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Author’s Correction: the original article incorrectly identified Wendy Smith as the wife of Bill Carstensen. It has been updated and corrected. Sharon Gay Smith was the wife of Bill Carstensen.
Craig Smith sat across the desk, staring at his coworker Loretta Gale, a producer at Fred A. Moreton and Company. His secretary had busily printed copies of the pages from the newly released book Paperdolls: Healing From Abuse in Mormon Neighborhoods, and Smith had put the pieces together. He had been the stake president of the Mueller Park Stake in Bountiful when Marion Burrows Smith and her husband Nicholas Groesbeck Smith, Jr. had brought their complaints against their son-in-law Bill Carstensen, alleging that Carstensen had molested their granddaughters at the home of Dick and Brenda Miles.
The Smith’s daughter Sharon Gay Smith would divorce Bill Carstensen shortly after the allegations had erupted. The allegations made by the Carstensen children described “touching parties” where children were brought to the Miles’ home, shown pornography, and then filmed while they were sexually abused and forced to sexually abuse each other. Dick and Brenda Miles were the son-in-law and daughter of an apostle, Russell M. Nelson, who went on to become the current president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. According to Marion Burrows Smith, Carstensen had been diagnosed as a pedophile at Johns Hopkins during a six week stay.
His daughters and his son alleged that Carstensen had sexually abused them, and that he had given the girls “marriage lessons” apart from the “touching parties” that Dick and Brenda Miles had recorded with a camcorder. The adults had enlisted “baby tenders,” teenagers within their ward and stake who were trusted to babysit the children of members, to engage in the abuse. Those baby tenders were also sexually abused by the adults in the group.
The children further alleged that the adults forced them to drink Kool-Aid laced with urine and feces, to consume coffee under the guise of compromising the children so that they would not report in order to avoid the wrath of their Heavenly Father for violating the Word of Wisdom. At the time of the allegations, David Hardy, a Utah attorney, received a phone call from his brother Ralph, who was an attorney working out of Washington, D.C. Ralph informed his brother of an incoming fax, which David was to hand-deliver to Russell M. Nelson.
David Hardy did as he was told. Russell M. Nelson showed up in person to the Bountiful ward, and personally squashed any possibility of a High Council against his son-in-law and daughter over the allegations. Years later, Loretta Gale, who knew Marion Burrows Smith personally as both a former therapist and a friend, would sit across from Craig Smith in his office as Smith stared at her. Smith told Gale that she had to stop talking about the book with her coworkers, and Gale replied that she had never spoken to any of her coworkers about any book.
Years before, Craig Smith had been the Stake President of the Bountiful Mueller Park Stake, overseeing the ward where Dick Miles served as a counselor to Bishop Walter Gasser, and where Bill Carstensen was the financial clerk. Smith would serve in that capacity until May 1993. Gasser’s own son told him that an architect in his ward, Brett Bullock, had abused him. When Sharon Smith’s daughter asked her what the difference between her husband’s “marriage lessons” and Brenda and Dick Miles’ touching parties was, Smith confronted her husband. Then she called her mother and then Dr. Barbara Snow of the Intermountain Specialized Abuse Treatment Center (ISAT).
When his children disclosed abuse allegations against him, Bill Carstensen’s response was that he did not remember. He also said that his children did not lie. The allegations against Dick and Brenda Miles did not end with the Carstensen children: another set of the Smith’s grandchildren were alleging that their Uncle Bill Carstensen had abused them during parties at the Miles’ home. Dick Miles had allegedly threatened the children by strangling a kitten, and he told one of the older girls that he would do the same to her younger sibling if she ever told. Brenda Miles had threatened to run over the younger sibling with her car.
The Smiths were in Hawaii with their daughter Wendy and her children, and the children were making allegations that their father had sex with his mother, their Grandmother Lou Ann Logan. There would be at least three other families in the Bountiful Mueller Park Stake whose children would bring allegations against Dick and Brenda Miles, but the Bountiful Police did nothing. They gave the Miles advance notice of a search of their home, where they found no child pornography.
