The New York and Missouri Connection: LDS Church of Satan Group

Missouri, Port Chester, Scarsdale, and White Plains

David Lee Hamblin was a man on the move in the early Eighties, a husband and a new father to his daughter Rachel. He had earned his first graduate degree at Brigham Young University, but he was working for a building developer when he married Roselle Anderson. David and Roselle were both part of the International Folk Dancers at BYU, and his ties to Provo were through his mother Mary June Adams. Hamblin had grown up in Missouri, where his father Robert was a professor at Washington University, and Robert’s career had taken him westward to the University of Arizona, where he would retire in 1993 after joining the faculty in 1971.

Robert Hamblin’s educational journey had taken his family to Michigan, where he earned his Ph.D in 1955, and then to Missouri, where he took a professorship at Washington University in 1957. Much of Hamblin’s work in sociology would focus on modifying the behavior of children. His wife June Adams, who held a master’s degree in child development and elementary education, would join him in a laboratory setting where the couple would study the learning experiences of 10 students between 3 and 5 years of age.

RLH Opportunity House

Hamblin’s proposals involved behavior modification in subjects, which led to pushback when Democratic Representative Frank M. Karsten publicly opposed a $634,000 grant to Washington University for an “Opportunity House” which would house sixty low income families for ten week terms. 30 researchers and residents would supervise the program, which would dole out reward points to children for brushing their teeth and “other family tasks” whichh would in turn reduce their parents’ rent. Karsten objected on the grounds that he had taught his children to do basic hygiene tasks without federal input or academic supervision, and he questioned the wisdom of spending $634,000 on the project.

From 1957 onward, Robert L. Hamblin’s rise through the Washington University Department of Sociology was meteoric. He attracted grants, including a grant from the Office of Naval Research to study “Individual Needs in the Group Situation,” thereby extending the project to a seventh year. Three years into his career at Washington University, Robert L. Hamblin would be promoted to Associate Professor, and then in 1967, Robert Lee Hamblin would become the chairman of the Sociology Department. Ten years after he started at Washington University, Robert Lee Hamblin was the chairman of his department. He had just been promoted to a full professorship in 1964.

Over those ten years, Hamblin’s focus on juveniles and behavior modification for children would give him an overlap with the academic focus of none other than Dr. Clyde Everett Sullivan, who would become his in-law when David Lee Hamblin married Roselle Anderson. Robert Lee Hamblin’s life as the father of Carol, David, Kristen, Suki, and Steven Hamblin was moving along nicely at 408 Alta Dena Ct in University City.

408 Alta Dena Court

He was a credible academic whose relentless grant and study proposals had yielded dividends in the form of a department chair ten years into his career. It would not last a year. In July 1968, Hamblin’s resignation would expose a rift between the sociology faculty and Washington University’s administration.

Robert Lee Hamblin’s chairmanship was over, but his professorship would continue for three additional years. His prospects at Washington University were demolished.

The central controversy was the dissertation of R.A. Laud Humphreys, who posed as a “watch queen” for men seeking anonymous sex with other men in public restrooms. Humphreys offered his services as a lookout for the police, so that men having sex in a public restroom could have advance warning if the police were to show up. Humphreys took down the license plates of those men, using that information to identify them and solicit them as research subjects. Humphreys claimed that 38% of his subjects were not homosexual or bisexual, even though they were meeting other men for sex in public restrooms.

He identified himself as a health service researcher instead of disclosing that he was a graduate student engaged in research for his dissertation. Humphreys did not procure his subjects’ consent in advance; instead, he identified them and approached them later to solicit their participation in interviews. This was a clear ethical breach, and when the topic and methods utilized in his dissertation became known, the chancellor of Washington University sought to rescind Humprheys’ doctorate.

Humphreys had been married since 1960, but in 1974, he would come out as a gay man. He did not separate from his wife until 1980, when he began living with a graduate student.

This was the type of research that was taking place while Robert Lee Hamblin was the department chair, and it cost him the confidence of his dean. Humphreys argued that anonymous sexual encounters between men in bathrooms were harmless, and sought to normalize the encounters. Robert Lee Hamblin had presided over a department that seemed perfectly fine with ethical breaches, which enabled Humphreys to lie to research subjects, track down their real identities through their license plate numbers, and approach them afterwards to solicit their participation in his dissertation research-in a manner that could have easily been interpreted as extortion, given the real dangers for gay men in the 1960s.

