Doomed to Fail - Ep 1: Russian to the Apocalypse - Catherine the Great & Lori Vallow

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

Welcome to our first episode! Today Farz and Taylor begin our journey into true crime and history's most tumultuous relationships. Taylor will talk about Russia's Catherine the Great and her wet noodle of a husband Peter III; Farz will dig into the horrifying story of Lori Vallow and her string of husbands.Follow us on Instagram & Facebook!  @doomedtofailpodhttps://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpodFor further reading on Catherine the Great:Catherine the Great by Robert k. MassieGreat Catherine by Carrolly Erikson Photos via Public Domain - Lori Vallow Pictures from Refinery29 and ABC news  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Welcome to June Fale, the podcast where we evaluate other people's tragic relationships, so we don't have to evaluate our own. I'm Fars, joined by my co-host, Taylor, and every week. will be bringing you two tales, one historic and one true crime related of relationships that were doomed to fail. Taylor, what is our signature drink today? Well, today I will be talking about Catherine the Great, who was Empress of Russia. Signature drink. No, I know. I'm getting there. And the signature drink, because talking

about Russia, is just vodka. Love it. No mixers. No, no tonic, nothing, just let's do some shots of vodka. That's our signature drink from the alcoholic side. Perfect. And on my side, the signature drink is going to be water because we are going to be covering some teetotolers who strayed pretty far from their belief system. So with that said, let's go ahead and kick things off. Taylor, do you want to start us off? Yes, I will.

And you know what? Hello, Fars. I'm going to focus on historical relationships that were doomed to fail. Kings and queens and emperors and arranged marriage. marriages and a lot of violence in coups and that sort of thing. I might talk about some more modern ones later, but right now we're going to start in the 1700s. And so I mentioned already, I'm talking about Catherine the Great. It's a little bit selfish because I do have a podcast that I've been thinking about doing for like years and have not done about America's first

ladies. And what is cool and what I want to talk about there and talk about here is that we're in the Enlightenment. We are in like the late 1700s. This is the same time that like in America there's Martha Washington. And then also there's Marie Antoinette and also there's Catherine McGrath. So like a lot of really like interesting stuff that's happening like with women and with rulers and with like revolutions around this time. Make sense? Do you know where we are? Yep. Okay. So yeah, in general, I just freaking love it. I think it's really fun that we're all all these people lived at the exact same time. Have you seen Hamilton? I have not, but I've heard the playlist of Hamilton.

Got it. So I feel like this reminds me of, you know, when the women are like, how lucky are we to be alive right now? Like, that's how I feel about this time in history is just like super exciting. I have some sources. So, you know, how lucky you are to be alive right now? This is enlightenment. Super exciting things are happening in the world on the globe.

My sources are I read two books on Catherine the Great in 2021 during pandemic reading time. The first one is called Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massey. It was okay. The last quarter of it is just like a list of people that she slept with. And like, there's more to life than that. You got to know. Yeah. Well, I don't want to just like, your biography isn't going to be like a list of people you slept with.

I hope. I don't think. I hope that's not the case. I mean, like maybe it'd be interesting for like a little bit. But after a while, you'd be like, okay, good for you. Whatever. So that one was okay. But book two that I read was better.

It was called Great Catherine, but Carole Eriksen. So that's the one that I recommend reading for this. So I read those in 2021, and then I did some Wikipedia and chat, GVT stuff to, like, jog my memory. And then also, have you seen the show The Great on Hulu? I have not. Oh, my gosh. So it is a, it says it's a mostly true story because it's not very true. It's like some things are true, people, different timelines or whatever.

But essentially it's Catherine the Great and her husband, Peter the Third. It's super sexy. Everyone is, like, really cool. And in real life, they were not. it is not that sexy or that cool but definitely still watch it because it gives you like the vibe of being in russia and that's where they do the tons of shots of vodka and then they just throw their glass on the ground and go huzzah um did they have indoor did they had indoor plumbing back then no how sexy could it have really been that's that's such a good question because

not that sexy yeah not very yeah no i feel like um people didn't shower that much well definitely not shower we didn't bathe that much a lot of like heavy makeup and like powdered wigs and you're totally right no no running water there's a story that is not in my story but to share and someone was like oh i got a new summer house essentially and all like the royalty went to the summer house and in the middle of the night half of it collapsed into a lake and there were rats everywhere um not great that was just like normal and that was like a nice house yeah not fantastic so no no indoor plumbing and no architect got it yeah no people are they're dirty they're a little sticky they're also cold because you're in russia um and you're really really far from the rest of europe and you're isolated like russia is it always has been feel as isolated um both you know physically and like culturally um before we go to russia we're going to go to prussia do you know what that was I feel like that was the opening scene in The Gladiator movie from forever ago was them being in Prussia, and that is the extent of my knowledge of Prussia. Maybe. I don't remember that, but sure. I'm sure they probably are. It's like where Germany is and like northern area of Germany, because Germany became a country like very recently. Like in the beginning of the 1900s, like it was like a collection of different states and different places. So we're in Germany.

Catherine the Great was born Sophie Frederica August von Anhalt Zerb Stormberg and 1729 That was impressive Thank you, I tried It's a long ass name She was like minor royalty So like not someone who was like

gonna be queen But she was like kind of like hung out In those circles Her mom Joanna Elizabeth of Holstein-Gatorp Had to get her married Had to get her married to someone like soon To be able to like up their family status That was her mom's goal.

In The Great, she's played by Jillian Anderson, and it's very sexy and fun. But in real life, she kind of sucked. She was kind of awful. And so she wants to strengthen pressure's relationship with Russia. And so is going to send her daughter to Russia to marry Peter III, who is, well, he's not Peter the Third yet, but he's going to be, and he's in line to be the emperor of Russia. So that's where she's sending Sophie, our daughter, over there. This also leads to things like, have you ever seen that? I'm going to ask you a lot of questions. You're going to be like, no, what are you talking about?

Have you seen that picture of King George, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Tsar Nicholas together right before World War I? Surprisingly so, yes. Nice. So this is the start of that. So everyone's going to be related. We're going to have a lot of cousins and relationships across Europe before all the World Wars. I'm excited that you've seen the photo. Yeah, I'm actually surprised that you asked me if I saw something and I actually had it. So, kudos to me. Oh, gosh, I love it.

