In the News

People often ask me, "But haven't you ever come across a real case of ritual abuse?". The answer is yes, I have. And I can tell you this: Almost without exception, that ritual abuse has involved small Christian cults, rather than international Satanic ones. For example, the Hosanna Church cult in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, was originally branded a Satanic cult that ritually abused children, but victims who testified at the trial of pastor Louis Lamonica Jr. mentioned only ritual abuse committed in a Christian context.
Now we have even graver allegations being made against a young Bible study leader in Kansas City, Missouri. Micah Moore, 22, has been charged with the murder of nurse Bethany Deaton, 27, and claims that he was persuaded to kill her by Bethany's own husband, Tyler Deaton. Tyler is an "ex-gay" who has headed a small, tight-knit Christian group for the past several years. Some members are so devoted to Tyler that they followed him from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, to his current home in Kansas City. Tyler and Bethany had been married for just three months when she died. Bethany's death on October 30 initially appeared to be a suicide (her body was found in a van parked near Longview Lake, a plastic bag over her head). No one suspected otherwise until Moore turned himself in earlier this month. He told police that Tyler has been engaging in "spiritual sex" with several of the young men who share his house, and that he routinely drugged Bethany so that his followers could rape her. Moore even claimed to possess video footage of these sexual assaults. Fearful that Bethany would tell her therapist about what was going on, Tyler approached Micah with the idea of murdering her and disguising her death as a suicide.
At this early stage, it's possible that Moore's story will turn out to be false. Maybe he killed his leader's wife on his own and pinned the blame on Tyler. However, at least three of the Deatons' four roommates have confirmed that Tyler was having sex with them and that he termed these relations "spiritual". The fourth roommate feels he was being groomed to become one of Tyler's sexual partners.
In Texas, Tyler felt that the official student clubs at Southwestern University weren't hardcore enough for him, so he formed his own independent group. Members would spend hours of every day in the campus chapel, praying and singing under Tyler's direction. They also engaged in "holy laughter", and attempted faith healing of severely disabled people on at least two occasions. Tyler preached to his group about the evils of homosexuality, claiming he "overcame" his own gay orientation through the power of Christ. By the end of the 2008-2009 school year, Southwestern administrators were so troubled by the group's activities that they denied Deaton further use of the chapel. That's when Tyler, Bethany, and several young men decided to relocate to a more sympathetic school, the International House of Prayer University in Kansas City. In Missouri, Bethany and Tyler attended Forerunner Christian Fellowship Church. They married in August of this year.
If the allegations made by Micah Moore are true, then a murderous Christian sex cult has been active on the campus of a Christian university for the past three years, engaging in ritualistic sex and rape under the direction of a charismatic but deranged leader. Will we call this group's practices "Christian ritual abuse"? Or will we continue to insist that abusive sexual practices are the exclusive domain of Satanists, when all evidence indicates that Satanic crime is, in fact, far less common than Christian crime? When you think about it, this makes sense. There are far fewer Satanists in America than Christians, so the rate of crimes committed by Christians should be much higher than the rate of crimes committed by Satanists. This includes sexual abuse and murder.

Another Forerunner was in the news this week, when 19-year-old Two and a Half Men star Angus T. Jones declared in a video produced by The Forerunner Chronicles that he feels terrible about being on a show that is "filth" and might even be contributing to Satan's plan to subvert humanity. He urged Americans to avoid television altogether, in fact. He has since qualified his remarks, stating that he has a lot of respect for everyone who works on the show; he considers them members of his family. He has not attempted to explain how a program produced by such good people can be a tool of the Devil.
The man who appears beside Jones in the video is Christopher "Forerunner" Hudson, a YouTuber who believes that Jay-Z is a Satan-worshiping Freemason. Hudson also buys into and promotes a broad range of conspiracy nonsense: The death of Osama bin Laden was faked, Michael Jackson's death was engineered to distract the world from the Pope's plea for a New World Order, etc. 

Charisma magazine is the most popular Christian magazine in the world. Despite its conservative slant, the articles featured in it are usually timely and concisely written, with little of the bombast you'll see on TV programs like The 700 Club or Jack Van Impe Presents. What, then, shall we make of a recent article titled "Can You Be Raped by the Devil?", which claims that the Medieval notion of succubi and incubi invading our bedrooms at night is valid, and that the content of our dreams can be influenced by these demons? The article, which relies heavily on the anecdotal accounts of one former stripper, even suggests that sexual orientation can be altered by sexual demons. Does ancient superstition such as this really belong in the world's foremost Christian publication, read by millions? What is this teaching the younger readers of the magazine - that every wet dream they experience in adolescence is actually a visitation from a demon bent on making them gay?

The Return of Doug Riggs

Satanic ritual abuse and "Nephilim hybrids" in Oklahoma

On the August 16th-17th broadcast of Coast to Coast AM, guest L.A. Marzulli was nattering on about endtime prophecy, natural disasters, and a Great Deception involving aliens or the Illuminati or something. I wasn't really listening. Then he said this: According to two researchers who contacted him recently, at least two American women claiming to be victims of Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) have reported that the Satanists took them to Mount Hermon to be impregnated by fallen angels, which Marzulli referred to as the Nephilim of Genesis 6:4 (I'm not even sure if the Nephilim are supposed to be the same "sons of God" that mated with human women, or giants unrelated to the angels, or the offspring of angels and women, but that's a different post). The researchers who alerted Marzulli to this story had no vested interest in the matter, he insisted.
Marzulli then hinted that the hybrid offspring of these women have some connection to the alien breeding program, and that the Nephilim are keeping them at an offworld location.
"Will they bring them back at some point?" host George Noory asked.
"Yes, they will," Marzulli replied without hesitation.

So I Googled "Nephilim ritual abuse" and found a recent online radio interview with Pastor Doug Riggs, described as a friend of L.A. Marzulli. The subject was "Nephilim Mothers".
The name Doug Riggs was very familiar to me, but I couldn't recall precisely why. I rifled through some notes. Sure enough, I had jotted down a bit of info on the guy. A month or two ago I had stumbled upon a documentary from 1994, In Satan's Name, which originally aired on HBO. Riggs and his Morningstar Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were featured in the film's most memorable and disturbing segment.

