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Why Did Homeland Security Protect David Leavitt?
Over the past month, Investigations in Ritual Abuse received information from three separate sources that the Department of Homeland Security instructed the Utah County Sheriff’s Office to back off of their original target in the Hamblin case, none other than Utah County Attorney David Okerlund Leavitt. Despite Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith’s public assertions to the contrary, David Leavitt was the original and primary target of the current UCSO investigation into allegations of ritual abuse. Leavitt’s June 2022 press conference was allegedly spurred by his receipt of a 150 plus page victims statement from a reporter who asked him about the allegations within that statement.
The reality is that David Leavitt’s name appears in the police reports from the Provo Police Department’s 2012 to 2014 investigation of David Lee Hamblin as a person of interest. The original GRAMA release by the Provo Police is incomplete, in that it omits the sections of police reports referring to David Leavitt’s role in the allegations against Hamblin and the alleged LDS Church of Satan. Additionally, the Victims Statements clearly have omissions, as subject matter is missing between paragraphs. IRA has filed GRAMA requests with various law enforcement agencies to recover the omitted sections.
The sources IRA has spoken to are in agreement that David Leavitt was the target of the investigation, and that David Hamblin’s arrest was a strategic effort on the part of the UCSO and the prosecutors to potentially flip Hamblin on Leavitt. However, the Department of Homeland Security interfered and ordered UCSO to back off of David Leavitt as a target of the criminal investigation, and two of the sources reference David Leavitt’s work in Ukraine as the stated reason for DHS’s interference.
David Lee Hamblin is represented by Michael Petro and Leah Ashton, and Petro has ties to David Leavitt’s nonprofit, having served as a visiting criminal and constitutional law professor in 2006 and 2007 for the Leavitt Institute for International Development in Kiev, Ukraine. The question of who paid for David Hamblin’s legal fees is as yet unanswered, because Hamblin claimed that he could not afford to retain Leah Ashton and Michael Petro during his last hearing in Manti, while simultaneously indicating that he could pay for a private company to monitor his GPS and geofencing if he were to be granted bail.
Harvey » Thu Aug 10, 2023 4:04 pm wrote:Reading this thread again in light of recently re-reading Bruce Robinson's They All Love Jack, I have to say, all the salient features of this case are very starkly familiar and nothing new. No matter how many good people there are within them, the existence of secret societies will always warp and distort the culture unfavourably against the many who are not initiates. How could it be otherwise?
Mooney lived with his wife in a duplex in Spanish Fork, forty-five minutes south of Linda’s. Mooney’s stepdaughter, in her thirties, answered the door and led us through a kitchen decorated with woven baskets and blankets, then to a pergola in the backyard, where we sat in deck chairs around a fire pit. Mooney appeared from the kitchen after us, light on his feet, seeming younger than his seventy-eight years. His gray hair, which hung to mid-chest, was tossed over one shoulder, and he wore a button-down and cargo shorts. He shook my hand, looking me up and down. “I want to know about you,” he said with a gravity that conveyed real interest. Then he talked for more than an hour in long loops, a solar system of digressions, without asking a question.
“Can I ask some questions?” I finally interjected.
He fixed his eyes on me like he was considering how much to divulge. “You didn’t say anything about the CIA stuff?” His question was for Linda, who had fallen asleep.
“Nope,” she replied drowsily.
“What I’m going to share with you is going to blow your mind,” Mooney said.
In 1982, he told me, six years before he first used peyote, during a long layover in Los Angeles, he decided to tour the neighborhood where he’d grown up, and there he encountered an old classmate who mentioned events of which Mooney had no recollection. He realized then that all memories from his childhood had been mysteriously erased (never mind that he had just brought himself to his childhood home). The cause of this amnesia, he elaborated, was that he had been drafted as a child into a federal program to train assassins and had been assigned to kill people all over the world. After being injured in Vietnam, he’d undergone “deprogramming” to forget that any of it had ever happened—a tale remarkably similar to the backstory of the Bourne movie franchise.