And so it was that Craig L. Smith, Bountiful Mueller Park Stake President, sat across a desk in his office from Loretta Gale, who had been born Loretta Gale Child. Smith knew who the players were on the Smith side of Paperdolls, because the ecclesiastical investigation had been his responsibility. When Bishop Gasser was released from his calling, Dr. Donald Doty had replaced him. Doty was the partner of Russell M. Nelson in Nelson’s cardiothoracic surgery practice. Craig Smith was the nephew of Nicholas Groesbeck Smith, Jr.
Loretta Gale Child was the daughter of Francis David Child and Norma Henny Jensen, the founders and owners of Olympus Insurance Agency. The family had lived at 4229 S Jupiter Dr in Salt Lake City, across the street from the Ned Fuller and his wife June. The Child’s sons, F. David Jr., Todd Dennis, and Bruce Darrell had attended Skyline High School. There, the Childs boys had been friends with Bill Carstensen, the boy who would grow up to marry Sharon Gay Smith and molest her children and his children and stepchildren from a second marriage.
They were also friends with David Leslie Fuller, who would go on to abduct and murder Kacie Woody, a girl in Arkansas. Fuller lived across the street with his parents Ned and June. Carstensen, Fuller, and the Childs brothers were friends with Brian David Mitchell as well, who went on to infamy as the abductor of Elizabeth Smart. In one neighborhood, five boys molested multiple girls including Loretta Gale Child. Child’s cousin Richard Ray Marcroft was convicted in 2008 for molesting two teenage girls. He showed the girls pornography and then raped them repeatedly. He was sentenced to serve 3 years to life in prison.
Craig Smith knew that Loretta Gale was April Daniels, because he had carefully traced the clues in Paperdolls back to Daniels. He did not offer condolences or apologies for the horrific abuse Gale had suffered at the hands of her brothers and their friends. He simply told her to stop talking about the book she had written with Marion Burrows Smith at work.
For Loretta Gale, the incident was notice that her job was in jeopardy. Less than two months later, her boss called her into his office, where he and Craig Smith gave her an annual review. According to Gale, she received a glowing commendation of her performance, followed by a $10,000 pay cut. She was told that she would report directly to Craig Smith. Within three months, Smith would call her into his office and fire her, claiming that the market for her product had dried up. Gale claimed that she had contacted the company providing financial backing for her insurance product, and the contact had informed her the market and the financing were in place and active.
She received three months of severance pay and a positive letter of recommendation.
Craig Smith had once again squashed any attempt to get to the bottom of the allegations in Mount Olympus and Bountiful. Loretta Gale had lost her job as a result of her efforts to tell of the abuse ring that had raped her repeatedly over the Sixties and Seventies. Her description of the abuse was graphic, but even in the present day, Gale disputes a link between her abuse and that of ritual abuse victims such as the Hamblin sisters. Her story has its similarities, but it also has its differences.
The Allegations of Loretta Gale Child
Loretta Child grew up as the youngest child and only daughter of Francis David Child and his wife Norma Henny Jensen. His wife’s parents had immigrated from Norway, converting to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Norway, where Sverre Jensen had served an LDS mission. In 1922, Sverre had arrived in Utah, where he would marry his wife Svanhild Henrikke Petersen on July 2, 1925. His daughter Norma Henny would be born first in 1925, followed by sons Arne Melvin in 1927, Robert Johan in 1932, and Ronald Dubved in 1933.
Norma Henny Jensen would graduate from West High School in 1943, and two years later, she would marry Francis David Child in the Logan Temple. The Childs were devout Latter Day Saints, and they founded Olympus Insurance Agency together. Their children attended Skyline High School, and the family’s home at 4229 S Jupiter Dr was surrounded by neighbors who appeared to be ordinary Saints.
There were the Fullers, Ned and June, and their children Darryl, Edward, David, and Debra. Ned Fuller was the ward clerk for the Mount Olympus 12th ward for 25 years, and his wife worked as a beautician and served as the Granite School District Lunch Manager for sixteen years. The Fullers lived right across the street at 4230 South Jupiter Dr, and their son David Leslie was fast friends with Todd and Bruce Child.
