The public revelation of a criminal investigation into ritual abuse by then-Utah County Attorney David Okerlund Leavitt at a press conference preceded the arrest of former therapist David Lee Hamblin and his ex-wife Roselle Stevenson. Leavitt’s press conference came after he was provided a 153 page victim statement from an earlier investigation and prosecution of Hamblin, who was both a distant relative and a close personal friend. The victim statement named Leavitt as a ritual abuser, and combined with seven other victim’s statements written by Hamblin’s daughters Rachel, Eliza, and Katherine Hamblin, it painted an extraordinary picture of a group of adults who had committed nearly daily abuse against their own children.
David Lee Hamblin was a central figure in that abuse; as a clinical psychologist, he allegedly utilized his expertise as a therapist and a ritual abuser to train parents and children within his group in ritual abuse, with an especial emphasis on training children to comply with ritual abuse. This was done through the creation of “parts” or specific personalities designed to fulfill a certain purpose within the group’s scheme of abuse. Hamblin’s eldest daughter Rachel alleged that her father had created a part named Tabitha, which cued her to comply with his demands to perform sexually for her parents and for other adults within the group. The utilization of parts was clearly designed to induce dissociation within the children of the group, so that they would be responsive to the demands of adults in mental, physical, and sexual contexts.
The children were to be compartmentalized into a distinct parts or personalities, each serving a specific purpose or role within their obligations as group members. The goal of the adults was to ensure that the children would grow up into adults who would perpetuate the group into the future, ensuring its continued activity and success within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Members of the group, which referred to itself as the Group, or the Church of Satan, were tasked with maintaining an outward and public persona as faithful Latter Day Saints, in addition to a secret persona as members of the Church of Satan. The former persona would provide cover for the latter, and the members would have the credibility and reputational benefits of membership within the LDS to immunize them from exposure for their activities within CS.
The members of the group were high functioning and high achieving individuals of notoriety. They were artists, medical and psychiatric professionals, academics, and successful businessmen. They held high callings in their wards and stakes within the LDS, and were either related to or friends with individuals who held even higher callings in the upper echelons of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They were bishops, stake presidents, high councilors, and held familial relationships or personal friendships with Area Seventies, Quorum members, or even First Presidency members.
Despite the overall tendency within the group for high functioning or high achieving lives, there were members who showed signs of abuse and its effects. These members failed academically, took longer than normal to matriculate in their undergraduate and graduate studies, and had extensive mental and physical health issues. The children of David Lee Hamblin were chronically absent or tardy in their school aged years, a fact which was documented in his divorce. The divorce proceedings also yielded confirmation of the Hamblin sisters’ allegations that their father had forced them to ingest peyote, a controlled substance, as well as confirmation of their allegation that their father had moved a mentally ill adult patient into the family home in Provo, where he forced Rachel Hamblin to participate in the patient’s therapy at the expense of her own education.
Hamblin’s devolution from a respected therapist and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was also chronicled in his divorce, as well as the investigation by the Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing (DOPL) which resulted in the loss of his license to practice psychology. His association with known sexual predators was both professional in his treatment of convicted child sexual abuser Sterling van Wagenen, and familial in the case of his in-law Timothy Nathan Tuttle, who was convicted of sexually abusing his adopted daughter. The court in Hamblin’s divorce found by clear and convincing evidence that he had sexually abused his eldest two daughters Rachel and Eliza. Two of the adult female patients that Hamblin had sexually abused testified at his custody hearing.
The court heard of Hamblin’s descent into a peyote-fueled exploration of Native American religion, which he integrated with his peculiar combination of psychology and the Mormon priesthood, subjecting his patients and his own children to the blend of beliefs and practices. Hamblin was utilizing hypnotherapy, peyote, and the mixture of his various belief systems into a method of convincing his adult patients that they were ritually abused as children. Hamblin would follow those efforts with a proposed therapeutic regimen that involved sexual contact with him, under the guise of healing his patients from their alleged childhood ritual abuse. His male patients would be subjected to sexual contact with Hamblin under the rationale that the semen of a righteous man could drive out the semen of the unrighteous ritual abusers, which Hamblin explained was causing the mental trauma and sexual identity issues that plagued his male patients. This would in turn enable Hamblin to cast out the parts that he claimed were causing mental illness and homosexuality in his male patients.
Those patients described a pattern of abuse that involved manipulating them into consent for the initial sexual contact, followed by increasingly more violent sexual assaults in Hamblin’s home office in Provo. When the patient did not comply with Hamblin’s desires, he would forcibly rape and sexually assault them. David Lee Hamblin was not a pedophile, or an exclusively heterosexual or even bisexual man. He was a situational offender, a man whose proclivities were contingent upon situation and convenience. In his home, his sexual access to his own daughters was unchallenged due to his status as the Paterfamilias, a man who owned his wife and children and exercised total dominion over each member of his family.
Author’s Notes: You can read the rest of this document over at Scribd here. It contains exhaustive footnotes with hyperlinks. A more extensive draft with additional sections and footnotes is available here. I did not transfer the document over entirely in this article because of the sheer number of footnotes and the fact that it would not copy and paste. I felt that readers should have access to it to see what the progress has been on constructing an overview and introduction to the Hamblin case for new readers and old readers alike a year and eight months into the research. Over time, this document will contain executive summaries of each individual mentioned in the Hamblin Victims Statements as well as additional findings which are as yet unpublished on this site. I have debated making an e-book out of the document in the long term. Hopefully, readers find it informative. Your support makes it possible for me to devote hours of my life to the research and writing necessary to expose the full parameters of the LDS Church of Satan and its members. You can donate an amount of your choosing over at Stripe.
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