The Doomsday Murders: Lori and Chad Daybell

This episode includes discussions of gun violence, dismemberment, child death, and murder.

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It's January 2020, and newlyweds Lori and Chad Daybell lounge by a tranquil pool in swimsuits.

After months of planning, they've traded snowy Idaho for the sunny Hawaiian island of Kauai.

It would almost be the portrait of marital bliss, except for a few details.

One, Chad's first wife, Tammy, died in her sleep two weeks before he married Lori.

Two, Lori's previous husband, Charles, was shot under mysterious circumstances in her home last summer.

Three, her youngest children, 16-year-old Tylee and seven-year-old JJ, have been missing for four months, and authorities say Lori refuses to help them with their search.

Believing the children's lives are in danger, an Idaho judge orders Lori to bring them to the Department of Health and Welfare and prove they're safe.

When she's served with these court documents, poolside, she seems unbothered, and she never shows up with Tylee or JJ.

From that point on, the case explodes.

Tylee and JJ's disappearance hits national news.

The public learns about several mysterious attacks and deaths connected to Lori and Chad, and strange buzzwords start to pop up in the media, like reincarnation, cult, possessions, zombies, all things Lori and Chad Daybell allegedly believe in that led them to be found guilty of an unthinkable crime.

Welcome to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

Every Monday, we bring you the true crime stories that stand out.

I'm Janice Morgan.

You might recognize me as the voice behind the investigative docuseries Broken and the true crime podcast Fear Thy Neighbor.

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Today, we'll be talking to author and retired criminal defense attorney Lori Hellis, who spent years researching the case for her new book, Children of Darkness and Light, Lori Vallo and Chad Daybell, A Story of Murderous Faith.

We're so thrilled she could join us today.

As Lori Daybell heads into her first of two trials in Arizona, it's important to note that she pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Stay with us.

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Olivia loves a challenge.

It's why she lifts heavy weights

and likes complicated recipes.

But for booking her trip to Paris, Olivia chose the easy way with Expedia.

She bundled her flight with a hotel to save more.

Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

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In 2013, Lori is years away from meeting Chad Daybell.

She lives in Arizona with her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, and after nine years together, he seems like the rock Lori's Lori's been looking for.

He's a financial planner, successful enough to support Lori and her two children from previous marriages, including her daughter Tylee.

And because Lori is a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Charles has converted to Mormonism.

From the outside, Lori looks like the perfect wife and mom.

It's the reason Kay Woodcock trusts the Vallows to take good care of her grandson.

You see, Kay is Charles' sister.

She's been doing her best to look after the baby, a child with special needs, but she believes he'll thrive in Laurie and Charles' home.

And for a long time, she's right.

So the Vallos formally adopt him and name him Joshua Jackson, or JJ.

Over the next six years, something changes in Laurie.

It's gradual, almost unnoticeable at first, but she grows more interested in neo-fundamentalist beliefs.

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.

That's Lori Hellis, author of Children of Darkness and Light, a book that tracks Lori and Chad Daybell's relationship, crimes, and belief system.

We're going to refer to Lori Hellis by her last name so things don't get confusing between between the two Lauries.

So when people think about the fundamentalist LDS church, that's really what their picture is.

But there's 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.

About a year before adopting JJ, Lori became engrossed in subjects like near-death experiences and doomsday.

She gets more interested in the, quote, end times, which as Hellis explains, isn't unheard of given Lori's Mormon upbringing.

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.

But Lori tends to take things a step further.

By 2018, she's attending survivalist classes and listening to doomsday podcasts because she wants to be ready for the end times.

physically and spiritually.

Then she meets an author named Chad Daybell.

In October 2018, Lori goes to a doomsday prepper conference where Chad is one of the speakers.

She already knows who he is, she's read his books, and one friend considers Laurie a Chad Daybell super fan.

Like Lori, Chad is a devout member of the mainstream LDS church who harbors not-so-mainstream neo-fundamentalist ideas.