So Peter, the third, will be. Peter the third. They actually met when they were kids. There were second cousins. She didn't like him because he was a wet noodle. So I feel like I might be describing people in terms of their noodle wetness. And he's a wet, he's a wet one. Like the last noodle in the pot that's like stuck on the bottom and you can't get it off the pot where you're trying to clean. Hold on. So the two people that are supposed to get together are cousins. Yeah. I mean, yeah just like queen elizabeth and what's his face that just died they're cousins learning a lot got it um yeah that's i think that's kind of part for the course in royalty is that

there's going to be a lot of cousins getting married so they're second cousins so like you know whatever so joanna says i want to get my daughter to marry um someone who is rich all these bachelors everywhere there's like king louis in france like all this is happening i got to get my girl in front of a guy. So she sends him to Russia. She goes with Russia, with Russia, goes with her daughter to Russia, blah, blah, blah, and they stay there for a little bit. The repress Elizabeth currently running Russia likes her, doesn't like her mom, sends her mom home, and then Sophie lives in Russia than forever. She never sees her mom again. She also never sees her dad again. When she left Prussia, her dad was like, promise me you won't convert

to Russian orthodoxy. And she does like immediately. wanted to get to Russia. Because one of Catherine big things is like, I am Russian. I'm going to learn language. I'm going to talk to the people. And that was a lot of big part of her ruling style later on. So I actually have a fun quote from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica describing Peter and his like wet noodleness. So you can kind of get a better idea of what he was like. And I'll show you a picture of him. You'll be like, oh, okay. I mean, not a picture like a painting, but like they couldn't even make it flattering. But in the encyclopedia it said, nature had made him mean smallpox had made him hideous, his deranged habits made him loathsome. And Peter had all the

sentiments of the worst kind of small German prince of the time. He had a conviction that his friendship entitled him to disregard decency and the feelings of others. He planned brutal practical jokes in which blows had always a share. His most manly taste did not rise above the kind of military interest, which had been defined as a corporal's mania, the passion for uniforms, pipe clay, buttons, the tricks of preyed, and the froth of discipline. He detested the Russians and surrounded himself with Holsteiners. So he wasn't great. He doesn't sound like a picnic to be in a relationship with, at the very least.

And when I say like, when they say Corporals Mania, like he would, he would play with toy soldiers until he was very old. And then once he got more power, he would make his serfs and his servants dress like soldiers, but not Russian soldiers, like Prussian soldiers, and then play toy soldiers with real people. so kind of like a Kevin Spacey from House of Cards yeah and then maybe a Kevin Spacey in real life as well but like yeah oh yeah but like less

manly I don't know if I agree with that but carry on I'll go with your interpretation like if that's possible I just that's I think come like shorter at least I feel like he's shorter I don't know how tall Kevin Spacey is either but shorter anyway Peter barely spoke barely spoke Russian

you know, played his, played with his toy soldier. Sometimes they were real people. So he actually was not born in Russia either. He was born in like another Prussian Holstein area in northern Europe and was brought to Russia because his aunt, Elizabeth, was the empress and needed an heir. So she was considering him to be an heir. He's actually the grandson of Peter the Great, but very far removed from any of that greatness. So let me pause there.

Ask me questions. Yes. I feel like the red flag in this relationship. is like who these people are. It sounds like Peter is the worst match for anybody. And this poor girl was ripped from our homeland and her family to marry a cousin who's also a stranger. It just all sounds bad.

Yeah. No, I feel like any arranged thing I feel like is probably red flag. Any like, especially if it's like for royal purposes, you know, like to enhance. the relationship between Prussia and Russia, it's not to, like, because you like each other or because, like, maybe you'll like each other or, like, whatever. It's, like, all about land. It's all about, like, you know, getting, getting power. It's, you know, doesn't matter if it's your cousin. So, like, it's definitely, you know, a little Game of Thronesy because it's just, like, power and incest and all of that stuff. So I think that, obviously, is the hugest, and then Peter's just,

like, not mature enough to be in a relationship. He's never had to be, and he doesn't understand, like, what it would take emotionally to be in a relationship with someone. But I don't know if that was a thing then. Yeah. Does it sound good. Yeah, we'll probably get to this later. But do we know if they were in love at any point?

They weren't. No. Okay. Of course not. Of course. Sorry. No, definitely not. Like, she gets there.

She's 16 when they get married. And she goes there in 1744. She gets married. Her mom leaves. she starts to just like really fully be like I'm going to be Russian so she learned like I said she learns Russian she becomes you know friends with the Empress Empress likes her she starts to like get involved with the Russian community she's also reading a lot of stuff because she speaks Russian and French and Latin and German and blah blah so she's like corresponding with Voltaire

and like really trying to like bring these Western ideas to Russia because Russia's like way behind everyone else like economically infrastructure wise and part of that is because of the You know, like it's cold as shit. You have to take a sled to get there. You know, that's how far away it is. It's not like easy to get to. So Catherine's now the Grand Duchess, a Katerina Alexevina. But so no longer Sophie, she's Katarina. She's Catherine. And her and Peter get married and she's, you know, reading and doing all this stuff. But she's not having babies. And the question is like, why isn't she having babies? It's been like a couple of years. Like what's going on? And the, the rumor is. is Peter just didn't know how. Like he didn't, no one told him how. To what? To make a baby. Oh, the whole process.

Yes. Interesting, okay. Quite simple process of baby making. He just didn't know. It's not always simple. Like maybe they like slept in the same bed, but they just like never, it was never constinated. They never had, they had, didn't do that.

So eventually he figures it out. Someone tells him. Like it's pretty much like a drunk bros around a thing. being like, so, Peter, your wife is not pregnant, what's going on? And he's like, oh, we're hugging a lot. I don't know. You know, and then someone, like, tells him how babies are made. And he's like, oh, and then he gets a mistress because he's like, that sounds fun, you know. Yeah. Yeah. He sounds like he learned how most of us learned from bros, well, not bros, more so like in, you know, middle school probably. But yeah. Yes, exactly. So he's like mentally there.

He's like mentally in middle school. So Catherine's like, okay, fine. well then I'll also like take a lover and so she you know they both have relationships which is super normal in this time also like a king or queen will have a favorite you know someone who is like they're a person to like you know have sex with and not worry about like you know getting pregnant so much because ideally like your wife would just be constantly having babies because half of them are going to die got to get a boy all that kind of thing right like you've seen you've seen did you watch house of the dragon no but everybody tells me too but I'm going to be a contrarian and wait in until it's done and then watch it the way I did with Breaking Bad. Anyway, spoiler alert, like 75 women die in childbirth. So, like, it's the same idea where, like, everyone's dirty. And if the baby's, like, not coming out perfectly, you're going to die. So they just have various lovers. That's totally normal and totally fine.

But they're trying to, you know, get to power in Russia. And they have a little bit of an idea to do a coup against Elizabeth. And who is, you know, Peter's aunt. She's a current empress. They're in line to be next, but they're trying to overthrow her. Elizabeth finds out and says, listen, you guys got to give me an error and I won't have you killed, essentially. So they do, they do make a baby.

His name is Paul, he's a boy, he does become emperor of Ruchina eventually. He is also a wet noodle, which I think is proof of his, you know, parentage is that he's a white needle just like his dad. It is interesting, but you named him Paul. It's like Paul's the guy you study with at the library. Like you want something more powerful than like an Ivan or, I don't know, maybe that's, Oh, I haven't Ivan in this story. Perfect.

So this timeline is wax. Please, if anyone is a Russian historian, don't come to my house and tell me. But Elizabeth is empress of Russia when we know when they're there. She became empress but overthrowing Emperor Ivan, who was two months old. So Emperor Ivan was just two months old. He was like, you know, a baby and she was like, fuck this. Even though I'm a woman, I'm still going to do it. So she put him in jail.

