Lee Patricia Udall, now Lee Bennion, has bloodlines that stretch back to the founding of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Those bloodlines intertwine with the Udall political dynasty, one that has produced state level Supreme Court Justices and U.S. congressmen, as well as presidential cabinet members. The bloodlines stretch throughout the Western United States, as Lee Bennion herself was born and raised in Merced, California.
She was a tall, willowy blonde when Joseph Wood Bennion encountered her, and the two were married on June 29, 1976. Lee was the great grand-daughter of Inez Louisa Hamblin, the wife of John David Lee. Inez’s name carried down to Lee’s sister Sara Inez Udall, who married the son of Clyde Everett Sullivan and Nola de Jong, Noel Clyde Sullivan, in 1975. This would make Lee Bennion the fourth cousin of David Lee Hamblin, and her sister Sara would be the daughter in law of Nola de Jong, the grand aunt of David Lee Hamblin’s daughters with Roselle Anderson. Noel Sullivan died of cancer in 1990, and his widow Sara married Robert Henderson, the associate conductor of the Utah Symphony, in 1994. Noel and Sara lived in Texas at the time of Noel’s death.
This would make the Bennion’s children and the children of Sara Henderson the fourth cousins one time removed of David Lee Hamblin. The branches of the tree were not branches, but simply loops that turned inward upon each other, with each connection drawing extended families closer together. A central allegation made by the daughters of David Lee Hamblin was that CS families were focused on bloodlines for spiritual power, which might explain the marital patterns that drew Sara Udall and her sister Lee to Utah from California.
The political prominence of the Udall family, along with the bloodline’s extensive history with the LDS, would have given the family and its relations the ability to cover for any improprieties of the sort alleged by Rachel Hamblin and her sisters. To understand how this worked, a reader must first go back in time to the early days of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
David King Udall
David King Udall was the son of English parents and LDS converts David Udall and Eliza King, and he was born in St. Louis, Missouri during his parents’ trek along the Mormon trail to Utah. The Udalls would eventually end their trek in Nephi, where they would become farmers. As a teenager, David King Udall found work building the Union Pacific Railroad, and in 1875 he married the first of three wives, Eliza Luella Stewart.
David King Udall, like the men in his family before him, was a willing servant of the LDS Church, and when he received his marching orders to depart for a mission to England, he did not hesitate to leave his new wife. He would not return from England until 1877. In his family, and in the families of those who married into the Udall bloodline, the men did whatever was required to advance the faith.
His brother in law William Thomas Stewart, husband of his sister Mary Ann Udall, was also the brother of his wife. The fact that Mormons were few necessitated close family ties, with sibling pairs often marrying other sibling pairs. Stewart would also go on to marry Rachel Tamar Hamblin, further entwining the Udall, Stewart, Hamblin-and later Bennion bloodlines.1 William Thomas Stewart’s father Levi, had been converted after his first wife-and first cousin-Melinda Howard had joined the LDS. Levi Stewart was baptized in Far West, Missouri by Jefferson Hunt, and he went on to serve a mission with none other than John Doyle Lee as his companion.
John Doyle Lee was another man who did whatever was necessary; Lee would go on to be convicted and executed for his role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The bloodlines had hard loyalty and determination bred into them. They were the men who would build Utah, Arizona, and Idaho in the most literal sense: Levi Stewart built Kanab, which was nothing more than an abandoned outpost when he arrived. The roads, dams, and infrastructure were the product of Levi Stewart’s management skills, and he was also the first bishop of Kanab.
Levi Stewart had built the a paper mill in Mills Creek in 1865, graded the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868 with 100 men working under his supervision, and then he followed up by re-establishing Kanab in 1870. He married sisters Margery and Artemacy Wilkerson in 1852 and 1854. His son William Thomas would go on to become the mayor of Kanab, and a representative to the Utah Territorial Legislature.
Eliza Stewart, the wife of David King Udall, was the first telegraph operator in Arizona. She had been recruited to the job by none other than Brigham Young, who had also given her father Levi his marching orders as well. The Udalls and the Stewarts did what was required, and nothing else. Without their efforts, the vision of Brigham Young could not have been executed into action.
