, I knocked on his door to say goodbye and spent several
hours and learned his real story. And this had a profound impact on me that carried over to the smart Case. I learned from him not to judge people. I still struggle with it, but at least to try to keep an open mind as it relates to what's on the surface, because it's often not what's real. And also to get fantastic skin. I mean, he was about as harsh of
an individual as you could expect. So there were several lessons there, several lessons growing up in the latter day Saint culture that really prepared me for that experience with the smart Case. And so I go back to that. It's kind of a Wonder Years type of rated memoir where there's part of my childhood and then there's the smart Case.
Specifically, let's get to you're trying to handle the media. You're trying to stress that you need to have a consistent messaging everyone extended family included that may be interviewed, and that is you are coordinating day and night from beginning, as you write in the book, from very beginning in
the morning, coordinating interviews, facilitating interviews, facilitating print interviews. But tell us about Tom Smart and his own mission and what he does, and how Bill O'Reilly and Fox News comes into this story.
So Tom is finally Elizabeth's grandfather. Charles Smart, who's the patriarchy, more or less, tells Tom, you're going home, You're getting sleep. He sets up a rule that anyone who's going before the media must have had at least four hours of sleep the night before, and so he sends Tom off, and that night, unbeknownst to us, Tom shows up on
Larry King Live. He had somebody drive him across town to a studio we've been doing all the interviews by satellite at the church house, and he's on with the neighborhood milkman who had seen this man, Brett Mike Ledmans, who was one of the initial suspects in the case. And during the interview, Tom again, who is severely compromised from a lack of sleep, determines in his mind that the milkman is the actual abductor, and he tries to
get him to confess to the crime. Live on Larry King Live, and then Tom starts saying erratic things, trying to get him to confess, like the abductor's not a bad person, that we think he's okay, And so that was kind of the beginning of it. And after that interview, Tom was sent, I think, to a remote cabin with
no self service to get some sleep. The next day, though he hadn't told us that he had lined up an interview with the Bill O'Reilly show and that there was a backstory to it that we weren't familiar with, and that was that Tom had worked with a man named Mark Klass, whose daughter Polyclaus was unfortunately abducted and murdered, and he had come to town under the auspices of a father of a missing child, trying to provide his help and advice to the Smart family and didn't disclose
initially that he was a paid Fox News consultant. And Tom set up a meeting with Ed and Lois Smart, Elizabeth's parents, and at the end Fox News came in for a little exclusive part of the meeting, and then Tom called Mark out and said, wait a second, you
know who are you working for? And Mark confessed that he was working for Fox News, and Tom told him to stay away from the family, and so he then went to Bill O'Reilly and they made this whole fuss out of the fact that Tom was a suspicious individual and that he was trying to impede the investigation, that Mark Klass and Bill O'Reilly wanted to bring in this famed forensic artist Jeanie Boylan, and that Tom had mixed it. The only problem was Tom didn't show up to the
interview the next day. He was going to take these guys head on, and the producer at the very last minute was able to convince Tom's daughters, my intern Sierra who was twenty one, and her younger sister who was eighteen, to come on the show in Tom's stead and completely ambush them over the situation which they weren't aware of. And this this was, I mean deplorable to begin with, and secondly, really caused a fury with Tom when he finally came out of his exile and was arrested.
What did the police have to say and what's the media response?
So a couple of things happened during that time. Around that time, the Salt Lake Tribune publishes a story that citing unnamed sources that a member of the extended Smart family might be involved in Elizabeths abduction, and of course, reading between the lines, it's obvious they're talking about Tom Smart, and it doesn't add up. I mean, at least from a public perspective. Here he is on Larry King Live
saying erratic things. Then he disappears, and then you know, he's called out on the O'Reilly Show, and you know, now this is happening. So Tom looks very suspicious under the circumstances, and you know there's something that it takes some time before the media kind of lays off of Tom and the public people aren't convinced that the family wasn't involved in some way until March twelfth, when Elizabeth is rescued.