And he was in jail for 20 years. And then one day there were people who were like trying to help him escape and accidentally killed him. Wow. Lots of bad luck. Yeah. Yeah. He didn't have the stones at two months old with Sandeku. I take it.

Yeah. So Ivan didn't make it. But he was also someone who could have been emperor. But he wasn't. So we have Paul eventually. So now they're hanging out. Peter has a mistress whose rumor to just be awful. Just like, no.

very nice like not pretty people are like why do you have this terrible woman as your as your mistress but he like loved her so that's like peter's great love is is this woman and katherine's great love is a man named gregory orlov and they are he's a general and he's like you're so smart we know better than peter like we have to be prepared to overthrow him when he becomes emperor and they kind they start thinking about that and planning that for a really really long time nobody was they were surrounded by people was this was so clear that something was going to be going awry at some point when she your wife is hooking up with the guy who controls the military yeah you didn't see this coming i take it i think he just like doesn't care because he's doing

like kid stuff you know like playing with like toy soldiers and he's probably just talking to this woman who's his um what is he should be mistress yeah yeah oh totally so he's just like not really I don't think he's all there. Like, he just wants to play. He wants to, he also has a lot of plans to, like, align with Prussia and, like, side with them in, like, different wars and things that were who Russia really wouldn't do that. So, you know, he's just kind of, like, busy doing his own things.

They don't live together. You know, there's, like, a whole, all sorts of things. Like, they're pretty separated. And then, so Elizabeth, who is empress is she dies in 1762 and Peter becomes emperor. He is emperor for about six months. that's as long as he makes it so she you know he's making everybody really mad he but he does pass like 200 new laws so there's actually a little bit that I was reading where like maybe he's not the worst and like new new historians are like being like well he did some progressive things he

definitely wanted to separate like church's date and like you know he couldn't he wasn't like the worst human ever maybe he's like a not soaking wet noodle but I don't know I didn't read a lot about that but he did a bunch of stuff so 200 new laws in his first six months Catherine is just like smarter than him, you know, and people can see that. And she's like doing this thing and people are excited about her. So in July 1762, six months after Elizabeth dies, Peter starts to actually get a little nervous. He's like, oh, I can see you're hanging out with people that maybe could not want me to be emperor. So he finally got in.

So he has them all arrested. So Catherine said it happens like in the middle of the night, in one day, all of a sudden all of people are arrested. And like, she's like, I don't know what, getting letters from horses. I don't know. It's like happening really fast. And she's like, so she runs to where the soldiers are. And she says, listen, everyone, you need to protect me for my husband. He's going crazy.

He arrested my friends. Like, he's the bad guy. I want to be in charge of Russia. I will do a better job than him. And she says the same thing to the clergy and everybody fucking loves it. They're like, this sounds great. It's been rumors. People have been talking about it.

So they all swear allegiance to her. and they do this like weird thing with like boats where like Peter's on a boat and she's on a boat and she's like oh my god just give up he like tries to run away then he finally he like he gives up and she makes him sign over abdication paper so she is now the empress i i love how directly the parallel here is when a relationship breaks up and you have shared mutual friends and it's like are you my friend or are you his friend it's the exact same thing except with like armies and people of the court I guess exactly and like 90% of them chose her you know because they were like you seem like at least you fucking speaker language you know like you if they knew nothing like they knew that so so Catherine says okay thank you for signing this over I'm gonna send you to jail for a little bit and then we'll talk later like that sounds great but guess what happens she kills him yeah they never talk he dies he mysteriously dies in jail like two days later so just like all those people in Russia right? right now who get thrown out of like windows of hotels basically yeah like oh that's crazy just

like ivan who got killed by his people saving him that makes no sense you know you get killed when you're in a russian jail probably i could i could have guessed that i could have presumed that yeah so peter is now gone they never had a chance to talk it out he's just gone and katherine is an empress of russia and she rules russia for three decades she does a bunch of like cool modernizing reforms With some stuff she doesn't do, she just has more kids. She meets, you know, a couple other men who become her favorites. When she gets older, when she's, like, 60s, she has his favorite, like, boyfriend who's, like, in his 20s. And she just, like, loves him.

And they just have, like, such a good time together. And he dies and she's so devastated because he was, like, another person that she really loved or love. He chees on her a bunch. So she, like, you know, gets the kicks him out, but ends up still, like, you know, hooking up by a bunch of people, which, again, it's not most interesting about her, but it happens. So she has more kids. She expanded the empire into Asia, into Europe. She had an alliance with England.

So she was really just kind of talking to everybody. And one of the cool things that she did first was she visited as much of Russia as possible, which is really, really hard. Like literally, she was in like a sled full of furs and like going across like the, what's it called? What's it called there? The Dandria, the Siberian. Yeah. Yeah.

So she's like doing all that. there's a big part of Russia that is Islam. So she's like, you know, cool with them. She's cool with different religions. She's like, you know, really doing that kind of stuff. She expands to paper money. She creates banks. They're, the thing that isn't great that's not great with any of the leaders during

this time is a relation to like slavery and serfdom. So in Russia, they didn't really have the like the transatlantic slave trade. That's really how it's happening at this time. But they did have like, you know, half of Russia was a serf, which is pretty much like you are indentured to, you know, the person who owns your land, who owns their land, who owns their land. And it's a pretty crappy way to live. So, you know, that still happens. And the surfs are very much like, well, she's enlightened and all these things. But why are we still living this really shitty life? Which is like, yeah, why are you? But it's because people still need,

rich people are still like, we're still rich. She became a painter of the arts. Her art collection is now the Hermitage Museum in Moscow, right? Or see painterage or wherever it is. That's where, that's her collection. She invited a lot of people to Russia. She also So inoculated people against smallpox. So she was like pro-vaccination and did it herself. So did they also accuse her of embedding microchips in her or when they got vaccinated or? No. The concept was too foreign.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting is like they were scared. People were scared. And then when they saw people didn't die from it, they did it themselves. So they like used logic to be like, oh, maybe this does work. And then did it and then we're okay rather than being like, I'm going to be mad about us forever and never do anything so the so the people in the 1700s russia who have no running water were essentially more enlightened when it came to vaccines than

modern-day people got it yeah that's fantastic um you know um and then when is the last people that that she was with another like great love of her life was general potemkin and did you ever see this is far the battleship potemkin which is like one of the first movies ever made definitely do not see that it's in it's silent obviously no but it i mean honestly it's like this is what i remember from i took like a film propaganda class in grad school and it's like this it's a story of a battle and the battleship's named potemkin and it's like coming up to port and like i just remember people like falling down the stairs i don't know why there's stairs because also a battleships i don't really understand i should watch it again but there's

were people falling down the stairs and rolling, but one of the first movie was ever made in Russia and the world. And that's what I think of. I think of Potemkin. But then, so they were married. It actually got secretly married. Most people think and they were like pretty happy towards like the end of her,

end of her life. He ended up leaving her to go out and like do, you know, army things to go out to, out into the battle. And then he ended up leaving her for several of his nieces. Like he dated several of his nieces, which is gross. And then he died, you know, in his 50s, like pretty young out in the battlefield. So another kind of gross, incestual thing that was, like, happening then.

