Hidden True Crime - Beyond The Veil: Chad Daybell's Prophetic Yearnings

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

A forensic psychologist and journalist begin to explore the inner workings of Chad Daybell's mind, and the hidden motivations driving a series of inexplicable murders. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Our Sponsors:* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Armoire and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.armoire.style* Check out Effecty and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.effecty.com* Check out Happy Mammoth and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://happymammoth.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/hidden-a-true-crime-podcast1836/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and to try to figure out some of the reasons why criminals do what they do. by way of introduction, I'm a clinical and forensic psychologist. I've been doing this for over 20 years. My expertise is in assessing high-risk felons for recidivism risks for violence and sex offenses. And I am Lauren. I met John five years ago. We were set up and living hundreds of miles away from each other. I was a journalist in Boise, Idaho at the time, and I was covering crime every day. John and I would talk on the phone at night, and I would tell them about these crazy cases that I was reporting on. One in particular had really affected me. It was a recent case of Adam Dees.

He was a 22-year-old man who was raised by good Christian parents and a good family and had gone one night, picked a house randomly on Google Maps, and went and robbed the home and killed the entire family. And it really affected me, and I lived alone at the time, and I was scared. and so John and I would stay up and just talk about it. And we've essentially been talking about crime ever since. Every night we talk about crime, whether we like it or not. One thing Lauren didn't mention about that case is the fact that Adam D's had no criminal record. And that's not atypical, but, you know, when you see a crime with such violence,

it is a little atypical that someone has no record whatsoever, no adolescent, record at all, no minor infractions, no expulsions from school, just nothing that would have led to predicting the outcome of that case. And so I think we were both kind of fascinated by that. And after a couple years, we talked about starting a podcast because all we did was talk about this stuff at night, much less so now that we have a three-year-old. But we talk about it in code now. We talk about it in code. Yeah. And so I think we're both really passionate about criminal behavior and why it happens and how it happens. We want to be able to understand why people do what they do.

We really envision this podcast as an informal dinner conversation. So we'd love for you guys to pull up a chair and join us every week as we talk about some of the most remarkable crimes you can imagine. It is true. We really do talk about crime every night at our dinner table. And we really do see this as being part of a community of people interested in crime, in the criminal mind, and why people do what they do. and perhaps at a higher level, as I'll tell Lauren, crime is really a metaphor for the human

condition. It's a metaphor for understanding people in general and understanding all of us and why we do what we do. So I think ultimately, ultimately the goal of this podcast would be to help us understand ourselves and to help us understand our world. And I hope with some of my experience and background and with Lauren's curiosity and journalistic skills that we can present something unique here and that's our goal. Someone once asked me, do you just sit up a night and ask your husband, why this, why that, why this? And I thought to myself, yes, pretty much. So yes, I will be, I will be asking many questions. So we were going to start with Adam D's case. And I think the thing that was interesting about that case to me is not only the lack of a criminal record, but the fact, it felt

very random. It seemed as if Adam D's literally, through a dart at a map, went in with the intention of robbing the home and ended up killing three people. And so I think that's what we're all afraid of. You know, Lauren and I live in an area without a gate. Okay, don't give it away. With a very large alarm system. I think we're all afraid of being that house with the dart thrown at it randomly on a map or on a Google map. And so I think that really captured our imagination until December when a case came in the news or a story hit the news about two missing children. And, someone who seemingly thought he was a prophet and his soon-to-be wife, or his wife, I guess, at the time, this was December.

We're talking about Lori Valo and Chad DeBow. Chad and Lori definitely took us away from our interest in MDs and put us in another arena. And I think at that point, we intent or the seriousness of our intent to start the podcast, accelerated a lot. Chad and Lori stole our attention in December when Lori's two children were discovered missing. Chad was a Mormon or LDS, a father of five, living in a small conservative town. He was religious. He was so religious that he had written over 20 books about his faith and sold them at a

Mormon-themed bookstore called Desiret Book. Lori had seemed to be a doting Mormon mother, but she didn't seem to care that our kids, 7-year-old JJ and 16-year-old Tiley, were missing. The kids were last seen in September, and to make the plot even more sinister, Lori's husband of 15 years, Charles Vallow, was killed just months before the children vanished, and Chad's wife of 30 years, Tammy, died suddenly at the age of 49. Lori and Chad quickly got married less than two weeks after Tammy died and had told people they were empty nesters.

