Hidden True Crime - Beyond the Veil: The Fearlessness and Filicide of Lori Vallow Daybell

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

We get closer to answering the big questions at dinner tonight- Why do human beings murder? Why did Lori really kill her children? We examine the research on filicide and psychopathy to provide some insight into these thorny questions in addition to bringing in a famous child murderer from the past, Diane Downs, to assist in our analysis. Before finishing dinner, we explore the roles of courage and fearlessness in homicide. What does fearlessness have to do with murder? And what does real courage look like and how can we attain it? 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

Hidden, a true crime podcast. A forensic psychologist and a journalist explore the hidden motives behind unthinkable crimes while examining our deepest fears along the way. According to Elizabeth Diane Downs, she and her three children were shot by a strange man. We were just out, I guess, sightseeing, I guess you'd say. And the kids got tired. They fell asleep in the car. So I decided just had on home. But I saw a road I hadn't been on before. We'd like to take back roads and just went down that. road and there was a guy standing in the road flagging me down so I stopped when this man shot my daughter my first reaction was to snap back to my childhood to the pain that had happened to me back then my marriage my entrapment by society this man was bigger than me he was stronger than me he had more power because he

had a gun and I stood there and I looked at Christy reaching and the blood that just kept gushing out of her mouth and and what do you do do. I'm Lauren Matthias. And I'm Dr. John Matthias. And who you just heard is Diane Downs, a woman spending her life in prison after being convicted of shooting her three children. We're continuing our insights into Lori Vallo-Daybell in this episode. You are in the right place. But the case of Diane Downs nearly 40 years ago is important for tonight's analysis. But first, before we'd continue, we need our listeners support. John and I, love doing this podcast. With each episode, we find ourselves more invested and spending more time on

each episode. We hope to continue creating and we hope you can help us grow along the way. While this podcast has its humble origins at our family dining room table, we have some big plans to explore the true crime terrain in a way that no one else has attempted, including forensic interviews with serial killers in prison, involvement on unsolved cases, psychological deep dives on controversial cases, forensic assessments of the most heinous past crimes. We also plan to offer significant bonus content in the near future as we grow. But with the time this is taking, and with these big dreams, we need our listener support so that we can continue to invite you to our dinner table each week, perhaps even more frequently as we continue to grow. Our initial goal is to be able to

produce a second season of our podcast. Our next goal will be to do more frequent episodes. If you would like to support us by donating, we have a Patreon account at patreon.com slash hidden true crime. You can also find that link on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash hidden true crime or by searching on Facebook for hidden a true crime podcast. One of our listeners from Australia wrote to us a couple of weeks ago and she asked if there was somewhere she could donate because she made the analogy that joining us for dinner at the very least would require on her part bringing a bottle of wine. We like that analogy because we do want this to be personable. We don't want a lot of ads if we can avoid it. And we would

like to be sponsored by our listeners rather than an advertiser that would be disruptive to our podcast. So I think the idea of a bottle of wine every week makes sense to us and it would be greatly beneficial. We love this podcast. We would like to go further and deeper with. We would like to go further and deeper with it. There's so many things we can do with this that we feel like other true crime podcast can't. Patreon.com slash hidden true crime. A link to our Patreon account will also be on our Facebook page. Facebook.com slash hidden true crime or hidden a true crime podcast on Facebook. Thank you so much for your support. And now back to Hidden a True Crime podcast and back to the spring of 1983. At night when I close my eyes, I can see Christy reaching her hand out to me while I'm

driving and the blood just keep coming out of her mouth. And that, maybe it'll fade too with time, but I don't think so. That haunts me the most. That's what Diane Down says she'll never forget after her children were shot on a rural road near Springfield, Oregon on May 19, 1983. She says it's the memory of her eight-year-old daughter Christy, her firstborn with blood pouring from her mouth after she had just been shot in the chest that would haunt her forever. But what is seared in Christy's mind forever?

The little girl remembers that it was dark and that Duran Duran's hungry like the wolf played on the radio while her mom drove along a rural Oregon road. Christy sat with her siblings in the backseat, seven-year-old Cheryl and three-year-old Danny. Her mother pulled the car over. Christy watched her mom retrieve something from the trunk of the car, opened their car door, and she watched her mom shoot both Danny and Cheryl in the chest before shooting her at point-blank range. She then saw her 27-year-old mom shoot herself in the arm. Before driving her children to the hospital, Diane wrapped a tourniquet

around her arm, but did nothing for her children. And while Diane claims she drove like a lunatic towards the emergency room, witnesses later recalled seeing Diane's car driving about five miles per hour that night. When Diane finally arrived at the ER, Cheryl was dead. Danny was paralyzed, and miraculously Christy was holding on. Dr. Stephen Wilhite said Christy was on the brink of death, that the eight-year-old suffered a stroke from blood loss, but ultimately her life was saved. This is what else Dr. Wilhite shared about the night he was called in to save Christy's life. When I was finished taking care of Christy, then I sought out her mother into my complete surprise. Diane was non-emotional, not a tear in her eye. And then she says, I really ruined my new car. I got blood all over the back of it.

I've never seen a reaction like that at all. At first, there was panic in the community, a manhunt for the shooter, a shaggy-haired stranger, according to Diane. But nine months later, Diane was arrested and charged. Diane's own daughter, Christy, now nine years old, testified in court against her own mother. According to the little girl, there was no hijacker, no man with a gun, rather Christy. explained it was her own mother with the gun and it was her mother who pulled the trigger. You might be wondering why we're starting with Diane Downs today. I think some of the initial parallels are obvious. They both killed their children. But I want to return to a question that

this podcast is going to continually address season after season. And that question is, why do human beings kill one another? What's the psychology behind human beings, committing murder. And I want to begin by talking about a book by David Buss that was written in 2005 called The Murderer Next Door. Bus is an evolutionary psychologist, and he looks at this issue from a little bit of a different perspective. Bus talks about a theory called homicide adaptation theory. And the idea behind homicide adaptation theory is that when children become a cost and not a benefit, then in some ways, they're at risk, particularly when there's a stepfather in the picture.