I'm going to go out on limb and say those relationships were also doomed to fail. Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. His sister was like, can you stop baiting my daughters? No. So gross. So, you know, whatever.

Catherine liked him and that one didn't work out either. So once she died, you know, she did have a favorite around, but she basically, you know, she was married to Peter. She might have gotten married to Potemkin. She dated Orlov for a long time, dated, like, I went to, like, dinner. But, like, they did the coup. They were together for a long time. and those are the great loves of her life.

And she died on November 16th, 1796. People who didn't like her said that she died having sex with a horse. Okay. But you know, might kill you and it's not true. But she had a stroke like old people do. So after her son, Paul, other wet noodle became emperor and made a bunch of bad decisions that led to the fall of the Russian Empire later. Wow.

So she was kind of the beginning. of all of that tried to do a lot for the enlightenment you know i think she was really successful in her life out in russia but definitely not meant to have like a fairy tale move to a place mary the prince become the queen that part of the fairy tale was not not in the cards for her so what would you what would you say i mean this seems pretty obvious at this point but what would you say are the clear red flags that were going on here i mean i want to say like her I think she made the best of that situation because she could have done like

Marie Antoinette also was in a very similar situation just like buried to someone random who sucked and she did more like hang out in court and you know the reasons that people feel the way they do about Maria Antoinette versus Catherine the Great because she was like I really want to do these things I think that she wouldn't have had an opportunity if her husband had been more of a green flag

you know if she had been if he had been like hey I'm awesome and then she'd been really happy, then she would have had, you know, 10 kids with him. And she would have just been, you know, the, you know, his, you know, there with him while he did all of his stuff. And she would have been, she could have been happy doing that. But he sort of gave her the opportunity to do other things because he ignored her. And he was like playing with his friends and like, you know, doing stuff that like, he didn't, he didn't see her as a threat. And he should have. Yeah. Yeah. He didn't have to do that. It sounds like it worked out for Catherine. And

the fact that she has now gone down his history as Catherine the Great is a huge indicator of that. Yeah, and he came from, he came from like a lineage of Peter the Great and he's just like Matt Peter. Yeah, yeah, wet noodle. Wet noodle. I don't like wet noodles. Okay. Really interesting. Cool. So that, that's the story of Catherine the Great, her wet noodle. Peter the third and the relationship that was never going to be super in love, but ended up making her very successful, which was, you know, always fun to see. And then Far as when he ended up, I handed it over to you for give us something more recent. Give us some true crime relationships that turned bad. I'm like, I'm nervous. Yeah, let's get into true crime territory. You know,

Taylor, I think you and I, as well as a lot of our listeners, would classify as PhDs in true crime. And so the story I'm going to bring up, I'm just going to ask you at the top, have you heard the name Lori Valo before? I have, yes. Ah, okay. So now you know why we're drinking water. I'll get into that a little bit in a moment. So my topic today is sent around Lori Valo, who I just find tremendously fascinating. I should start by saying that her and this person that she was married to that we'll get to, their trials have not begun yet. And so all the facts aren't out, but editorial stance, she did it. They both did it. So that's going to go with that. The facts are it's so abundantly clear that that is what happened. And so the reason I'm really fascinating

with this case in particular is my general fascination with the concept of family annihilators. And so family annihilators are people who, I mean, it's self-explanatory, right? They annihilate their families. And to me, maybe I'm being a wet noodle, but that just seems like very anti-social behavior to kill your entire family. I think, no, no, Fars, I think that, I think that you're on the right path of that. I think that's an Eldente noodle is someone who does not murder their family. So we let's all stick with Eldente. Okay, great.

Because there's some situations where people are murderers and I can completely understand, you know, you, you catch your spouse with someone and you wipe them out. Don't do that, please, but it makes a lot more sense. Family annihilation is incredible and it's ferocity and intensity and everything else. And what also makes this case really interesting is the general makeup of family annihilators. So this stat is from a 2003 study I pulled up. So the numbers are going to be different now, but probably not within a huge statistical margin of bear.

So out of 71 family murders, 59 were perpetrated by men. So about 83%. 95% of the perpetrators were both men and the heads of the household. So think Daddy did it, essentially. In this case, we're going to find out that that's not the situation. So let's go ahead and set the stage. So Lori was born Lori Noreen Cox in June of 1973 in San Bernardino, California. I have nothing against people who have been married a bunch.

Totally fine. I've been married and divorced. People get divorced all the time. It's totally acceptable. Totally. Five times feels like it feels like there's something going on underneath there. Yeah, she's not like, well, I don't know, she's not like a movie start, right? get married like five or six times but like also like to this was it any of the same people like

over and over again I think that's I find that fascinating when people like get divorced get married someone new get divorced again and then remarry the person from before so it's like three marriages with two people but is it five separate guys it's five separate guys and I'm just going to start at top by saying I could tell that Lori Valo was probably an incredibly attractive woman in her youth and a lot of people probably gave her a lot of attention. And so if your husband is a wet noodle, team of the day, then it would be easy to continuously move on from person or person. Okay, well, okay, she's born in 1973.

She's not like 100, but fine. No, no. So let's go in, let's, let's digest these marriages a little bit. So, 1982, married's a guy named Nelson Gaines, 95. In 1982. 1992. Okay, I was like she was nine, so that's bad. That's the red flag.

Yeah, big red flag. 92. 1995, she married someone named William Lagoila. Okay. 2001. So that one actually lasts a decent amount of time. 2001, she married someone named Joseph Anthony Ryan, much to his bad luck. And in 2006, she married someone named Leland Charles Anthony Valo.

We're going to refer to this person by his name Charles. because that's typically what the media calls him, and that's what he goes by in his family. And he's number four. That guy died. Okay. 2019, she has her fifth marriage to a guy that we're going to be discussing here in a little bit. So she bounced along around between marriages quite a bit.

And if I was Charles, I probably would have thought a little bit more about how many marriages had happened within that time frame. So if you're counting, that is. three marriages in nine years, which is, it seems, you know, again, not being approaching anyone. And also it's worth noting going back to the water component of our chat today that Lori is also, she was also raised LDS, but she was a Mormon. So marrying young, having a bunch of kids, it kind of goes with the territory. That kind of makes sense because like, I guess if you think

you're not allowed to like just like date someone, you have to marry them. you know but yeah that's so much paperwork and that's just so expensive and like it's exhausting and to Lori's credit to whatever son I can give her credit um husband number three was physically and sexually abusive reportedly to her and her kids oh that's terrible yeah so there's there's there's a whole host problems did he die yet he didn't but he he got it in a different way that we'll we'll get to an okay good okay cool so At some point, Lori decides that she's going to tell Charles that she's leaving him. And the circumstances under which she tells him, definitely hint to some sort of not to break.

So this is going to be the kind of punctuation point of Lori's just a free spirit to what the hell is going on with Lori. So in January of 2019, again, she's still married to Charles. She told him she didn't want to be with him anymore and that she was the reincarnation of Joseph Smith. for anybody listening who doesn't know, Joseph Smith was the, I'm just going to say, charlatan founder of the Church of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormonism, which we are referring to here is LDS. So I'm going to say that that's a bit, that's bigger to me than the divorce red flag is the, I'm a reincarnated person. If you're Charles, you already got to this, you already got to this point because you ignored the divorce red flag. Oh, my God.