In 1994, no fewer than 14 members of Morningstar Church believed they had been brought up in Satanism, were horrifically abused as children, and had Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). All of this was based on repressed memories they recovered while in "counseling" with Pastor Riggs, during sessions lasting up to 19 hours in length. Please keep in mind that we're not talking about Okie bumpkins, here. These were reasonably intelligent, middle-class people who seriously should have known better.
To be fair, Morningstar didn't look like a cult. Riggs was a poised, handsome man with graying hair and a mellow voice. He spoke knowledgeably about psychology. It's no wonder that parishioners turned to him for pastoral counseling unrelated to Satanism or abuse (marital trouble, eating disorders, etc.).
From 1985 on, these counselees began recovering memories of horrific, lifelong ritual abuse at the hands of Satanists. Namely their own parents. And after 1991, when Riggs learned about MPD (now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder), they began to discover they had hundreds, even thousands, of separate personalities because of the Satanic ritual abuse. Riggs told them that every single one of their alters could be possessed by demons.
Counseling was conducted in a large room with a mattress on the floor, so counselees could go through abreactions without hurting themselves. Riggs would lay on top of the person when abreactions became intense, while helpers held the person's arms and legs. In this way, counseling and deliverance from demonic possession were merged into a single process. In one filmed session with a 30ish man, Riggs ordered a demon out of his body ("Explode the seals!") while the man writhed and convulsed on the mattress, growling obscenities.
Ultimately, Riggs concluded that all these people had been victimized by the same Satanic cult, led by a man named Joe (father of one of the parishioners, Pam), and that God had brought the victims together at Morningstar to be healed. Joe supposedly conducted powerful rituals for high government officials (including leaders of the Soviet Union), the Vatican, even heads of state. The narrator of In Satan's Name explains that in reality, Joe was a Nebraska salesman who had never left his home state. He died during filming.
Needless to say, the allegations tore apart families. A graceful, soft-spoken couple in their 60s, Jim and Fran Field, mourned the loss of their daughter Cynthia to what they considered a destructive, all-consuming cult.

This was as far as In Satan's Name took the story, but I soon learned that the situation at Morningstar was even stranger.
A testimony written in 1999 by 49-year-old Morningstar member Kim Campbell starts out as boilerplate SRA stuff. Campbell explains that Satanism, "as old as mankind itself", is a blend of Sumero-Akkadian/Babylonian mystery religions, Kabbala, and Paganism. "The culture is unbelievably and ingeniously evil; virutally everything about the culture is humanly damaging." Kim was subjected not only to "every abuse, trauma, and demonization imaginable within satanism", but to "medically-based mind control programming" at U.S. government facilities, clinics, and the Tavistock Institute (a favourite bugaboo in the world of conspiracy theory). Half of his waking preschool life was spent "being indoctrinated and incested". This realization came to him after 18 months of therapy with Pastor Riggs.
It isn't until page 7 of the testimony that shit gets seriously weird. Kim drops this bombshell: His real father was Edouard Philippe de Rothschild, and Kim was the "bastard son...of occult incest", indicating his mom Lula (who died in 1977) had some relation to the Rothschilds. Kim spent much of his childhood and adolescence on his dad's French estate, and was brought up in homosexual incest. He thought it was normal, even admirable.
Edouard despised God and loved humanity with equal passion. "Such was the true generational core of my ancestral iniquity and, being a Rothschild descendant, it was maximally demonized." As all Satanists do, Edouard introduced his son to Christianity, "with none other than Herr Josef Mengele himself coaching him over his shoulder." Kim was being groomed to infiltrate the Protestant church. As Riggs declared, the members of Morningstar Church "had come together to live in such a way as to hasten the Lord's coming for His Bride, but we also had been constituted in the occult to frustrate the will of God for the Church and bring the antichrist instead."

Wow. Just wow. Somehow, Doug Riggs convinced most of his 30-40 parishioners that they were multiple personalities programmed in Zedekiah's cave by the great families of Europe (plus Nazi doctors) to infiltrate the Christian Church and pave the way for the Antichrist, who will be a member of the Hapsburg family associated with the name "Alexander".
Instead, they found a saviour. Un-fracking-believable, no?

Let's go back to L.A. Marzulli for a moment. He also mentioned that Dr. Mengele was one of the originators of mind control. This is a very popular notion in conspiracy circles, but it makes little sense. Mengele was a geneticist, not a psychiatrist, and there's no evidence that he took even the slightest interest in psychology.
Marzulli also made reference to the work of I.E.D. Thomas, a Welsh minister who believes that UFOs and alien abductions are demonic manifestations, another guise of the Nephilim.

Back to Riggs and the Morningstar Satanists. Last April, Riggs and his wife were guests on The Byte Show, accompanied by about half a dozen of Riggs' SRA victims, to discuss the infiltration of Nephilim hybrids into society.
Riggs began the show with a reading of Matthew 24:37, in which it is stated that the coming of the Son of Man (Christ) will be just like the days of Noah. And what happened in the days of Noah? Nephilim mated with the daughters of Man. That's exactly what Riggs contends is happening now. Fallen angels - the "B'nai Elohim" - are interbreeding with human women, by force. He cited the work of I.E.D. Thomas. Hmm. Call me an asshole, but I'm starting to wonder if Marzulli's "two researchers" actually exist. Isn't it more likely that he got his eschatological Illuminati-Satanic-Nephilim info from his buddy Doug?

Two women gave their stories of being "Nephilim mothers".
Sally, a surprisingly chirpy woman, says that after joining Riggs' church, she began to journal and pray, and memories started surfacing. She shared her journal with the pastor, but after a time she felt God compelling her to share things directly, even her most frightening memory (the President wearing a gorilla costume). Through prayer and God's guidance, she learned to trust her emerging memories. She learned that she came from a royal bloodline, stamped with a certain iniquity and allied with Nazi doctors. Many years ago she revealed to Riggs that she had once given birth to a Nephilim child. She had been groomed literally from the womb to bond with the principality (spirit) that sired this child.

Riggs sat on the Nephilim hybrid revelation until this year. Now he's an expert on the subject. Riggs explains that Nephilim conception occurs at age 13, through an arcane genetic-engineering process (angels can't reproduce). Gestation is 4 months. Once the Nephilim hybrid sons have matured, their mothers are encouraged to become their lovers, carrying on the tradition of "incesting".

The second woman, Juliana, learned just this year that her recovered memories of giving birth to human sons were actually screen memories of bearing Nephilim sons. Like all the other Morningstar members, she was born to a European "royal family", then placed with relatives in the U.S. She was "incested" by the couple she called her mom and dad. She trusts her recovered memories because of their emotional intensity, a very poor indicator of whether a memory is true or false.

For the rest of the program, Riggs made a strenuous effort to show that the SRA victims' memories didn't come from him. Hilariously, though, he got them to explain how he doesn't tell them what to say by telling them what to say.
There is, of course, ample reason to suspect that the Satanic Illuminati stories did come from Riggs. First of all, there's that peculiar use of "incest" as a verb. While this may be common usage in the survivor community, I have come across it only a handful of times - and every single instance involved Riggs or one of his church members. Secondly, recovered memories of SRA have turned out time and time again to be unreliable (see the Ingram case for a particularly chilling example). Thirdly, some of the key details are whack. There was no Edouard Philippe de Rothschild, and if there had been he would have been Jewish. How, I wonder, would a Jewish Frenchman and a Catholic Nazi groom a child to infiltrate American Protestant churches? If the Satanic New World Order plot is closely linked with Hitler's plan to create Aryan supermen, as Riggs contends, why would a former Nazi help a Jewish man raise his illegitimate children? And Satanism notwithstanding, why would a Nazi and a Jew be hanging out together in the first place?