Which is interesting because people get upset that the news media calls Chad a stepfather often since JJ and Tiley were dead before he and Lori got married. But Chad was going to be their stepfather, had they not been murdered? Well, for all intents and purposes, he was a stepfather because they already planned the marriage before the children were murdered. Right. She had moved to Rexburg. She had moved to Rexburg.

They were planning on a life together. They had the marriage planned by then. In this case, he played the role of a stepfather. Bus talks about the idea of parental investment. The basic premise is that killing children is not actually all that uncommon among other species. He talks about, for example, African lions. So when lions have cubs, what happens is the female will nurture those cubs and the males will leave the pride at that time. until the cubs are able to reproduce.

When the males leave the pride, they join with other males, and they seek to take over other prides. These roving bands of stray lions that have been kicked out of their pride will seek to enter other prides and to find the most suitable mates. When they do that,

they're entering prides with offspring that are not theirs. Genetically, they're not biologically their offspring. What happens then is that these foreign invaders, these foreign lions that have now entered a new pride, they will kill approximately 25 to 35% of the Cubs. Wow. The reason they do that is because they want to establish their dominance with their own offspring right away. So they have no concern whatsoever for Cubs essentially that aren't theirs. And this isn't just true of lions.

This is true of gorillas, cheetahs. in some cases chimpanzees. This is true in many species. So, oddly enough, it's probably not totally surprising that human beings have a similar tendency. As far as stepfathers go. Exactly. I guess we can see Chad as the lion here

because bus cites research by Daly and Wilson where he argues that the single best predictor of children being killed by a parent was the presence of a surrogate parent in the home. 90% of those surrogate parents turn out to be stepfathers. Wow. Not only that, the research shows, and this is extraordinary to me, the research shows that the fathers of biological children, when they kill their kids, are more likely to do it in a way that's quick and efficient and doesn't involve suffering. More humane.

It's more humane. Right. Whereas stepfathers and step parents who kill their kids are more likely to inflict suffering. Wow. They're more likely to beat the child or draw out the abuse. They're more likely to inflict pain on the child. Whereas a biological parent, the goal is to end the child's life quickly. Sort of like how Chad probably killed Tammy in a more humane way than Tiley was killed.

Right, exactly. Tiley's death looked as if it involved a lot of pain and a lot of suffering, sadly. But that would be totally consistent with the way a stepfather would harm a child as opposed to a biological father that if for whatever reason, let's say a child had cancer or the child was suffering a great deal, and the biological father decided to take the life of a child, they're more apt to do that in a way that is quick and painless. And that doesn't mean necessarily that Chad is the one who killed Tiley. We don't know, but he was the one that we believe was giving the orders

that ordered the children to be killed and likely how they were killed. I think Buss's idea here is that there's no investment, right? that ultimately, Chad, as the stepfather, has no biological interest in these kids. And actually, interestingly enough, with JJ, Lori has no biological ties to JJ, too. Talk about a kid who's being strung out to dry. Talk about a kid with no protections or supports. I mean, when these two find each other, that kid has no chance. Clearly, that's not to say that all stepfathers are like this.

Both John and I know many incredible stepfathers. It's just statistically speaking when it comes to murder of children. It's a greater risk factor. There's plenty of loving, nurturing stepfathers. That's not Buss's point. Buss's point is that even in loving homes, the stepfather, in many cases, is less likely to invest in the stepchildren as much. It's also about an investment in the mother.

The stepfather does not want the mother to invest resources in their children because that takes resources and time away from them. And this can also happen with a stepmother. You hear those cases, too, that a stepmother is angry at the biological child of someone that she marries, too, but stepfather's more likely. Right. Stepmothers, too, but stepfathers are a greater risk. In Chad's case, and Buss found this to be true, stepfather's favor their own offspring because they don't want competition between the kids. They don't want competition for resources between their children. In Chad's case, at least, these These two kids that were coming into the family posed some threat, and there was no parental

investment on his part. In fact, he saw them as a potential drain on his resources. Well, and can I say that we have talked to many people. We've mentioned that before, and we have talked to a reliable source very close to the Daybale family. And we know that Chad mentioned that he was happy that his new wife was hot and loaded. He wanted that money. He wanted resources.

And he wanted her. He wanted her to himself. The hot part implies he doesn't want to share Lori with their kids. As twisted as that is, he sees this as him taking ownership of Lori. We've heard this from multiple sources, that Chad was likely very envious of people who had money. And I think there could have been some jealousy. with these children. They lived in a big home. They were well taken care of. He was jealous that these children had more than his children. There could have also been that in play. And we know that Chad was

possessive. He would tell people that he often said, I tell Tammy what to do. Somebody questioned something about Chad and Tammy once. Someone once said that they thought Tammy was independent, and that might have come across in her career or in other arenas in her life. But when it came to her marriage with Chad, Chad called the shots, or at least he thought he did. And that's a parent that he believed that in his autobiography and in all of his writings. We've heard this from several people that Chad told Tammy what to do. When it came to their marriage, it was very much Chad's party. And so this is consistent with Buss's theory of homicide adaptation theory, that Chad did not want these children competing for resources or for his time. And he wanted control of Lori, right?

He wanted to say the same thing about Lori, I'm sure, and Lori was more independent. The same thing about Lori that he said about Tammy. She does what I tell her to do. And I think this ties back to we talked about these homicides being a sacrifice of sorts. I think this ties back to that idea, too, that the sacrifice here is Chad testing Lori to see if she's going to be compliant, to see if she's going to obey him, right? And this question we get a lot about, who do you think made this? decision to murder the kids?

Chad. I think we're getting an answer here. Right. It was Chad. Which is what we've always said, but we want to reiterate that. It was Chad. Intuitively, it seems like Lori would be the one to get the ball rolling or to start this whole conversation about murdering the kids.

