Hidden True Crime - Beyond the Veil: The Making of Lori Vallow Daybell

Episode Date: August 30, 2020

In this episode we begin to disentangle the twisted web that is Lori Vallow Daybell through a close examination of her family upbringing and dynamics. We explore the Cox family system (Lori’s family of origin) through the story of Narcissus and explain how this classic mythological tale still holds sway today. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Our Sponsors:* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Armoire and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.armoire.style* Check out Effecty and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.effecty.com* Check out Happy Mammoth and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://happymammoth.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/hidden-a-true-crime-podcast1836/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And she on occasion two or three times said to me, if Chad is Satan, he sure is a good one. So that tends to lead me to think that she wasn't 100% convinced either. That she may have doubted Chad to me. Yeah, yeah. This is Lauren Matthias. And I'm Dr. John Matthias. And what you just heard was Melanie Gibb, Lori Vallaud-Daybells. best friend during an interview with East Idaho News's Nate Eaton.

I wanted to lead with that because I think it's going to set the theme for our podcast today. Today we're going to be looking at Lori, Vallow, Daybell, and depth. I know a lot of you have been anxiously awaiting this moment. So it has arrived. Thanks for the patience. Thanks for hanging in there and waiting. Here we are. And let me tell you, this is a real tangled web that we're going to try to unravel here.

So be patient, stay with us, and we will get you to some reasonable understanding by the end, I hope. So I wanted to lead with that comment by Melanie Gibb because I think in most criminal situations that I've been involved with, there's always these moments when a major choice is made. Oftentimes, those moments involve a certain amount of self-reflection, which isn't necessarily a common element of a lot of criminal undertaking. But this is one of those moments for Lori. When I heard Lori say this, it reminded me of a moment in Shakespeare's famous play King Lear, where King Lear, in the beginning of the play, he sits down with his three daughters, and he's dividing up the kingdom, and one of his daughters refuses to play along with them. So he disinherits her, effectively.

And he's leaving, and the Earl of Kent, who's one of his best advisors, takes him aside. And the Earl of Kent says to Lear, see better Lear, let me still rebutt. remain the true blank of thine eye. And what Kent is telling Lear essentially is, why can't you see this? Why can't you see that your daughters are playing you? Why can't you see that you're making this horrendous mistake? And Lori, in that moment, has a moment of self-reflection where she thinks maybe I'm going down the wrong path. Just maybe Chad might be Satan. Right. But as in King Lear, where Kent gets banished from the kingdom, Lori doesn't see better,

and of course, the entire tragedy unfolds. I want to stay with this idea of seeing today because I think this is going to be a really important metaphor for understanding Lori. Seen or seen better, as Shakespeare says, is a really powerful metaphor throughout all great literature.

It can be a really important guiding metaphor for us today. So let me bring in another well-known myth from Greek mythology, which is also about seeing, which is the myth of Narcissus. In the parable of Narcissus, Narcissus essentially becomes smitten with his own image. He becomes smitten with himself. He spends all of his days and all of his time looking at his reflection or his image in the water in a pond.

Eventually, over time, because he never eats or sleeps or takes care of himself, Narcissus dies from the lack of any type of nurturance, either internally or externally. The reason why I want to bring this up, this myth, is because in 1994, two psychologists, Stephanie and Robert Pressman wrote a book called Narcissistic Families. And I want to start there. I want to start with narcissistic families. I think it's important to mention when I talk about this book that the conditions that the Pressman's identified as constituative of narcissistic families also can have a wider appeal and

include sociopathic families or histrionic families or borderline families. In other words, the conditions that are necessary to create a narcissistic family are going to be the same conditions that would create a sociopathic family or a histrionic family or a borderline family. And what I mean by that, is in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, there's a cluster called Cluster B of personality disorders. And in that cluster, there's four different personality disorders which are identified. The important thing to know about this cluster is that there's a lot of overlap between these different diagnoses.

It's almost like a Venn diagram. What'd you say? Yeah, right. Yeah, it's a Venn diagram. I think that's one of the criticisms of personality disorders is they're not mutually exclusive. If somebody has antisocial personality disorder, which is sometimes also referred to as sociopathy or psychopathy, and I'll talk about that a little more later, they might also have a lot of the characteristics of narcissism or histrionic personality or borderline. The Pressmans, when they wrote this book, they were specifically talking about the conditions that led to narcissistic families.

it's important to mention that because of the overlap, many of the conditions they're identifying would also apply to other types of families and also to the creation of, in many of these cases, children who have these types of personality disorders. Instead of focusing specifically on a personality disorder that Lori might have, I think it would be more useful in this case to step back and to identify what goes on and what the pressants call a narcissistic family. and then to look at that and to look at how that influenced Lori and whether, in fact, there is a diagnosis that we need to assign to her. I know there's been a lot of speculation on the groups that were involved in. A lot. A lot. That Lori is borderline or antisocial or histrionic. Or a psychopath.

Right. And even in one of the psychological evaluations that I looked at, there's some mention of these terms and these diagnoses. An evaluation referring to Lori. Right, referring to Lori's evaluation. Actually, the evaluation was of Joe Ryan. Okay, right, during their custody battle. But Lori was interviewed. So what are the conditions?

The oppressments identify three elements of narcissistic families. Let's start with the first one. The first one is what they called skewed responsibility. What they mean by that is as children get older and seek to become individuals, as they seek to differentiate themselves from their parents, The parents become threatened by that. Essentially what happens is the parents shift responsibility from raising the children to putting their own needs first. So responsibility shifts from being normal nurturing parents to essentially reversing the roles where the children become the caretakers for the parents.

