Hidden True Crime - BEYOND THE VEIL: The Secrets of Lori Vallow Daybell, PART 2

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

Lori Vallow Daybell has been convicted of murdering her two children, but right before her trial began in April, Hidden hosts John and Lauren Matthias sat down to ask the question many have been wondering: Did Lori change before she commited her crimes, or is this who Lori Vallow has always been? This is PART TWO of a TWO PART Episode exploring Lori Vallow Daybell's mind. A forensic psychologist and journalist (who are husband and wife) explore the inner workings of Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow Daybell's minds, as well as the hidden motivations driving a series of inexplicable murders in 2019. While Lauren attended Lori's trial and plans to attend her sentencing in July of 2023, the hosts continue interviewing and investigating what's Hidden, just as they have been for three years. You can get caught up by listening to our full 'Beyond the Veil" season. LAUREN MATTHIAS worked as an anchor and reporter for ABC, NBC, and FOX News in Boise, Idaho Salt Lake City, Utah. She spent a decade reporting on a diverse range of topics from high profile crimes and criminals to Presidential visits. Most recently, she reported for Salt Lake City’s ABC affiliate News4Utah and in 2015 she received the Idaho State Broadcaster’s Association Best Reporter award and has been reporting with News Nation throughout the trial. She is the producer and editor of the Hidden True Crime Podcast along with her husband Dr. John Matthias, a forensic psychologist. DR. JOHN MATTHIAS is a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist with 30 years’ experience in both clinical and forensic work. He serves as an expert witness for the federal government and has consulted on numerous high-profile cases for District Attorney’s offices and defense attorneys in several states. In the forensic area, Dr. Matthias has developed expertise in personality assessments, hidden behavioral motivations, complex trauma and criminal psychology. In the clinical realm, he has worked with numerous victims. He received his Master’s degree in Marriage, Family and Child counseling, as well his doctorate degree, from the University of Southern California.  Dr. Matthias graduated with honors in philosophy from Princeton University, and he won the prestigious McCosh Thesis prize while there. In high school he graduated valedictorian from a large public high school in Chicago where he was chosen to participate in a ground-breaking valedictory study that continues to this day.  Dr. Matthias is an adjunct assistant professor in the University of Nevada Las Vegas clinical psychology doctoral program. He supervises UNLV doctoral students on forensic assessments, clinical case formulation, and various therapeutic approaches to clinical work. Contact them at [e-mail] WEBSITE: https://hiddentruecrime.com/ TO SUPPORT: https://www.patreon.com/hiddentruecrime https://paypal.me/hiddentruecrime https://cash.app/$hiddenTruecrime. DISCLAIMER: The views of our guests/interviewees, do not reflect the views of Hidden True Crime. 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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John and I are doing this Beyond the Vale episode. Thank you for being here because we have a lot to cover in part two of Lori Valo and her secrets. So thank you for joining us. Let's begin with our typical disclaimer. I want to make it known that this is speculation. These are my opinions. This podcast and this video are intended for educational purposes. is they are not official court proceedings or they don't have anything to do with official

court proceedings. So this is purely speculation. I want to point out that both Chad and Lori are innocent until proven guilty. Let's just do a quick summary of what we talked about previously for those who weren't able to catch it or see it. And so I want to start with, I talked about juries and how they evaluate evidence. And I mentioned a book called Anchored narratives, the psychology of criminal evidence. It's by Willem Wagner. He's a Dutch psychologist, now deceased, but I mentioned that I thought this book is outstanding and it's well out of print by now, which is amazing to me because I think every lawyer should read this or at least every lawyer that's in the courtroom because it really does provide, I think, the best depiction of

how juries and human beings interpret evidence. And just to summarize their argument or his argument, he argues essentially that juries interpret evidence based on stories and narratives. So juries will look at the most compelling, coherent, and plausible story that is told by their defense and the prosecution. And then they will look and evaluate how well the evidence fits that storyline. So when he says anchored narratives, he's talking about a story that's anchored and anchors a reference point, but a story that's anchored by evidence. And so, So, like, I think of the Murdoch trial where Paul's video was such an anchor. Paul's video was so critical.