When you look at bus and when you look at this notion of the lion entering the new pride, the conclusion here is that Chad was behind it. Yes. Make no mistake as we continue. this episode about Lori. It was Chad that got the ball rolling. Bus in his book, he mentioned a well-known French proverb

that I think is pertinent here, which is quote, the mother of babes who elects to rewed has taken their enemy into the bed. That's a French proverb. The French apparently understood this better than we do. Again, thank you to those

loving and caring step-parents. And foster parents, too. And foster parents. Chad Daybell is not one of them. So Chad clearly got the ball rolling. We've established that again, but this is an episode about Lori. And Lori killed her children or allowed them to be killed or thought this was okay. Philicide. Let's get back to Lori. Yeah, you're right. That takes us to the research on Philicide, which is a parent killing their children, or at least in this case, condoning the murder of her children. It's what Diane Downs did. Right. And also, I think,

We should point out the similarity with Diane Downs. Diane Downs met and fell in love with this guy, Nick. We went to Downs' apartment and conducted a search at the residence. After she gave us consent to search, we found diaries where she had written almost daily. Diane had fallen in love with a coworker. His name was Robert Nickabocker. Everybody called him Nick. And she fell for it.

for him big time. He was married, but he was separated from his wife, Charlene, at the time. Diane Downes fell in love with Nick. Nick made it clear to her he wasn't interested in her because of her three children. So Diane believed, mistakenly, that if she killed her children, that Nick would come back to her. Because that usually works to get a guy. I guess for Lorette did, though. Right.

And so her motivation was somewhat similar to. to Lories in the sense that Nick did not want to invest in her children and she didn't see a problem with that. She actually believed that her best chance to find a suitable mate would be to rid herself of her children so that he would love her. So she saw her children as a cost and not a benefit. You can't replace children, but you can replace the effect that they give you. That created the conditions for her to believe that murdering her children was a viable solution to that problem. any parallels, which would make sense Lori saw her children as a cost and not a benefit after she met Chad. But of course, just like Lori, it goes beyond that.

Okay. There's other reasons, of course. Diane Downs, for example, shows very little emotion at all. So I stopped and got out and asked what was the problem and said, I want your car. And I said, gee, I'd be kidding. I mean, how many people really do that in real life? They don't. She comes across as emotionless, probably depressed, narcissistic.

Parallels. This sounds like Philicide, the reason a mother would kill her children. Right, exactly. So I think homicide adaptation theory gives us a good running start. And then we want to jump into some of the research on Philicide, which will fill in some of the blanks. Historically, a lot of the research on philicide was based on severe mental health problems. Most of the research was attributing filicide to either severe. severe depression, such as postpartum depression, like really severe depression where psychosis was

possible and or psychosis. So the initial thought on phyllicide was the only way a mother could kill a child would be if they were psychotic and lost touch with reality, or they were so depressed as in postpartum depression. Which is in Andrea Yates case when she drowned her five children in the bathtub. She had postpartum. There was psychosis. That was sort of the end all for killing your children. And there can be a psychotic component to postpartum depression. Yes. Postpartum depression and psychosis and or both of those were typically perceived to be some of the main causes of philocyte. But then over time, some of that research started changing a little bit and it was finding other elements in Philicide. Depression, by the way, has been a constant through most of the research,

which is interesting, because I've always said from the beginning that I thought Lori was depressed. Yes. And people have pushed back on you for that. She wasn't depressed. Look how happy she is. And all the videos, she's carefree. But if you look at her affect, if you look at, at least in the footage I've seen, if you just look at her in the courtroom and if you look at her in Hawaii, even when she's supposedly happy as a clam, right? She's married to this guy, this prophet. She's in paradise. She's in paradise, which is her escape, her go-to place.

Her affect is so flat. It's so non-existent. Like, it just looks like someone who's depressed. Couldn't her flat affect just maybe be too much Botox? I think that's a really good hypothesis, but my guess is that if you just look at her in the courtroom, You don't get a lot of Botox in jail, so I'm probably going to go with depression. Okay. Krishna in 2007 found that Philicide was often affiliated with severe depression, and that depression

was typically caused by some type of childhood abuse, either physical or sexual abuse, which takes us back to our first episode on Lori where we speculated about sexual abuse. Right. Diane Downs also said during her trial she had been sexually abused by her father when she was 12 years old. More recent research has found, this is from Spinelli in 2003, has found that anger combined with immaturity are both risk factors for philocyte, which when you think about Lori. I think of anger and immaturity. Right. Corah, really?

That's what you think is me, Coral. Sorry, go ahead. We've already established Lori's rage. Right. We know that she's an angry human being. We know that she flies off the handle. We know she has a problem with rape. These were elements consistent with borderline personality disorder.

The immaturity part of that is really fascinating to me because people have speculated, and we have too, on Lori's call with Chad in prison, where she sounds like a little girl. Right. There's one element of borderline we haven't talked about. Psychologists use the term regressive. There's a very regressive quality to Lori, meaning that she tends to revert to almost a childlike state under stress. Yes. And this call, this is the question.

call we're talking about when law enforcement are actively digging in Chad's yard right before they find the bodies of JJ and Tiley this is the call he's referring to hello so yeah she sounds like a little girl. What can I do to help you? The research that combines anger with immaturity, I think, is right on with Lori. There's some risks here right away, not only from borderline personality disorder, but from the fact that Lori has a very regressive childlike quality, which would make her more prone to be impulsive. It would make her more prone to making rash decisions. Chad comes to her and says, hey, you know, why don't you get rid of your kids for me? I just still, just to hear that is mind-blowing that a woman, a mother would even think about it.

But clearly she did and she did it. Very impulsive. So at some point, I don't know how many times Chad asked. It might have been one. I don't know. But at some point, she agreed. Well, not only did she agree, she agreed to it while he still had a wife. She was taking a risk.

There was no guarantee he was going to. That sounds terrible to say, too. But, I mean, honestly, if you're going to kill your kids for someone, you'd want them to, you know, be available. The Philicide research gives us depression, possibly childhood abuse, which we believe pertains to Lori, anger and rage and immaturity. And there's another researcher, his name is Jeffrey McKee. He wrote a book in 2006 called Why Mother's Kill. McKee is a forensic psychologist. He collected research over a period of about 29 years. And McKee developed a typology of women who potentially kill their kids. I'm going to go through some of these and we'll talk about how they apply to Lori.

