Mother happy Wanda Barzee is back

In the latest chapter in one of the most bizarre kidnapping cases ever recorded, the government got a guilty plea out of one of the kidnappers while at the same time rescuing that same person from being kidnapped.

This week in federal court Wanda Barzee pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting in the kidnapping of then 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002.

The person she aided and abetted was Brian David Mitchell, her husband, who remains locked up in the same state mental hospital that Wanda, thanks to the help of her prosecutors, is now in the process of escaping.

For decades, Wanda was held captive — by mental illness.

Friends and family have attested that her history with depression, punctuated by wild manipulative mood swings, dates back at least to when she was a young mother in the 1980s, raising six children while embroiled in a violent, combative marriage.

When that one ended in divorce she got into another violent, combative marriage — with Mitchell, a man with his own problems.

Together they charted an unconventional path devoid of medical doctors, psychiatrists and, not incidentally, any of the antidepressant medication Wanda had previously taken.

They embarked on the road never traveled. They shunned society, dressed in robes, changed their names to Immanuel (him) and Hephzibah (her), considered themselves God's chosen, slept on the dirt, ate from Dumpsters, and, on at least two recorded occasions, and no doubt others, jointly proposed to young women to join them and become Mitchell's second wife.

According to Mitchell's own writings, everyone was out of step but him and his wife.

Either they were crazy, or we were.

When the young women said no to their marriage proposals they turned to kidnapping and rape.

When nine months later they were caught red-handed, literally clutching onto a thoroughly traumatized Elizabeth Smart, their rooms at the mental hospital were secured.

That might have been that for Wanda if the courts hadn't allowed the hospital to give her forced medication for her mental illness. In May 2008, five years after being found with Elizabeth, that medicating began.

Ever so slowly, she began seeing things through eyes she hadn't used in decades.

"The forced medication changed her," says Wanda's mother, Dora Corbett. "I'm so grateful, so very grateful that she's competent again and knows who she is and what she needs to do."

On Tuesday, 64-year-old Wanda pleaded guilty to kidnapping and publicly apologized for her actions. She was sentenced to 15 years in prison, with time at the mental hospital counting toward the 15.

Seeing her daughter headed off to do jail time for nine years, her mother is beside herself with joy.

Compared to where she's been, prison isn't a sentence, it's liberation.