And the defense and the prosecution both had different storylines for interpreting it. And so the jury, it took the jury essentially less than two hours to deliberate. They obviously thought the prosecution storyline was more compelling, which was that Alec was there when Paul recorded the video. There was no vigilante. And so the prosecution did an excellent job of really framing the story on that video and then providing a compelling narrative as to why and how Alec, based on that evidence, would have committed these murders. I think it's really important to point out then that what Wagonar argues is that juries are not these rational creatures who sit in the jury box. They're actually quite emotional and they're swayed more by narratives and storylines than they are by facts. Facts matter, but facts within the context of narratives. And I think so that's, so I think when we're looking at a trial like Daibel, it's really important to understand last time I called them the main arguments, but I could also say the main storylines or the main narratives, how the defense is using them, how the prosecution is using them, how the evidence being presented is trying to anchor those particular.

storylines. So that's going to be really important. It'll be interesting to see what evidence, what calls, what videos, what texts, what each side uses to really tell the better story, or at least in the case of the defense, a lot of times a defense just has a test to tell a competitive story that introduces sufficient reasonable doubt to cast into question the story that the prosecution is presenting. When I think of like the Melanie Gibb call, for example, I think that's probably going to be something that the prosecution will try to use as a reference point and to try to use as an anchor for their story to show that both Chad and Lori knew that the children were missing. And that they, right, because one of the issues here, I think in this trial is going to be who knew what.

If Chad is going to argue in his trial that he doesn't know that Lori is attempting to harm people, then he's not culpable. And if Lori argues the same, you know, last time we talked about the idea of breaking bad, if Lori, for example, argues that or her attorneys argue that she basically meets Chad, she breaks bad, she becomes this entirely different person, and that somehow Chad is making these violent decisions behind her back, or maybe he's communicating with Alex Cox, who he sees is one of his disciples to carry out his mission and Lori doesn't know, then that's important. So the Melanie Gibb call would be an anchor of sorts, I think, because it shows that

Chad and Lori are both communicating about what's occurring, and they seemingly both know that the children are missing and why the children are missing. And so, right, that's an important piece of evidence. Given that and given the fact that people are going to see various arguments here and various storylines about what's happening. I basically said that Chad Daybell drives the entire drama here, the entire narrative because his system of light and dark and his idea of zombies is what, in the end, leads to the murders. Everybody in this story that's labeled or identified as a zombie ends up dead. I compare it a little bit to an analogy would be Matthew Coleman, who, for those of you

who don't know, we've talked about Matthew Coleman or our Patreon, but Matthew Coleman, murdered his two young children. It's such a heartbreaking tragedy. I mean, so is this one. They all are. But Matthew Coleman is a surfer who believes that he did believe, I don't know if he still does. I think he may have changed a little bit in prison, but he believes that there are alien human hybrids out there who have reptilian or lizard DNA combined with human DNA. And eventually these lizard people are going to destroy the world. This is a narrative, by the way, developed by the way, developed by a British guy named David Ikey. He's been telling this story for like 20 years.

This narrative, this story about lizards has been adopted widely by Q&ON followers. And so Matthew Coleman, who was also a big Q&N person, he took his kids to Mexico, and he brutally murdered both of them. It was just horrendous. One of his children was actually alive for quite a while. Then he continually had to take further actions to murder his. child. And it's, anyway, he did this because his belief was that his children would eventually threaten the world and create some harm. And so he had to rid the world of this horrible risk that his children posed and he murdered them. So again, like Chad DeBow, it's, as you point out,

it's the belief. It's the belief system here that's driving this whole process. With Matthew Coleman, it's the belief in not zombies, but these alien human hybrids. And with Chad DeBel, It's the belief that zombies are going to eventually take over the world. He has to rid the world of zombies before the apocalypse. And that really is his mission, and that's Lori's mission. And I think that, by the way, is why Lori, no matter what people say here, that Lori has some culpability because she knows about the zombie narrative. And she participates in assisting Chad with whatever harmful actions he's proposing. So my final thought that I introduced last week, we talked a little also about Alex Cox.

