The Bloodlines of the Bennions

A CS Family and Its Intersections

Joseph Wood Bennion, the husband of Lee Patricia Udall, is himself the scion of a family line that stretches back to the beginnings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The challenge of mapping the Bennion bloodline cannot be overstated, as the bloodline intersects with many other prominent bloodlines in the LDS. Polygamist LDS families defy accurate genealogies, with husbands taking on sisters and half-siblings from the the same families as their wives. The trend towards consolidation of bloodlines covered in the previous article on the Udall family line increases with the Bennion bloodlines.

The members of the Bennion bloodline have enmeshed themselves in the centers of power within the LDS. Bennions are professors at BYU and the University of Utah, they are administrators of the Utah and LDS educational system, and at least one Bennion bloodline member is in the highest echelon of the church: the First Presidency. Henry Bennion Eyring is third in line by age and respective rank to the highest office with the LDS. The Presidency of the LDS typically confers by seniority of age relative to one’s rank; by that standard, Henry Bennion Eyring would be just nine months behind his fellow counselor in the First Presidency, Dallin H. Oaks.¹

Through his paternal grandmother, Eyring is a first cousin once removed of George W. Romney, Mitt Romney’s father. His sons include Henry J. Eyring, the president of BYU-Idaho, formerly Ricks College, and Matthew J. Eyring, the Chief Innovation Strategy Officer of home automation company Vivint.

The Bennion bloodline does not merely intersect with the Romney family, it also intersects with other prominent families as well, most notably the Cannon family. It is this intersection that produces the consolidating effect within the Bennion bloodline. This intersection is seen in the genealogy, specifically the marriage of Zina Bennion, born to John Moroni Bennion and Mary Turpin in 1973, to John M Cannon, born to Angus Munn Cannon and Maria Bennion in 1865. Zina was the half-sister of John M. Cannon’s mother Maria, the daughter of John Moroni Bennion, John’s grandfather, making his wife his half-aunt.

This would drive home Brigham Young’s admonishments to Saints that it would be better for a Saint to marry their sister or their brother than to marry outside of the faith.

The marriage of Lucille M. Cannon to Glynn Sharp Cannon would mean that a pair of grandchildren of John Moroni Bennion and Angus Munn Bennion were spouses. Glynn Sharp Bennion was the son of Israel Bennion, the half-brother of Zina Bennion and grandson of John Moroni Bennion, and Zina was married to John M. Cannon, the brother of George M. Cannon, who was the father of Lucille M. Cannon. There were no branches in the family tree, only loops that circled in on each other. The bloodlines were consolidating in Utah, far away from the prying eyes of the federal government and the enemies of the Latter Day Saints who had driven them westward. In the desert, the Saints were free to practice their faith and marry as they saw fit. They were a law unto themselves.

The realities of polygynous and polygamist relationships in the LDS of the 19th century renders it virtually impossible to map genealogies in any conventional sense. Ancestry, Gramps, and other genealogical software does not afford a user the ability to map marital relationships between half-siblings and close consanguinities. The facts were that among polygynous or polygamist groups, women were a prize. Polygamy ran one way; husband could have many wives, but wives could not have many husbands.

The spiritual wifery of the Cochranites practiced by Brigham Young and his lieutenants, polygynous as it was, involved ritualized wife swapping. The polygamy that Young’s practices publicly evolved into did not involve such practices, but the LDS Church of Satan did practice polygyny if Rachel Hamblin and her sisters are telling the truth.

The Victims’ Statements outline example after example of wife swapping in the group, with Chelom Leavitt and her sister taking up with David Lee Hamblin, and with Joe Bennion taking up with Roselle Hamblin. The daughters of David Lee Hamblin were polygynously sealed to multiple men within the CS, and the Victims’ Statements tell of multiple girls being sealed to adult males within the CS and its affiliates in Manti, such as James Harmston’s True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days.

