A Mormon Murder Mystery Pt. 1 | Cultish

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YouTube channel today, subscribe and hit the bell. See you there, guys. What's up, everybody?

And welcome back to Koltish. A little different again this time. Right now I'm flying solo, but I have my buddy here.

His name is Ryan McMartin and we're doing an episode today on Lori Vallow and the

Mormon doomsday cult. I know that we've had many people ask us to do this and we're doing it.

We're going to get into it. And I know Ryan's a new face, but what's interesting about Ryan and I is actually on the side, hopefully for Apologia Studios, All Access members, we're going to be having a full

Mormon history podcast. We're about 19 episodes in already. Yeah, we're at MCU levels at the moment of how much material we've produced.

And we were what, like eight years into Mormon history out of like 180?

That's the funny thing about Mormonism is the history is absolutely insane. We're 19 episodes in, which is it's roughly around probably 35 hours.

It's not available yet, but we're also doing another series for Under the Banner of Heaven. And that's kind of where our

Mormon history series began. It just all of a sudden we planned on doing like 10 episodes and it turned into way more.

We just have a minimum of self -control. We have a minimum of self -control. He texted me last night and said, we're doing two episodes and that's it.

You know, just two hours and I'm cutting you off. Yeah. Oh, I love it.

All right. All right, fine. I'm happy to introduce you guys to Ryan and hopefully you'll be seeing more of his face in the future.

So keep your eye out for Apologia Studios, All Access, become a member and in the distant or short future, you will see all of our episodes on Mormon history and Under the

Banner of Heaven there. So let's get into it, Ryan. Let's talk about Lori Vallow and the

Mormon doomsday cult. Where do we begin? Do we begin in 1960? That's always the tricky part whenever you're talking about any story whatsoever.

Just where do we even begin with this? And that was kind of the problem that we had with Under the

Banner of Heaven because we were like, well, where do we start? I guess at the beginning. Well, where's the beginning? You know,

Joseph Smith's grandparents. OK, yeah, well, I guess that's it. And and look what happened with that.

Yeah, we obviously went all the way back to Adam anyway. So yeah, yeah, right. So with with this, there are a couple of preliminaries.

We want to make something clear from the outset. The cult that Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell participated in is not to be conflated with mainstream

Mormonism. They're not representative of it. And as we go on, we're going to talk about a couple of specific, really important points where they deviate from,

I guess we can call it Mormon orthodoxy, you know. And so so we want to make that clear. And we're going to keep on kind of revisiting that idea just to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Yeah. Hold on. Before we go further, we have the wild, wild world of Mormon orthodoxy, the ever -changing, effervescent, bubbly world.

Yeah, what even is that? Yeah, of continuing revelation. But one of our slogans is bad theology hurts people.

So can you briefly describe why Mormonism, in terms of bad theology, can give birth to a movement like this?

Yeah, I think we can kind of introduce that now. But the way that I think of it is that if Chad and Lori had not, if they had been just regular mainstream

Mormons, then at the very least, this situation would have played out very differently. However, the context, both doctrinally and culturally, of Mormonism did kind of shape things in a way.

So obviously, like your average Mormon neighbor or, you know, the guys that come and knock on your door, they're going to decry everything that Chad and Lori ever did.

And they're going to be right to do that because that's not a part of their religion. But there are going to be those things that Chad and Lori will do that will not make sense unless you understand some specific aspect of Mormonism, if that makes sense.

Right. Yeah. One thought for me is kind of like the burning in the bosom. And we have many conversations with people on Thursday nights doing evangelism,

Ryan, and it's like God speaks to them. So it seems like Mormonism, with continuing revelation and a priesthood authority, creates the perfect storm environment for people when they go off the loose end or easily go off the loose end and just do their own thing.

Yeah. And one of the weird things that we're going to see about this particular cult is that it isn't a fundamentalist cult.

And the way that this works is that basically with any organized religion, you're going to have three potential sources of authority.

You're going to have divine external revelation, like a

Bible or, you know, the Koran or something like that. And then you're going to have teachers, you know, maybe they're going to be

Bible teachers, pastors, sheikhs, rabbis, whatever. And then finally, you have the boots on the ground, the average show, you know, your average

Orthodox Jewish person or something like that. Fundamentalism in any religion is going to be the idea that that first type, that revelation, the prophets, the scripture, that that is meant to be the foundation for everything else that you believe in, everything that you do.

Nobody's really consistent with that. You know, you find a lot of fundamentalists that are like, you're ignoring this part right here, you know, but that's what fundamentalism basically is.

And so in Mormonism, fundamentalism usually takes the form of, you know, ignoring, like they'll say the church has apostatized, they'll say basically everybody after a certain point, every prophet has gone off the deep end and we reject everything.

And so they're usually going to be embracing the policies of, say, Brigham Young. And so you're going to have things like polygamy, you're going to have blood atonement, you're going to have even just the way that they dress, right?

This group though isn't fundamentalist. They still follow in that line of you being the arbiter of truth, right?

And that's what theological liberalism is, where you are the one who determines by some kind of experience or wisdom or whatever, what ultimate reality is.

And this happens a lot. This happens unfortunately in a lot of liberal Christianity, you know, we don't.