Okay. McKee's first category, he subdivides these categories up into additional categories, but his first one is detached mothers. So I think we can rule that out for Lori. His second category is abusive slash neglectful mothers. That sounds like her a bit. No? We don't really see Lori as being abusive, per se. We've heard that she was lazy. We've heard that she was a lazy mother. As far as we know, not hitting the kid you're right she's not physically abusive the key's third category is psychotic slash depressed mothers so we just talked about this i feel like there was some depression i think she fits this category fairly well one of his subcategories is psychotic depressed impulsive mothers so

i think we definitely see some of that and when john first mentioned allory looked depressed this was months ago actually it was before j j and tiley's bodies had even been found and you thought it's not uncommon for a woman who's middle age based her life on her looks. She's growing older. She's becoming depressed, facing her mortality. And not just that, the history of childhood abuse. There's probably some issues with self-esteem that have haunted her entire life. This idea of the false self we talked about, this need for validation from others all the time.

Actually, yes, Lori Selmaid spoke to East Idaho News and she said that, Lori was always seeking validation from Chad. Every phone call from him. She would constantly ask if Chad loved her, according to the cellmate. When you have a false self, you're going to be more prone to depression because you don't know who you are. You haven't developed that authentic self. So this bubbly, happy, go lucky, carefree-looking, Lori we see in videos, would that be her fault self? That's a facade of who she's trying to present to the world.

but I don't think she knows what's behind that facade. A false self is essentially a lack of a self. So would it be that she doesn't even know she's depressed? Yeah, no, I think if you asked her, she'd say she's not depressed. Okay. She doesn't know. She looks depressed, but she's not going to acknowledge it. She doesn't even know she is because of her fault self.

Right. Lori lacks the self-awareness to probably even know that she's depressed. McKee's fourth category is what he calls retaliatory mothers. Although we can say that Lori does seem to retaliate, that there's been some argument that Lori retaliated against Kay and Larry for getting the insurance money. I don't think she fits this category that well. Okay. She does retaliate. She retaliated very much with Joe Ryan.

Right. She does retaliate. But I think that we're going to talk about that a little bit differently in a minute. I don't think that she killed these kids for that reason. Okay. It could have been some motivation, but she doesn't really fit this everywhere in her life. Okay. Not that the insurance money wasn't a motive, not getting the insurance money made her very angry,

but there was more to this. But she does retaliate. I think her retaliation is more of a recent phenomenon. It doesn't seem to apply as much earlier in her life. I also think that borderline personality disorder is a better explanation for her retaliatory, instincts as opposed to seeing retaliation as the primary

motivation for her crimes. And the fifth category that McKee talks about is what he calls psychopathic mothers. He has a subcategory of psychopathic mothers that he calls psychopathic narcissistic mothers. And I think

this is the bull's eye we're looking for. Right. This is going to really take us in depth into Lori Valo-Dade. Bell. Psychopathic mothers. Before we get into the McKee's idea of the psychopathic mother, I want to tell a story about a group of adolescent sex offenders I worked with.

The correct terminology these days is actually youth with sexual behavior problems so that we're not labeling them as sex offenders per se. There's a movement in working with adolescents who have committed sex offenses not to label them and especially not to label them for life. and I agree with that. So I was doing a group with teenagers who had committed sex crimes. And one of the exercises I do in my groups with kids or adolescents is I have them get in a circle and then I have them try to display an emotion on their face.

It's called the face pass. So the way it works is they're in a circle. They're making an emotion on their face. They're looking at the person next to them. And the person next to them is trying to pick up that. emotion, so they have to name the emotion, and then they turn to the next person, and they continue doing that. The purpose of this exercise is to do something active, first of all, because kids don't

like to sit. And the second thing is to get them to be able to read and understand and acknowledge emotions among each other, because there's a lot of research these days supporting the idea that sex offenders, both sex offenders, juvenile and adult, and violent offenders, do not recognize emotions well. It's called signal detection theory. The idea is offenders fail to understand their own emotions, so they struggle with reading other people's emotions as well.

I'd like to actually cite a research article from Gillespie in 2015, who worked with another researcher named Anthony Beach. He's a British researcher who's done a lot of work on risk among sex offenders. Beach is probably one of my favorite researchers in this area. What they found was that sex offenders showed a reduced sensitivity to emotional expressions compared with non-offenders. And both sex and violent offenders showed particularly reduced sensitivity to fearful expressions. They also found, and this is really interesting to me, that both sexual and violent offenders showed impaired sensitivity to high intensity, female fearful, expressions compared with non-offenders.

And violent offenders also showed a higher criterion for classifying moderate and high-intensity male expressions as fearful. In other words, sex offenders and violent offenders struggled to recognize fear in particular, but emotions more generally among other people, but especially among females. Let me get back to my group. The kids are simulating different emotions. And it's typical when they start that they don't recognize any emotions, except for anger and in some cases, happiness. But they especially struggle with sadness and fear.

And sadness and fear are probably the two most difficult emotions to acknowledge among human beings, because anger is more prevalent in our day-to-day lives, I think, although there's some families that shut down anger. And for those kids, it's really a struggle. But after about 10 minutes, most of the kids did fairly well. well with this. I get them to exaggerate their emotions as we go along so they become more and more obvious. In fact, they're almost jumping up and down and screaming in some cases to get each other to recognize the emotions. And after about 10 minutes, most of the kids did. But there was one 15-year-old in the group who no matter what they kids did, this person, this boy, could not recognize

any emotions whatsoever. And I knew that was a problem because not only of this research, but that his offense in particular was somewhat violent. And it was obvious to me that because he couldn't read fear, that he would struggle with this, that his risk for reoffence would be higher. And so we spent a lot of time working on helping this young man to recognize fear. And that actually takes me into some great research by Abigail Marsh. Marsh is a researcher at Georgetown, and she wrote a book in 2017, summarizing a lot of research called The Fear Factor. What Marsh is interested in is actually altruism, but on the other side of altruism is psychopathy. Marsh was interested in doing functional MRIs, fMRIs, and looking at the

brains of initially adolescents to see if their brains differed from people that were more altruistic. And what she found was there's a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is responsible for essentially regulating our emotions,

especially fear, but all of our emotions and to some larger degree fear. Marsh found three things that were consistent with people she would label as psychopaths. The first one was they couldn't recognize fear in other people's faces.