Which is really interesting because if you think about it, I thought reincarnation was a Buddhism or a Hindu belief. And then she's LDS, you know, maybe I was speaking out of the turn here. But it's curious that she's blending and mixing and matching different faiths and belief systems here. Almost like none of them were true. And you can just come on together. It's almost like that, Taylor, just fairly. So Charles didn't love when he was hearing, clearly. He tried to have Lori psychologically evaluated.

And that didn't go well. Yeah. She didn't take to that shock. I can't find any information on what happens during this time. All I know is that she basically disappeared for 58 days. Just gone. Nobody knows where she was. I at least don't the reports on finding. She did have kids. She's left them. Yeah, she left them. Okay. So that's where we are with this. So a month later, Charles files for divorce. In the divorce filing, he claims that Lori threatened to kill him if he tries to stop her preparations for the second coming,

the second coming of Jesus. Five months later, in July, and this is where it just blows my mind. In July, Lori's brother, his name's Alex Cox, he shoots and kills Charles claiming self-defense. Yeah. At that time, these people are psychos. It's absolutely incredible. So at that time, the police accepted that. They were like, yeah, that's what happened.

And they just, like, wash their hands a bit. But like, okay, can I ask some questions? What state, what gun and happy state are we in right now? Arizona. Okay, makes sense. And what did he say, like, what, were they shooting each other? I don't know. Was it like a shootout?

How did he get? Was he like, did he say he was like trying to kick me, so I shot him with my gun? Like, what kind of self-defense is that? So we're going to find out a little bit later that Alex, Kind of a loose cannon. Alex didn't seem like he needed a lot of motivation to assault or kill somebody. Great. I think we should definitely give him guns.

I think that he passes the test for me. Yeah. Give him out of gun. Yeah. This family, Lori's side of the family just sounds like a bunch of psychopaths. It's absolutely incredible. Yeah. The part I was going to get to a little bit later, I'll dive into now, is that he also assaulted Lori's third husband.

The details that are also a little bit murky, but apparently he tasered the shit out of this guy, which like that guy deserved it, right? That guy deserved it. Yeah, yeah. That guy had it coming. So we're not super sad about that. But it's just the fact that this guy's first instinct in any situation is not talk about it and not do, it's just pull out either a taser or a handgun. And like what weird, I mean, speaking of my man, I'm just a speculation, but like, why is he a sister's protector in that weird way? you know like so i didn't write this in the outline but apparently

Alex and Lori were weirdly sexual which with each other in front of people there was one thing i read about um from Alex's ex-wife who said that when Lori and him got together he would pick her up in that like Ryan Gosling Rachel McAdams notebook way you know he's like with a hands on the gas and like simulate like rubbing against each other it was they had a weird relationship. These people are not normal. That's not great. No, I'm ugh. Okay. Yeah, not great. Oh, I'm glad I asked, because

confirmed bread flag. Now you have it in your mind. At this point, we're going to rewind a little bit because we need to introduce another character who, surprise, surprise is husband number five. Four years before all this transpired. In 2015, Lori began reading a book by a guy named Chad Daybill, which was self-published

because, of course, it was self-published, right? The very achievable goal. very attainable yeah yeah the book was called standing in holy places it was a series that he wrote and i'm going to get into i actually did read a bit of this book and i'll tell you my opinion of that in a little yeah not fun um three years later they actually met in person for the first time in an event so she read his book and then met him later yes yes years later yeah apparently she got into this like i'm skipping ahead a little bit the book is very end of time names dooms day. So part of me thinks that like this, her getting into this book, it kind of

innocuous, but like, I think books based on what the cover looks like, she might do the same thing. And she started reading it. And all of a sudden, she's like halfway through the series. And she's like, oh, like now I'm thinking about the end times and all this. I feel like this 2015 interaction of like her getting the books and reading them. It kind of starts that whole process. And this is before she thinks she's Joseph Smith or after. Before. Okay. Yeah, 2015 book series starts 2019 i'm joseph smith and the second coming of jesus is happening and i got a prep for it so yeah the name of the book standing in holy places three years later they met in person at that event apparently like the morals here are relatively laxed so they had a few liaisons after that interaction

lorry would have parties when charles was out of town chad would be there and then everybody would leave and then he just kind of slink around and say there and so they were sure she was basically cheating on. And then, yeah, and then in November 2018, Lori and Chad actually appeared on a podcast so they became friends. Like, they became acquaintances, right? Mm-hmm. I'll get to the podcast. I'll get to the podcast. I think I've heard, I think I've heard snippets of the podcast, and it's, it continues the crazy, but I'm excited to hear more about it. It definitely continues to crazy. It sounds like the podcast producers also named the LDS sect that they will eventually be involved in. It's worth noting this is not mainstream Mormonism.

Shockingly, the Mormon church has distanced themselves from these people and this sect, right? Did the only God tell them to? Yeah. Yes, Joseph Smith told them to. It was ordained before you signed your checkbook over to distance yourself. So the podcast was produced by preparing a people. The name of the podcast itself is Time to Warrior Up. I just hate this dickhead languages people use. It's just so, it's like you're not a warrior. Chad looks like a leather skin swinger from Florida. Like he's not like taking over the world or anything. Right.

But they all had this vision of themselves, just blows my mind. It's interesting because it sounds like the name of the, the producer of the podcast, praying people is also a name of the sect that they belong to. It's hard to actually dig into the details here because I try to go on their website and I try researching the shit out of this.

It's all shuttered. Like there is no, like even the webmaster who created the website posted something on there saying, we're just going to remove this and go about our lives. Like we're not, we're done with this at this point. So that was not true. Not track for all. Yeah, exactly. So going to the podcast, again, I listen to it, and the theme is just general religious, like, generous religion and nature and the awakening to Jesus. It segues in a prepar territory. There's talks to the end time and preparing for the end time. They're just intense, stupid people. You know, it's like the worst combination of everything. It's having, it's like having drive. Your drive isn't to make the best sourdough bread. It's to, it's to,

just destroy the entire world or watch it be destroyed it's awful it's i mean have you read obviously like i love dan carlin uh the history podcaster like love dan carlin more than more than anything and uh i read his book i've read up three years in a row around this time of the end of the year because it kind of like i don't know if like it sums up a lot of stuff and i wish it was written post 2020 because it does talk about pandemics but it's called the end is always near and it's about people have been doing this for fucking ever, being like, you know, oh, God, Jesus is coming or, oh, no, blah, blah, blah, this is going to happen. And then, like, scaring people to giving them their stuff and, like, making sure they're in power.

