Think Out Loud

New book by Oregon journalist focuses on religious extremism

By Julie Sabatier (OPB)
Sept. 1, 2022 4:53 p.m. Updated: Sept. 12, 2022 11:38 p.m.

Broadcast: Monday, Sept. 5

Portland journalist Leah Sottile’s book “When The Moon Turns To Blood” centers on the case of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell. Sottile digs into the couple’s apocalyptic beliefs and the history of the extremism that exists on the fringes of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church.

Portland journalist Leah Sottile’s book “When The Moon Turns To Blood” centers on the case of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell. Sottile digs into the couple’s apocalyptic beliefs and the history of the extremism that exists on the fringes of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church.

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Portland journalist Leah Sottile’s book “When the Moon Turns to Blood” centers on the case of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell. The couple will be on trial next year, accused of killing two of Vallow’s children whose bodies were found in Daybell’s backyard. But the book is about much more than just true crime. Sottile digs into the couple’s apocalyptic beliefs and the history of the extremism that exists on the fringes of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church. We talk with Sottile about what this case reveals about religious extremism in the American West.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Allison Frost: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Allison Frost in for Dave Miller. Portland journalist Leah Sottile’s new book When The Moon Turns To Blood centers on the case of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell. The couple will be on trial next year. An important content warning here: this is a conversation that will include mentions of extreme violence, and so the show this hour may not be appropriate for all listeners. Now’s your chance to turn off the radio.

Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell are accused of killing two of Vallow’s children, whose bodies were found in Daybell’s backyard. And there are other suspected murders in their immediate circles as well. But the book is about much more than just true crime. It explores apocalyptic beliefs, and the extremism on the fringes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church. Leah Sottile, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Leah Sottile: Thanks for having me.

Frost: This is such a compelling read and horrific in so many ways, if you don’t mind me saying that. When did you first become aware of this story?

Sottile: So the story started for me I think when it started for a lot of people, which is in December 2019, I saw headlines out of Idaho about two children who had gone missing, but also their mother had gone missing, and her husband, and people had no idea where they were. But there was a quote in one article that I read that said that people suspected that the mother’s cult-like beliefs might lead to some knowledge about finding them, and might lead to their whereabouts. And I knew that the mother and father were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, The Mormon Church, and I wondered if maybe they had some beliefs that were similar to things that I had covered before in my work. And so that’s kind of when it started for me, just a passing interest and wondering about their belief systems, and then pretty quickly confirming that that they did. And that’s where my reporting began.

Frost: And we’ll talk much more about this in the conversation, but you’re not saying, and you did not find, that the Church itself is a cult, but those religious extremist beliefs could be considered a cult, very separate. And that’s part of the book, there’s this tension between the mainstream church and these extreme religious beliefs.

So you just mentioned this just briefly, that these are the kinds of stories that you’ve covered before, or similar to the kinds of things that you’ve covered before. What do you think draws you to these dark, extreme stories, if I can sum it up very broadly?

Sottile: Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s a funny question in a way, because I started my career almost 20 years ago as a music journalist. And so how I sort of arrived at specializing in reporting on political and religious extremism, specifically in the western United States, is kind of an interesting ride. And it sort of started for me when we had to take over here in Oregon in 2016 of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and really, understanding the political moment that takeover was predicting in a way.

I think where the commonality is that my work is very interested in people who are at the fringes of society. When I started, that was people on the fringes of the alternative music scene and that sort of thing. But it’s translated into kind of me realizing that I have kind of a keenness for cultures that are on the outs with mainstream society, and figures who are either ostracizing themselves from society, or they feel that society has pushed them away.

Frost: Well, I do want to get into the story itself and the facts behind the story that you found. Before we get into those details, can you just give us a sense of the range of sources, the kinds of reporting? Because you spent at least two years on this, and it reads like kind of a novel, it’s sort of a omniscient view almost, except for the once or twice or three times when you say “I couldn’t get an answer to this because no one called me back” or “they refused comment” or things like that.