Now, there are a lot of twists and turns to this case. Anyone following the case knows this, and we assume most people listening to this first episode are aware of more than this quick rundown. But for those who aren't aware, it's important to know that after months of searching, the bodies of Tiley and JJ were discovered, buried on Chad Daybell's property, just yards from his home. Lori and Chad are now in prison and the world is trying to make sense of what has happened, including us. Speaking for Lorna myself, I think we hoped against hope that maybe the kids were holed up in some

bunker in the middle of northern Idaho or Montana or something and some doomsday prepper bunker and maybe they were alive. I think the facts didn't necessarily suggest that, but that was our hope. And so I think like many people, we felt a lot of sadness when, you know, in some ways, like many of you, I think we felt like we knew these kids. As parents with a son, we could certainly relate to those kids and what everyone was going through that was hoping against hope that the children was still alive. One reason we've decided to start this now is because we want to be able to honor the victims to help people understand this case a little bit more and why. I don't want to say why this happened because it should never happen. Right. To understand why human beings do this. So part of

our goal here is to help honor the memory of these victims. And I feel, you know, just as an aside, I feel like this case is a particularly heinous crime because children are involved. Many of the cases I deal with, especially sex offenses, they involve children. And those are heinous too. Very rarely are the children murdered. I think I, you know, my job is difficult because, because I think there's a lot of mourning. There's a lot of grief. Although my job is primarily to assess the risks of perpetrators, the other side of that equation is I have to deal with a lot of pain

and a lot of suffering on the victim's side. This case is no exception. I think every time I go into a prison and sit in front of a perpetrator, I think there's some sense of grief for me as well. And I think that even though I never worked on this case in a formal professional role, I think there was a lot of grief here, too, to learn the final outcome.

And so if I can contribute in some way to understanding this or helping people understand it, to help people even grieve this situation a little bit, then I think we will have accomplished our goal with this podcast. I want to start by reading a comment that I saw in social media by a woman named Tia. She was asking about this case in particular, and she said, how do people turn into this? How do you go from appearing as good people to monsters? I'm so sorry for all of this and for the family. I think that's exactly why we're doing this podcast,

is to try to answer that question. I can tell you from having done, you know, over 500 assessments of high-risk felons that the reasons are rarely straightforward, that human beings are complex, that a lot of our motivations are hidden, that a lot of them aren't obvious. And that's the name of our podcast is hidden.

We're trying to uncover some of those hidden elements that play a role in criminal behavior. And answering that question, I think we'll start today. Chad Daybell. I'm going to start with Chad Daybell. Three reasons why I think Chad Dayball was moving in this direction. Today I'm only going to have time to cover one of those reasons,

and we'll get to that in a minute. Over the next several podcasts, I'll discuss the other two. Just to give you a sneak peek as to the three reasons. The first reason is that Chad perceives himself to be more than human. The second reason has to do with disconnection, and the third reason has to do with a person. personality variable that I would call openness to experience. I'll only cover the first of those today, but we'll get to the other two over the next several podcast episodes. Before we get to that first

reason, though, can we just talk about what we've talked about before I'm always asking you? Is Chad Daybell simply evil? Can people just be evil? I think that's an interesting question. You know, when you ask a psychologist about evil, it kind of starts encroaching upon theological or religious ground a little bit. So it's a little tricky to answer that. But there is a whole branch of psychology that question, the psychology of evil, and it's more empirically driven. It's based on research. In the psychology of evil, there's a researcher named Roy Baummeister. I believe he's at Florida State now, but I could be wrong. Anyway, he wrote a book called Evil around 1997. He summarized a lot of the research, and he kind of began to define what the psychology of evil looked like. And according to Roy

Baummeister, he said there has to be two aspects of evil to be considered as such. The first is that it requires the infliction of harm. I think we would all agree that there was some infliction of harm here, obviously. The second aspect. This show is supported by Odu. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up, and it gets complicated and confusing. Odu solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odu is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on features you need.