And it's just, like, such a thing over and over and over again. So that's the interesting thing. I don't think that these people, there was no profit motive here. These people, it's not like they went off and did something great with it. Like, you'll find out what they did with it. It wasn't like there was some grand plan. I also love that I wrote here in this outline that as I was listening to this podcast because there's pictures of them up as they're talking so you can see the face and the voice

match up to each other and they're like kind of this stupid shit. I literally wrote down small dick energy because it is exactly what it is. It's just just the worst of the worst. And the women are like, ooh, right? Yeah, Lori's cheating on her husband with this fucking moron. I hate to look, if your name is Chad, I don't have anything against you, but he was a chat. Let's be honest. So, and speaking of Chad, so he had some really interesting beliefs, obviously.

If I were to summarize him, he's basically, like, he's like a sideshow rouse about a con man. He's a religious zealot. He probably owned a bunch of crystals. We don't know for sure. I'm sure he had some gold chains that he wore with his, like, shirt wide open. Yeah, just not a super appealing person. And on his belief system, he told people, this is where it doesn't totally jive with traditional LBS. beliefs he told me he lived on different planets there's some element of him being like this

celestial being tied into all this religious religious awesome like he had already done that yeah yeah so i think i didn't write it down but i think it was somewhere around 50 or so planets that he lived on oh good for him yeah he's been all of the map apparently he also had this habit which was it just it speaks a little bit to what you said about like this like desire for power he had this he had this habit of categorizing people based on how light or dark they were but not based on like their skin color no no it wasn't racist it was based yeah it was not racist but i mean it was arguably course because it led to like a lot of death and tragedy but he was based off of how

light or dark their energy was and so if you had light energy like you were in if you had dark energy then he just would cast you out would just very very interesting mentality there. He told Lori, go ahead, sorry. No, I also, I'm just, I just, I feel like this is the best planet out of 50. There's just no way. Like, there has to be one better than this. Like one that's like, like, why would you say here if you had an option of like a bunch of other ones? Like, there's got to be one that's better, but continue. Yeah, if the multiverse is true, then the Jetson actually happened. And so he could be a flying car. Yeah, like, why, why now? He also told Lori that she had lived 21 different lives.

just a lot of stupid shit, and apparently all worked on Lori, because clearly you'll see that she's very, very thin with this guy. Mm-hmm. So, it's interesting, we're going to introduce another character in this story. Her name is Tammy. So in the middle of all this, and to literally nobody's surprise, Chad was also married at the time. Oh.

Yeah. Yeah. Chad bounced around a lot less, apparently. They were married for 29 years, so he was taking it seriously up until he didn't. Seven months after Charles is killed by Lori's brother, Alex, Tammy is found dead at her home. At the bottom of a staircase, that's my guess. No, I think she was in the bathroom, actually.

Ugh. Yeah. And this part, again, blows my mind. It just shows how little people care. No autopsy was done because Chad, as her husband, was like, no, I don't want to autopsy. Just throw her body in a trench and we'll call it a day, basically. I mean, obviously, like, Lori was,

cool getting divorced just fucking get divorced yeah don't kill people i don't understand getting divorced a ton maybe you should talk to a therapist but like don't kill don't kill people i do have my suspicions that lordy also had alex kill the husband so like Lori's not yeah absolutely their lives were colliding in a way that was incredibly destructive at this point i do i do also want to i guess also kathen the great did have her husband killed so but That was like, it was a whole other thing, you know. Everybody was killing everyone back then. And she went on to do good things.

So it wasn't, you know, it could have been worse. Yeah, it could have been worse. You could have been married to, uh, to Lori or Chad here. Yeah. Yeah. This part I find, like, almost comical, although I shouldn't be laughing about it because it's tragic. So before she died, Tammy reported that someone tried to shoot at her when she was in her garage. And she thought it was a paintball gun. I don't know, but I think she was delusional.

Like, a paintball gun leaves paint's residue, none of which was, like, someone was trying to kill her. Like, this is right before she's found dead. I think, well, two quick things. One, my dad did get shot by a paintball gun one time walking down the street, and he thought he was shot by a real gun. Because he, he, like, heard the gun go off. It hurt him, and he looked down, and he, like, had, like, a big stain on his shirt, and it was orange. And this first thought was, oh, my God, I bleed orange. Okay, okay.

We'll give Tammy the benefit of the doubt. So I think it was confusing when you're under fire. Also, for Christmas, my husband bought me a knife with my name engraved in it. So I can't use that knife to kill him because it has my name engraved. That's exactly why you did it, too, I'm sure. So, yeah, so obviously there's some parallels happening between Lori and Chad as they start to get close to each other. And this is around the time that we should introduce to children. of Lori into the mix.

So there are three. There's Colby Ryan. This was with husband number two. He's at this point, 27 years old. He's not relevant really to this story except for the initial involvement he had and trying to find

the other two kids. So super cute. I don't know that. I've not seen this dance pictures. He's very cute. Continue. I just wanted to read that up. Listeners, look up Colby Ryan

and you can let us know if you also think what Taylor thinks. Colby was adopted by husband number three. that's why he has the same last name, Ryan, as the guy who was sexually assaulting, abusing, and hurting everyone, basically. Right. That's terrible. The other two are Tiley, Ryan.

She was born to actually born to husband number three in 2002. Mm-hmm. And then JJ, who was born in 2012. Now, this was Charles Ballot's great-grand-nephew, who the couple then adopted as their own. So it was, for whatever reason, they didn't think the family should take care of them. and they adopted him as their own. Okay. On September 8th,

Tyler was last seen at Yellowstone with Lori and Alex. Again, Alex is a psycho. Like, why are they taking this child alone into, like, a national footh? It's just like... He's already killed Charles. Yeah, he's already killed Charles.

Okay. Yeah. Anyways, again, like I wrote down here, Lloyd's brother seems critical to all this stuff. Like, he obviously has incredibly violent tendencies and now they're just going to go camping alone with this child. Yeah. A few weeks later on September 24th, we're still in 2019.

Lori called JJ's school to tell them that he's being withdrawn to be home. We actually don't really know what happened between the 8th and the 24th. There were some discussions about neighbors seeing them packing a car late at night with stuff and like, whatever. Like there's, again, the facts haven't come out yet. So this is all speculative. On November 5th, Chad and Lori get married. And this part, again, just blows my mind how. incredibly stupid these people are. So this is, they get married two weeks after Chad's wife

is found dead. So, red fly, right? Oh my God. Wait a month. Jesus Christ. Yes, yes. Wait four weeks after the death of the wedding. I'm going to say that's the minimum. Yeah. 29 years. It's incredible. So again, this is the part that blows me away. And this is being corroborated. So at the wedding, I guess like people were asking where the kids were, and they told them that Tiley was either dead as of 2017 or that Lori had no children at all. What? What? So this part, I know, because I know, I know this part of the, partially the story, but like, I feel like as I want to be like, as a parent, this is crazy. But that's as a freaking human being, this is fucking crazy. You know, like, I don't get.

nothing special for being a parent. Like, what? That doesn't make any sense. Like, you're, like, you're lying and you're, like, in the weirdest way possible. Like, what's a strange? It's a very strange boy to get out of the fact that you definitely killed these kids. Just, like, say they're with someone else. Oh, they're with my friend, Beth.

