Byline: Isaiah, Goel
Author’s Note: One of the great privileges of this work is watching people I work with take off and make connections on their own. One of those people is a man that goes by the name Isaiah, and while I’ve provided some instruction to him, he has taken that instruction and gone well beyond it to make vital connections. While I’m writing this article, the research involving the principal actors is almost exclusively his. My focus has been on other elements of the Hamblin network, but Isaiah’s findings were simply too relevant to delay writing up, as they present a direct link between David Lee Hamblin’s family and the Roney family.
The Symbolism and the Sign
The Hamblin Victims’ Statements detail the CS’s obsession with the harp as a musical instrument.
To improve my finger dexterity, coordination, hand strength, grace, poise, confidence when performing, etc. Redacted told me I was required to take music lessons. They wanted me to have "finesse" sexually, as Redacted said, in my Church (CS) progression and home career as a prostitute and second wife to Redacted. I was started on the piano in New York, but they switched me to harp in Provo (I was given more piano lessons again in Spring City). Redacted instructed me to tell everyone who asked that Redacted had taken me to classical concerts "all growing up" and it had inspired me "so much.” She said to say that I had "begged and begged Redacted” to start the harp and when they finally saw how serious I was, they agreed. Redacted had me tell this fictional story (in her presence) to countless people throughout my life. Redacted often said wanted me to have "harp hands," as she called them (with dexterity, coordination, strength, grace, poise, finesse, etc.).
Redacted and the filmmakers and photographers of child pornography they used often included me playing the harp in their "work." My hands were often filmed in scenes playing the harp. These "skills" (with accompanying photos and films) were advertised to potential "clients." They also had us pretend to be angels and play the harp for photos, films, and live performances and then had us perform sexual acts on each other and others.
Redacted Richard and Redacted Carma told me that Redacted had chosen my instrument well because it says in LDS scripture that Cain’s descendants had been skilled on the harp. After a few years, Redacted made business cards for me that said, "Praise the Lord upon the harp." She would laugh and show the cards to CS friends and treat it as a big inside joke, saying "Lord" stood for "our Lord Lucifer."
-VS 1, pp. 8-9.
The symbolic significance of the harp in Scripture is of vital importance to understanding the CS’s emphasis. The harp’s significance in esoteric tradition is informative as well.
When King Saul was afflicted with an evil spirit, David took the kinnor-the lyre, which is represented as a harp as well-and played for King Saul, driving the evil spirit to depart from him.
In literature, the power of the harp is said to encompass a hypnotic effect, causing listeners to be so mesmerized that they were “deprived of all senses save that of hearing.” This effect was also transferred to the lute by the Middle Ages, and any skilled instrumentalist had the power to deprive the listening audience of all sense, rendering them into a state of stupefied wonder and bliss.
For Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages, the lyre and the harp represented the sacred. The lyre was analogised by Marcus Aurelius Cassiodorus to the Ten Commandments, given its ten strings, and stated that the shape symbolised the cross, “the whole of our redemption,” and served as a representation of the Christian life, where with discipline and focus one could “perfect the good.” For Michel de Meaux, the open harp’s two wooden parts represented the cross, with the strings representing the body, stretched between the “suffering of the body and the grief of the mind,” with the lower peg symbolising fear while the upper peg symbolised love, and the tuning key standing for grace, “[drawing] the heart to itself and [bringing] it to a higher passion.”
The human body was therefore pulled by divine grace to divine love, in de Meaux’s reasoning. For the strings of the harp, which were made of dead gut, de Meaux’s reasoning analogised the drying and stretching of the string to the washing of man’s flesh from sin, “dried through abstinence, and stretched through endurance.” The manufacture of a string from the gut was symbolic of “cleaning the soul of sin,” as Ian Pittaway puts it in his article The medieval harp: harp symbolism.
The origins of the harp in Scripture are traced back to Cain’s lineage, specifically the son of his descendant Lamech, who introduced polygamy into the world via his marriages to the Adah and Zillah. Jubal was said to be “the father of all such as handle the harp and organ” in Genesis 4:21.
The significance would not be lost on the membership of the CS, who openly went looking for Cain the rural areas of modern day Utah. The Hamblins put their eldest daughter Rachel into lessons under Lysa Rytting, an accomplished harpist who would be linked to several other prominent students with CS familial connections.
The stress between the harp as an instrument of holiness sufficient to drive out a demon from King Saul and an instrument of hypnotic effect was represented in other art forms as well. In Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights Hell panel, the musicians are shown tortured on their instruments. Bosch depicted a harpist crucified on his harp, strings threaded through his body as he was stretched in eternal torment.