Sottile: I’m a freelance journalist, so this often means that I am the last person to arrive to a story, and that was certainly the case with this. When this whole story of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell and the missing children came around, it was being reported by CNN and Fox News and Nancy Grace and Dateline. So by the time me, this one person comes along and says “hey, I want to talk to people”, they were all either tapped out on the media, or had signed agreements to not talk to other journalists. So what I did was I knew that I wanted to work on this story, and I knew that I could see something in the story that all the other people were missing, which was its connection to modern American extremism.

And so I started just reporting through documents. I have a huge love for public records laws, and started building out a timeline based on what was publicly available to journalists like myself. Bodycam footage, police reports, police interviews and things like that. And then I started cross referencing it with what information was out there specifically by Chad Daybell. He’s a prolific writer of books. So I started reading all of his books and trying to understand his escalating paranoia and conspiracism and belief system over time, and how that intersected with this specific story. It was a lot of kind of on the ground, shoe leather reporting.

Frost: I want to get back into Chad Daybell later in the conversation. But both of these people are accused of just horrific crimes. As a reminder, it was Lori Vallow’s children who were found burned and cut up. When we’re trying to understand how something like this could have happened, how someone could do something so horrible, a lot of times the first place that we go is their childhood. So what did you find in terms of Lori’s childhood? Not to say that anything really explains this, but there are some factors that you found.

Sottile: What I found was a young woman who grew up in a pretty traditional LDS home, in that she was going to normal public school, but she was also attending specific LDS seminary classes before she went to school every day. And that was going on for a long time. And I found a large family that was very interested and embedded in the LDS church.

But what really kind of raised my antennas in the extremism realm was that I found out that her parents stopped paying their federal income taxes when she was in high school. They not only stopped paying them, they were in and out of court arguing about why Americans should not have to pay taxes. And this is obviously something that has come up a ton in my work and far right extremism, people who are tax protesters or sovereign citizens and have these anti-government belief systems.

But most notably, I found that her father, in 2020 when the children were still missing and no one knew where they were, he published a book on Amazon about how the American public can dismantle the IRS, and why they should. It was just a classic bit of sovereign citizen literature. What it told me was that Lori Vallow had this upbringing that sort of firmly placed her family at the fringes of the LDS church. None of these beliefs are commonly held, but they are held within this sort of fringe subculture of the Church that is anti-government and has a lot of these conspiratorial ideas.

Frost: Sort of raised in this culture of fringe, not necessarily the religious fringe. How about for Chad Daybell? He had these obsessions with near death experiences, having claimed to have one himself. So how did you find that that, and other aspects of his childhood, set him up?

Sottile: Again, Chad Daybell grew up in this very traditional LDS home, he grew up in the bosom of the LDS church in the Provo area, which is where Brigham Young University is, just very traditional Mormon guy by all standards. But at a certain point, he says that he had this near death experience when he went cliff diving and hit the water, and he believes that he saw beyond the veil. And in his writing, he talks about how afterwards he had this unexplainable interest in these authors who write in this fringe culture that we’re talking about. They write about the kind of weaving of the constitution and the LDS belief systems together. And I found that to be very interesting, that someone could have this supposed near death experience, and then afterwards they come out of it a new person, firmly embedded in this fringe part of the Church.

He goes on to say that he had another near death experience after that that only bolstered this belief system. This becomes a very notable part of Chad Daybell’s life. It signals him going from a very mainstream guy, to this very fringe subculture of the Church that exists within all of America, but specifically in the Mountain West.

Frost: And of course, there’s no way to get into his head and see did he have a near death experience. But you note that the second near death experience, no one remembers him saying anything about it, that there were other people there at the incident, and it was involving the ocean and something dramatic, and he hit his head and he went to the hospital. His brother, I believe, you quoted him saying “he never said that.”

Sottile: Yeah, that it was surprising for them to learn.

Frost: And of course, there’s just so much of that we couldn’t talk about all of the different evidence that you dig up and cite.