They had no fear recognition capabilities. The second thing she found was that their amygdala in the brain was non-responsive. It was not as responsive as a typical amygdala should be when it was encountering stimuli that should have elicited some type of fear response. With an amygdala that's non-responsive, you get someone essentially who doesn't experience, fear. So the first part of this equation is you can't recognize fear. The second part of this equation is you don't feel fear. And the third part of the equation is the amygdala was smaller. It was consistently smaller in all of these subjects who struggled with fear. So the idea was

that the amygdala was somehow defective, that it was not functioning as well, that it was damaged. So Marsh finds these three elements. Let's let's let's look. Listen to Marsh explain these in her TED talk. I became a psychology researcher, and I've devoted my work to understanding the human capacity to care for others. One answer is compassion, obviously, which is a key driver of altruism. But then the question becomes,

why does some people seem to have more of it than others? And the answer may be that the brains of highly altruistic people are different in fundamental ways. But to figure out how, I actually started from the opposite end with psychopaths. A common approach to understanding basic aspects of human nature, like the desire to help other people, is to study people in whom that desire is missing,

and psychopaths are exactly such a group. Psychopathy is a developmental disorder with strongly genetic origins, and it results in a personality that's cold and uncaring, and a tendency to engage in antisocial and sometimes very violent behavior. Once my colleagues and I at the National Institute of Mental Health conducted some of the first-ever brain imaging research

with psychopathic adolescence, and our findings and the findings of other researchers now have shown that people who are psychopathic pretty reliably exhibit three characteristics. First, although they're not generally insensitive to other people's emotions, they are insensitive to signs that other people are in distress. And in particular, they have difficulty recognizing

fearful facial expressions like this. this one. And fearful expressions convey urgent need and emotional distress, and they usually elicit compassion and a desire to help in people who see them. So it makes sense that people who tend to lack compassion also tend to be insensitive to these cues. The part of the brain that's the most important for recognizing fearful expressions is called the amygdala. There are very rare cases of people who lack amygdalas completely, and they're profoundly impaired in recognizing fearful expressions. And whereas healthy adults, children usually show big spikes in amygdala activity when they look at fearful expressions,

psychopaths and magdalas are underreactive to these expressions. Sometimes they don't react at all, which may be why they have trouble detecting these cues. Finally, psychopaths and magdalas are smaller than average by about 18 or 20%. So my mind is going a lot of places and I know that if I go too many places, I'll go on a tangent and you'll say, let's stick with Lori. But the first thing I thought of was Alex Cox. There is a woman who wrote an anonymous story about meeting Alex in 2013. When she was 27 years old, he was 45 at the time. They met in 2013 in Columbia. She had a brief romantic relationship with Alex. We do know who this woman is. We know that this woman is real, although she wants to remain anonymous. She's married now and has moved on with her life. But

after being pressured into having sex with Alex, she recalls this moment. The only time I felt scared with Alex was the second time we had sex. He had such a glare in those green eyes, such lust. I am not lying. His eyes were shining in such an evil way and it made me feel uncomfortable. I was somewhat scared, but I ignored it thinking he was simply enjoying it too much. This reminds me of the sex offenders you're talking about, that don't recognize fear in women. Like most people might recognize that their partner is afraid or fearful. He's not even seeing her. She was scared.

That sounds like a classic description of a sexual assault. So I know we need to get back to Lori, but that is sticking in my mind. So I just want to throw that out there, their brother and sister. They come from the same narcissistic family. Keep going. But wow. You know, so there's another thing that our reliable source close to the Daeball family told us about Chad is that Chad couldn't read other people's emotions.

And I remember you kind of asking the source that we were speaking to about that specifically. And they said, yeah, Chad could not read other people's emotions. He missed other people's emotions. He was totally self-absorbed. Okay, go on. Thank you. Back to Lori. What does this mean for Lori?

Well, let's think about this for a second. So there's a close relationship between fear and empathy. Why is there a relationship between fear and empathy? Because if you don't feel fear and you can't recognize fear in other people, then you won't recognize when somebody needs help. You won't be able to understand their pain. You won't see their pain. And not only that, you won't understand it because you don't feel fear.

So this means that Lori, obviously, had no empathy whatsoever. She had no ability to cope with her own emotions. And this actually goes back to our discussion of Lori growing up in a narcissistic family, too, where there's no validation of emotion, right? There's no recognition that when she's feeling fear, that's not getting validated by her family. Where does this lead us in terms of understanding Lori? I think the obvious conclusion is that Lori is also a psychopath.

I don't know any way around that. That her inability to experience fear and to see fear in other people suggests that she's probably a psychopath. Let's listen to Lori's response to the police arriving on the scene after Charles Valla was shot and killed. This clip is from Dateline, showing how Lori was acting when police arrived on scene after her husband of 15 years, Charles was killed.

Is he heard or is he alive? Yeah, there's blood. He's not moving. I got in a fight with my brother-in-law and I shot him in self-defense. He came in me with a bat. How long have you lived here? Like three weeks. Oh, geez. Yeah, okay. That's why the neighbor stood in the last thing.

Gotcha. Like, hi, neighbor, sorry. It was kind of like a happy go lucky. She was just kind of smiling. She was talking about how Tiley was going to go to BYU, Hawaii. and it was just a very, very nonchalant, you would have thought that we just, you know, recovered their stolen vehicle. Right.

She's giggling about the neighbors. That's why the neighbors don't know. Gotcha. Like, hi, neighbor. Sorry. After her husband was just shot and killed. Now, eerily listened to this clip from ABC's 2020 of Diane Downs reenacting the crime scene where her children were killed.

We asked Diane if she'd do a reenactment for us. We simply wanted to nail down her statements, and she was more than happy to do that. Sitting in the car is Elizabeth Diane Downs. She can be seen sitting in the car, and she's kind of primping, making sure that her hair looked the way she wanted it. Diane Downs is trying to show the investigators exactly what happens. I'm throwing the keys, okay? I'm throwing the keys.

So they can understand and get the forensics right. I got in the club. I just hit my cast. I just hit my cast. Started the car and left. The car door shut itself. She was giddy. She laughed.