Now, meanwhile, the police have seemed to have their own agenda and are not working or working with the family necessarily and talking about a different suspect. The person named Ricci tell us about this.
Yeah, So Richard REESI was a handyman who had worked at the Smart's home for a period of several months. He had been fired I think six or eight months before Elizabeth went missing, and there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that pointed to him. It came out once he was arrested, that he had stolen items from the smart home, he had stolen items from another neighbor's home nearby, and had gone in the house during the middle of the night, had awakened a guest and had taken things
from the house. So he looked like somebody that had the ability and and knew the house and all these other details that could have come in in the middle of the night with a knife and taken Elizabeth. So he was arrested. There were a number of other elements that that pointed to him being the man, and the police were absolutely convinced it was Richard Greasy behind closed doors.
They told the family they were ninety nine point nine percent sure it was him, despite the fact that there were some very peculiar developments and questions that didn't add up with recy being the suspect.
So what is the family response to this differing of opinion, and also what how does the public respond and the media respond to the suspicions now that seemed to be caused by Tom and his actions.
Well, there's a lot of focus on Tom and then Richard Reesy tends to take some of that away when the rec development breaks. That's after there had been a heavy focus on Tom Smart. The Nation Inquirer, right before Reese is arrested as well, publishes a story about the Smart brothers being involved in a gay sex ring that potentially led to Elizabeth's abduction. And it was so ludicrous, especially in such a conservative community like Salt Lake City.
That wasn't it wasn't at all believable here and even outside of Salt Lake it was so far fetched. In a way, it did the family a favor because it kind of took the emphasis off of them a little bit, just because it's gone too far. And so when rees came out, that became more of the focus. And then and then something peculiar happened on July twenty fourth, which is a statewide holiday, and there's fireworks. It's just like the Fourth of July everywhere else. We celebrated it twice
here in the state of Utah. But on the twenty fourth of July, there was a break in at Elizabeth, or an attempted break in at Elizabeth's cousin's home. And her name was Write and she was one of Elizabeth's best friends, and the irony was that it was almost identical to how the break had occurred on the night of Elizabeth's abduction. Yet at this point, Richard REESI was in jail, so there was no way that he could
have done that. The police did not want the information getting out, and it took about a month before it finally broke, And when it did break, they said that they had investigated it and they believed it was a teenage prank. And that was where around that time is where the family and law enforcement started to really have some differences of opinion as it related to Richard Reese and the larger case.
Now, you want to keep the board's focus on finding Elizabeth and not suing Bill O'Reilly or any other thing that anyone's proposing. You want to keep that focus. So what is the strategy that you employ with the media and what do you do to get the messaging that you want out to that public and move this case.
Backing up to that point, when Tom comes back after the O'Reilly interview, which I believe was on a Friday, so it was like Monday morning, he brings an attorney with him into the board meeting and he says, you know, we he starts handing out a press release and he said, at the eleven o'clock briefing this morning, we're going to announce that we are taking legal action against Mark Klass
and Bill O'Reilly and Fox News. And there was just such a bad idea from the onset, and he was starting to get some traction with a few people on the board, and there was quite a bit of discussion, and I finally stood up and wrote Elizabeth's name. There was a blackboard in the room. Wrote Elizabeth's name on the blackboard and circled it and said, look, our focus is on Elizabeth and anything that doesn't help in finding her really doesn't matter, and we need to keep our
focus there. And our message was largely along those lines it had been. But moving forward, we asked ourselves that question quite often. You know, we went back to our mission. Our mission was finding Elizabeth. This is helping, you know, both tactically and from a message standpoint.
Can you tell us about Jane Clayson and her role in this story?
Sure?
So.
Jane is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, had went to school at Brigham Young University here in Utah and started her career with KSL Television. Utah is a small, kind of a medium market from a demographic standpoint, but we tend to have really strong broadcast journalists that come out of here and go national. And then this has been for some time, and so this market is one that she usually two
or three rungs up. When you start out as a broadcast journalist, you usually start in a really small market.