Then there's the fact that this has all happened before.
In the early '90s, right around the time Riggs was learning about MPD/DID, psychiatrist Bennett Braun opened a DID treatment unit at Chicago's Rush Presbyterian Hospital. Within a year, he and his colleagues had most of the patients convinced they were lifelong victims of Satanic cults, that their alter personalities still practiced Satanism, that they had ritually sacrificed and/or eaten other people, and that because of their Satanic affiliations they posed a mortal danger to their families, themselves, and other patients. Braun even told them that flowers sent to their rooms were coded mind-control messages from Satanists, with certain colours representing threats and commands.
As former patients like Pat Burgus and Mary Shanley later revealed (see the Frontline documentary The Search for Satan), the people in Braun's DID unit were so heavily medicated that stories of cannibalism and Satanic incest began to make sense to them. They have since renounced all their "recovered memories", and some filed lawsuits against Braun and the other doctors involved in their treatment.
What happened at Rush Presbyterian isn't much different from the spectacular displays of female hysteria that gripped Paris's Salpetriere Hospital in the late 19th century. Under the influence of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, numerous women underwent bizarre convulsions and contortions not unlike the symptoms of "demonic possession". When Charcot died in 1893, the symptoms abated, leading some of his colleagues to suspect that the hysteria had been iatrogenic in nature. Medical historian Edward Shorter supports this conclusion in his book A History of Psychiatry (1997, John Wiley & Sons).
Though Dissociative Identity Disorder is classified as a dissociative disorder in the DSM-IV, Multiple Personality Disorder was considered a form of hysteria. Specifically, it was Grande Hysterie - the very same condition suffered by Charcot's patients.

It's tremendously disturbing to me that Riggs has been carrying on this "counseling" for over 30 years without interruption, and that he is bringing a new generation of "victims" into his circle (his youngest, a Canadian named Sarah, is just 21 years old).
There's troubling evidence that the Nephilim hybrid/recovered memory nonsense has taken hold in at least one congregation in Australia. Riggs is also closely associated with Russ Dizdar, a pastor we'll examine in the next post.
Also, Riggs' belief system is rooted in a school of thought that sees all mental illness as demonic in nature, and/or indicative of repressed memories. He insists that before they enter into counseling with him, his parishioners read the work of Neil T. Anderson, a minister who preaches that 80% of Christians are "demonized" to some extent and that most (if not all) mental illness is a symptom of demonization. He offers "clinical deliverance" (exorcism) as treatment.

The Devil in Massachussetts

I know that at this moment, many Americans are deeply upset over Scott Brown's election to the Massachusetts Senate. A Republican in that swing state will almost definitely spell the end of the new health care plan that could - if properly administered - transform U.S. health care from the "privilege" it is today to the basic human right it should be. This is tragic.

However, Pollyanna that I am, I'm going to point out a couple of things about the Democratic contender, Martha Coakley, that aren't so great:

1. She didn't try hard enough. Wasn't she on vacation for part of her campaign?

2. Coakley has a very mixed track record when it comes to common sense, and her handling of the Amirault case is as good (er, bad) an example as any.

Let me take you back to 1985. Almost exactly 25 years ago, Violet Amirault and her two children, 31-year-old Gerald and 28-year-old Cheryl, were charged with abusing and molesting children in the daycare run by Violet in Malden, Massachusetts.
Violet Amirault opened Fells Acre Daycare as a single parent and had been running it since the mid-1960s without any complaints. In fact, it was considered one of the best daycares in the community, and there was always a waiting list.
Then, in the autumn of 1984, the family of a 4-year-old who attended the daycare considered the boy's sex play with his cousin to be a troubling sign. They questioned him about bad touching by adults. He said that Gerald Amirault (known as "Tooky") had removed his pants one day. This was true; Gerald helped the boy change his clothes after he wet himself on one occasion.

Somehow, this incident mushroomed into a vast array of bizarre accusations. On September 12, 1984, more than a hundred parents attended a meeting to discuss the issue with police. Gerald had just been arrested, two days before the birth of his third child, and police were interviewing all of the daycare's 70 or so children with the help of a pediatric nurse named Susan J. Kelly. Parents were encouraged to question their kids at home, as well. Soon, they were eliciting stories of secret rooms, clowns, sodomy with a butcher knife, a murdered baby, biting robots, witch and "bad lobster" costumes, and something about an elephant. One child said, "Tooky was sorry for chopping me into little pieces." Another said that 16 fellow preschoolers had died.

Jurors at Gerald's trial didn't hear about clowns and monsters, but they did hear about secret rooms where child pornography was produced. These rooms were never located. At Violet and Cheryl's trial, the allegations were more outlandish: a child lashed nude to a tree on a busy street, robots, butcher knives, etc. The prosecutors made an unusual decision to face the child witnesses directly toward the jury rather than the defendants, ostensibly for the children's peace of mind.
There was no physical evidence in the case. The prosecution rested solely on interviews of the children. Video recordings of these sessions reveal that if the kids denied being abused, Kelly prodded until they disclosed something - anything. Officer John Rivers referred to the process as "getting blood from a stone".
No one had ever heard screams of terror coming from the daycare, nor seen any naked children tied to trees. No Malden toddlers had mentioned Satan at the dinner table until after Gerald Amirault was arrested.

Nonetheless, Gerald Amirault was convicted of raping and abusing 9 children, and was sentenced to 30-40 years in prison. His mother and sister each received sentences of 8-20 years for raping and abusing four children. The women's lighter sentences were clear indicators that the prosecution and jury considered Gerald to be the head of the family's Satanic Robot Clown cult.

Violet's and Cheryl's convictions were overturned in 1995, when a judge ruled that they had been denied their Constitutional right to face their accusers in court. Then the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reinstated the overturned convictions, and the Honorable Isaac Borenstein granted motions for separate trials. However, he ultimately ruled that "grave errors" in the original questioning of the children had irrevocably tainting their testimony, rendering it inadmissible as evidence. He believed the case bore the earmarks of ritual abuse hysteria, noting that none of the kids showed signs of abuse prior to the arrests of the Amiraults.
In 1997, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Violet and Cheryl would be reincarcerated until their new trials. Violet passed away during this time, having spent close to a decade of her golden years in prison.

Here's where Ms. Coakley enters the picture. In October 1999, as the Middlesex district attorney, Coakley struck a deal with Cheryl Amirault: In exchange for being released, Cheryl would receive 10 years probation - as long as she gave no TV interviews and had no unsupervised contact with children.

For Coakley, this deal wasn't about getting some leniency for a woman almost universally considered an innocent victim of "Satanic panic". No, for her it was about keeping Gerald Amirault in prison. Early in negotations, she demanded that the long-serving Amirault family attorney, James Sultan, pledge to drop Gerald as a client in return for Cheryl's release. Sultan refused.