Alex Cox is probably going to be an easy fall guy or an easy target for, I would imagine, for all of the defense attorneys here because he's dead and because he seemingly played a large role in some of these murders. We don't know exactly what that role is. There's been a lot of speculation that he's the one who actually committed the murders. And so it would seem like Alex Cox could fill in a lot of gaps. If there's unanswered questions or uncertainties around certain evidence that Alex, I wouldn't be surprised to see Alex Cox fill in a lot of gaps.

those gaps, at least for the defense, in terms of trying to create a narrative where Alex Cox played a very large role and may have acted by himself, sort of a lone wolf type of situation that we talked about last week. That brings us up to date, I think, that I introduced the idea that I was interested in this storyline or this argument that perhaps Lori broke bad, meaning that she meets Chad. She becomes a different person. This is very much much a storyline that has been developed by several key players in this narrative, specifically the Cox family and to some degree April Raymond as well. So April. Lori's friend, April. April, right. April has been quite vocal about the fact that she

believed that Lori was extremely different after she met Chad. A lot of people have been, though, you know, about vocal like that. Yeah. So then we brought in Walter White from the show Breaking Bad. and talked about how Walter White broke bad, and he broke bad because he had cancer. He was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He thought he didn't have long to live. So he started cooking meth and selling it, and he became a drug lord in short. And the question I posed was, is Lori like that? Is that the role that Chad plays in this story?

And is that something that maybe the defense could sell to a jury in terms of, an anchored narrative. Could they convince a jury that Lori's a lot like Walter White? But Walter White's crisis is lung cancer. Lori's crisis is the coming apocalypse. Lori, I believe, is quite convinced of the apocalypse. She's, I think she feels compelled to act because she believes the end of the world was coming on July 20th of 2020. We believe that those numbers, by the way, have some ties to the book of revelation, but we won't get into that at the moment. That's pure speculation. Maybe we'll get into that later. So how the question then becomes, if Lori breaks bad, so again, the storyline here is she meets Chad. She becomes a completely different person. She gets caught up in this

drama of portals and zombies and dark and white ratings, light and dark ratings. And she really isn't making many decisions. Chad's making all the decisions. Chad's running the show. But But she participates. She knows about it. She has influence on Chad. And so that's her role, but perhaps her influence is little. So this would be, right, this would be the argument for breaking bad. And let's evaluate this. So I think maybe the best way to think about this narrative about whether the story about whether Lori broke bad is to consider the idea of risk. And so let's start, let me start with Walter White. So the summary is Walter White in the first episode is mocked by some of his students. He's working at a car wash to make extra money. A couple of his students

see him there washing their car. They take pictures. They laugh at him. They mock him. His brother-in-law, Hank, hands him a gun. Hank mocks him for looking like he's scared of his own shadow when he's handling the gun. So presented as kind of this meek guy who teaches high school chemistry, who's afraid of his own shadow. And then later in the series, as Lauren points out, there's this now, I think fairly famous moment in television where he's meeting with members of the drug cartel and he asks one of the members to say his name and the guy hesitates because he knows it's a power play. So the guy won't say it, but Walter persists. And he finally says, you're Heisenberg and he says, you're damn right, I am.

And he says it in such as assertive manner that you recognize now that Walter White is no longer this lovable loser, high school chemistry teacher. He is truly a drug lord. he's transformed completely. Right. He broke bad. Right. So the question, you know, I would raise here is, and if we're going to evaluate whether

someone broke bad, I think it's important to assess risk. In other words, what would Walter White's risk for violence be before he gets cancer and what's his risk when he becomes a drug lord? And I think the same thing, I would ask the same thing of Lori. What's Lori's risks for violence prior to meeting Chad Daybell? So when you say risks, what are there risks for violence? violence because that's what you do in your career is no assess for risk. I assess for risks of recidivism.

I mean, I also do, I've also done clinical work, a lot of clinical work with felons and offenders of all kinds. But my main job, my primary job for the last decade has been to do psychological evaluations and risk assessments for felons. And so I think answering this question of risk is really important. So if we think about Walter White, if Walter White doesn't get cancer, and he remains a chemistry teacher. And I went in and did a risk assessment on Walter White for his future risks of violence.

