#41: The Doomsday Murders (Part 1/2)

Faith, Delusion, and the End of the World: 7 Things You Need to Know About the Lori Vallow Case

1. The Quiet Horror Hiding in Plain Sight

Rexburg, Idaho looks exactly like you'd expect a small Mormon college town to look. Faux brick facades. Manicured lawns. The kind of place where people leave their doors unlocked and wave to their neighbors. Nestled within what locals call the "Zion Curtain" corridor along Interstate 15, it radiates the particular safety of a community that believes God is watching over it.

Which makes what investigators found there in June 2020 all the more devastating.

While the world was consumed by the early chaos of COVID-19, forensic teams descended on a property in nearby Salem belonging to Chad Daybell. What they uncovered beneath the surface of that ordinary-looking yard was anything but ordinary. In a melted green bucket, buried on the grounds, they found the burnt remains of sixteen-year-old Tylee Ryan. A short distance away, they unearthed her seven-year-old brother Joshua — known to everyone who loved him as JJ. He was still wearing his red pajamas and black socks. His small hands had been duct-taped together.

Today, Lori Vallow sits in the Madison County Jail, less than a mile from a Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers. JJ's favorite treat was their "Dirt 'n Worms" sundae — gummy worms and Oreos. He never got to order it again.

2. How Near-Death Experiences Became a Loophole for False Prophets

Long before Chad Daybell met Lori Vallow, he had already built himself a mythology. At the center of it were two claimed near-death experiences: a cliff jump at Flaming Gorge in 1985, and a brush with the Pacific surf in La Jolla in 1993. Through these experiences, Daybell claimed he had crossed into the spirit world beyond the veil, received divine assignments from deceased ancestors, and been given direct access to an internal guide he called "The Voice."

He wasn't working in a vacuum. In the early 1990s, author Betty Eadie published Embraced by the Light, a memoir about her own alleged near-death experience that became a massive cultural phenomenon in Utah — traffic reportedly jammed the freeways for miles just to hear her speak. Eadie's success proved there was a hungry, lucrative audience for people claiming to have seen the other side, and crucially, that this audience didn't need institutional approval to believe them.

This is the loophole Daybell exploited. As sociologist Massimo Introvigne has noted, once you validate private near-death revelation, you introduce a source of spiritual authority that no church can control or regulate. The Catholic Church, for example, channels all revelation through the Vatican. But in communities where personal visions are treated as equally valid — or more valid — than official doctrine, there is no guardrail. Anyone can claim to have spoken to God. Anyone can say they've been given a mission. And in the right environment, people will believe them.

3. The Radical Ideology That Set the Stage

To understand how Lori and Chad's belief system took root, you have to understand the ideological soil it grew in. Two figures in particular cast a long shadow over the Mormon fringe world that shaped them: Ezra Taft Benson and W. Cleon Skousen.

Benson, a former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture who later became LDS Church President, and Skousen, a former FBI clerk and Salt Lake City Police Chief, spent decades weaving together LDS theology, anti-communist paranoia, and the antigovernment worldview of the John Birch Society. They framed American political life as a cosmic battle against secret, evil combinations — a narrative that mapped conveniently onto LDS scripture and gave their followers a sense of divine purpose in their suspicion of the federal government.

Their legacy rippled outward. By 1992, the LDS Church felt compelled to publicly distance itself from the survivalist and "super patriot" movements that had grown in their wake — figures like James "Bo" Gritz, the real-life inspiration for Rambo, who drew massive audiences in Mormon country with warnings about universal barcodes and federal gun seizures. Around the same time, a man named Sterling Allan founded the American Study Group in Provo, encouraging followers to prioritize personal revelation over church leadership entirely.

Out of this world emerged a consistent ideological playbook built on three pillars: a deep suspicion of government as a force of satanic tyranny; a near-religious reverence for the U.S. Constitution as a divinely inspired document under threat; and an urgent belief in the need to prepare for societal collapse, in which only a chosen 144,000 souls would survive. These weren't fringe footnotes. They were the building blocks of the world Lori Vallow grew up in and Chad Daybell preached to his followers.