Check out Odu at ODO.com. That's O'DOO.com. The fact is what he calls chaos or sometimes unleashing chaos. And the reason he sees that is important in this question of evil is because chaos suggests that there's a violation of assumptions, that there's, in some ways, whatever our worldview is, most of us think of the world, I hope, as a fairly safe and secure place. It's fairly predictable. But when chaos is unleashed, that shatters our assumptions about what we know.

It shatters our assumptions about children being harmed or children being killed. How can we even begin to make sense of that? So evil in many ways is about chaos. It's about not being able to rely on our assumptions about our predictable assumptions about the world anymore, not being able to see the world the same way. That if everything is unpredictable and uncertain and we can't get through the day without stumbling from one uncertainty to the next, then I think most of us would be pretty disjointed. What's one financial lesson you learned the hard way? I'll go first. It's not too late to start saving.

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Type in how much money you'd put in and see the potential future balance of your account. Sign up now and join the over 13 million all-time customers who have already saved and invested over $22 billion with Acorns. Head to Acorns.com slash hidden true crime or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid non-client endorsement compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorn's Tier 1 compensation provided. Investing involves risk, Acorns Advisors, LLC and SEC registered investment advisor. A few important disclosures at acorns.com slash hidden true crime. Does anyone else find themselves saying, I feel way older than I actually am or I feel way younger? Did you know there might be some truth behind that feeling?

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Right now, our listeners can get 20% off their entire order at true diagnostic.com by using code hidden true crime at checkout. That's true diagnostic. T-R-U-D-A-G-N-O-S-T-I-C.com. Just use code hidden true crime to save 20% off. Plus, if you subscribe, you'll get an additional 20% off. Discover your true age today. Hello, it is Ryan, and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin-slot games on chumbacasino.com. I looked over the person sitting next to me, and you know what they were doing?

They were also playing Chumba Casino. Everybody's loving, having fun with it. Chumba Casino's home to hundreds of casinos. style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere. So sign up now at chumba casino.com to claim your free welcome bonus. That's chumba casino.com and live the chumba life. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. When Lauren and I first started talking about crime and we talked about Adam D's,

one of the reasons that case was so fascinating was because it appeared to be so random. It wasn't predictable which home he was going to pick. It wasn't predictable that he was going to walk into that home and kill people. that seemed to be a last-minute impulsive decision. It wasn't predictable that this particular individual who was 22 years old and had no criminal record would ever do something like that. And again, if we're thinking about those two facets of evil, the infliction of harm and chaos, Adam Dees fits that.

And Chad Daybell, he fits it. Extremely well, because he shatters our assumptions about normality and predictability and certainty. and I think a lot of this question about evil centers upon that issue. Thank you for explaining that. So back to the reasons you mentioned earlier. How did we get here to a place

where two innocent children were murdered? Let's back up and get a really broad view of this situation. I think the place I would start, and this may seem like an odd place to start, but the place I would start to understand Chad and probably Lori, but we're going to start with Chad, would be to back up and say, this is someone who really struggles to accept the fact that he's a human being.

When I was in grad school, I remember I'm someone who's always had a deep love of literature, and I remember I was taking some classes in literature and literary theory, and my advisor at the time said, you know you're not going to get any credit for those classes, and you know that our department's not going to pay for them, And I said, yes, but I understand that very well, but I think we're a little misguided and not believing that literature has some meaning for understanding human beings. And so I took a literary theory class, and I was introduced to a literary theorist named Stanley Cabell, who is also an American philosopher, he chooses at Harvard.

