Former Utah County Attorney David Leavitt has outrun accusations of an illegal adoption and ritualistic child abuse after attorneys within US Homeland Security Investigations shuttered an investigation into his actions.
In an exclusive interview with The Last American Vagabond, a former Homeland Security Investigations analyst reveals how he was targeted by the US government for pursuing an investigation into a powerful Utah politician following a controversial adoption of a Native American baby.
The analyst said that he and his colleague were sidelined after attempting to subpoena the Mormon Church’s internal hotline for reporting sexual abuse as part of their investigation. The federal government would eventually turn its focus to him after he questioned why charges had not been filed, despite an admission of guilt by the suspect.
“They spent $2 million investigating, and they couldn’t even arrest me. They got into my phone, my iCloud, and still couldn’t find anything to arrest me on,” the analyst told The Last American Vagabond (TLAV) over the phone. “This was under Biden… signed off on by Secretary Mayorkas.”
Alejandro Mayorkas served as the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under former US President Joe Biden.
The analyst requested anonymity to speak freely on his role in the investigation. TLAV has independently verified the claims made by him.
Ritualistic Child Sexual Abuse
This saga begins with the Utah County Sheriff’s Office (UCSO) May 31, 2022, announcement that an investigation into “ritualistic child sexual abuse and child sex trafficking” in Utah County had begun in April 2021.
The UCSO statement noted that “multiple county and federal agencies are investigating reports of ritualistic child sexual abuse from as far back as 1990.” The investigation subsequently discovered previous reports alleging “similar forms of ritualistic sexual abuse and trafficking” that occurred in Utah County, Juab County, and Sanpete County during the time between 1990 and 2010.
In September 2022, former therapist David Hamblin was the first suspect to be arrested and charged by the UCSO for multiple first-degree felony sexual offenses against a child. He was booked for three counts of sodomy of a child, one count of rape of a child, two counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child, and one misdemeanor count of lewdness involving a child. His ex-wife, Roselle Stevenson, was later arrested on similar charges.
One of the targets of the investigation was a therapist previously charged with a series of sex crimes against young female family members.
The Utah County Attorney’s Office dropped charges, and the man was not convicted.
Police reports indicate they had a taped confession. pic.twitter.com/ZqXGQVsCyG
— Adam Herbets (@AdamHerbets) June 1, 2022
Despite Hamblin’s admission that he raped his own daughter, by April 2025 all the charges against him would be dropped. This was the second time in the last decade Hamblin was arrested and accused of abusing his daughters and other alleged victims. In 2012, The Utah Daily Herald reported:
“A Provo man was arrested earlier this week on several rape charges stemming from incidents in the 1990s. David Hamblin is being charged with 12 counts of rape of a child, three counts of sodomy of a child, one count of attempted sodomy of a child, all first-degree felonies, and two counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child, a second-degree felony.
The charges are based on events that reportedly happened between 1991 and 1998.”
Charges against Hamblin would be dismissed without prejudice in 2014. The 2025 dismissal was dismissed with prejudice, meaning the charges cannot be refiled in the future.
Victims’ statements from the 2012 case describe David Hamblin as committing abuse as part of a cult made up of local Utahns. The statements claim the cult was responsible for rape, murder, and cannibalism of children. Hamblin and others accused in the 2012 case were also members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church. As TLAV has previously reported, the Mormon Church has a history of covering up abuse of children.
“It’s a lot of couples. There’s a lot of people involved, but, you know, we were looking at probably eight targets, the closest people to Hamblin,” the analyst said.
Two of those people accused of being involved with Hamblin and the cult were former Utah County Attorney David Leavitt and his wife Chelom.
The Press Conference
David Leavitt served as Utah County Attorney from 2018 through 2022. He is the younger brother of former three-time Utah Governor Michael Okerlund Leavitt. The father of the two men is Dixie Leavitt, the founder of the Leavitt Group, one of the largest independent insurance brokers in the nation.
One day after the UCSO announced their investigation, Leavitt held a press conference declaring that he was not a cannibal or a murderer. He claimed the Sheriff’s investigation was a political attack on him related to his upcoming primary election.
“I learned that my wife and I were part of those allegations, alleging that we were guilty of cannibalizing young children and murdering young children,” Leavitt stated during his press conference.
While he did not mention David Hamblin by name, Leavitt said the Sheriff’s investigation was related to charges filed against an unnamed man more than 10 years ago. Leavitt said the charges were dismissed because “the evidence was so outlandish and so unbelievable.”
Leavitt also shared a 151-page document titled “victim statement” related to David Hamblin’s 2012 case involving allegations of sexual abuse of children. The document includes Leavitt’s name, as well as more than a dozen people accused of practicing ritual sexual abuse of children. He described the report as “151 pages of utter baloney” and called the woman who made the allegations “tragically mentally ill.”