It is clear that Humphreys was not merely a researcher or a graduate student. He was a closeted gay man using the cover of academia to argue that anonymous gay sex in public restrooms was harmless and therefore worthy of destigmatization. The fact that his department chairman was an active, endowed member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who knew or should have known what Humphreys was doing is even more appalling. Even if Robert Lee Hamblin didn’t object on moral grounds; he should have put a stop to Humphreys research on ethical grounds due to Humphreys lying to subjects, failing to secure their consent in advance, and the clear privacy breaches Humphreys committed. Hamblin did nothing, and it cost him his chairmanship.

In the context of his granddaughters’ allegations, Robert Lee Hamblin’s failure to act where Laud Humphreys was concerned is consistent with what Rachel Hamblin and her sisters allege. The Hamblin Victims Statements explicitly outline homosexual conduct between David Lee Hamblin and Craig Christensen, and make it clear that homosexual conduct among the women of the LDS Church of Satan was widespread in the Eighties and Nineties, even as the COJCLDS was publicly battling against gay marriage.

Today, alleged LDS Church of Satan Punisher Joe Bennion’s Horseshoe Mountain Pottery displays a Pride Flag in the window. Robert Lee Hamblin was willing to put his academic career on the line in Sixties to enable Laud Humphreys to engage in research methodology-and a dissertation topic-that was far outside of what would be considered in academia at the time. He was also willing to risk public exposure that could have led to church discipline as a Latter Day Saint.

Given the allegations against Robert Lee Hamblin by his granddaughters, which detail his own conditioning of David Lee Hamblin and his siblings for incestuous sexual contact, between parents and children and siblings, the fact that Robert Lee Hamblin had access to children in research settings is even more troubling. During the time he would have been training his own children Carol, David, Kristen, Suki, and Steven Hamblin to comply with the LDS Church of Satan’s sexual practices, raping his own daughters and teaching his sons that they were entitled to sexual dominion over their sisters, Robert and June Hamblin were conducting studies on children as young as three years of age.

Their subjects were drawn from extremely young children, poor families, juvenile delinquents, and other pools of individuals whose accusations of wrongdoing would have likely been dismissed with ease. Robert Lee Hamblin would have had a hunting grounds to himself, and he would have had the ability to offer his own children in sexual trades to compromise his fellow academics and others who might have opposed him. This kind of compromise operation was detailed by Robert’s granddaughters, who allege that their parents offered them in sexual trade to people within the CS and outside of the CS. The child pornography films David Lee Hamblin produced with his daughters were offered for sale out of a video rental store in Mount Pleasant.

His academic career with Washington University was clearly over. Robert Lee Hamblin was forced to consider other options, and he found his next position at the University of Arizona.

Arizona

The Hamblin family moved to Arizona in 1971, and settled in at 70 Calle Encanto, a home tucked away in a neighborhood ensconced in a circular street layout. To the north, E Calle Clara Vista eventually turned into East Calle Belleza in the south. The neighborhood had access roads from East 5th St and E Broadway Blvd, as well as North Country Club Rd, but it was not otherwise accessible from Guano Way, the road that ran down the eastern border of the community.

Encanto Circle Park Neighborhood

For a group like the CS, the neighborhood surrounding Encanto Circle Park was secluded, and offered privacy for those who wished to be tucked away from scrutiny. Robert Lee Hamblin started anew in his academic career at the University of Arizona, a professor of sociology. Almost immediately, Hamblin ran into trouble.

He had hired Philip G. Vargas, a Harvard Law School graduate, offering him a one year contract as an assistant professor. Four white assistant professors hired at the same time as Vargas were given three year contracts, which Robert L Hamblin defended as justified based on their qualifications. Two of the assistant professors, like Vargas, did not have Ph.Ds in sociology, and Hamblin admitted that he had only hired Vargas because of pressure Mexican-American students exerted on the university administration.

Vargas sued through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He left at the end of 1974, accepting a one year fellowship with the Drug Abuse Council. He was the only professor of 202 hired in 1973 who was Mexican American.

Vargas was not the only disgruntled faculty member in Hamblin’s department. Frank A. Petroni also sued the University of Arizona in April 1974, claiming that Hamblin and UA Vice President Albert B. Weaver had overridden a faculty vote of 11-2 to deny tenure to Petroni, while also defaming him by characterizing his published articles as material for “second-or third-rate journals.”

Hamblin claimed that he had instituted a publish or perish standard in the department designed to catapult UA’s Sociology Department into the top 10 nationally. He did attract grants to study the spread of violence, claiming that he could mathematically model such matters. The deeper question was how Robert Lee Hamblin managed to go from a deposed department head at Washington University to the incoming department head at the University of Arizona.

