Just minutes after Elizabeth Smart, 14, was snatched from her bedroom in the dead of night, a police car idled by along a neighbourhood street as she was forced to the ground at knifepoint.

Kidnapped teenager Elizabeth Smart, trapped in the hills above her anguished family’s home for the first two months of her disappearance, may have been kept from escaping or crying out for help by the growing influence of her captors, police said.

A 15-YEAR-OLD girl kidnapped at gunpoint from her bedroom nine months ago has been dramatically reunited with her parents in Utah.

A 15-year-old American girl who vanished from her bedroom nine months ago was found alive walking down a street with a drifter who had once done work at the family’s home.