Hidden True Crime - Beyond the Veil: Inside Chad Daybell’s Murderous Mind

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

We begin to piece together the disparate elements of Chad Daybell’s life and the underlying motivations for the murderous schemes he devised along with Lori, examining how and why his upbringing, avoidance of his mortality and the quest for significance all led to his eventual crimes. 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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Minimum monthly payments required. Minimum purchase required. See Store for details. Hidden. A forensic psychologist and a journalist explore the hidden motives behind unthinkable crimes while examining our deepest fears along the way. That was the character Charlie Frost from the movie 2012. The same character that Chad Daybell referred to as himself in our last episode.

A doomsday character who in the end is right. And that is the moment we all learn that Charlie Frost is right and yet. Yellowstone is erupting. And this is hidden with Dr. John Matthias. And this is Lauren Matthias. This is Tuesday, the day before Chad Daybell has predicted the world will come to an end tomorrow. This also happens to be our son's third birthday today. So we're trying to enjoy it before, I guess, before our imminent demise.

And I guess you could say there's a bit of a hope that Chad Daybell is not right. Because while we were recording this on a Tuesday, if you're listening to this, it means that day bell, unlike Charlie Frost, was not right. Well, not necessarily, because if you're listening to this to on a Wednesday, I don't know what the deadline is. It might be midnight on Wednesday. So if you're listening to this in the late afternoon or early evening, there's still a good four or five hours left before the world comes to an end. True, true. If you're listening to this on Thursday, glad you're here. If you're listening to this on Thursday, I think a celebration is an

order. On the other hand, as Chad and Lori sit in in their jail cells, I'm wondering what they're thinking about. That quote by Charlie Frost, he's watching Yellowstone erupt. And he says this. This marks the last day of the United States of America and by tomorrow all of mankind. And we will be visible from the Milky Way as a tiny little puff of smoke. And that quote is entirely relevant to our podcast today, which is going to focus on putting the pieces together from our previous episodes. In our first episode, we talked about Chad Daybell's denial of being human.

In the second episode, we talked about the idea of insecure attachment. And in the third episode, we talked about close-mindedness. So I referred to those as the three-legged stool. Today, we're going to start putting specifics together into this puzzle to figure out Chad and how he arrived at the place where murder was considered to be a viable option. So where would you start? I think I would actually back up to the idea of insecure attachment. I want to start there because although this isn't entirely clear,

it does appear that Chad Daybell felt neglected as a child. Now, whether he actually was neglected, we could probably debate. But based on his autobiography, there's certainly hints of the fact that he didn't receive enough attention. So in his mind's eye, I think he felt some sense of neglect. There were five children total in the Daybell family. There could be other siblings close to age. The mother could have been, she could have been busy with too many children. She could have given Chad ample attention and he simply felt neglected.

Right. And so that idea of neglect evolved into what I referred to as insecure attachment a few podcasts ago. Insecure attachment essentially means that the child does not develop a stable, secure attachment to a caregiver, and that creates a number of other problems, as we discussed previously. My evidence for that was the fact that Chad really does not focus on relationships or mention relationships in his autobiography. In fact, much of his childhood appears to be devoid of significant relationships, which is a peculiar thing for a child. We could say perhaps that there's some version of autism, or back in the day, we would call it Asperger's. Perhaps there's some of that. And, which would put us more into the genetic physiological realm.

And that could be part of it. Maybe there's no neglect at all. Either way, it appears that there's some type of insecure attachment. If we look at Chad's autobiography, one of the offshootes of insecure attachment is a poor sense of self or low self-esteem. I know we talked about that in our second podcast. There's other things going on, though. I think a lot of children with insecure attachments often feel a strong sense of shame,

and they feel insecure and they feel vulnerable, and there's a sense of weakness. For many children, of course, children that are trying to gain some sense of mastery over the world, that can have a really detrimental impact upon those kids. I think we see that. I think with Chad Debel,

there probably is a great deal of shame. For Chad, in particular, I think that shame led to, in many ways, a deep sense of insignificance. There's a lot of evidence for this later that we'll talk about. It's not difficult to go from his poor sense of self-esteem to concerns about not mattering enough or not being important enough or not being visible enough in his family or not getting enough attention. All of that I would lump under the category of insignificance.

Which is exactly like that Charlie Frost quote. He said, we will be visible from the Milky Way as a tiny little puff of smoke. Insignificance. So this idea of insignificant. So this idea of insignificant. It plays a major role in a lot of this story about Chad Daybell. And his autobiography, we see it in a lot of places. There's a number of dating rejections. Last week I talked about the woman from Florida. He was dating who told him, you know, man, you really need to get out there and see the world because I ain't never been with someone like you that's so sheltered.

