Dawn of Mantis: True Crime, Mysteries and More · Dawn of Mantis Podcast

DOM Ep369 - KIDNAPPED: Elizabeth Smart REVIEW

March 13, 2026·1 hr 18 min·7 clips

Mary Catherine's memory triggered by a Guinness Book page led to identifying Elizabeth Smart's kidnapper after months of police focus on the wrong suspects.

A documentary review starts with logistics, then almost immediately gets rowdy. Ivan, Joe, Sam, Brian, and Clint ease into a format that sounds part planned, part patched together while everyone is already talking over the edges. Brian is back on mic. Clint comes in as Sam's bowling league partner, which sends the room toward sound effects before the case setup can stay straight for long. The loose mood helps, strangely enough, because the review keeps landing on details where the documentary, the investigation, and the panel's own guesses scrape against each other. One suspect gets most of the attention. The panel asks whether people stopped searching the woods and trail because he had become the prime suspect and had a car. Mary Catherine's voice recognition makes the whole thing harder. Her saying the voice was not his is a major point in his favor, but nobody treats it like the case is suddenly clean. Then the chairs come up. While he was in custody, chairs showed up at the cousin's house near a window, and the panel cannot quite get past how strange that sounds as an attempted abduction detail. The timing is what bothers them. If he was locked up, the simple version of the accusation starts wobbling. Then his death shifts the tone. They call him lucky at first, then catch themselves after remembering he died in custody from a stroke or aneurysm. That correction hangs there. They wonder if the pressure of the accusation helped push him there, while still admitting his history made suspicion easier to stick to him. The interrogation scenes bother them too. Questions about what he would do if a sleeping girl woke up strike the panel as leading, creepy, and brutal for an innocent person to answer cleanly. Nobody walks out with a tidy verdict. By the end, the group seems more sold on the format than expected, with Brian's 15 pages of notes keeping the chaos mostly on the road.

As heard by us

A scrappy documentary review that stays close to the case and its strangest turns.

Dawn of Mantis reads like a loose true-crime documentary review, with Ivan, Joe, Sam, Brian, and Clint trading reactions as they move through the case. It works best when the panel stays in that conversational lane.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a messy, funny, skeptical documentary-review episode with Ivan, Joe, Sam, Brian, and Clint.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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