In July 2001, the parole board unanimously recommended that Gerald's sentence be commuted. The final decision would be up to Governor Jane Swift.
Coakley, acting as advocate for the victims and their families, began lobbying Swift on their behalf.

While it's commendable for Coakley to offer assistance to victims of child abuse, this particular case wasn't a good place to start. Either she isn't well-acquainted with the facts of the case, or she's harebrained enough to believe that a Satanic Robot Clown cult operated a Hell Hostel for toddlers in plain view of a small town's residents for nearly 20 years.
There is a third, even less appetizing possibility: That Martha Coakley politically exploited the Amirault case to make herself appear very tough on crimes against children. Again, being a victims' advocate is commendable - but this wasn't the right place to start. The Fells Acre case is full of victims: the Amiraults, the parents who believe their children were horrifically abused in a safe place, and the children who were persuaded of the same thing by suggestive questioning. Some of them bear psychic scars to this day. Victim Phaedra Hopkins and her family spoke out against the proposed commutation of Amirault's sentence, as did Jennifer Bennett. She says she and the other kids were telling the truth; the Amirault family ruined her life. Brian Martinello and his mom, Barbara Standke, also spoke out. Brian had scratches or sores on his genitalia when he went to Fells Acres at age 4. He and his mother remain convinced that this was the result of sexual abuse.

Governor Swift rejected the parole board's recommendation in 2002. Gerald Amirault spent another year and a half in prison before being released on parole, a registered sex offender and convicted child abuser for the rest of his life.

Thanks, Ms. Coakley.



Notes on Sources:

Most of the information in this article comes from John Demo's excellent book The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Modern World (Viking, 2008), Dorothy Rabinowitz's January 14, 2009 Wall Street Journal piece ("Martha Coakley's Convictions"), and news articles on the Fells Acre case compiled online by Hugo S. Cunningham. All online materials were retrieved January 20, 2010.

To date, a definitive account of the case has yet to be written.

A Family Divided

An unhappy ending to 1989 abductions motivated by Satanic ritual abuse panic

Twenty years ago, Marvin Maple and his wife Sandra somehow got it into their heads that their two grandchildren were being ritually abused by their parents (the Maples' daughter, Debbie Baskin, and her husband Mark). The Maples alleged that Debbie and Mark belonged to a Satanic cult in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which practiced murder, child molestation, animal sacrifice, and other atrocities. So they sought, and were granted, temporary custody of 8-year-old Christie and 7-year-old Bobby. When a yearlong investigation failed to turn up even one indication of Satanic ritual abuse, a court ordered the children returned to their home. At the time, far from being a Satanist, Mark Baskin was pursuing a degree in theology.

Just before the Baskins were scheduled to regain custody of their children in March 1989, the Maples disappeared with the kids. For 20 years, they lived as the "Bunting" family; Christie was renamed Jennifer, and Bobby went by the name Jonathan.

Meanwhile, the Baskins never gave up on their missing children. They distributed fliers far and wide, gave interviews and made media appearances whenever possible, and appealed to the Maples to do the right thing. Their answering machine always contained a message for Bobby and Christie.

Then it happened. Early last month, a patron in a cafe in San Jose, California, overheard 73-year-old "John Bunting" recounting the abduction of his grandchildren. He was annoyed that a newspaper story about the children had described him as a kidnapper.



Police soon located Christie and Bobby. Christie, 28, was working as a nurse in San Jose, while Bobby is married with children of his own. The Baskins eagerly awaited a reunion, but feared that the kids might not feel the same way after being told for 20 years that their parents were abusive Satanists. Unfortunately, their fears manifested when they traveled to San Jose; both children refused to respond to phone calls or visits.

Sandra Maple died in 2006. Marvin faces kidnapping charges in Tennessee. He, too, refuses to speak with the Baskins. He says he is innocent. According to the report below, Debbie's two sisters seem to be supporting their father.




The Baskin abduction bears a striking similarity to a 1990 grandparent abduction in Hobbes, New Mexico. This case has a happier ending, and the underhanded method used to induce stories of Satanic ritual abuse is transparent:

As described in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, Ladonna Morrow had a strained relationship with her mom, Pat Farmer, but needed her to help care for her 4-year-old son, Jared Peters, after she divorced Jared's father. Pat disapproved of the divorce, so using televangelist-produced videotapes and coaching, she taught Jared to describe being molested and ritually abused by members of a Satanic cult. Then she encouraged Jared to report this abuse, and sought sole custody of her grandson.

Two months after custody was granted to Pat Farmer, Jared's father and the authorities came to the conclusion that there was no Satanic cult and no abuse. Ladonna regained custody of Jared, but Pat was allowed monthly, unsupervised visits. She simply didn't return Jared after one of these visits.

Pat was caught in Salt Lake City two years later, and Jared was reunited with his mother.

There may be no such reunion for the Baskins. They remain a family divided and ruined by the spectre of Satanic panic.

Anna Nicole's Moonchild

First Bob Larson announced Anna Nicole Smith died because she was suffering a curse (and offered for sale his handy DIY curse-removal kit). Now anti-occult cable access TV host "Freeman" says infant Dannielynn is a Moonchild summoned by Anna Nicole's Satanic Illuminati mind-control handlers. I won't comment on Bob's motives - I think we can all guess wha they are - but it seems that Freeman believes every word he's saying...

According to "Freeman" of the Austin cable access show The Freeman Perspective, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s eccentric husband, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, really is the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter Dannielynn, as he insisted (DNA testing revealed Larry Birkhead to be the father, but never mind that; facts must never get in the way of a good conspiracy theory). Von Anhalt was the result of Nazi experiments in breeding perfect Aryan specimens who could take over the world (clearly unsuccessful). Anna Nicole was a mind-controlled slave programmed through Satanic ritual abuse to have multiple personalities (he points to the infamous Mushroom Clown video as evidence that she had a little-girl alter personality). Lawyer/partner Howard Stern was her primary mind control handler. And Dannielynn is a Moonchild.

The Nazi breeding part of Freeman's theory is drawn from a rumour that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the biological daughter of Adolf Hitler. This shouldn’t even be considered a possibility, as Merkel was born 9 years after the Fuhrer's death, but the explanation is that the horrifically sadistic Auschwitz doctor Carl Clauberg was able to freeze some of Hitler’s sperm and inseminate Eva Braun’s younger sister, Gretl, with it years later. The rumour say Clauberg was “the father of artificial insemination”, but in actuality his Auschwitz experiments centered around forced sterilization of Jewish women. He only dabbled in insemination techniques. Robert Jay Lifton, in his 1986 book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide , noted “Clauberg is reported to have told prisoners he planned artificial-insemination experiments, and there is one report of his admitting to two assistants that he had future plans for experiments in both natural and artificial insemination.” (272) There are no reports that Clauberg actually achieved any success with insemination; he is by no means the father of the procedure, which is derived from much older methods of animal husbandry.

