JJ Vallow

Well, I mean, this is another cult tactic is that all he's doing is he's telling these people that, you know, they have lived this role in a past life. And it just so happens that the role that they lived in the past life that was very important and very cool is the exact same role that they have to live in this life. Like Lori Vallow has to be the wife of the prophet.

Alex Cox has to be the protector of the wife of the prophet and also the prophet. You have to be. You have to be, because this is your destiny. Like, that's the whole destiny thing.

Man, if I were to become a Mormon, I'd be president of the church in 10 years. Let's do it.

Now, being a special protector was a hell of a lot more exciting than Alex Cox's reality. Alex Cox's reality was that he was a failed stand-up comedian who'd never gotten out of the Phoenix open mic scene and instead opted for a career as a truck driver.

Is that, oh, did you hear that from your brother-in-law, Adam?

Ed said last week, country wouldn't run without them.

But driving a truck is not as exciting as being the personal assassin for a central figure in the upcoming apocalypse. So, with Alex at their side, Chad and Lori had someone who would carry out their dirty work without question. Now, about eight weeks after Charles' murder, I guess it's eight weeks, not seven weeks.

Eight weeks after Charles' murder, Lori, Tylee, and JJ moved into a townhouse unit in Rexburg. Well, Alex Cox soon moved into the townhouse next door after quitting his truck driving job to quote unquote protect Lori full time.

It does seem, however, that by the time the Daybell cult began building this little enclave in the Rexburg townhouses in early September, Alex had already been told about the plan to get rid of Tylee and JJ. This, of course, can be inferred from the idiotic text messages sent between Alex and Lori. On September 3rd, Yeah, this makes me angry.

Because this is the thing that happens with cults so fucking often. And it's especially prevalent in modern cults. I'm so fucking sick of cults getting cute.

On September 3rd, after Alex set up the Wi-Fi for his and Lori's townhouses, he texted Lori the network name. Alex had called it Anti-Layman, which is, of course, a stupid Mormon thing. Layman being short for Lamanites, the bad guys in the Book of Mormon. But tellingly, the password for the Wi-Fi was TooManyKids, using the number 2, which is weird by itself, but not incriminating.

But in response to the Wi-Fi name and password, Lori wrote, unprompted, that she and Chad were trying to, quote, get to the bottom of what we need to do to eliminate them completely. Which was in reference to the kids.

Lick your lips.

Like when it's too difficult to get out or when it's too physically hard? Physically hard.

So now that Chad Dayball and Lori Vallow lived in the same town, they go on walks together on the Brigham Young University, Idaho campus, where Chad would tell Lori to be patient because Tammy was going to die in a car accident any day now.

Chad, however, didn't go by Lori's townhouse just yet because Lori's daughter, Tylee, was understandably upset about uprooting her whole life at the age of 16 because her mother believed herself to be one of God's chosen. And Chad Daybell was pretty much the symbol of everything that was going wrong in Tylee's life.

But Lori would not wait long at all after moving to Rexburg before she took care of Tylee.

No, it's really not. But the problem when they moved to Rexburg is that, you know, Tylee had been this sort of mini-me for so many years, but then Tylee's behavior changed. Yes. Tylee was not doing... Yeah, she's a 16-year-old. She's not doing whatever Lori says anymore. She's being difficult. You know, she's fucking pissed off that she had to move to Rexburg, Idaho.

And I think it's the second, third, maybe fourth time she's had to move in her life. She's fucking sick of it. And Lori does not do well with people giving her any kind of guff.

Exactly. Well, just a week and a day after Lori moved into the townhouse in Rexburg, she and Alex took Tylee and JJ on a day trip to Yellowstone National Park, just an hour and a half drive away. The whole family took a lot of photos on their smartphones where everyone appeared to be happy and having a good time.

But those photos were the last known pieces of evidence that showed Tylee Ryan still alive. As far as what happened to Tylee, we really don't have a clear picture of what went down.

By the time Tylee's body was found, many months after her murder, it was so badly decomposed and had been so thoroughly destroyed that the medical examiner had no choice but to determine the cause of death as homicide by unspecific means. Later investigations, however, used smartphone data and pings on nearby towers to track the movements of Alex Cox.

And using that data, they were able to build a loose timeline of what may have transpired.

So according to the smartphone data, Alex Cox showed up at Lori's townhouse late at night after the trip to Yellowstone, arriving at 2.42 a.m. It's believed that Alex and or Lori murdered Tylee that night, and Alex spent the next hour completely dismembering and beheading Tylee's corpse in Lori's home.

He then took the remains to his own townhouse next door, where he presumably got a couple hours of sleep. Then, at 9 a.m., he left for Chad Daybell's property with Tylee's dismembered body in tow. See, Chad had a good amount of land surrounding his home in Idaho, plenty of room to bury a body, and he'd already chosen a spot to bury Tylee east of his barn.

Chad, the former professional gravedigger, likely dug the hole himself.

Alex believes it's real. Lori believes it's real. Chad most likely has convinced himself that it's real. He's the one who's going to benefit the most. Yeah. And I think there's also, there's a bit of a ritualistic aspect to this, which, you know, I'm going to get into now. And if you want to get into a ritual, you usually have to do that on your own property. Mm-hmm.

We know that Lori, Alex, and Chad Daybell planned this murder together well in advance, because the day after Tylee was killed, Chad had googled what direction the wind would be blowing on the day they were set to dispose of Tylee's corpse. The reason why he googled wind direction was because he and Alex had planned to burn the body before burying it. And this is, you know, possibly two reasons.

It could be to lessen the chances of someone noticing the smell of rotting flesh over time, or it could be, like I said, somewhat of a ritual.

I feel like there's a lot comes down to just totally knows how hard it is to burn a body. Chad was in the fucking dead body business for forever. Do you cremate?

Chad googled the wind direction to make sure that his neighbors didn't catch the scent of human flesh cooking out in the open. And so, after Tylee's body was burned, most likely by Alex, they tossed her decapitated head into the grave first, then poured the still-burning remains into a green bucket. Then they were burning to the point where the bucket melted from the heat.

The bucket was then placed on top of the head, and by 11.45 a.m., Alex was on his way to get lunch at Del Taco. having just buried his niece.

I put Del Taco over Taco Bell. Well, both of you are fucking idiots. I mean, they're both really bad. And we have no business. Like, eating Del Taco or Taco Bell in L.A. is like eating fucking Pizza Hut in New York City.

Yeah, they burned the whole thing. They tried to burn her head. Tried to burn her head, yeah.

Well, he's a former gravedigger. This is what I'm saying. Well, that's the thing. The crematorium and the gravedigger guys, they talk.

Yeah, I don't think they're always talking shop. No, that's why it might be a ritual thing. Or it might just be like, it might just be let's I don't think they were trying to like fully cremate the body. Like I think what Chad Daybell knew is I think Chad Daybell knew about how much decomposing flesh can smell like and how easily it can permeate up through the ground.

