Chronicles of Halloween II

Cemeteries and Meetinghouses

There are no shortage of tales of ritual abuse in the state of Utah. Utah produces a per capita surplus of strip malls, unprosecuted and uninvestigated sexual assaults, enormous high schools that could pass as community colleges, and McMansions amidst cookie cutter townhomes. It is a state that is at once breathtaking for its natural beauty and the banality of its suburbs. In Utah, the older something is, the more likely it will be aesthetically pleasing.

To wit, I found myself in the Avenues of Salt Lake City once again tonight, camping out with a thermal camera and a DSLR, waiting for the inevitable revelry of idiots. I was not disappointed. At first, I noticed the abundance of cars in the parking lot and along the street of a meetinghouse across the street from the Salt Lake Cemetery. The cemetery itself is a hodgepodge of burial grounds for the Jews, the Catholics, and the Latter Day Saints. It’s a lovely place in the daytime, peaceful and quiet.

The dead lie in their slumber, away from the bustle of highways and interstates and strip malls. This is old Salt Lake, where homes are not framed with matchsticks and cheap siding. These homes are made of stone and brick, and face no real threat from the elements or time. They were made to withstand both, and to look beautiful in the process.

Earlier today, I came to the conclusion that Caleb Proulx, attorney for Joseph and Lee Bennion, is an utter incompetent. He has danced around discovery requirements for well beyond the 28 day limit, citing my failure to make initial disclosures-there were none. Every witness I might call in my stalking case was listed in the Bennion’s disclosures, but I humored him by filing initial disclosures that mirrored his own by listing the same witnesses. He didn’t respond.

What is worse, when confronted about the issue, he stated that my initial disclosures didn’t meet the standard of Rule 26.1. To be fair, neither did his initial disclosures, which cite Rule 26.1, which reads as follows: (a) Scope. This rule applies to the following domestic relations actions: divorce; temporary separation; separate maintenance; parentage; custody; child support; and modification. This rule does not apply to adoptions, enforcement of prior orders, cohabitant abuse protective orders, child protective orders, civil stalking injunctions, or grandparent visitation.

I had humored the Bennion’s discovery requests in order to obtain discovery from them, but the fishing expedition they attempted went well beyond any matters pertinent to the civil stalking injunction. As such, I objected on the grounds of relevance, and also under Rule 509 of the Rules of Evidence, which shields news reporters from any requirement to reveal confidential sources or confidential source information unless the opposing party demonstrates by clear and convincing evidence that disclosure is necessary to prevent substantial injury or death.

Clearly, the Bennions cannot demonstrate that disclosure of sources is necessary to prevent substantial injury or death, but my sources could likely demonstrate the risk of substantial injury or death, given the reality that the Bennions are allegedly rapists, murderers, and sexual sadists who have terrorized adults and children for decades. In all likelihood, there is no requirement for discovery under the Rules of Civil Procedure with respect to a civil stalking injunction; Caleb Proulx simply sought to mount a fishing expedition by misstating the rules and the law.

It is consistent with what he has done over much of his career. In 2012, Proulx petitioned the Utah Supreme Court to issue an extraordinary writ compelling the Salt Lake Recorder to place an initiative on the November 2012 ballot. The Supreme Court denied his petition, and proceeded to demolish each of the five arguments he offered in support of his position. First, Proulx sought to place a popular initiative on the ballot that would not constitute binding law, despite the fact that every prior precedent made it clear that the purpose of initiatives was to initiate legislation, which was understood to be “the process of making or enacting a positive law.”

Proulx quoted various court cases in support of his position that a non-binding popular initiative could be placed on the ballot, but the Court found that he either misunderstood the case law or was misrepresenting it. The Court then cited a case that found that “purely advisory statements were inappropriate subjects for [statewide] initiative[s].” White v. Welling directly rebutted Proulx’s position, which he would have realized had he the capacity to do comprehensive legal research and understand what he was researching.

It is clear that he lacks in both areas. That is why he lost. It’s why he continues to file spurious petitions, spurious discovery requests, and misstate the stalking statute as well as the Rules of Civil Procedure and the Rules of Evidence. Caleb Proulx is a moron scraping by doing contract work for juvenile defendants, seemingly having exhausted his options to work as a private attorney for clients who are not related to him or who are not assigned to him on rotation as indigent minor defendants.