Gretl Braun did have a daughter, Eva Barbara Fegelein, named after her Aunt Eva, but she was born on May 5, 1945, and committed suicide in 1975 - during the same period Merkel was studying physics at the University of Leipzig. Clearly, the Merkel-Hitler rumour is a fantasy aimed at defaming a controversial and much-maligned public figure: G8 member, first female chancellor of German, proponent of EU expansion. She’s ideal fodder for anti-Illuminati conspiracy theories.

The Moonchild was a concept introduced in Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law. It was described as something like an AntiChrist and/or an incarnate god, a child "resembling man, and possessing those qualities of man which distinguish him from beasts, namely intellect and power of speech, but neither begotten in the manner of human generation, nor inhabited by a human soul." Rather than being conceived and born, the Moonchild would apparently be summoned through magick ritual.

In 1946, California rocket scientist/occultist Jack Parsons attempted to summon a Moonchild into the womb of his girlfriend following a complex set of rituals he called The Babalon Working. His assistant in this endeavor was, believe it or not, L. Ron Hubbard. The intended vessel/mother of the Moonchild, Marjorie Cameron, never manifested any signs of pregnancy, but to the end of her life she believed that she really was the incarnation of Thelema's Mother of Abominations, the Scarlet Woman of The Book of the Law. The “birth” of the Moonchild was a metaphysical event, taking place on the ethereal plane. After Parsons' untimely death, Marjorie Cameron performed a ritual to conceive a posthumous child with him a la Osiris and Isis, whom she christened Wormwood. This "child", too, manifested only on the ethereal plane.

Freeman's theory is, essentially, that genetically engineered Nazi Satanists are trying to take over the world by impregnating their mind-controlled robotic priestesses with AntiChrist Moonchildren.
Crowley’s Book of the Law described the Moonchild as "mightier than all the kings of the earth".

So, if you can imagine that the daughter of Anna Nicole Smith will someday rise up to rule over us all, this may be the conspiracy theory for you.

A Word from Alex Constantine, conspiracy researcher

August 27/07: "PS: "Satanic Panic" is one of your many undocumentable (when you get down to it) lies. Been there, done that. You and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation exist to discredit the victims of mind control activity. I exposed the FMSF long ago. You I'm exposing now. Same kettle of fish. Wallow in it. You are a collaborator in crimes aginst children, and don't want to come across as that. Too bad. I see you for what you are. That's what Constantines do. Poison yourself with asparatame, for all I care. It's the innocent that I'm trying to protect. The moles should follow their own advice on aspartame. Where's the libel suit? Haven't I defamed you by labelling you publicly as a mole? No. You deny it indirectly, by suggestion, above, but aren't you angry? I would be. I'd probably threaten to sue. But you take it in stride. Good little mole. I like you, too."

Not only was Mr. Constantine horribly mistaken about my gender (I'm a Canadian housewife, not an American man as he assumed), my source of income (I'm a housewife, not a CIA agent), but he's also dreadfully mistaken about my opinion of the False Memory Syndrom Foundation. I do not approve of this organization and I don't support it any way, nor do I reference the little valuable info that it provides from time to time. Why? The non-profit org was started by an accused child molestor, and his daughter's claims have never been disproven; there is no such thing as "FMS" - it was created by a member of the group, Ralph Underwager, who was later expelled from the group for expressing pro-pedophilia sentiments in a Dutch publication. I believe false memories can and do exist, but these aren't the people to be investigating it.

Hosanna Church Update

An Update on the Ponchatoula, Lousiana Satanic Ritual Abuse Case

Two young men expected to testify in the upcoming trial of Trey Bernard in Ponchatoula have recanted. 17 and 21 years old, they now say they were not ritually abused by members of Ponchatoula's Hosanna Church as children.
A 7-year-old girl allegedly abused by the Hosanna "cult" has not recanted, but isn't expected to testify.

Over the Edge of Evil: "Dr." Jerry Johnston

Paging through my copy of Jerry Johnston's 1989 book The Edge of Evil (with a foreward by Geraldo), I idly wondered what had become of this "expert" on Satanism who claimed to have lectured to more high school students than anyone else his age.

It didn't take long to find out. As I write this, bitter criticism and controversy swirl around "Dr."/Pastor Johnston and his megachurch, the First Family Church of Overland Park , Kansas (Jonston has an honorary "doctorate" from Falwell's Liberty University). In a March 2007 series of articles by Judy L. Thomas, the Kansas City Star brought to light possible financial misdeeds at First Family:

• In 2005, Jonston raised millions of dollars for a building that would house a Christian children's academy. The building was completed, but in August 2006 Johnston announced to his church that the academy opening was being postponed indefinitely and that the remaining money would instead be spent on a sanctuary with seating for 5000-7000.
• In October 2000, First Family began taking donations for its main sanctuary. Donors would have their names displayed on a monument. However, despite the raising of $750,000 the monument wasn't acquired until 2006 (after the Star began its investigation) - and it was considerably less grand than the 2000 plans.
• In 2005, Johnston announced that an anonymous donor had answered the congregation's prayers by giving the church 200 acres of land on which to build a youth camp. Real estate records told a different story: Johnston's son Jeremy signed a $400,000 mortgage on the property in the church's name.

First Family is a Southern Baptist Convention affiliate with approximately 4200 members, a worldwide TV ministry, and an annual budget of $17 million.

Johnston claimed that First Family finances are overseen by a responsible board of trustees. The Star found that one lawyer listed as a longtime board member, Tim Dollar, had never attended the church nor a single board meeting.

In the wake of the Star's revelations, Christian and Kansan bloggers like Just Cara were inundated with comments from people who had left First Family due to their unaddressed concerns about financial mismanagement on the part of Johnston and the board. Despite this wealth of claims to the contrary, board chairman Robert Ulrich (former U.S. Attorney) said no one had ever rasised concerns about church finances.

Since being born again in his late teens, Johnston has been a vocal opponent of Satanism/occultism, gay rights, and the theory of evolution. The Other Side of Evil is '80s Christian boilerplate, derived primarily from a handful of newspaper accounts of teen Satanic murders and the discredited confessions of "recovered" Satanists and SRA victims like "breeder" Jacquie Balodis. See Kerr Cuhulain's Witchvox article on Johnston for more information.

Louis Lamonica, Jr.

Ponchatoula Satanists to go on trial "sometime in 2006"

It's very difficult to find any information on the imminent trial of the 7 people charged with involvement in child and animal abuse in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, (see my post "Recent Allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse in the U.S.") but one blogger (Professor Pan) has reported that the DA announced the case will go to trial "sometime in 2006", and an article in the Baton Rouge Advocate confirms this.