And so I think that what they were trying to do was burn the flesh away so it wouldn't smell.

As Henry said last episode, these are Mormons trying to get away with murder, sheltered folk. And from what we've seen over the years, nothing gets you into trouble faster than over-explaining. That, of course, is exactly what Chad did after the disposal of Tylee's body.

After Alex left that day, Chad decided that he needed to explain to his wife what that burning flesh smell was, whether she noticed it or not. So he sent this highly incriminating, unprompted text to ostensibly cover his tracks. And please, verbatim.

I just wanted to come by and tell you not to go down that road.

Just go down. Don't go down that road.

Yeah, it is. It is. Remember what happened in Pet Sematary, too? We all love Clancy Brown. I do.

Yeah. Duck. I'm going to teach you so much. So good. Now, even though Tylee was only 16 years old, Lori told everybody that she was now attending BYU-Idaho. Most people accepted the explanation as to why Tylee wasn't around anymore. So when there weren't a lot of follow-up questions, it seemed like Lori felt safe enough to move on to the task of getting rid of JJ.

See, according to Melanie Gibbs' boyfriend, Chad was telling Lori that JJ was now a zombie who loved Satan. Cool! I knew you'd say that. Yeah! God, that would have been awesome. Lori said she believed Chad's claim because JJ's vocabulary was growing, and he was finally sitting still to watch TV, where he'd never been able to do that previously.

Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with the sacralicious Henry Zabrowski.

Now, it seems like there was a moment when Lori thought that she might not have to kill JJ. She told podcaster Melanie Gibb that she was going to hand over JJ to his grandmother, Kay Woodcock. She was going to lie to Kay and tell her that she couldn't take care of JJ anymore because she had cancer.

But I think at this moment, Lori got a little too wrapped up in her own story and decided that it was time to practice what she preached. Or she was just lying to Melanie Gibb as she's lied to everybody. Indeed. See, from how Melanie Gibb put it, Lori was overanalyzing everything JJ did. And the only answer Lori seemed to come up with was zombie, zombie, zombie.

Now, in Laurie and Chad's world, leaving someone as a zombie was to doom that person's soul to an eternity in limbo. So just handing off J.J. didn't work with the mythology the Daybell cult had built. So just two weeks after his stepsister Tylee was murdered, J.J. had to go as well.

So on September 22nd, Melanie Gibb and her boyfriend came over to record a podcast with Lori, and they ended up staying the night.

Dan's still doing that, huh? He's been doing that since the old days back in 2010 when we were recording stuff together.

Well, Gib and her boyfriend saw Alex take JJ up to bed before they went to sleep. But when they were packing up to leave the next morning, JJ was nowhere to be seen. Lori quite nonchalantly told them that JJ was being a zombie the night before, after they'd gone to bed. And he climbed up on the fridge and smashed a picture of Jesus.

Then he climbed onto the kitchen cabinets where he got stuck between the cabinets and the ceiling like a fucking cat. So Lori said she'd asked Alex to take JJ over to his place to calm him down. But as we now know, that was the night that Alex killed JJ Vallow. With this one, however, we absolutely know that Lori Vallow was present during whatever it was that transpired.

And we have Ed Larson.

Yeah. Now, again, we don't know exactly how the murder went down, but it is possible that it may have been a highly neglectful accident. Yeah. When it comes to Lori Vallow, though, this really could go either way. What we do know is that Alex and Lori wrapped duct tape around JJ's head tightly to cover his mouth. By accident.

And just covered in it. Then they wrapped tape around his head several times from his chin to his forehead, basically only giving him the ability to breathe out of his nose. JJ's feet and ankles were also bound in duct tape, as well as his wrists. In fact, Alex and Lori had wrapped duct tape all around his hands and arms all the way up to his elbows.

Finally, though, Alex put a white plastic garbage bag over JJ's head and pulled the drawstring, which is probably what ultimately killed him. But the reason why we know that Lori Vallow was at least present for the torturous death of her son is because investigators found one of Lori's bleach blonde hairs stuck in one of the pieces of duct tape used to restrain JJ.

GHB, that's the roofie drug, right?

As far as why this happened, it very well could have been that JJ, and this could still work in with your theory, that JJ was having an episode of sorts. Alex took things too far in trying to calm him down. And JJ died.

Well, that's the thing. Once he'd wrapped him up, it's possible that JJ died or Lori just told him to finish the job, even with the podcaster couple staying in her home that night. But it is more likely that Lori and Alex had fully planned to murder JJ on September 22nd, even with the podcasters there, if only so Lori could prove how powerful and untouchable she was by this point.

Maybe.

This murder is brought to you by Squarespace. See, the evidence for premeditation here is that Alex headed out to Chad Daybell's property the morning after the murder, just like he'd done with Tylee. Except this time, he carried JJ's seven-year-old corpse in a black plastic garbage bag.

Now, smartphone data says that on the morning Alex disposed of JJ's body, he only spent 17 minutes on the northern edge of Chad Daybell's property, near Chad and Tammy's pet cemetery. But since Alex spent such little time on the property, it's likely that Chad had already dug the grave either the night before or that morning.

And the directive had to be given in person because no text exists that could reasonably be linked to the body's disposal. So all Alex had to do was throw the body in the hole, put three wooden panels and three heavy stones on top, then fill the small grave with dirt before once again leaving Chad's property.

It is hard. So today, we're here. We're here at the conclusion. Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow, part four. We're going to find out just how guilty these motherfuckers are.

Chad Daybell had been there five years.

Okay.

Yeah, I guess he moved there in 2018, so yeah, maybe like two years.

Yeah, did they have a bunch of dogs and cats die in a fire or an explosion?

As far as what Lori told people about JJ, she, for some reason, had multiple stories that were all slightly different. And I never understand this with these people, why they have to tell different people different stories when it's so much easier to have one simple story to stick to. That's really good advice if you're trying to kill.

That's what I always say. If you want to learn how to do something well, don't just look at the masters. Look at the failures. Look at the failures. Lori told his school that JJ had gone to Louisiana to stay with his grandparents. But she told JJ's nanny that JJ had gone to visit his grandmother in Hawaii. No fucking reason. Yeah, JJ's living an amazing fake life. Yeah.

The explanation Lori had given people about Tylee, however, the one that she'd gone to BYU-Idaho, that was starting to wear thin. On September 24th, Tylee's older brother and Lori's first son, Colby Ryan, texted Tylee's phone to wish her a happy birthday. Obviously, Lori Ballow had been anticipating something like this.

because she'd kept Tylee's phone charged and ready to use since Tylee's murder. So when Colby texted Tylee's phone, Lori texted back, pretending to be the dead daughter that she had killed.