And then he thought he saw the world. He went on a mission and he thought that his mission, because his mission was in Newark, New Jersey in a fairly rough area of town. Chad Daybell believed that he became worldly overnight. But the reality is, Chad Daybell did not become worldly or see the world. He entered a mission in Newark, New Jersey, and saw the world through his eyes. He made no attempt to let the world influence him. His job was to influence the world with the world that he brought with him from Springville,

Utah, or Rexburg, or wherever he lived at the time. It wasn't that he became more world. It's that the world became more like him. He always filtered the world through what he thought the world was. In his autobiography, we see some of his dating rejections. He essentially marries Tammy because she's the first female that expresses interest in him. He has few friends in childhood. He tends to be socially isolated, which I think is a form of pure rejection.

Although he doesn't get into that for obvious reasons, this autobiography has the feel of someone who does not necessarily fit in with his peers and that is not a part of the in-group. He's not playing sports or involved in a lot of activities with his peers. There's some other interesting things in his childhood that stand out. One is that in the fourth grade, he writes a murder mystery novel that gets him some acclaim. You know, for me, a fourth grader writing a murder mystery is a strange thing. I mean, how did he, how did Chad Dayball arrive at the place where he even considered writing about murder in the fourth grade. And it was his first book. He talks proudly of it, that this was his first book. I don't have the title right in front of me, but it was the murder of somebody and his assistant,

two people murdered. The interesting thing is that this is on his mental map. And even though we might see this as something playful, it's peculiar to me that a nine-year-old is contemplating this idea of multiple murders at such a young age. In fact, I would probably say that by then, this feeling of insignificance is starting to become a little more pervasive in his life. This murder mystery, I think, is a way for him to reclaim some power, right? He... Absolutely. He writes this murder mystery.

He solves it. He's the hero in the end. He says that it was in his fourth grade library and that kids could check the book out. So it gives him some sense of attention. It gives him a little bit of notoriety. He's proud of it. It empowers him a little bit.

In his autobiography has a picture of the cover of that depicts a hawk, not sure why. The title is the murder of Dr. Jay and his assistant. There you go. That's just a little interesting tidbit that stands out. Another interesting tidbit that stands out is Chad talking about his discovery of harming honeybees. This is a quote from Chad's autobiography on page 33.

He said, one day that spring, I was slowly walking home across Memorial Park after school. I saw a honey bee pollinating a dandelion. I peered at it for a moment, then smashed it with my shoe. I spotted another one. Then another one. I got a strange satisfaction from it. I kept count,

and after about a half an hour, I had killed 120 bees. Then, as I was about to step on another bee, a masculine voice shouted in my ear, hey, stop it, leave them alone. I jumped back and looked around, but there wasn't anyone in sight. I was really shook up because the man had sounded really angry.

I walked in a circle for a minute, trying to make sense of it. Finally, I realized that maybe an angel was fed up with me killing God's innocent creatures. That incident helped me realize how pathetic I had become, and I decided to start making better choices. The strange satisfaction. And also, it does already show a lack of conscience, like an angel sitting on his shoulder saying, knock it off, rather than his conscience.

I guess you could argue that the voice he hears is, his voice, his conscience, but the fact that he has to attribute it to something external to himself is problematic. Most of us would recognize that that's our voice, or we would have some type of internal dialogue about such an incident. But Chad doesn't recognize that. He sees it only as some external force that has to direct him, which is really peculiar. I wouldn't suggest that that that has anything to do with, say, schizophrenia, but it certainly suggests that his moral compass is somewhat askew, even at this early age, and that he struggles. to write the ship internally.

In other words, has this child... I don't know how old he is here, eighth grade. So this is in eighth grade. Chad Debel would have been around 12 or 13. By 12 or 13, most children have developed a fairly reasonable moral compass that has some internal coherence and is not entirely dependent upon outside voices

or outside forces dictating our actions. One of the most interesting parts of this is the satisfaction part. Right. Right? Like anytime a child drives satisfaction from killing of any sort, it's peculiar. Well, and to kill 120 of them. That's a lot of bees.

And it was significant enough to Chad to remember it years later and write this down in his autobiography that he felt a strange satisfaction. This isn't exactly killing the pet dog. But on the other hand, the interesting part of this to me goes back to this notion of insignificance. And what I mean by that is these are both forms. of violence. One is direct, one is indirect, but the violence here is an attempt in some ways to reclaim power. And I think that's a theme that we'll see with Chad Daybell throughout this entire saga is Chad's attempt to reclaim power. I think when Chad feels powerless or out of control

or stuck, there's always this attempt to reclaim power. Probably the most salient example of Chad's response to the sense of insignificance are his two near-death experiences. What happens in each of those experiences, and he describes two of them, essentially allow Chad to reach beyond the veil, as we discussed last week, and to connect with dead people or spiritual entities. In other words, what happens with his near-death experiences is that Chad becomes godlike. Chad develops an ability that, according to him, very few people other possess, and that ability is to see the future, to know the future, and then to see through the veil. To see through the veil, to reach beyond the veil, and to obtain information about the future that few other people have. And that changes everything for Chad. And as we explained in our last episode, the veil in LDS doctrine means that we can't see God's plan.

