SALT LAKE CITY — Once an accomplished organ player in Salt Lake City, Wanda Barzee became a disturbing figure for members of her own family after she helped in the 2002 kidnapping of then-teenager Elizabeth Smart.
Days before the 72-year-old woman is released from prison, looming fears about whether she remains a threat and calls to keep her off the streets bring up deep-rooted questions about mental-health treatment in the nation’s prisons, an expert said.
And details of the crime still horrify Barzee’s niece, Tina Mace.
“It just makes you ill. How could anyone do that?” she said.
Her aunt played the organ at her wedding decades ago, before Barzee joined Mitchell as he acted on his so-called revelations from God.
Like Smart, Mace is alarmed by the surprise announcement this week by Utah authorities, who said they had miscalculated her aunt’s sentence and would release her from prison on Sept. 19.
“From what I know, no family can take her in or would take her in,” Mace said.
Federal agents have found a place for Barzee to live when she starts her five-year supervised release, said Eric Anderson, the deputy chief U.S. Probation Officer for Utah.
He declined comment on whether she will be in a private home or a facility, but she “will not be homeless,” he said.
Barzee has served the 15-year sentence she got in a plea deal the year she testified against street preacher Brian David Mitchell, her then-husband who kidnapped the girl from her bedroom at knifepoint.
During her months in captivity, Smart said the older woman sat nearby and encouraged her husband as he raped the teenager.
Smart is now a 30-year-old speaker and activist who said Thursday she’s deeply concerned that Barzee remains a threat, citing her refusal to cooperate with mental-health treatment in prison and reports that she may still harbor Mitchell’s beliefs.
Smart called for authorities to consider carefully whether inmates have been successfully treated before they are released.
But large-scale changes requiring rehabilitation could pose troubling questions, said Rebecca Weiss, an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
“We could be incarcerating someone indefinitely who has served their sentence,” she said.