Brigham Young was navigating a precarious reality: his Church was young, its members were few, and the nation in which they existed was openly hostile to their beliefs and practices. Latter Day Saints had been chased from multiple states, often dying in clashes with their neighbors. As a matter of practical necessity, his church would require Mormons to marry Mormons, because the church would not survive interfaith marriages. The men who showed promise, such as Levi Stewart and David King Udall, would have all of the perks of merit, including multiple wives and choice assignments. The world could be whatever they made of it, out on the rough terrains of Utah and Arizona.
The American West afforded the new church its privacy to grow and expand as it saw fit. Its new prophet, Brigham Young, the victor in a hard fought and bitterly contested succession battle in the aftermath of Joseph Smith’s assassination, needed men he could depend on to realize his vision. He found just that in men like Levi Stewart and David Udall, and their in-laws Jacob Hamblin and John Doyle Lee. Jacob Hamblin was the man who rose to his feet to proclaim that Brigham’s voice was that “the true Shepherd-the chief of the Apostles” during the vote for Sidney Rigdon’s claim as prophet.
David King Udall and his wife Eliza Luella Stewart were the types of Saints who would do whatever they were ordered to do to carry their church forward and realize their prophet’s vision. Udall was ordered to St. Johns, Arizona in 1880, where he was to be the first bishop of the town. He would take Ida Frances Hunt, granddaughter of Jefferson Hunt, as well Addison and Lois Barnes Pratt, as his wife in 1882.
Eliza Udall was trained at Desert Telegraph Company in Pipe Spring, for Brigham Young had decreed that she would be the first telegraph operator in the Arizona Territory. David and Eliza Udall were the leads in Brigham Young’s effort to transplant and grow Mormon colonies in the Arizona Territory. For Eliza, part of the dedication her church involved begrudgingly accepting Ida Frances Hunt as her sister wife. Hunt’s journals are referenced in Long Laboring in the Desert, and they record the tension between the two women as David King Udall navigated the journey into polygamy.2
The level of dedication to LDS doctrines like polygamy would prove to be problematic, as two months before David King Udall married Ida Frances Hunt, the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act had outlawed plural marriage. Polygamy was now a federal crime, as the United States realized that it could not depend on governments in the Western Territories to prosecute polygamists, due to the fact that so many government officials in those territories were polygamist Saints. Although they knew that the federal government was coming for polygamists, David King Udall, his first wife Eliza, and his second wife to be Ida Frances Hunt made the trek to St. George to to seal their polygamous union.
They would spend the rest of their marriage hiding Ida Udall in various locations to avoid having her called to testify against David King Udall. The family rarely lived together over the next decade. When Wilford Woodruff issued his 1890 statement rescinding the LDS’s doctrines on polygamy, David Udall initially sent Ida to Eagar, Arizona because he could not live with her and be in compliance with the new doctrine. This move was rebuffed by the church’s leaders, and David Udall briefly moved Ida back to Round Valley, Arizona, to live with the rest of the family.
The church leadership discreetly implored David to marry the widow Mary Ann Linton Morgan in 1903, continuing the bifurcation between the public proclamation of the LDS that it no longer supported polygamy and the private practices in which it did support polygamy. David King Udall did whatever his church requested or required, and he married Mary Ann, who would live with Ida in Hunt, Arizona, where Ida was managing a ranch. Ella Udall was running an ice cream parlor in St. Johns, Arizona, while serving as the stake Relief Society president in St. Johns.
The trend in marriages over the course of David King Udall’s life was one of consolidation: LDS families routinely married sibling pairs off to one husband, or to brothers from another family. There was no remedy for the animosity of the United States towards Mormons more obvious than increased insularity and increased intermarriage among the same bloodlines, but if the Hamblin daughters are to be believed, those bloodlines were believed to be imbued with an especial spiritual power by the members of the LDS Church of Satan.
During this time, the die was cast: the Bennions, the Hamblins, the Udalls, the Leavitts, and the Lees would marry each other over and over again. 130 years later, a prince of those bloodlines named David Lee Hamblin would threaten to undo decades worth of effort with his reckless behavior. Spiritually powerful or not, a bloodline is only as good as its members adherence to the disciplined procedures that evolve out of decades worth of experience. David Lee Hamblin was not content to follow the traditions of his forefathers; instead, Hamblin set out to build his own tradition.