Yeah, we see that bleeding in even into the Mormon organization right now because Elder, I think it's

Elder Alan D. Haynes, he just said in one of his speeches, he said, you cannot treat prophecy like antique cars.

It doesn't get more value in age, and you can't use past prophecy to contradict future prophecy.

Meaning that Mormon fundamentalism is ultimately unfundamentalistic, because there's no solid or concrete ground for someone to appeal to you other than the authority of the prophet who's speaking now.

Yeah, and there's, I think for the thinking Mormon, you have to embrace some sort of theological liberalism here, because how do you intellectually defend the book of Abraham?

You really can't. We've got an extensive series that's going to come out at some point in the future where we talk about that.

And so what do you do with it? Well, what you have to do is in some way embrace some sort of contradiction, or just say, well,

I don't believe this, or you know, I believe this in spite of the evidence, or something like that.

You have to go to some sort of, I feel right about it, when we shouldn't have to do that.

You know, we shouldn't have to embrace that kind of an ideology in order to continue believing things.

We should be able to to embrace the truth, and also be able to defend it intellectually and personally.

I mean, and that's the truth of what's going on in this situation with bad theology hurting people. Doing what you think or feel is right in the situation for Lori Vallow, or murder.

Conspiracy and murder. The fruit of their labor was that.

It was all in vain, and there will be justice that will occur within this life, but also ultimate justice given by God for the murder that she committed on her son and her daughter, ultimately.

And a variety of other people. Yeah, even her, yeah, one of her ex -husbands, and even maybe her husband before that, and Chad's wife.

Yeah, it's a whole big thing. I think we started a good little foundation, though, just to get the our audience thinking about how

Mormonism can give birth to a movement such as this. Yeah, in the beginning, there was a little family,

Barry and Janice Cox, and they were members of the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. And these are often portrayed as being just typical members.

I don't think that's 100 % true. I mean, there's nothing really about them that would make everyone say these people are freaks, or their children are bound to go off and commit murder and start a cult or anything, but they were a little bit odd.

For one thing, Barry was known as one of those people that really only wanted to talk about one thing. And in his case, that was taxes.

He only ever wanted to talk about how taxes are unconstitutional. And from what I can tell, he's still kind of like that.

He wrote a book about it and things like that. Whereas Janice, she, and this is back in the 70s and 80s and stuff, this was a time when conformity was still a really big thing in Mormonism.

I know it's still kind of depending on what individual subculture you're a part of or what neighborhood you're in, but back then it was much more intense.

But Janice Cox was the sort of person that would show up to pick up her kids from school wearing a skin -tight leopard print outfit with giant glasses and things like that.

Where were they living? Do you remember? Loma Linda, California. Oh, okay. But not in Salt Lake City, Utah.

No. Or American Fork, Utah. No, no, no. And there's a lot of geography stuff.

We're going to skip a lot of it. The stuff that Dateline in 2020 did, they can cover that kind of stuff.

But they eventually had, from what I can tell, five kids.

Lori's one of their five children. She wasn't an unusual kid.

It was a fairly healthy environment for the most part, with one little exception being that her parents were kind of,

I don't want to say absentee parents, but they would regularly go on vacations for just themselves and leave the kids behind.

They're like latchkey kids kind of? A little bit. Nothing that would have made people at the time say, oh, these kids are being neglected.

They wouldn't be calling CPS from what I can tell. But it wouldn't be uncommon for the parents to take off and go to Hawaii for like a week and leave their kids money to buy food and stuff.

But yeah, they would do that kind of a thing. It was kind of a hands -off parenting technique from what we can tell.

The other thing, at some point, Janice started getting on her daughters about their weight.

Lori wasn't morbidly obese as a kid, but she was a little bit chunky, normal for your average

American kid. But her mom started getting on both her and her sister Stacey about this, and this will have some repercussions later on and sort of tie back into things a little bit later.

She also had a brother named Adam. He's one of the people who, from what

I can tell, is an innocent victim of this. He is somebody who started to notice that Lori eventually will go off the deep end and he tries to right the ship.

He, at one point, tried to organize an intervention with her to try and set her straight.

There's another really interesting story about Adam, but that would take us way too far afield. She also had another brother named

Alex. Now, Alex, you're gonna hear a lot about him. There are things that I could say that aren't really…

We can't document to the biblical standard that this happened.

All I can really say is that there are rumors, and I think we can verify that at least he had an unhealthy type and degree of devotion to his sister.

Right. Where Adam was at one end of the spectrum, Alex was at the other.

Yeah, sort of. I guess in comparison with Alex, anybody seems kind of stable.

Alex is devoted to both Lori and also to his niece in ways that just make people scratch their heads and say, why would anyone be like that?

Not just why would anyone do that. Why would anyone have that kind of a disposition towards their own sibling? It's just bizarre.

There's another sister. She doesn't really factor into the story except for towards the end.

She's one of the people that will testify against Lori, but there's not a lot to say about that. What's up, everybody?

It's The Super Sleuth here letting you know that you can go to shopcultish .com and get all of our exclusive cultish merch.

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Talk to you later, guys. She's growing up, and she's kind of a little bit overweight according to her mother's standards.

She does, probably because of her mom's influence, really buck against that.

