Defense witnesses flesh out Mitchell's earlier life - Salt Lake Tribune

By Stephen Hunt

The Salt Lake Tribune

Published Nov 16, 2010 08:17PM
Updated 30 minutes ago Updated Nov 16, 2010 08:54PM While working with Brian David Mitchell at OC Tanner during the early 1990s, Doug Larsen came to consider his fellow tool and die cutter “close to being a brother.”

“He and I hit it off really well. We had a lot of similar views about the world and religion,” Larsen testified Tuesday for the defense at Mitchell’s trial for allegedly kidnapping Elizabeth Smart.

Several years later, Larsen spotted a transformed, Biblical-looking Mitchell begging for money at Main Street and South Temple — a man who now refused to even acknowledge his former friend.

Larsen, hoping to find out what Mitchell had done over the years, said: “You gave that guy a ‘God bless you’ for fifty cents. Will you give me five minutes of your time for five dollars?”

Mitchell, money in hand, looked at him and said, “The Lord be praised. God bless you.”

Larsen said, “I will pray for you,” and then he started to walk away. Mitchell turned and over his shoulder said, “And I will pray for you.”

Before that, Mitchell had been a clean-cut and “utterly sincere” member of the LDS Church, who often was ridiculed by other workers at the Salt Lake City jewelry company for singing hymns and zealously expressing his religious opinions. But after Mitchell quit in 1994 and became a follower of a naturopathic health concept called lymphology, Larsen said he lost track of him for four years prior to the Main Street encounter.

Prosecutors rested their case in chief Tuesday morning after four days of testimony that laid out the alleged facts of Smart’s kidnapping and her nine months of captivity and sexual abuse at age 14 in the hands of Mitchell, 57, and his wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee, 65.

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The defense » Now, with the start of the defense case, comes what U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball has identified as the real focus of the trial.

Larsen’s testimony — and more to come this week from other defense witnesses who knew Mitchell prior to Smart’s June 2002 abduction — is designed to illustrate Mitchell’s alleged descent into madness.

The defense is asking jurors to find Mitchell not guilty by reason of insanity. They also have the burden of proving he was insane at the time of the alleged crime.

To that end, Mitchell’s father and other family members are slated to testify today about Mitchell’s childhood and teenage years. Barzee, who pleaded guilty to kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor and is serving 15 years in prison, could take the witness stand as early as Thursday. She is being held in the Davis County Jail awaiting her testimony.

The defense’s first witness Tuesday was Dru White, who was an LDS high counselor in 1987 when he met Mitchell and Barzee at a Salt Lake City ward. Mitchell was the bishop’s clerk, Barzee the organist.

White said Mitchell was “quite clean-cut and well-dressed — a normal, conservative young man.”

Mitchell had a reputation as “an active member of the ward, and willing to work and serve,” which earned him a promotion to counselor, White said.

“He seemed eager to do a good job,” recalled White. “He was quiet, but friendly. At meetings he was quite attentive and listening carefully to everything that was going on.”

On the witness stand, Larsen said he was devoted to his religion, but that Mitchell was even more devoted.

They both read the same religious books, both assumed the prophesied Davidic king would arise from the upper leaders of the Mormon Church, and both admired then-LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson as “among the great prophets.”

He and Mitchell also considered most church members to be “largely idolatrous.” He said they often discussed religion at work, and both were viewed by co-workers as “religious fanatic guys.”

Mitchell got into arguments with co-workers over religion because he was “very confident to the point of being dogmatic and inflexible, and he came across as abrasive,” Larsen said. When co-workers became annoyed and called Mitchell “crazy,” he would terminate the discussion by walking away, Larsen said.

But after Mitchell left OC Tanner, Larsen said the man he encountered was not the same Mitchell.

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A changed man » Speaking to reporters outside of court, Larsen said of Mitchell: “The person I knew no longer exists; he’s completely changed.”

“It’s like Brian David Mitchell died,” said Larsen, adding that he attributed the changes to Mitchell’s experimentation with LSD as a teen.

But Larsen added that he didn’t doubt Mitchell knew what he was doing.

“He’s clever, he’s lucid. He was calculating and in control,” Larsen said, pointing out that Mitchell tried to keep from getting caught by police.

Larsen said that while listening to testimony last week from Smart about what she called her “nine months of hell” with Mitchell and Barzee, he recalled that it was similar to a religious, science-fiction fantasy novel he once wrote and allowed Mitchell to read.

He testified that Mitchell objected to a portion of the novel in which a female character “prostitutes herself” to distract some guards and allow other family members to escape.

Mitchell claimed “he didn’t think God would ask a girl to give up her virtue,” Larsen recalled. Yet Smart had testified to a scenario “almost identical to his objections,” Larsen said, referring to Mitchell’s alleged contention that it was God’s will that they “marry.”

Larsen also told an amusing anecdote about Mitchell from his time as an actor in a Creation play, which used to be held on Temple Square, but has now been replaced with a movie.

Mitchell, who played the role of Satan, was taken aside and told, “You are one of the best Lucifers we’ve had, but could you tone it down a little,” Larsen recalled. “He was amused by their concern [that] he played a good devil and he was convincing.”

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More witnesses » Also Tuesday, the defense called two sons of the late C. Samuel West, a lymphologist who employed Mitchell to promote the concept that “bouncing” helps the blood and lymphatic system work together to prevent and to cure disease.

Karl West testified that when he first met Mitchell, he was clean-cut and dressed normally, but later wore robes, earning him the nickname, “The Israelite.”

Mitchell and Barzee lived off-and-on in the basement of the West’s Orem home, and also in a teepee in the backyard, while building a covered handcart, which they later pulled across the country, West said.

West testified that the couple left after having a religious disagreement with his father, possibly over the issue of practicing polygamy. West said the couple was also burning something in the basement of his house, which caused him to accuse the couple of “desecrating” the residence.

When Mitchell and Barzee reappeared in the spring or summer of 2001, West said they stood on the sidewalk in front of the house, yelling and “telling us the house was going to be destroyed.”

“I’d never seen him like that,” West told defense attorney Wendy Lewis. “He was off his rocker.”

Asked if Mitchell appeared mentally ill, West replied: “Yeah, in retrospect.”

But when prosecutor Felice Viti asked if Mitchell and Barzee may have burnt incense in the basement to cover the smell of marijuana, West agreed that after seeing pictures of Mitchell on the news with a beer in his hand, he decided it was marijuana.

“Are you saying he fooled you?” Viti asked.

West replied: “Yeah, definitely.”

shunt@sltrib.com

Pamela Manson and Cimaron Neugebauer contributed to this report.

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