He wove those beliefs throughout his books, some of which he marketed as fiction and others non-fiction.

But all of his writing, he claims, is based on his life and his visions, because he says he can communicate beyond the veil.

The LDS Church preaches the idea of premortal life, that people existed with God before being born here on Earth.

But they say most people can't recall this time before they were born thanks to the veil, a gift bestowed by God that causes them to forget their pre-existence.

Chad tends to take mainstream ideas and put his own spin on them.

In his autobiography, he says that he had near-death experiences that tore through his veil.

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.

At the prepper conference, Chad is hawking his books at a booth when when he locks eyes with Lori, a bubbly, outgoing former cheerleader who adores his work.

Once they get to talking, he thinks he's heard this woman's voice and even seen her face before.

He even feels like they've been in love before.

That night, he can't sleep.

He's too smitten with Lori, and he can't ignore the attraction between them, which he later describes as, quote, the scientific phenomenon known as loin fire.

To Chad, it can only mean one thing.

He tells Lori they knew each other in a previous life.

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.

Biblical scholars describe James as a brother or cousin of Jesus.

Whether it's a vision or a pickup line, it works.

Lori shares Chad's views on a type of reincarnation they call multiple mortal probations, the idea that a soul can make several trips between heaven and earth.

Things move quickly as they text and talk constantly.

The following month, they meet in secret at a temple where Chad uses his authority to perform a sealing ceremony, cementing their relationship for all of eternity, even though they're both legally married to other people.

Lori is still with Charles, and Chad has been married to his wife Tammy for 29 years.

But Chad becomes more than Lori's spiritual partner.

He becomes her prophet.

He tells her she's a literal goddess and announces he's had a new vision of the future.

The end times are coming, he says, soon, and it's up to the two of them to gather 144,000 faithful, chosen followers and lead them to salvation together.

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.

Lori reaches out to friends and family members she thinks are among the chosen and tells them about Chad's visions.

She also claims new powers of her own, telling one of her brothers that she no longer needs food or sleep.

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.

Even as they gather a small group of followers who support their mission, Lori and Chad run into a problem.

According to Chad, an evil spirit has taken over the body of someone in Lori's family.

Her real husband, Charles Vallo.

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By early 2019 lori's marriage to her actual husband charles is strained he has noticed her growing interest in fringe ideas for some time but for the most part they were still happy until lori met chad daybell

on january 31st charles is in houston finishing up a work trip and preparing to head home to arizona at the airport He learns someone has canceled his plane ticket.

He manages to fly back anyway, only to discover his truck isn't in the airport parking lot where he left it.

When he finally makes it home, Lori is nowhere to be found and won't answer her phone.

Despite the rough patch in his marriage, Charles still seems shocked by this turn of events.

But considering the bizarre things his wife has been saying lately, including allegedly threatening to murder him, he decides to call the police.

After all, Tylie and JJ are also gone.

It's nighttime when officers respond at Charles and Lori's house.

Charles tells them he fears for his children's safety because of Lori's religious beliefs.

He says Lori claimed she was a god and that doomsday would arrive on July 21st, 2020.

She also accused him of being somebody called Nick or Ned Schneider and reportedly gave him a warning.

According to paperwork later filed by Charles, Lori said he was, quote, in her way, and he claimed she threatened to murder him if he interfered with her plans.

Charles asks the officers to serve Lori with a court-ordered mental health evaluation.

When she arrives at the police station, she disarms everyone with her characteristic smile and charm.

She agrees to a cursory screening at the local mental health clinic, which determines she's not in need of further holding or assessment.

This puts even more strain on their marriage.

Charles files for divorce and takes JJ to Houston for a while.

They briefly attempt a reconciliation that spring.

Later, a local news outlet obtains emails from Charles' account to his life insurance company.

In them, he accuses Lori of attempting to change the password to his account during this time.

Ultimately, it doesn't work out between the Vallos and they remain estranged, but they don't divorce.