The veil is put between us and God and the heavens and spirits so that we don't know what is happening. Chad goes from this social outcast who's socially isolated. He's being rejected and dating. By his own admission, he has low self-esteem. He's probably experiencing a lot of shame. There's some violence in terms of stepping on and killing bees that he's ashamed of for sure. He then has these near-death experience. and now all of a sudden he has God like authority.

As I talked about it in the first podcast, this moment, these near-death experiences are really the beginning for Chad in terms of leading to the path that takes him to where we are today. Without these near-death experiences, he has no authority to foresee the future, to create a new Jerusalem,

to take on the role of a prophet. And by the way, in that first podcast where I talk about Chad's prophetic yearnings and how he was, intend upon denying being human. This provides some of the reasons why. This explains that his prophetic yearnings were a response to this feeling of insignificance and to these feelings of shame and his low self-esteem and the insecure attachment.

So all of these things combine to create this godlike state, which is obviously the antithesis of being human, of feeling human, of experiencing shame and vulnerability. And Chad, for whatever reasons, mostly, I think, to reclaim sense of control and power over the world or mastery as we all want to do, he goes to an extreme with this. Because he's very LDS, because he had just been on a mission, I think that Chad wants to transform these feelings of shame into something that's the opposite of that, which is absolute power. So now we have a kid who essentially is, for lack of a better term, a nobody, and now he's a God. He can see the other side of the veil. He can predict the future. He's going to write books that he believes are prophecies that the church should take seriously.

There's a number of things that change for Chad Daybell when he moves from relative outsider to this state of becoming a deity. In a lot of risk assessments or psychological evaluations I do, sometimes I'll sit with someone for hours and I'll feel lost. Even though I've read the case file and I've developed hypotheses before I walk. into the prison or jail. A lot of times I'm still looking for that one ingredient that could make sense of everything. No doubt I spent some time thinking about Chad Daybell. Have you now? Right. Trying to find those ingredients. We have the three philosophical

foundations that we developed in the first three podcasts, but there was such an epithinal moment that I found for Chad Daybell. And it's no different than those moments when I'm in front of an inmate and I feel a little lost and I'll be a little lost and I'll just throw a question out randomly, hoping for something reasonable, and the inmate will say something completely innocently that they don't understand the implications of, and there it is. Those are those types of epiphanal moments for me where everything makes sense. Fortunately, we have one of those moments in Chad Daybell's book. On page 55, he was a young man at the time, and Chad Daibble says, quote, I vividly remember

walking slowly across the BYU campus during a January snowstorm and thinking there isn't a soul on earth who cares what I'm doing right now. I knew that statement wasn't completely true, but at home it seemed life revolved around my other siblings' activities, and at BYU I had taken general education classes, meaning I was seated with hundreds of students and large auditoriums where I rarely sat by the same person twice. So let me repeat that quote. There isn't a soul on earth who cares what I'm doing right now. If you want to understand Chad Debo, that's the quote that you would turn to because Chad essentially is saying, I feel meaningless. I need to change that. All of us, of course, want to feel some sense of significance and mastery through work or personal

projects or in various endeavors that we undertake. And that's not the issue. We all want that. The issue is how far we're willing to go to experience it. Most of us, us if we want to feel significance, we do a better job at work. Maybe we step up our game or we go to some additional trainings, right? With Chad Daybeau, apparently that wasn't sufficient. He had to turn into a God. Right. For Chad Daybell to feel significant, he needed to literally create this persona that could reach into the future and predict the future and acquire a godlike status. So what happens to Chad Daybell after all of these experiences and he becomes this prophet or godlike figure. Yeah, so I think that's where the story starts becoming interesting. He gets a prompting

to start writing books because he has this special knowledge. I can't remember his first books, but he starts writing a series of books. As we've discussed in previous podcasts, he says quite specifically that his books are simply obtaining information from beyond the veil and then bringing them back to the human realm. Right. Those are his fictions, which are not fictions. Right. He calls them fiction, but in reality they're not. He doesn't perceive them as fiction. Right. And so he starts a publishing company essentially, I think, to spread the word about his visions