Well, they did. It was called the Disney Channel.

It made huge hits.

She's the bee's knees.

Except Dr. G. Who's that? There was a whole show, a reality show about a medical examiner named Dr. G in which they use actual people as the corpses. Not, of course, the actual corpses. But, you know, they use actors to play the corpses. And it's a lot of old people. They're trying to figure out the cause of death. So it's just a bunch of naked old people getting manhandled by actors.

Now, when Lori started texting as Tylee to Colby, Colby figured, this is kind of weird. Can I give you a call? But Lori, texting as Tylee, wrote back that she was too tired to talk. And Lori didn't even bother to try and mimic Tylee's emoji-heavy texting style. Colby, of course, knew that something was up immediately.

It did not, however, enter his mind that his mother had killed his sister who was now pretending to be her on the phone. And it would be a long time before Colby accepted that fact.

Now, depending on your point of view, the fall of 2019 was either very good for Chad Daybell or very bad. After years of declaring himself a prophet in public appearances and on podcasts, the LDS establishment, that's the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they finally took notice and duly excommunicated Daybell from the Mormon church. Flush! Flush!

Yeah, they do it all the time. But that's the thing. They stripped Chad of his LDS membership. They banned him from entering Mormon temples or partaking in the sacrament. And that should have been a life-shaking moment for him. But really, all this meant was that Chad had nothing else to do but to retreat completely into his own little fantasy world.

And that's the big problem with this, with the Mormon church, is that they have these people that are on the fringes. They start saying all this crazy shit. The Mormon church says, like, hey, you can't be a part of our club anymore. And so that only makes those fucking people double down on the crazy shit that they've been talking about.

And additionally, for a fringe figure like Chad Daybell, I would imagine that being excommunicated was a bit of a badge of honor because Chad continued on his merry way with Lori and his other followers, even though it was obvious that everything was starting to fall apart.

Yeah, the neo-fundamentalist revolution.

It's basically, we're going to start your, we see your coup, we see it coming, and we're going to take out your guys before it even gets close. Yes. Now for two people who are trying to get an entire town prepped for the end times, which was due in about nine months at this point. Oh my God, where do we get the floats?

Well, for people who were trying to get all this shit done, Chad and Lori spent an awful lot of time on their own personal romance. But more than anything, they spent a lot of time making sure they got paid.

See, since Lori hadn't gotten any payout from Charles Vallow's insurance policy because he'd switched the beneficiary to his sister Kay, Chad made sure they had a nest egg by significantly increasing the life insurance policies he'd taken out on his wife Tammy.

At the same time, Chad and Lori also made sure that Lori's niece, Melanie Boudreau, who had reconnected with Lori and gone all in on the cult, they made sure that she was still the beneficiary on her ex-husband's policy. Ex-husband because Chad and Lori had forced her to divorce him because he was a dark spirit.

But once it was confirmed that Melanie Boudreau was indeed still the beneficiary, the ex-husband, Brandon Boudreau, was clocked as a full zombie and was therefore put on Alex Cox's hit list. Got all that? Yeah, I got all of it.

and get ready for assassin mode yeah now we know that lori was involved in the plot to kill her niece's ex-husband brandon boudreau because she visited a gun shop the day after jj was killed and took photos of assault rifle ammunition boxes it's believed that lori took these pictures to show alex what he needed to use to kill not only brandon boudreau but tammy daybell as well

because both Tammy and Brandon had now been officially clocked as zombies, and both were heavily insured. As such, Chad was also laying the groundwork for Tammy's impending death by telling friends she wasn't doing well, and that he wouldn't be surprised if she died in her sleep any day now.

So when we last left Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow, Lori's fourth husband, Charles, had just been murdered by Lori's psychopathic open mic comedian brother, Alex Cox. Since Lori was now unfettered by marital demands, she was free to finally move to Rexburg, Idaho, a.k.a. the New Jerusalem, where Chad Daybell had been gathering his faithful followers in anticipation for the end times.

But before Tammy got got, Chad and Lori decided to take down Brandon Boudreaux first. So on October 2nd, Alex stupidly drove Tylee's Jeep to Brandon Boudreaux's home early in the morning. A Jeep that Brandon knew!

The worst. And yes, he made the trek all the way from Idaho, all the way down to Gilbert, Arizona. And that, of course, that's the same town that Alex had murdered Charles Vallow. Gilbert, Arizona was kind of like the first Rexburg. A lot of these people had moved to Gilbert to be around Lori and Charles and so on and so forth.

They're all over the road.

Well, once Alex arrived in Brandon's neighborhood, he parked across the street from Brandon's house. He then got into the back seat and steadied his silenced rifle for the moment Brandon returned from the gym. He keeps reminding me.

He does. Dan Aykroyd in that movie does seem to be on the edge of an orgasm the entire time.

It's a very strange film.

It is. I need to go back and see and watch it. It's about miniature golf, right?

Once Brandon pulled up, Alex fired a shot, and with a whoomp, Brandon felt a bullet whiz by his head. Immediately recognizing that someone was shooting him, Brandon hit the accelerator and drove off, while Alex fled in the opposite direction. Exiting stage left.

Terrified, Brandon reported the attempted assassination and hid out at his parents' place with his kids, having narrowly escaped the fantasy world created by Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow. Tammy Daybell, however, would not escape Chad and Lori. And from the timeline and Lori's digital trail, we know that Tammy's death was planned far in advance.

See, on the same day that Alex Cox tried to shoot Brandon Boudreau, Lori ordered two extremely tacky wedding rings off Amazon Prime using her ex-husband's account.

Now, Lori would later say that she'd bought these rings for the upcoming wedding between Alex Cox and cult member Zulema Pastenas. But that doesn't explain the collared shirt and linen slacks that she also bought on her dead husband's Amazon account in her dumpy groom-to-be's sizes.

On Amazon Prime, you can.

There was still, however, three people standing in the way of Lori and Chad being together fully. Lori's two children, 16-year-old Tylee and 7-year-old JJ, as well as Chad's wife of over 30 years, Tammy Daybell.

But these clothes, of course, would be the same that Chad would wear during his and Lori's impending nuptials. So the whole excuse of I bought the rings for Alex and Zulema does not hold. Now, three days after Lori ordered the rings, Chad sent her a text saying that he had big news about Tammy.

After getting no reply, Chad sent another text explaining the big news because he obviously couldn't wait to tell Lori. Here's that text.

Basically telling him, time to kill Tammy.

Multiple... She is a... Well, I know you don't know.

Yeah, I did, actually. I struggled quite a bit on this episode with, like, how much of the lore to put in and how much more... You don't need to know anymore. You really don't. You really don't. You know everything you need to know. There is a whole fucking... There is a lower layer to this fucking shit that is, like, it's so deep, and it's so stupid, and it's so confusing.