Keep in mind, Lori says this man isn't really Charles anymore, that he's some kind of dark entity who's taken over his body.

Friends later say Laurie was likely told these things by Chad Daybell.

The idea of Satan or evil spirits sent to derail mankind exists within the mainstream LDS church and in other religions.

But as Hellis points out, Chad takes these ideas a step further.

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.

To determine if a person is aligned with God or Satan, Chad had devised his own convoluted rubric.

He categorized people as either light or dark, basically good or bad.

From there, he rated people on a sliding scale from zero to six based on how light or how dark they were.

For example, Lori's parents were threes on the light scale and Lori was a 4.3.

Meanwhile, two of Lori's exes were twos or higher on the dark scale.

Charles started out as a three light, but according to Chad, everyone's ratings could change if something happened, like if they were taken over by a demon or another dark entity.

Very slowly, people moved from the light to the dark as 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.

When Charles was supposedly possessed, he became a dark being, or as some people involved in this story would say, a zombie.

Remember when he told police Lori accused him of being someone named Nick or Ned Schneider?

That's because Chad gives these dark entities names like Ned or Garrett or Hillary.

After Chad claims Charles is possessed, Lori invites a few like-minded friends to an intense prayer circle she hopes will cast the darkness out.

Once finished, Chad tells her it worked, but a new, more powerful entity moves in.

By July 2019, Lori lives in a new house about 30 minutes outside of Phoenix that Charles rents for her and the kids.

He stays in Houston, but makes trips back and forth to visit and care for JJ.

That's what he's doing on July 11th when he arrives at Lori's house to drive JJ to school.

He's also planning an intervention for Lori and is flying in one of her brothers, Adam, as backup.

But at some point, another member of Lori's family finds out and tips her off.

When Charles arrives to pick up JJ, he's met by Lori's other brother, Alex Cox.

He's an aspiring stand-up comedian, and he's always been protective of his little sister.

Now that he's one of Chad and Lori's followers, that's especially true.

Chad even tells Alex it's his personal mission to protect her.

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 Daybow.

It's Alex who dials 911 that morning and reports, quote, I got in a fight with my brother-in-law, and I shot him in self-defense.

The dispatcher instructs Alex to perform CPR until help arrives, but Charles dies.

Alex tells investigators that earlier that morning, Lori and Charles got into a heated argument.

Tylee came into the room holding a bat as if to back up her mom, but Charles snatched it from her hands.

That's when Alex says Charles took a swing, hitting him in the back of his head, as Lori fled with Tyle and JJ.

Alex grabbed his pistol from the room where he was staying, but Charles wouldn't stop advancing on him.

So So Alex shot twice in self-defense, he says.

Then he called 911 just minutes later.

There is a lack of clarity surrounding what happened that morning.

Before we get into it, it's important to note that as of this recording, Lori is still facing charges of conspiracy in Charles' shooting.

She has pled not guilty.

One conflicting report has to do with where Lori was when Charles was shot.

Alex tells police Lori had already left before he shot Charles.

But Lori tells police she was still inside the house.

She just didn't see it happen.

She then leaves the house.

She's in Charles's rental car.

She drives away.

She has Charles's phone with her.

According to evidence released by the Chandler Police Department, 43 minutes passed between the time Alex shot Charles and the time he called 911.

Phone records indicate that Alex's first call wasn't to emergency services, it was to Lori.

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.

The medical examiner determines where Alex was standing when the second shot was fired based on the trajectory of the bullet.

And when paramedics arrive at the scene and begin chest compressions, it's clear from the blood in Charles' lungs that Alex never attempted CPR.

Now Charles is gone, and Lori is sealed to Chad for all eternity.

But as Lori will remind Chad many times, they still can't be together in the mortal realm.

Chad is still married to Tammy.

Lori seems to be waiting in the wings, relocating from Arizona to Rexburg, Idaho, where Chad and Tammy live.

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,

motherly

presence presence in the community and a good neighbor, and she certainly did not deserve what happened to her.