And Stanley Cavell had this idea that human beings essentially can be divided into two groups. there's the group that avoids being human, and I'm oversimplifying this tremendously. Stanley Cavell is a very, very deep philosopher. So forgive me, Stanley, for oversimplified. But this is how a psychologist sees it. So human beings struggle with the issue of avoidance versus acknowledgement, which, interestingly enough, is very similar to Freud's concept of defense mechanisms. So I think when we, and I think Kavel would take.

tell you he was influenced by Freud in psychoanalysis. But the basic idea is that some human beings avoid their mortality. They avoid the fact that they know they're human and they don't want to deal with that fact. They can't cope with the fact. They can't grasp the fact. They can't accept the fact that they're human. And then the other group involves acknowledgement that human beings are humble and compassionate and they understand that they're mortal and they have limitations and they have flaws. And even though Stanley Cavell was a philosopher, I think that distinction is really important here. Because if you look at Chad Daybell, you'll see someone who, he worked in a cemetery, he was around death all the time. He was Mormon, which he was deeply religious, I guess. And he threw himself into that

belief system wholeheartedly. And I think, you know, it looks to me like this is someone who really, really struggled with his mortality. And he really struggled with the fact that he was human. He wasn't special. He was an ordinary, fallible, imperfect human being. And I think that's where a lot of this begins. I think Chad Daibel wants to feel special. I think he wants to feel like he's more than human,

which is to say potentially godlike. He later calls himself a prophet. And you're talking about his autobiography, too. For everyone, for everyone, John has read his autobiography and his writings. So this is where a lot of this is stemming from, too, to understand him. Right, I'm sorry. A lot of this information is coming from his autobiography. That and a few new sources I've been able to obtain. But I think this notion of being human is really an important one. In psychology, the way that gets translated, there's a theory called terror management theory,

which looks at how human beings deal with mortality. So it's kind of the pragmatic translation of Kavell into something that's been researched. And there's a tremendous amount of research on this. I actually mentioned terror management theory in my first blog. I said, if you really want to understand this case at the deepest level, go look up terror management theory. Just in a nutshell, the basic premise there is that humans, we know we're going to die, we don't like the fact that we're going to die. So we try to avoid that fact. And the way we do it is through two avenues. One, self-esteem. We try to bolster our sense of self. And we try to, see ourselves as special and more than human, and that helps assuage our death anxiety. And the second

way we do it is through culture. So the way this research has done with term management theory is they do what's called subliminal priming. And that means essentially they're taking themes of death and presenting it to people at a subconscious level. They don't even know this. But so they're priming them with these mortality issues. And they observe how people react. And so one of the common, One of the consistent findings is not only to people become more entrenched in their self-views, but they also become more immersed in their culture. So somebody who's deeply religious will dive deeper into their religion and they'll defend it more assiduously or they'll be more steadfast about their religious beliefs.

Same thing with ideology. If you're on the far left or the far right and you're primed with death essentially or mortality issues, you're going to dig deeper into that. you're going to dive deeper into your ideology and you're going to cling to it tenaciously and you're not going to want to give it up. So the way we deal with death anxiety is essentially through the ego,

bolstering the ego, or through cultural issues. Why is that important here? Because Chad Daybell was around death all the time, all the time. He was the cemetery sexton. Right, he was a cemetery sexton. And so he buried bodies, he mourned bodies,

he put on funeral services. I think at some level, this really got into a psyche. I mean, I, you know, I'm trying to picture myself in that job. I think it wouldn't take much to imagine that that would be a tough job. And I would probably struggle with similar issues or most of us would I think. The differences, I wouldn't concoct this entire paradigm of whatever. Immortality.

Immortality and dark and light beings. And, I mean, he took this someplace that was really unexpected. And just another observation I would have in that arena is, that as someone, again, as someone who sat in a number of prisons in front of a number of felons, I think I would also argue that a lot of them have the same issue. You know, I've been in front of murderers who will tell me that the reason they did it is to feel powerful. That they, in taking a life, they felt more than human. You know, I think of there's a serial murderer by the name of Israel Keys.