The Utah County District Attorney
Ritualistic Sexual Abuse/Cannibalism Press ConferenceDavid O Leavitt
🚨 Warning – not for regular people.
You cannot handle the truth. Do not watch. Do not think about this. Be Mormon. Pay your tithings. I am only posting due to scarcity. pic.twitter.com/sJG6TPLDGf— Zelph (@thelastLamanite) June 5, 2026
Those claims would later be debunked by court records.
The rumors about David Leavitt were strong enough to prevent him from winning his bid for reelection. Leavitt received 16,462 votes for 27% while challenger Jeff Gray received nearly 39,000 for 73% of the votes.
“I think the result is absolutely a result of the misinformation campaign against me not only over the last month, but the last six months,” Leavitt said at the time. “And if the people of Utah County understood what we are trying to accomplish, it would have been a different result.”
After Leavitt lost his position as Utah County Attorney, the investigation into ritualistic child sexual abuse continued. David Hamblin would be arrested in 2022 and the charges dismissed for good by 2025. David Leavitt was never brought in for questioning or officially charged with any crimes relating to the investigation.
However, David Leavitt was being pursued for an adoption scheme that appeared to run afoul of adoption laws and may have qualified as child trafficking.
The Adoption
On the day of David Leavitt’s 2022 election loss, Utah Fox-affiliate FOX 13 reported that he was implicated in an adoption scheme turned human trafficking investigation. The FOX 13 Investigates team released a video of Leavitt discussing how he used his political influence to work around laws regarding adopting Native American children.
The videotaped confession from Leavitt was originally recorded by journalist and documentary filmmaker Amy Herdy in 2020. Herdy was told by a source that David Leavitt had been sharing his story of adopting the Native girl with friends. Herdy was incredulous but decided to interview Leavitt to see if she might learn more.
Herdy says she began bantering with Leavitt and before long he openly discussed the adoption. Leavitt said that he and his wife, Chelom, were visiting her parents in 2017 when they overheard the family discussing their Native foster daughter, Mary Grace Medicine Top. Mary’s father was a Cheyenne chief who also happened to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).
The LDS church operated a program from 1954 to 2000 where Native parents could send their children to foster homes with Mormon families. Mary’s parents put her in the program and she was placed with Clyde and Karen Eastwood. Mary would live with the foster family on and off for a few years. Chelom Leavitt was one of the Eastwoods’ daughters.
When David and Chelom heard the discussion about Mary’s daughter, Tonah Fishinghawk, struggling with addiction while juggling a newborn, they decided they should adopt the baby. This is when David Leavitt called Lawrence Jace Killsback, then tribal president of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe based in Montana.
“I’m thinking to myself, ‘How in the world am I going to do this?'” Leavitt could be heard saying in the video. “Finally, this strategy comes into my head, and if you’ve got five minutes, I’ll tell you the story.”
In the video, Leavitt explains how he brokered a deal with the Northern Cheyenne by telling them he could make an agreement with Ukraine to import the Cheyenne’s buffalo. Leavitt told Killsback about his friendship with former Ukrainian president Victor Yushchenko.
“Victor and I have this goal of introducing buffalo into western Ukraine,” Leavitt says in the video. “And you’re a sovereign nation, and you have a buffalo herd, and Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and it doesn’t have a buffalo herd, but it wants one, and so I’m here to see if we can form a bilateral agreement between the people of the Northern Cheyenne and the people of Ukraine to introduce buffalo to western Ukraine.”
“At that point, (Killsback) was all ears,” Leavitt continued. “And I said, ‘That’s the second reason why I’m here. The first reason why I’m here is this. We want to adopt one of your people.'”
While Leavitt was able to convince the tribal president to go along with the scheme, he had more trouble with Tribal Social Services—a detail he readily admitted in the video.
“Tribal Social Services looked at us and said, ‘We’re not giving you this baby,'” Leavitt said. “I just said, ‘You know what? You are shameless.’I just let her have it with both barrels… There’s such a prejudice in the Native community about a non-Native adopting a Native.”
Leavitt went back to Killsback to get his support. Killsback gave it and went to Tribal Social Services to convince them to allow the adoption. Killsback would later be sentenced to six months in prison for stealing from federal, state, and tribal agencies. He died in January 2026.
“I left, and five minutes later the phone rang and it was the social worker saying, ‘I think I’ve figured out a way to get this child to you,” Leavitt admitted.
Leavitt was allowed to take the baby on that day in 2017. The little girl is now considered to be his step-foster-great niece.
After David Leavitt shared his story with journalist Amy Herdy, she realized his scheme likely violated the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). ICWA was passed in 1978 as part of an effort to keep Native children within their families and tribes.
“We ended the interview, and got out of there, and got to the car,” Herdy told Reveal, a podcast produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting. “And I felt almost immediately that we could not keep this from law enforcement.”