After our meeting, Mooney would send me selections of his autobiographical writing, some of which was not meant to be factual, he said. I would try to interview him twice more. When I asked why he believed it was essential to share peyote with white people, he told me about the “peace” the drug brought him. “People need this medicine, regardless if they’re Indian, Caucasian, African, Asian,” he said, then began an unrelated monologue. In August, he would leave me a voicemail saying, “I am very interested in seeing you financially successful.” After that, I gave up.
When I asked Linda what she thought of Mooney’s stories, she said, “I just accept James for James. Gent will tell you he’s a liar. But James isn’t. He’s the visionary, so he’s going to create the vision.”
Kate Talley first met David Hamblin in 2008 when her former sister-in-law introduced her to the disgraced former therapist turned wannabe medicine man and accused sexual abuser. Talley was seeking counseling relating to her own experience with ritualistic sexual abuse. When she first met Hamblin she was married to Eldon Talley, a knife maker based in Utah.
Over time, Hamblin came to greatly influence her now former husband. Kate Talley told The Last American Vagabond (TLAV) that Hamblin held his so-called “healing circles” at her and Eldon’s home in American Fork, Utah for several years. Hamblin’s circles are suspected to have played a role in his ongoing sexual abuse, just as he has been accused of using hypnosis during therapy sessions to accomplish his abuse.
“Hamblin is most definitely a cult leader. He’s a very dangerous man. He convinced Eldon that he (Hamblin) is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ.,” Talley stated.
Talley says David Hamblin told her ex-husband that he was also a reincarnation of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, as well as a reincarnation of Orrin Porter Rockwell, the bodyguard of Smith who was known to have killed many people in the American West.
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Kate Talley says she first went to her bishop in the Mormon Church to seek guidance for her memories of ritual abuse. She says her bishop said they would try to help and encouraged her to call the church’s “help line”. Two weeks later she met with the bishop again and was told there was nothing he could do for her.
Ultimately, she decided to leave the church in 2007 as she sought help elsewhere. Shortly after leaving the church, her husband at the time, Eldon Talley, and his sister, would recommend David Hamblin’s “healing circles”. After participating in the circles and witnessing the influence Hamblin had over her then-husband, Kate began to express her concerns to Eldon.
“What Hamblin was doing was mind control and hypnosis,” Kate Talley tells TLAV today. She told Eldon she no longer wanted to participate in Hamblin’s circles. She says Eldon forced her to go to the circles regardless. “At the time it felt like he was choosing his creepy medicine man over his wife,” she says.
“When I spoke up to my ex-husband about my true feelings towards Hamblin, Eldon & David began a ‘treatment’ for me called ‘putting my bitch skin in the fire’. It was really horrible,” Talley said. She says this “treatment” involved gaslighting, financial control, silent treatment, and humiliation in front of a group of people at the “healing circle”. Hamblin also forced her to reenact her past traumas to “heal” her with his “righteous seed”.
Kate Talley would be witness to the first arrest and attend court hearings for David Hamblin relating to accusations of ritualistic child abuse. “I went to all the hearings and there were a group of people who believed David Hamblin was a 100% innocent,” Talley told TLAV.
She says at the time she was still “kind of captive and under Eldon’s control”. She also says that Eldon supported David Hamblin financially through his previous case, sending him money every week while he was in jail. “He might have given him in the hundreds of thousands of dollars by now.”
In 2014, the charges against Hamblin would be dismissed without prejudice, meaning they can be refiled again at some point in the future. However, the current two sets of charges against Hamblin do not directly relate to the 2012 case.
When the case was dismissed, Kate Talley says it was viewed by Hamblin’s supporters as vindication. She remembers Hamblin framing the case as the result of a volatile divorce where his kids were “turned against him”. When questioned about the claims of sex abuse with his patients, Kate Talley says Hamblin admitted to the sexual abuse, but said he had repented for his actions.
“I know David Hamblin is guilty of a few of the things in the witness statements (from the 2012 case), because he told me he was,” Kate Talley told TLAV. “But he admitted to me & Eldon that he ‘used to have very out of balance sexual energy’ and he told me about having sex with his patients when he was a licensed psychologist in Utah. And also before that in New York. He worked at Cornell Medical Center in New York. He left after a big scandal.”
