Elizabeth Smart detective reveals silly typo that stopped her being found ‘months sooner’

A detective on the Elizabeth Smart case has revealed one silly typo in police records that stopped the missing teen from being rescued sooner, and it was completely missed out of the documentary.

Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart has shot right to number one on Netflix, a 90-minute documentary film that follows one of America’s biggest ever abduction cases.

Smart was abducted from her bedroom on 5th June 2002 when she was just 14 years old by a street preacher called Brian David Mitchell, who went by the name Emmanuel. She was held hostage and sexually abused for nine months, but she could have been resuced “months earlier” if it wasn’t for one silly mistake.

Salt Lake City Police Department’s Detective Cory Lyman. Credit: Netflix

In 2006, Cory Lyman, the former lead investigator on the case, told ABC News that the kidnapper’s name was spelt wrong when he was arrested for shoplifting in Salt Lake City. He told police his name was Emmanuel, but police spelt the name incorrectly as “Immanuel”.

At this point, the police hadn’t released the sketch of Mitchell, but when they eventually did, his name didn’t pop up on the database due to the spelling error.

“Putting ‘I’ on the front instead of ‘E’… it didn’t show up,” Lyman said. “Detectives would have picked him up on probably that first or second day [after first learning about him].

“I struggle with that. I go over that in my head, as does everybody else in the task force [in the investigation],” he said. “What could we have picked up on? What did we miss? What did we do wrong? What should we have thought out better? Those kind of questions.”

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Credit: Netflix

Lyman wishes they’d chosen to go public earlier. “We didn’t think it would be so difficult to find this guy,” he said.

“Logically, this guy has no resources. He had no car, no home, no nothing. Logically, he doesn’t have the means to carry this out as a kidnap. If he did it, then we likely had a homicide.”

Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart is available on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news and drops, like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

Featured image by: Netflix