and to develop a following, which he does. He picks up people from a vow and he picks up people from preparing the people. I find his publishing company a very important thing in recruiting his accidental cult. We can call it a following, whatever it is. With his publishing company, that gave him the ability to go see. out people who adored him. A perfect example is Julie Roe. He found Julie Roe. He said, let me publish your book. And as Julie Roe says on her YouTube podcast, Chad and I would talk every day. For those that aren't familiar with the case, Julie Roe is an author who had a near-death experience, who was excommunicated

from the Mormon church, who does energy work, who originally defended Chad. She's changed her tune once the bodies of the children were found, but Julie Roe was recruited by Chad through his publishing company. Another is Hector Sosa. He is another author that was recruited by Chad. Chad explains how he knocked on Hector's door and said, let me be your ghostwriter. You have a near-death experience to share. It's important to share. And boom, Hector Sosa is adoring Chad. And then soon all of these people are in the speaking circuits along with him. I really feel like he used his publishing company to groom people to find adoration. Right, and not only to bring people into his call,

if that's the right word, but also to spread the word about his own books. Yes. And his own visions. His publishing company really became the platform through which he was able to communicate his godlike visions and to expand the realm of his influence and potentially his cult. The other thing that's interesting about his publishing company is he seeks out famous athletes to work through his publishing company

so we can write their biographies, which I think is really fascinating because, again, it shows, Chad isn't content just picking out the average Joe to write about. He wants to find the most famous people he can that are willing to interact with him. Those he considers significant. Right, exactly, and they give him some social status. He finds athletes, he writes their biographies for them. Again, this enhances this view of how important he is and how special he is. But not all goes according to plan.

There's some setbacks for Chad. For one, I think that as his books became more popular and he's on the speaking circuit, I think he fully anticipated that the church would recognize his accomplishments. He felt like his books were in Deseret Book. He expected perhaps that the leadership of the church, maybe the apostles or the group of 70, would take notice and recognize his visions. I think at the very least he anticipated that he would get a calling to become a bishop and none of that transpired. That was really probably a great disappointment and a

frustration to Chad Daybell. To not even receive the calling of a bishop, which would be the head of a congregation of a few hundred people, it's like being passed over for a promotion and would be very frustrating for him, I assume. Right. For somebody who was so invested in the church and someone who in his mind's eye played the game and wanted to get ahead and wanted to be promoted within the church. It must have been extremely frustrating for him to not get higher callings to become a bishop, for example. There were other disappointments for Chad as well. His publishing company eventually went bankrupt and he had to go back to work as a cemetery sexton, which by the way, was work that he had done previously when he was writing many of his books. We've talked about that before. That's an

interesting part of this story as well, because when he is taking on this godlike persona, he's working each day in a cemetery, burying people. He already has a thing for death between killing the honeybees and writing his murder mystery, now throw in cemetery sexton and actually digging graves. This constant exposure to death in the cemetery undoubtedly, in my opinion, impacted his psyche in a negative fashion. I don't think he was able to cope with it. I think part of this response to feelings of insignificance and powerlessness as a child also in this constant exposure to death, that part of this prophetic persona was a function of increased feelings of insignificance by being around dead people, by being around death.

Because ultimately, I think we'd have to say that death is the end of any dreams or aspirations or projects or goals we would have in this world. And so I think Chad was confronted with that day after day. It probably only increased his feelings of insignificance. And I think that the more he was around that, the more he probably sought to solidify this godlike persona. Another element that's important to discuss in this case would be the fact that the simple fact that Chad was getting older. In addition to working in the cemetery, marrying the first woman he met, Tammy. That chapter where he meets Tammy, by the way, is titled.

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Check out O-D-O-O-O-D-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. courtship. He's been married for 30 years before he meets Lori. I think there's definitely some issues in here about a midlife crisis. His career is not what he anticipated. He's not getting recognition from the church. He's working in a cemetery. He has a publishing company that's gone bankrupt. This has all the trappings of a midlife crisis, right? He's getting older. He hasn't succeeded at the level he expected in any domain. He's picked up weight. He's more sedentary. All of these things would suggest that life is starting to take its toll. He's not the 25-year-old that he was

with unlimited hopes and aspirations. He's now a 50-year-old with the clock ticking. He's become a grandpa. His kids are grown. His last kid's on a mission. Right. His kids are grown. They're leaving the nest. So you've got a series of things that are all coming together. In one of my earlier blog posts, I actually described it as a midlife crisis with a severely delusional twist. And what I meant by that, the delusional twist was thinking that he was a god. The midlife crisis we've just explained. Now we're at the point where the stage is set for this entire saga to start unraveling. All we need now is a femme fatale to enter the picture.