I would have to say that they would be next to nothing. So he would be very low risk. He would probably continue teaching chemistry until he retires. He would receive some type of pension, right? He would live out his life without much conflict. I think Walter White clearly might be an extreme case. And by the way, the name White, I think is completely relevant here. White as in bland, as in boring, as someone who doesn't take risk.

As in good, light and dark, if we're going to go to Chad's Bailey. Right. As in light, right, exactly. And so towards the end of Breaking Bad, Walter White is wearing the black hat. The black hat, for those who know Westworld and know the man in black, when a character in a show like Breaking Bad is wearing a black hat, that's a pretty good sign that things are not going well and that this character has now become, he's gone to the dark side.

He or she has gone to the dark side. So we see that in Westworld. the character there, in the initial episodes, the character there, Ed Harris's character, called The Man in Black. He wears White early on, and then he's dressed all in black towards the end. Same thing with Walter White. So the main point is that it would be very, very hard to assess someone like Walter White is having any risks or, you know, minimal risk for violence before cancer. And so cancer becomes an absolutely transformative event. When he's a drug lord, clearly his risks for violence are excessive.

You know, he's, he's, say the least, yeah. Everybody who comes in his path that has to do with drugs in the drug world is pretty much ending up deceased. So obviously, so the before and after there is pretty extreme. In the case of Lori, I think we really, let's, this is where we want to go today. I think we want to take a little bit of a deep dive and try to understand Lori a little better and try to assess what her risk for violence would have been before.

She meets Chad Debo. So by now, there's a fairly well-known recording of Lori. Yeah, to preface this, this is Lori Vallow, Daybell, but she was Lori Vallow here, married to Charles at the time in 2018 at Melanie Gibbs House, where she is sharing her testimony of Christ. She's with, Christ, she's with like-minded, faithful members of the LDS church, but they all sort of have these additional beliefs. And she's sharing her testimony. This was originally played on Annie Cushing's channel analytics. I did not have a murderous heart. I just wanted to stop the bleeding and stop the pain.

And so someone wise was speaking to me and said, you need to go to the temple. So I went and met my bishop, and I was like, I'm either going to turn my life to the temple or I'm going to commit murder. So do you want to give me a tent? temple recommend? And I was perfectly honest because at that point, I had nothing to lose. You get to the bottom rung and I had nothing to lose. And he gave me my temple recommend. And I started to the temple every week. I did not have a murderous heart. Yeah. So this has become a fairly

well-known piece that's made the rounds in the daybell case for good reason. And the good reason is that it says a lot about Lori. The most important part of this, I think to me, is Lori saying I was either going to commit murder or I was going to go to the temple every day. And then you hear some nervous laughter. So, you know, you might be able to interpret this as being a little sarcastic or, you know, she might be trying to be a little playful here. And I think the laughter might suggest that a little bit. But the fact that the outcome is that she starts going to the temple every day suggests that she's being completely serious.

Right. Right. She did, and she did go to the temple every day. Right, she did. And so the interesting part about this is that this is, this shows us in a way how Lori Daybell thinks. This is how she processes the world, how she makes sense of the world, especially under stress. So let me emphasize something. You said, this is how Lori Daybell thinks even before she was Lori Daybell.

This is how Lori Valo thought and processed. Because if we're focusing on the whether or not she broke bad, this is Lori Val. at this moment. This is Lori, right. This is Lori Pre-Chad. Yeah. And that's really important. So that it's pre-chat.

Everything we want to look at is, right, in analyzing whether she broke bad is pre-chat. She's introducing us or letting us have a glimpse of her thought process. And her thought process here is especially under stress because she's talking about some of the conflicts in her marriage with Joe Ryan and how that created a lot of pain and she didn't really know how to deal with it. And the interesting part of this thought process is it's binary. She sees the necessity of an either or choice here. She sees either the temple or murder.