Meanwhile, this bizarre and disturbing incident of alleged Satanic ritual abuse has received very little attention from the mainstream press in the U.S., and even reactionary Christian news sources seem to be ignoring it. A search of World Net Daily, for instance, turns up not one reference. Where are all the fundie Satanic Panic advocates who were crawling from the woodwork in the '80s and early '90s? Should we be grateful that no one is blowing Ponchatoula out of proportion...or should we be concerned that no one seems to care when a whole churchful of kids is possibly exploited?

The Johnny Gosch/Jeff Gannon Incident

Conspirologists sparked intense online speculation about child prostitution, Satanism, and kidnapping in the Midwest and the Capitol.

Google "Johnny Gosch" and you will find a wealth of info on a young boy who disappeared from his Iowa neighborhood in 1982. He has become a part of the "Franklin Cover-up", which began to surface in 1988 with the collapse of a small savings & loan in Omaha, Nebraska, and culminated in a series of trials involving allegations of child prostitution, murder, and Satanic worship involving very well-known citizens of Omaha and beyond. Two people from Omaha insist to this very day that they were pimped out by some of Omaha's most esteemed citizens as children. Paul Bonacci claims that he helped abduct little Johnny Gosch on the orders of Temple of Set founder Michael Aquino, and amazingly Noreen Gosch, the boy's mother, supports this story. She wrote a book, Why Johny Can't Come Home, in which she explained that her son was very much alive and still being controlled by his kidnappers as an adult. He supposedly paid her a brief visit in 1997.

In spring 2005, a bald young reporter named James Guckert was booted out of the White House when it was discovered he didn't have proper press credentials and had possibly engaged in male prostitution. A conspiracy theorist noted his resemblance to an old photo of little Johnny Gosch and proposed that this man, who went by the alias Jeff Gannon, was the kidnapped boy. The reporter denied it and evidence was scant, but speculation was rife on such sites as Jeff Wells's blog Rigorous Intuition. Conspiracy theorists opined that the resemblance between Gannon/Guckert and 12-year-old Johnny Gosch was uncanny, that Gannon could be little Johny Gosch all grown up and corrupted by the Bush administration.

After reading the article on Gannon/Guckert in the June 2005 issue of Vanity Fair, I seriously doubted Gannon and Gosch could be the same person. Gosch would be 35, while Gannon is 48. Trauma can age a person, I agree, but Gannon also has a life history that has been picked over thoroughly by left-wing bloggers. He grew up in Pennsylvania (a grad photo accompanies the Vanity Fair piece) and worked various jobs before he became senior reporter for a teeny Conservative news service called Talon News (now defunct in the wake of the scandal). He graduated from high school when Johnny Gosch was a tyke. While it's thrilling to think that a kidnapped boy has resurfaced as a Bush-administration stooge, smuggled into the White House pressroom by shadowy powers-that-be with orders to "make Bush look good", there doesn't seem to be a single solid item of evidence that Jeff Gannon, male escort and staunch Republican, has ever been anyone other than plain old Jim Guckert (his real name and, significantly, the one he used to gain his first press pass). He wouldn't have been valuable to Bush's administration anyway - Talon News was virtually unknown until the Gannon scandal broke.

Returning to Johnny Gosch and the Franklin cover-up: Was Omaha a hotbed of Satanic and abusive activity in the 1980s? It seems that way. The late Monsignor Hupp, who headed Omaha's famous Boys' Town far longer than even Father Flanagan (played by Spencer Tracey in the 1938 movie Boys Town), confessed to Lincoln lawyer John DeCamp that he knew young boys were being molested by priests at Boys' Town. And there have been several suspicious deaths in the case. Were the abusers involved in Satanic worship and the production of snuff films? That remains to be seen. Bonacci said that he was taken to California's Bohemian Grove, a staple of modern conspiracy theories, and forced to appear in a snuff film with another young boy. The cameraman was none other than gonzo reporter Hunter S. Thompson, who committed suicide in February 2005.

Recent Allegations of Ritual Abuse in the U.S.

The Ponchatoula Case
A tiny church in small-town Louisiana will be the focus of a criminal trial; the pastor confessed to ritual/sexual abuse of children.

In May 2005, a former pastor named Louis Lamonica, Jr., walked into a police station in Livingston, Louisiana, and admitted that he and several other members of his church congregation had sexually abused children (and a dog) in the years 1999-2003 (when Hosanna Church of Ponchatoula shut its doors). He admitted to molesting two boys from the age of 4 until they were 12 or 13. Amazingly, Lamonica was stunned when Livingston police arrested him - he thought he was reporting crimes, not confessing to them! At any rate, it was hardly news to the police. They had first heard of the abuse a week earlier, from an Ohio woman named Nicole Bernard. Bernard told police she had fled Louisiana to protect her two children from pedophiles in Lamonica's congregation.

Within a couple of weeks, 9 former members of Hosanna Church had been arrested and charged with aggravated rape of children under 13. Among the accused were a Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff's deputy, Lamonica's 45-year-old wife Robbin, the church pianist, Nicole Bernard, and Bernard's ex-husband. This is when things started to get really weird. Several of the accused and some of the witnesses stated that Hosanna Church had been a cover for a Satanic sect that conducted ceremonies involving pentagrams, animal sacrifice, and black robes. Lamonica himself said that he had ritually sacrificed cats and poured the blood over children forced to take part in the ceremonies.

Hosanna Church was started by Louis Lamonica Sr., and during his lifetime was a vibrant body of at least 100 members. When Jr. took over the reigns in 1993, membership plummeted until barely a dozen congregants remained. Lamonica was, by all accounts, a strange and difficult man, a demanding and over-controlling pastor. No one suspected that he was a child molestor and a Satanist, however. Somehow, in a quiet town of 5000 that is known for its Strawberry Festival (and its plethora of churches), this behaviour didn't catch anyone's attention.

I have to wonder: Did the accused fabricate stories of devil-worship to justify their sexual abuse of children and animals? Is it all a "Satan made me do it" smokescreen? It seems entirely possible, however, that Lamonica turned to occultism after Christianity didn't work out for him, and secretly gathered a handful of followers who were attracted to children and/or Satanism. The unsolicited confessions of Nicole Bernard and Louis Lamonica lead me to believe that this could be one of the few authentic instances of ritual abuse in the U.S.

8 adults are currently awaiting trial on charges of aggravated rape of children (all 4 men are accused of abusing 3 children, two boys and a girl); a 54-year-old woman has been charged with failing to report the abuse. The prosecutor has made it clear that allegations of Satanic worship will not be included in the trial.

Sources:

May 19/05 90 WAFB Baton Rouge (CBS affiliate) news report by Matt Clough

Mormon Ritual Abuse?
Famed Latter Day Saint apologist Hugh Nibley has been accused of ritualized molestation by his grown daughter, a columnist for O magazine.