When did Chad then say that he experienced the voice? He had a voice that would speak to him. When did that start for him?

Sottile: It seemed to start after these near death experiences that there’s this voice that he refers to that guides him through life and in making decisions big and small. And I’m going to be really clear that I think that a lot of people will say I felt a strong compulsion to something, and so I made a decision in my life. I’m not saying that’s strange at all. But what Daybell does throughout all of his writing, his memoirs, in his fictional books, and his blog, he will commonly explain something by saying that this sort of otherworldly, beyond the veil source points him in a direction and says “you should not apply to grad school” or “you should do do this or not that.” Most notably, around 2015, the voice spoke to him and said that he needed to uproot his family from the Salt Lake Valley and move north to Rexburg, Idaho, because he believed that this was going to be the place where the LDS people would be saved in the end times.

And so he actually did do that. He uprooted his very large family and moved them north.

Frost: Wife and five kids, right? This is not an easy task.

You mentioned this earlier, but he wrote a huge body of work, fiction works that he later claimed were visions, a memoir, and it sounds like you read if not all of them, a whole whole bunch of them. And I’m wondering what was it like to be immersed in that world as you read book after book after book?

Sottile: I think that it started as an exercise in - I started the reporting on this book in the spring of 2020 when COVID was just surging, and we were all locked down and everyone was looking for a project, and this was sort of the project that I chose. And to be fair, I really thought “I’ll read one book, it probably won’t lead me anywhere.” But it did. This book that we’re discussing is an exercise in that, in that what I started to see was his fictional books were laden with these conspiracy theories that I had seen spouted about by the far right for many years.

But I also saw that he had written two memoirs, one about these near death experiences and the impact on him as a person, but also one about his work as a grave digger, and that he kind of had this sort of jokey approach to death. It was very strange. And strange characters are not something that deters me, I just became kind of fascinated, like who is this guy? I started to understand that he had gained quite a bit of celebrity around his writings, both nonfictional and fictional, and that people really started to think of him as a visionary. And that was very interesting for me.

Frost: I want to talk about the title. “When The Moon Turns To Blood,” you didn’t make it up, it has multiple sources. Can you tell us a little more about that image?

Sottile: A key part of this book that readers will see very early on is an understanding of the Book of Revelation in the Bible. The Book of Revelation is sort of the surrealistic bit of the Bible that is very important to the LDS Church. It’s in the name, this is about the End Times and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and the name Latter Day Saints, that’s what that is a reference to.

There’s kind of all these horrors that are spelled out of what would happen at the end of the world, stars dropping out of the sky and things like that, and the moon turning red and kind of dripping with blood. It’s this really grotesque image. And it was very, very important, that specifically, to the founder and prophet of the LDS Church, Joseph Smith. He kind of issued a version of his own that mimicked a lot of these same images that was foundational to the Church starting. So, I wanted to kind of make a direct reference to this really horrific story, if you take it literally, and kind of put that right at the front. This is grounded in this book of scripture that is very important.

Frost: Before we get a little further in the tension between the mainstream LDS Church and these and these fringes that Chad helped establish and develop, you dedicate the book for “believers.” What did you have in mind when you did that?

Sottile: I’m glad you asked. I wanted to make a really big distinction here, that it is clear to me that there’s something really pure and beautiful about being a faithful person, that that’s so deep and personal to people. And in my years of reporting specifically on religious extremism, I’ve found that one of the darkest things that I’ve confronted is this ability and willingness to manipulate people’s religious beliefs for people’s own personal ends. So in a way, I wanted to dedicate the book to people who are faithful, who are believers in some kind of religious doctrine, and acknowledge that this is maybe a piece of literature that will help people be aware that that is a possibility. Really, just trying to set the stage and acknowledge that this is something that I respect, and that this is about the manipulation of that.

Frost: I think you make a really good distinction between the mainstream LDS Church and these really, really fringe beliefs. And I get that this could have happened on the fringes of any religion, any church. Did you also intend for that to come through as well?