You cut your teeth there, you go to the next rung up, and so Jane kind of started, you know, three rungs up on the ladder and quickly made a name for herself and got a job with ABC Nightly News, and then was discovered by CBS News and became Briant Gumble's co host on the Early Show, and that lasted for a couple of years, and then she was a correspondent for CBS News and for forty eight Hours, and she came out to cover the case for forty eight
Hours and it formed a close relationship with Lois, who wasn't as involved with the day to day media. Convinced Lois to do a primetime special for forty eight hours that would run in February, and this was like at the end of the summer, so like five months later, they were there was going to be this special that the family was going to collaborate with Dane Playson and CBS for several months.
On what happens in the recy case and him as a suspect.
Sure, so there's a lot of doubt and suspicion surrounding Richard Reesi. And in September, which is about five months after elizabeth subduction, he has a brain hemorrhage and he dies in prison, completely unexpectedly, and this creates a real challenge because the police are somewhat positioning his death as though, you know, the mystery of Elizabeth's abduction may have died with recy And so the family has to make a very concerted effort to show condolence to the reci family
and not come off as being insincere. And in the same vein pointing out that even if Reesi was involved, he didn't act alone, and at that point offered some rewards for information, one about, you know, if anyone could explain what had happened at Elizabeth's cousin's house on July twenty fourth, and a couple of other questions that they offered rewards for around that time anonymously and didn't receive any credible tips from it.
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address to try ZipRecruiter for free. ZipRecruiter dot com slash murder again that's ZipRecruiter dot com slash mur der, ZipRecruiter the Smartest way to Hire. Now, Chris, we were talking about the it seemed that there needed to be some new development in this case. And you then take us to the Mayflower Hotel and the Smart family travels to New York City and to meet John Walsh and America's Most Wanted the host. John Walsh tell us how this happens and what happens as a result.
So there's a couple of things here that happened.
So they do.
They go to New York, they do their first network interview, and this is around the time of Reese's death. And then shortly thereafter, a couple of weeks later, Mary Catherine Smart, Elizabeth's sister, who was in the room the night that she was abducted. She had feigned sleep. It was pretty dark, she didn't get a good look at the individual, but she recognized his voice and one night, you know, the family had been told too throughout. Don't ask her questions.
If she wants to talk about it, talk about it, Let her talk about it. But if you allow her to process it, at some point she may figure out who it is. And this happened one night she was reading the Guinness Book of World Records and saw a picture of the world's strongest woman, and it popped into her head that that voice was this man named Emmanuel who had worked in the yard one afternoon. He'd only been there one day. And she went to her father and said, Dad, I know, I remember who did I
remember who was in the room? I know who took Elizabeth? And they got pretty excited and called law enforcement. And law enforcement was less interested in the development. They just created tension. The fair amount of the book deals with this tension between law enforcement and between Ed and Lois Smart on what to do. Law enforcement does not want the information coming out, and Ed and Lois Smart are
at odds. They're extended families are at odds regarding what to do that the extended Smart family feels like they should defile law enforcement and come forward with the information, and the other side believes that they should trust us authority and do what the police are saying. And this goes on for several months before they finally make a decision on what to do.
What is the police justification for not going along with a sketch? What is their rationale? For that.
You know, I couldn't really speak for the police department, so what I would be saying is somewhat speculation. It goes back to and in law enforcement there tends to be a lot of tribalism, and I think in this case there was a herd mentality where most of the people in law enforcement felt that it was Richard REESI, that it was a slam dunk, that he had done it, and that they were wasting their time with anything else.
They also had been under incredible scrutiny from the media, from the public, from the mayor's office, and I think they wanted to avoid any additional items that could reignite that.
So what happens in terms of this continued police focus on this reci and the family, as you say, increasingly at odds with the police to do something with this sketch that is has been produced. But the police are pretty lax in the production of that sketch to say the least.