She doesn't see any other options. So this is someone who I think really oversimplifies the world, somebody who really reduces the world to its most basic constituent elements and creates this binary decision, either or decision, which I think for most of us that if we're experiencing a relationship conflicts, no matter how bad it is and no matter how strife. thought we are, we're probably going to see other options besides murder or a religious immersion. And so that's not how Laurie sees the world. So I think this really gives us an incredible

glimpse into Lori's decision-making process in the sense that it's either for Lori religion or something on the complete opposite end of a religion, which is murder. So there's no in between for Lori. There's simply, there's no compromise. There's no negotiation. Right. And I think that type of thought process is going to, by the way, so that thought, type of thought process is going to increase someone's risk for violence. They're not able to deal with nuance and they're not able to deal with complexity. In fact, let me read a quote here from a book called Humanizing Evil. It's an edited collection by Ronald Nassau and John Mills. There is an essay in here. So there's not a lot of work on why people break bad, by the way,

in the field of forensic psychology. But this is an article on that. It's called Breaking Bad and the Rhetoric of Evil. It's by Ronald Nassau. It's. It's a lot. It's, This is probably one of the absolute best psychological analyses on the psychology of Breaking Bad. Here's what he says. This is page 97. Again, this is his essay, Breaking Bad and the rhetoric of you. He says, quote, unable to entertain complexity and or empathize with views other than their own. These individuals are threatened by difference. In flexible and processing information, contrary to their perspective, and capable of selective and non-veridical interpretations of reality. His argument here is this is one of the reasons people break bad is because they can't process complexity.

They're threatened by difference. They're inflexible. He calls it non-veridical interpretations of real, meaning that these people are extremely selective in terms of evidence they use to process the world. So I think there's an argument to be made here that Lori's thinking her thought processes prior to Chad Daybell are already, have already moved her in the direction of breaking bad to some degree. Because this is how she sees the world. This is how she sees the. negotiating issues with Joe Ryan. So there's so much to unpack in this statement, by the way. So that's my first part. The second part is that I think oftentimes people that resort to this sort of simplicity and this

oversimplifying of the world, they tend to also struggle with a strong sense of themselves. In other words, I think that oftentimes they have what I would call an empty self. So actually the term I use is self by proxy. What I mean by that, if the self is relatively empty, then eventually something, something's going to fill in those gaps. Something's going to fill in that vacancy. In cases like this, I think you have, Lori is sort of, again, she's showing us who she is in the sense that it's either religion or murder. So she's kind of telling us that herself, those gaps get filled in by religion. So in the absence of a really sort of complex, strong self, an authentic self, you get this empty false self that gets defined by ideology or religion or oftentimes these grand ideals.

these abstractions that become a proxy for the cell. These people haven't really defined themselves very well. And so they're more susceptible to ideologies or they're more susceptible to large abstractions that then become proxy for a real self. So I think you're seeing that here to some degree. And you see it a lot in these types of situations too, by the way. And the lacking of self explained that. You know, we talk about that a lot, like a lack of identity, knowing who they are.

That's hard for some people to kind of understand what that means if we all know who we are. Let's back up and talk about how someone could get to the point where their self is him. That's going to get us in a discussion of something we've talked about in our podcast previously, which is the idea of narcissistic families. The book I've referred to in the past quite a bit is by Pressman and Pressman. It's called The Narcissistic Family. This book was written a while ago, is written in, I believe, 1994. Let me read how they define a narcissistic family.

This is on page 18, quote, the narcissistic family often resembles the proverbial shiny red apple with a worm inside. It looks great until you bite into it and discover the worm. The rest of the apple may be just fine, but you've lost your appetite. In the narcissistic family, most of what happens can be just fine, but the emotional underpinnings are not there. The children are not getting their notional means mat because the parents are not focused on meeting them.

Instead of providing a supportive, nurturing, reality-based mirror for their children, Narcissistic parents present a mirror that reflects their own needs. They expect their children to react to those needs. The focus is skewed and the children go up feeling defective, wrong, and to blame. When one is raised unable to trust in the stability, safety, and equity of one's world, one is raised to detrust one's own feelings, perceptions, and worth. When one is raised as a reactive, reflective being as an echo, So echo in the story of narcissists and echo, one has not been taught the skills necessary to live a satisfying life.