She eventually becomes a beauty contestant and things like that. Unfortunately, that influence will have a more profound negative impact on her sister,

Stacy, which we'll get into in a minute. Got you. Okay. Man, okay. Continuing on, we have right now just the picture of Lori's family and a little bit of her upbringing.

Kind of a latchkey kid, not even really that. Nothing crazy, but the parents could have been a little bit more active.

This was the 60s and 70s, so things were a little bit different back then. There's also shag carpeting and all kinds of different stuff.

Yeah, she was growing up. She was born in, let me see here. It was 1967, I believe. 1973.

Oh, 1973. Right, right, right. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yep. 67 was her sister. Yep. Yeah, so she was born in 73, and so she's growing up in the 70s and 80s and early 90s, that kind of stuff.

In 1990, a young man by the name of Chad Daybell married his wife,

Tammy. Now, Chad was in kind of a similar situation in that he didn't seem like the sort of person that would end up doing this kind of stuff.

I mean, when you look at, say, the childhood of somebody like Jim Jones, there were warning signs.

Yeah. Huge blinking neon warning signs that this dude was headed for trouble. It wasn't like that with Chad.

He grew up, again, in Provo this time, just lived an average kind of Mormon life there.

He eventually went to BYU and graduated with a degree in journalism. After he got married, he got a job with Cedar Fort, which is a publishing company.

It's fairly well known in Mormon communities. He was kind of high up in that, and so that led him to choosing a career in writing books and publishing some of his own stuff.

Eventually, in 2004, Chad and Tammy would actually found their own Spring Creek Book Company, and that was how he ended up publishing a lot of his own works.

Gotcha. That's kind of how Laurie, when we get into that in the future, finds Chad and kind of gets enamored with some of his theology and ideas.

All right. If we can put them on a timeline right next to each other, we have Chad getting married in 1990.

In 1992, we have Laurie marrying her first husband and her high school sweetheart,

Nelson Yanes. Yeah. We're going to go with Yanes. Yanes. Okay. Then in 1995, she divorces

Mr. Yanes, and this is kind of like a theme that you see throughout Laurie's life. Yeah. This will be the first. This is the first.

This is the first one. Then in 1995, soon after divorcing

Mr. Yanes, will marry a guy named William. We're going to just say

William L. I'm not sure how to pronounce that. Ligoya. Ligoya? Okay. Well, I hope

I haven't insulted any Ligoyas out there. Yeah. There isn't really anything terribly noteworthy about this marriage with one exception.

This is when Laurie has her first son, Colby. Yeah. Colby, throughout this whole story, is just the most tragic victim,

I think, of what's happened here. He is one of those ones that is...

I can't imagine what he's experiencing right now. I don't think there's anyone in the world that understands it because he has had to see from the outside the degradation of his mother.

This is one of the things that makes this story so strange and why it stood out to a lot of people is that Laurie Vallow didn't start out being a maniac who would, like a sociopath, want to kill her children.

During this period, after Laurie gets a divorce from her second husband, what

Colby describes is like you and me versus the world. Yeah. His mom was his protector and it was like they were best friends and partners and they could do anything together.

Yeah. That was his stability. His rock because his father... Yeah. His father was no longer in the picture.

I don't know what kind of custody arrangements they had, but it doesn't sound like he was really all that active.

I could be wrong about that, but he doesn't really seem to come into play in later events. This provides a contrast for what happens later and why it's so bizarre.

That's the way things were back then. Laurie and Colby were just trying to get by as a single mother and her son, all while in another part of the world,

Chad and Tammy are having... They would eventually have five children and they're starting their careers and everything.

And all of this is perfectly normal. Yes. But then something happens that I think is sort of an indication that things are going off the rails slightly.

I mentioned before that Stacy, Laurie's older sister, had a problem as a result of...

Largely as a result of their mom's influence. She got to the point where she even developed what you might call a phobia of sugar.

She did not, as an adult, have a healthy relationship with food.

And that's something I think she got from her mom. She eventually became a diabetic. And in 1998, she slipped into a diabetic coma and did not ever wake up.

That's Laurie's sister, Stacy. Yes, Laurie's older sister. And imagine the connection she probably has with her sister, knowing that at times of her life, when her parents are gone for weeks on end, that her sister is probably helping take care of her.

It's almost like a mom. Yeah, I think so. I mean, there was something like a six -year age gap.

I mean, I think of how, you know, I think of your family dynamic, where your oldest will take care of the babies to some extent, you know, and they're gonna end up hopefully eventually looking after her.

And I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be Laurie and have your sister die indirectly as a result of something that had influenced you as well.

Wow. So she gained, she became diabetic, yet she had a phobia of sugar.

Yeah, it was, I forget which type of... Could be a type two diabetes. It probably something like that.

What's interesting is typically people get diabetes from like over eating or eating horrible foods.

Well, she, I think, went back and forth. I think she would have those times where she was binging or something along those lines.

And it's that imbalance that caused this problem. And then the phobia of sugar leads her to a diabetic coma.

Yeah. It's like you have too much of something so your body gets used to it.

And then suddenly you're not getting that anymore. I'm not a medical expert, but that's just not healthy with anything really, especially sugar.

But the key thing here is Stacy had a daughter by the name of Melanie. When Stacy died,

Laurie began to talk about Melanie as if she was the reincarnation of Stacy.

Not that Stacy just had, or that Melanie had common traits with her mother.