Yeah, So there's a lot of back and forth between the families. And finally Tom Smart is the one who makes the recommendation that Ed and Lewis should talk to John Walsh and agree ahead of time that whatever John Walsh says to do that, they will follow it, and they agreed to do that. And they had met John earlier at the end of the summer and had done his daytime talk show, and they had been invited back in early December to do his year end show. He
brought back his best guests. And I reached out to John, and I'd worked with him a fair amount, so we had a relationship, and I explained to him that the Smarts had that there was a development that they wanted to talk to him about and get his objective counsel, that they needed him to know. I needed him to remove his journalist's hat and to be you know, to
keep things completely confidential. And he agreed, and so we went and did the show and afterwards talked to John and John nearly jumped out of his seat when he heard the development that Mary Catherine had remembered and said, you guys need to come forward with this, that this is one of the most important developments in the case.
And he de cided probably a dozen other cases that had been solved where there had been mistakes by the police department that America's most wanted had become involved in. And we were always careful well, not to give new developments exclusively to any one media organization. And I talked to John about that and I said, we'll give you some preferential treatment, but we want to do a press conference in early January to announce this. You know, if you want to put together a package before that, we
can work on something like that. And John said, let's talk after the first of.
The year and what happens on Larry King Live again. Larry King Live has devoted incredible amount of time and I'm resources, but focus on the Elizabeth Smart case. What happens with John Walsh the information that you thought was confidential.
Yeah, So on the twenty third of December, and then to back up a little bit, the Christmas holiday was incredibly difficult for the Smart family. They could not fathom going through Christmas without their daughter and it was a very somber time for them. And I had largely said let me, I'll handle you know, whatever's happening, Just take care of your family, don't worry about it. I'll let you know of something big rises. Well, on the twenty third of December, I get a call from Tom Smart.
I wasn't watching, but John Walsh was on Larry King Live, and he had just leaked everything about Mary Catherine's epiphany. So the story came out on Larry King Live. Luckily, because of the holidays, I didn't receive any calls until the next day, about ten o'clock the next morning, and then the floodgates opened and I spent Christmas Eve on my front lawn doing interviews. And the way we handled that was we said that there was credibility to what John was saying, and at the same time, the family
wasn't ready to make that announcement. They would do that early in the new year. Law enforcement immediately discredited what John was saying. They said he was doing it to promote his own TV show, that they had investigated this guy, that there was nothing to it, and that you know, he was just blowing hot air.
How does the other the rest of the media respond to this? Even though it's on Larry King Live.
Locally, it gets a little national. Locally, it gets quite a bit of attention. It does get coverage and they give it's pretty balanced. It gets both sides. It gives the side of what John saying, that it's my quote saying that there's credibility to it, and then the police saying there's no credibility to it.
So you say, it's a bitter pill to swallow for you with this betrayal by John Walsh. But still the fact remains that you want to have this information that Mary Catherine has brought forward in terms of the sketch and description. So how do you get this to happen? What happens in terms of your decision to what to do next.
So yeah, I was very disappointed that that came out from John. You know, ed shared my frustration. At the same time, John had been such an ally to the family. It was hard to be mad out of me such an incredibly nice guy. In hindsight later on, there's members of the board, kind of the extended family who believe that John not leaked that information. It's possible that the Smarts might not have come forward with it. There were
a number of things that occurred. Law enforcement as the Smarts were getting closer to defile them continued to put more pressure on. They pulled Ed and Lewis and me into a meeting one day and said, look, well we want to reason with you. We found bullet casings in Richard Reese's cheap, and we're relatively confident that he took Elizabeth out to the desert, he shot her. He's buried
or somewhere. We may never find her. We're doing our best, but we want to level with you and if you guys come forward with this information, it's gonna it's going to cause all kinds of issues, and it potentially could embarrass and Mary Catherine, and we want to protect her. And so they were making this case and it kept delaying things, and finally Ed Smart decided I'm coming out
with it. We're doing it, and on February fifth, we called a press conference, and in the press conference, we offered a ten thousand dollars reward for anyone who could exonerate Richard Reesi and then released a sketch of this man, Emmanuel, who had worked on the house. For one day, local media covered it ed and I jumped on a plane
and went to New York. I had lined up interviews with the morning shows, and that next morning all of the shows canceled and it was odd, and so I called a source with one of the networks and asked him what was going on, and he said the police department had made it very clear to the media that they should be careful on this one, that I had concocted the story to try to get Elizabeth back in the news, and that they had investigated this guy and found nothing that led them to believe that he was
any more prominent a suspect than anybody else. And so the national media completely panned the story. Locally, the story was about the reward, not the fact that there was, you know, the King Mary Catherine who remembered this guy that was potentially involved in the abduction, and so it was it was really ignored, and at that point, you John, who had been the goat for a little while, came
out as the hero. He was the only one who really took the story seriously and did significant feature on America's Most Wanted, which led to Brian David Mitchell's family stepping forward and saying, this is his name, and he's capable of this, and we need to find him. And there were two other stories in the next two weeks on America's Most Wanted before Elizabeth was recognized by America's Most Wanted viewers and was rescued.