Family members of the Native girl also spoke to the Reveal podcast, including the father, uncle, and grandmother Mary Grace Medicine Top. The family members said that while it is true that Tonah Fishinghawk had struggled with drinking, the family did not approve of David Leavitt taking the child.
In September 2017, Tonah was arrested for an alcohol-related charge and taken to jail. Her nine-month-old baby was taken by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Fishinghawk later relinquished her parental rights and gave permission to Leavitt to adopt the baby. However, the entire adoption was only approved by the tribal chief, and not the family.
Shortly after the adoption took place, Leavitt visited the house of Mary Grace Medicine Top. Leavitt proceeded to lecture Mary and her son Darwyn, the brother of Tonah and uncle to the child. The interaction was recorded and played on the Reveal podcast.
“And you have to give us the right first to take care of our family. You cannot just take them from us, is what you are doing. That’s how we see it, David,” Darwyn says to Leavitt.
Mary pressed Leavitt for answers as well.
“Let me ask you one thing. Who are you to come into my house and say what you’re saying? Because for one thing you haven’t been around, you haven’t known what we’ve been up to in our lives,” she said in the recording.
David claimed that the family involved him and that he would be recognized by the law.
“You allowed me to be involved and I’m also involved because by tribal custom and law, I’m Tonah’s uncle and I’m these girls’ great-uncle and the Indian Child Welfare Act will recognize my right.”
“What connection will you keep with us? This is her culture,” Darwyn shot back. “This is why ICWA is created is—for cultural reasons.”
After some more back and forth, Leavitt threatens Darwyn: “And I’m telling you, we don’t have to be enemies, but if we’re going to be enemies, you go ahead and take me on.”
Amy Herdy’s interview with Leavitt would eventually find its way to the desk of the Homeland Security Investigations analyst as part of a criminal human trafficking investigation. However, the analyst told TLAV that Leavitt had already been under investigation prior to the adoption.
The Investigation
The analyst says his team had been investigating sexual allegations against David Leavitt since 2016. He joined the investigation in 2019.
“When I came on board, an agent from HSI had already had the case for a few years. It’s a really big case. Leavitt was always on the radar,” the analyst told TLAV.
Leavitt was being investigated as part of the preexisting investigation into David Hamblin, the therapist who had been accused of ritual abuse in 2012 and again in 2022. The accusations in the case against Hamblin include claims of incest from his daughters, rape, murder, and cannibalism. The HSI analyst said the accusations were being taken “very seriously” by his department.
When asked how serious the claims were taken within other departments, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), he told the story of a memo that is reportedly in the possession of the FBI.
“I did not see the memo. I was told about it… by a very reliable source… that the FBI had a memo that they understood RSA (ritualistic sexual abuse) was real, but they would never investigate it,” the analyst said. “And they gave, like, four reasons why, and one of them was because the victims wouldn’t make good witnesses on the stand.”
The analyst says his team had received Amy Herdy’s video interview with Leavitt and added it to the case file related to suspicion of human trafficking. He said the HSI special agent he was working with told him from the beginning that their Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) didn’t like the case against David Leavitt.
“We could tell that the ASAC wanted it shut down. He wouldn’t take our briefs and he didn’t read anything, but he knew of the allegations and he called them salacious. Which is pretty bizarre from a law enforcement standpoint. I’m like, ‘You haven’t even talked to the victims,'” the analyst detailed.
He says by this point the ASAC hadn’t even heard the details of their investigation.
“We knew that he wanted it shut down. We didn’t know exactly how it was gonna be done, but he eventually removed us from the case.”
Five months after receiving the taped confession of David Leavitt, the HSI analyst and his team were removed from the case.
The Coverup & the Whistleblower
The analyst says he believes the betrayal was related to a “brilliant idea” proposed by the special agent leading the investigation. The special agent proposed subpoenaing records from the Mormon Church’s hotline for reporting sexual abuse.
“We would’ve been able to see how many people have called and reported RSA to the church, [and] were any of our victims or suspects in any of those calls,” the analyst said with more than a hint of frustration.
According to the analyst, when their supervisor, Brandon Crane, found out about this plan, he “lost his shit.” The analyst said Crane was a “big time Mormon.”
“Brandon Crane was the supervisor who had ASAC Steve Andres remove us. Andres retired after I filed [the whistleblower complaint] and Crane became ASAC and didn’t cooperate with Utah County Sheriff Smith, and made sure Leavitt wasn’t investigated.”
TLAV emailed known email addresses for Steve Andres and Brandon Crane for comment. Neither have responded as of the time of publication of this article.
Additionally, the analyst said ASAC Steve Andres called the United States Attorney’s Office and had them remove an assistant United States attorney (AUSA). He says one of the AUSAs called him in January 2020.