Is this an example of how Colby, Lori's son, JJ and Tiley's older brother, mentioned that his mom, started treating him more like a boyfriend as he got older? Exactly. It's a role reversal. The parent should always be the parent. The child should be the child, and there shouldn't be a lot of confusion over that. Typically, one of the parents is going to have some type of personality disorder that's going to create the narcissistic family. That makes sense.

Usually, you won't see this when the children are young because basic needs are met fairly easily. This starts coming into play as children get older, and they start developing their own personalities, and they start having their own voices and opinions, that's when parents get threatened. That's when parents seek to have their children become a reflection of themselves. And that's the second condition the pressants identify. Children react and reflect parental needs so that they receive validation

through becoming some version or extension of their parents. There's that old cliche about if the acorn falls too close to the oak tree, to the mighty oak tree, that the acorn doesn't get any sunlight or nurturance and fails to grow and thrive. It's a bit like that. Let's think about the acorn not taking root because it's too close to the towering oak tree. Let's bring in Barry Cox to start this analysis. Barry L. Cox.

Barry L. Cox. Barry L. Cox is Lori's father. Barry is the oak tree. His kids are the acorns. They're not falling far from the tree. They're not taking root. So what do we know about Barry Cox? And why would he be the oak tree?

Well, let's start with the fact that Barry has been an avid, anti-government, anti-IRS advocate for many years. In 2019, he published a book. The book was actually published while the kids were missing. How the American Public can dismantle the IRS by Barry L. Cox. learn how the IRS is a criminal organization which must be abolished as a matter of law. Barry's basic argument, as far as I understand it, I don't have the patience to get through this entire book. You'll have to excuse me for that. And that says a lot because he has read Chad's books. I definitely lost a few brain cells reading Chad's book, but I think I was starting to slough off

so many brain cells from reading Barry's book that I had to stop at some point. But as far as I can tell, his essential argument is that God sets the laws and that God does not find the IRS to be a very noble or good organization. Right. That God does not believe that the IRS is an organization that benefits humankind. Here's a passage from the book. American law is unique. It is predicated upon the inspired words of God the Father, the creator of all things,

who personally appear to Moses to give the Ten Commandments as written and published in the Bible's first five books of the Old Testament. These laws were intended to peacefully govern the liberated tribes of Israel from 400 years of bondage. He then quotes Exodus chapter 3, 7 through 8. And then he goes on. The image of the most respected Old Testament prophet Moses was carved into the face and walls of the United States Supreme Courthouse in Washington, D.C. In very deed, this honored courthouse built in 1935 is a gallery of the Bible scriptures featuring the Ten Commandments, which contain the wisdom of God's laws for governing a peaceful and righteous society within the United States of America. The early patriots of the United States of America believed in God and, and in caps, Jesus Christ.

So did you notice that there's no mention of the IRS in any of that? I think that if I was writing a book on abolishing the IRS, I might consider mentioning the IRS. first paragraph or two. But no, we don't get that. So let's look at what this means. The IRS is basically a collection agency. The IRS's job, as I understand it, is to collect money from the American public, and Congress determines the rate at which that money will be collected and how it will be spent. So to me, the IRS really tries to be apolitical. Now, I'm sure many of you aren't big fans of the IRS. I know none of us probably enjoy having a fair amount of our paychecks taken out and spent by the government in a way that we have very little control over. However, I think most of us would

recognize that the purpose of the IRS is to collect money essentially to benefit the community. The community, in this case being the United States. So the broader community. In theory, the purpose of the IRS is pro-social. It's to take money to benefit others. We may not always agree with how that money spent or who the others are that are benefited, but the point is it makes us a part of the community. The very idea that you think that your chunk of earnings should not be given back to the community in any way whatsoever, at the very least, this suggests a massive amount of entitlement. And I think when you perceive the IRS as an enemy and as an organization that's trying to steal your money, you're essentially saying, I don't care about the community, I don't want to participate in the community,

I don't agree with how the community is going to spend my money. There's a huge sense of entitlement. Also, when you take on the IRS, I mean, wow, in 1997, Barry Cox sued the IRS personally. He lost, and he actually ended up having a big chunk of his assets garnished because he had refused to pay taxes. Including his house. Including his house for so many years. And he spent some time in prison. But he didn't learn a lesson. He got out and years later decided to write a book.

Right. Taunting them. That's normal. In addition to this sense of entitlement, I think it would be fair to say that there's a huge amount of grandiosity here. If you're grandiose enough to think you can take on the IRS and win, man, you're more power to you because that's not something I have. have the energy to do. Grandiosity, this idea is bringing us closer to the idea of narcissism. Grandiosity is probably one of the most important characteristics of narcissists. To take on the IRS, to not pay taxes for years, to think that the rules don't apply to you, all of these are

very antisocial ideas, all of these are narcissistic ideas. I think there's a message here that there's no limits, that the limits don't apply to him, that he can do, whatever he wants. I talked a little bit last week about the state of Arizona, pressing charges against him for distributing flyers for his law practice when he wasn't licensed to practice law. So again, this is another area where he thinks the rules don't apply to him, where he can simply practice law without a degree or a license, and that's fine because he knows more than we do. And as you pointed out the irony, he's saying, I can practice law. I can practice law without following the law.

Without, right. I can practice law without the law applying to me. So it applies to you. It doesn't apply to me. And again, grandiosity. Another thing that's interesting about Barry Cox is in the letter that Barry Cox wrote to the courts when his daughter, Stacey, was engaged in a custody battle with Steve Cope. Stacey is Lori's older sister, now deceased.

she died years ago. Barry wrote a letter to the courts. I'm going to quote him. Here's what he said. He told Steve, quote, I told him that a wife was like a delicate flower and needed to have tender love and care, that a husband was like a gardener

who needed to provide nurturing care to see the flower flourish and bear fruit. He was indifferent to my suggestions. What can we learn about Barry Cox from that particular quote? A lot. Well, I think the first thing that's apparent in that quote, is that he clearly sees himself in a very stereotypical male role.