It's incredible you described a person that you were playing basketball. One of your favorite hobbies growing up. And still imagine you talk about Adjason Burnett, somebody who played high school basketball with you, gave him acall he wasn't answering tell us about this very dramatic scene that you read about.
Yeah, So that day, on March twelfth, kind of a difficult start to the day, Tom Smart had blasted law enforcement to the Salt Lake Tribune.
And over the.
Prior nine and a half months, we've been so majored and so disciplined in how we talked about law enforcement to not be overtly critical of them. We recognized that they were still the families, one of the family's best tools for finding Elizabeth, and also recognized that getting into shouting match with law enforcement was only going to create conflict in drama and it wasn't going to of any
good purpose. But Tom finally defiled that, and nine and a half months of frustration came out in the Salt Lake Tribune publishes a front page story about the family finally criticizing law enforcement, which creates all kinds of national attention.
The New York Times, USA Today, NBC News, everybody wants to talk now, all of a sudden, despite the fact that a few weeks earlier they had no interest in this development, and so we had planned a press briefing for that afternoon and Tom Smart and that Smart and I were getting together to determine how best to navigate that situation. And a few minutes before the meeting, Ed called me and told me that he had been summoned to the Sandy City Police Department, Sandy being a suburb
ten miles to the south of Salt Lake. He was told not to stop, not to talk to anyone, not even Lois. He felt like he needed to call me because he was going to be late to the meeting, he might even miss the meeting, and I told him to, you know, let me know when you know something. But as you mentioned, my good friend Jay and Burnette, my basketball teammate, threw me the assist of a lifetime when I called him and he finally picked up, and he told me that the police department had brought in an
indigent teenager that they believed was Elizabeth Smart. And I paused and tried to keep my composure. I was crying and said to Jason, where did they find the body? And he said, what body? She's in the room next to me, and it was the most unbelievable news I
had ever heard. We know the end of that story, but in that moment, it was surreal, and I was able to get a hold of ed Smart and then we had a resolution plan, and Tom and I started calling down to the other members of the extended family and the board and giving them instructions on what to do. And it was about forty five minutes later that the story finally hit the news. But it was the assist of a lifetime.
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Now you chronicle the credit moments. Again. We already mentioned at the beginning of this interview when you first laid eyes on her at that police station in the shabbily dressed and much different after a few days of nutrition and proper sleep and rest. But you also did see her less than twelve hours later at the home and then which began this extraordinary relationship that still exists today.
You've been in an employee of the Smart family. You talk about the White House meeting in the rose Garden, but let's talk about the national Amber Alert, one of the main things that was always focus of the family and also yourself.
Yeah, the Amber alert was a godsend and it really you know, a lot of people recognize Elizabeth and the amazing work she does in taking something that's so tragic and using it as a catalyst to help other people and to be a force for good. And her father
really started that with the Amber Alert. He was at a point where he was restless, the media attention was waning, and I reached out to Utah's congressional delegation and Senator Orn Hatch's office suggested that we get involved with lobbying for the Amber Alert, and Ed it was a perfect fit. He was as passionate about it as anyone could be.