Sottile: I have an interest in this kind of newborn religion that is Mormonism. It’s really not that old, and it’s American-born. And I think that’s so much of my work is interrogating the culture of America and what has come out of this place. So, I do think it could happen on the fringes of any religion, but why this one specifically? And how does that tie to a fringe history that has existed for quite some time within the very young LDS church?

Frost: Would you just remind us, for people who may not be familiar or it’s on the fringes of their consciousness that it’s a more recent church, but can you just give us the outline?

Sottile: The LDS church started in the mid 1800s. It’s got this very unique origin story and that a young man in upstate New York claimed that he had seen an angel in his bedroom, and that angel instructed him to unearth some golden plates from a nearby forest. And on those golden plates was the word of God. But he was the only person to ever see these plates, and he was the person who supposedly translated them, and that message that he said was on those became the Book of Mormon. It’s very interesting because Joseph Smith himself was something of a treasure hunter and a scryer, interested in these kinds of activities, and so that you feel that infused in the beginning of the Church.

The long and short of it from there is that he became very controversial. He assembled the Church. It got a lot of blowback from people who were very offended by this new religion starting. He moved all around the country at the time, trying to find a place that he could create a very Mormon-specific city or civilization in a way. He was killed by a mob in Illinois. And that that kind of created this culture within the LDS church that people were willing to kill them for their beliefs, and that could either scare you away, or it could make you kind of double down on the belief system. And it was shortly thereafter that one of Joseph Smith’s acolytes, Brigham Young, moved the LDS people westward to what was outside of the United States, but is now considered Utah.

I think a lot of that story is really important to understanding that people who are Mormon remember this very recent history of what happened to them, and feeling like they were supposed to be protected by the Constitution to have freedom to practice whatever religion they wanted, and that in fact, in some characterizations, they feel it went the other way, that they were oppressed. I think that’s very fresh, and for some people, that’s very real. In some families you’ll hear people really make sure that that story is kept alive; don’t ever forget that they came for us, and they could come for you again.

Frost: So in some ways, their paranoia or their caution, or this attitude that you’ve described isn’t for nothing. It is very much grounded in persecution. There’s kind of an implied self defense, if you’re always ready for an attack.

Sottile: And this is something that I feel like I’ve seen a lot in my work on the more militant far right groups, specifically with the Bundy family. I made a podcast that OPB helped put out called Bundyville a few years ago. And part of that was going and asking the Bundy family specifically, this is a Mormon family, do you believe that your religious belief system helped lead to your confrontations with the government? And they just point blank said “Absolutely. Yes.” So I thought that was very interesting that they were not afraid to say “what happened to us, what happened to our people is still very important to us, and it informs everything we believe about the government and what could happen in the future.”

Frost: One of the other things that you explore is Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow’s relationship, and what they both believed, and how they came together, and it’s unclear who was the leader. And maybe that’s not exactly the right question, but what did you come out with in terms of who seemed to be driving the bus?

Sottile: I still don’t know. And I think that that is kind of what’s part of, taken at a distance, the horrific nature of what happened here. That’s part one of the things that fascinated me about the case was that I was always trying to figure out who was who was leading who. For a while I thought, based on Chad Daybell’s writings and the fact that he had an economic benefit in him selling books that were laden with conspiracies and his ideology, that he was probably leading things.

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But then I started to dig into Lori Vallow’s history and saw that she had some pretty radical beliefs, and there was kind of a lot of death happening around her that happened maybe before she even met Chad Daybell. So a lot of this was trying to understand the intersection of how two people could have these belief systems that were very similar, and what circumstances could possibly allow them to meet each other? Chad lived in Idaho, Lori lived in Arizona, but they were able to meet. So that’s a lot of what the book gets into, is what the culture is that fostered a place for these two people to encounter each other.

Frost: And just a quick note, the death that you referred to connected to Lori was the death of one of her ex husbands. It was a significant death.