In text messages, Chad laments this separation between he and Lori.

He even likens his ordeal to that of another powerful and misunderstood person,

Harry Potter.

He tells her, quote, every few weeks I get to escape and have amazing adventures with my goddess lover, but then I have to return to my place under the stairs feeling trapped.

Chad isn't the only one getting caught up in fantastical books.

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 in to her really naive idea of romantic love.

And I think Chad was very much the same.

That September, Chad urges Tammy to visit her family in Utah, which may or may not be because he's had another premonition that Tammy will die in a car accident.

But Tammy survives the trip.

The following month, on October 5th, Chad messages Lori to say he's figured out Tammy has been taken over by a level 3 demon he calls Viola.

Because Chad says he can communicate beyond the veil, he adds that he's reached out to the real Tammy, and she's instructed him to get Viola out.

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.

On the morning of October 19th, it's Chad's turn to call 911.

He reports that when he woke up that morning, Tammy had fallen halfway off the bed, and as he tried to pick her up, he realized she'd passed away in her sleep.

He adds she'd been feeling sick the night before.

He requests to forego an autopsy, and Tammy is buried just three days later.

Then, exactly two weeks after that, Chad and Lori exchange wedding rings on a beach in Hawaii.

Rings they had ordered from Amazon while Tammy was still alive.

Lori's brother Alex also gets gets married to a woman named Zulema he'd recently met through Lori and Chad.

But Alex's wedded bliss is short-lived.

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 Zulema Pastenes to marry Lori's brother Alex, and they were married about two weeks before Alex died.

The medical examiner later rules that Alex died of natural causes, a blood clot in his lungs.

But before that official ruling is released, some people are suspicious about the timing of Alex's death.

For one thing, it occurs the day after an order comes down to exhume Tammy's body so an autopsy can be performed.

Zulema asks Alex if he was involved in Tammy's death, and he assures her her no, but he also says he thinks he's becoming Lori and Chad's fall guy.

She presses for more information, but Alex doesn't answer.

Then, investigators come to realize that both JJ and his older sister Tyle are missing, and they have been missing for a while.

Tylee was last seen on September 8th on a family trip to Yellowstone, and JJ hasn't been seen since September 22nd when Lori's friend Melanie saw him at his house.

As the search for Tylee and JJ wears on for several months, Melanie tells investigators something that's been troubling her.

Something that happened the day before JJ disappeared.

Lori told her the little boy was no longer her son.

Like Tammy and Charles before her, JJ had been possessed by a dark entity.

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By now, authorities know Tylee and JJ were last seen alive in September.

At the beginning of this episode, we talked about Lori's unnervingly cool attitude during the time her children are missing.

As police investigate, there's also growing concern over Lori's attitude in the weeks leading up to their disappearances.

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.

It's not uncommon for people to change as we leave childhood behind.

But Lori Daybell believes there's a supernatural explanation for Tylee's behavior.

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.

Tylie disappears shortly after that family trip to Yellowstone National Park we mentioned.

Photos show her smiling, holding her brother in her arms.

Investigators believe she returned to Rexburg with her family on the evening of September 8th.

and that she was dead by the following day.

Detectives are able to use cell phone data to track Lori, Chad, and Alex's movements over the next few weeks.

On the night of the 8th after their trip, Alex returns to Lori's twice.

Once, he makes a quick trip to a gas station and stays at Lori's until 11.44 p.m.

He then drives home and comes back to her place in the early hours of September 9th.

He's there from 2.42 to 3.37 a.m.

Later that morning, Alex goes to the Daybell property after Tammy leaves for work, and and he's there for a little over two hours.

That same day, Chad texts Tammy to tell her he burned some debris in their fire pit and buried a raccoon in their yard.

JJ, who's still alive, remains with Lori.

There's no question that JJ was a challenging kid.

I mean, he had...

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.

Alex returns to Chad's property on the morning of September 23rd, the day after JJ was last seen alive.

This time, he doesn't stay very long, but Chad is there too.

