Miraculous return of 'brainwashed' missing girl

The case began as a startling abduction: a 14-year-old girl, seized at gunpoint from her bedroom last summer with her terrified younger sister looking on from the other side of the room. But the start of Elizabeth Smart's story is only half as strange as its conclusion.

Nine months after she vanished without a trace, and with most of the world resigned to the likelihood that she had been murdered, the Salt Lake City teenager – blond and pretty in the all-American style – has turned up alive, and apparently healthy, a few miles from her family home.

She was found in the company of a married couple, drifters who professed to have a direct line of communication to the Almighty, as all three ambled up a commercial street in the suburban town of Sandy. All were wearing wigs and carrying bags and rolled-up bedding. Elizabeth, now 15, was wearing some kind of veil over her face. When police asked for her name, she initially refused to answer.

Elizabeth's family, friends and neighbours hailed her return as a miracle yesterday, tears of joy and relief rolling down their faces as they faced the curious hordes of the American media. "Thank God. Thank God," her uncle, Tom Smart, repeated in front of the cameras.

The drifter couple, Brian Mitchell and Wanda Barzee, were arrested and taken to the Salt Lake County jail on a kidnapping warrant, and the public prosecutor's office said it intended to see them punished to the full extent of the law.

But there were as many questions as answers yesterday. Why, in nine months of captivity, had Elizabeth never shouted for help or attempted to run? Were drugs involved? Was this a straightforward kidnapping, as the police assert, or something else? While child abduction experts said her case appeared to be almost unprecedented, her father, Ed Smart, went on the morning television shows and said he still did not know many of the details of what had happened.

"Physically she's OK," he said. "I know that she's been through brainwashing. For her to have gone through the past nine months has just been horrible, absolutely horrible."

Initial reports suggested Elizabeth had spent time in San Diego, in southern California, and had also lived for several months in a flat only one block from the Salt Lake City police headquarters.

Brian Mitchell, who cultivated a biblical image with his flowing beard and staff and liked to call himself Emmanuel, first came across the Smarts when he asked Lois, Elizabeth's mother, for money on the streets of Salt Lake City. Lois subsequently paid him to rake leaves and fix the roof of the Smart home.

His wife, Wanda, meanwhile, was said by her grown-up children to have cultivated an obsession with babies and young girls ever since her own daughter – the fruit of a previous marriage – left her at the age of 14 to live with her father. According to her son, Mark Thompson, she would wander around with dolls and pretend they were real. Last year, she was thrown out of a Utah hospital for "touching other people's kids".

Her daughter, Louree Gaylor, told reporters that Elizabeth was not unlike her at the age of 15. She also described her stepfather as something of a freak. "He shot a dog in front of us, made me eat my own rabbit for dinner, things like that," she said. Mr Mitchell was also capable of inappropriate hugging and kissing, she added.

Mark's brother, Derrick Thompson, suggested that the couple had started taking LSD about 10 years ago. "They said they weren't on drugs, but we think that was a lie," he told a television reporter. "We think that's how he could communicate with God. That and listen to the Steve Miller Band."

For months, the police focused their investigation on another handyman who had worked for the Smarts, Richard Ricci. He refused to account for his movements in the days after the abduction, and died of a brain haemorrhage in jail after he was arrested on suspicion of burglary.

The Smarts became increasingly convinced that he was not involved. Nine-year-old Mary Katherine, who lay in silence pretending to be asleep as the abduction took place, gave a physical description of the kidnapper that did not match Ricci but seemed closer to the man the family knew as Emmanuel. Not until last month did the police circulated a sketch of Emmanuel, based on Mary Katherine's descriptions.

That, in turn, was publicised on the television show America's Most Wanted and prompted two Sandy residents to call the police when they believed they recognised Emmanuel as one of the threesome walking down the street on Wednesday afternoon.

As soon as the news of Elizabeth's recovery broke, cars started honking their horns in her neighbourhood. Crowds gathered in Sandy and left balloons and flowers. "Welcome home, Elizabeth. We love you," one sign put up by a local business owner read. Another said simply: "Thank you God."