We lobbied on Capitol Hill, we did countless interviews, and the nice thing about it was it gave us an opportunity every time we talked about it to also talk about Elizabeth and to keep her story alive, but in the process to do something very positive. And shortly after Elizabeth was rescued, Ed really put the heat on, and Elizabeth even wrote a letter to Congress, and a few
weeks later, the National Lumber Alert was passed. And it's something that has stood as kind of a hallmark of that case that it's been something that's now universal and has helped bring so many kids safely home and you've.
Worked and Elizabeth asked you to be involved with her, and again just tell us what this role was with this much different project than the rescue and search for Elizabeth.
So years later I worked with Elizabeth during the trial. It was about a decade later that her abductors were put on trial and then sentenced, and we looked at how do we take this opportunity where there was a lot of attention and use that to put out a message about other survivors and other victims of child abduction and sexual abuse, and worked with something that Elizabeth is
such a shy and modest person. She didn't want it to be about her, and so this gave her something else of substance to talk about and she's like, I want to do this. Can I do more of this? And it's you know, you have a tremendous opportunity to be an advocate, And so we started working together and
figuring out and she had a lot of opportunities. A lot of people played a role in this, but really figured out how to position her in the best way possible so that she could make a difference and be a voice for the voiceless.
You write in the introduction that members of the church. If I don't have this incorrect. There's a reason why you took so long to be able to write this book, and there's a reason why it is so important to include your upbringing and the lessons that you learned by growing up in the culture of the Latter day Saints church. Tell us a little bit about these connections and the relations to this story and your upbringing.
Sure, so I worked as I was writing the book, I was part of a group of writers from around the country who had no connections to Utah and no connections to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. And as I was reviewing some initial material, they really pushed me and my culture to me is passe, and they kept saying, well, wait, what is this and explain that we're not interested from a religious standpoint, but we're really interested in your culture, and your culture really plays
an important role in this story. And so they pushed me a lot. And we're a great sounding board as somebody on the outside that helped talk about about that culture. But I grew up in a culture that's very well organized, that that's very disciplined, you know, in the you know, the Mormon Church is the common term gone away from it.
In the church.
You know, even from the age of three or four years old, you start speaking to the to the group, so you're grown up. You grow up as a communicator, you grow up doing a lot of service, and you know, many people choose to serve a full time two year mission, which I had the opportunity to do at the age of nineteen, and there were many experiences through that that prepared me for the opportunity to work with the Smarts
and then with the Smarts, I mean. Some interesting elements of that culture as well is that you know, each congregation is geographical, so if you live in a certain area, you go to church with the same people in that area at the same time each week. And it creates, especially in Utah, it almost creates these small towns within a small town where everybody knows each other, everybody looks out for each other, and when there are needs and challenges,
you know, the village really comes together to help. And that was a big part of the reason that the search for Elizabeth was organized so quickly and so efficiently. There were some outside groups that came in to help with that as well. But the culture itself, and there are many people who aren't in the church that are a part of this culture as well that really lent to that search effort and lent to providing the providing to the needs of the family during that time.
Yeah, it's very it's fascinating to see the immediate response and the level of organization in this church that rallied around this family is extraordinary, and I have not read of anything of the sort in comparison.
And the interesting thing is, you know, the Smarts lived in an area where people were more affluent, but this same structure is exists throughout the world. Had some friends who had an issue while they were on vacation in Hawaii and had some extenuating circumstances, and they were able to get a hold of the bishop, the leader of the local ward, and then they were able to come
to their aid. And so there really is an amazing tradition that goes back to the early days of the Church of people serving one another and really being there in times of need. And this was just a prime example of that.
You also don't go into too much, but I think it is very important that you and you do stress this that despite what Brian David Mitchell contended in say interviews and what the media interpreted and conveys in their reports some form of connection, sort of an extremist religious connection that Mitchell had with the Latter day Saints of the Church. So you talk about polygamy and that issue and dispel any kind of the notions that people might have.