Let’s get into a little bit about what those beliefs are. We’ve referenced a lot of fringe beliefs. Just taking Lori first, she becomes in her own mind, and convinces those who she draws in, that she’s a kind of goddess, which we haven’t talked about, but the structure of the Mormon Church, and many others it should be said, is very hierarchical and male dominated. Do you think that that was part of why she spun out in that way? And tell us a little bit more about what that meant, her being a goddess.

Sottile: In the things that I have reported on, I found that it seemed that Lori had a real need for power in her life. That she has now been married five times, and all of these marriages ended very poorly, and in the case of her fourth husband in him being murdered. And so I think that she was really looking for power. I think she had a very clear track record of craving attention. She was on Wheel of Fortune, she was someone who modeled, she was a beauty queen, she wanted to be seen and respected. But she was also an extremely faithful woman. There was nothing more important to her than her faith. And so I think she was sort of jockeying for some kind of power within the Church.

She started telling people that she was the goddess, that she was a warrior, and eventually that she was one of the leaders of the 144,000, which is a reference to the Book of Revelation and this belief that there will be this kind of chosen people called the 144,000 that will survive the horrors of the end of the world, and lead God’s kingdom into the future. It’s very interesting, and all of this is manipulation, a twisting of LDS beliefs into something that could be more beneficial for her.

Frost: You really paint a portrait of her as an extreme narcissist for one thing. And she also, as you note, began to eventually believe that she could control the elements, in addition to one of her friends that she did that with quite a bit, and tried to bring about the deaths of various people, psychically or spiritually.

Sottile: Yeah, she thought she could control the weather. She thought she could assess people for whether they were a light spirit or a dark spirit. She started referring to people who had gone dark by different names. So she stopped calling her former husband Charles, she started calling him Ned Schneider, these really bonkers things that in a way you could see him as a little bit humorous, but when you see where this went, it’s like this very dark spiraling of someone dehumanizing people around her that were questioning her, and wanting to just get those people out of the way.

Frost: Many people I think, including myself at one point, just thought that these people have really serious mental illness with these beliefs, especially when they lead to killing, killing your children or killing other people, allegedly. So what’s wrong with the explanation that Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell were just psychopaths, mentally ill, delusional?

Sottile: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think that part of my reporting was kind of really trying to answer that, is there some kind of history of mental illness that needs to be considered here more seriously? So many people I talked to said “I don’t know why you care so much. These are just sociopaths.” As a reporter, I could never find evidence of that. No one could ever tell me specifically that they knew that there was some kind of diagnosis or a family history. And I think that that’s really important, that without that, we don’t know. Of course, that could be something that is at play.

But I think what that does is it casts off these ideas that Lori and Chad had. Zombies, I don’t think has come up before in the extreme fringes of the LDS Church, and it certainly did here. But with some variation, they actually mimic beliefs that are held by a fringe of the Church, but by a lot of people. And I talk in the book about a number of instances where people have taken beliefs and committed violence with those. And I think that this firmly nestles Chad and Lori into that violent fringe history of the Church that has been something that has really been kind of a cancer to the mainstream church that they’ve tried to kind of separate themselves from. I talk quite a bit at the end of the book about how that’s kind of just not enough. There are some beliefs that are really nurtured. I think there’s some flaws, if I can say that, within the LDS belief system that kind of allow for this creative manipulation of what the Church says is real and what’s not. And it could be difficult for people to make distinctions between those.

So, yeah, I think it would be the easy thing to say “crazy people, don’t need to worry about it.” But I think that it speaks to something that’s very interesting and very scary about this inability by the mainstream Church to sever itself from the more extreme members.

Frost: Why do you think that is? You referred to the openings that can provide a more fertile ground for this type of misinterpretation. Can you explain that a little bit more?

