Richard Hamlin Case: Torture Conviction, Cult Story, and Appeal

The Richard Hamlin case is the 2006 El Dorado County, California conviction of a former Sacramento prosecutor and criminal defense attorney who tortured his wife Susan over several years while forcing her and their four children to accept a fabricated story that her father led a satanic cult trying to kill him. Hamlin was sentenced to life in prison for torture, along with additional terms for spousal injury, criminal threats, and misdemeanor child abuse. He remains incarcerated at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga after being denied parole for the third time in late 2023.¹

Who Richard Hamlin Was

Hamlin met his wife Susan in law school. He worked first as a Sacramento prosecutor and then built a high-profile criminal defense practice, and the family lived in El Dorado Hills with what looked from the outside like a comfortable place in Sacramento’s social scene.² The professional biography matters to the case because Hamlin later used his legal training to represent himself at trial and to construct the elaborate false narrative that ran alongside the physical abuse.

The Abuse Inside the Home

Susan testified that the physical abuse began sometime after 1999 and had escalated by 2003 to a near-daily occurrence. She described strangulation, blows to the head, being thrown into furniture, a gun held to her head, a knife pressed against her skin, and lit cigarettes held to her face. She also testified that Richard deliberately struck areas of her body already bruised or broken from earlier assaults, to maximize the pain.³

A medical examination on March 1, 2004 documented five broken ribs, a broken nose, ears swollen nearly shut from repeated blows, and extensive bruising. The couple’s children testified that Richard hit them with books and that they lived in daily fear for their mother’s life.⁴

The Satanic Cult Story

The violence was paired with a psychological framework Hamlin built and expanded over time. He became fixated on the idea that Susan’s father had molested her as a child and that she had repressed the memories, and he pursued the notion of a million-dollar lawsuit against her father. Susan eventually came to believe parts of the account.³

In January 2004, after reading a book about surviving “ritualistic satanic abuse,” Hamlin told the children that their grandfather led a “demonic cult” trying to kill him and that both the grandfather and Susan had molested them. He carried guns around the house and kept a Taser and a sword in the bedroom. By Super Bowl Sunday 2004, the accusation had shifted to Susan alone, and Hamlin used physical force and a firearm to coerce her into recording a “confession” to child molestation. Susan later described these as rehearsed sessions conducted at gunpoint over a period of months.⁴

How the Case Came to Light

In the first week of February 2004, Hamlin accidentally shot himself in the leg. Before paramedics arrived, he instructed Susan to “stick to the story”: that she and two acquaintances, Lisa and Rock Clum, were plotting to kill him, and that Rock Clum was responsible for her visible bruises. Susan repeated the story to a detective at the hospital.³

On February 26, 2004, Hamlin brought Susan to the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office, where she gave a detailed statement falsely admitting to molesting her children and repeating the fabricated account about Rock Clum. Officers were skeptical and separated the couple for individual interviews. In hers, Susan described what had actually been happening for years. Child Protective Services removed the children, and Hamlin was arrested two days later, on February 28, 2004.¹

The Charges and the Verdict

An El Dorado County grand jury returned an 18-count indictment in April 2005 covering torture, child abuse, criminal threats, corporal injury on a spouse, assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury, false imprisonment by violence, and negligent discharge of a firearm. Three of the children testified before the grand jury about the beatings, the demonic-cult claims, and their mother’s injuries.³

Hamlin represented himself. Trial ran from October 2005 through January 2006, and his defense leaned on the same narrative he had built at home: that Susan and her family were conspiring to murder him and that the abuse accounts were fabrications. He told the court he was not a “common wife beater.”⁵

The jury convicted him of one count of torture, three counts of inflicting corporal injury on a spouse, one count of making a criminal threat, and three counts of misdemeanor child abuse as lesser included offenses of the felony child abuse charges. The torture count carried a life sentence. Jurors acquitted him on seven counts, including false imprisonment and several assault counts, and hung on three more, which prosecutors did not retry.³

The criminal threat conviction rested on a recording in which Hamlin, with a gun on his lap, told Susan, “I’ll kill you now if you [inaudible]. You’re not escaping this one.” Parts of the recording were inaudible, but the surrounding context, including his demands that she “answer these fucking questions” and “come clean,” was later held sufficient to establish the seriousness of the threat.

The Appeal

The California Court of Appeal, Third District, affirmed all of Hamlin’s convictions on February 9, 2009, while finding two sentencing errors.⁶ The court held that torture can be committed through a continuous course of conduct rather than a single discrete act, and that jurors were entitled to infer intent to cause extreme pain from Hamlin’s pattern of targeting his wife’s existing injuries. It also held that surrounding circumstances gave meaning to the partially inaudible threat recording.³

The sentencing errors involved upper-term sentences on the criminal threat and spousal injury counts, which had been based on facts not found by the jury, admitted by Hamlin, or supported by prior convictions. The court also struck a no-contact order and sent the case back for resentencing on those specific counts. The life sentence for torture was not affected.³

Where Hamlin Is Now

Hamlin is at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga. He has been denied parole three times.

At his first hearing in 2011, Susan and their children Alec, Jenn, and Clare publicly opposed release, telling reporters he had threatened to “send someone to kill us even if he was in jail.” Another son, Ryan, also planned to attend to argue against parole.⁴

He came up again in January 2019, after receiving a three-year advancement of his hearing date, and claimed to have undergone a “religious awakening” and taken classes on domestic violence. Susan disputed the sincerity of that account, noting that Hamlin had previously held a leadership position in their church and had used Bible verses to justify his abuse. Parole was denied.⁵

At his third hearing in late 2023, Board of Parole Hearings commissioners Troy Taira and Kathleen Newman found that Hamlin still posed a threat to public safety, lacked credibility in several areas, had not addressed his “sadistic behavior,” and continued to minimize the violence he inflicted on his family. The El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office confirmed the denial.¹

1
Village Life. Hamlin Denied Parole Again
2
ABC News. Primetime Story
3
Findlaw. People v. Hamlin
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CBS News Sacramento. Family of Convicted Torturer to Fight His Release
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Mountain Democrat. Man Serving Life Up for Parole
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CAP Central. People v. Hamlin