After David King Udall: From the Fringes to the Center
The Mormons had spent the entirety of their history on the fringes of society and culture. They were rejected-often violently-virtually everywhere they went. The rest of their community saw them as a sex cult due to polygamy. Two brothers from one family marrying two sisters from another family, or one man marrying two sisters, was seen as a purely sexual transaction by the rigidly monogamous Baptists and Catholics and other mainline Christian groups who made up the majorities in Missouri and Illinois. The fact that Mormons were actively proselytizing in those communities, seeking to draw the relatives of Protestants and Catholics alike into their nascent faith, only served to further inflame tensions.
Brigham Young was a politically astute realist, while Joseph Smith was a romantic idealist. Smith believed that he could navigate the sectarian resentments by repudiating polygamy, while Brigham Young privately practiced polygamy with all of his supporters within the LDS. Brigham knew that Smith’s death presented an opportunity, an opportunity to bring his polygamous beliefs and practices out into the open, but only if he could build a Zion away from the non-Mormons. He took his followers West, and eventually settled in what would become Utah.
Brigham Young understood that power was power, as opposed to an office or a position. He understood that power grew from what you were willing to do while you had an office or a position, not from the office or position itself. He wasn’t interested in holding onto an office or a position simply for the office or the position: Brigham Young understood the utility of the office and the position to exert power, to consolidate power, and to expand power.
If there was a Mormon practitioner of realpolitik, it was undoubtedly Brigham Young. It was Young who quietly and discreetly navigated behind Joseph Smith’s back to enable polygamy and his supporters’ embrace of polygamy, and it was Young who proclaimed that polygamy was a revelation received by Joseph Smith nine years after Smith’s assassination. There is not a single firsthand source to support the notion that Joseph Smith ever practiced or preached polygamy, but Joseph Smith’s own words condemned polygamy as heresy and he excommunicated Saints for practicing plural marriage while he was alive.
The historical record shows that Brigham Young and his lieutenants were practicing polygamy in England while on their mission, and importing their plural wives back to the United States upon their return. Brigham Young instinctively understood that history was either internal or external, and that internal histories were written by the victors. External histories are written by dissidents and the defeated, easily dismissed as the embittered grumblings of those who did not prevail. Brigham Young walked to the stand after Sidney Rigdon called for a vote on his claim to the presidency, and he declared himself the president.
Young was accompanied by the men who had served with him on his mission to England, the men who had embraced plural marriage: Parley P. Pratt and Heber Kimball. He was seconded by Jacob Hamblin, who cried out to the congregation: “That is the voice of the true shepherd-the chief of the Apostles.” Sidney Rigdon stood no chance. He had been by Joseph Smith’s side, and his chief ally was dead. Dead men have no share or say among the living.
Brigham Young had quietly and discreetly built the foundation for his claim to the presidency over years of behind the scenes work. He outmaneuvered Rigdon and any other contestants, and Rigdon would soon be excommunicated and forced out of Nauvoo. Young would write Rigdon’s history, manufacturing a series of controversies and divisions between Rigdon and Joseph Smith that could not overcome one simple, incontrovertible fact: it was Sidney Rigdon who was selected by Joseph Smith as his running mate in Smith’s abortive campaign for President of the United States. Rigdon fled Nauvoo, and founded his own Church of Jesus Christ of the Children of Zion, which splintered into several other factions over time.
The purported private revelations to Joseph Smith regarding polygamy were rebutted by the fact that polygamy was referred to by the Book of Mormon as whoredom. Orson Pratt waited until August 29, 1852 to reveal polygamy as the official doctrine of the LDS, despite the fact that Young and his followers insisted that Joseph Smith had received revelation on polygamy in 1843.
History is written by the victors, and the victors have no need for consistency in their version of events. They hold the power to make lies the truth. This was a hard-won lesson for Brigham Young and his acolytes. Young recognized that if his church was to survive-if his narratives were to prevail-that the Latter Day Saints would need to move from the fringes to the center. He dispatched his most capable men and women throughout the territories of the Western United States to accomplish that goal.
