A Mormon Murder Mystery Pt. 1 | Cultish

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Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and the Mormon Doomsday Cult

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

Yeah. 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.

Okay. Yeah. Well, I guess that's it. And, and look what happened with that. Yeah. We obviously went all the way back to Adam anyways. So with with this, there are a couple of preliminaries. We want to make something clear from the outset.

The, 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 than we have the wild, wild world of Mormon orthodoxy, the ever-changing, effervescent, bubbly world.

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, 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, or if they had been just regular mainstream Mormons, then at the very least, this situation would have played out very differently.

However, the, 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 Maury 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 that Chad and Maury 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.

Authority, Fundamentalism, and Theological Liberalism in Mormonism

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 a divine external revelation, like a Bible or, you know, the Quran or something like that. Right. 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, the average show, you know, your average Orthodox Jewish person or something like that. Right. 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, 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, 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, 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, in, even into the Mormon organization right now, because elder, I think it's elder Allen 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, 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 like, 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, and so like, 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, 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, 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.

So, I mean, and that's, 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 whatever last name you want to give her and Chad Daybell.

There's a lot of those.

It ended up with 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.

So let's. And a variety of other people. And yeah, even her, yeah. One of her ex-husbands and even maybe her husband before that and Chad's.

The Cox Family, Lori's Childhood, and Early Family Tensions

Wife. Well, yeah, let's look, let's look. Yeah. It's a whole, 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, but 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 you know, 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 I, from what I can tell, he's still kind of like that. He like wrote a book about it and things like that. Whereas Janice, she, and this back in the seventies and eighties 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, 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, you know, 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, no. And there's a lot of geography stuff. We're going to skip a lot of it. You know, the stuff that like Dateline in 2020 did, they can cover that kind of stuff. But yeah, they eventually had, from what I can tell, five kids.

Lori's one of their five children. She wasn't like an unusual kid, you know. 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. You know, nothing that would have made people at the time say, oh, these kids are being neglected. You know, 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 was, she wasn't like morbidly obese as a kid, but you know, I mean, she was a little bit chunky, you know, 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, who, 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. You know, he at one point tried to organize an intervention with her to try and set her straight, right?

There's another really interesting story about Adam, but that would take us way too far afield. But 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. Yeah. Where Adam was at one end of the spectrum, Alex was at the other.

Yeah, sort of. Yeah. Well, I guess in comparison with Alex, anybody seems kind of stable. But yeah, 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. Yeah. And 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. Gotcha. 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.

There's the Bad Theology Hurts People shirt. Jerry wears it all the time. I wear it all the time. Sometimes we wear it at the same time without even trying to have that happen on the show. And we're just like, whoa, you're wearing the shirt.

I'm wearing the shirt. You could wear the shirt too. Go to shopcultish .com today and get your exclusive cultish merch. Talk to you later, guys. So she's growing up and she's kind of a little bit overweight according to her mother's standards.

Lori's Marriages, Divorce Pattern, and the Death of Stacey

Yeah. And this kind of But she does probably because of her mom's influence really buck against that. And, you know, she eventually becomes like a beauty contestant and things like that. But unfortunately, that influence will have a more profound and negative impact on her sister, Stacey, which we'll get into in a minute.

Gotcha. Okay. Man. Okay. So 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. More like a Nothing crazy, but like, you know, 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. I think it was 1967, I believe.

1973. Oh, 1973. Right, right, right. Oh, yeah. That's right. Yep. 67 was her sister. 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. So 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. Had just lived an average kind of Mormon life there.

He eventually went to BYU, graduated with a degree in journalism. And after he got married, he got a job with Cedar Fort, which is a publishing company. It's fairly well known in Mormon communities. And 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. And 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. And 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. Yeah. All right. So if we can put them on a timeline right next to each other, we have Chad getting married in 1990.

1992, we have Laurie marrying her first husband and her high school sweetheart, Nelson Yanes. Yeah. We're going to go with Yanes. Yanes. Yeah. And then, okay. So 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. And then in 1995, she, 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.

Ligoyen. Ligoyen? Okay. Well, I hope I haven't insulted any Ligoyens 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 this, 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, like 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. 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 kind of a contrast for what happens later and why it's so bizarre. Yeah, so that's kind of the way things were back then.

They were, you know, Laurie and Colby were just trying to get by as a, you know, single mother and her son, all while in another part of the world, you know, 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. That's 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, you know? 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 going to end up hopefully eventually looking after her.

And that's... 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. Probably something like that. What's interesting is typically people get diabetes from like overeating 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, you know, especially sugar.

And so the, but the key thing here is Stacey had a daughter by the name of Melanie. When Stacey died, Laurie began to talk about Melanie as if she was the reincarnation of Stacey. Not that Stacey 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. You know, 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. Like growing up LDS as well, there's no like reincarnation that is orthodox doctrine. No, there's no, there's no reincarnation in Mormonism.