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everything changes. Most of you have written us comments about what about Lori? Didn't she play a role? Yes. Lori is the catalyst that sets this bonfire ablaze. She is the combustible, flammable material that just creates a wildfire that cannot be contained. So obviously, yes, Lori, plays a massive role in this entire dynamic. It's interesting to think about whether any of this would have happened if either Chad or Lori never met. And it's hard to imagine that it would have. One of the fascinating things about Chad that we haven't talked about and we will down

the road is whether or not Chad is a psychopath or whether or not Chad is highly antisocial. The reason that's interesting is because almost all murderers or accomplices to murderers, and especially murderers of children, have some elements of psychopathy, but it's not clear to me that Chad does. We could argue that there's probably some narcissism, and no, I'm not diagnosing that. I'm just pointing that out as a characteristic, but this is where Lori comes into play.

Chad is more passive, and even though Chad has really created the conditions for all this to transpire, I think Lori is the prime mover. Lori sets the ball rolling. She sets this whole thing in motion. That in some ways, Chad needs Lori. needs Lori's encouragement. Chad needs Lori's impetus to act more than anything. And Lori, contrary to Chad, I think, is much more of a action-oriented person. She's more of a results-driven

person. When Lori wants something, Lori's probably going to find a way to get it, no matter what. It's that combination that makes this so toxic and so dysfunctional. But we'll get back to that more later. When we talk about Lori, I'll be talking about some of the research on philosophies. which is killing children. The parent killing the child. A parent killing the child. And I'll be talking about there's some speculation in previous psychological reports that Lori was diagnosed with borderline personality. And that's a very interesting topic to take up.

I think we'll be talking about that in some future episodes and how that plays into this dynamic between Chad and Lori. So I hope that gives you a little bit of a teaser. We will get there. for future episodes. But for the moment, let's finish our thoughts on Chad. If we're going to look at the underlying motivations for Chad's role and these murders, we might say something as simple as, well, obviously, this was sex and money, right? There's insurance money involved, and he wanted to have sex with Lori, and case closed,

sex and money. There you go. There you go. Every dateline episode ever. Right, right. Every dateline or 48 hours episode is sex, money, revenge. Let's not forget revenge. There's always revenge of some sort somewhere.

I saw a murder not too long ago where a customer was slighted. He went in to purchase something trivial. I don't remember what it was. And he believed that the shop owner was ridiculing him and he came back and killed him. Revenge. So let's not leave out revenge. So is this a case about sex, money, and or revenge? Well, you're listening to Hidden.

We're not going to just stop there. Do those elements play a role in this? Yeah, of course. But I think we want to dig a little deeper. We're starting to put some of the pieces together. But now I want to step back, as you guys are, I'm sure, accustomed to at this point, after hopefully listening to our first three episodes, I want to step back a little bit and take a bird's eye view. And I want to ask the question, why do human beings murder other human beings? Now, I know that's a really philosophical question, but I think we have to ask that question if we're going to start to solve any murder, and especially this one.

It's a very complicated question. There's a lot of different psychological theories about why humans murder other humans. We're not going to answer it today, but I want to open the door a little bit on some of the current thinking on that issue. We'll be picking up a lot of these ideas about why humans kill each other in the future. But let me start with one right now that's a little more obscure and probably not as well known. There's a German anthropologist by the name of Walter Berkert. And Berkert wrote a book in 1972 called Homonikans. Homonocons means the killing animal.

What Berger argues essentially is that killing is built into the human condition. Now, he doesn't exactly say if that's genetic or if it's sociological or psychological. But his argument is that humans survived from the very beginning by killing animals, killing prey, in some cases killing other humans for survival, for food. As human communities evolved, what happened was that, humans still had to hunt and they had to kill. And again, in some cases, they killed other humans, but they also had to exist with each other in communities. So there became this tension between existing in a cooperative fashion and going out and murdering stuff. So according to Berkert,

what happened was human beings created rituals to separate the two. They created rituals, most specifically the ritual of sacrifice. So in order to domesticate this act of killing, human beings found it necessary to develop sacrificial rituals to make it appear more normal and more common, and that way they could bring these violent aggressive impulses from killing into the community and make it safe. Berkert's argument is that as human communities became more sophisticated and evolved, this never changed, that we still have versions of this today. He even argues that the foundations for many religions can be found through these types of sacrifices. and violence. In fact, and please don't find this offensive. This is not just the messenger here, but he argues that even Christianity, where Christ was essentially murdered on the cross,

is an act of extreme violence, but it's an act of violence that starts an entire religion. Berkert says that killing is ingrained in the human condition and that we go through these sacrificial rituals all the time. Now, you might be wondering, what does this have to do with Chad Daybell? And the answer to that, and my wife and I, Lauren and I have talked about this a lot over the dinner table. The answer to that is I really think there was a sacrificial component to these murders. Sad to say, but... And when you say these murders, we're talking particularly about Tiley and JJ. Is that correct?