He's absolutely notoriously evil, for lack of a better term, what he did and how he did it. And that's actually a case we want to get to eventually. But Keyes said something similar, and I've heard this from murderers too. In the few interviews that he gave before he committed suicide in prison was that he took a great deal of pleasure in killing. He derived a sense of power, a sense of control, a sense of mastery by killing people, which is an odd way to do that. Most of us do that in much healthier ways, thank goodness. But Keyes was unique in that sense that he took. murder and killing in some ways to be an affirmation of himself, an affirmation of his life,

which is a peculiar twist, but not altogether unknown in literature. I think of Achilles. You know, Achilles in the Trojan War was a killing machine, and he used to thrive on that. I understand that that's fiction, but the basic premise behind Achilles' killing in war was that in some ways killing made him more godlike. It increased his ability or his his desire to be immortal, that he was this fearless soldier, part God, actually, who in some ways became more than human by killing. And I think that's a common theme in murderers. Actually, I would argue that that's, I've seen that with sex offenders too. You might want to pause the tape at this point if you're, if you're a little skittish about talking about sex offenders. So trigger warning. Trigger warning,

yeah, but I've sat in front of a lot of pedophiles, and they've told me, you know, we tend to think that pedophiles are attracted to kids sexually, and that's true. There is some hardwiring in the brain that suggests that they are, but I've heard time and time again from a number of pedophiles that it has nothing to do with sex. It's about taking the innocence away from a child. And so if you take a middle-aged man like Chad Daybell and that person defiles a child, in some ways I would, would argue that what they're trying to do is they're trying to reclaim their youth. They're trying to recapture their innocence. And again, that takes us right back to this theme about being more than human. Many people, many felons, and many human beings in general are just incapable of accepting

their basic mortality in humanness and accepting that. And I think in the case of Chad Dayball, I think that's probably a really good place to start. That actually helped me understand a little bit more. And we talk about Chad Daybell a lot. And I just learned even more about him. But what about Lori? You know, there's a mother involved. There's a mother who willingly went along with this plan or plot or we don't yet know who killed who yet. We know that Chad clearly helped bury them in his backyard. But where does Lori fit in all of this? This wouldn't have happened without the mother allowing this to happen. They got married and they got married after the kids were dead. I think to really understand this case, we really need to start with Chad.

My first blog post that I wrote about the Daybell case, my first sentence was how I felt like Dateline, although fascinating, the first dateline, which was primarily about Lori, missed the boat a little bit by not focusing on Chad more. Lori undoubtedly plays a role, and I think we'll get there. But I think to really understand this case at the deepest level, we have to start with Chad. In that first post, I brought up Sophocles and Oedipus, and I talked. talked about how in the Etyple trilogy, the Oracle is really kind of the underlying being running

the show. That without the Oracle, the Oracle is making predictions and the Oracle is kind of setting the stage for everything that's going on. And I think in some ways, Chad plays that role. Chad's the Oracle. And I'm pretty sure he'd be happy to tell you that too. So, um, probably. I don't, I don't think he'd like to term Oracle.

He'd probably be happier with profit. But, but I think, Chad. You know, and again, I don't want to get, you know, I know there's been a lot of debate on social media about who's responsible for what and is Lori the ringleader? Is Chad the ringleader? And I don't want to get too wrapped up in that because they both have a role without a doubt. But I think from my perspective, I'd like to start with Chad just because I feel like Chad really sets the stage. If you don't have Chad's belief system and you don't have Chad's hierarchy of like. and dark and good and evil and numbers, you know, he was assigning people like a 4.1, 2, 3, 6,5,

like, you know, which I joke with Warren. I'm pretty sure, by the way, that you'd be a 4.569 dark right now. No, no, I think I'm, I think I cross the infamous five level. I think I'm like a 5.568. Pure chaos. Which, by the way, I love the decimal thing because from a psychological standpoint, when you give someone of, let's say that the rating system was a five or a six or just a, just a whole number as opposed to a decimal, it makes it seem more scientific when you assign a decimal. So, you know, psychologically, he knew what he was doing because he was assigning like very specific decimals. But there's an absurdity to it, obviously, right? Clearly, yes.

I mean, is this a scientific system? So, yeah, I might be heading to a six. I don't know. I could be quickly. Salad, six. Back to Chad then. We'll stick with Chad. I will allow you to stick with Chad for just maybe a few more episodes until we get to Lori.

For the listeners, I would urge you guys to start thinking about this case in terms of Chad and his inability to accept the fact that he's human and that he's mortal. He works in a cemetery. He works around death all the time. He's immersed in a belief system that has some very, particular beliefs about the afterlife and the pre-life. And I think all of that plays a role here. I think he took a really deep dive into denying the fact that he's human and figuring out a way that he could create a belief system around that.

