SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - A woman serving prison time in the 2002 kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart from her bedroom was moved Thursday to a Utah jail.
Wanda Barzee, 70, was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail just after midnight after being transferred from another jail in Texas, Lt. Justin Hoyal with the Unified Police Department said.
Barzee pleaded guilty in 2009 to helping the self-styled prophet Brian David Mitchell kidnap the 14-year-old girl and hold her for nine months before she was found and rescued.
Barzee was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison with credit for time served. She served her sentence in a Texas prison that offers women’s medical and psychiatric services. Having completed that term, she was brought back to Utah to finish a one to 15 year sentence on a state kidnapping charge, according to Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill.
Gill said Barzee served some of that time concurrently with her federal prison sentence.
Barzee will be moved on Friday from the county jail to the state prison, where she will be behind bars at least until a June 2018 parole hearing, Gill said.
Her lawyer, Scott Williams, said in an email Thursday that he would offer details when he knew more about his client’s status.
Mitchell, Barzee’s estranged husband, is serving two life terms in an Arizona federal prison.
Smart was 14 when she kidnapped at knifepoint from her Salt Lake City bedroom in 2002. She was held for nine months and was repeatedly sexually assaulted and threatened with death. Her kidnappers took her to California but later returned to Utah, where the girl was found and rescued.
Smart has since started the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to protect children and educate them about violent and sexual crimes.
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