Well, if you look at it from her perspective, you know, at this point, you know, her husband has been excommunicated from the church. They've been in their entire lives. But they're both like I would imagine life for Tammy right now is highly stressful.

Yeah, but she definitely doesn't know that they've been texting every day for, at this point, a year.

She has no idea that they made forehead sex. Well, four days after Chad sent the text about Tammy being switched, he gave Alex Cox the go-ahead to carry out Tammy's assassination. As Tammy was unloading groceries from her car in front of her and Chad's home, Alex Cox suddenly appeared with a ski mask and a rifle. Coming for you, Mrs. Esther House.

Now, at first, Tammy thought that Alex was holding a paintball gun, but when he fired several shots, it became obvious that it was an actual rifle, albeit silenced. But as it turned out, Alex Cox was a very bad shot, and he missed Tammy just like he missed Brandon. Tammy screamed, Alex ran away, and Tammy called the police soon after.

It's so biblical.

The police, however, decided to seize on Tammy's initial impression that the assailant was using a paintball gun and therefore dismissed the whole thing as a prank.

Yeah. Now, the theory is that Chad Daybell wanted complete control over Lori, and that wasn't going to happen until both of Lori's children from previous marriages were out of the picture. In my opinion, though, Lori wanted the kids gone just as, if not more, than Chad. But that does bring up a few questions. See, if you'll remember, seven-year-old J.J. wasn't even Lori's biological child. J.J.

They've seen guns. They're in a rural community, a fundamentalist Mormon community. They've definitely seen guns.

Well, that is the thing. Yeah, there would be paint. I did think about that. Where's the paint? But it wasn't a gated community. It was a rural community. I know these places well where you get just outside of town and these properties are large. They're like a few acres and each house is pretty far away from each other.

So you can fire a bullet and it's not really going to hit anything or it's not going to hit anything close. And these cops aren't going to go off into the fucking, you know, they're not going to go out into the woods to see if there's any, like, bullet holes. These motherfuckers have nothing else going on. It's Rexburg, Idaho. But that's the thing. If there's woods, there might be nothing.

Like, there might be nothing beyond it, and there might be nothing to see.

It's no violent crime. Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing. It's the most likely explanation. Occam's razor. Every cop is supposed to go off of like, what is the most likely explanation here? And in Rexburg, Idaho, the most likely explanation is some shithead kid with a paintball gun. Not a fucking assassin for a cult. Uh, well, that's where they were wrong.

But we know for a fact that Lori and Chad ordered this hit because later that night, Zulema Pastenas was hanging out with Lori when Alex called. Zulema heard Lori tell Alex over the phone that he was an idiot who can't do anything right by himself. Yeah, she sounded like a fucking cartoon villain.

Zulema, of course, took that to be an admonishment for botching the assassination, but only later because Zulema, poor, poor, stupid, stupid Zulema. The way that I would describe Zulema is that Zulema doesn't, like, I don't think Zulema really knows that there's anything going on at this point. She doesn't think about the murders or anything like that.

It's only after everything kind of comes back that she goes, oh. Oh, that makes sense now.

But in the end, Chad Daybell decided to go a different route in murdering his wife. Instead of an assassination, he and Alex decided to go with a good old-fashioned suffocation in the middle of the night. About ten days after Alex's attempt on Tammy Daybell's life, Chad called 911 and said that his wife had gone to sleep with a bad cough.

Chad had thereafter found her dead with so-called pink foam coming out of her mouth. So he ruled the causes as natural and immediately sent the body to a funeral home because Chad specifically said he did not want an autopsy.

was blood-related to Charles Vallow, so Lori could have easily shuffled responsibility for J.J. over to J.J. 's biological grandmother, Kay Woodcock. She specifically asked for him. In that same vein, Lori could have unloaded Tylee onto any number of people in her immediate family.

That is true. They really can't. If I let pranks and coughs run my life. His whole life would be fucking shattered. It'd fall apart, yeah.

Now, as far as what Chad told Tammy's family, he said that she'd been sick and had been having coughing fits as of late, which her family found hard to believe because she'd been in perfect health when they saw her just two weeks earlier. Chad, however, stonewalled everyone again and again and even made a tacky and oddly detached Facebook post announcing her death. It read, quote,

Her eldest son, Colby, certainly would have taken Tylee in rather than see her die, and even Lori's youngest sister, Summer— seemingly the only sane member of the Cox family, said she would have happily taken care of Tylee until Tylee was old enough for college. And so the question is, why did Lori and Chad have to kill the kids at all?

It's the thank you so much.

He really is a bad writer.

Yeah. He's supposed to be. He's written like novel after novel.

What does that mean? Yeah. He used the word beautiful twice in three sentences.

Oh, and by the way, she was buried in the same cemetery where they used... No, not the pets.

No, it was a cemetery in Utah where they hadn't met, but she'd gotten him a job after they started dating. They worked there together for a long time.

Yeah, same joint.

Not the astronaut's wife, but the gravedigger's receptionist.

But, you know, Lori and Chad, you joke about it being like whoever I show up with four days from now. Two weeks after Tammy died, Chad and Lori flew to Hawaii and paid $600 for a beach wedding complete with a photo shoot. When they got back, Chad even had the nerve to call one of Tammy's sisters to tell her that he'd gotten remarried in Hawaii. This is two weeks after he buried Tammy.

Strangely, though, Chad described Lori as an empty nester whose daughter had died a year previous. Again, Chad's given details. He doesn't have to give. And he's lying for no reason.

Well, Chad and Lori's insistence that they go full steam ahead, it wasn't really working in the real world. Because the disappearances of Tylee and JJ were finally starting to catch up to Lori Vallow.

In late November 2019, JJ's grandmother, Kay Woodcock, finally called police down in Gilbert, Arizona to tell them that JJ had been missing for three months and that his adopted mother, Lori Vallow, wasn't responding to texts or calls. Kay had called Arizona police because she didn't know Lori had moved to Idaho.

But unbeknownst to Kay, those same cops were already investigating Lori for the attempted murder of Brandon Boudreau because Brandon had absolutely recognized the green Jeep that his attempted assassin drove as the same one that belonged to Lori's daughter. Additionally, those same cops in Arizona were also revisiting the death of Lori's fourth husband, Charles Vallow.

Well, personally, I think it comes down to two possibilities. As I said last episode, J.J. and Tylee might have known incriminating details about the murder of Charles Vallow, and Laurie may have ordered Alex to kill them to supposedly protect their holy mission.

So one of the Arizona detectives agreed to drive to Idaho to do a welfare check on JJ. And the only way that visit could have gone worse for Lori and Chad is if JJ's dead body had fallen from the fucking ceiling in the middle of the interview.

