Complex picture of pair emerges

The man who would rename himself Emmanuel stands in the back row — a slight, dark-haired man, wearing a dark suit, exactly like the other men posing for the picture of the LDS stake high council. It is the early 1990s.

Searching his face now, 10 years and a world-famous kidnapping later, it is impossible to see in the Salt Lake County Jail booking photo of Brian David Mitchell any indication of a man on the verge of slipping into fanaticism and beyond.

Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Ilene Barzee, are jailed for investigation of aggravated kidnapping in the abduction of Elizabeth Smart, who was found Wednesday walking with the couple on a State Street in Sandy.

But the picture that is now emerging of Mitchell — as the nation's media try to unravel the history and the motivations of the ragtag, self-proclaimed preacher to the homeless — is one of a complex man, characterized as both gentle and explosive, boy-next-door and eccentric.

The pictures of Mitchell include a skinny little boy in Miss Larson's fourth-grade classroom at Canyon Rim Elementary, where former classmate Sharon McGough remembers a "mean-spirited, very difficult child" who once threw rocks at her on the playground.

"He was kind of a loner," McGough remembers. "He couldn't really play in groups. He was out in the hall a lot because he was disruptive," refusing to participate in class activities. "I remember him always being odd man out. I don't remember him having friends."

"There are certain kids that evoke memories," says another former classmate. "He was one of those boys who had 'cooties,' one of those boys who was just odd." It pains her now to remember the way he was rejected, she says.

Even back then, she says, "his eyes were kind of haunting."

McGough remembers that Mitchell's father left the family and that his mother, Irene, "had a timid, deer-in-the-headlights look. She couldn't handle those boys at all." Mitchell is the third of six children.

Mitchell went on to Wasatch Junior High and then to Skyline High, where his 10th-grade yearbook, in 1969, lists him as one of the handful of sophomores not to have a photo taken. According to Granite School District records, Mitchell transferred to East High School, but the Salt Lake School District has no record of him except a 3-by-5 registration card. He is not pictured in subsequent East High yearbooks, and there are no further records of his attendance there or at Skyline.