Right. Yes. I thought that too, that he is the patriarch. He's the dominant one. If you looked at me as a delicate flower, you had to nourish. I don't know how I'd feel about that. Yeah, I can't see Lauren as a delicate flower. Well, if Lauren was a delicate flower, she might be a, what are those called the flowers that eat people? Really? That's where you're going?

I am so not editing that out. What are those flowers? In other words, your wife is not a delicate flower. A little shop of horrors. What's the name of the flower? It's a Venus fly trap. I'm a Venus fly trap, is what you're saying. Right, which is to say strong, independent, and sometimes you even bite back.

Oh, you almost saved yourself. I think that the delicate flower analogy shows that, number one. How he sees women, how he views women. How he sees women. He sees women as weak. He sees women as dependent. He sees women as needing a man to water them and nurture them and have them grow. He sees them as apparently not mobile, apparently, not independent, as stuck in one place. I think there's some misogynistic undertones to this. You think? A flower also dies without nurturing. A flower wilts. A flower fades. A flower fades. A flower needs attention. The male is the one providing that attention. The male is the one watering the flower. This is how he sees relationships.

This is how he sees his wife. Yes. She's no Venus flytrap. Right? And he sees this as a net positive. Enough that he wrote it in a custody battle. That's how positive he looks at this. I think we can also make some inferences about Janus at this point.

Janice is Lori's mother. She's married to Barry. Steve Cope in his custody filing talked about Janus being a obsessed with appearances, obsessed with weight and body image. That's an interesting observation because this suggests that Janice is very much falling into the cultural stereotype of... That delicate flower. The delicate flower.

The pretty blonde who tends to the male. Whose job is to be beautiful. She's an object that he sees as his and not her own person. Just based upon this rudimentary knowledge of Barry and John. Janice, their marriage falls into a category that I sometimes call that the Tarzan Jane marriage. The Tarzan Jane marriage is one that has very clearly defined roles. The men and the women don't step out of those roles. There's not a lot of reciprocity. The man is in charge. The man dictates the rules. The man sets the tone in the household. One of the supposed advantages of this type of

relationship is things are consistent, that the roles are known. For many couples, the Tarzan Jane works perfectly fine. In fact, I'd say that most marriages have some version of these roles, and that's perfectly fine. I think the problem comes in when the roles become too rigid. In a very religious household, for example, like the Cox's household, you're expected to follow the party line. There's no deviation from stereotypical roles. There's no disloyalty towards the basic fundamental tenant that Tarzan does certain things, Jane does other things, and those are the way you're supposed to behave. And we actually see this in some of Alex Cox's comedy routine.

There's racial stereotypes. Alex Cox, again, he comes up a lot. He's Lori's older brother. He's now dead. He played a role in the children's death. Here we see Alex playing on the idea of stereotypes that would be characteristic of narcissistic families with rigid worldviews, including racial stereotypes. So while I was in jail,

I also had a religious experience. I found Jesus. I found Jesus, Iola, Jesus Jimenez, and Jesus Garcia. They were all in my cell, and they all shared a bunk. I found out Christmas is wrong. Jesus was not born in Bethlehem. He was born in El Salvador. He was not a car.

He was a roofer, a Tyler, and a landscaper. This routine's interesting because I don't think Alex for one minute questions the inappropriateness of his jokes here. I think he just takes it for granted that this is how people see different cultures, that this is how people see the world. This is similar to Barry Cox and the sense that Barry Cox takes it for granted that women are flowers and that other races are inferior. or that perhaps the world has more complexity than they imagined. In these types of families, they're mal-dominated, they're patriarch, there's probably a lot of expectations about following the rules. There's another irony here, too, about Barry Cox,

because he's a very devout Mormon, apparently, my guess is that he's tithing, he's giving money to the church, which is the same concept as the IRS. It's just that he's choosing to give it to a different organization and have his money spent in a different way. So I think it's ironic that there's this hypocrisy about not wanting to support the United States, but being willing to support the Mormon church. Right. And that's us guessing.

We don't really know because a lot of the things that they claim to do as Mormons, they also didn't do. So I don't totally know that he was a tithe payer. Whether he's tithing or not, I still think it's hypocritical. In the sense that if he is tithing, he's giving his money to an organization without objective. and if he's not tithing, then he's not a devout Mormon. I think hypocritical sums up the Cox family. And inconsistent.

There's some other interesting things we know about Barry Cox. We know that he was arrested and charged with soliciting a prostitute back in 94-95. That was also in Steve Cope's statement. We know that he walked into Steve Cope's place of employment and in front of a third party assaulted him. Steve Cope was married to Stacey. This was during their custody battle. Melanie Polowski is their daughter. He pinned him up against the wall.

He was charged with assault. After he questioned Steve Cope's integrity, he then beat him up. Well, even better yet, he read him scripture, and then he beat him up. If you want to know Barry Cox, let me read that. This is from Steve Cope's filing with the court for a protection order against Barry Cox on August 8, 1995. He says, Barry Cox visited my place of employment. He wanted to discuss the divorce proceedings, between his daughter, Stacy, and myself.

He'd been quoting me scripture and questioning my integrity. It seemed odd to me since he was recently charged for solicitation of prostitution. Barry then claimed to show me divorce papers by ripping my shirt open and ramming 50 pages or more into my shirt. He then grabbed my shirt with his fists and shoved me against the wall. He had his fists and my shirt around my neck. My assistant called 9-11. Barry then left and was cited for assault and domestic violence. And so there was a witness to this as well.

Yeah, there was a witness. So if you want to know Barry Cox, in addition to everything we've talked about, think about the notion of somebody walking into a public place where you work, quoting scripture, and then assaulting you. Think about the contradiction. Do you think this is someone who is a consistent parent? Do you think this is someone who is going to see his children for who they are? Do you think this is someone who's going to acknowledge his kids' individuality?