Detectives later use cell phone data to confirm that much.

About five months later, police arrest Lori in Hawaii on February 20th, 2020.

They extradite her to Idaho and charge her on multiple counts, including abandonment.

But they still don't know where her children are.

Chad also leaves Hawaii, moving back into the home he once shared with Tammy.

He's still there on June 9th when authorities show up at his door with a search warrant.

In one area of his property, in the shade of what will become known as JJ's Tree, they uncover the boy's body wrapped in a garbage bag.

In another part of the yard, they locate Tyle's burned and dismembered remains.

Her DNA is found on tools still hanging in a shed.

Chad makes an attempt to flee in his vehicle, but he doesn't get far before he's stopped and taken into custody.

In Idaho, Lori and Chad face multiple murder charges in connection to Tylee, JJ, and Tammy's deaths.

Tammy's autopsy revealed that she hadn't died of natural causes.

She was asphyxiated.

Lori's case moves ahead first, but before opening arguments are made, she spends 10 months in a state psychiatric hospital to ensure she's competent to stand trial.

Later, her diagnosis will be revealed to the public.

An unspecific personality disorder with histrionic and narcissistic features, coupled with hyper-religiosity.

In May 2023, Lori is convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder Tylee and JJ, as well as conspiracy to murder Tammy.

Lori's attorney gets the death penalty taken off the table, and she's sentenced to life imprisonment.

The same isn't true for Chad.

When he's found guilty on three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of conspiracy to murder, he's sentenced to death.

As of the recording of this episode, Lori faces more charges in Arizona across two cases.

She has pleaded not guilty in both.

First, as we mentioned, she's accused of conspiring in the death of her fourth husband, Charles Vallow.

And second, the attempted shooting of a man named Brandon Boudreaux.

Back in October 2019, an assailant in a green jeep opened fire on Brandon outside his home.

He missed and sped away, but not before Brandon registered who the person was.

He says it was Alex Cox driving Tylee's Jeep.

Brandon is the ex-husband of Lori and Alex's niece, who's counted among Chad's followers.

One of the lingering questions in this story is, did Lori and Chad really believe believe everything they told their followers?

Did they kill Tammy, Tylee, and JJ because they thought their victims were possessed and standing in the way of a divine mission?

Or was their motive something simpler?

One theory is that they just wanted to be together, unburdened by children.

We also know that they benefited monetarily.

Lori collected JJ's social security checks after his death, and Chad received $430,000 from Tammy's life insurance policy.

We asked Lori Hellis, who spent years researching this case, what she thinks.

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.

Before Lori was sentenced to life imprisonment, she told the court she'd spoken with Tylee and JJ since their deaths, that she too has an ability to communicate beyond the veil, and she insisted her children are happy.

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 allocution 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 he,

reading between the lines, you realize he's talking to her about he's communicating with Alex Cox in heaven.

Investigators and prosecutors seem to agree.

Money wasn't the only motive.

Hellis says, those who think Lori doesn't really buy these fringe beliefs see a woman who is able to carry on with her day-to-day life.

But this trait isn't totally unheard of for someone with a delusional disorder.

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 days are coming, she's going to, you know, like the Apostle Paul, the walls of the prison are going to fall down and she's going to be released.

By the time this episode releases, Lori's trial in the Charles Vallow case may be underway.

She's been given the okay to represent herself.

The Brandon Boudreaux case will be tried later, and we'll be watching both to see what happens.

Thanks for tuning in to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

We'd like to thank author Lori Hellis for her time and expertise on this case.

Please be sure to check out her book, book, Children of Darkness and Light, at the link in the show description.

Her work and interview were extremely helpful to our research.

She also has a YouTube channel called Children of Darkness and Light.

Stay safe out there.

This episode was written and produced by Mickey Taylor, edited by Connor Sampson, fact-checked by Lori Siegel, sound design by Alex Button, and video editing by Spencer Howard.

I'm your host, Janice Morgan.