In the midst of wading through documents related to alleged LDS Church of Satan High Council Punisher Gordon Bowen, I was alerted by my protege the Wolfhunter, who pointed me in the direction of the AP’s recent write up on Paul Rytting, the attorney who heads up the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saint’s Risk Management Division.1 In March 2017, Rytting began attending meetings with 31 year old Chelsea Goodrich, who had one request: that the COJCLDS allow Bishop Michael Miller to testify in the criminal trial of John Goodrich, Chelsea’s father, who had confessed to raping her while she was a child. Miller had heard Goodrich’s confession, in which he acknowledged abusing his daughter over a number of years. Goodrich had been arrested and excommunicated, but the Church would not allow Michael Miller to testify about Goodrich’s confession.
Instead, the Church fell back on the inviolability of the priest-penitent privilege, even though the privilege originated with the Roman Catholic Church, an organization said to be an abomination by Heavenly Father during Joseph Smith’s vision. The reason is rather obvious: the Church has a financial interest in concealing the full extent of its members’ involvement in incestuous sexual abuse, because that abuse is apparently endemic within Latter Day Saints who believe that they have full dominion over their wives and children, up to and including the right and the prerogative to slip into bed with their daughters and rape them. That’s what David Lee Hamblin did in his role as Paterfamilias, invoking the Wisdom of Parents. It’s what Brigham Young preached from the pulpit when he said it would be better for Latter Day Saints to marry their own sisters than to marry outsiders, and when he preached that Adam and Eve’s sons had sex with their own sisters in order to populate the planet.2
This thinking was the basis for brother sister marriages sanctioned by Brigham Young himself, who married his secretary George D. Watt to his half-sister Jane around 1852.3 So it was that the sands of time fell in the hourglass of the lives of the depraved and degenerate, and Brigham Young fashioned a view of human sexuality that permitted half-siblings to be married, advanced the notion that full sibling children of Adam and Eve were married, and justified the marriage of full siblings in the event that they could not find other Latter Day Saints to marry. In addition, Brigham Young denied the Virgin Birth of Christ, stating that God the Father had sexual intercourse with Mary.4 This would of course invalidate the fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14 where Christ was concerned, making the Son of God a mere product of carnal intercourse rather than the Messiah. Blasphemy was one of Brigham Young’s strong suits, as is evidenced by his insistence that the purported revelation on polygamy publicly revealed nine years or so after Joseph Smith’s assassination could contradict the revelation of the Book of Mormon, which classified polygamy as whoredom.
And so the tortured legacy of Brigham Young’s tenure continued years later for Chelsea Goodrich, whose father, an LDS bishop, crept into her bed at night to rape her. Much like the Hamblin girls, Goodrich had to watch as prosecutors dismissed the charges against her father when the COJCLDS barred his bishop, Michael Miller, from testifying about John Goodrich’s confession. An incestuous child rapist walked free, and the world would have known nothing about it had Eric Alberdi, a fellow Latter Day Saint, not attended those meetings with Chelsea Goodrich as her advocate. Alberdi recorded the meetings, and did not sign the confidentiality agreement Rytting drew up to keep the matter quiet.
Chelsea Goodrich’s story is all too familiar at this point. In 2015, she began to remember the abuse. Her father had become aroused in the pool with her, apologizing and then telling her to abstain from mentioning it to her mother. John Goodrich then began getting into bed with her at night, pressing his erection against her. Chelsea Goodrich was 29 years old, a graduate student, and her life began to fall apart as she remembered. She turned to a friend, who happened to be the child of Paul Rytting, an attorney and the Risk Management Director of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
In affidavits he swore out for a West Virginia civil suit against Christopher Michael Jensen, who abused children while babysitting, Rytting extolled the virtues of the priest-penitent privilege:
“Disciplinary proceedings are subject to the highest confidentiality possible. If members had any concerns that their disciplinary files could be read by a secular judge or attorneys or be presented to a jury as evidence in a public trial, their willingness to confess and repent and for their souls to be saved would be seriously compromised.”
After all, the souls of pedophiles are worth saving, even if it means destroying the faith of their victims and men like Eric Alberdi, who left the Church over its treatment of Chelsea Goodrich and the handling of the case against John Goodrich. When Chelsea Goodrich told her mother about the abuse, Lorraine Goodrich confronted her husband, who confessed to becoming aroused around his daughter but denied sexual contact. John Goodrich blamed Satan for his decision to crawl into Chelsea’s bed in a hotel room in Washington, claiming that he had heard sexual activity through the walls in another room.
“The adversary I’m sure worked on me,” he said, using a church term for Satan. “And that’s when it was going through my mind when I climbed in bed with Chelsea and was really aroused … with the intent of spooning and snuggling you but I didn’t.”
Goodrich later divulged the details of his molestation of Chelsea to his relatives, who told him he should go to the police. Goodrich said he’d rather go to his bishop, and the relatives drove him to Michael Miller, who heard John Goodrich confess to molesting his daughter. With recordings of their conversations with John Goodrich and sworn statements by his relatives, Chelsea and Lorraine Goodrich might have thought they had an open and shut case against John Goodrich.