Do you think this is someone that would actually search for his missing grandkids? He hasn't said a word about his missing grandchildren, not even since their bodies were found buried in Chad Daybell's yard. So now we're getting closer to this idea of narcissistic families. As children begin to become more autonomous as they grow up, the parents, in this case, Barry and Janice, become more insistent upon having... having them reflect their needs, having them mirror their needs, they provide invalidating responses to them often.

So in other words, when the child asks for something, the parent will often deny that. When the child discusses feeling something or thinking something, the parent will usually twist that to reflect something of their own needs. So the result of this is the emotional needs of the children become neglected. The children become vacuous. They become empty. their selves become lost. If you become nothing more than a reflection of your parental image,

think of the myth of Narcissist again. He sees his image. But what if Narcissus looked into that pond and saw his parents and only his parents? Then he would become their reflection. That's what's going on in the Cox household. These children are becoming a reflection of their parental needs. They're not really becoming their own persons. So in other words, their identities are based on

their parents' needs. Exactly. As a matter of survival and as a matter of getting their own needs met, they need to reflect back their parents' needs, their parents' desire to be seen in a certain way. And that's especially true when we're talking about a narcissist or a sociopath. And let me make it clear at this point, too, this is speculation. This is based upon the best available evidence I have. It's based on facts we have. It's based on documents. But it's still, speculation. I want to make that really clear. I am not diagnosing. I'm not diagnosing here. I'm simply saying this seems like a reasonable hypothesis. These seem like reasonable ideas, speculations, but this still is speculation. So that's a big caveat. More information may come out. We may learn a lot more about

Barry and Janice and the Cox's as trial looms. So all of this is tentative. All this can be adjusted down the road and I want that to be clear. My analysis is based on what I know. This case is ongoing. Information is ongoing. As long as we're talking about diagnoses, another interesting tidbit that came out of by Barry Cox was in Steve Cope's custody statement. He said that Stacy, the oldest daughter, had described that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. And that's fascinating. And by the way, schizophrenia is not inconsistent with a personality disorder. You can be a narcissist and a schizophrenic. That would not be a pleasant combination. No. But you can be multiple, you can receive multiple diagnoses. So let's assume for the moment that there's some truth to that. I mean, I don't know.

I'm just basing this on Steve's statement, but it's interesting to speculate his paranoia and some of his observations that seem at times completely untethered from reality might be schizophrenia. The only way I could actually diagnose these things, by the way, is if I were to get in and do some intense testing and met him and met him in person if I did some interviews. Again, this is speculation, but it doesn't seem tremendously far-fetched. And one thing John said when he was going over the documents when I walked in, he said, you know, the only person that really seems to have a good grasp of what's going on is Steve Cope. Right. Thanks, Steve. Steve has stayed quiet throughout this entire ordeal with his daughter and ex-family, the Cox's. But Steve, we just want to give you a

shout out if by chance you might ever listen, you've got to grasp on reality. And I think Steve's custody affidavit was probably the most accurate and rational assessment of this family I've come across. I think there were tremendous insights into that, which is probably why he received custody of Melanie. Yes, he did. At the end of this, he received custody. And then, of course, Melanie found her Cox family years later, was all of a sudden in a cult, and here we are today. When you become a reflection of parental needs, what happens is that your thoughts and feelings are often buried, that you don't develop independent thoughts, you don't develop an autonomous identity, and you struggle to feel emotions because emotions are not validated in the home. One of the things I've seen a lot of,

and this is consistent with some research, but not a lot. It's more based on clinical lore, is the idea that in narcissistic families, a lot of times the family members are indulged materially, but deprived emotionally. And on that note, I wanted to read another part of Barry Cox's statement. This is from Barry's response, August 14, 1995 to Steve Cove's custody affidavit. Barry says, quote, during the period of their marriage, I had taken Steve, Stacey, and Melanie on vacations to Texas and Las Vegas, and have gone with them on vacations to Hawaii. I have often bought their airline tickets, rooms, food, and always whatever incidental expenses they have. have had. We have taken them with us to Disneyland, Nottsbury Farm, the zoo, miniature golf,

movies, water skiing, and out to horse farms. I always believe that we had a close and loving relationship until after Steve left Stacey. This statement by Barry is interesting to me on a number of levels. Number one, it shows quite clearly he values the material part. Well, and that's what love is to him, right? Look what I do for them. I spend money on them. But there's no, there's no, there's a There's nothing in here at all of any type of emotional. Nurturing at all. Nurturing or a notional connection. There's nothing in here.

Would you rather spend the day at Disneyland or would you rather have some type of emotional nurturance from your parents? I hope it's the latter. Maybe it's not from everyone else. Well, Barry Cox doesn't seem to think so. Barry Cox apparently thinks that Disneyland and Nottsbury Farm are sufficient substitutes from responsible parenting. You know, this is another area where we see this idea of a narcissistic family, where we see this idea of material things replacing the emotional needs. Well, and that's a lot about control as well. When you have a narcissistic family, you're going to be more loyal to the person buying you gifts.

It's almost like an act of control. If you do what I say and stay in line, you will receive A, B, C, and D. And if you don't, and if you decide to divorce my daughter, then we will make your life a living hell. And that's another feature of narcissistic families. There's something going on that family therapists call enmeshment. Emashment means there's no boundaries. It means that the family members don't know where one person begins and the other ends, that there's just a lot of confusion and chaos and identity diffusion and a lack of boundaries. We'll talk about this more when we talk about some of the sexual problems.

this family. Stay tuned. When parental needs become of paramount importance and the self gets lost, there's another interesting thing that happens. That is usually at some point when the child recognizes that in some ways they've sacrificed themselves to their parents, a lot of times anger starts to seep in. You'll start seeing a little bit of acting out. You'll start seeing angry outbursts.