Kate Talley says her family were “a little bit of the ‘who’s who’ of Mormonism”. She traces her family’s lineage back to Nauvoo, Illinois and the founding families of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church. Nauvoo was the center of the Latter Day Saints movement during Joseph Smith’s life. After his death, most of the LDS believers would follow Brigham Young to Utah.
“I grew up with this really strong, rich pioneer history. We had been taught about the Mormon church and the founders,” Talley says. “I grew up being really proud of my roots and where I was from.”
However, it was from within this family that Kate Talley would experience the abuse which changed her life. While growing up in Payson, Utah, Talley says she was regularly abused by her grandfather from the age of 2 to 11 years old. The abuse only ended when her grandfather died.
“My dad’s father — who was the one that was abusive to me, him and his friends and the cult that he met with — he was the son of a doctor in the little town of Richfield, Utah,” Talley told TLAV.
Kate Talley’s grandfather was born into the the Mormon Church. He would eventually serve in the Army Special Forces during the Korean War. “It’s my belief that he was trained, with the Special Forces in the military, in the MK Ultra program,” Talley says. “I think it’s important to understand that the abuse I suffered was kind of, high grade, military abuse, including torture.”
Talley’s grandfather was also a pharmacist in Utah. Talley describes being drugged by him beginning at a very young age. She says these experiences lead to substance abuse issues later in life which she has since recovered from. “I know this played a part in my looking for something to numb my pain,” Talley stated.
“I know from speaking with members of my family that my grandfather was also abused, and so was his brother,” she says. “One of the reasons I am speaking up is because this is an ancestral problem and it’s passed down in the Mormon Church, and I think all churches a lot.”
On August 30, 2023, the waiver hearing for Roselle Stevenson, formerly known as Roselle Anderson Hamblin, was conducted. IRA was unable to do live coverage because the court had omitted a Webex link to the hearing. As a result, there was no way to watch the hearing remotely.
During the hearing, Roselle managed to obtain bail of cash or surety for $10,000, with the stipulation that she wear an ankle monitor. AMP will be monitoring her release, and she is barred from leaving the state of Utah without court permission, and she is barred from contact with anyone under 18 years of age. Roselle Stevenson is also barred from possessing a firearm and she is ordered to avoid attending hearings where Emily Elisabeth Sheets is present as a result of two separate protective orders.
Emily Sheets is the victim in the current case against Roselle Stevenson, and she is the daughter of Dave and Deborah Sheets, who are both named as members of the LDS Church of Satan in the Hamblin Victims Statements. IRA was aware of her status as one of the victims in the current Hamblin investigation, but we did not publish because her name was previously unknown to the public. However, the protective order in the current case against Roselle Stevenson references Emily by name.
That’s the update for now, and the next profile IRA will publish this coming week will be on Emily Sheets’s parents, Dave and Deborah Sheets. To the readers who supported us and answered the call this past week with subscriptions and donations, thank you so much. We will be opening up the archives later this week as a result, so no paywall. Thank you.
For the survivors who read this, we need your stories. If you or someone you know has information about David Lee Hamblin and his alleged accomplices, contact us as @Goel1830 on Telegram or at 1830goel@gmail.com.
“Some scholars are convinced that such groups have existed for centuries. Their abusive cult activities may co-exist side by side with traditional worship; that is, members may publicly practice an established, respected religion. The members are often well-known and respected within their larger communities.”
“Evidence has been uncovered to support the thought that individuals have in the past, and are now committing crime in the name of Satan or other deity. The allegations of organized satanists, even groups of satanists who have permeated every level of government and religion were unsubstantiated.
Clearly, crimes involving sexual and physical abuse are occurring. Evidence in the state supports the notion that ritual crime can exist, even on a large scale as in the Zion Society case in Ogden. Police agencies from across the state have the burden of evaluating and investigating all allegations that come to their attention.”
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