Before he retired, Hamblin would court additional controversy: he used the personal experiences of student Elizabeth L. Burns, disclosed in a classroom assignment, in a pair of his books and during his in-class lectures. Hamblin never notified Burns in advance, nor did he secure her consent. He simply referenced Burns by name to her fellow students when lecturing, and put her writing in his books.

Against the backdrop of the Laud Humphreys matter, Robert Lee Hamblin’s actions were consistent with a career long disregard for the norms and ethics of social science research and writing. Wherever he went, controversy followed.

If Robert Lee Hamblin’s granddaughters are telling the truth, his private home life was oriented towards training his sons to abuse their own sisters. That abuse carried over into adulthood, as Suki and Krii Hamblin allegedly carried on incestuous sexual relationships with their brother David during the CS’s Eighties and Nineties activity in Provo and Spring City. Craig and Suki Christensen had followed David and Roselle Hamblin east to New York City in the Eighties.

New York, New York

David Lee Hamblin had taken his family down to Arizona in the early Eighties while he completed his graduate work towards a doctorate. While there, Hamblin and his wife Roselle took up the cause of Food for Poland, and they appeared in numerous newspaper articles covering the cause. They were listed as the Arizona coordinators of Food for Poland in a March 1982 Letter to the Editor appearing in the Arizona Daily Star.

He had completed his Master’s degree in August 1983, and then he had undertaken his doctorate level work. Hamblin’s dissertation was chilling: he examined value convergence, or the idea that “successful psychotherapy patients adopt their therapist’s values.” In the context of his daughters’ and his patients’ allegations, Hamblin’s efforts towards value convergence were as follows:

• with patient Brett Bluth, inducing the notion that childhood ritual abuse memories had been recovered under hypnosis, and that the ritual abuse was the cause of Bluth’s homosexuality. Bluth denied being under a hypnotic state, stating that he was conscious during his sessions with Hamblin, and he disputed Hamblin’s assertions that he had revealed childhood ritual abuse. Hamblin countered by telling Bluth that if he did not relent and accept Hamblin’s narrative, he would remain a homosexual. This culminated in Hamblin convincing Bluth that the only way Bluth could overcome his homosexuality was the ingestion of semen from a righteous man to drive out the semen of Bluth’s purported childhood abusers. When Bluth talked to other patients in Hamblin’s practice, he realized that Hamblin was using the same techniques on those patients and he decided to confront Hamblin.

• with his daughters, inducing the notion that girls, even at the age of infancy, beguile and tempt men, thereby displacing culpability from the men for sexually assaulting children to the children themselves.

• with all of his patients, articulating a mixture of theories that combined Native American beliefs with Latter Day Saint priesthood blessings, as well Hamblin’s own “parts theory,” whereby Hamblin could use the priesthood power he held as a Latter Day Saint to cut off undesired parts from his patients’ psyches, while also utilising peyote as a therapeutic drug. Hamblin additionally sought to convince his patients that sexual contact with him was part of their therapy.

Hamblin explicitly conditioned recovery on compliance with his methods, and total acceptance of the values underlying those methods. His patients, desperate to overcome homosexuality, depression, anxiety, and dissociative identity disorder, generally went along with his methodology and did not question him until much later.

When David Lee Hamblin took his young family eastward to Port Chester, New York, he and his wife Roselle set up his household at 77 Touraine Avenue, a house divided up into several apartments. Rachel Hamblin alleged that the landlord of 77 Touraine Avenue was the local CS Punisher, who carried out the group’s torture in the basement of the building. She and her sisters were subjected to that torture, and forced to watch other children receive electroshock therapy and other forms of abuse.

Wherever the Hamblins moved, they chose residences in neighborhoods where the CS had an existing presence. New York was no different than Utah or Arizona. David Lee Hamblin took his family to a neighborhood where their home would be located at the end of street, right before a circular cul de sac. The neighborhood Robert Lee Hamblin resided in during the early Seventies featured the same cul de sac model. Grandview Avenue and Touraine Avenue were the only ways into the block that the Hamblins lived on. They were secluded, free to practice their beliefs in an apartment dominated by the CS.

There were three key locations outside of their residence for the Hamblin family during their time in Port Chester, New York. The first was David Lee Hamblin’s internship at Cornell Medical Center-Westchester Division in White Plains, New York. The second was the only meetinghouse in South Westchester at the time, at 60 Wayside Lane in Scarsdale. The final location was David Lee Hamblin’s employer at Samaritan Counseling, located at 2 Milton Road in Rye, New York.