She cracked jokes. I mean, she's reenacting the gruesive shootings of her three children. In both cases, their laughter is a wildly inappropriate and incongruent response to their lethal predicaments. Let's talk about Melanie Gibb talking about Lori's lack of fear when she was caught. This was Chad's preliminary hearing, and Melanie Gibb explained that when Lori called and asked Melanie to lie about JJ's whereabouts, she was not nervous. Chad was, but Lori was not. And I may have already asked this, I apologize.

I did approximately what time did you call by Mr. Dave Lave? that late morning. He said, hi Melanie, this is Chad. The Rexburg, police are going to call you. Don't pick up. He let me know that the police were over at Lori Ballow's home in Rexburg. They were inquiring about where JJ was and that she was going to tell the police that JJ was with me. Okay. How did you respond? In shock, I said JJ's not at Kay's house. He said no. I asked him if he was nervous and he said yes. Now listen to how Melanie explains the call from Lori an hour after Chad initially called her. Lori calling me.

Was it an hour or two after after what? I'm sorry, Chad's phone call. Okay. What was the nature of that conversation? When I picked up, she told me that the police had been there asking her JJ. Just want to let you know, everything's fine. She was upbeat, sherry, acting like nothing was wrong. There was a question that was asked of us months ago that we both decided we wanted to answer.

Maybe now is the time. Tim Hinton asked us this question. He said, why was Lori not nervous when she asked Melanie Gib to lie and Chad was nervous? Because Melanie says the same thing in her interview with Nate Eaton, too. the same story. Chad was a little bit nervous. Lori had no fear. Lori has no fear probably because she's a psychopath and her amygdala might be damaged or defective. So she has no capacity to feel fear and to recognize fear in others. So that's a simple answer in terms of Lori. In terms of Chad, I think Chad was afraid of the consequences. But this is the interesting part with Chad.

I think Chad wasn't afraid when he was with Lori. I think Lori emboldened him to the point where he had very little fear when he was with her and planning with her and thinking about the future with her. I think Lori definitely promoted fearlessness to some degree because she was a buffer. But I also think that Chad was narcissistic. I mean, I think that wouldn't be a difficult. conclusion to reach if you just think about the fact that he thought he was a deity. Pretty sure he's narcissistic.

Chad's fear was more about consequences and not fear of doing anything wrong, right? In fact, on that issue of doing anything wrong, our source very close to the Dave L family told us that not once has this person ever heard Chad say, I was wrong about anything in his life. So the fear wasn't about being wrong because he didn't think. he was wrong. Chad was never wrong, according to this source, ever. Even if he got the date of the second coming wrong, he would just say, well, more needs to happen. He was not wrong. He would do what any profit does, which is, oh, you know, yeah, I was a little off. The data I was downloading from Beyond the Vail was just a little fuzzy that day. So we're just going to put

that date out a little bit. Yeah, right. Chad would say, I testify. that the data was slightly off due to the barometric pressure. And I would testify that the data was slightly off because Oprah Winfrey must have had a enormous presence in the universe on that day. Oprah reruns in full force. I testify, Oprah is at fault, or my dark sister-in-law, to be Chad and to be able to blame anyone but him. So now I think we're starting to really drill down with Lori

and understand how a combination of factors came in the same. to play for her to kill these kids. Borderline personality disorder gets us far. Taking her to the level of a psychopath gets us really, really far because if you combine borderline personality disorder and psychopathy, you're talking about a really lethal combination. In fact, there's research by Andrews and Bonta, both of them are criminologists who've looked at the psychology of crime. they talk about what they call the central eight that are risk factors for violence. Of the central eight, they point to what they call the big four factors for violence. Of the big four, every single one of them has to do with antisocial characteristics.

So the big four are antisocial attitudes, antisocial behaviors, antisocial personality factors, and antisocial associates. And does everyone know what antisocial means? I mean, we're 10 episodes in now, and we've talked a lot about it. But what does antisocial mean? Because a lot of people think when they're in high school and don't want to go to a party that's antisocial. Okay, yeah, let me clarify. So antisocial is a term that's used in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders

that's been used consistently in that manual to diagnose someone as a sociopath or a psychopath. These terms are, for the most part, interchangeable, although it's generally recognized. that a psychopath is probably the most severe, the most extreme form of being antisocial. To be antisocial, the way I'm talking about it is essentially to be diagnosed with a personality disorder. A personality disorder that means you break rules, that you're grandiose, that you manipulate, that you lie, that you do things that have no socially redeeming value. So Andrews and Banta, if you look at the big four, I think it becomes clear, depending on how we interpret antisocial associates, I guess if you see Jason Mao and Julie Roe and some of these other characters as being antisocial to some degree, then you'd have to say that Lori probably fits all of the big four.

Now we're getting near the foundation. We've got Lori as a borderline personality disorder. We believe now that she's a psychopath. That's a really combustible combination, obviously. Do psychopaths just not recognize fear or do they not show it either? They don't feel it. They don't feel it. Because their amygdalas are not responsive.

This reminds me of that story about Banks when he was scared and you saw his fear. We were at a pool swimming last month and we were teaching Banks to swim or Lauren was mostly teaching him to swim since I'm not much of a swimmer. Without success. But I was attempting. Normally he wears a life jacket and Lauren took it off so that she could teach him to swim without it and I think he had become comfortable wearing it so we were at this large pool public pool and he was running away from me towards the end of the pool in a corner of the pool and he could

see me but I wasn't that close to him and he didn't have his life jacket on and I could tell he was about to jump and when he jumped in the pool he had this incredible look of terror on his face. And I remember thinking, first of all, I got to get over there and get him. I did get him quickly. It was horrifying to me because I saw this look of terror on his face that I'll never forget. It was just, it was a moment where I thought, holy cow, this is what kids who drown in pools must look like. And fortunately, I was nearby. But I also thought at that moment about Lori and the unimaginable scene that came to my mind was her kids with these horrendously fearful looks on their faces before they're about to be killed and she has no

concern whatsoever or the killer if the killer was Alex Cox and she wasn't in the room he did not see their fear they did not feel or see their fear right at all if they had seen that fear I would like to think they would have done something different. Even if she wasn't in the room when they were killed, just the idea that your kids are about to be killed. Just the notion that your kids are going to be killed by someone, whoever that is, and they're going to be afraid, would be a deterrent to most normal human beings. Just like Banks had this incredible look of terror on his face that I'll never forget,

that will stick with me. I can't imagine how a parent, I can't imagine how Lori or Chad, for that matter, our chat has children, how they can ignore that and do what they did. I can't imagine how it ended for JJ entirely knowing that their killer could not have empathy, could not see their fear, could not see their pain, and could do what they did to those children. For all of us that have fears, we can pat ourselves on the back right now and know that it means we're healthy and human and have empathy. That you're not a psychopath?