In 2005, 42-year-old motivational speaker and author Martha Beck released her memoir of breaking away from the Mormon (LDS) Church, entitled Leaving the Saints. Mrs. Beck was one of 8 living children born to the influential Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley, a prolific scholar and foremost Mormon apologist. In her book, Beck claims her father sexually molested her between the ages of 5 and 9, and did so in a ritualistic manner (whilst chanting ancient Egyptian phrases and Bible passages). Mrs. Beck began to "recover" the memories of incest as an adult, though she says she has traumatic memories she never suppressed, as well.

There is a small amount of physical evidence in this case, but it doesn't point directly to Mr. Nibley molesting his daughter. We may never know what really happened. It is significant, however, that Mrs. Beck's 7 siblings have refuted her allegations (see hughnibleydefense.com). Is the family in denial about possible abuse, especially now that Mr. Nibley is no longer alive to defend himself? Is Mrs. Beck mistaken about the events of her childhood? If abuse did occur, was it occultic/ritualistic in character? Time may tell.

Mrs. Beck is a successful author and life coach who has a regular column in O magazine. She deals with sensitive issues that most mainstream columnists sidestep: Loneliness, loss of faith, toxic relationships, etc. Oprah has called her one of the most intelligent women she has ever met.

Update on Richard Hamlin

Richard Hamlin, the Sacramento man who claims he was nearly the victim of Satanic ritual sacrifice at the hands of his incestuous father-in-law (see "The Hamlin Case" below), has been convicted of spousal abuse and the other charges against him. Apparently the jury didn't buy the Satanic cult stories.
Hamlin could be given a life sentence.

The Hamlin Case: Satanic Ritual Abuse in Sacramento

California attorney Richard Hamlin believes his wife is under the control of her father's Satanic cult; conspirologists support him.

Until February 2004, California attorney Richard Hamilton led an outwardly idyllic existence. He was a former Sacramento County deputy prosecutor with a successful Sacramento practice, a $1 million mansion in posh El Dorado Hills, and four children by his wife of 20 years. Susan Hamlin, 46, was also an attorney. The only obvious wrench in the works was Hamilton's elderly father-in-law, a respected Fresno biochemist named Sydney Siemer.
In 1999, following a period of hospitalization for depression, Susan Hamlin had begun to recover repressed memories of childhood rape and torture at the hands of her father. She shared these horrific memories with her husband in 2002, and he responded by traveling to Fresno and publicly distributing fliers with damning information about Dr. Siemer.
Dr. Siemer hired a lawyer and denied that he had ever abused Susan or her three siblings, filing a restraining order against the Hamlins. He offered to attend therapy with his daughter to help her realize that her memories of incest and violence were false, but Mrs. Hamlin declined. Mrs. Hamlin's sister couldn't recall any abuse in the Siemer home, so she entered therapy to try to recover memories of her own. To date, she has not come forward with any allegations.

February 22, 2004: Susan Hamlin returned home from a Starbuck's in Granite Bay covered in bruises, her nose broken and some ribs fractured. Her husband demanded to know what happened. Mrs. Hamlin confessed that for the past two years, members of a Satanic cult to which she and her father belonged had been plotting to ritually murder Richard Hamlin as a "trophy Christian", a fitting sacrifice to Satan. Susan was promised she would be made high priestess of the cult if she went along with the plan. The murder was scheduled for March 1, at midnight. When she tried to extricate herself from the plot, she explained, she was summoned to meet with a fellow Satanist named Lisa Clum at the Granite Bay Starbuck's. (Apparently, the women were going to chat about Satanic ritual sacrifice over venti lattes and blueberry scones.) As soon as she stepped out of her car, Lisa's 47-year-old husband, Rock Clum, allegedly beat Mrs. Hamilton to a bloody pulp right in the parking lot and warned her to "stick with the plan".
Susan Hamlin had even more chilling revelations. Her father continued to exert sexual and emotional control over her to such an extent that she was still having incestuous sexual relations with him. He and his friend Howard Mily, the high priest of the cult, had been sexually exploiting her since she was a young teenager. They had prostituted her, used her to procure other young victims, and ritually tortured her in the most sadistic ways imaginable. She admitted that she had molested 3 of the couple's 4 children from 1996 to 2002, under her father's instruction. He taught her how to hypnotize her kids and sexually abuse them as any "good Satanist mom" should, she said. At the time the abuse began, the kids were ages 6, 8, and 12. Dr. Siemer, his wife (Susan's stepmom), and Susan's sister all molested the Hamlin children as well.
There was more. In 1982, Howard Mily and others in the cult tortured Susan for a 3-week period by stringing her up on a pegboard and confining her in cold storage. Twice she was forced to witness the torture of a dark-haired 9- or 10-year-old girl they had abducted; they broke the girl's bones and tied her body into strange positions, then murdered her. This was filmed.
Dr. Siemer had a stash of child pornography and snuff films in his Fresno home, according to Mrs. Hamlin. Aghast, Richard Hamlin urged his wife to report everything to the police. On February 26, four days after the Starbuck's beating, he accompanied her to the El Dorado Sheriff's office, where she confessed to molesting her kids and plotting to kill her husband. She explained that the sexual abuse was not for her own sexual gratification, but an effort to accustom the children to touching and to "keep [them] from thinking their sexuality was their own." She also described the murder she witnessed in 1982, not specifying if this was a recovered memory or not.
Several detectives interviewed Mrs. Hamlin on tape and had her sign a statement. The Hamlin children were immediately removed from the home by Child Protective Services for their own safety, but the detectives decided not to arrest Mrs. Hamilton until an investigation into her claims had been conducted.
Two days later, Susan Hamlin returned to the Sheriff's office and recanted every word of her elaborate signed confession. It was a lie, she said; neither she nor anyone in her family ever molested the kids. Her father had never sexually abused her. It was Richard Hamlin, not Rock Clum, who beat her up the previous week and forced her to implicate her father in a murder plot that was all in his head. After the beating, he had threatened her at gunpoint and swordpoint.
The detectives had been reluctant to accept Mrs. Hamlin's original claims, but they pounced on her retraction. Richard Hamlin was immediately arrested and eventually charged with 18 felony counts of spousal abuse, torture, death threats, negligent discharge of a handgun, and child endangerment. His trial began on October 11, '05. His 18-year-old son Ryan took the stand and testified that Mr. Hamlin had been beating his wife up to 5 times per week since 2002. The day of the Starbuck's beating, believing there really was a Satanic plot against his life, he had forced the whole family into the van and driven to Granite Bay with a sword, a Derringer, and a paintball gun full of frozen paintballs. The two Hamlin girls were dropped off somewhere, but Ryan and his younger brother were forced to stay in the vehicle and train the paintball gun on their mother while she gave directions to the Clum house. Richard Hamlin intended to murder Lisa Clum and Dr. Siemer, Ryan told the court. (1)
Mr. Hamlin is defending himself in the trial. You might wonder how he could possibly stand a chance against the incredibly damaging testimony of his own son and ex-wife. It's easier than it looks. First of all, Hamlin was able to acquire Susan's journals from 1999-2002. They are chock-full of recovered memories of incest, Satanic ceremonies, and torture, undermining her claim that Dr. Siemer and his alleged accomplices never laid a hand on anyone. To complicate matters, Susan's court testimony at times directly contradicts her father's. She insists he never worked in Indio, California (home of the notorious Cabazon Indian Reservation, supposed site of illegal weapons experiments and gun-dealing throughout the 1980s) - but Dr. Siemer admits he did. (3)