It was a stronger kind of language than that. And it was something that stood out in the minds of people that knew her.

They didn't say, oh, well, this is a bad sign that you're going to go off into a cult at some point.

But it was like, this was different from what you would normally say. Yeah. That's interesting.

Growing up LDS as well, there's no reincarnation that is orthodox doctrine.

No, there's no reincarnation in Mormonism. So the way she maybe gets it is just spirit children in a pre -existence or something.

And this one spirit inhabiting a body again. I think when we dive into the theology of it later on, after we've kind of gone through just the basics of what happened, there's some reasons for both why reincarnation is not an aspect of Mormon theology and how they managed to try and fit this into their own burgeoning kind of thing.

But yeah, it's not a Mormon thing. Wow. And she's already divorced how many times right now?

This would be her second from what I can tell. Yeah. In 2001,

Lori marries for a third time. This time she marries a guy named Joseph Ryan and together they have a daughter named

Tylee. Okay. This is a little bit more, like there's more to this particular marriage than previous ones.

I mean, we don't really know anything about the previous husbands. In this case, things get a little bit weird. There are accusations of abuse of various types, physical abuse, at some point sexual abuse.

Again, I don't think we have met the biblical standard of two to three independent lines of testimony to say definitively who's responsible for what.

I've heard enough that I feel like it's credible. There's circumstantial evidence? Yes. Joe Ryan's sister came and visited for a while and she had to leave early because she was so sick of her brother yelling at his kids and roughing him up and stuff like that.

Right. So we have Lori and Colby. And now Tylee. And now Tylee. So Colby at this age would have been, let's see.

I don't know when he was born though. Oh, gotcha. Okay. So we have Colby, he's a little bit older, and now his sister is born.

He's a big brother. And now we have the aspect of abuse coming into the household from Joseph Ryan.

Colby then becoming more protective probably over his sister and even his mother being just a little bit older of a man.

And just in the midst of that, they eventually do divorce in 2004.

One of the things that makes this kind of tricky is that it's not at all uncommon in custody battles and divorces for somebody to start accusing the other one of being abusive towards the kids.

And you have to take that on a case by case basis. You can't just say, well, the person who's being accused is always guilty or the person who's being accused is always innocent.

It has to be on a case by case basis. And so we don't have enough to know, but it doesn't sound like it was a healthy environment and it doesn't sound like something that any of these kids wanted to grow up.

Gotcha. So it looks like Colby was born in between like 19, uh, probably around 1996. So at this age, when she's in this relationship,

Lori with Joseph Ryan, it'd be anywhere from him being five to about, uh, eight to nine years old when the relationship.

Somewhere around there. Yeah. Gotcha. So Colby would have been old enough to have some understanding of what was going on.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but not, not enough to really have the kind of perspective that an adult would.

Right. If that makes sense. Um, so of course they divorced in 2004 and again, you know, it's a single mother and trying to raise her two kids and then they run into guy named

Charles Vallow. Charles Vallow from what we can tell is everything that they had initially wanted in a stepdad.

Yeah. Um, Charles grew up Catholic, uh, probably, I don't know what, how devoted he was to it, but I do know that he converted to Mormonism, um, in his courtship with Lori, but that was an important thing to her.

Um, and so, you know, that was, he was wanting to be the family man.

He wanted to take care of these kids. He wanted to be a good husband. And from all accounts, he was, um, he, he actually previously had played professional baseball.

Like you, you kind of hear the, the audio of, uh, when he was talking to the cops later on and you kind of get this mental picture in your head and it's just not, that's not what it looks like.

You see these pictures online and he's like this big beefy guy, you know? Um, and he, he's just, everybody loves him.

You know, he, he really forgive the metaphor, stepped up to the plate, uh, and become and became the kind of dad that like all these kids had been looking for.

Yeah. Um, and for a while it looked like this story was going to have a happy ending as long as nothing changed.

Right. So, so I wonder what appealed to him, right? Like she's been divorced three times now.

I think, I forget if he had been divorced or if he was a widower, but I think he had been married previously and that was a part of their initial bonding that they both, um, that they, they both had this kind of shared experience.

And, and, you know, it can be hard for somebody who has been married previously to, uh, find love again.

Yeah. I believe he had two children from a previous marriage. I think so. Yeah. Uh, that sounds about right. Um, but yeah, he, he wanted to kind of become this family man and, uh, move on with his life.

And it really looks like he did at least for, uh, for a good while in 2014, the family moved to Kauai, Hawaii.

And again, things look like they're going really well. This is actually about the time when another major player comes into the story,

Joshua J .J. Vallow. Now the way that this works, uh, it gets a little bit complicated.

There's a big family tree involved here. Uh, Charles Vallow had a sister named Kay Woodcock and, uh, she was married to a guy

I believe named Larry. They had a son who at least for a period of time was, let's just say making some unwise decisions.

You know, it doesn't seem like he was on the right track. And as a result, he got his girlfriend pregnant and they decided, you know what?

We are not ready to take care of a kid. So they talked with, uh,

Kay and Larry and Kay and Larry agreed that they would at least try to raise this kid as their own.

Uh, again, a very, a very noble thing, you know, that's hard for grandparents to do.

