Written by Goel for Investigations in Ritual Abuse and reposted by Relentless Hope.
It was a cold day in Manti, crisp and bright, as around 50 people gathered on the steps of the courthouse at noon. They were there in support of Tobias Schroeder, the alleged victim of David Lee Hamblin, a disgraced therapist and self-styled medicine man. Hamblin lost his license for having sex with his patients and attempting to convince them that the sex was therapeutic, so it is no stretch to believe Tobias Schroeder’s claim that Hamblin molested him when he was a five year old therapy patient being treated for the abuse he suffered at the hands of a teenage boy.
It’s been two and a half years for Tobias Schroeder, who treks down to Manti for each of the scheduled preliminary hearings, hoping to testify and convince the court that there is probable cause to believe his story and move the prosecution of David Lee Hamblin forward. Schroeder misses work as a plumbing contractor each day he attempts to attend court, and the hearings have been continued on multiple occasions.
When they emerged, Hamblin and his attorneys and the Utah County Attorneys who were prosecuting Hamblin walked out of the courtroom. Other matters were called; a name change petition for a soon to be married man, various criminal cases for sentencing, all while the spectators in attendance wondered exactly what was going on with the Hamblin hearing. As time wore on, people began to check their cell phones and visibly react.
The news was in from the Hamblin hearing before Judge Roger Griffin: the case against Hamblin for his alleged molestation of Emily Sheets had been dismissed, due to the misconduct of a Utah County Sheriff’s Office investigator. Special prosecutor Nathan Evershed, the replacement for the original deputized prosecutor Ryan Peters of Juab County, had moved to dismiss the case. Evershed cited the February 14, 2025 Motion for Sanctions and Request for an Evidentiary Hearing filed by Hamblin’s attorney Leah Aston.
In that motion, Aston requested an evidentiary hearing “to determine whether Utah County Investigators Elise Hines and/or Jason Randall have knowingly and willfully withheld evidence in [the Hamblin] case.” She then provides a timeline of events:
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The case was filed on September 28, 2022.
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Defense filed a request for discovery on October 10, 2022, and received an 11 page police report labeled “version 2.” It included only two interviews with Emily Sheets, and was dated 9/26/2022.
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Prosecutors represented to the court that the case against David Lee Hamblin did not involve satanic ritual abuse, as the December 28, 2022 filing by original special prosecutor Ryan Peters made clear: “The Defendant is charged in this matter with sexually abusing the alleged victim, not in the context of a satanic child abuse cult, but in his own homes with perhaps only family members present. Currently, there are no charges that the Defendant abused the alleged victim in this case in the context of a cult. The State, however, acknowledges that others have suggested and accused the Defendant and many others of participating in a satanic child abuse cult.” See P6 State’s Response to Motion
To Compel Defendant’s Second Set of Special Discovery.
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On August 19, 2024, Peters’ successor Nathan Evershed disclosed additional discovery to Hamblin’s attorneys, which they reviewed, and which contained an additional interview with Emily Sheets conducted on September 29, 2022, in which Emily Sheets described “in great detail an allegation that after her baptism she wastaken into a room at an LDS church where she was surrounded by many people in blackcloaks; she was given the laying on of hands in a satanic ritual, and spoon fed semen from many named participants.”
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Evershed produced an additional supplemental police report that had not been provided to the defense after being questioned on February 5, 2025 as to why this interview was not mentioned in the previously disclosed police report. The report was 24 pages long and produced on the Juab County incident reporting system, and it was dated 5/22/2023. The supplemental report contained details of other interviews not previously disclosed, but Evershed located those interviews and disclosed them to the defense on February 6, 2025. In one of those interviews, Emily Sheets’s parents David and Deborah Sheets-who were named members and abusers within the CS according to the Hamblin sisters- “refute and dispel allegations made by the Hamblin daughters,” and Deborah Sheets “opined that [Emily Sheets] is “sometimes” untruthful and gave an example of a recent time when [Emily Sheets] was not a truthful person.” David Sheets gave a glowing endorsement of David Lee Hamblin, and said there was never any indication to him that Hamblin was engaged in impropriety. Another interview by a friend of Emily Sheets indicated that Hamblin “implanted or encouraged false memories of abuse in therapy.”
The reality is that the prosecution deliberately chose to charge Hamblin with crimes related to non-ritualistic instances of abuse to avoid the SRA issue. The crimes presented in the information filed against Hamblin in Sheets’s case do not involve ritual sexual abuse; therefore, the prosecution would argue that ritual abuse in the context of a cult is immaterial to the explicit charges filed against Hamblin in the Sheets case. Additionally, the date of the Sheets interview where ritual abuse is mentioned is September 29, 2022, the day after the case was filed on September 28th.
It should strain the credulity of the credulous that the prosecution and the Sheriffs Office timed an interview with Emily Sheets the day after they filed the case against David Lee Hamblin, an interview that examined the issue of ritual sexual abuse. There is no implication here; the prosecution and the Sheriff’s Office were deliberately attempting to investigate ritual abuse allegations separately from the charges they brought against David Lee Hamblin in the Sheets case.
Their dance cost Emily Sheets two and a half years of her life, and it might cost her any chance of seeing David Lee Hamblin prosecuted. The fact that the prosecution and the Sheriff’s Office were ordered on numerous occasions to turn over all discovery materials by Judge Griffin makes their failure to do so all the more inexcusable, and the end result is that Emily Sheets is back at either square one or at zero, depending on whether or not Judge Griffin dismisses the case without prejudice or with prejudice. The former instance will provide an opening to re-charge Hamblin; the latter will likely end the possibility that Hamblin will ever be prosecuted for abusing Emily Sheets altogether.
The shenanigans of Elise Hines, Jason Randall, and Ryan Peters did not simply cost Emily Sheets a shot at seeing her alleged abuser face culpability; those machinations had repercussions for Tobias Schroeder as well. Today, the preliminary hearing was continued yet again for at least a month. In two weeks, the prosecution and Hamblin’s attorney Brian Frees will meet behind closed doors in Judge Larsen’s office to determine what evidence from the Emily Sheets case should be discoverable in the Tobias Schroeder case.
At issue is whether or not the the presence of an investigator who conducted Sheets’ interview in the second chair of Tobias Schroeder’s interview should be grounds for calling into question the veracity of Schroeder’s allegations. This could have been dealt with if the Utah County prosecutors who are prosecuting Hamblin in Manti had provided that interview video to Hamblin and Frees in compliance with the order compelling them to do so months ago. Instead, the prosecution chose to provide an uncertified transcript instead of the video they were ordered to provide, which gave Brian Frees the opening he needed to delay the preliminary hearing even farther into the future.