John Goodrich, on the other hand, told the police nothing had happened and that he was not ashamed of anything. And so it was that Chelsea Goodrich reached out to Paul Rytting to enlist him to allow Michael Miller to testify about the abuse confession, while also confronting Rytting with the recorded conversations in which John Goodrich claimed he had repented to other church leaders over the years about the abuse. Ten days after John Goodrich’s arrest, a 53 year old woman came forward to allege that Goodrich had drugged her with Halcion, a sedative used in dental procedures, in order to rape her. Goodrich resorted to drugging her after she ended their adulterous affair.
Goodrich was taped asking the second victim to lie to the police, admitting that he had drugged her, and apologizing to her. He described his actions as “fun as heck,” but acknowledged that he was in the wrong and “mad as hell at myself.” In July 2017, the prosecutors dropped the charges against John Goodrich related to his abuse of Chelsea Goodrich, and then extended a plea deal to Goodrich for distribution of a controlled substance in the second case. Goodrich received a sentence of 90 days in jail and three years of probation.
Chelsea and Lorraine Goodrich were removed from the email list for the Relief Society by Michael Miller’s wife, and Rytting came to the Goodrich ladies with an offer of up to $300,000 with the condition that they never sue the church or acknowledge the settlement. All recordings were to be destroyed within 10 days of signing the agreement. Chelsea and Lorraine Goodrich were both now divorced, financially struggling, and pariahs within their ward and stake. John Goodrich is still a practicing dentist.
Paul Rytting is the brother in law of Lyssa Rytting, the harp teacher for the Hamblin sisters.5 Given the pattern of CS members having CS families give music lessons to their children-Roselle Stevenson’s piano teacher was none other than Joe Bennion’s aunt Francine Bennion, wife of psychologist Robert Cannon Bennion-this places Paul Rytting at least CS adjacent to the Hamblin group. It would also provide circumstantial evidence to confirm the Hamblin sisters’ allegation of Gatekeepers within the LDS and the state of Utah who could intercept and squash allegations of sexual abuse by CS members.
Additionally, Investigations in Ritual Abuse has identified a pattern of dentists who hold membership within the COJCLDS who utilize the sedatives they have access to as medical professionals in order to abuse women and children. Chelsea Goodrich does not make allegations of ritual abuse against her father John Goodrich, but this does not change the reality that an officer of the COJCLDS used members’ tithing revenue to compel a mother and daughter to destroy evidence of criminal activity against a sexual predator who abused the daughter and drugged at least one other woman he was engaged in an extramarital affair with.
It would be one thing if Rytting had offered a civil settlement without the attached condition of destroying audio recordings in which John Goodrich admits to criminally molesting his own daughter, but it is entirely another when an officer of the Church induces a victim to destroy evidence of crimes in exchange for a confidential civil settlement. That is de facto proof of obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence, but the key takeaway is this: the priest penitent privilege needs to be repealed in all fifty states, so as to leave men like Paul Rytting no room whatsoever to conceal the crimes of sexual predators like John Goodrich.
Be warned, foul evildoers: I am training the Wolfhunter and others to pick up where I leave off, and to continue the work when I depart this world. The Wolfhunter is go, full send, and he has shown great promise.
This is something pertaining to our marriage relation. The whole world will think what an awful thing it is. What an awful thing it would be if the Mormons should just say we believe in marrying brothers and sisters. Well we shall be under the necessity of doing it, because we cannot find anybody else to marry." (The Teachings of President Brigham Young, Compiled and Edited by Fred C. Collier, Vol. 3, pages 362, 368)
Embry, Jessie L. “Ultimate Taboos: Incest and Mormon Polygamy.” Journal of Mormon History, vol. 18, no. 1, 1992, pp. 93–113. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23286362. Accessed 6 Dec. 2023.
"And when the Virgin Mary was begotten with Child it was by the Father and in no other way only as we were begotten. I will tell you the truth as it is in God. The world don't know that Jesus Christ our Elder Brother was begotten by our Father in Heaven. Handle it as you please, it will either seal the damnation or salvation of man. He was begotten by the Father and not by the Holy Ghost." Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff's Journal, April 9, 1852
VS 1, pg. 9.
Alex Bigney was named by both Eliza and Kate as having participated in the Hamblin family's ritual abuse. He and his wife are also credited with helping their 3 sons form a Celtic musical group, "Kirkmount" in the '90's. Alex Bigney jr was the harpist in Kirkmount.
Lysa Rytting is named as Alex Bigney jr's harp teacher. That makes at least two children of CS members that studied under Lysa Rytting.
https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=24208948&q=%22lisa+rytting%22&rows=200&sort=date_tdt+asc%2Cparent_i+asc%2Cpage_i+asc&year_start=1967&year_end=2007
https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=22848540&q=%22lysa+rytting%22&rows=100&sort=date_tdt+asc%2Cparent_i+asc%2Cpage_i+asc
Another connection between Lysa Rytting and the Hamblin Victim Statements...A 1990 Christmas Presentation sponsored in part by the infamous McCurdy Doll Museum:
https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=24113252&q=%22lisa+rytting%22&rows=200&sort=date_tdt+asc%2Cparent_i+asc%2Cpage_i+asc&year_start=1967&year_end=2007
I love the first note on wolfhunter
Check this link out https://suzukimusicutah.org/teacher/allisonroney-778
Roney sounds familiar + harp + Lyssa Rytting. Hmm