Sister Recounts How She Helped Find Elizabeth Smart

ByABC News
July 21, 2005, 7:51 PM

July 21, 2005 -- -- The only witness to the June 2002 kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart says the path to the missing Utah girl's recovery began with a picture of a muscular woman.

Mary Katherine Smart says several months after her sister disappeared, she was cleaning her room and happened to flip through a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records.

"The page was like ... [a] really muscular lady and like a Harley Davidson person, and I was thinking like who has been to the house, and who was suspicious, or and the name "Emmanuel" came into my head."

Police say Emmanuel turned out to be a Bible-quoting drifter who the Smart family had hired to do some work in 2001. On March 13, 2003, several weeks after Mary Katherine's realization, police found her sister with the man.

Mary Katherine says she doesn't know why she thought of Emmanuel when she was flipping through the book. But her mother says Mary Katherine told her she may have been looking at the book when Emmanuel had been working nearby.

In her first interview about her sister's kidnapping, Mary Katherine Smart described to "Primetime" co-anchor Diane Sawyer what happened the night her sister was kidnapped.

She was 9. Elizabeth was 14. They were asleep in their beds when a man quietly entered through a kitchen window and came up to their room.

"I was sort of awake, and I saw this guy in my room, and I'm like 'Who is he?'" Mary Katherine said.

"I saw him in come over to my side, and then I saw him walk over to Elizabeth and he tapped her, and she's like "What is it?" And I guess she thought it was me."

The man forced Elizabeth to get out of her bed and get shoes. "If I was her I would have like screamed my head off. I don't know how she did it," Mary Katherine said.

She got up to tell her parents, but stopped at her bedroom door because she saw the man forcing her sister down the hall. Terrified, she ran back to bed.

"I thought, you know, be quiet, because if he hears you, he might take you too, and you're the only person who has seen this," Mary Katherine said. "I was, like, shaking."