That we're not a psychopath, which actually makes me think of something else because we talked about this. John loves the climber, Alex Honnold. I know that John really admires him. We watched his documentary Free Solo. He's the climber that he climbs without ropes. He free solos and they've done studies on him and he has no fear or shows very little fear. So I'm trying to actually process that. Are you saying that someone like Alex Honnold is a psychopath? Yeah, that's a great question. Um, because that's, well, I hope he's, he's not because he lives in Las Vegas not too far from us if he is I don't want to run into him but to answer that question that's a really interesting question because Alex Honnold had a fMRI done on his brain as

well just like Abigail Marsh was doing brain scans brain imaging of these psychopaths so too did someone look at Alex Honnold's brain to see if it was normal and what she found was that it wasn't What she found was that Alex Honnold's amygdala was smaller than normal, just like a psychopath, and she found that it was non-responsive to all these gruesome images that she was flashing before him. So that suggested the same things we're talking about, that he feels no fear, and that he can't recognize fear in other people. And so it's a great question because the obvious conclusion should be that Alex Honnold's a psychopath, but that's not the conclusion.

And I'll explain why that's true. Okay, good, because I like Alex. I was worried where you were going with this. I like him a lot, too. So the reason that's not true for Alex Honnold is probably for a lot of reasons. Number one is that Alex Honnold grew up at a home that validated his emotions, at least as far as I know as a mother did, and Lori didn't. So there's that nurture component that Alex Honnold had an advantage of being in a home where emotions were acknowledged and recognized. The most important part of this equation, though, is that Alex Honnold.

Donald trained his brain to deal with fear, that he was so focused on climbing and the risks of climbing that he was able to, I don't know if he was able to shrink his amygdala. He was able to train his amygdala to not respond to fear in a way that a normal person was, at least in that specific domain of dealing with heights and the risks of falling to his death. So he was able to, I think, in some way, shape his brain, which is pretty remarkable. But there's another element with Alex Honol that I think. should be mentioned and that is that Alex Honnold is someone with a lot of humility and humility to me is the capacity to be vulnerable and to acknowledge our limitations and

humility involves to me a large degree of self-awareness and emotional sensitivity anyone who knows Alex Honnold says that he's the kindest most humble guy and in some cases people will get that wrong but with him I think it's true that Alex Honold knew his limitations. He knew areas where he needed to improve. He understood when he made mistakes. I guess you could say that being on a rock, a thousand feet off the ground with no rope, really teaches you the lesson of recognize your limitations quickly because it's about survival.

The source that we've talked to, they mentioned that Chad could never be wrong. So there was clearly no humility, the opposite. and that they mentioned that he would show no emotion. They did mention that he was kind of a scaredy cat, that he would get scared and would not take risks. It was the opposite of Alex, as in they believe that his near-death experience was made up when he jumped off a cliff into the water.

They believed that it was an adrenaline rush that he had and he decided it was a near-death experience because he was so fearful of doing things like that. He would never take risks. Any thoughts on that? I'm kind of just realizing how exact opposite. There's a difference between physical fear, physical risks, and emotional risks. I think Chad was afraid of physical risks, but he wasn't willing to acknowledge weakness, which is an emotional risk.

So I think it's interesting because Alex Honnold may have initially had a fear of physical risk, but he trained himself not to. And Alex Honnold was able to recognize emotional weakness or weaknesses, whereas, Chad wasn't. So Chad has this fear of being weak or vulnerable. Chad has a fear of being emotionally vulnerable, whereas Alex Honnold doesn't at all. In fact, when we're talking about this topic, it reminds me a lot of when I was in graduate school in the mid-90s, I remember there was this t-shirt that said no fear. I was thinking about those. And I remember thinking as a doctoral student in psychology, I remember seeing these t-shirts all over campus. mostly with undergraduates, by the way,

but a lot of the undergraduates would wear these no-fear t-shirts. And I remember thinking how absurd it was. Like, human beings feel fear. It's hardwired into us to feel fear, unless our amygdala's are screwed up, as we now know. It means we're human. Right, it means we're human.

That if a lion is charging you across the campus, I hope you have some fear. So, but if you don't, I guess you get to wear a no-fear t-shirt. I remember thinking I should take a Sharpie and walk up to these people and cross out the know. I would ask them,

Do you mind if I take a Sharpie to your t-shirt? That's a sure way to get punched. So I wanted to cross out the no and put so much instead of the no, because in fact, I've always felt like the no fear t-shirt was actually an indicator of how much fear they had, but how much they were covering it up. Right. They're going to end up like Chad Daybell. Chad would wear a shirt like that, no fear.

Right. And Lori certainly would. Right. Little did they know they should have had a little bit more. And speaking of Lori not having fear, one thing we didn't mention either was a very clear statement. and one of the documents given to us by Cheryl Wheeler, where the evaluator actually very clearly states that Lori has no fear. In this document with the evaluator,

it was very clear that Lori had kept repeating that Tiley was sexually assaulted by her dad, Joe Ryan. And the evaluator was trying to find out if Tiley was being coached by Lori to say that she had been sexually abused by her father, or if Tiley really truly was telling her mother she had been sexually abused. And this was the questioning that happened. And here's Lori's response. This is from the psychosexual evaluation for Joe Ryan.

And the evaluator had this to say about Lori. So this part of the evaluation is actually where Lori and Tiley are in the room together. And they're asking Tiley if she was really sexually abused by her dad, Joe Ryan. The examiner asked this to Tiley. Has anyone told you or made you come here today and tell me about Daddy Joe? Child's answer, which we now know is Tiley. Yes. The examiner asked who?