Saints would no longer be primarily concerned with eternal matters; instead, they would set their efforts to temporal concerns like political power, and they would entrench themselves in political offices in Arizona, California, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and elsewhere. David King Udall’s bloodline would be of central importance to this journey from the fringes to the centers of temporal power.
In Arizona, David King Udall’s children would be instrumental in moving the LDS from the fringes to the center. His son Levi Stewart Udall would marry Louisa Lee, the granddaughter of John D. Lee and Jacob Hamblin, and upon passing the Arizona bar exam in 1922, he became an attorney. He succeeded his father as stake president in St. Johns in 1922, and he continued as stake president until 1945. In 1946, Levi Udall became an Arizona Supreme Court justice, eventually rising to become the Chief Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court.
When he died on May 30, 1960, his brother Jesse Addison Udall, previously a member of the Arizona House of Representatives, and a Superior Court judge for Graham County, was appointed to replace him. The Udall family held a seat on the Arizona Supreme Court from 1947 to 1972. Jesse’s grandson Gordon H. Smith went on to become one of Oregon’s U.S. senators.
Levi Stewart Udall’s sons Stewart and Mo Udall were both U.S. congressmen, and his grandson Mark Udall was a U.S. Senator from Colorado and a congressman, while his grandson Tom Udall served as U.S. Senator for New Mexico after a stint as congressman.
The Lees managed to produce Rex E. Lee, Solicitor General of the United States, later the dean of BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School. Rex’s son Mike Lee is now one of Utah’s U.S. Senators, serving alongside Mitt Romney. Mike Lee is the first cousin, once removed of Stewart Lee Udall, and the second cousin of Thomas Stewart Udall.
If the end result is any indication, Brigham Young had a knack for recognizing talent among his followers. The decisions he made to send those men out to build his kingdom in Utah, Arizona, and elsewhere resulted in entrenched positions of power from state governments all the way to the federal government. Utah’s former governor Mike Leavitt is a distant relation of the Udalls, Lees, and Hamblins through Priscilla Leavitt Hamblin, sister of Lemuel S. Leavitt, the great great grandfather of Mike and David Okerlund Leavitt.
It was these bloodlines that moved the Latter Day Saints from the fringes to the center of power, making it possible for the claims of Rachel Hamblin and her sisters to true. Those bloodlines also produced the Bangerters, specifically Utah Governor Norman Bangerter, who brother William Grant Bangerter married Geraldine Hamblin. Two Utah governors, multiple U.S. Senators, chief justices in Arizona, elected state representatives in Arizona, Utah, California, and elsewhere: the bloodlines of the alleged LDS Church of Satan produced the path for Saints to move from the fringes to the center, and in doing so, those pathways provided the means for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days to move into the mainstream of America’s faith traditions.
The California Connection
Jefferson Hunt, the grandfather of David King Udall’s wife Ida Frances Hunt, was a man of singular focus and drive. Hunt joined the Mormon Battalion, which had been formed at the United States government’s request due to the Mexican-American War. His company marched all the way to San Diego, California, but Hunt settled in Salt Lake City after the war. Brigham Young needed supplies for his Saints in Utah, and so Jefferson Hunt began guiding supply expeditions to California, along with gold prospectors. By 1851, Brigham Young saw fit to dispatch Hunt to San Bernardino, California, where he started an LDS colony and went on to serve in the California Assembly.
Hunt’s legislation resulted in the formation of San Bernardino California, which he served in the California Assembly. The San Bernardino colony served as a vital supply source for Utah’s incoming Saints, who needed food, which the cattle ranchers of San Bernardino were happy to supply. 900 of the 1,200 residents in San Bernardino were Mormons, and they built the streets and roads and parks and squares of the new city. The problems of the past resurfaced, when Brigham Young recalled his followers to Salt Lake in 1957, fearing a possible exodus from Utah to better prospects in California.
When Jefferson Hunt returned, he founded Huntsville, Utah. He later served as Weber County’s representative in the Utah Territorial Legislature.