So the way she maybe gets it is just spirit children in a preexistence or something. And this, this one spirit inhabiting a body again. I think when we, 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, there's some reasons for both why reincarnation is not an aspect of Mormon theology and why, like how they managed to try and fit this into their own burgeoning kind of thing.

Yeah.

But yeah, just, it's not a Mormon thing.

Wow.

Joseph Ryan, Charles Vallow, and the Move to Hawaii

Yeah.

And she's already divorced how many times right now? This would be her second from what I can tell yet. In 2001, Laurie marries for a third time. This time she marries a guy named Joseph Ryan and together they have a daughter named Tylee.

This is a little bit more, like there's more to this particular marriage than the 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, without like, I don't think we have like the met the biblical standard of two to three independent lines of testimony to just say definitively who's responsible for what.

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

Right. So we have Laurie and Colby. And now Tylee. And now Tylee. So Colby at this age would have been, let's see. I don't know what, 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, you know, they eventually do divorce in 2004. There are, 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 know, 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 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 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. But not, not enough to really have the kind of perspective that an adult would. Right. If that makes sense.

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

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

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, he, he actually previously had played professional baseball.

Like you, you kind of hear the, the audio of 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 he looks like. You see these pictures online and he's like this big beefy guy, you know?

And he, he's just, everybody loves him. You know, he, he really, forgive the metaphor, stepped up to the plate and become, and became the kind of dad that like all these kids had been looking for. Yeah.

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, 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 find love again. Yeah. I believe he had two children from a previous marriage. I think so. Yeah. That sounds about right.

But yeah, he, he wanted to kind of become this family man and move on with his life. And it really looks like he did at least for, 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, it gets a little bit complicated. There's a big family tree involved here.

Charles Vallow had a sister named Kay Woodcock and 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 Kay and Larry and Kay and Larry agreed that they would at least try to raise this kid as their own.

Again, a very, a very noble thing, you know, that's hard for grandparents to do. But, and they took J .J. 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 J .J. and he was just like, I love this kid.

That first time that you hold your kid. 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 J .J.'s biological mother may have been drinking or doing drugs during the pregnancy.

Oh, okay. Possibly. We don't really know for sure. But we do know that at some point J .J. 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, Laurie 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 of the exact timeline of his life. But they're like, we want to, we want to raise a kid together from the start. Right.

And it was just a match made in heaven. It was like, this is perfect. We've got this kid that you're absolutely going to love. And everybody is in love with this kid. And they took him in and officially, legally adopted him.

And so J .J. Valo becomes Laurie and Charles' 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 reunified family. We've got Colby, Tylee. Is Charles' 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.

And they had a grandson and he adopts this child into their family. So this was his great nephew. Yes. Gotcha. Yeah. And for the future, we're just going to say J .J. was their son. Because in reality, when you adopt somebody, that's what happens.

Yep. And so again, at this point, things are going really well. Colby and Tylee finally have a stable family. And kids, that's the number one thing. And J .J. looks like he's got some good parents that are going to raise him up.

Everything looks like it's going to be fine. Okay. 2017. The 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 in. This is where everything starts to collide. And the way it works is that she starts reading his books. And he had a podcast. I forget what the name of it was. There are a couple of different podcasts that come together.

He does interviews and that kind of stuff. And she's just enraptured by this guy. I don't know what level of interest she had in End Times and theology stuff before this. To go back, I think what enamored her as well is that Charles was kind of like a superficial LDS man.

He wasn't really deep into theology or anything like that. It was more like he was LDS for their marriage. And so Chad was actually so entrenched within LDS theology that he became his own essential theologian.

That appealed to her because Charles wasn't the man that was deep into fulfilling the covenant path in terms of intellectual knowledge. Yeah. In terms of intellectual knowledge, from what people have said, Charles did actually convert.

It wasn't just a sign on the dotted line kind of situation. He actually was teaching Sunday school classes and things like that. He was active and involved in the church from the time that he converted.

But like you said, Chad had this thing where he had thought about a lot of this. And he had a lot of the same inclinations as Laurie did. Now, the complicated part and the part that gets kind of muddy is who comes up with what at what point?

Because we've already seen that Laurie had some concept of reincarnation. But did Chad already believe that and they just kind of latched onto each other? Or 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. 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 Living on the Edge of Heaven, where he talked about having two near-death experiences and how that shaped how he viewed his life.

He said that in the second one, the first one was like he was cliff diving or something 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 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 the door to the rest of everything else. Right. So Laurie's door was essentially opened when her sister died. Yeah, in a way. Finding peace through her niece, thinking in a sense that her niece could be her reincarnated sister.

And now for 11, I believe it's 11 years. Yeah. 11 years, Laurie's been married to Charles. They moved to Arizona. She starts getting interested in some of Chad's podcasts and maybe reading his books, having correspondence or trying to get correspondence with him.

Because it's like Laurie'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 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 things about the end times.

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 I believe that something else begins to happen.