And he could avoid any anxiety about death, which oddly enough is probably a good reason not to work in a cemetery. Probably was like the last job he should have ever taken. But that's where I would start. Stanley Cavell on acknowledging our humanness, terror management theory on what we do to deny our mortality and how that gets translated into behaviors that eventually can be harmful or even murderous. So I'm feeling or thinking two things right now. I'm feeling certain that I never want to work in a cemetery. And I'm also contemplating my own humanness, my own mortality. How do we acknowledge our own humanness?

Last week I took our son, Banks, who's almost three years old, out to Snow Canyon for a hike. We hiked up to a sweeping vista that overlooks a great deal of the park. It's an amazing view. And I sat down with my son on one of the red rocks and we were looking out and he turned to me and he said, Daddy, is that where dinosaurs go? And I thought for a moment that he was right, that that's where dinosaurs go. And it took me back to the beauty and grandeur of Snow Canyon. And it took me back to reflect upon the fact that these canyons are 400 million years old.

And that here I was in this moment sitting with the sun I never expected to have. That's been such a huge blessing in my life. And he was holding my hand. He told me he loved me. We were in this amazing, beautiful place looking out together. And I thought, what could be better than this? And I thought this is precisely the type of experience to provide so much meaning to my life. And this is precisely the type of experience that allows for a great deal of majesty and beauty and grandeur and awe.

And as we were walking back to the car, I thought for a moment about Chad Daybell. And I thought, I know that's odd. It's probably not the person I should be thinking about in that moment. But I thought about Chad Debo. And I thought, what would Chad see on that rock looking out? over the amazing canyons, amazing Red Rock canyons and Snow Canyon. And my thought was nothing. I don't think he would be in the moment.

I don't think we'd appreciate the beauty and the grandeur of that moment. I think Chad Debel would be focused on the New Jerusalem. Chad Debel would be focused on his visions. He would be focused on getting in touch with other people beyond the veil. Chad Debel in that moment would be consumed by something otherworldly, by visions and promptings and ideology based upon his special powers to see the future. And so I think that takes me full circle to this issue of wanting to feel as if we're more than human and denying the very things, the amazing, special, beautiful things that are right in front of us every day that we take

for granted. And I think obviously weren't enough for Chad Daybell to feel some sense of meaning and some sense of purpose and to feel special. Chad Daybell had to look elsewhere. He had to look into a future that didn't exist. He had to create that future. He had to create this entire fiction around who he was and how special he was. And other people gathered around that. Other people flocked to that vision. And that made him feel even more special.

And so I think that brings us full circle to this whole idea of first and foremost, I think if we're going to understand Chad Debo, we have to start with the notion that he perceived himself to be more than human or other than human. profit, a prophet, a special person, an extraordinary human being that deserved attention, that sought attention for his visions, that found a way to get other people to coalesce around that vision and obviously with extremely tragic consequences. So as I thought about that and as I returned to the car and we got in the car with my son, my son turned to me and he looked me in the eyes and he said, Daddy, I love you so much. And it was such a sweet moment and I looked him in the eyes and I thought

this is my life. I don't need more than this. This is enough. And I wish I could say the same for Chad Daybell. Maybe this entire tragedy could have been avoided as Chad Babel was able to simply appreciate the moments of his life and the beautiful things that were sitting right in front of them all along. So can we get into those next two reasons now about Chad Daybell?

Do we have time for that? I feel like we've kind of reached the... I think we're finishing dessert and we're ready to push away and that I would like to follow up next week with another podcast about Chad. We'll invite you guys to sit at our dinner table. We'll keep a seat open. I'm kind of wishing this dinner was a little bit longer because he has notes. I'll be honest with more things to say about Chad.

And I'm trying to look over his shoulder here and see what they are. So until next week. If you guys have any thoughts or observations or want to weigh in and anything I've said, which please do disagree with me, That's what I'm used to with my students. I'm happy to engage in conversation over any of these issues. Just let us know what your thoughts are. And until next week, we'll have a chair open. Good night.

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