But, um, and they took JJ in and the way that Larry describes it, it was like, he wasn't really sure up until a certain point where he like held

JJ and he was just like, I love this kid. Um, that, that first time that you hold your kid, you know, and after a while though, there became a problem or a problem became apparent to them.

The theory, and there's no way to really verify this. Now the theory is that JJ's biological mother may have been, uh, drinking or doing drugs during the pregnancy.

Oh, okay. So possibly we don't really know for sure. Uh, but we do know that at some point

JJ started to exhibit some of the signs of autism. Gotcha. It doesn't sound, it's hard with autism to determine like where on the spectrum they are.

Yeah. It doesn't sound like he was so far gone that like, you know, he can't communicate or anything like that.

Well, he did need special care. Yeah. And Kay and Larry are like, we're grandparents. We do not really have the capacity.

And they start kind of thinking like, what do we do then? At about that same time, Charles comes for a visit and he mentions to Kay and Larry, he says, you know,

Lori and I are looking to raise a kid by ourselves. Gotcha.

And by this point, Colby is probably a teenager. I would think, I'm not sure, um, of the exact timeline of his life.

Yeah. Uh, but they're like, we want to, we want to raise a kid together from the start. Right. And it was just like a match made in heaven.

It was like, this is perfect. Like we've got this kid that you're absolutely going to love. And everybody is like in love with this kid.

Right. And they took him in and officially legally adopted him.

And so JJ Valo becomes Lori and Charles's youngest son, their adopted child.

Yeah. Wow. And that's about the same time that they moved to Hawaii. Okay. Gotcha. That's in 2014.

So now they're living in paradise. Essentially. We've got this, uh, reun, uh, this reunified family.

We've got Colby, Tylee is, is, is, um, Charles's two children living with them too.

At this time. I don't believe so. Okay. So we got Colby, Tylee, and then Charles goes and takes a visit to his sister.

Yeah. And they had a grandson and he adopts this child into their family. So this was his great nephew.

Yes. Gotcha. Yeah. And so for, for the future, we're just going to say JJ was their son. Cause, uh, you know,

I mean, in reality, when you adopt somebody, that's what happens. Yep. Um, and so again, at this point, it's like, things are going really well.

You know, Colby and Tylee finally have a stable family and kids like that's the number one thing, you know, and JJ looks like he's got, uh, some good parents that are going to raise him up.

Everything looks like it's going to be fine. Okay. 2017 family moves back to the

U S mainland and lives together in Arizona. At this point, friends and family hear that Lori is reading the books of a guy named

Chad Daybell. Okay. This is where Chad comes back into the big, this is where everything intersects, starts to, to collide.

And, uh, the way it works is that she, she starts like reading his books and he had a podcast.

I forget what the name of it was. There, there are a couple of different podcasts that come together. He, he like does the interviews and that kind of stuff.

And she's just enraptured by this guy. You know, I, I don't know what level of interest she had in like in times and theology stuff before this, but like, and I think about, uh, to, to go back to,

I think what enamored her as well is that Charles, uh, he was kind of like a superficial LDS man. Like he wasn't really deep into theology or anything like that.

It was more like he was LDS for their marriage. And so Chad, uh, was actually so entrenched like within LDS theology that he became his own essential theologian that appealed to her because Charles wasn't the man that was, uh, deep into fulfilling the covenant path in terms of intellectual knowledge.

Yeah. In terms of intellectual knowledge. Yeah. I think from what, from what people have said, Charles was, uh, he did actually convert, you know, it wasn't just a sign on the dotted line kind of situation.

He actually was like, you know, uh, teaching Sunday school classes and things like that. Like he was active and involved, uh, in the church from the time that he converted.

But like you said, like Chad had this thing where like he had thought about a lot of this and he had a lot of the same, um, inclinations as Lori did.

Now the, the complicated part and the, the part that gets kind of muddy is who comes up with what, at what point?

Because we've already seen that Lori had some concept of reincarnation. Um, but like did

Chad already believe that and they just kind of latched onto each other or was

Chad, did Chad hear that and think of this as something that he could use or exploit?

I don't think we're ever really going to know that. Right. The only thing that's really still available of his published works that shows what he personally believed is there's one book,

I think it was called something like, um, like living on the edge of heaven where he talked about, uh, having two near death experiences.

Gotcha. And how that, that shapes, uh, and how he viewed his life.

He said that, um, in the second one, the first one was like he was cliff diving or something and, and something went wrong.

And the second one was a swimming accident where he was underwater for too long. And in the second one, he says that he like talked to his grandfather about life and stuff.

And he received some sort of revelation as to his children's future. I don't know what exactly, but afterwards he said that it was like, um, the, the veil had been torn between him and the afterlife.

And so he was always sort of connected to that other world from that point out. Interesting. Yeah. And that's kind of what opens, uh, what opens the door to the rest of everything else.

Right. So Lori, Lori's door was essentially opened when her sister died. Yeah. In a, in a way. Finding peace through her niece, uh, thinking in a sense that her niece could be reincarnated, her reincarnated sister.

Uh, and now for 11, I believe it's 11 years. Yeah. 11 years. Lori's been married to Charles.

They moved to Arizona. She starts getting interested in some of Chad's podcasts and maybe reading his books, uh, having correspondence or trying to get correspondence with him.