You'll start seeing some anger. And now we're getting closer to Lori, right? This is Lori. This show is supported by Odu. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up, and it gets complicated and confusing. Odu solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odu is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way.

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So Charles Vallow was married to Lori Vallow for nearly 15 years before he was murdered. Before he was married to Lori, he was married to Cheryl Wheeler and had two sons. That's who Cheryl Wheeler is. So Cheryl, in a court document filed to try to get custody of her kids and take them out of the Vallow household. And take them out of the Vallow household. Cheryl talks about the dramatic fights that would occur between Charles and Lori. She talked about just these crazy, massive spectacles. In one case, she talked about Charles was driving the car and Lori reached over and kept grabbing his arm and trying to pull him off the steering wheel, that one of her kids thought that the car was going to crash, the child was afraid for their life, they were screaming

at each other. You see this incredible anger and rage that Lori has. It's not hard to imagine this. Knowing her father and her family. So that's another element of an narcissistic family. When the self becomes displaced by parental needs, the self still wants to find some type of validation, some type of recognition. That's a major part of Lori's personality is this attention-seeking part. She's in beauty pageants. Which is also what her parents want her to be. She fits kind of the classic female stereotype, but she just can't stop getting enough attention.

It's never enough. Is that why she's had five marriages? That would speak to her intimacy problems, which is a characteristic of narcissistic families. because the self is so buried behind the parents' needs, because the self is empty, there becomes a tremendous need for external validation. And what I mean by that is in the absence of a self with any substance, the self will naturally fill in the void

with outside influences. And in the case of Lori, it's clear what that is. It's religion. And that's true for this entire family, for the most part, that religion was the one element that filled the void. This is particularly interesting to consider with Lori because Lori seems to me to be a person who needs religion as a substitute for a conscience. You're actually answering one of our listeners' questions right now. She left this on Facebook.

They wonder how all the religiousness fits in with Lori's narcissism, narcissism being her term. And there you go. Religion becomes the mechanism through which the loss of self, the void of the self can be filled. In the absence of an inner self or an inner world, we're going to fill that void, or Lori will fill that void with outside influences. In her case, that would be men, that would be religion, that might be sex, that would be money, material possessions. Chad Debo? Chad Debel. The irresistible nature of Chad Daybell.

Will we talk about that later? Why the attraction to Chad Daybell? I think we're getting close to it now. Okay. All of us want to know. What in the world did she see in Chad Daybilt? I don't think she saw the beauty of narcissus. I think she saw someone who proclaimed himself to be a prophet.

And I think that was sufficient. That was all she needed. The notion that someone, someone who lacked any sense of power as a child, because she grew up with such a dominant father, is someone who at some level would, be seeking omnipotence. And I think Chad Daybell offered her that vision of omnipotence. When he offered to bring her on as his partner in the New Jerusalem and he anointed her a goddess, I think that was so compelling to her. A gatherer of the 144,000. Right. Well, not just a gatherer, his partner. Right. Right. This obviously didn't

have anything to do with physical appearances. This had to do with the promise of something that she longed for, which was connection to a god and connection to omnipotence. Her father probably offered some of that, but it was always, it was always howl. Well, she would have never been a partner with her dad either. Right, exactly. In fact, probably the biggest defense mechanism you'll see in sociopaths is the need for omnipotin control. That's also true of borderline personality disorder too.

The biggest defense mechanism is omnipotin control. And the reason that's a defense mechanism is because omnipotin control allows, us to feel power that we don't normally feel, that we seek to control the world, to manipulate the world, to get what we want when we know deep down that it's a fiction. So Chad, you think she knew deep down? It was a fiction? I think she felt empty. I think she felt weak. I think she felt vulnerable. I think we all feel that. I think she felt shame. I think she was covering all that up with her deeply religious beliefs and her materialism and her beauty queen stuff. She was seeking to assert herself in a way that made her feel important and special and omnipotent.

And Chad Daybell, more than anything else, that's what Chad Daybo offered her. He offered her immortality and omnipotence. Okay. And not the best-looking package. This whole situation actually reminds me a good deal of the French play Serenot de Bergerac written in 1897. The story is about a French nobleman who has an unusually large nose because of that he's concerned that he will never find love that no woman would be capable of loving him so he so he wooes his prospective love interest roxan through poetry and music and language in general i think

this current situation with chad is actually if serenot de bergerac was Mormon and lived today and he was a doomsday prepper who wrote a good deal of fiction about the post apocalyptic world that would be Chad Daybell. So would Chad's version of poetry then be his pickup line, hey, we were married in past lives? Probations. Right, right. Probations. Got to get the terminology right.

And it's not reincarnation. It's probation. Right. And how bizarre is that? How would you like to be in a probation? If Chad told me that, I'd probably punch him, not want to then have an affair with him. But also, and let's talk about that.

What about her materialism? You know, she lived in this fancy house. She dated, by all accounts, good-looking men. She cared about those things. Are you saying that really all he needed to do was woo her with domsday preaching and past probations? Quick observation, by the way, the punching part. That's the Venus fly trap. I would say never underestimate the power of fantasy.

Remember that Lori encountered Chad's writing. as early as 215, maybe earlier, and she became a huge fan of his, which meant she had a tremendous amount of time to develop fantasies about who this person was and how important he was and what a deity he was. When I think about the role and influence of fantasy in people's lives, it's just enormous.

I think in this case, Serenot de Bergerac was able to divert attention away from his looks through his words. I think something similar is happening here, that Lori was able to create this immense fantasy of someone who was a god or godlike, and that really appealed to her. Another element of narcissistic families is what the pressmen call intimacy deficits. That should be no surprise.