I don't know. Like. So they get around to that. They get around to that, but they get around that with the police, not with everybody else. Weird. obviously all these facts just stack on top of each other again it's all circumstantial but you can deduce something out of this um this behavior so and then this is the part where it all kind of spirals into that scenario a few weeks after this marriage jj's grandma k

she called the police a going to make a welfare check on jay jr boy then told the police the kid was away with a family friend named melany gibbs again not to disperch anybody Melanie is also on these podcasts if you start looking them up. And again, like just put the face to the voice and hear what they say and you'll reach your own conclusions about Melanie. These like the doomsday podcasts? Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I think the podcast, we're all taking down.

So anything you find is going to be archived through YouTube. But still, it's worth just listening for a few minutes just to know that there's people like this that exists in the world. I need a little rage boost. Yeah. Yeah. police called Melanie and they were informed that she hadn't seen JJ in months. The FBI and local police went to search the house next day, only to find that it had been abandoned. Melanie later confessed the police and Lori and Chad told her to lie to the police by the whereabouts of JJ.

So basically, Lori and Chad called Melanie. It was like, hey, people apparently are asking questions about these kids because, oh, my husband's dead at the hands of my brother. And now these kids aren't around and people are being really suspicious about it. And so they're asking me like other people are annoying. You know, like, it's very, it's very Casey Anthony at the hot bodd contest. It is very, very Casey Anthony of them. That is a great reference. We're going to throw that back.

So around the summer, the police also become aware. So at this point, they're like, we just are looking for JJ. Because there is nobody else asking about Tiley. Because I guess Tiley's original dad and then later stepfather didn't really care what was going with Tiley, and Lori obviously didn't care. And so this time, the police don't even know that Tadley's been missing. December is when they become aware that, oh, there's another kid involved here. What's going on with that? Yeah. And so at that point, things start unraveling pretty quickly, which it should be because these people are complete idiots. The FBI started looking at Taney's death

more closely. They exhumed the body to conduct an autopsy. We actually don't know what the results of the autopsy are because officials never released that. I'm sure it'll come out during the trial. That's nice that he didn't have her cremated. Oh, what an idiot? Yeah, if I murder someone, I'm going to have them cremated. That doesn't, that there's a good point. Yeah. Well, you got that listeners.

If you kill someone, make sure you preemate them. Yeah, but don't kill anyone. As the investigation starts narrowing in on them, Lori and Chad decided to book it, basically. They released a statement to their lawyers, which was the stupidest statement I've ever read in my life, about their just loving parents and just everything you would expect. of people who are obviously guilty of doing horrific things.

But I don't know where my kids are, but like, come on. Yeah, exactly. Just look at them. Look how happy they are. Look how free they look. Oh, my God. So on February 20th of 2020, Lori gets arrested in, I'm going to confess my favorite vacation destination ever, Kauai, which is an island of Hawaii.

She was initially just charged for desertion and non-support of a child because nobody can find the kids. There's no body. There's no evidence of anything. We just know that there was kids and now there's no kids. There's also several misdemeanors that were tacked on her because she was apparently a huge pain in the ass to deal with for the police because obviously.

Yeah, so she was extradited. And at this point, she was actually living in Idaho. And so she was extradited back to Idaho and held on $1 million of bail. On June 9th, a search warrant is executed on Chad's home and they find human remains. Chad is then charged with murder. And, yeah. And on June 13th, it was confirmed.

that those remains belong to JJ and Kylie. Poor babies. You can also just like... Leave it in the fire station. Yeah, you can be a bad parent and get your kids taken away and they go into foster care, which is like not great,

but better than being dead. Yeah. Yeah. There's also a part of this that when... So apparently Alex and Chad were on the property at some point, and Chad texted Lori that I just buried a raccoon or something.

Like, we don't know what any of this means, but it's, again, it sounds like Alex was involved in all this stuff. And so, yeah, that's where things mostly, um, stopped. There was a lot of legal shuffling that happened. Chartered were dropped. Others were added. Bail went up, bail went down. Lory actually was found at one point to be completely incompetent to stand trial. And then later on, that was reversed. It's very interesting. I mean, initially, I mean, you can tell that she's not well. I mean, she believes in some pretty crazy shit and she killed her kids. So like, yes. And I editorial stance, I do think she was involved in killing the husband as well. So the trial was originally set for January of 20, 20, 23. So it was

about to happen. Then that date was canceled and it's supposed to be moved up to some date that we do not know yet. This is kind of a crazy story. There's so many things going on that we haven't covered. So there's another piece of this. Again, this family is absolutely incredible. Other facts that came out in the middle of all this was that Lori's nephew-in-law was shot at by someone driving Charles Vallow's car after Charles had died. It's just like, yeah. And then Alex, the crazy brother, he died suddenly in 2019. Like after all these deaths presumably happened, it was attributed of natural causes, but there's so much, like, there's so much death surrounding the family. It's just, it's just, it's kind of nuts. You know, I, yeah. So, no justice for that guy,

but he should have, he should have been in jail for a long time because he kills someone. But I guess I don't even know, would he ever been in trouble? Because they already were like, oh, it was self-defense for whatever reason. So I guess. Well, they never tried him. So it would have been like a double jeopardy situation. They could have later on discovered it. They, you know, if they actually gave a shit, they could have looked at phone records and knowing how sworn these people are, Lori was probably texting. Like, Charles is a Yeah, Charles is in the front yard. Nobody's around. Make sure you put it to his temple. You don't mean? Like, I should have figured something out. Good job practicing shooting at Tammy in the

garage. When I was going through and just like researching this family and going all the way in the weeds on this, it occurred to me. And the analogy I came up with was this is basically as if the Luth family from rest of development and the firefly family from House of a Thousand Corpses came together like they're psychopaths they're also bumbling and stupid it's like a weird mix of both right and they just like believe whatever they want to believe i just do we know how the kids died we don't we don't we don't know anything yeah it's makes me so sad because i mean obviously this is like so sad for the kids but like what were they telling the kids you know like imagine like living in a house where your parents are like or whoever your mom is like blah and like the world's gonna end and i'm don't worry because

I'm reincarnated, blah, blah, blah. Like, do you believe them, I guess, because you believe your parents? Like, that's, you know, as a kid, you're like, okay, so, like, were the kids afraid? Like, were they together when they were killed? Do they know? Hopefully they didn't. I just, like, I always, like, go to the worst case of matching them, like, being afraid before they died, you know?

And, like, that's just, oh, that just, like, makes me sick. I can't imagine. Yeah, it's the trust they put in their parents. And then hopefully, hopefully not knowing what the hell is going on before it happens. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, I think, you know, I kind of went into conclusion mode here, again, because the trial has been set. A lot of the details are still, you know, up in the air.