Child answered. Colby and Charles. The interview ended. And when the child made these statements, the mother's jaw dropped. Eyes widened and appeared shocked. She did not seem fearful that she was in trouble. Rather, she seemed in disbelief and shock. In other words, Lori was caught in a lie because Lori had been telling them over and over again that Tiley says that she is sexually abused.

Lori was caught in a lie and this would be a point of embarrassment or in fear that someone had caught her. But instead, she's just shocked. She showed no fear. She's indifferent. And speaking of no fear, let's listen to the ER doctor again. Describe talking to Diane Downs the night her children were shot. So I stopped and got out and asked to live with the problem and said, I want your car. And I said, gee, I'd be kidding.

I mean, how many people really do that in real life? They don't. When I was finished taking care of Christy, then I sought out her mother. And to my complete surprise, Diane was non-emotional, not a tear in her eye. And then she says, I really ruined my new car. I got blood all over the back. I've never seen a reaction like that at all. So the real connection between Lori and Diane Downs, in addition to homicide adaptation theory,

which we discussed earlier, and the research on phyllicide related to severe depression, is that they're both psychopaths. That is the lethal foundation that in the end they both share. This leads me to think about this idea of no fear. I always thought back when I was on campus and people were wearing these shirts, that the shirts really missed the point. The point wasn't about not having fear. The real issue was courage.

I felt like if I were to do a T-shirt like this, it would have to be about courage. Not fear. Not having fear is irrelevant. I think the real issue is, can we be courageous? Courage is sometimes misunderstood. Courage is not the absence of fear or fearlessness. It's the willingness to experience fear and to take action anyway, often in the service of a larger purpose. When I think of courage, I think of the Maya Angelou quote.

Maya Angelou said, courage is the most important of all virtues, because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently. So courage underlies the other virtues. Courage is the foundation of the other virtues because it allows us to act. But I think this is a really important caveat. So if the hidden podcast were ever to come out with a t-shirt line to compete with no fear and we would come out with a t-shirt line about courage, the first t-shirt I would have would be a rebuttal to the no fear t-shirt.

The no would be crossed out and I would put so much fear. but at peace with it. But at peace. There you go. So much fear, but at peace with it, right? Because that's more realistic. Right. You're going to have fear.

Just try to make peace with it, right? Try to live with it. Try to manage it. That's human. My next T-shirt would be about courage, specifically. And it would say, courage equals fear plus humility. We're going to have fear.

Courage is about dealing with that fear and acting anyway and having the humility to recognize our limitations. And then I want to have a t-shirt that's a direct rebuttal to the no fear t-shirts. I had no idea that our next business venture was T-shirts. The things we learn when we do a podcast. It's like couple therapy.

You know how much I wear T-shirts. Yes, the same four. We do need a couple more. Can someone spare a T-shirt from my husband? My next T-shirt would be for Lori and Chad. I would specifically send them one each, his and hers, matching T-shirts. It would say no fear equal sign. No fear equals psychopath.

We can send those shirts to Lori and Chad in prison or J.L. I guess now if we want. Okay, but what about Alex Honnold? What t-shirt do you have for him? I'm so glad you mentioned that because I specifically have a t-shirt line called the Alex Honnold collection. I'm sure you do. This t-shirt would be earmarked specifically for Alex Honnold. Because I don't know a lot of other human beings that would qualify to wear this. And the Alex Honnold collection, the T-shirt would be,

courage equals no fear plus humility. Meaning you can actually have no fear if you're Alex Honnold, but if you have humility, then you're okay. Because the humility will act as a buffer to the fear. I'd like to end tonight's dinner with a short clip by Renan Ozturk, who was a climbing partner of Alex Honnold's. They were in Alaska in 2017 where the weather was really poor, and they didn't have much of a chance to climb,

but Renan does some video work. He's not just a climber, but he's also an artist and a videographer. And this is a clip of Renan talking about the impact of Alex Honnold on him and how he is, in fact, quite the opposite of a psychopath. Going on a climbing expedition with Alex. whose mission in life is so simple, who doesn't sugarcoat anything, is like spending time with the ultimate life coach. He forces me to look more closely at who I am, what I do, and why. Alex's own solution to life's uncertainties is to spend every waking moment climbing.

But that isn't for everyone. But his example reminds me, don't ever leave your truest self behind. Sometimes when you've lost something in your life that matters, the only thing left to do is go and find it. What really strikes me about Renan's thoughts on Alex are this idea of the authentic self and how Lori and Chad are so far away from that. It's just unimaginable how these two just really never find that authentic self.

But I want to end with the thought that when you do find that authentic self, and then you lose it, it's important to go back and try to reconnect with it. Otherwise, you really lose who you are. There's a famous German theologian, his name is Paul Tillick, and he wrote a book called The Courage to Be. And Tillick's basic argument is that courage is about more than overcoming fear, and it's even about more than having humility, although those are important components of it. It's really about expressing yourself in the world in an authentic way. It's about being who you are and expressing that self in the world. And that's my aspiration for today, is that we all take the time to try to figure

out who we are and how we can matter in the world because I believe strongly that Chad and Lorry never figured that out. And hence, we're left with this tragedy. Let's all try to be a little more courageous and live from the place of authenticity. Thank you for joining us for dinner tonight. Our Facebook page is hidden a true crime podcast or you can do Facebook.com slash hidden true crime to get there. We're going to have links to some books we talked about today as well as the story of the woman who had met Alex Cox in Columbia. We'll also have a link to our Patreon there. If you would be willing to donate so we can continue doing these podcasts, it would mean so much. We are so tremendously grateful to those who have been supporting us and who are

supporting us. Thank you for your support. Our Instagram page is at Hidden True Crime. As a reminder, stay safe to wear a helmet. Don't go into portals. I'm not even sure that the fearless Alex Honnold would go into a portal, but he might. I don't know. He might. We should ask him. I think he is smart enough to not go into a portal or waste his time. with portals. He has bigger things. Like climbing El Capitan. Right. Be fearful of going into portals and listen to that fear. Embrace your fear this week.

Thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your support. As always, please share it with your friends that we have a seat for them at our dinner table as well. Until next week. Good night. Good night. Good night.