Susan Hamlin: Abuse, Satanic Cult Delusion, Trial, and Parole

The Richard Hamlin case is a California criminal matter in which Richard William Hamlin, a former Sacramento prosecutor who later worked as a high-profile criminal defense attorney, was convicted in January 2006 of torturing his wife, attorney Susan Hamlin, and sentenced to life in prison.¹ He remains incarcerated at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga and has been denied parole three times, most recently in late 2023.²

What Richard Hamlin Did to His Wife

Richard’s violence against Susan escalated sharply after 1999 and, by 2003, had become a daily feature of their home in El Dorado County. Susan testified that he beat her “on a daily basis, more than once a day,” using his fists, a gun, a sword, a Taser, a metal pipe, and pieces of wood. He strangled her, threw her into furniture, held lit cigarettes to her face, and deliberately struck areas where she already had broken bones or swollen bruises to intensify the pain.¹

A medical examination on March 1, 2004 documented five broken ribs, a broken nose, extensive bruising from her face down to her thighs, and ears so swollen that one canal was ninety percent closed. Individual beatings earlier that month had left her with a sword wound from blocking the blade, a face bloody and swollen after being hit with a gun and thrown into a window, and black eyes and blood in her cough after being kicked and struck with a metal pipe in the family’s laundry room.¹

The Satanic Cult Delusion

The physical abuse was wrapped around an elaborate false narrative Richard built and enforced. He told Susan she had “repressed memories” of childhood sexual abuse by her father, fed her the content of those supposed memories, and threatened to beat her if she did not play her part in what he described as a planned million-dollar lawsuit against her father.¹

In January 2004, after obtaining a book about surviving ritualistic satanic abuse, he expanded the story. He claimed Susan, her father, and family friends were members of a satanic cult plotting to kill him. He accused Susan of molesting their children and forced her to record a confession to that effect while holding a gun on her and threatening to kill her if she refused. He called the family’s church a “trap” designed to lure them to their deaths, and he isolated Susan from friends by writing them into the conspiracy. Susan later told a reporter that during the beatings Richard said he “thought he was beating the demons inside me.”³ The appellate record is clear that no cult existed; the conspiracy was Richard’s fabrication, and no one else was charged in connection with any of his allegations.¹

How the Case Reached Police

In early February 2004, Richard accidentally shot himself in the leg. He instructed Susan to tell authorities that a family friend named Rock Clum had attacked her in a parking lot, a story meant to account for her visible injuries, and she initially repeated it to a detective.¹

On February 26, 2004, Susan went to the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office. Her statement still carried the coerced confession to molesting her children and still blamed Rock Clum for her injuries, both of which she later testified had been fabricated under duress.⁴ Authorities used the information to have Child Protective Services remove the children from the home. Richard was arrested two days later.¹

Trial, Conviction, and Sentence

Prosecutors filed a criminal complaint on March 2, 2004, and a grand jury returned an 18-count indictment in April 2005. Three of the Hamlin children testified before the grand jury, describing beatings they had witnessed, their mother pleading with their father not to hurt her, and being told by Richard that their mother and grandfather had molested them as part of a cult.¹

At trial, the prosecution relied on Susan’s testimony, the children’s accounts, the medical documentation of her injuries, and a tape Richard himself had made in February 2004 in which he could be heard threatening to kill Susan if she did not answer his questions. The defense argued that the conduct did not meet the legal standard for torture, that a key threat on the tape was “inaudible” and so conditional, and that the child abuse counts intruded on parental rights.

In January 2006, a jury found Richard guilty of torture, one count of making a criminal threat, three counts of inflicting corporal injury on a spouse, and three counts of misdemeanor child abuse. He was acquitted on other charges, and prosecutors declined to retry counts on which the jury deadlocked. The court imposed a life sentence on the torture conviction. Richard was 45 at the time.¹²

The Appeal

Richard appealed, challenging the sufficiency of the evidence, evidentiary rulings, and his sentence. In February 2009, the California Court of Appeal, Third District, affirmed all of his convictions. It found that the trial court had erred in imposing upper-term sentences on the criminal threat and spousal injury counts because the aggravating facts had not been found by a jury, and it struck a no-contact order, sending the case back for resentencing on those limited points. The life sentence for torture stood.¹⁵

Parole Hearings

Richard has come up for parole three times, and Susan and the children have appeared each time to oppose his release. At the first hearing in December 2011, Susan, Alec, and Ryan sat in the same room as Richard while Clare and Jenn, then minors, watched through one-way glass. The board denied parole, and Susan told reporters the decision would let her daughters “grow into adulthood without fear of their father trying to get back into their lives.”⁶

He was denied parole again in 2019.⁷ At his third hearing, with the result reported in late December 2023, commissioners found that Richard “still posed a current threat to public safety,” “lacked credibility in a number of areas,” “had not yet addressed his sadistic behavior,” and “had minimized the extent of his violence toward his former wife.”²

Susan has told reporters that “the same delusions that motivated the violence” are still present and that Richard threatened from jail to have the family killed.⁴ The family has called him a “master manipulator” who would feign religious conversion to win release, and noted that despite a no-contact order he has tried to reach them through letters and by sending a girlfriend to speak with their son Alec. Susan and all four children were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after Richard’s arrest.³

Richard Hamlin remains incarcerated at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California.²

1
Findlaw. People v. Hamlin, No. C053982
2
Village Life. Hamlin Denied Parole Again
3
Mountain Democrat. Family Fights to Keep Abusive Man Behind Bars
4
CBS News Sacramento. Family of Convicted Torturer to Fight His Release
5
ABA Journal. Life Sentence Affirmed for Lawyer Convicted of Torturing Wife
6
Village Life. Hamlin Denied Parole
7
Mountain Democrat. Alec Hamlin’s Fathers and Sons Part of the Healing Process