Worse still, Caleb Proulx managed to convince a judge to issue a stalking injunction without citing so much as a single instance of any direct or indirect communication with either of his clients. I have never spoken to the Bennions, nor have I enlisted anyone else to speak to them or interact with them. I cannot find a single case involving a stalking injunction against a respondent who never met, interacted with, or had any physical contact, direct or indirect, with the person or persons they supposedly stalked. I wrote about the allegations against the Bennions, and I ridiculed them for being geriatrics who paraded around Spring City in robes and masks chanting satanic mumbo jumbo while allegedly raping and murdering people.

Joe Bennion had a fancy nickname: the Punisher. Anyone who has met Joe Bennion, or watched the various YouTube videos he appears in, has trouble with the idea that Joe Bennion could punish anything or anyone. He’s a man who is small in stature, physically unimposing and thoroughly unintimidating. He is a man who has been the butt end of the joke for much of his life, milking cows for minimum wage during the early days of his life in Spring City as an aspiring artist. He is related to Church presidents and apostles, but he is himself thoroughly mediocre.

He made kitschy pottery until he opted to leave commercialism behind in order to make plain bread bakers with a Y imprinted on the clay. There’s nothing particularly distinctive about Bennion’s work other than the fact that it is generic. His wife is a painter, and like other painters within her group, she paints self portraits where her neck is comically elongated with a chin that juts out. There are sunflowers and daisies, butterflies and dogs and horses interspersed amongst her portraiture, and landscapes that inevitably lapse into black mountains and landmarks that absolve her of the burden of painting anything other than a black shape vaguely resembling a landform.

She’s not as awful as her protege Brian Kershisnik, whose art resembles something a child might scrawl out, but she is not good. There are a few moments when Lee’s art approximates something beyond distortion of subject, where biceps and forearms are distinct and hands and necks are not jarringly disproportionate. There is nothing original about Lee Bennion’s art; it is self-focused, often staggering in its inability to convey anything other than self-obsession with her own form and likeness.

She paints herself, and badly. She manages to eke out a living selling her wares for a few thousand dollars here and there to the Latter Day Saints who patronize the starving artists among their own ranks, but her husband and his pottery and her soap and skincare products-allegedly consecrated to Satan and purportedly blended with the ashes of murder victims-provide the bulk of their income, which is to say very little, because if there were more income, the Bennions wouldn’t be relying on their son-in-law to ineptly pursue a stalking case. They’d be able to afford a competent attorney who didn’t misstate the law and the rules of procedure and evidence.

The members of the LDS Church of Satan are dullards. There is Gordon Bowen, who never had an original idea of his own, opting instead to steal from his subordinates in the advertising business. Bowen excels at selling the ideas of others and lying about his own part in those ideas. David Lee Hamblin is a disgraced former clinical psychologist who now relies on income from healing circles where he preys on vulnerable, traumatized people, plying them with peyote to pry out some pseudo profundity of revelation: they’re gay, they’re abused, they’re this, that, or anything else, and they want to hav sex with him. Hamblin managed to pay one month of child support and alimony, and so his inability to make a living after destroying his own career by having sex with his mentally ill patients is obvious.

Joe and Lee Bennion are artists eking out a living in Spring City among neighbors who revile them. The threat of a lawsuit apparently keeps Joe entrenched in his calling as a greeter at the doors of the First Ward. His wife no longer attends services, having made her principled stand to abstain from attendance in opposition to the Church’s doctrine on abortion, gay marriage, and transgenderism. The Bennions do not believe what their church teaches, but they will not withdraw their membership because they would rather stay on the rolls and undermine the church from within.

Brian Kershishik and his wife Suzanne are now divorced. Suzanne Kershisnik runs a backyard theater troupe for children in Provo, while Brian continues to ply his paintings at various galleries. The art scene for Latter Day Saints is insular, and Brian Kershisnik is big among Saints because he is a Latter Day Saint who paints. He will never be marked outside of the internal world of Saints.

The rest of the LDS Church of Satan membership is as generic and pedestrian as Bowen, Hamblin, Kershisnik, and the Bennions. They are remarkable only for their alleged cruelty, sadism, and deviancy. Their lord lucifer was unremarkable in his time as well, serving only as a foil for those who defeated him at every turn. Every day, billions defeat him anew when they resist the temptation to be horrible, to transcend fallen natures and emulate God over lucifer. There are losers and winners, and the luciferians have hoped for a triumph for as long as the devil has been a concept, and they have hoped in vain. Every individual they murdered or raped or tortured who did not become luciferian in their outlook won the battle and the war.

The Hamblin sisters left the Church, and went on to live their lives and form families of their own. They have defiantly refused to succumb to the temptation to be as pedestrian and banal in evil as their parents and their extended families.