So when detectives knocked on the door of Lori's townhouse, it was actually Alex Cox and Chad Daybell who answered, and the last person you wanted talking to the cops were these two knuckleheads. Where Lori was always calm and collected with the police, Alex, and especially Chad, melted under the slightest pressure.

For example, when detectives asked if JJ was home, Alex and Chad just looked at each other and said nothing.

The grandmother, Kay Woodcock. And the detective told Alex that he knew this wasn't true because guess what? Kay Woodcock was the one who called and asked for the welfare check.

This can't be real then. So the detective asked for Lori's phone number. Alex stupidly said he didn't have his sister's phone number.

But if you wanted to talk to Lori, she was in the townhouse next door. So he just immediately was like, I don't know her number, but she's next door. You can talk to her there. She heard her through the wall. Yeah. While one officer went to talk to Lori, Chad panicked and tried fleeing the interview in his Chevy Equinox.

The detectives, of course, stopped him and asked him again about JJ. Chad said the last time he saw JJ was in October, and he didn't have Lori's number either, in case the cop was wondering, because he didn't know her that well.

Yeah, not like a seven-year-old disabled boy.

Well, Chad's claim that he didn't know Lori that well was another easily disproved lie. Because the cops knew that Chad and Lori had just gotten married in Hawaii.

So it's possible she really did think there were zombies. Well, that's the thing. It may be something far more shallow than the spiritual mission. I would concur that it is absolutely far more shallow.

Because how long does it take to really know someone? Sometimes you don't know anybody, you can live with them forever. Finally, though, the cops located Lori herself in one of the townhouses. And she tried using the same charm that had worked on cops her entire life. But the veil was starting to slip. Lori tried the brick wall of rambling tactic. This is one of Lori's go-tos.

She went on and on about JJ's autism, how she was such a good person for raising him, how horrible Kay Woodcock was, and how Lori should have been the person to receive the insurance benefits for her husband's death. In fact, she's going to sue Kay Woodcock. It's just moving from subject to subject to subject, so the cops can't ever focus on what... they're actually there for.

And finally, Lori started talking about how her brother Adam, a.k.a. Bo Nasty, he was trying to kill her for insurance money. She's basically deflecting all the blame away from herself while simultaneously trying to play on the sympathies of the police.

But when the cops didn't buy it and just kept pressing her to just tell him where JJ was, she improvised and said that JJ and Tylee were both at the movies with her friend, podcaster Melanie Gipp. They're all seeing Frozen 2.

Okay, sure.

You just want to blame Josh Gad for anything.

See, like her mother, Lori Vallow was obsessed with appearances, and one couldn't very well be seen as a great spiritual leader of the Mormon people and a mother who abandons her children simultaneously. It's also possible that Lori wanted to prove to Chad and to herself that she could walk the walk.

Yeah. I'm glad you kind of turned the corner on that one. You used to have a lot of animosity.

Because you used to have like a kind of a blanket hatred.

Yeah.

I'm going to go ahead and defend Jorge Garcia right now. I think he's delightful. I'm a massive Lost fan. I met him once at an event in Brooklyn, and he was extraordinarily kind. Jorge Garcia, I mean you no harm. Well, Lori told the cops that she was going to have Melanie call them as soon as they got back from watching Frozen 2.

But just after the cops left, Chad returned to come up with a plan, albeit a very bad one. He called Melanie Gibb and told her that the police would be calling about JJ. But she must not, under any circumstances, pick up. And that's it.

Well, Lori then called Melanie Gibb herself and asked Melanie for a recent photo of, quote, children running around. And Kim later testified that Lori had implied that she wanted Melanie to make it look like the photo was of JJ, but Melanie declined to participate.

Now, the cascade of lies that came from the mouths of Lori, Chad, and Alex was enough justification for search warrants on all the townhouses rented by cult members. But when the cops returned for the search the next day, they found that Lori and Alex were both gone, and all of Lori's clothes were missing. As it turned out, though, Chad, Lori...

So it is possible that Lori killed her kids because being the mother of two missing children is a better look than being a neglectful mother. And killing her kids proved her dedication to her and Chad's fantasy world.

He does like it. We know he likes it. He loves it. He loves it. We know he loves it. As it turned out, Chad, Lori, and Alex were not necessarily on the run. Instead, they moved on to the next phase of solidifying their cult. See, after spending Thanksgiving at Knott's Berry Farm... Classless.

Well, after that little vacation, Chad and Lori joined their most ardent members in Las Vegas for a flurry of cult weddings. Remember last episode I said they made all the people divorce and they made all the people marry? They hadn't made them marry just yet. They just paired them together and said, you're going to marry this person. This is your soulmate.

This is the point where they actually went through with it.

So two days after the cops executed a search warrant on the cult's townhouse enclave, Chad and Lori met Alex Cox, Zulema Pestanis, and Lori's niece, Melanie Boudreau, in Las Vegas.

Now, the first wedding that night was between Alex Cox and Zulema. Alex was following orders from Chad and Lori to marry Zulema because they told him that that's just what was supposed to happen. And Zulema got to marry the cult's protector, which upped her status just the slightest bit.

I just fucking hate that. I just hate him so much.

But then there was the matter of who was going to marry Lori's niece, Melanie Boudreaux. See, after her divorce from Brandon, Melanie Boudreaux had been trolling the Mormon dating sites, and she'd found a poor sap named Ian Pawlowski. Now, as far as I know, Ian and Melanie had never met in person prior to their Vegas wedding.

But Melanie was reasonably cute, and Ian was very much into her Mormon doomsday prepper vibes. Yeah. Wow, I'm looking at it.

Yeah. Of course there is. There's a dating site for everybody. Wow. There's a dating site for people who work in the funeral business. See, that's cool. That's fun. But I'm just saying, there's sites for everyone. Wow. There's sites for balloon fetishes. Oh, really? Yeah. Meet up with somebody else who likes getting horny with balloons. Pop it off.

Well, after the ceremony between Melanie and this new guy, Ian Palowski, who, just keep in mind, this guy just showed up. Yeah, he's fresh. He's brand new. Brand new. He don't know nobody. He doesn't know anything about any of this. He just thinks he found this cute woman on a Mormon single site, and he got lucky. And they have multiple cult members back in Rexburg that could probably pick

Yeah. Well, after the ceremony, Melanie revealed everything to Ian about the cult that he was now unwillingly a part of, from the end times 144,000 prophecy to the light-dark scale, as well as the ever-present threat presented by zombies possessed by demon slugs. But instead of bolting, Ian basically said, fuck yeah, sounds cool.

Yeah. He described Melanie's lowdown of the entire Daybell mythology as fun and exciting, saying that it felt as if they'd ripped their entire worldview from a Dungeons and Dragons manual.

It's a direct quote from Ian.

But after Melanie Boudreau was done with the world building, things turned very dark very quickly when she got into the actual plot. She told Ian that her ex-husband Brandon was possessed by a demon. Okay. And that Alex Cox, the man Ian had just met, was actively trying to murder Brandon as a consequence.