The Fechters, Kenneth and Delores, lived up the street at 4170 South Jupiter, and Kenneth Fechter had worked as a double agent for the FBI targeting communists spies beginning in 1969. Previously, Fechter had worked at Sperry Rand, which is now Unisys, developing vacuum tube computers, and as a public schoolteacher. His wife Delores was president of the Mt. Dell Ladies Golf Club. Their daughter Susan was born in 1952, the same years as Todd Child, but the Fechters didn’t arrive in Salt Lake City until 1969.
The Stevens family, Delsa and Farrell Leon, lived up the street at 4160 S. Jupiter, and they were almost as old as Loretta’s maternal grandparents Sverre and Svanhild. The Wagstaffs at 4200 S. Jupiter were also almost as old as the grandparents, whom Loretta referred to affectionately as Gramps and Grandma. Sverre Jensen was an immigrant from Norway, a man who had joined the LDS and served a mission before coming to the United States.
At 4190 S. Jupiter Dr., the Raemer family lived just up the street past E Hermes Dr. They were another older couple, born in the Twenties, and their three children attended Skyline High School. John and Steve Raemer had been born in 1946 and 1949, followed by their sister Dale in 1952. Their parents John H. and Ellen Raemer had been born in 1911 and 1920. These details would prove important in the updated Paperdolls and Cowboy Boots that Loretta Gale would publish in 2024.
It’s the details that make Paperdolls decipherable.
The updated book is dedicated to both Elizabeth Smart and Kacie Woody, and Woody’s dedication has “Crimes That Never Should Have Happened” emblazoned to the right of Woody’s name. On her Substack, Loretta Gale reminisces about realizing that one of her abusers had murdered 13 year old Kacie Woody, a girl he met online and kidnapped in Arkansas. David Leslie Fuller had grown up at 4230 South Jupiter Dr., right across from the childhood home of Loretta Gale at 4229 South Jupiter Dr.
On page 55 of her book, Gale references David Fuller, and alleges that he took her down in an excavation pipe shortly after her baptism at eight years of age. In her book, Daniels says that Fuller is almost ten years older than her; but in reality, David Fuller was born around four years before Loretta Gale. He was friends with her brothers Bruce and Todd, who were born in 1952 and 1953, barely eleven months apart. Bill Carstensen was another friend within the group, and all of the children attended Skyline High School together. So did Brian David Mitchell, who would go on to kidnap Elizabeth Smart. Francis David Child Jr. was born in 1947, and the age difference was critical: he spent his time away from his younger siblings, often working and studying outside of the home.
The Child’s father, Francis David Child, Sr., founded Olympus Insurance Agency with his wife Norma Henny Jensen, and his sons F. David Child, Jr. and Bruce Child would join the firm. So would Loretta Gale Child, before leaving after her allegations against her brothers and her father were aired out in a therapy meeting her father refused to attend. Francis Child and his wife Norma were both alcoholics, often disappearing from their home at night after the children were in bed. During the day, Loretta’s parents would lock the door to their room and drink from mini-bottles of vodka. They would also take pornographic pictures with a Polaroid camera that their children would later find.
That left Loretta to be raised by her older brothers, and Bruce Child was her primary caregiver. Todd Child was also prominent in Loretta’s life, but Bruce was more immediate and closer in age. Their parents were not present due to an addiction to alcohol and the demands of running a business.
In her book, Loretta Gale attempts to obscure her family’s identity by turning her brother F. David Child, Jr. into her sister Melinda, but the context clues are obvious: Melinda, like F. David, is the oldest sibling; she is also divorced with two children from a prior marriage like F. David Child, Jr. Loretta’s brother Todd, like April Daniels’s brother Tom, dies young and leaves behind a widow and daughter. Todd is the best friend of Carol Scott’s daughter Lorraine’s husband Hank, and Carol Scott is Marion Burrows Smith’s pseudonym in the book. This would place J. William “Bill” Carstensen as Todd Child’s best friend.
