"A lot to unpack here."
I'm surprised there hasn't been any discussion of this case here yet, but I've also been holding off on starting a thread for weeks now. Like a lot of curious cats around this beautiful country, I was first hipped to this strange saga when one David Okerlund Leavitt, County Attorney for Utah County, Utah and running for a contested re-election, held a perhaps inadvisable press conference to assure all & sundry that he was not, in fact, a child-molesting cannibal. That was Wednesday, June 1st.
He referred to a 151 page document that outlined accusations of an abuse / CSAM ring involving over a dozen families, claimed it was an "outlandish" "pack of lies," and insinuated it was only being brought up because of a fugitive from a 2008 rape charge in Utah who faked his own death. This is, I regret, only the very beginning.
However, after many unpleasant evenings and days of working the angles and following leads, there is without question something concrete here, and that is the case of David Lee Hamblin, licensed clinical psychologist, fake peyote church medicine man, and serial abuser creepshow.
The personage of Nicholas Alahverdian aka Nicholas Rossi aka "Arthur Knight" is a thread unto himself but quite tangential to this story, despite his daily efforts to make himself the center of it. His biography has some very curious details, one of which involves Boys Town in Nebraska, but I am unable to verify a word of it.
The personage of David Leavitt is implicated in three of the victim testimonies, all of them Grand Guignol lurid. By his own admission, he knew Hamblin while the alleged abuse was taking place, stating in the press conference that "This therapist was my elders quorum president in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was my neighbor. I had a family connection."
Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith has been clear all along that the case his department is currently investigating is focused on Hamblin, not allegations of a larger cult / abuse ring. The case is driven not by the statements from Hamblin's daughters, filed in 2012, but by the statement from Brett Bluth. I believe but cannot confirm that statement is from 2013, and was later corroborated by a 2015 call from another victim of Hamblin, who described a very similar M.O., and was participating in Hamblin's peyote-based "therapy" group.
(This was incorporated in 2011 as TAHTEYA TOPA (FOUR WINDS) NATIVE AMERICAN CHURCH with Eldon Talley and Wayne Jones Hintze. Talley is a knife maker of much repute, and Hintze has an eminently spooky and typically Mormon/IC bio. Talley's daughter has blogged about Hamblin being her "medicine man" circa 2007.)
The allegations against Hamblin are a contradictory spectrum. Abuse charges involving his daughters were initially filed in 2000, while Hamblin and his then-wife, Roselle Anderson, were going through a protracted and contested divorce. While these statements are horrific, detailing years of abuse beginning in infancy, they do not include any mention of a larger abuse network, and do not identify Roselle Anderson as a perpetrator.
The 2012 charges are much different, outlining the familiar contours of a multi-family, inter-generational, Satanic Ritual Abuse network. Roselle Anderson is identified as a (particularly sadistic) perpetrator along with her parents. Many other prominent Provo area families are also mentioned, with surprisingly few redactions along the way since many of them are now deceased. Many atrocities and murders are described along the way.
Then there is the Brett Bluth material: he was referred to Hamblin by his Bishop, Conrad Cotfredson of the Alpine stake. He was fighting with the realization he was homosexual and wanted an alternative to "conversion therapy." He states that Hamblin insisted 1) he was being successfully hypnotized (Bluth does not believe this) and 2) during these inducted trance states, he related a detailed story of being raised in a Satanic Ritual Abuse cult.
This escalated until Hamblin was sexually assaulting Bluth, in his office, in order to "heal" him. This pattern of abuse is corroborated by the 2015 statement from the peyote group caller, and according to police reports, corroborated by additional witnesses there are (to my knowledge) no FOIA releases or documentation for.
While it may seem at first glance that all these different narratives cannot be true, from a strategic perspective, there is a clear utility in abusing the client-therapist power dynamic to seed false SRA allegations while you yourself are actively engaged in actual SRA activity. That said, I personally remain agnostic on the overall murky landscape here, but have become certain there's definitely something strange afoot in Zion.
A couple final points. I have multiple documents going and I'm wrapping up the first draft of a timeline, but I'm not trying to write an essay here, just start a thread.
1. LDS has been dealing with SRA allegations for decades, some of which are credible, and a disturbing number of those credible cases overlap with the same locations and families. All of the many problems that plague SRA cases apply here. At a minimum, though, it is clear that the Mormon hierarchy has had a system set up for decades now in order to cover up child abuse cases "in house" rather than report felony abuse to law enforcement. So at a minimum, then, this is what Leavitt is responding to: the need to protect one of the wealthiest and most powerful institutions in the United States from billions upon billions of dollars of litigation.
2. David Leavitt is likely a State Dept / CIA spook who has been involved with ongoing operations in Ukraine. He runs a nonprofit charity front, The Leavitt Institute for International Development (site), in cooperation with the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). His work brought him to Ukraine just before the Orange Revolution, where his office overlooked Independence Square. He later had to leave in a rush. He was also in a rush to get to his apartment in Kyiv to "secure documents" and "collect some personal effects" as the latest conflict with Russia broke out. Then he was looking to find 500 families on behalf of an anonymous donor to get out of Ukraine and into the United States. Just regular County Attorney things.
3. David Leavitt's older brother Michael was Governor of Utah for three terms, as well as a Bush admin appointee and a confidant to the Romney family and campaign.
4. The history of "peyote churches" in the Southwest is packed with weird shit, cult fronts, intelligence assets, and the usual cornucopia of organized crime activity that takes advantage of The Rez no matter what the tribe. In this specific case, Hamblin's long-standing access to peyote, and track record of using it to manipulate others, needs to be considered in connection with the more lurid and occult aspects of the victim testimony.
5. Finally, Hamblin's wife indicated in a statement to the court that she found out David Hamblin led a parallel life, complete with wives, in the Manti polygamy abuse network run by James Harmson, the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ Saints of the Last Days. Harmson is also indicated as a cult perpetrator in the 2012 era testimony of Hamblin's daughters. I have not had the time yet to engage with the abundant material surrounding this monster or his, uh, "church" yet.