Sottile: Two things. I think that one of those is something that makes the LDS faith very interesting, that it allows people to receive personal revelation. So this is something we were talking about with the voice earlier, you can have a very personal and direct relationship with God, and they might speak to you in a way. Where the LDS Church makes distinctions is that it’s perfectly fine to be guided by God, but when you start to take those ideas out the front door and try and say “I received a message, I want to spread that message,” that is something the Church is very clear is inappropriate. So I think that that’s something that I talk about in the book, that if you believe that God told you that the world is gonna end, you may flout the direction of the leaders of the Church and say “I feel this is real enough, I want to share it with people.” And I think part of that is at play here.

The other thing is that there is something that many people know about about the Mormon Church which is that there is preparedness doctrine, that a lot of LDS families are very large, and given the history of the Church, the Church leadership encourages people to be prepared for times of hardship. They’re very specific, this could be an earthquake, this could be a loss of a job or a loss of power or water. So people are encouraged to stock up, to make sure that they’re very self-sufficient, they don’t have to depend on anyone, and they can also take care of these large families.

But as in all things, there are people who take that preparedness doctrine to the extremes. And Chad and Lori really catered to a lot of those people who feel they need to prep because the world is going to end. The Church doesn’t ever say prep up in case the world ends, it’s like in case of a storm. But people say “yeah, yeah, what they mean but they’re not saying is that the world might be ending.”

So I think that those are two aspects that really beget people who take the beliefs in a new extreme, unsanctioned direction.

Frost: And one of the things also that you talk about that they said that they’re prepared for is being attacked, literally being attacked from foreign aggressors and also from those in the “liberal cities.” So it really is quite a wide range.

Sottile: Yeah. And those things specifically are some of the language that I would see in the kind of conspiratorial circles that Chad Daybell ran in. They didn’t have anything to do with the LDS faith. These are like very common anti-government or conspiracy theories that have been around in the west and beyond for a very long time. Fear of the New World Order, fear of the United Nations coming in to take over, and that sort of thing. There’s kind of this Mormon twist on this, but a lot of these things are really common in these other circles.

Frost: It’s like the secular meets the religious in this perfect Venn diagram in that way. I want to follow up on something else that you mentioned, the continual trying of the Church to separate themselves from this, despite the opening that this personal revelation doctrine provides. Chad Daybell was excommunicated, right? And there have been other excommunications as well. Do those tend to have the effect that one might think they do?

Sottile: Well, I think in this case, anybody who I have observed was an accolade of Chad Daybell’s, they’re so horrified by what happened that it’s had that effect that he was wrong. But there are many, many other examples of people who have preached similar things as Daybell who have been excommunicated, and they said “fine, excommunicate me. I know that I have the true word of God, that I am the true Church,” and people will follow that. The LDS church, for being such a young faith in America, has a big history of splinter groups, where people say “the Church leadership is wrong on this one. Listen to what I have to say.”

Frost: And of course, not all of those who are excommunicated actually allegedly committed murder. So that’s another pretty strong difference.

How would you describe the LDS Church’s relationship with fringe members, like some of them that you’ve referred to, like those on the AVOW forum, which is Another Voice Of Warning?

Sottile: I think a big part of this book was me getting into this group, Another Voice Of Warning. It’s kind of a message board that’s run by somebody outside of Rexburg, Idaho, and that really kind of caters to these things we’ve been talking about people who believe in near death experiences, and maybe are willing to entertain some of the more fringe elements of the Church, but are still themselves Church members. There’s a lot of talk prepping and things like we’ve been saying, liberals coming into conservative cities to try and take over.

I think that the Church is very aware that these groups exist. Specifically, I discuss at one point that this powerpoint presentation leaked out of the Church hierarchy talking about things that were real threats to the faith. One of those was a concern that people within the Church had a real desire to to “level up,” to kind of take their faith to the next level and become a believer in a new way that was not within these boundaries that the mainstream Church is talking about. One of those things they were concerned about was people claiming to be prophets, and people claiming to have near death experiences, and this somehow gives them a new vision. I think the church is very aware that these things are there, but there’s only so much I think that they can cram the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. And I think that when they start excommunicating people, it’s when people have been very out about their beliefs that they’re seeing things that should be only reserved for Church leadership to see, or receiving messages. And that’s that’s how Daybell got himself excommunicated, I imagine among other things.