Uh, cause it's like Lori's almost like the spiritual leader of her home. So it's like Chad is the spiritual leader of his home and he can see it through the fruit essentially of his, uh, writing and things of that nature.

And she's longing for something like that. And then what you're saying is there's a theological interest as well.

She's reading some of these things. She's also interested in, uh, things about the end times. Uh, and he talks about that kind of stuff as well, because it's all mixed with their theology, which we'll get into in the later episode, but she gets correspondence with him.

And, uh, I believe that something else begins to happen. Yeah.

And there, and we don't have very much insight into what their dynamic was and at what point, because a lot of what happened between them was just in personal conversations.

Right. It was, um, you know, their text messages and things they did, uh, at some point decide to have separate phones.

So like Chad had a phone that was just for Lori. Right. And then Lori had a phone that was just for Chad, by the way, married couples.

Uh, if your spouse is doing that, that's a bad thing. That's a bad thing. Uh, yeah, this is, they weren't subtle.

That's the thing that kills me. Just like they, at some point it's obvious.

It's so obvious. They're not even trying to hide the affair. What's up everybody.

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Do you think this happened, uh, after they had met in person in 2018? Because they met at some conference in Utah.

Yeah, it was, uh, it was in 2018. Yeah. So the first thing that happens is, uh, in April, 2018, um,

Joe Ryan dies. That's one of her, that's her third husband. Lori's third husband.

Yeah. Her third husband, the abusive one. Yeah. He, he dies from a heart attack and they initially, they just kind of wrote that off as being, um, a heart attack.

And then they eventually, they reopened the case after everything else happened. It does look like he actually had a heart attack, but it was really fortuitous cause it meant like he wasn't gonna be, um, fighting for custody or anything like that.

Cause that's Tylee's dad. Yeah, that's Tylee's dad. So he would have a claim of some sort to her and suddenly it's over and Lori was not exactly upset about that.

Uh, but then just a few months later in October of 2018, finally Chad and Lori meet in person.

Um, there's a conference that, uh, took place somewhere in Utah and they finally get a chance to actually talk.

Now the conference that we're talking about, I don't have the facts and figures, the numbers right in front of me, but it doesn't sound like, you know, a

Ligonier conference where there's like a thousand people there. They're probably like 30 people.

Yeah. So you're going to get some one -on -one time. You're going to get to raise your hand and ask this person a question and there's, you can develop something there.

And I think that's exactly what happened. Um, so that's October of 2018. Now, January of 2019 or just a few months later,

Charles begins to show some concern about Lori's beliefs.

And this is the point at which he calls the police and he talks to them and this is recorded on body cam.

Now the, I don't know how much of the full theological package has been delivered to Lori, but we're already at the point now where Charles is saying, my wife is telling me that I've died and that my body is being possessed by a demon named

Ned Schneider. Something has happened in a relatively quick period of time.

Uh, and this is, it's insane. It's wild, but it's so quick. This is a few years ago.

She wouldn't have said anything like that. About this time, according to, um, Adam Cox, who remember is

Lori's other brother. Uh, he was saying that he had had a conversation with Lori, where she was telling him that she was, uh, reincarnated and that she had progressed to Godhood and had come back and that she couldn't be killed.

And Adam's like, what are you talking about? Like, what is this? And sometime around here, he gets into contact with Charles and they start talking about having some kind of intervention.

Wow. But, um, unfortunately that would not come to fruition. Yeah. Let's, let's stop real quick.

Let's try to find that body cam footage and throw up here and let's just listen to a little bit of it. So just for clarification here, here is the first body cam footage.

I'm only going to play about a minute and 30 seconds of it just to give context to what Ryan was talking about. He's outside of a hotel here that Lori was staying at.

And, uh, he was locked out of the house first by Lori. He went to an hotel to confront his wife.

He also had a petition to try to hold her for a mental evaluation. So Gilbert police officers captured their interaction with Charles after he failed to locate her at the hotel.

And here it is. So is she in there? I don't know. What's going on?

Why is she here and you're not here? Are you staying here with her? Long story.

She's had kind of a run from the army. She thinks she's married to Moroni in the past.

You think she's what? Married to Moroni at the top of the temple. Angel. Angel. LDS. They don't let me in there probation.

And she knows when the second coming is happening next year. So there's a prophet. He knows that she knows, she know about it.

She'd be so prone on Jesus Christ. Face to face in the temple every day. I've tried to support as much as I could, but it's gotten really, really bad lately.

She's had a break. She says, I'm Nick Schneider. I've taken over Charles's body and Charles has been killed.

I'm going to kill you. You're going to be murdered today or tomorrow. I'm going to have, I can do it. I'm not going to get my priesthood with my power.

She does priesthood blessings. She does. So who's

Nick Schneider? Okay. Okay. All right.

So we'll stop. We'll stop it there. There's a lot right there. There is a lot right there. Did you hear that? Everybody we're again, we're going to get into the theology more in the next episode, but I want you to have the context of what

Charles was going through. He says, my wife is telling me I'm not Charles. There's someone named Nick Schneider, who's possessed my body.

And Nick Schneider has killed Charles. And now I need to die essentially. And remember, she's been having correspondence now with Chad Daybell for about a year.

This is about a year or a year and a half before Charles then comes to police. So he says she's having a mental break.