When you grow up in a narcissistic family, you struggle to develop lasting relationships because you've grown up essentially in the shadow of a dominant parent, in this case, Barry Cox. you probably have an insecure attachment because you haven't received the normal validating responses that children should receive from their parents, validating their emotions, validating their thoughts, validating their interests and their independence. As an aside, there's a well-known researcher at the University of Washington. His name is John Gottman.

Gottman did a study in the late 90s where he looked at the healthiest children and he found that the healthiest families engaged in what he called emotion coaching. So what exactly is emotion coaching? Emotion coaching is when the parents assist their children in understanding emotions. It's that simple. To get more specific, Gottman defines it as the process of assisting children to identify, acknowledge, and express emotions. So that definitely didn't happen in the Cox household. Did they have emotions besides anger?

Well, I think they would even pretend they didn't have anger. True. All was well in the Cox household. Look the other way, so they say. Gottman essentially found that the healthiest kids in terms of school adjustment, the widest social networks, the best grades, the most successful students came from emotion coaching families. In the Cox family, it doesn't seem like there was any emotion coaching. In that sense, most of these kids probably had insecure attachments. We talked about attachment in our second episode.

Episode two. I'd refer you back to episode two. And maybe if you want more details on attachment, please go revisit that. I don't think it's unusual that both Chad and Lori were insecurely attached. The Pressman's point out these families often have very little trust. The children at some level don't trust the parents because they know the parents are dominating. They know that they're tending to their parents needs. And they're going to also learn how to manipulate their parents.

Is this where Lori got her manipulation skills? Melanie Gibbs spoke of Lori's anger. others have as well. We've heard her get angry on the phone during that recorded call with Melanie Gibb. Is there a witness? And he's a family father gave that Joseph Smith by himself in the grove with their witness? No, but they had it later with other people. Yes or no. I'm sorry? Is that in the scriptures? Yes or no? Never had any idea that you would be the person. I'm asking questions. Yeah, the manipulation is a function of attempting to feel loved. Yeah, this is a really interesting question because manipulation serves different functions for different types of personality disorders.

In fact, in the DSM, the differential diagnosis between a borderline personality and an antisocial personality is power. A sociopath will manipulate to get his or her way to get power, whereas a borderline personality disorder will manipulate to get their emotional needs met. It's not clear to me which or both apply. Could both apply? Is that a possibility? Could both apply? You can have multiple personality disorder diagnoses. Really?

I am learning this for the first time. So yes, it's possible. Well, that makes me think she was both. And I can say that because I'm not the psychologist who has to worry about diagnosing someone. I'm going to say Lauren's opinion only. Perhaps she was both. Let's dig a little deeper into the Cox family. I want to get back to this idea of scene.

better. I think it's interesting to imagine that Janice, who was obsessed with appearances, never really saw Lori. What she saw was a daughter who appeared to be pretty and slender and basically fit the stereotypical feminine role that Janice always wanted in a daughter. Listen to what Janice said in an interview with CBS when her two grandchildren were missing and nobody knew where they were. I know the truth about Lori. I know how loving she is. I did not see any great change in Lori. And she couldn't crack enough to do harm to her children. I've never seen anyone who put their whole life and soul into a child like she did with each one of those kids. Making a statement like that is totally consistent with a narcissistic family and the sense

that what she perceives to be the person she knows is actually nothing more than an extension of herself. What she's saying is she thinks she knows someone that's like her, but she doesn't really know who her daughter is because she never cared to look. Not to mention in the same interview, she then says or claims that she spoke to JJ on the phone, Tober, we know now he was dead by then. She was straight out lying. That type of line is consistent with the narcissistic family also in the sense that these families are amashed and they'll do anything to cover for each other. They will lie, they will violate the boundaries of others, they will cover up, they will do whatever it takes to protect their children if that's what it takes because their children are often extensions of themselves. And so in some ways, they don't see this as a lie. They see this as just normal business.

This is the normal business of a narcissistic family protecting itself. Lying to hide family secrets. Right, exactly. Covering up secrets, bearing secrets, closing ranks to the world. that others can't see them for who they are. And listen to what she says about her son Alex in this same interview. We already know at the time of the interview that Alex spent time in prison for assaulting Lori's husband, Joe Ryan, and that he shot and killed Lori's husband Charles Vallot just

months prior. Now we know Alex's phone pinged on Chad Daybell's property during the time law enforcement believe the children were being buried. So how does Alex's bomb describe him? Listen to this. is the most laid-back person. He's been funny his whole life. He was protective of, very protective of Kobe and Tiley, very protective.

He's always owned up to anything he's done wrong. He certainly wasn't perfect. But he doesn't have the intensity of a hitman. He doesn't have the desire to be hitman. He doesn't think that death solves anything. So when you listen to Janus talk about her son, Alex Cox, do you think she has a good grasp? of her son outside of her narrowly defined expectations for him?

Or do you think that he's a reflection of what she wants to see? And I think that's also true of Tiley. I don't think Lori ever saw Tiley. I think Lori saw Tiley as someone who didn't fit the stereotype. And that she kept trying to push Tiley back into that mold. And I think that was probably a big part of some of their conflicts. I can't imagine being Tiley, who from all accounts and for what I've seen and read was, smart, thoughtful, fun, had so much inside of her trying to please her mother. And we have documents

that show that there was great concern for Tiley's welfare in this family. Tiley's friend's mother has said that she saw Lori, body shame Tiley. With all that Tiley had going for her to hear that on her Pinterest account, half of it was diet stuff. It's heartbreaking to me. It goes to show that they really didn't see her for who she was. Right. And that Tiley was also following this narcissistic familial trend towards meeting her mother's needs and not hers. That she too was becoming a reflection of Lori and not herself. That Lori wasn't giving her the freedom to grow and become her own person.