Rachel Hamblin and her sisters alleged that Jay Mitton lectured them in his home on the necessity of polygamy for entry into the Celestial Kingdom, the highest level of Heaven.² Without polygamy, exaltation was not achievable. While Mitton allegedly referred to the Celestial Kingdom rather than the Outer Darkness stressed by the Hamblin’s familial CS group, the ties between the Hamblins and Mitton’s daughter Julie Mitton Staples cannot be overstated. Ewan Harbrecht Mitton, Jay Mitton’s sister-in-law, was called a prophetess by the CS elders, and Rachel Hamblin alleged”people would go to her for visions/future reading stuff.”³

The reality was and is that those within the LDS who believe in polygamy would have to compromise by necessity: there was no way to publicly take on multiple wives, and therefore the members of the CS and those within the LDS who believed in polygamy as a requirement for exaltation would be required to engage in secret ordinances with each other’s daughters and wives. Rachel Hamblin and her sisters were sealed on multiple occasions to multiple men within and without the CS.

In the early days of the LDS, the reality that men were in competition with each other for wives would have necessitated other compromises, including outright incestuous compromises. For a church that predicated its central doctrine of exaltation on the practice of polygamy, the limited pool of potential wives would have required a consolidation of bloodlines. For those within the LDS who believed in the spiritual power of bloodlines, or in a proto-eugenic approach to marriage and blood purity, incestuous marriages would have been a necessary evil. It is clear that sex was the central driving factor of polygamy, given the sheer number of children produced by men and women in hardscrabble conditions in the Utah desert.

A little over a century later, the centrality of sex would be very clear within the LDS Church of Satan, as its members concluded virtually every meeting and get-together with sexual orgies. The meetings themselves featured sexual performances as the CS re-enacted the Endowment, only stressing the eventual triumph of Satan over Jehovah and Christ. Those sexual performances featured the female children of the CS forced to re-enact the role of Eve, which placed them in the position of being raped by the CS men who portrayed Satan, Jehovah, and other characters.

Fertility was emphasized as well, with specific ceremonies celebrating the onset of a girl’s menstrual cycle, because the impregnation of a CS girl could be used to accomplish abortions that were viewed as a means of increasing the spiritual numbers of the CS family in eternity. Aborted children would simply await the arrival of their CS family members in the afterlife.

Joe and Lee Bennion are the most frequently referenced individuals in the Hamblin Victims’ Statements after David and Roselle Hamblin. As such, the examination of their familial bloodlines is relevant to any investigation into the ritual abuse allegations made by Rachel Hamblin and her sisters.

The Bennions and Their Intersections

Henry Bennion Eyring was Spencer W. Kimball’s nephew through his father’s sister Camilla Eyring, who married Kimball. His father Henry, born and raised in the LDS community at Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua, was the son of the polygamist Edward Christian Eyring, who had married two daughters of Miles Park Romney, Caroline and Emma. Miles Park was the great grandfather of Mitt Romney, the eventual Republican nominee for president and one of Utah’s U.S. Senators. The Mexican Revolution forced the Eyring family north to El Paso, and they later moved to Pima, Arizona.

Henry Eyring earned his doctorate in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1927. He would marry Mildred Bennion, the granddaughter of John Moroni Bennion through his son Marcus Lowell Bennion, in 1928. In 1931, Eyring took his family east to Princeton, where he had taken a professorship. He would labor at Princeton for nearly 15 years before accepting a position as dean at the University of Utah, where he would also serve as a professor of chemistry and metallurgy.

Over the course of his academic career, Henry Eyring would produce 600 articles and thirteen books. His son Edward M. Eyring would go on to become a professor of chemistry at the University of Utah, while Harden B. Eyring would would become an educational administrator for the State of Utah. Eyring had served the LDS in many callings, including branch president, district president, and twenty years on the general board of the Deseret Sunday School Union. He was exactly the sort of Saint that the LDS would uphold as an example.

His son Henry earned a degree in physics at the University of Utah, but pursued business administration in graduate school at Harvard, earning his master’s degree and his doctorate. Eyring worked as a professor at Stanford University, but in less than a decade he would move to become the president of Ricks College. He would take on callings as varied as seminary teacher and bishop of the Stanford singles ward, but he would serve in 1985 as counselor to Presiding Bishop Robert D. Hales. When Howard Hunter died, Henry Bennion Eyring was sustained as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on April 1, 1995. Twelve years later, he would be sustained as Second Counselor in the First Presidency on October 6, 2007.

The Bennion bloodline was within striking distance of the highest office within the LDS. Henry Bennion Eyring is still a counselor within the First Presidency.