Frost: Taking the faith to the next level, that is I think what really resonated to me in terms of a universal problem, if you will, that permeates, I don’t know if it’s fair to say all religions, all churches, but it’s certainly something that I have noticed in a lot of different stories that have nothing to do with the LDS Church. And you talk about, as we referred to earlier, the other murderous consequences of some of these fringe beliefs, like Jim Jones and the Moonies, and you talk about 5, 6, 7 others as well.

And as a person of faith myself, I was raised with the Bible and many other religious documents, it occurred to me when you were talking about in the book about your disbelief at first that anyone could really believe that, that God would tell them to kill anyone, but especially to kill their children. And what came to me from the Old Testament, I remembered that there was the story of Abraham and Isaac, where God told Abraham to kill his son Isaac, but did not let him go through with it. But it was a test of faith. So in that way, I feel like that was one of the things that I saw reflected. This is the LDS Church, but it has ripples everywhere.

Sottile: It’s so interesting that you say that. Since this book has come out, I’ve heard from many, many people who have read it with their different religious perspectives. And one of the most notable, chilling things that I heard from a couple of people who grew up in very Evangelical circles were homeschooled, kind of off gridders. One of them shared with me that she remembered her mother saying to her because of the Old Testament, I know that if God says I should kill you for our faith, that I should do that. And this person specifically had severed themselves pretty clearly from their family.

But them sharing that with me said that this is not just Lori and Chad, that there are people who take things that are supposed to be instructive lessons, and they take them to the nth degree, and share with their children that may be that God said for them to do anything, they would do it without question, and how scary that is, and how how sad that was. This person specifically was saying, in the story of Tylee Ryan, who is Lori’s daughter who died, that she thought “that could have been me.” And that was just so sad and sobering for me to hear.

Frost: She died allegedly at the hands of Lori Vallo, her mother, just to be clear.

What are people missing if they only see this story through a true crime lens?

Sottile: I think that they’re only engaging with the kind of immediate details. I’ve been a magazine writer long enough that I can recognize a story that’s a good narrative. It’s crazy, it develops, there is a very interesting and wild tale here. But I think to only see it for the boundaries of what happened between 2019 and 2020 and now will play out in court is failing to understand that these ideas didn’t just come from Lori and Chad, that they were part of a history and a culture and something that is really scary, that this violence that has existed at the very fringes of the Church.

We’re in a time of a lot of uncertainty, politically, religiously, in every part of American life is this sort of fear and paranoia, “what’s next?” And I think when there are people who are part of a history of folks who are always waiting for the end, that this could be not necessarily a predictor, but I think that it would behoove all of us to know that there are people who are very scared and very paranoid, and when you wrap that up in religion, that can have really, really horrible consequences.

Frost: So much of this coverage of the case has focused on Lori, you have definitely focused on both. She and Chad are being tried together. How significant is that?

Sottile: I think it’s really significant. In a case like this, both of these individuals have been in jail for two years. They were actually married for a very short period of time before going to jail. In a lot of cases, I think people would think that one of them would turn on the other and say this person made me kill my kids. None of that has happened. They are very firmly together. Lori has been very clear with the court. Sometimes she will say nothing, but she has had her attorneys be very clear that she must be referred to as Lori Daybell, not Lori Vallow. And she appeared in court a couple of weeks ago. It was a very strange hearing for a lot of reasons, but she was all smiles and very excited to pose for the cameras. She also had a hair tie around her wedding ring finger. And the media really took that as a message from Lori to everyone that she is standing with Chad in this case.

Frost: And they are specifically charged with what?

Sottile: They’re charged with a lot of things, among them, conspiracy to commit murder of both both of Lori’s children, her daughter Tylee and her son JJ, but also conspiracy to commit murder of Tammy Daybell, which was Chad’s wife of 29 years, and she died very suddenly in October of 2019. There’s also grand theft charges there that Lori and Chad were using the social security and the insurance money after their deaths.