And she was trying so hard from all accounts. She was trying so hard to be her own person. That gives me a good segue to talk about Stacey. Stacey was the oldest. Stacey was a type 1 diabetic. Lori's oldest sister. She passed away at age 31 in 1998, I believe. Stacey, too, had a number of health problems.

Steve Cope brought this up in his custody paperwork. He talked about how she refused to take her insulin. She refused to eat sugar. She believed that germs were infecting everything. Janice denied in 1995 when Stacey was 67 pounds. that she was anorexic. Janice denied that there were any emotional issues with Stacy whatsoever, in spite of the fact that multiple doctors that Steve named in the paperwork,

all agreed. She needed a serious psychiatric help. They all agreed that she was anorexic. They all agreed that this was a problem, but not the Cox's. Janice said in the Steve Cope documents, and this is Janice writing now, Steve agreed with me on the phone that all of Stacey's problems had a physiological basis associated with her diabetes and were not emotionally induced. Janice was heavily invested in the idea that her daughter's problems had no emotional component,

which also would be consistent with the narcissistic families, inability to face the fact that most of their problems are emotional. When Stacey was struggling and weighed 67 pounds and Janice and Barry were denying that anorexia had anything to do with it, they actually made a comment. Steve had talked to Stacey and she told them, this. This is Steve writing about a conversation he had with Stacy. She called me on the telephone and she said words to the effect of Steve. I have done everything that I can. I've talked to Barry and Janice, her parents and we all agree it is my time to go. Imagine that your daughter has

anorexia and your son-in-law is sounding the alarm on this. He's telling you that she's not taking insulin because she has diabetes too, that she's not eating properly, that she's doing everything she can to avoid taking care of her health. So in addition to the diabetes, she's clearly anorexic, she clearly has a massive eating disorder that she's denied. And you go to the family and the family says, well, you know, too bad, time to go. They would rather say it was likely her time to go or God's plan that she go now than to admit that she has an eating disorder. That She has an emotional issue. That scares them more than her passing away.

Now that I've spent about 50 minutes leading up to this moment, here's the point I want to make. Here's my theme for today. And that is, wait for it, that Stacey's tragic situation is actually the metaphor for the Cox family, which is while her body was starving for food and nourishment, I would argue even more strongly and tragically that what she was really really. starving for was emotional nourishment. I think that's what was lacking in the Cox family. This is really all about emotional nourishment. And it's about being seen and acknowledged. And heard. And heard for who you are as a child growing up. That Lori, like her sister,

Sacey, I don't know if Lori had any eating disorders. I think it's probable. We don't know for sure based on what we know about this case. But there's no question in my mind. The Lori II struggled with emotional nourishment. Alex Cox struggled with emotional nourishment. The underlying theme is in narcissistic families, parents predominate, their needs predominate, children are secondary, they don't get their emotional needs met,

they're starving emotionally, they just want some attention, they lose their sense of self, they typically turn to outside sources for validation, such as religion or extreme religious beliefs. They struggle to form intimate relationships. And in the end, they come up empty. In the end, they steal their dead sister's credit card. That's what Alex Cox did when Stacey died.

He was found using his dead sister's credit card. How does this apply to Alex, by the way? Well, for one thing, we know that he didn't have any significant relationships until he married Zulima at the end. Which we question dubious in terms of why he, married her. I guess we don't know the motivation, but it hardly seems like it was based on mutual affection. Right. Zulema and Alex got married two weeks before Alex's death. On the 911 call, Zulema's son referred to Alex as his mom's boyfriend. Older male here named Alex. He's just

passed out here on my bathroom. Okay. Do you know him? No, it's my mother's boyfriend. Alex's last name? I don't know. You don't know his name? No. So even her own son didn't even know that she'd married him. And clearly the Coxes didn't know either. Here's Janice. It was hard to hear about Alex from the police. We didn't know had gotten married. We didn't know he'd moved back to Arizona.

Also, their wedding officiator in Las Vegas has spoken up and said that the two seemed non-emotional about the entire affair. So really, Alex's only significant relationship is, a total mystery. Weren't you saying that Zulema had been married multiple times before? Yeah, I think seven, six maybe eight, six, seven, eight around there. She was an energy healer who was part of the cult. It was Alex's first marriage and not even his family knew. We know that Alex took a number of trips to South America to meet Latina women.

And also in one of Alex's comedy routines, he jokes about assaulting Joe Ryan. as if that's material for a comedy routine. Joe Ryan is Tiley's biological father. Not only does he joke about it, he clearly doesn't grasp that he did anything wrong. You ever had something that you knew was the right thing to do, but it turns out that later on it was a felony. This is a true story.

I thought that my ex-brother-in-law was a pedophile, so I took a stun gun and I discharged it right in his nuttack. And in Texas, that's a... felony. I'm thinking, you know, maybe I'll get a handshake or a parade or something. So apparently Alex Cox thinks that assault is funny, which is ironic because his father, Barry, who had earlier assaulted Steve, also seems to think that assault is perfectly acceptable, or even maybe humorous. I can't help but laugh. Alex is the most laid-back person. He said, I tasered a pedophile. And so he said, he said,

I'm willing to admit it. This obviously is a family that doesn't see a problem with violence. They're self-righteous. They take the moral high ground. And within all of that, you have multiple instances of violence and assault, consistent with our theme of Barry being a dominant figure and antisocial and grandiose. We see similar qualities in Alex, undoubtedly. A lot of people have been asking if you think that Lori was saying,

actually abused. I think we're going to have to save that for next week. Is dinner coming to an end? I think our dinner's coming to an end. I want to return to the story of Narcissus, and I want to talk about the other part of that story that's often neglected. And that's the story of Echo. Echo, who followed Narcissists everywhere, had no ability to speak. So the name Echo is suggestive of that, that Echo could only pair it back words from other people. Echo loved Narcissus. She wanted nothing more than to have Narcissus tell her that he loved her. And one day he did that.