We're all of them, including Charles, Vallow and Tammy. Or are we just talking about the children? I think we're talking more specifically about the children. Tammy was less about sacrifice than about simply being an obstacle to the future that he envisioned. Because he was talking about having visions of Tammy dying well before her death. In fact, he talked openly to Julie Rowe about his belief that Tammy would be killed in a car accident. I think, I don't remember when, but several months before when she actually died. Tammy's a little different.

If you look at this case, I think it's particularly interesting to think about it. in terms of Burkert's notion of sacrifice, because Chad had a history of rejection in the past from women and also from failures, like his bankruptcy of the publishing company. All of a sudden, Lori appears in his life. Lori, in some ways, was this fantasy of the perfect female he never had. Lori, too, was an attempt to reclaim power for Chad. Lori allowed him to revisit in midlife.

All these fantasies he had about beautiful women and erotic women that would seduce him. The cheerleader, and I say that because he would talk about cheerleaders and football players, and she was a cheerleader. So this femme fatale walks into your life. You're 49 years old. You already have her attention because you're proclaiming yourself as a God, and she believes it.

You're proclaiming yourself as a prophet. You already have her attention because she's read your books. She's smitten with you, and now she's showing interest in you. But you probably don't trust this. If you're Chad Daybell, you probably don't fully trust her intentions. So what better way to test her loyalty than to ask her to sacrifice her children? Talk about the ultimate act of sacrifice, right? If you're a deity, why not ask a person that you're in some ways afraid of?

Because he must be deathly afraid of rejection from her. Why not ask her to do the unthinkable? What better way to show that she's more committed to him than anything else in her life? Maybe some of you were thinking about the story of Abraham and Isaac, right? But I am. I think there's some parallels there that God wants to test Abraham's loyalty. I have no doubt that Chad Daybell knows that story extremely well. And what Chad Daybell's asking of her is, who do you side with?

Do you side with me, the deity, or do you want to spend time and energy on your kids? Am I significant enough for you? How significant am I? If there's some credence to this perspective of sacrifice, there's also another component. It's not just about Lori. It's also Chad seeking confirmation of the fact that he's a deity. It's also Chad saying that I can do this. I can murder human beings because I'm a deity and nothing is more important than that.

And this also goes back to Berger. Because one of the things Berker talked about in the idea of sacrifice was that when you slaughter or kill an animal and then eat it or consume it, then in some sense you attain power from that animal. By killing this creature, you too become somewhat godlike. This is where you get the idea of drinking the blood from an animal that's killed. You drink the blood because now you acquire some of the power from that animal. Sadly, we see this with rhinoceruses.

We kill rhinoceroses for their horns because human beings, or at least some human beings, have this misperception that if they consume the horn of the rhinoceros, they'll attain virility and strength and youth. And of course, this is all a myth, but it's related to this idea. of sacrifice. When you sacrifice someone or something and then you consume a part of that creature, or at least you participate in the demise of that creature, then you have exhibited similar godlike qualities. And I think that might be part of the reason. I think there's many other reasons. I talked about those in another blog post, but that's part of the reason I think Chad

buried the body so close to home, because it reminded him, because it was a confirmation of his godlike powers. He could look out in his front yard as sick as this is and he could be reminded that he as a deity was perfectly fine killing these children, or at least it was a reminder of the fact that he believed he was godlike. Let's back up a little bit and talk about a few other elements that get us from Chad's godlike status to the murder of several people. One other obvious ploy is Chad's rating system. We've talked about this a lot. In every episode, I believe we've brought up

Chad's rating system where he rated individuals, light or dark, evil or good. Chad's rating system allows him to dehumanize these children. If he's testing Lori's loyalty, he's also finding a way

to make it more acceptable for her to sacrifice her kids. And the easiest way he can find to do that is to create this entire fiction of light and dark and good and bad and evil and zombies. And once he does that and he gets Lori's buy-in, now he's just a few steps away from having the ability to kill these kids

because he's totally dehumanized them. In fact, there's some research suggesting that without some type of dehumanization of others, it's virtually impossible to take the next step of murdering someone. So he dehumanizes the kids through his system. My guess is that he also runs in some problems with Tiley. My guess is that Tiley did not fully accept Chad's belief system and that Tiley probably pushed back against Chad to some degree. I assume she did as a 16-year-old who could see what was happening. Tiley presented some real problems to Chad.