Letters from Todd Child to his family during his time in the National Guard confirm that Bill Carstensen was one of his closest friends. Both men attended Skyline High School, as did the other boys in the neighborhood. The allegations made by Loretta Gale are graphic: she alleges that her brothers Todd and Bruce, along with Bill Carstensen, Brian David Mitchell, and David Leslie Fuller molested her repeatedly over her childhood. Her father violently orally sodomized her until she passed out, and her front teeth were loose for months.
Her mother summoned a dentist to visit the family home at night when she regained consciousness. This detail is critical, because dentists do not usually make house calls. Neal Bert Olpin was a dentist who lived in the same neighborhood as the Child family, at 4257 S. Jupiter Dr. with his wife JoeAnn. He is likely the dentist who was summoned to examine Loretta Gale’s teeth when her father knocked them loose by violently sodomizing her. For months, Loretta Gale was on a liquid diet in order to save her loosened front teeth. Gale had a memory of father bathing with her, ejaculating on her, and she thought the ejaculate was soap that was up his penis. Loretta later had a memory of her father raping her, and telling her not to let her mother know that she made love better than her mother.
Loretta Gale does not make allegations of ritual abuse, other than outlining episodes where her brothers and their friends used a Ouija board during the abuse. Gale claims that the board always spelled out “fuck” when she used it. She also claimed that the boys would tell her that if she didn’t allow them to molest her, then Satan would have sex with her and she would have Satan’s child.
The boys would sometimes abuse Loretta in tandem with her cousin as well as two college-aged neighbors whose parents were almost as old as her grandparents. The boys would force her to lick the excrement from their penises when they anally raped her, and they would urinate and ejaculate on her.
Later, as Loretta Gale began to process the memories of her abuse, a central question was how her mother never caught on to the abuse. Every Wednesday, Norma Child would do the laundry, and her daughter’s clothes were covered with urine and semen. Norma Child never said anything to indicate that she had noticed the urine and semen in her daughter’s laundry, and this pattern of consistent denial of the obvious was pervasive in Norma Child’s life, even when Loretta Child and her family sat in a therapy session and discussed the abuse, which her brother Bruce allegedly acknowledged.
Her father refused to attend the sessions, and tried to fire his daughter from the family’s insurance agency after the session. Her brothers interceded and told him that if she was fired, they would leave as well. The abuse allegations were being handled privately, in therapeutic settings, but the family’s history was spilling into the next generation. Loretta Gale wrote of her adopted nephew’s commitment to a psychiatric hospital after he threatened to kill his parents. The nephew in question also allegedly attempted to burn the family home down.
The reality that handling chronic sexual abuse privately, without the aid of law enforcement, led to further consequences seems lost on Gale when it comes to her own family. When it comes to Elizabeth Smart and Kacie Woody, however, her perspective changes. These crimes should have never happened, and would have never happened if Brian David Mitchell and David Leslie Fuller had been held accountable or given help as teenage boys who were abusing neighborhood children. Brian David Mitchell’s stepdaughters LouRee Gayler and Heidi Woodridge testified that Mitchell had sexually abused them, forcing them to look at pornographic images.
In a parallel to the Hamblin abuse, Gayler alleged that her parents served her pet rabbit Peaches for dinner, much like Joe Bennion allegedly served his own daughter’s pet for dinner. Mitchell’s former stake president Paul Mecham testified of allegations of inappropriate conduct against Mitchell in the mid-Eighties, which led to Mitchell exploding in anger at Mecham. In 1983, Mitchell had undergone a mental health evaluation with Dr. Randall Oster of Sugarhouse Mental Health when he had wanted to put his children from his first marriage up for adoption.
Loretta Gale claimed that Mitchell may have met up in San Diego with his old high school friend David Leslie Fuller during the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping. She speculated that Fuller may have gotten the idea to kidnap Kacie Woody from his encounter with Mitchell, but she presents no direct evidence.
In the end, Gale’s allegations are as notable for what they do not contain as they are for what they do contain: she never alleges being forced by her abusers to participate in abuse against other children. She is exclusively in the recipient role in abuse. This is inconsistent with virtually every single allegation of chronic long term abuse Investigations in Ritual Abuse has examined over the past two years. Ritualistic or not, her abuse is tied to the Dick and Brenda Miles case by the relationship between Bill Carstensen and her older brother Todd Child.