Eyring was not the only prominent member of the bloodline, because the Bennion family intersected throughout the LDS and its affiliated institutions. At Ricks College, Steven Don Bennion would serve as president from 1989 to 1997, when he left to become the president of Southern Utah University. He would leave SUU to serve as the mission president of the New York South Mission in 2006, departing that position in 2009. Steven Bennion had previously served as president of Snow College from 1982 to 1989.

His grandfather Milton Bennion was president of the Branch Normal School, which would evolve into Southern Utah University. Milton Bennion had served as a member of the Utah State Board of Education, and as a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, eventually rising to become the dean of the School of Education. His son Lowell Bennion founded the Institute of Religion at the University of Utah in 1934, and went on to found the Teton Boys Ranch in Idaho. That ranch has since been resurrected as Birch Creek Service Ranch in Spring City, Utah.

Owen Cannon Bennion, the son of Glynn Sharp Bennion and Lucille Morris Cannon, would marry Lenore Wood, the granddaughter of Zina Bennion through her mother Zina Lenore Cannon. Owen’s grandfather Israel Bennion and Lenore’s grandmother Zina Bennion were half-siblings through John Moroni Bennion’s polygamous marriages. The looping of the bloodlines continued well into the 20th century. Owen Bennion was Joe Bennion’s father.

Owen Bennion taught science at Lincoln High School in Orem, Utah, at Brigham Young High School, and at the Indian Education Department at BYU from 1968 to 1984. His brother George Cannon Bennion was a professor in the BYU English department for thirty years. Owen and George’s brother Robert Cannon Bennion earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from BYU, and proceeded to earn his graduate degrees from the Ohio State University, and he returned to BYU in 1961, where he served a professor of psychology for 36 years from 1961 to 1997. He also operated his own private practice as a therapist.

Their brother Glynn Colin Bennion obtained his masters degree in botany from the University of Utah, and worked as a teacher in various schools throughout Utah for 25 years. Their sister Eileen and her husband Frank McKean served a calling in the mission presidency in the Brazil Recife Mission, but Frank McKean died six months later of a heart attack. Franklin McKean had worked as the dean of admissions for BYU, and as Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of Utah, retiring in 1983. He had also been a major general and commanding officer of the 96th Army Reserve Command until 1979, having joined the military in 1944.

The Bennion family had intersections in multiple LDS educational institutions, in some cases serving as deans and presidents within those institutions. They were deeply entrenched in non-LDS educational institutions as well, such as the University of Utah and Southern Utah University. The patterns of intermarriage among their bloodlines, bordering on incest, are consistent with the claims of Rachel Hamblin and her sisters.

Conclusion

Joe Bennion is the alleged Punisher of one of the Spring City Councils of the CS, with the other local council being dominated by the Allred family and their allies. His familial ties extend to the First Presidency of the LDS with Henry Bennion Eyring, and his marriage to Lee Patricia Udall ties his family to the Udalls, the Lees, and the Hamblins, as well as the Leavitts. By itself, this may seem innocuous, but IRA has received reports from survivors alleging that Henry Bennion Eyring is involved in the ritual abuse of multiple victims. The allegations span decades and extend to over four dozen individuals who relay remarkably similar allegations of abuse.

Coupled with the allegations against Joe Bennion, his wife Lee, and the rest of the Hamblin CS group, the allegations against Eyring tend to lend credibility to Rachel, Eliza, Katherine, and Miriam Hamblin’s claims of a multigenerational group operating within the LDS and perpetrating sexual abuse across generations of various families. Those families intermarry with one another repeatedly, in order to preserve their bloodline purity and enhance what they believe to be the spiritual power of those bloodlines.

This report is by no means all-encompassing as it pertains to the Bennion family and its intersecting bloodlines. The genealogies of such bloodlines are challenging to map for the aforementioned reasons: due to the tendency of Bennions and their intersecting bloodlines to marry closely within the line, it is difficult to map the relationships through conventional genealogical methods. IRA will continue to research the bloodlines of the Bennions and other families within the alleged LDS Church of Satan to establish or dispose the credibility of the Hamblin Victims Statements.

At this juncture, everything uncovered in IRA’s investigation tends to corroborate the central allegations made by Rachel Hamblin and her sisters.

1. Oaks was born August 12, 1932, while Eyring was born May 31, 1933.

2. VS 2, pg. 63.

3. Ibid.