“He’s like, ‘Hey man, just to let you know, your ASAC called my boss,’ who was the US attorney, and wanted us removed,” the analyst shared. He says the AUSA told him that one AUSA had already been removed and that he was likely to be taken off the case as well.
The analyst also recalled a meeting between him, the Special Agent, and members of the Utah Attorney General’s Office.
“We went to their office. We’re talking about the case, and the Deputy Attorney General was there, his name was Spencer Austin, and he had an investigator with him, and they had this giant stack of folders in front of them. It was all the Hamblin stuff,” the analyst recalls.
He says he asked his superiors why they didn’t prosecute David Hamblin despite his own admission that he raped his daughter.
“The Deputy Attorney General looks over at his investigator, and he’s like, ‘Do you know why?'”
The analyst said the investigator calmly responded, “Nope, I don’t know why.”
Frustrated with the lack of investigation into David Hamblin and David Leavitt, the analyst filed a whistleblower complaint against his bosses for not investigating. He received a letter from the United States Office of Special Counsel in response. The letter from attorney John U. Young stated:
“You alleged that HSI improperly terminated an investigation into allegations involving current Utah County Attorney David O. Leavitt. We emphasize that, while (Office of Special Counsel) has found a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing based on the information you submitted in support of your allegations, our referral to the Secretary for investigation is not a final determination that the allegations are substantiated.
This remains an open matter under investigation until the agency’s final report is forwarded to the President and Congress.”
He says that after he filed his complaint “all hell broke loose.”
“Nobody wants to work with you. I wasn’t allowed in the office. I ended up resigning,” he told TLAV. “It was just too stressful. I knew they were investigating me. They were gonna punish me and try and put me in jail for it. So I resigned and moved.”
Meanwhile, the special agent he worked with was moved out of state.
The analyst says the agents who received the case after his team was sidelined “understood it was not to go anywhere.” He says there was no further investigation.
“They kept it open, but didn’t investigate him.”
After his partner and he were both removed from the case, the analyst says that UC Sheriff Mike Smith—the one who initially announced the investigations into ritualized child sexual abuse—contacted HSI for the files, but was ignored. He says the Sheriff was ultimately prevented from accessing the files.
Regarding the claims of ritual abuse, he is uncertain if the crimes continue to this day or if the victims coming forward are focused on abuses from the ’80s and ’90s. However, after interviewing alleged victims and claimed witnesses, he is certain it is still happening to some degree.
“And it’s all related to the religion.”
The religion he speaks of is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He says it’s undeniable that the Leavitt family’s wealth and connections to the Church helped him escape any consequences for his actions.
“The entire case with the child is just complete fraud. That should’ve never happened. And I mean, his lawyers [Leavitt] were the church’s lawyers,” the analyst said in reference to the law firm Kirton McConkie, which also represents the LDS.
“David Leavitt knew the judges, had the lawyers for the church. I mean, Kirton McConkie—it doesn’t get any bigger,” the analyst shared. “They represent a billion-dollar industry. Of course, he was gonna be able to take a child and fake the adoption.”
The analyst specifically pointed to the powerful influence of the LDS throughout the state of Utah.
“The church runs everything from the small local municipalities all the way up to the state. Most people that are in a position of power are LDS,” he said. “Their loyalty is to the Church, before their family, before their job, before the oath to the Constitution.”
TLAV has previously reported on the numerous allegations of ritualistic abuse within the LDS and throughout the state of Utah.
The Getaway
In 2022, after losing his election and escaping any consequences for the adoption or the allegations relating to the David Hamblin case, David and Chelom Leavitt bought Knockderry castle in Scotland for $1.5 million USD.
The Leavitts have since rebranded themselves as remodeling influencers, complete with accounts on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The Facebook account has 788,000 followers while the Instagram has 1.4 million.
Based on the comments on these platforms, it’s clear that the vast majority of their followers have no idea what David Leavitt was accused of or the influence of his powerful family. Utah media has also largely moved on, with only occasional fluff pieces on the castle appearing from time to time. So far, the Scottish media has shown no interest in digging into the past of their new residents.
My hope with writing this investigation is to renew interest in the accusations against David Leavitt, to inspire their social media followers to ask him about the circumstances of the adoption, and why he and his wife were listed in the David Hamblin victims’ statements. I encourage Scottish media to pick up on these threads and question the Leavitts directly.
“I’m glad to hear that someone’s looking into it. I mean, not too many people will. They just wanna forget about it,” the analyst told TLAV at the end of the phone call.
For the sake of the Native child and the alleged victims of David Hamblin, do not forget this case. Spread this investigation. Comment on the Leavitts’ social media accounts. Email Scottish news outlets. Only by standing up and speaking out can we hope to prevent these kinds of abuse of children, as well as the abuses of power that are obviously taking place within federal law enforcement.