Melanie Boudreau then went even further, telling Ian that Lori Vallow's kids, Tylee and JJ, they'd also become zombies. And Melanie believed that Alex had taken care of them as well. In other words, what started off as a fun LARP for Ian Pawlowski very quickly turned into a terrifying nightmare.

So after hearing the plot, Ian Pawlowski texted his ex-wife, whom I assume he still had a good relationship with, and he asked her to Google Melanie Boudreau because Ian couldn't do it himself in Melanie's presence. It was an excuse to reach out. Yeah. And Ian's ex-wife did so. What? What? Oh, what?

Ian's ex-wife then called the police, marking yet another person who'd contacted the authorities asking for someone to look into the activities of Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow.

Ian Pulaski, however, was terrified as to what would happen to him if he pulled out of the marriage.

So he stayed with it and soon moved to Rexburg along with everyone else. He did continue communicating with his ex-wife, but he hid the texts because he believed if the cult ever found out, he'd be labeled a zombie and killed as well. But Ian was able to stand just six days of marriage to Melanie Boudreaux.

And she spent those six days making him sit down and listen to pap podcasts and avow podcasts.

And he's just sitting there sweating.

God, I never should have agreed to go to that open, Mike. He and his ex-wife, after six days, they contacted the detectives from Arizona who were already investigating Lori for both the attempted murder of Brandon Boudreau and the disappearance of her children. they put Ian in contact with the FBI.

And after Ian spilled everything he knew, he became an informant, pumping Melanie for any information she might have. You got to do the flip. Got to do that number one flip. Chad and Lori, meanwhile, seem to have completely given up on the idea of a new Jerusalem.

Now that their spouses were dead and Lori's kids were out of the way, they used the near half million dollars Chad had received from Tammy's life insurance policy to rent a house in Hawaii in December of 2019. They all but abandoned Rexburg.

And that's great advice for anyone who lives in Rexburg.

Yeah, yeah. Now, this blasé behavior about the impending apocalypse was strange to the faithful followers Chad had left behind. And all the people who'd followed Chad without question were at long last starting to examine everything with a closer lens.

What with the many deaths and disappearances surrounding Chad and Lori, it began to finally dawn on podcaster Melanie Gibb and her pat boyfriend that they very well might become accessories to murder if they weren't careful.

So to cover their asses, Melanie Gibb and her boyfriend began recording every phone call they had with Chad and Lori, hoping that at some point their former spiritual gurus would incriminate themselves.

Yeah, well, she wasn't doing it for the police at this moment. She's just doing it for herself.

No. I feel like that was the second. During a call on December 8th, 2019, Lori insisted over and over again that JJ was fine and safe, but she refused to elaborate. That was her line, over and over again. He's fine and he's safe. I don't need to tell you where he is.

Chad also denied ever saying that Tammy's death was foretold, even though he'd related this prophecy to podcaster Melanie Gibb perhaps half a dozen times, if not more.

Once Chad and Lori began to realize that their podcast buddies were no longer on their side, Lori began claiming that Melanie Gibb had been influenced by dark spirits.

Well, actually, she did have something to counter that. She went nuclear, and she called Chad and Lori the Mormon equivalent of the Antichrist, known as Coreywhore. More like Loriwhore.

Now, once the Antichrist came into the conversation, Lori hung up and never spoke to Melanie Gibb again. Gibb could have therefore easily ended up on the cult's hit list as another zombie. Well, she definitely was. But the noose was tightening around Chad and Lori's collective neck more and more with each passing day.

Well, if we're talking about appearances, that does bring up another question. If Lori killed the kids because it looked better than abandoning them, then why did she keep their deaths a secret? Well, I think that question tells you quite a bit about Lori Vallow. One, I think it speaks to her as a narcissist who engaged in the highest forms of magical thinking.

See, Gibb got proactive, and she took the recording of her last phone call with Chad and Lori to the police. And based off Chad's suspicious comments concerning the subject of his wife and her foretold death... police were able to get a court order to exhume Tammy Daybell's body for a full autopsy, done entirely clandestinely and without Chad's knowledge.

Very quickly, investigators noticed that there were several blunt injuries consistent with being restrained and or suffocated to death. But to this day, we have no idea if it was Chad, Alex Cox, or both of them who directly participated in Tammy's murder. Tammy's body was in, out, and back in the ground in just eight hours.

But by the end of it, investigators had determined that Tammy's death was indeed suspicious, although they did not yet have enough evidence to arrest Chad for her death.

Now when it comes to the murders both successful and attempted, we have evidence that Chad, Lori, and Lori's brother Alex, they were involved in every one of them, but were totally in the dark as far as the hows go.

The reason why we don't know much is because Alex Cox, the assassin who tied it all together and probably carried out each murder with his own hands, he did not survive past December 2019. And it's possible, however unlikely, that Chad and Lori might have had something to do with it.

If it was just natural causes. There is.

Yeah, we don't. Well, that's the thing. It might be natural causes. It might not be natural causes, but we don't have any proof that Chad and Lori specifically were involved in it. Let's get into it. Please.

See, after the marriage to Zulema in Las Vegas, Alex moved back to Gilbert, Arizona, where Zulema still lived because Chad and Lori were already on their way to living their true fantasy life in Hawaii.

She did whatever she wanted in this world and believed that she was so special that if she just kept denying that anything was wrong, things would work out all on their own. But I also think, perhaps even more so, that Lori did believe Chad when he told her that the world was going to end in July of 2020.

Yeah, and they're like, go to, what about me? Yeah, go with your wife. Go where? Gilbert.

Yeah.

But according to Zulema, Alex spent a lot of time after the wedding talking about how Chad and Lori were setting him up to be the fall guy for some mysterious thing Chad and Lori had been doing.

Before Zulema could find out what this mysterious thing was, Alex was found dead on the floor of his and Zulema's bathroom, covered in feces.

With pink foam coming from his mouth.

With this pink foam, quite similar to the pink foam Chad described coming out of his wife Tammy's mouth the night she died.

Yes, they did. And no poison? No poison. None whatsoever. Yeah, we don't know. It's very strange. Well, just a few days before his death, Alex had driven to Mexico to score some illegal prescription drugs. And investigators believe that Alex used these drugs to die by suicide to protect Lori and Chad.

Others, however, believe that Alex may have come to the realization that he'd murdered his brother-in-law, his niece, and his nephew, all so his sister could be free to marry some doughy asshole, and he couldn't live with what he'd done. It should have been me.

But after a thorough autopsy, it was ruled that Alex died from blood clots and high blood pressure, hereditary conditions that had killed other members of the Cox family. So it's hard to say exactly what the circumstances behind Alex's death really were. I mean, it is stressful.