His great grandsons served as mayors in Phoenix, legislators in Arizona, and 3rd grandsons Gordon Smith and Milan Dale Smith, Jr. were U.S. Senator for Oregon and a U.S. 9th Circuit Judge. Jefferson Hunt’s foray into California paved the way for Saints to settle in that state, despite Brigham Young’s recall.
The Hamblin Allegations in Context
The LDS Church of Satan believed in the doctrine of a pre-mortal existence, which is the orthodox doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The LDS Church of Satan’s spin on this doctrine placed Lucifer above Christ as the Firstborn Son of the Father in the spirit, the rightful heir to Heavenly Father or Jehovah. Within the mainline LDS, those who followed Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness as outlined in Abraham 3:22-26 within the Pearl of Great Price were to proceed from their spiritual pre-mortal existence to obtain physical bodies, which they would inhabit on the earth. They would progress with free agency to choose Heavenly Father’s plan and follow his commandments, and thereby achieve exaltation in the Celestial, or highest level, of Heaven.
The journey from the fringes to the center outlined in the preceding sections would have implications for the CS’s claims that they had “Gate Keepers” positioned throughout the world. The family lineages outlined in the preceding sections tend to confirm this as a valid possibility. The Hamblin family’s connections extended to U.S. Senators, state level Supreme Court judges, federal court judges, congressmen, mayors of major cities, state legislators, and the like. The relationships between those founding families of the LDS and the patterns of marriage still occur in the modern era, as seen in Lee Udall’s marriage to Joe Bennion and her sister Sara’s marriage to Noel Clyde Sullivan. Lee and Sara were already David Lee Hamblin’s fourth cousins; the marriage of Sara Inez Udall to Noel Clyde Sullivan put her in matrimonial union with David Lee Hamblin’s in-laws through his mother in-law Carma de Jong and her sister Nola de Jong Sullivan, Noel’s mother. The trend towards matrimonial consolidation continued in the present day.
This would tend to confirm the claims made by Rachel Hamblin about the bloodlines of the CS. The concern with bloodlines played into the ordinances of the CS with regards to incestuous conceptions and abortions.
Rachel Hamblin’s parents and grandparents emphasized conceiving only with certain bloodlines, because the bloodlines were the power of the CS. This idea dated back to Brigham Young’s February 22, 1852 sermon:
“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 whole world are at the same thing, and will be as long as man exists upon the earth.”
It would not be the last time Brigham Young delivered remarks that could be seen as sanctioning incest in order to affirm the purity of LDS bloodlines. On October 8, 1854, Young delivered his infamous Adam-God discourse:
Then I reckon that the children of Adam and Eve married each other; this is speaking to the point. I believe in sisters marrying brothers, and brothers having their sisters for wives. Why? because we cannot do otherwise. There are none others for me to marry but my sisters.
Brigham Young taught that it was preferable for incestuous marriages to occur than to entertain the idea of Saints marrying non-Saints. The non-Saints fell under the declaration of Heavenly Father to Joseph Smith: “All other creeds are an abomination.” Those who followed creeds outside of the LDS were corrupted, unworthy of intermarrying with Saints.
From the perspective of the LDS Church of Satan, they would have been following an originalist, faithful view of Brigham Young’s teachings. Their bloodlines were too important, too precious, to be mixed with the bloodlines of those who followed the mainline LDS’s teachings. The bloodlines of David Lee Hamblin and his relatives were not to be corrupted by mixture with non-CS families, or even with CS families of lower rank.
Children conceived by incestuous unions between fathers and daughters were spiritually significant in the context of abortion. They were, as David and Roselle Hamblin put it to their daughters, “pure, blood children” that would increase their spirit family’s ranks in Satan’s kingdom. Since mothers within the CS took the lead in fertility ceremonies with male children, it is conceivable that mothers were conceiving children by their sons in the same manner.
Far from being a hindrance, each incestuously conceived child would have added to the ranks of the spiritual armies the LDS Church of Satan members believed were waiting on them in Lucifer’s Kingdom. The importance of bloodlines is repeatedly stressed in Rachel Hamblin’s Victim Statement, as her grandmother Carma de Jong performed a matriarchal blessing that decreed Rachel would desire the purity of the family’s bloodline:
Rachel Hamblin claimed that she and her sisters were forced to engage in an LDS ceremony twice a month to form the “Chain of Lucifer,” which Hamblin referred to as “a ceremony of the bloodline.”