Moreover, the narrative crafted by Marion Burrows Smith has significant issues as well: her eldest daughter Kathleen would sue her when Smith allegedly mortgaged a property using Kathleen Smith’s trust, which purportedly terminated upon Smith’s twenty-second birthday. That birthday would have taken place in 1974.
In 2008, Gale’s cousin Richard Ray Marcroft would be arrested and charged with 20 counts of sexual abuse. Davis County Deputy Attorney Richard Larsen told the judge that the prosecution could have filed even more counts, but the abuse was so frequent that it was innumerable for the purposes of charging in its entirety. Marcroft would be given a pair of three year to life terms in August 2008. He showed his two teenage victims pornography, and then he sexually abused them, which is exactly what Loretta Gale’s teenage male abusers did to her throughout her childhood.
Gale writes that her perpetrators numbered in the twenties, but the specific details she provides are sufficient to identify a mere seven with certainty:
Todd Child
Bruce Child
F. David Child, Sr.
Richard Ray Marcroft
David Leslie Fuller
Brian David Mitchell
7. Bill Carstensen
The most likely candidates for the college age abusers described by Loretta Gale are John and Steve Raemer. The details provided by Gale line up with the Raemer brothers. There are other perpetrators who are as yet unnamed.
Marcroft, Fuller, Mitchell, and Carstensen went on to molest others, and Fuller murdered Kacie Woody after raping her. Had Loretta Gale’s mother bothered to question why her daughter’s clothes were soaked and stained with urine and semen, those four boys could have been prevented from perpetrating as adults. Gale claims that the number of victims in her neighborhood is expansive, and she wrote of her encounters with those victims during adulthood after Paperdolls was originally published in the Nineties.
Conclusion
The full extent of the abuse that occurred in the children of the Mt. Olympus neighborhood, whose families were overwhelmingly members of the Mt. Olympus 12th ward, may never be known. What is known is that family members knew or should have known about the abuse against Loretta Gale, and the fact that the boys in that neighborhood were regularly raping younger children. The idea that the adults in the neighborhood were apparently unaware strains credulity: Loretta Gale writes of the boys repeatedly urinating and ejaculating on her and other children, and so multiple parents in that neighborhood would have had to turn a blind eye and lose their olfactory senses to avoid noticing what was happening to their children.
The question of how Bill Carstensen came to marry into Mormon royalty when he married Sharon Gay Smith is also unanswered. Carstensen was the son of divorced parents, not prominent in any real sense. Wendy Smith was the daughter of Nicholas Groesbeck Smith, Jr., whose ancestors included the uncle of Joseph Smith, Jr. and the eight president of the Church. The ties between the Groesbeck, Smith, and de Jong lines were detailed in the previous article in this series.
The reality that Loretta Gale left her family’s insurance business to work at Moreton, which just so happened to employ the very stake president who had presided over the Dick and Brenda Miles investigation in the Bountiful Mueller Stake is another fact that strains credulity. The Moreton & Company website reveals a staff whose surnames potentially place them in the same families as accused ritual abusers, or those who covered for ritual abusers that Investigations in Ritual Abuse is aware of from two years of research.
Those connections will be mapped out for future articles.
In Part III, the final article in this series, IRA will detail the possible explanations for the de Jong, Smith, and Groesbeck connection while outlining how that connection relates back to David Lee Hamblin.
This stuff has to be brought to light. Thanks for your work here. Thanks for looking at the connections.
To my mind, Gordon Bowen is the one that proves the ties between the Provo LDSCoS and the SLC LDSCoS. The fact that Bowen was closely associated with President Hinckley and President Faust and is still a close associate with multiple members of the Quorum of the Twelve is reason enough to link the Hamblin sisters and the Miles' abuse rings. I suspect, and others of us who follow these things do as well, that Nelson is closely tied to the LDSCoS. I, for one, would be surprised if Nelson isn't the MM for the SLC branch.