The Hamblin Connection
For Rachel Jones and her sisters, the harp was a similar instrument of torture, as they were forced to play for audiences at CS events where they were routinely raped and tortured.1 In the child pornography films the Hamblins forced their daughters to perform in, the harp was featured prominently. An instrument that was once associated with the cross, a means of driving out demonic forces, was now transmogrified into a means of inviting those demonic forces into the lives of the Hamblin children in the form of the CS parents and adults who abused them. The harp was their suffering.
In 1990-1991, Jones was invited to a sleepover at her grandparent’s home, where she had to repay her grandparents for the payments they made for the lessons she took from Lysa Rytting. Jones and her sister were forced to perform oral sex on both of their grandparents.
The harp was central to the CS’s instruction of Rachel Jones and her sisters, as she recounted when she wrote of her parents telling her she would be able to overcome stage fright if she consecrated her practice sessions and performances to Lucifer. Another harp teacher mentioned by Rachel Jones in her second Victims Statement is Julie Mitton Staples, who was also listed as the Peacemaker mentor to Jones on page 101 of VS 2. The Staples family was alleged to be CS, with Jay Mitton offering patriarchal blessings to the Hamblin children during their parents divorce, and instructing them as to the importance of polygamy.
Melanie Mitton Yorgason was Rachel’s understudy, as Rachel was sent to live with her family during the Hamblin divorce in order to help Melanie become a better Peacemaker.
Katherine Hamblin corroborated the allegations of her sister Rachel with regards to the harp, detailing how her parents promised her a larger harp if she was compliant with their abuse. Any gifts she received, such as harp lessons, had to be repaid with sex. Eliza Hamblin’s recollections corroborated her sisters’ allegations, specifically with regard to the harp figuring prominently in the pornographic films the three elder Hamblin children were forced to perform in as “The Three Graces.”
For the Hamblin children, the harp was a sign of their suffering, a tree upon with they could be stringed up by their parents as sacrifices to Lucifer. It was the constant accompaniment to their daily abuse at the hands of their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other CS adults. Rachel, Eliza, and Katherine Hamblin were forced to perform at all times, be it sexually or musically, with the overarching purpose being the advancement of the CS and the financial gain of their parents.
The Roney Connection
The Roney family’s connection to the Hamblin CS group is not limited to property in CS neighborhoods around Provo. It is direct.
Nu Skin executive Gary B. Garrett’s daughter Allison Roney studied harp under Lysa Rytting, the same harp instructor who gave lessons to Rachel Jones. Gary Garrett shows up in property records for 1307 E 2300 North in Provo, purchasing the property from real estate partnerships and entities known to be owned by Julie Mitton Staples and Melanie Yorgason Staples. Garrett would sell the property to Joseph and Robyn Staples in 2015.
His daughter Allison would go on to marry into the Roney family in November 2019, and her Facebook page provides links to Julie Mitton Staples and Roselle Stevenson, who are both in her friends list.
The Hamblin Victims Statements make it clear that the Hamblins would not have wanted their children being instructed by a non-CS harpist, or any non-CS instructor across the various disciplines they were trained in. David and Rosie Hamblin took great pains to make sure their daughters were surrounded by and immersed within the CS in every facet of their lives. At church, the Hamblin children were moved to classes with men like Joe Bennion. Their equestrian lessons were given to them by Lee Bennion. Their art lessons were provided by the grandmother Carma Rose de Jong Anderson and their grand aunt Nola de Jong Sullivan.
Their social circles were exclusively CS, with Janae Jones’s daughters and her son figuring prominently. Nearly every single day and night was spent among the CS at the homes of CS members for various CS ordinances. The CS kept their children in house. This would likely indicate that Lysa Rytting was CS, and the connections between Gary B. Garrett’s daughter Allison and Lysa Rytting, as well as the Mitton-Staples family and the Roney family are therefore telling.
Conclusion
As IRA continues to dig into the Roneys, more and more evidence emerges connecting them to the CS and making it more likely than not that they are a CS family. Thanks to the keen eye of Isaiah, the connections outlined in this article continue to affirm the central hypothesis made in early articles within this series.
There will be more to come.
This included the CS parties at Gordon Bowen’s home in Salt Lake City.
I knew Nedra, she was friends with my parents and had asked my father, who was a plastic surgeon, to invest in her company. He declined and did regret it because of her success. I actually went into labor in her home while on her couch in her mapleton home. My brother was also a missionary in LA in the 90s and early 2000s. He and his companions were always invited to her parties. My brother went once and there were a ton of celebrities there. She was a very troubled soul. I know one husband committed suicide, her oldest daughter who was adopted, ( someone left her on Nedra’s porch when she lived in the river bottoms), committed suicide when she found out her mother was sleeping with her husband. These are all things people close to her have told me. I had also heard from one of her nanny’s that one of her earlier husbands had been involved in Hollywood in some way. She had also told me that he had been murdered by the mafia. I cannot verify any of this, the only thing I can verify is her friendship with my father and what he told me as well as what her nanny told me.