Naturally, conspirologists have pounced on the Hamlin case. The Indio link "confirms" the findings of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro of Virginia, who in the late '80s uncovered connections among pirated PROMIS software, the October Surprise that allegedly cost Jimmy Carter the 1980 election, the Beirut bombing, fuel-air explosives developed on the Cabazon Reservation by Wackenhut and other CIA fronts, and dozens of other shady doings that he attributed to a power cabal called "The Octopus". Casalaro's Octopus theories are too complex to examine here, but I will note that Casalaro was found dead in a West Virginia hotel room in 1991, an apparent suicide. Supporters declare he was murdered for being a Man Who Knew Too Much. (see Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith's book The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro for a detailed study of this, or save yourself some trouble and check out Kenn Thomas's chapter "Behold a Pale Horse" in Jim Keith's Secret and Suppressed, Feral House, 1993)

One of Casalaro's primary sources was a man named Michael Riconosciuto, who claimed he personally modified stolen PROMIS software for the U.S. government (so it could be used to "spy" on foreign computers). He also made a lot of other claims regarding the CIA, NSA, the October Surprise, etc. Hereafter I'll refer to Riconosciuto as "Tater", since he looks like Mr. Potatohead with a Mo haircut.
After Richard Hamlin's arrest, Tater informed him that he had important information about his father-in-law's activites. On March 30 of this year, Tater penned a letter of Judicial Notification to the Chief Judge of the Superior Court in El Dorado, claiming he has proof that Dr. Sydney Siemer worked on illegal biowarfare research for the CIA in Indio in 1982. I don't believe this information is even remotely relevant to the Hamlin case, which is a domestic violence case. What does biowarfare research have to do with incest, death threats, and spousal abuse? This is how the judge, Edward Keller, responded as well.
Tater is currently incarcerated on unrelated charges and will not be allowed to testify in the Hamlin trial. Unfortunately, Richard Hamlin firmly believes that Tater is a credible witness who could aid his defense. From Hamlin's open letter, posted on his website: "Michael Riconosciuto is in jail. He has fought the government over and over again. He could have seen my plight and said, 'It’s not my fight,' yet he won’t. With nothing to gain—except a sense of justice and truth—he volunteered his information about Dr. Sidney Siemer."Why is Tater even involved? Well, his letter of Judicial Notification speaks for itself..."My legal defense team has in their possession documents obtained after my trial that clearly can be used to support the defense of Richard Hamlin, and prove the direct knowledge I possess...is true and correct...There is the additional matter of the prosecution of Philip Arthur Thompson who is presently charged with murder and rape in the same jurisdiction as the Richard Hamlin case. The above mentioned government documents will show Thompson was actively working as an FBI informant against me at the time he committed numerous rapes and murders. Many...orchestrated by the real perpetrator in the Hamlin case." Tater continues, "Eldorado County [sic] has demonstrated a conflict of interest between the Thompson case and the Hamlin case...impeach[ing] my credibility in the Hamlin case serves to obstruct my being an effective witness in the Thompson case.." Furthermore, Tater states he's been threatened by the "real perpetrator" in the Hamlin case, causing him to be transferred to a medical facility where his prostate canser isn't being treated properly. You decide: Does this sound like a man with "nothing to gain"?

Richard Hamlin's open letter makes clear his position on his ex-wife's original claims of being a Satanic pawn. He believes them. Yet he is quick to point out that the case is about incest and psychological abuse, not occult beliefs and practices. He writes, "The traditional media has focused almost exclusively on the 'Satanic' angle of this case. Such reporting is a miscarriage of justice to the real overriding issue of incest and molest and the methods child molesters use to enforce and perpetrate their ongoing abuse.This case is about incest." Hamlin believes that Dr. Siemer raped and terrorized his 4 children, continuing to have relations with Suan even after she married. He had sex with her the night before her wedding. The kids were "swapped" with other incestuous families and prostituted. Susan helped her dad gain access to other victims, including her own kids. Dr. Siemer wanted Richard Hamlin dead to shut him up and get him out of the way, so he could continue to exert sexual and emotional control over his family.

Based on the findings of Virginia McCullough of the conspiracy-oriented website http://www.newsmakingnews.com/ and the private investigation of the rather sinister Ted Gunderson (who insinuated himself into the case alongside Tater), Richard Hamlin also believes his father-in-law was a part of MKULTRA, the government's secret mind-control program. "So, we have a man that usd mind control, learned from our own government, to create the perfect incestuous family". McCullough has written a series of articles in defense of Richard Hamlin and buys the Satanic ritual abuse stories hook-line-and-sinker. She clearly relishes the case, calling it "the best conspiracy case in recent California history". She claims two anonymous sources have linked Dr. Siemer to a CIA child kidnapping/prostitution ring called The Finders, and revealed that he's a "senior member" of the Temple of Set's Order of the Trapezoid. There is no evidence to support either claim.

Richard Hamlin and his conspiracy-minded supporters aren't acknowledging the possibilities that Susan Hamlin could be a compulsive liar, an hysteric, and/or mentally ill. They uncritically accept the basic truth of her original claims and have fit them into a standard conspiracy framework. According to Mr. Hamlin, Dr. Siemer escaped detection for so many years by using trauma-based mind control and the resultant Multiple Personality Disorder to create amnesia in Susan and her siblings, then adding intimidation of an occult nature. He also has friends in high places. All of these conclusions are derived from Susan Hamlin's descriptions of conditioning, hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation used by her dad to control her. Hamlin makes much of the fact that Dr. Siemer reportedly worked with Army Intelligence and had a high security clearance. He and McCullough believe he was engaged in covert operations, radiation experiments, and illegal biowarfare research. Again, I don't know what any of this has to do with domestic abuse and death threats.
Worst of all, Hamlin blames himself for much of what has occurred. He expresses deep guilt for not having realized that his "babies were being hurt...I cared about me, material things, and my career." (2)

The bottom line: The Hamlin case is the result of incredibly complex intrafamily issues that could never be fully resolved in a courtroom. The principal players themselves don't appear to know what is true, what is imagined, and what is an inextricable combination of truth and imagination.

Sources:

1. Sacramento Bee, Oct. 26/05, "Teen: Father feared a plot" by Ramon Coronado
2. Official site for the Richard Hamlin defense (www.geocities.com/richardwhamlin/)
3. Virginia McCullough articles at www.newsmakingnews.com