Deputy District Attorney Vicki Ashworth stated at trial that Susan was acting "like an abused and battered woman." In any case, the handwriting expert was Marcel Matley, the same expert Dan Rather used to verify the signature of George W. Bush's former squadron commander in the National Guard.

At trial, Kim Dubach, Richard's former legal secretary, testified that in November 1999 Susan Hamlin told her that she suspected she (Susan) had been molested as a child. Susan based her belief on a memory she had had when she was 16, said Dubach. A friend spent the night and Susan saw her father touching her friend's breasts, which triggered the memory of her own abuse years earlier. Susan's sister testified that while their father was not a great dad, he didn't do anything sexual to them. The sister testified that she worked for her father for 23 years. For good measure, Ashworth accused Hamlin of having an affair with Dubach.

I hesitate to speculate as to what the truth might be in this case. We know that some sort of emotional crisis occurred about five or six years ago in the Hamlin household and that Susan and Richard both began exploring the idea that she had been molested by her father some thirty or forty years earlier. Richard certainly became convinced of this and of satanic cult and mind control activities. Did she abuse her children, as she says she did? Are the things she wrote in her diaries to be taken as the truth, the confabulations of a disturbed mind, or the fantasies forced upon her by her husband's sick mind? Is there any truth at all to Richard's version of what happened? Was Susan abused as a child by her father and others? Did she witness a torture and murder of a young girl? The only thing I feel confident speculating about is that others won't hesitate to speculate as to what really happened and they will have their books and movies out by summer. (update: I was wrong. Summer has come and gone and this story is still ripe for the plucking. update: ABC's Primetime took up the story in February 2007.)