And that's the stereotype of my religion, polygamy, which was something that was outlawed in the eighteen hundreds. There are fundamentallyst groups that are not tied to the Church, that are very much around the fringe that practice polygamy. And I write in the book that I was asked one as a child in Missouri, a gift shop cashier asked me how many wives my parents had, And I'd never seen a polygamist growing up. I have since then, but
I growing up, I'd never seen one. Yeah, But there are all these stories, there are lots of Netflix docuseries, there's books, there's other things written about these splinter groups well outside of the Church and a small fraction of them that there's these extremists, the herbal Leverons, the Warren Jeffs, the Brian David Mitchell's that use religion as a leverage to get what they want. Elizabeth in her book said that Brian David Mitchell didn't care about religion. All he
cared about was sex and alcohol in that order. And so it's something that is misportrayed a lot specific to the current Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, and so it was something that I did want to
address and just fell a little bit. Not that there aren't issues in places, and not that there aren't some issues with these splinter groups, but it's such a small percentage, and it's unfortunate that it taints a group of good, god faring people that are doing amazing things in our community and in society.
We didn't talk about and we didn't talk about this in the beginning, but I think it's important tell us about the genesis of this book, because originally you were writing about your next door neighbor, the damage Warvette, and the relationship that you had and all you learned on that relationship. But tell us how it plays into the genesis of this book unexpected.
I don't want to spoil it, but the last chapter is an experience that happened at a celebration a couple of days after Elizabeth was rescued, and I encounter somebody who just ties everything back. It was as though my experience growing up with Baker Paxton had prepared me for that moment. It was one of the most miraculous moments outside of with rescue and meeting her for the first time.
It brings those two stories together. I've heard from a number of people who've read the book that initially they're like, wait, what is this backstory, Like, I just want to read about the Smart And over time they cooked by it and they all of a sudden are wanting to see where that one goes as well, and then just amaze how they come together in the very end.
And you say that there's the role of the values that you learned growing up in the church. Speak to the kinds of things like forgiveness and understanding, which led to being able to successfully manage the kind of eccentric and at times out of control characters of people like Tom Smart and other people in the media themselves that had their own agendas.
Absolutely, and I think today we have we're just so quick to judge people, and especially people going through extenuating circumstances, and it's often when these people need our help the most that we are the most critical of them. And those experiences growing up helped me to hopefully be a little bit more understanding and charitable and to have a little more patience in those circumstances, because it was you know, if I snapped at the media, that wasn't going to
reflect well on the smart family. And so how do you how do you diplomatically handle that situation? How do you give somebody the benefit of the doubt while still being assertive and looking out for the best interest of your client. And so a lot of those lessons growing up really instilled that in me and prepared me for those experiences, and reflecting on it twenty years later has helped reassure that, I mean, I still struggle with it.
It's not like I'm an expert at it reminds me and all the time in my often I'll meet somebody and in the back of my mind, I'll say, Baker, you know, to remind me that this person is likely very different than how I'm judging them in the story I'm telling myself in the moment.
Yes, absolutely, It's an extraordinary book and I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about unexpected, the backstory of finding Elizabeth Smart and growing up in the culture of an American religion. Chris Thomas, can you tell us if people want to find out more information? Is there a website? Do any do any social media?
Absolutely so, Chris Thomas connects dot com and a really fun element of that, Dan, I think you find this interesting is I went and pulled from about twelve chapters. I pulled the video so Bill O'Reilly interview for example. I have excerpts from that interview video of that interview, so you can actually go back and see that that corresponds with it. I have a number of pictures there. It links to my social media and so trying to make it something that is dynamic and multimedia in function.
So I hope people will enjoy that. And you know, the books available just about everywhere as well as on audible. I voiced the book, so if you're not pared of my voice, you can hear it in nine and a half hours more.
Well, thank you so much. That's great news, and it's great to hear that you're voicing your own audiobook as well. That it's very very interesting and I think very much warranted and also appreciate it. I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about your book Unexpected, the backstory of finding Elizabeth Smart and growing up in the culture of an American religion. Chris Thomas, you have a great evening, and thank you so much for this interview.
You too, Dan, thank you so much.
Good night.