She's not living in reality anymore. And she's, you know, she's read Charles's books and stuff, but she only meets him in October.

Chad's books. Yeah. Chad. Yeah. She, she only meets him in October. So as far as like a direct interaction, it's only been a few months.

Wow. So I mean, I wish that I had access to like any of his old interviews and stuff.

All you can, all you can really find online is like trial transcripts and his awful, awful books.

His books are so bad. I mean, they're like, I could go on forever. They can be as bad as you want when you have your own publishing company.

Yeah, exactly. Like I, you would wonder like, how did somebody get this done? I just setting aside bad theology.

They're just really stupid. All right. And I know that's not the worst thing he did, but I like to read and I like to read good things and it's,

I don't want to read any more of Chuck stuff. Right. Anyways.

Uh, so yeah, it's, uh, about this time that Lori's beliefs seem to be kind of fully developed into the insanity that will cause everything else to happen.

And Charles, uh, Charles is saying like, Lori has already threatened to kill me. Yeah. Wow.

You know, this is by this point, it's like things have gone too far.

And they, as a result of this interaction will have a psych evaluation done of Lori, which she will pass with, with flying colors, which

I wish I knew a little bit more about that because I wonder how that managed to happen when

Lori is known to be somebody who can be very charming. And so maybe that's got something to do with it, but something, it's not just that she's believing things that are weird.

Like there's something wrong with her at this point, right? That's in February, 2019, she was actually deemed a competent after a mental health intervention in Charles Vallow.

He filed for divorce February, 2019 saying that he feared for the safety of himself and his children.

Yes. And I guess she talked her way through it and charmed the police. I think you can actually watch parts of that interview on a documentary.

I forget exactly. Well, there's one that she did where they, like after her children go missing, the cops come to her house and they're like, what's all this about?

And she just totally has these cops in the palm of her hand. Oh yeah. Yeah. That, I don't know if that's the one you were thinking of, but it like, it just shows like how deceitful she can be.

Yeah. I believe that in the documentary that I watched that it could, it could have been that interview, but I believe they actually had footage from the, the first initial interview after he talked to the police and fought for the divorce.

But I remember just them talking about essentially that she was a charmer. She was a beauty queen at one point.

So she knew how to talk right. And get her way out of things. And I believe she even brought her daughter with her to the interview, uh,

Tylee to give some type of sway because she didn't not only just manipulate the police. She also manipulated her children at this time.

Yeah. She manipulated Colby and she also manipulated Tylee. Especially Tylee because Tylee had, uh, at this point, uh, a devotion to her mom.

Like she wanted to be just like her mom. She wanted her mom's approval. So, so bad. And that I think explains a good bit of what happens next.

Right. And before we go on it, I believe in the documentary as well, that her son, he consistently tried to get her to see things clearly.

Uh, part of their relationship got destroyed with Colby. Uh, he claims in the interviews that he was now a

Christian. He had come to Christ, I think through meeting his girlfriend. Maybe. Yeah.

I hope so. Yeah. And, uh, he was always having phone conversations with her, trying to plead with her to, uh, know who

Jesus is. And I know there's controversy with Colby now today, I'm not going to get into any of that type of stuff, but just shows you the dynamic of the relationship that he would have had at it with his mother during the time she started having an unemotional break.

And I, and I meant to say actually that she was manipulating JJ, not Colby at the time she's manipulating Tylee and JJ.

I believe Colby at this time is doing his own thing, trying to reach out of the house. He's trying to plead with his mother to regain some form of sanity because he is the one that she actually stays in consistent contact with almost throughout the whole time because it's her son.

And during these phone conversations, he's constantly trying to deplete with her to regain some mental.

He's trying to bring her back. He's trying, he's trying to bring her back. So we have a marriage in shambles right now with Charles and Lori.

I can only imagine what custody looks like with JJ and Tylee.

Meanwhile, I believe Charles isn't living at home anymore. He's allowing Lori to stay there.

And Lori brings her brother into the picture. You said something about Adam, her, her first brother, not

Alex, but yeah. Talk about that real quick. Yeah. Adam well, just as far as the stuff that pertains to what's going on here, he, he'd had, um, by this point he had conversations with Lori that were like, uh, like this woman has gone completely insane.

What do we do about this? And I think that's kind of indicative of how the rest of the family was feeling.

Now, what he's talked about in, in interviews past is that she had kind of destroyed like that part of the family too, because in order for everything to, uh, follow the way that it does, there has to be a lot of lying.

And so she starts telling people, Oh, well, you know, the kids are over here, the kids are over there. And it leaves everybody else in the family thinking, well, do

I believe her or do I not? And if I don't believe her, well, then what does that mean?

You know, if Lori doesn't know where the kids are and what happened to the kids, and it makes you sort of feel bad for thinking that your own sister could do something, something bad to her own kids.

But like, you're also realizing that things don't make sense. And that kind of stuff was splitting open, uh, the rest of the family.

Um, as far as Adam goes, he, he tried, tried to like talk to his mom and say like,

Hey, Lori's saying some weird stuff. And his mom was like, well, she didn't say anything like that to me. Um, Adam tried to set something up with Charles and just get an intervention going.

I don't know if he tried that before the, uh, the divorce or if it was afterward, but I do know that because of what happens in July, they never get a chance to actually do that.