A few nights before her marriage to Tyler David Jones, the son of LDS CS member Jeffrey and Janae Jones, Rachel Hamblin was taken to a girl’s night sleepover where her female relatives extolled the virtues of the family bloodline.
The bloodline is central to the CS. Rachel Hamblin’s parents and grandparents stressed how their familial bloodline depended on Rachel and her sisters carrying forth the mantle into the future.
Without the children of the various CS bloodlines, there was no hope for the CS to continue its work into the future. There would be no Triumph for those bloodlines in Lucifer’s Kingdom, or there would only be a reduced level of Triumph. The ranks of the families who progressed from the mortal, physical world to the Outer Darkeness Kingdom of Lucifer would be negatively impacted if their children did not carry on the work of the CS.
The bloodlines had a temporal concern and an eternal significance. The temporal concern was raising children to positions of power as adults within local, state, and federal government agencies. These would be the Gatekeepers who could intercede to protect the CS from exposure. The eternal concern was raising a righteous seed, as David Lee Hamblin put it, to Lucifer, so that the bloodlines would prosper in the eternal kingdom of Lucifer.
Conclusion
In the process of carrying out their beliefs, the members of the CS committed any number of crimes. The examples in the previous section detail forcible rape, sodomy, and incest. The allusions to Gatekeepers interfering in criminal investigations into those activities implicates the CS in obstruction of justice and public corruption.
The reason it is important to place the CS against the backdrop of a historical context is simple: the allegations made by Rachel Hamblin and her sisters are sensational, arguably too sensational, for a jury of ordinary individuals to buy. Those allegations must be decoded, demystified, and placed into a logical framework that follows from facts. By placing the allegations about bloodlines and Gatekeepers into a genealogical context, those who research the Hamblin case can present evidence for the plausibility of the Hamblin children’s allegations. That evidence can show how the current alleged members of the CS like Joe and Lee Bennion, David and Chelom Leavitt, and countless others fit into the multigenerational patterns of the alleged LDS Church of Satan.
Connecting that history, and its emphasis on bloodlines, with the teachings of Brigham Young, can demonstrate that the CS, much like other polygamist and fundamentalist offshoots of the mainline LDS are claiming an originalist version of the LDS’s doctrine while dismissing the current church’s doctrine as a bastardized and even heretical form of teaching. Polygamy, even incestuous polygamy, is something these groups believe trumps current law and current LDS doctrine, because the spiritual significance of bloodlines and the eternal implications of those bloodlines is of paramount importance for the CS and its sister groups.
The higher law argument of these groups is nothing unfamiliar to the ordinary men and women who would make up a jury. It’s a story juries in Utah, Arizona, and other states have heard time and time again. It makes the sensational aspects of Rachel Hamblin’s accusations seem ordinary, even banal. The LDS Church of Satan is merely yet another group claiming such nonsense in its justification of child sexual abuse, rape, and even murder. It’s not a new story. It’s the same story, told yet again, in slightly different terms.
Stripping the CS of its mystique and sensationalism will be central to obtaining convictions against its members for their criminal wrongs. It will also be central to obtaining civil judgements that can financially cripple the group and its membership going forward. That is why the bloodlines matter, and that is why the research matters, and it is also why the context of bloodlines and families will matter going forward.
Rachel Tamar Hamblin was the daughter of Jacob Hamblin, who had married Sarah Priscilla Leavitt on September 11, 1857.
pp. 257-280.
I’ve known about protecting the “bloodlines” my whole, life but reading this is still eye opening. Super important work & research you are doing, my friend. I am deeply grateful to you. Please spend some time in the sunshine these next few days, you probably really need a break from this stuff - it’s so dark and heavy. I’m sending my gratitude. Thank you!
I wonder if there's a connection between skull and bones (and other secret societies), polygamy, and the cs. The polygamy thing Brigham did also mirrors what king Noah did to foster up support... Interesting. I also wonder if the church will ever allow polygamy. Same sex marriage in the temples is obvious, but would polygamy be practiced again? I suspect it will but don't have the proof.