Tiley is a really interesting part of this equation because she's almost an adult. She's 16, almost 17. She's at a point in her life where she can be independent. So it's really peculiar. Most kids that are killed and thilicide are younger. Most kids that are killed by parents typically tend to be three or younger. So Tiley is a little bit of anomaly. The reason why Tiley loses her life is because she infuriated Chad.

Tiley upset Chad so much that as the deity he was becoming and as the prophet who would later make a claim to being the prophet of the entire Mormon church, he was not someone who was looking for feedback about his fallibility at that time. Tiley probably told her mother, this guy isn't who he seems to be. This is getting crazy, Mom. I think you really need to pull back. And Lori just wasn't willing to hear that. And when Chad got word of that, I'm sure that her zombie status escalated quickly. Again, this is another way to dehumanize Tiley.

Some of the evidence I have for this is the fact that Tiley's body was extremely disfigured and dismembered. And typically, you'll see that when there's a lot of... lot of rage involved in a crime. It's one thing to kill someone and to bury them in a normal fashion or keep the body intact. It's another thing altogether to intentionally disfigure the body to take it apart. In some cases, that occurs because perpetrators are attempting to dispose of the body, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. This would provide some evidence for the fact that Chad was extremely angry with her. He was probably very very. upset that Tiley challenged him. If not directly, then certainly indirectly through Lori.

And so Tiley, unfortunately and sadly, paid the price for that. I guess one of the lessons here is if you run into a deity, don't take him on directly. Let's go back. I think the general narrative I'm developing here is someone who felt neglected, someone who was isolated as a child to some degree who experienced a deep sense of insignificance and inadequacy, who responded to that by developing this belief that he could connect to God, that he was a direct messenger from God, and that in fact he was somewhat of a God himself or at least a prophet. And then from there, creating a cult or at least a cult or at least a group that adopted those beliefs and worked on his behalf, which only accelerated when he ran into Lori,

who became a catalyst for all of these different extreme beliefs that he probably never would have acted on without her. So as I wind down this episode on Chad, and I hope I've connected some of the pieces, our first three podcasts set the stage. Today I brought in some specifics to argue for why those elements are important. And quickly, the closed-mindedness piece that I talked about in our last podcast is extremely important in all this because never once does Chad attempt to disconfirm or challenge anything that's going on here. Never once does Chad ever ask the question, am I really a deity?

Is any of this really true? So the closed-mindedness part means there's a certain inevitability to this. I think Chad saw this as being deterministic. As I said last week, once this train came off the tracks, there was no. stopping it. Chad Daybell had no interest in remaining open or curious enough to get the train back on the tracks. So that piece is also extremely critical. It's maybe not as critical in terms of developing a conceptualization or a narrative of how Chad went from birth to his current predicament. But I think in a nutshell, that's the narrative. And at the center of this narrative

is this notion of significance. When I think of that, I think of a psychologist by the name of Eric Kruglansky, who's done some amazing work on closed-mindedness, but he's also looked at terrorism and terrorists, and that is a really interesting parallel here, because terrorists, according to Kruglansky, often, and especially suicide bombers, they often act out of a quest for significance. There's a quote I love from Kruklansky about significance, and I'll just read it quickly here. He says, the threat of insignificance brings with it, quote, the nightmare of ending. up as a speck of insignificant dust in an uncaring universe. That is just like the quote we began with by Charlie Frost in the movie 2012 when he says,

and we will be visible from the Milky Way as a tiny little puff of smoke. Right, exactly. I know, it's crazy how that's related. We've gone from Charlie Frost, the fictional character that Chad Daybell relates to, to Eric Kruglansky, who's done something. some of the best research on terrorism and closed-mindedness and cult leaders to essentially saying the same thing. Chad Daybell does not want to end up as an insignificant speck of dust in the universe.

And I think none of us do. You know, I want to maybe end with a little bit of a story here about how when I was working at the VA hospital back in 2003, the SARS epidemic had reached the U.S. And the mortality rate from that was very high. And I remember it was right before the holidays. and there were signs all over the VA saying, be careful, wash your hands, blah, blah, blah. And I remember thinking, you know,

there's a day left before I'm going to go out of town for the holiday. I'm not going to sweat it. And then the next day, I started getting a fever, and I started feeling sick. And it was really bad. My fever was 104 for hours. I took all kinds of Tylenol,

but the fever wouldn't break. So I went to the hospital. They gave me an antiviral. Thankfully, it worked. And I remember it was probably the sickest. ever been in my life. I couldn't breathe. My lungs were filling up and I was afraid I was living by myself at the time. It was a very difficult time. But one of the things after that incident, one of the things I thought about was what if this was a lot worse? What if this was airborne and it had a

mortality rate above 50%. I don't remember the SARS mortality rate. I think it was fairly high. I was haunted by this idea that a virus like SARS would strike and it would infect most of the population. And essentially that would be the end of civilization. And then, of course, flash forward to 2020 with COVID-19. I'm still haunted by my SARS experience from 03. And I'm thinking, here we go again. What if COVID-19 was much deadlier? I mean, it's horrible.