And she parroted back the words, I love you, hoping that he would hear and he would acknowledge her. But Narcissus did not hear. Her words fell on deaf ears, and she died of unrequited love. And I think when you add in Echo to the story, it becomes a beautiful metaphor for the children of narcissistic families. The children are like Echo. They just want to be heard.

They have no voice. They parrot back their parents' words. They just want to be heard. But they're not. And when they're not heard, they too can die of unrequieted love. All they want is love. Let me tell a story about an inmate I was evaluating a couple of years ago. This inmate was on death row.

I was asked to evaluate him because the courts wanted to know whether the death penalty should apply or whether he should just get life in prison. Two weeks before I was assigned this evaluation from the courts, this inmate had attempted to kill the previous evaluator. He took his pen and he shoved it into his jugular and he almost killed him, except for the fact that one of the guards came in and stopped him. But the psychologist was harmed. He was hospitalized.

They reassigned another evaluator, which was me. The courts sent me a number of letters letting me know the risks and I decided to do it because I felt like I could. They wanted someone else to take a look at them. They sent me in six months later. I had multiple guards standing outside of the room. I did something in this evaluation with this death rowing made that I've never done before. And that is every visitation room in every prison or jail has what's known as a panic button.

So right by the door is a button that if there's an emergency, the evaluator or the visitor will press that and somebody will come in immediately, especially if there's a guard station outside, which isn't always the case. I decided in this situation I was going to send a message of trust right away. And the best way I can think of doing that was to sit on the opposite end of the table from the panic button. So when they brought the inmate in, I was already in the room. I was sitting on the other end of the table away from the panic button. And he was seated next to the panic button. That's the only time I've ever done that. I believe it had a really significant impact because he came in.

He knew immediately what was happening. And I think it put him at ease. We both knew during that evaluation that the outcome was going to be a negative one. We both knew that his options were best case, life in prison. I ended up listening to him very deeply. I ended up paying attention to him at a very profound level. I don't think I did a tremendous amount of talking during that interview. But there was a lot of crying.

I remember he spent the last hour and a half in tears talking about his childhood, talking about things he had never talked about with anyone else. Three months later, I received a letter from this inmate. Thanking me for listening, thanking me for being the one person, including family, that he could reveal his story to, that he had never done that before, and that he felt better, even though he knew he was going to die in prison, and he felt more complete. The moral of this story is that he's echo, and I'm listening profoundly. It doesn't matter what he's done. As a human being, I still have an obligation to listen to that story as best I can and to try to understand him as best I can. can, even though we both know the outcome's going to be negative. This also brings me back to my lead

today about seeing better. I want to end today with the idea that there's a lot of echoes in the world. There's a lot of people that don't feel like they're being seen or heard and that if somehow we can take the time to see just a little better and to hear a little more deeply someone's story and their pain, that we can probably avoid a lot of future problems. I really feel like if Chad and Lori had seen a little better and if they had heard a little more clearly and if they as children had been seen better and if they as children had been listened to more deeply that you and i wouldn't be doing this podcast right we we would have nothing to say because they would be different people and they wouldn't have done what they did and jj and tylee would still be here with us today and we could

have avoided this entire tragedy and so my aspiration is let's all try to take a little bit of time to see a little better and to hear a little more deeply and maybe that can change someone for the better that will resonate for generations and generations to come we still have a lot more to say about lorry ballo in fact we received a lot of questions tonight and there were some questions that we planned on answering tonight that we did not this is the beginning i just wanted to introduce the idea of narcissistic families and to kind of the tone for what's to follow. There's so many areas we need to cover with Lori.

Next week, we're going to be looking more deeply at personality disorders and how they apply to Lori or if they apply to Lori. And then in another episode, we're going to look at some of the elements that came together for her to get to the point where she was able to murder her kids. Which is what everyone is grasping to understand or make sense of how, how, how could a mother murder her kids. We're pointing out of few elements now. There's a lack of empathy. There's a lack of emotional connection. There's a willingness to sacrifice everything for this feeling of omnipotence. We're going to be talking about the idea of terrorism and how it applies here. There's a lot of paths we're

going to go down. Setting the foundation. We're setting the foundation with the narcissistic family. I want to thank April Parker for helping us get some of those documents specifically, the custody battle between Steve and Stacey Cope. April runs the Facebook group, Find Justice, Tiley and JJ. We also want to thank Annie Cushing, Tiley Ryan's, and for her relentless pursuit of information that has also helped us. And we want to thank all of you for sharing this podcast with all of your friends. We had 10,000 downloads this last week.

We're so grateful for all of you who are sharing with your friends, and leaving us reviews. We want to be able to keep doing this. So thank you. We're really energized by all the positive feedback, and we're very grateful and humbled. If you haven't yet, like our Facebook page,

Hidden a True Crime podcast, and our Instagram page at Hidden True Crime, we actually have a YouTube channel now, Hidden True Crime, so you can go follow us on that channel. We'll post the podcast there, as well as some other videos soon. So as always, I want to say, stay safe, wear a helmet, please try not to fall into a portal.

And if you're ever questioning whether someone you're hanging out with could possibly be Satan, but maybe, maybe not. Listen to that thought. If you have a moment of self-reflection where you think you're being deceived by Satan, you probably are being deceived by Satan. Go with that. Yeah, go with your gun on that one. Until next time.

We'll keep a seat open for you. For next week, good night. Good night. This episode is sponsored by Marathon Sports. Runners know the feeling. That moment when the shoe disappears, your stride feels smooth, your breathing settles in,

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