And if she just held on long enough, then the matter of the missing kids was going to be a moot point.

It could have. That's what I mean. Now, by this point, authorities had been asking Lori to produce her kids for months. But in December 2019, they decided that if Lori was going to keep stonewalling them, the only option they had was to go public. So the authorities pulled out all the stops with a full media blitz. Including us. Yeah. Attacking Lori and Chad simultaneously.

With Lori, they hammered the fact that she was totally uncooperative with telling police where her kids were. But Chad's involvement here was the secret sauce that made this whole story even more treacherous and indecent. Ooh. Police finally revealed that they had exhumed Tammy Daybell's body and had ruled her death suspicious. Ooh.

And they believe that the cases of Lori's missing kids and Chad's dead wife may be linked. Chad and Lori, of course, discovered all this through newspaper headlines. They read all about it from their romantic villa in Hawaii. And they were, I'd imagine, simultaneously terrified and excited that their little cult had just become one of the biggest news stories in the world.

You don't think that they'll check the pet cemetery, do you? No. No. There was no pets. Are they looking for pets? Did you leave that? Is that old man who tells people to not go down that road still there? Because if he's still there, then I don't think they're going to go down that road. He's very convincing.

Or that, you know, it's the possibility also that the word is going to get out about their religion, about their, you know, unique view of Mormonism. People are going to see the light.

Now, that's not at all what happened. Almost immediately, the Mormons who'd spent years supporting and believing Chad and Lori, they began to cut ties. The founders of Preparing a People, the Preparing a People podcast network, they issued a statement denying they were a cult. And it's always bad when you have to issue a statement denying you're a cult.

Yeah. And they quickly distanced themselves from Chad and Lori by removing all of their podcast appearances. Now, that's a pap smear. The only person who came to Chad and Lori's side was the founder of the neo-fundamentalist Mormon message board, Avow, who publicly declared that Chad and Lori were innocent.

This guy even allowed Chad and Lori to publish a statement on his website in which they claimed to be victims of bad press who were only trying to protect JJ and Tylee from so-called evil forces.

Yeah, no, no, bad press.

A bad notice can kill a whole show, you know.

Yeah, it was Stillborn. It was more the CGI in that, though.

By January 16th, 2020, the state of Idaho filed a court order demanding that Laurie produce JJ and Tylee within five days. The deadline obviously came and went, and the media attention only increased when Dateline aired a two-hour special called Where Are the Children? Appropriately, they aired it on Valentine's Day. But finally, time ran out for Lori Vallow.

On February 20th, 2020, 02-20-2020, and this was a month after she blew past the court date where she was supposed to produce the kids, Lori was arrested in Hawaii, where she was charged with a whole host of crimes, from desertion of a child to contempt of court. Chad, however, stuck to the script.

While Lori was in jail in Hawaii awaiting extradition to Idaho, Chad talked to her for an hour every day, assuring her this was all a part of the celestial plan and that the world was still definitely coming to an end on July 22, 2020.

Things were really starting to cook for Lori Vallow, but she was extradited to Idaho in March of 2020, which was the same month that COVID-19 brought the entire world to a halt. And now we're going to pause for a four-hour series on COVID-19. Pause.

Lori's march towards justice was therefore put on hold, but it did give investigators more time to turn their attention towards Chad Daybell and the death of Lori's fourth husband, Charles Vallow.

So after combing through all of Chad and Lori's texts, both the ones they sent to each other and the ones they sent to other people, investigators found the absolutely idiotic text that Chad had sent to his wife the day after Tylee's murder, the one about cremating the raccoon and burying it in the pet cemetery.

Now, investigators knew that this text was sent the day after Tylee was seen alive for the last time, during the trip to Yellowstone with her uncle Alex and her mother Lori. From there, investigators looked at Alex Cox's locations using his phone data. And when they put the locations and the stupid, over-explaining text together, they decided they'd better take a look at Chad Daybell's backyard.

W-H-I-N-E.

And so on June 9th, 2020, the FBI and Rexburg police brought cadaver dogs to Chad's home. Chad let them onto his property, then plopped down in his Chevy Equinox. He nervously watched investigators and kept getting in and out of his car while running his fingers through his hair, acting about as guilty as he possibly could.

Before long, the dogs had located the first burial site, that of J.J. Vallow. And just by coincidence, Lori had chosen that moment to call Chad from prison. That's the big coincidence in this story.

I love this call so much because this is the call between the two of them because I love calls when people realize how fucked they are. It's so much fun. We're just going to listen to 15 seconds of it because there's a lot of mumbling and you can't understand what Chad's saying most of the time without subtitles. But here is Chad and Lori realizing that their lives are over.

like okay babe like it's that whole like just oh hey are you okay but that's the weird thing about it is that it is that same like girlfriend it's girlfriend voice yeah it's that it's that same voice that your girlfriend or your wife gives you like when you're in great distress like it's that's the funny thing is you can actually tell she really loves him because like she's like she's genuinely concerned for him and genuinely wants to make him feel better but is she not just concerned with herself

I think partly, but I think she's concerned with herself, but she's also concerned about him.

And that's exactly what he did next.

Yes. Once Chad hung up the phone, he could see that something was happening. That's about the time they discovered JJ's body. So, just like he'd done before, Chad tried running away in his Equinox.

The cops quickly chased him down, and since Chad didn't have the stones for a chase, he surrendered. And finally, after all this time, both Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow were in jail.

Hello, my ragtime gal.

Well, once Chad was arrested and the discovery of both bodies became public, the Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow story grew to even greater proportions. Before long, all the details about Chad and Lori's beliefs about zombies and the end of the world became public as well. And Lori Vallow was finally given the infamous designation of the Doomsday Mom.

Now, the case for murder here was difficult to prove because investigators believed that Alex had been the one who'd actually murdered the kids. But after the now former cult members, Zulema Pastanis, obtained immunity... Gotta do that flip! ...and podcaster Melanie Gibb really started talking, police were able to charge Chad and Lori with the first-degree murder of Lori's kids in May of 2021.

Soon after, Lori Vallow was also charged with conspiracy to commit first degree murder in regards to the death of her fourth husband, Charles Vallow. And both Lori and Chad were charged with the murder of Tammy Daybell. And so by June of 2024, Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow had been found guilty on every single charge.

And while Lori received life without parole, Chad Daybell is currently sitting on death row in Idaho.

Yeah, he might. I really wonder what his last words are going to be.

I'm pooping. Oh, he gets strapped into the, you know, the lethal injection. Because I'd imagine lethal injection is how they're going to kill him. Yeah. I wonder what his last words are going to be.

Yep. Completely by coincidence, Dateline revealed while we were recording these episodes that Lori Vallow had agreed to give them an interview, her first since her podcast appearances, and certainly the only one since she was arrested, charged, and convicted. This interview was released just a week ago. Mm-hmm.