I don't want to underplay it. and I have tremendous sympathy for all the victims who have passed away. But my thought was, what if this was much worse? I couldn't go to work. Our family was quarantined for a month. And I talked to Lauren. I said, you know what? This thing is just bugging me.

I need to figure out a way to work this out. So I sat down and I wrote a fictional novel called Immunity. I'm still working on it. I haven't completed it. But immunity is essentially about a character who's thrown into a pandemic. a deadly pandemic that ends civilization, that character has to figure out more than anything else what really matters to him. As we think about Chad Daybell and we're stuck in the middle of this horrible pandemic, more than ever in my life, I've had to confront this question about what

really, really, really matters at the end of the day. If civilization collapsed, if your house and your valuables and your car had no meaning or use anymore, what really matters? When I think about the Chad Daybell case, I'm certainly thinking about that issue. I don't know if Chad Daybell knew himself well enough to be able to answer that question. But I think when you start killing kids or become an accomplice to killing kids, you've really lost sight of what matters to you. When you kill your wife for no apparent reason, when you leave your kids orphaned, essentially. I mean, they're adults. I understand that.

you've lost sight of what really matters to you. As I've done in every previous podcast, I want to end with an aspiration here. And that aspiration is, I hope during this time, this difficult time during this pandemic, I hope we can step back and think about what really, really matters to us. In my book, Immunity, my main character,

his name's Adam, Adam discovers that what really, really matters to him is family. He has a son, he has a wife. Gee, that sounds familiar. He wants to protect them at all cost. In many cases, he questions whether it's worthwhile going on, but he feels like there's no other choice but to go on. And so he will protect his family at all costs. And that is what matters more than anything else.

It doesn't matter how much money he has in the bank because that's worthless. It doesn't matter how nice his house is or his car is because those get burned to the ground anyway. I wish Chad Daybell had started. stepped back to self-reflect just a little bit and think about what really matters. I've talked about this before, but Chad Daybell created this fantasy world and he lived in it. And I think he lost sight of that question. The question is not just what matters the most. It's what matters the most here and now, not 10 years from now. And so that's my aspiration. Let's think about that. What matters the most to us? And then my challenge is, can we live according to those values?

Thank you, everyone, for joining us tonight. I know that it was mostly John talking tonight, and he said he'd do that for me because I spent the day making our little boy a bug cake for his birthday before July 22nd tomorrow for the end of the world. John said he had mostly take this one. But I'll get to enjoy a delicious bug cake later today, tonight. Yes, you'll get to enjoy that bug cake tonight, and we'll post pictures of...

that cake on our Facebook page, which, by the way, we want to share that with you. We do have a Facebook page where we're going to share books that we use, quotes that we share, bug cakes that we make. The Facebook page is hidden a true crime podcast or you can find it through doing at Hidden True Crime. We also have an Instagram at Hidden True Crime and we also have a Twitter which is Hidden Crime. And I should mention our forthcoming website. Yes. You can find our website, which we're in the process of completing.

It will be at hiddentruecrime.com. Hiddentruecrime.com. Soon there, we'll have blogs as well, and we'll be able to share all the blog posts that John has mentioned and that we want to share with all of you. We'll have them compiled into one place. So hopefully by next episode, we'll have that website up. That's our plan.

Keep sharing with your friends that they have a seat with us at our dinner table as well. We want to keep doing this, and we're so grateful for the support. and the reviews. Yeah, thank you very much. It's been really encouraging to know that some of you are enjoying this and getting something out of our podcast. I think that was our hope when we started this. If only, we didn't have day jobs. John and I have been enjoying this so much. We could spend 40 hours a week on this. We will have an empty chair for you at our table for next week. If there is a next week, by the way, if you happen to be listening to this on a Thursday or Friday, which is after the 22nd,

which is when the world will come to an end, then I will feel a great sense of relief. And if there is no Thursday or Friday, then perhaps if you're listening to this on Wednesday night, then I certainly hope you make the most of those last hours on this planet. I feel fairly comfortable that we'll continue this podcast next week. But, you know, maybe Chad Dayball's right. We'll see.

Until next episode, next week. We'll have a seat open for you. Until then, good night. Good night. sale is going on now. For a limited time, field of freedom to shop incredible hot buys. Your style, your choice, all at an unfeatable price. Plus, pay over time with up to 60 months special financing. From bedroom looks to living room styles and every room in between, our hot buys make saving big and styling your space easier than ever. Only at Ashley in North Charleston and

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