I honestly think that the moment this relationship was doomed to go this direction was when she started getting, when started just even reading Chad's books and then, because if it wasn't Chad, I think it would have been someone else. if it wasn't because she started thinking like a like just the worst version of like an anti-vaxer out there like she just started like putting these pieces together for herself and if it wasn't chat i really do think they would have just done it with someone else they had a i do think i do think so my take on it is that they had some sort of a positive validation feedback loop between each other i didn't say this but chat and tammy they created that company and it'd been around for a while they did the self-publishing they published all kinds of books it

wasn't just theirs okay so Tammy like also was kind of crazy well yeah I mean not I'm saying like she believes like this this like doomsday end of the world stuff that they're talking about and so like Tammy's not like oh my husband's going crazy she's like no we're fine this is what we've always done yeah basically but but my point on that is that for 29 years well I don't know how long the the publishing company was around, but they were married for 29 years. So Chad was apparently together enough to hold a marriage together for 29 years, which I haven't done before. And then on top of that, they started and ran this company where Tammy was like the CFO and he was the CEO and they had like employees and staff, their publishing company. Like, I don't know who was the driving

force, but it feels like when they came together, they fueled each other. Yeah. Yeah. In a really bad way. So, and again, this is, this one's really, really interesting to me. So in March of 2020, after everything happened with Chad and Laurie, they're in jail, this guy named Brandon Bordreau, hopefully I'm saying that right, he had a child custody dispute with his wife, Melanie Poloski. I'm doing great here. Beautiful. Brandon is Lori's nieces, ex-husband. So I think of Lori's sibling, has a niece, and then that is the ex-husband. So in the filing, Melanie told Brandon that she was concerned for the kids because Lori and Chad believe, quote, their children are possessed and had become zombies, end quote. So this isn't a court filing for a custody

battle that had nothing to do with this. This is the part that, you know, this is going to be a incredible, okay? So it goes a little bit further. In the filing, literally, they handed this to a clerk of the court. It defines zombies. It defines zombies, and this is all quotes, human bodies that have had their original spirits forced from them and have been possessed by either a demon, a disembodied spirit, or a worm or a slug, end quote. The worm and slug part I don't really get. No, that makes sense. What you're talking about? Okay. yeah yeah

they said that about other people's children no they said that about their own children I don't know what the relevancy of that is in this child custody battle maybe it has to do with like Brandon's judgment of bringing his kids to chat and Lori's house to hang out after they killed their kids

oh also because at that part I remember from this story is like they would be like, oh, you know, what, I have bad news as far as it's a zombie. And they'd be like, oh, no. And then, like, think that you were a zombie. Yeah. But I didn't realize the particulars of how you got there. It's not, it's not rise from the dead.

It's, there's a worm. I'm a worm now. Or a slug. Well, the spirit is the worm or the slug. I mean, look, we're already like so far past. Like, it's just like, yeah. So I actually try to read another one of the books that Chad produced. called The Great Gathering.

And it's in the same series. It's the same series that Lori got obsessed with. And again, I'm not religious, so I don't actually totally understand this stuff, but it really seems that you have to be essentially a super Mormon to even follow along. It almost reads like the Bible, like, and then Izekiah of Jerusalem with, like, it's just, it's just such drab bullshit. I mean, I just see a lot of, like, carpet in their house. I don't know why, but they probably had a lot of carpet, just like crosses hanging,

everywhere. It just probably had like a really fucked up vibe to it. A live laugh love sign and like, like, last off a hobby barn. No, it's, it was probably more like, kill the zombie sign and like had a dagger through. And like a beautiful font. Yeah. And a beautiful, yeah, it's absolutely wackadoo. And the book itself was obviously very end-timey. It's all about the battle of good versus evil. But here's the thing about that I found interesting was that it wasn't metaphysical. It wasn't like some ethereal like good versus evil concept of like the nature of good versus evil it felt physical physical it felt like this is happening and then you hear the mechanics of what you do to combat it not like

prepare your mind for the ultimate bad no that shit like it was very very literal yeah very literal it just seemed very matter of fact the way they framed it so Tiller what's your take I'm so sad I'm so sad for those poor kids um because they didn't deserve to love these crazy fucking parents. And the thing that is just, the thing that really I think is a red flag for like after all, all said and done is all of that weird like, oh, I never had a daughter.

Or, oh, she has been dead for years. Or like, oh, I don't know. JJ must be somewhere. Like that kind of like callous, casual lying is so crazy. Like it's like, you're crazy. like it's like you're crazy like you can't like that doesn't make any sense that you can like say that out loud and like look at people in the eye and say that like something is very very wrong so that i think is like i feel like good job to people who like called the police and stuff because they're like they're like this is not this is crazy you know i don't know any other word to say it but like that that that amount of lying is so weird so like what else did she do her whole life you know that was like that um yeah look if i don't want to answer a question I just, oh, like, there's the buffet. I got to get, like, more shrimp.

You know what I mean? Find a different way to deflect, but just, like, sitting there with a stone cold face saying, this kid's been dead for three years. It's just, other world. Yeah. Yeah. And then, like, on her wedding day, two weeks after the freaking other wife died, I can't believe people went to that wedding.

That's also crazy of their friends, because I feel like, if, you know, if that happened, I'd be like, I feel like my friend Chad is getting married too soon. I'm going to maybe back out of this one or, like, not be involved in the celebration because his wife was just murdered or died of whatever causes. I'm hot now. I'm going to take my shirt because I'm just angry. I'm just, I'm just sad. Taylor is just taking off her jacket, not her shirt. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, my outer shirt. But I'm hot and bothered because I'm so sad. And just like, it's so frustrating because it's like, for what purpose was all this? Like you're saying, like, if I'm not going to be super rich, then like, what was it for? like why why like you're not prepared for the end of the world because that's not true and also like you don't have you don't have a lot of stuff and like i don't know it was just like like like you said like ego ego loop feed each other with it and like i'm sure he fucking loved that this like cute little blonde woman was like i love your book me i know the as a male i can attest that when

women feed our egos it you can do pretty much anything after that um so again you know me you know that I'm very respectful towards everyone's belief system. But I do think that Mormonism played a pretty big part of this. Because if you understand Mormonism, you have to make multiple leaks of faith to get behind it. And also, I think that it puts you in this infantized state of mind where you're like, to your point, you don't date, you just immediately get married to the first guy because you're horny and you need to like just figure it out. I think, I think Lori in general, because of the way she was raised, had to suspend a lot of disbelief. Yeah, totally.

And then I think that her introduction to Chad was just the catalyst that took over the train when the conductor jumped off. You know, in his mind, Chad was the, what's, it's God's warrior. And I think that to someone like Lori, that is believable because she's believed so much to that point. Right. If you already, if you already believe some stuff, then like, like, remember that abduct, in plain sight movie where like the guy who told the girl there were aliens after them and all this stuff and she's like I already believed in all these like fanciful of religious stories so like why wouldn't I believe that you know exactly exactly that yeah yeah yeah I guess the lesson for me

at the end of all this is that if two people with the same brand of crazy meat maybe slow your role talk to someone if your friends are telling you things listen to them although I never do but as a general advice and guidance to everybody else please do it um so that's it that's our first episode yeah i also want to say don't don't kill don't kill your children at the very bare minimum i go out on the limit say or anyone ever like maybe kill your husband if he's a shitty emperor and you have better ideas like potato potato but like don't kill your children yeah yeah spouses take some you know children not so much case by case basis children no awesome well I think that's it thanks everyone for joining and if you have any red flag tails of

your own that you'd want to tell us please send us an email at high at doom to fail podcast.com thank you thanks Thank you.