Frost: How significant is the hearing that happened recently where Lori Vallo and Chad Daybell’s lawyers filed a motion saying that the conspiracy charges were confusing?

Sottile: It’s really notable. Right now, Chad and Lori are headed toward a trial in January where they will stand trial together for a number of charges, among them conspiracy to commit murder of the children, and conspiracy to commit grand theft, to then take their Social Security after their deaths and use that money. What this hearing was about is that Lori Vallow’s lawyers came to the judge in this rural county in Idaho and said that the conspiracy to commit murder and grand theft is very confusing, that those are two things being linked together by that word “and.” And that could really confuse the jury, because conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit grand theft have very different penalties associated with them. So the judge is considering right now sending the entire indictment back to the grand jury to reframe.

And I think it’s important to say that Lori and Chad are facing the death penalty in Idaho. So I think there is a concerted effort to be very clear going into that knowing that this is a very serious thing that they are on trial for, and the consequences are the most serious. So they want to go into that making sure that this can’t go back on appeal or anything like that in the future.

Frost: Do you have plans to cover this trial next year?

Sottile: Absolutely. I think that there are many, many questions that I couldn’t answer that I think will only be answered in court. What was the cause of death for Chad Daybell’s wife Tammy? That’s something that’s been very secretly guarded by the authorities there in Idaho. And will we get some kind of conclusion to your earlier question of who was leading who here? I think that that’s something that can only come out in evidence that hasn’t been seen by members of the media like myself. So yeah, absolutely, I plan to.

Frost: Who else is being charged? We haven’t talked about that at all. There were allegedly the crimes committed by other people, including murder.

Sottile: Well no one else is being charged right now, and I think that that says to me that a lot of people who had knowledge of what Chad and Lori were doing and planning to do, that they have cooperated in some way with the authorities. So I think one thing that is really important to note here is that Lori will also, in some capacity, face charges in Arizona for the death of her fourth husband Charles Vallow, who was shot and killed by Lori Vallow’s brother.

There are so many twists and turns to this case. There’s a drive-by shooting that happened in Arizona that has to do with other people. Arizona has been pretty clear once things have wrapped up for Lori specifically in Idaho, that she will then face some kind of charges in Arizona as well.

Frost: Aside from what people around them may be facing or not facing, what is the effect more broadly that you could tell on their circle of believers, that they’re being charged with these murders?

Sottile: As far as I can tell, this has been horrific for people who were close to Chad and Lori. Because there were a lot of people that were close to Chad and Lori that really had no inkling that any of this was going on. So there’s a lot of just pain and trauma there. I think that some of the people who were close to Chad and Lori, I have seen some of them being very out and saying “I was misguided, I was looking for something more, I thought I had some kind of unique perspective on the faith, that we could see things that other people couldn’t. And I see now that that was so misguided and wrongheaded and dangerous.”

So there have been a few people who have said things, but I will be honest with you that I keep tabs on Another Voice Of Warning, and that website continues to march on, without Chad of course, but really fomenting that same paranoia and conspiracy that Chad was a part of.

Frost: I want to end with something that you wrote at the very end, hopefully this will not be a spoiler. Your book is these murders and what is behind them, possible explanations for how this could have happened, what these murders came from. But there’s an even larger context that you reference. Would you mind reading from the end of the epilogue?

Sottile: “So maybe the heart of this story is something much more endemic, a societal numbness to death and violence, a fixation on fear. It felt like the case could be an allegory for the rest of the world, for everything happening right now in this country. There seems to be a sense of doubt that evil can be sitting right in front of us, a belief that moral questions are things only to be considered in a voting booth and not in our everyday lives. When you start to look around, you can see fear everywhere: fear in politics, fear in policy, fear every time we pull to refresh and a new hell confronts us. It seems like we’ve collectively decided to laser focus our energy on personal and collective ruin, and the case of Chad and Lori is, in effect, a ripple of that.”

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