New York, New York

David Lee Hamblin taught seminary at the ward in Scarsdale for two years, 1986 and 1987. He had access to the high school youth in his capacity as Brother Hamblin, seminary teacher. According to his daughters, David Lee Hamblin was an active member of the CS during this time. He was engaged in the daily sexual, physical, and psychological abuse of his young children, and Rachel would have been no older than seven during this time, Eliza would have been merely four years old, and Katie would have been just two years old. In his capacity as a graduate student training to become a psychologist, he had access to vulnerable individuals at both Cornell Medical Center and Samaritan Counseling.

The question of why David Lee Hamblin chose Port Chester and the surrounding area for his graduate internship is likely answered by the presence of his uncle in law Clyde Everett Sullivan in Scarsdale during the Sixties and Seventies.

The Sullivan-Anderson Connection to Scarsdale

In December 1969, Richard Lloyd Anderson and his wife Carma made the decision to ship their daughter Roselle east to Scarsdale, New York in the middle of her senior year of high school. Roselle would finish her high school education while living with her Uncle Clyde and Aunt Nola. Roselle Anderson had been active in extracurricular activities in the late Sixties, playing recorder and piano in various groups, including Ars Pro Gaudio, where she would perform with Michael Nibley, son of accused ritual abuser and BYU Professor Hugh Nibley. Her piano teacher was none other than Francine Bennion, the aunt of CS Spring City Punisher Joe Bennion.

In Missouri, her future husband David was earning designation as an Eagle Scout. There was no obvious reason for Roselle to go eastward midway through her senior year of high school, but her parents sent her nonetheless. Contextual clues in the Victims Statements written by her daughters may give insight into why she was sent to live with Clyde and Nola Sullivan in 1970 and finish her high school career.

Rachel Hamblin VS 2, pg. 125

The significance of Clyde Sullivan’s presence in Scarsdale cannot be overstated. Sullivan was an alleged CS member, working as a clinical psychologist in New York from the Sixties into the mid-Seventies at least, and he was located in the same city as the meetinghouse and ward where his nephew in law David Lee Hamblin would serve as a seminary teacher in 1986 and 1987.

The meetinghouse in question is secluded from the other meetinghouses in the area, and drew from a wide geographic area as a result. The meetinghouse at 60 Wayside Lane in Scarsdale is 20 minutes from David Lee Hamblin’s old apartment in Port Chester, but it was just 9 minutes from Clyde Sullivan’s home at 128 Moorland Drive in Scarsdale.

128 Moorland Drive

Given the allegations that the Hamblin children make in their Victims Statements, it is likely that both Robert Lee Hamblin and Clyde Everett Sullivan sought out locations where they as CS members could be safe to practice their beliefs without interference. Their known residences should be scrutinized due to these factors.

The five addresses in question would require a trip of a mere 50 minutes.

Conclusion

Given the facts and the allegations within the Hamblin Victims Statements, it is more likely than not that CS groups operated within Scarsdale, NY, Port Chester, NY, Tucson, Arizona, and University City, Missouri during the time frames that Robert Lee Hamblin, Clyde Everett Sullivan, and David Lee Hamblin were located in those areas.

IRA is building contact information for residents in those areas during those time periods in order to locate and contact possible witnesses to CS activities. Your support, via subscription or donation, makes that possible. A search of Westchester County property records would costs $20 for a day pass and $1200 for an annual subscription. The Newpapers.com six month subscription was $59.90, and it was critical in uncovering these connections.

The videos that IRA produces require a $60 monthly subscription to HeyGen.AI, and our Ancestry subscription is $24.99 a month. Dropbox is another $12 a month, and the court searches that we use vary in cost across jurisdictions. Typical monthly costs in Utah alone for Change are $30 a month. When Spokeo is utilized, it costs $24.99 a month. Protonmail Plus costs are $4.99 a month per account, and we strive to keep separate dedicated accounts for survivors due to security considerations. These costs may not seem significant, but they are apart from living expenses and time invested in uncovering the truth about David Lee Hamblin. We currently have 1,002 subscribers, with 92 paying subscribers.

My monthly bills, from car insurance and gas to cell phone and Internet to food and medical expenses, are around $1200 a month. Your support helps IRA continue to do this work and get to the truth of the Hamblin case. Thank you for subscribing, donating, and most of all for reading and sharing this information.