Lori Hellis

Alex Cox had an auto accident at age 16 and had a traumatic brain injury. And a lot of the family always described him as never having grown beyond that age 16, didn't have a lot of impulse control. I mean, he certainly was their soldier throughout the entire time that Lori knew Chad Daybell.

She then leaves the house. She's in Charles's rental car. She drives away. She has Charles's phone with her.

They're talking and texting. And of course, the medical examiners report that the second shot when Alex shot, he shot Charles, Charles fell down. And then the second shot, he was standing at Charles's feet and fired kind of execution style right into his heart.

I think Tammy Daybell sometimes is the overlooked victim in this case. Now, there is every indication that she bought into Chad's belief system. But she was a devoted mother. She was a devoted librarian at the school. She was very involved in her community, very involved in her church. She was in every way a kind person. motherly presence in the community and a good neighbor.

And she certainly did not deserve what happened to her.

Before she met Chad, she was totally taken by Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. I mean, they're young adult books, but to her, it completely played into her really naive idea of romantic love.

And according to Chad, When a demon takes over a body, it forces that person's soul out into limbo. And the only way to get rid of the demon is to kill the body, is to remove the ability of the demon to have this vessel to live in.

The LDS Church believes that you cannot be exalted to the highest level of heaven if you're not married. And so... He started making sure that everybody was married off, but they all had to be married off to people who shared their beliefs. And so he convinced Zulama Pastenas to marry Lori's brother, Alex, and they were married about two weeks before Alex died.

I understood that Tylee had been sort of Lori's mini-me. Tylee and Lori had a close mother-daughter relationship until Tylee hit her teenage years. And I think it was very difficult for Lori to allow Tylee to become her own person. And Tylee became sort of a outspoken kind of teenager.

And I think that was really hard for Lori to stomach because the little mini me that she had been for so long suddenly was her own person. I think that was very difficult. But, you know, the people who knew Tylee, her friends, her girlfriends, had such a different picture of her. She was such a dynamic person. She loved to sing. She was very outgoing. She was fun.

Suddenly Tylee was possessed by a demon because she was hard to handle as a teenager and she didn't like Chad and she didn't like what her mom was doing. So then suddenly she was taken over by a demon named Hillary.

There's no question that JJ was a challenging kid. I mean, he had some disabilities. But anybody who knew him also said that he was the most loving, joyful kind of a kid. There's no question raising him was a challenge. But everybody who knew Lori said she was really good at it. I think she finally just... The mask cracked.

And when she came to believe that she had this higher mission, then that was justification for her to just say, I'm done with him.

Chad had this sense of wanting to be important. He was grandiose. He was special. And Lori also had some of those needs as well. And so he sort of fed into her needs. Now, there is no question that Lori has religious delusions and that she still, to this day, right now, believes with her whole being those religious delusions.

I don't think there's any one particular thing that you can say, oh, this is the thing that convinces me that they believe fully. But certainly Lori's elocution at her sentencing, it's very clear on her side that she believed. I think some of the most telling evidence that came out at Chad's trial were the prison phone calls that he had with her where he's talking about, oh, I texted Ray today.

Well, that was what they called Alex Cox. And Alex Cox was dead. And so reading between the lines, you realize he's talking to her about he's communicating with Alex Cox in heaven.

So a person can be fully functional and still be absolutely rooted in their delusion. And that's what's going on with Lori. She absolutely believes Chad is a prophet. She is exalted. They have been called to lead the 144,000. She absolutely believes that whatever this is, is a trial that was sent by God, that the end days are coming.

And when the end day is coming, she's going to, you know, like the Apostle Paul says, the walls of the prison are going to fall down and she's going to be released.

Monsters are real. Aliens are here.

Most people, when they think about fundamentalist Mormons, think about the FLDS, the community that's up on the Utah-Arizona border. And they're the group that you see wearing the prairie skirts and the very stylized hairdos and practicing polygamy.

So when people think about the fundamentalist LDS church, that's really what their picture is. But there is another faction. And I always sort of describe it as like Russian nesting dolls, kind of one inside the other. Because there is definitely a core group of fundamentalists who are really embedded in the mainstream church. And those are the Chad Daybells.

And what they're attempting to do is to really undo a lot of the liberalization and modernization of the LDS church over the years.

I mean, it's in their name, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They believe that we are in the latter days, that Jesus Christ is going to come back, that the book of Revelations is going to be fulfilled.

Chad claimed that he was a visionary, that he could see beyond the veil, that he could talk to people in heaven, and that he had this line of communication. And so he was communicating with everyone else the direction he was getting from heaven.

So initially, Chad told Lori that they had been married to one another in the time of Jesus and that they had been friends and followers of Jesus and that Chad had been James the Just.

he convinced her that they had this mission that they needed to fulfill. So throughout the time that they're espousing this information, they're going to people that they know and say, we think you're part of the 144,000.

Well, they were very charismatic, but they looked for people who had certain vulnerabilities. And so when they were reaching out to people, they were looking for people who felt like they were on the fringes, And reaching out to them and saying, you're special. And you're not on the fringes because you're odd. You're on the fringes because you're more enlightened than everybody else around you.

You're special. And that was the way that they manipulated people.

So what would happen is Chad would say, oh, this person has been taken over by one of those evil demons. What he told people was when a demon takes over a body, it forces that person's soul out into limbo.

Very slowly, people moved from the light to the dark as they lost favorability with Chad. But he did this whole thing where he assigned them numbers because it sounded kind of scientific. It was absolutely his own, made up out of thin air. That whole philosophy had absolutely nothing to do with LDS teachings.