Yeah. And what exactly happened in July? And let's, let's get into that right now. So here's where, um, where national attention starts to be drawn into this.

On July 11th, 2019, Charles Vallow was shot dead by Alex Cox at Lori's home in Chandler, Arizona.

The claim made by Alex and Lori and Tylee is that Charles came to Lori's house, looking to pick up the kids as part of their custody agreement.

There was some sort of altercation between him and Alex. Um, at some point

Tylee gets scared and grabs a baseball bat and comes downstairs and somehow

Charles gets the baseball bat out of her hands, um, attacks

Alex and hits him in the back of the head. And Alex just happens to have, uh, I think it was a revolver on him and he shoots

Charles. Supposedly as the revolver was near the suitcase in the bedroom and he ran into the bedroom and grabbed.

Yeah. He didn't have it on like on his body yet nearby. Cause that would have been suspicious,

I guess. Um, after this happens, um, Lori, I don't,

I don't know if Lori was supposed to be at the scene at the time, but she takes, uh, JJ to school, which is one of the first signs that I think should have been kind of an alarm to everybody that something weird was happening here because the police who arrive on scene don't know any of this stuff that we've just brought in.

Um, they, they don't know that she's got these weird spiritual beliefs or anything like that. They just know, uh, an ex -husband has been killed in the home of his wife.

And well, you know, these kinds of situations can be very volatile. It's kind of understandable.

And remember the testimony that we have about what happened comes from Tylee. It comes from, uh,

Alex and from Lori and parts, parts of it coming from Lori. So if you want, you can actually go and you can look on YouTube and find body cam footage of the conversations that, uh,

Lori and Tylee were giving to the police officers about what happened and, uh, why

Alex shot Charles Vallow. Uh, you can weigh that for yourself. I believe that the courts already weighed in on parts of their opinion of the situation, but continuing on, we have now

Charles Vallow, right. Married to this woman for about 11, 12 years.

Uh, it seems like he was the one that she was always waiting for to rescue their family, to take them from the pit.

But something happens where she falls in love with a man through his writings and through his theology ends up believing some insane things about the afterlife, uh, about even herself having a direct connection with God and her brother as well gets roped into this.

And her brother ends up killing Charles. Yeah. And, and that's, that's the reality. So we have one dead husband before Joseph Ryan, uh, which they've said that she, he died of natural causes, probably just trying to, just trying to paint a picture here.

And then we have now, uh, Charles Vallow shot multiple times by her brother,

Alex. And then what happens? Well, already this is sort of attracting some attention because there are aspects of what happened that don't really make a whole lot of sense.

And I, you know, it's already, it's been done to death, but I'll just point out that, um, you can see in the, in the videos that Alex has like a bandage on the back of his head.

And he says that, um, uh, the Charles hit him with a baseball bat. Charles Vallow was a big guy, bigger than me.

And I'm a big guy. Uh, and he used to play baseball. And I'm thinking if this dude swings a bat and hits you in the head, you're not going to get a little scratch on the back.

You're not going to be okay. Yeah. You're going to be out for the count. Yeah. Like that's, that's a big thing.

Also it's discovered later that like Alex never stayed the night at Lori's house, except for this one time.

And, you know, he waited 43 minutes to call the police. It's just a bunch of stuff that just sounded weird to people.

And, uh, you know, her, her reaction when they interview her is kind of strange.

Cause the thing is, if you plan a murder ahead of time, you mentally get used to the idea that this person is going to die.

So it's hard for you to fake shock. Uh, you, you can't really fake the surprise because it's not a surprise to you.

You know, this is going to happen and you're used to the idea of this person not being alive anymore. And I think that's the case with everybody that was interviewed, including

Tylee, but their stories were all the same. Right. And, uh,

I think this will play into the fates of various people later on in the story.

Um, but then in, uh, September of 2019, Lori, who now has a custody of her two youngest children moves to Rexburg, Idaho under kind of strange circumstances.

And that's where Chad Daybell was living at the time. It was strange because she didn't go out and say to everybody,

Hey, I'm going to Rexburg, Idaho. Like Colby had to track her down. Um, why not be open about this?

And unfortunately very soon thereafter, the problem gets much, much bigger because that's when, uh, on the 8th of September, 2019, uh,

Tylee and JJ and Alex and Lori go to, uh, Yellowstone national park where they finally have their, their final, uh, family outing and get together.

And this one haunting picture of, of the kids together. And after that Tylee goes missing.

Wow. And I think right here is the, the sad, sad place to stop the episode, but we're going to stop the episode here.

And then we're going to get into the end of the life lives of JJ and Tylee.

And then we're going to go into the theological implications. What is it that happened here? What the spiritual perspective?

Yeah. Let's, let's untangle this timeline, uh, through the lens of understanding their theology and critiquing these things through the biblical worldview, because bad theology hurts people.

And again, how could all of this has been prevented? How, how could all of this have been prevented? And again, we know that justice will occur cosmic justice, uh, by the

God who will make all things right in the end for the terrible things that occurred to JJ and Tylee and even

Charles, uh, in my opinion, and a whole bunch of other innocent people have been negatively affected by this.

Absolutely. So, uh, stick with us while we talk about this. And the second part coming up right after this, we hope you enjoyed this episode.