And after watching it, I can say with conviction that prison has not changed Lori Vallow one iota. And she still believes that absolutely everything we've said about their mythology is true. You know, I was convinced.

No. Well, she used the same tactic on Keith Morrison that she used on the cops when they showed up at the townhouse. It's this wall of... It's this brick wall of rambling where she spent... The majority of the hour and a half that they had together, that's all the police would give Keith Morrison, she spent the majority just rambling on about Tylee and not really saying anything in particular.

So when you actually watch the episode, it's maybe... Four and a half minutes of Lori Vallow talking over it. They stretch it over a fucking hour and a half. It sucks. It's maybe, maybe four minutes of her talking.

He does want the chicken shit.

But she did say that she still believes that both she and Chad are going to be exonerated any day now. Again, Jesus loves an ark. Yeah, he does. Well, what she said is that Jesus, she's been to heaven multiple times. She said that in the interview. Jesus showed her when she was in heaven a vision of the future in which Chad and Lori were together.

And they were together outside of the prison walls. So therefore, that means that Chad and Lori will be exonerated one day.

And Laurie also says that her and Tammy are friends. They're sister-wives, basically. And that Tammy visits Laurie in prison, and they have conversations. And she also says that Jesus visits her in prison. And she does just ramble on.

She talks about how, you know, if I ever had a bumper sticker, I always had this joke that if I had this bumper sticker, then I would say, Jesus loves you, but he loves me more. And I just thought that was really cute.

And she has this fucking demeanor about her that's infuriating and insane because she's talking the whole time about how she has been falsely accused, falsely convicted, falsely tried.

Yeah. It's very strange. Yes. But it's her go-to move.

Yes. She's very much the star here.

Yeah. And she is also very delusional. So delusional, in fact, that she half-joked in the interview about the possibility of being a guest on Dancing with the Stars after her release, as if the world is going to be sorry that they ever doubted her, that she'll become a beloved public figure who makes television appearances.

I guess she believes that it's really not that far off. It's really not that far fetched.

Sarah Palin. That was the controversial one on Dancing with the Stars.

Now, this interview... Yeah, right?

Yeah. Now, this interview coincided with the beginning of Laurie's latest trial, the one concerning the murder of Charles Vallow. It's going on right now. Oh, yeah. And Laurie, like her father before her, is representing herself with a face full of, as you said, clownish prison makeup. In other words, it's a fair bet to say that Lori Vallow's delusions will never end.

He looks like what Slimer looked like when he was still alive.

But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's not entirely her fault. Now, yes, Lori is a narcissist of the highest order, and that probably would have been true no matter what religion she was. But when narcissism meets Mormonism, it's like fire meeting gasoline.

Because of Mormonism's built-in improvisational nature, any LDS member with a touch of evil and a big heaping of arrogance, they have a ready-made cult kit that they can pick up and use at any moment. And we've seen this happen dozens upon dozens upon dozens of times.

Yeah.

You can go play in this little area. And what's worse is that it doesn't take a lot of these people to do a lot of damage. The number of ardent followers that Chad Daybell had, it didn't even approach double digits. Yet he and Lori together were able to use Mormon ideology to justify the murder of four people, including two children.

Furthermore, fringe Mormon voices like Pap and Avow, along with all those NDE and End Times authors, they're constantly adding their own bits of lore to the Mormon storyline. And the more stuff there is to build from, the easier it is for people to spin off into their own dark corners where all manner of evil lurks.

I like that. Well, Spider-Ham's been around since the 80s. I used to love Spider-Ham comics. Okay. You don't sound convinced. It's not for him. I mean, it should be, though. Yes, that is true. But that's all to say that religion in this country is becoming more dangerous by the day, more sinister, more violent. And it's not just Mormonism.

There's an edge to Christianity at large that's only gotten sharper over the last few decades. And I'm not exactly sure what the rest of us are supposed to do about it.

What I can say, though, is that while it is your choice to follow whatever religion you want, it's your responsibility as a human being to think for yourself, especially if the people in charge start asking or telling you to do things or believe in things that you know aren't right. For some of you, that day might come very soon.

So in the end, all I ask is for you to think about what the people in charge are saying. Because if a religion or a movement tells you that you and yours are special, that you and yours are good while everyone else is evil, then they really aren't that far off from the narcissism that created Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow.

Yep, we're taking down this $500 billion fucking massive capitalist system.

Now, what we do know is that the plan to kill Tylee and JJ began pretty soon after Lori arrived in Rexburg in July of 2019. And this is about a year before the apocalypse was due to come knocking on everyone's door. See, since J.J. was severely autistic, Charles had bought him a service dog.

Yeah, okay, now it can be done. Now it's gone, and we can move on to other things.

One of the main contenders is specifically not Earthbound.

Yeah, it's very much in the name.

Hey, we know we played many shows in Salt Lake City before. I fucking love playing Salt Lake City.

Yeah, because they go hard. Oh, yeah. People like Exmo's, people who aren't Mormon at all in Salt Lake City, yeah, they push back pretty fucking hard.

He wasn't like that enthused about the Nazis. Also, he was pretty, he was pretty, he definitely may not have been enthused about the ideology, but he was definitely enthused about the workforce they provided.

But soon after Charles' murder, Lori put the dog up for sale, cleaning house, as it were, which was more or less the first step towards her getting rid of all her remaining encumbrances.

That is inspired casting, my friend. Absolutely inspired casting.

What you actually said is like, well, the service dog was more like Charles's thing. It's like not really my thing.

You just want an army of dogs to just make a lot of noise.

It seems like it would be an encumbrance.

Now, while the cops hadn't charged Alex Cox with the murder of Charles Vallow and instead believe the easier, work free explanation of self-defense, the people in Chad and Lori's immediate circle were not so easily swayed. See, for some reason, the murder of Charles Vallow was what finally snapped podcaster Melanie Gibb out of her delusions concerning Chad and Lori's claims of divinity.

Because I don't think Melanie Gibb ever really believed that their text chains wishing for the death of Charles Vallow were actually going to work. Melanie Geb later said that while she started out as a true believer, she did anything Chad and Lori asked her to do after the murder.

Not because she was a follower, but because she had become afraid that if she said no, she would be labeled as a zombie and murdered as well.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's very easy to see why she didn't go to jail, because she turned state's witness.

Now, once Lori moved to Rexburg, she was soon joined by her and Chad's so-called divine hitman, Alex Cox. Unlike Melanie Gibb, Alex had only gotten closer to Chad since he'd shot and killed Charles Vallow, and Chad was playing the same game with Alex that he'd played with Lori.

See, while Laurie had been told that she'd been the wife of important figures in Mormon history in her past lives, Alex was told that he had been a special protector to important figures. And it was Alex's job in this life to protect Laurie from zombies like Charles Vallow.