That banality was on full display among the tombstones of the Salt Lake City Cemetery tonight, as teenagers and adults traipsed across my thermal camera in the darkness until the park officers rode down in their truck to drive them out. For the aspiring paragons of darkness seeking to make contact with morbidity, their inflated sense of the supernatural came to a quick end as the F-150 rode down towards 4th Avenue. They ran in their robes and costumes towards the street.

There was something pathetic about the scene. Here were Latter Day Saint children and adults meandering from a meetinghouse to the cemetery, dressed in Halloween costumes as they walked out of the doors into the night to go stand among the dead and do whatever. There in that cemetery, the dead lay, many of them allegedly involved in ritual abuse while they were alive. They were dead and empty and impotent and cold in the ground, no longer significant and no longer able to harm or hurt or terrorize.

Some of them likely died believing that they were immune from the consequences of their cruelty and their sins, having been anointed a second time. Their calling and election were made sure, not by the Atonement, but by some ordinance involving foot washings in a temple outside of normal operating hours. They were gods on earth, but now they are dead and buried and their graves are trod on each Halloween by moronic people in costumes seeking a thrill in the morbid.

The members of the CS managed to convince terrified children that they were powerful beyond measure, connected to a secret establishment that could cover any sin or criminal act. If that is the case, why am I writing this piece? Why have I managed to do this work for two years? Should Caleb Proulx and his clients succeed, what will it matter? I’m still going to write, to investigate, and to expose. As I sat on the Cathedral of the Madeleine and the Masonic Temple and the cemetery, all that I saw was a location where silly and stupid people did evil things in service of a defeated demigod who will never possess the capacity to deliver himself or anyone else from the consequences of their acts.

David Lee Hamblin is ruined. He’s a free man, but he’s a ruined man. No one outside of the mentally ill and hurting desperate people he preys upon looks at him with respect or adulation. That is because he is pathetic.

Gordon Bowen was exposed as a homosexual with a sexual fixation on children years ago. His lord lucifer couldn’t or wouldn’t protect or shield him from exposure.

The Bennions have been rendered pariahs among their community. Regardless of how the Hamblin case ends, they will forever be attached to the allegations of child rape, murder, and satanic activity contained with the Hamblin Victims Statements, and they have only the judgment of God waiting on them. Their defeated impotent devil will not deliver them.

Craig Christensen will forever be known as a man who allowed his brother in laws to sodomize him at family get togethers in front of children, while his wife Susan allegedly had an incestuous sexual relationship with her own brother.

Exposure renders ritual abusers in an accurate light: pathetic perverts with nothing to commend them beyond their exceptional capacity for perversion, cruelty, and sadism. These are pitiful people, and the only reason they exist with impunity is a corrupt system that shields them in order to avoid exposure for other people of a higher social and economic standing who partook of child rape and sexual orgies. Things that are done in darkness come to light, and secret codes and combinations inevitably become public.

These are not intelligent or even apt people. They are idiots existing in an anti-meritocratic system, and that system depends on secrecy to avoid exposure for its kind: the reality is that none of these people are any good at anything. They persist because of their family connections, and because the Church has a vested interest in protecting a false image of certain family bloodlines it believes comprise the elite premortal spirits of the final dispensation. These are not elite people. These are people who are barely ordinary skulking among tombstones and canyons while raving about devils and demons and terrifying children and mentally ill individuals.

Among socially adroit and functioning individuals, these people have no chance of presenting as peers. They are outcasts, and few people like them outside of their own kind, child rapists and sexual sadists. They are tolerated out of politeness or pity or a combination of the two, but they are not respected. They deserve our contempt, because they are contemptible. They do not deserve our fear, or anything approaching respect.

It is understandable that victims are cowed by the sheer suffering these individuals inflict, but the reality is that these individuals inevitably fail to do anything to a victim who comes forward to talk. Once you talk, these dullards lose all power. Once you speak truth into audible existence with respect to these inane individuals and groups, they have no power whatsoever. They may posture and preen with threats of litigation and lawfare, but they ultimately fail to achieve much of anything as long as you tell the truth. It is only when you resort to lying-when you mirror them in deceit-that they maintain or enhance their power.

Serious, intelligent, healthy people do not go traipsing about in costumes among tombstones on Halloween, and they do not sit around in their homes or on their land in robes chanting mumbo-jumbo nonsense while raping and killing others. We mock the devil and his doers, and stand out in the open without hesitation, secure in the knowledge that he and his pitiful legions have no power over us other than that power which is ceded by Almighty God for His purpose and glory. Ultimately, we are but instruments of God, and His glory is our purpose.

The ending has already been written, and we know how the story ends. We should live confidently in that knowledge, certain of victory.