He endured eye-rolls from most everyone else on the task force as he continually pursued other leads, worked with the extended Smart family when relations with police became strained, and kept the case alive. More germane was the fact that by then Ricci was back in prison.Ī month later, when Ricci died, Fennerty refused to bury the case with him. The break-in attempt had two eerie earmarks to the successful break-in seven weeks earlier at Elizabeth's house - a chair propped up underneath the window and a cut screen - that led Fennerty to canvas the neighborhood with agents despite the fact the sheriff's office dismissed the episode as a prank. His intuition that Ricci wasn't their man was heightened when a botched break-in occurred later in the summer at the home of Elizabeth's cousin, Jessica Wright. Troubled by a lack of tangible evidence, Fennerty never did buy into the prevailing notion that the perp was Richard Ricci, the onetime Smart handyman and ex-con who quickly became the police's most prominent person of interest. As local coordinator of the FBI Crimes Against Children unit, he immediately called in a team of child abduction experts from Washington, D.C., to produce a profile of the perp. He was the first federal officer to arrive at the scene that first morning, at the behest of local law enforcement officials in charge. ![]() Since graduating from the FBI Academy at Quantico in early 1997, he'd been on the job 5½ years at the time of the kidnapping. A native of Astoria, Ore., Fennerty's first posting as an FBI special agent was in Salt Lake City. He was there on Day One, June 5, 2002, when police tape went up around the home on Kristianna Circle and the manhunt began for the 14-year-old girl taken from her bed in the middle of the night. ![]() It's a story of a lawman trusting his instincts and doing his job so well and for all the right reasons, with no focus on public acclaim or, for that matter, peer acceptance, that eight years later his critical involvement remains more footnote than front and center knowledge. He's the guy Brad Pitt plays in the movie.įennerty was omnipresent in the Smart investigation - well, until right there at the end when they kicked him off for solving it. In the end, he was miles from the news cameras, the microphones and the klieg lights, working yet another case in yet another jurisdiction, out of sight, unavailable for comment - appropriately enough.įBI agent Mick Fennerty was never visible in the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case - not during the nine months Elizabeth was missing, not during her rescue and definitely not during the trial that concluded Friday with a guilty verdict against Brian David Mitchell, the man who took her.Įven though he was always at its epicenter.
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