4. The Prophecy That Turned Believers into Agents of the Apocalypse

At the heart of this extremist theology sits a piece of Mormon apocrypha that the LDS Church has officially dismissed as, in their own words, "trash." The White Horse Prophecy claims that a day will come when the U.S. Constitution hangs by a thread — and that it will be the LDS people who rise up to save it.

The mainstream church wants nothing to do with it. But for those operating on the fringe, it is transformative. It doesn't just give believers a sense of purpose — it gives them a divine mandate. Suddenly, defying the law isn't criminal. It's holy. Barry Cox, Lori's father, spent decades waging legal warfare against the IRS, convinced the government was a satanic institution. The Bundy family standoffs operated from the same ideological framework. In this worldview, every act of defiance — every flight from police, every refusal to comply — becomes an act of sacred resistance on behalf of a divinely inspired document.

It is a short walk from believing you are defending the Constitution to believing you are one of the chosen 144,000. And from there, an even shorter walk to believing that the rules governing ordinary, "telestial" human beings simply do not apply to you.

5. When Murder Gets Rebranded as Mercy

Perhaps the most chilling theological thread running through this case is the concept of Blood Atonement — a fringe belief, roundly rejected by the modern LDS Church, which holds that certain sins are so severe that the only path to divine forgiveness runs through the shedding of the sinner's own blood.

The mainstream church calls it a staple of dime novels. But the idea has persisted in radicalized circles for over a century, providing a framework in which killing someone can be recast not as a crime but as an act of spiritual mercy — a ritualized offering, the smoke of which rises to God as atonement.

Brigham Young preached on the concept in 1856, declaring that there were sins for which a man would gladly have his blood spilled on the ground if it meant his soul could be saved. That sermon was delivered 170 years ago. But the logic it encoded — that violence, in the right context, is sacred — didn't stay in the 19th century. For those willing to reach for it, it has always been there, waiting to justify the unjustifiable.

6. The Performance of Perfection

Lori Vallow didn't come from nowhere. She came from the San Bernardino Valley — the same Southern California landscape that Joan Didion wrote about in her landmark 1966 essay Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, describing a place built on the pursuit of an unnatural, manufactured perfection. Lori embodied that world completely: blonde, beautiful, a former beauty queen and cheerleader who moved through life projecting an image of effortless suburban grace.

But underneath it, inherited dysfunction ran deep. Her father Barry Cox spent decades in legal warfare with the IRS, operating from the conviction that the federal government was a satanic enterprise and that its laws didn't apply to people like him. Growing up in that environment — where virtue was performed rather than practiced, and where the rules of ordinary society were treated as optional for those with a higher calling — left its mark.

As William March wrote in The Bad Seed: these are people who present a more convincing picture of virtue than virtue presents of itself — more perfect than the original, in the way a plastic flower is more symmetrical than a real one. Lori Vallow smiled at crime scenes. She threw pool parties. She giggled during police interviews. The performance never stopped. It was all she knew.

7. Why the Prophecy Never Dies

History is full of doomsday movements that survived their own failed predictions. When Dorothy Martin's UFO didn't arrive in 1954 to carry her followers to safety before a prophesied Chicago flood, her group didn't dissolve — they announced that their own righteousness had saved the planet. When a vortex failed to open in Sedona in 2012 to remove what one group called a "simulated reality virus," the believers simply adjusted the timeline and moved on.

This is the pattern. Prophecy fails; faith adapts. The goalposts move. The timeline shifts. And the conviction that you are one of the chosen — that you have been given a mission, that you answer to a higher authority than the laws of men — proves remarkably resistant to contradicting evidence.

Chad Daybell claimed to hear The Voice. Lori Vallow believed she was a translated being, immune to death, operating beyond the reach of ordinary consequence. Both of them, in the end, were products of a world that had spent decades teaching people to trust their private revelations above everything else — above the church, above the law, above the lives of the people around them.

The line between spiritual conviction and dangerous delusion is thinner than most of us would like to believe. And when someone is taught that The Voice is always right, the only question that remains is where it will lead them next.

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