So in short, a narcissistic family is a family where oftentimes one of the major two caregivers, either the mother or the father, tends to be narcissistic. They don't even necessarily have to have a diagnosis of narcissism, but they tend to be so self-absorbed that they can't mirror or provide for their children's needs, emotional needs in particular, but other needs often as well. the children become a reflection of the parents rather than the parents helping the children to figure out who they are, to develop a true self, an authentic self. So in other words, because the parents' needs are paramount and come first, the child then reflects

those needs back to the parent, rather than the parent reflecting certain of the child's emotions back to the child or certain needs of the child back to the child. And by doing that, a parent who is more a mirror for the child, child feels sad and the parent says you look sad, the parent is giving that child the opportunity to figure out what they feel. And the parent is giving that child an opportunity to figure out who they are. That's how you develop what Winnicot would call an authentic or true self. So the narcissistic

family, this issue of narcissistic families is really critical here because I think what happens in these types of families, and we'll talk about the Cox family in a minute. But what happens in these families is that the children really become mirrors of their parents or they reflect their parents' needs rather than themselves. They haven't had a chance to really figure out who they are. And here you end up with an empty self or a self by proxy. In the Cox family, we know that religion was an extremely important element. So given beliefs in the Cox family and the importance of religion and given perhaps some narcissism among some of the family members, it probably would have been a real struggle for these kids to really figure out who they were and what they wanted and what they

valued. So Lori, I think, has some version of this self-propoxy idea and that she takes on religion to become who she is. And her views and her approach of the world are indistinguishable from her religious belief. If they want to know a little bit more about the dynamics of the Koss family, I would refer them to one of our previous podcast. This is going to be another important component of Breaking Bad, which is potential abuse. It's really a gray area for us about whether Lori Valo in this case, because again, we're talking pre-chat Daybell, experienced any type of abuse. So we know, and again, I refer people back to our episode or previous episode, but we know that there were some really poor sexual boundaries in this family. We know Barry assaulted

Steve Cope. Steve Cope was married to Stacy Cox. She was the oldest of the Cox children. She passed away from diabetes, is allegedly, but we've speculated on some other issues. We believe there. That's who Steve Cope is. This was during their divorce or custody battle, Melanie Boudreau, their child. So we've covered some of this in the previous podcast, but I'm going to reiterate it because

I'm talking about risk factors for abuse. So this is from a police report dated August 8th, 1995. this police report was fired, filed by Steve Cope. He says, Barry Cox visited my place of employment. He wanted to discuss the divorce proceedings between his daughter, Stacey, and myself. He began quoting me scripture and questioning my integrity. It seemed odd to me, since he was recently charged for solicitation of prostitution. His voice got louder, at which time I stood up and asked him to lower his voice or leave. He continued, to verbally attack me. There he 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 shove me against the wall. He had his fists in my shirt around my neck. My executive assistant called 911. He then left and was cited for assault and domestic violence. So this is Barry Cox, Lori Valadebel's father. Father. First of all, let me acknowledge this was a while ago, but obviously this is during a period of time when Lori was in the family. Yeah, exactly. So she was a child still. And I don't know the disposition of this particular situation. In other words, I don't know the outcome. I don't know what happened to Barry. I don't know whether this was reduced as a charge, whether he was

convicted of assault. But the point is that you have some violence here in public in the open, It's done in front of another person. He grabbed his throat. He pushed him up against the wall. He ripped his shirt. This is the sort of behavior that certainly would suggest that there could be some type of abuse or physical violence in the home. So. And Laurie's family of origin with her parents and siblings.

Do I know that for sure? No, I don't. But, you know, this is not a normal way to handle conflict. Steve Cope is engaged in a custody dispute. Barry Cox is upset. this is the way he handles it. He goes to his work and threatens him. This is not, again, like Lori, resorting to kind of this binary type thinking, a very simplistic way of trying to solve problems. So we're seeing a similar type approach to decision making by the father.

We're seeing some violence in the family, not directed against the kids that we know of, but my point is that this type of violence would be a risk factor for family violence as well. So we have that. We know that Lori has claimed that she was physically, abused and she was in domestic violence relationships in several of her marriages. Presumably, I guess we don't need to say exactly what marriages, but at least in several of her marriages, she's claiming that there was violence. So we have several instances here of some type of abuse. This is in the, this is in the Debel text, what I call the text love letters.

This is when Chad was giving Lori a blessing. So Chad refers to himself as James. he refers to Lori as Elena, many of these texts. Yeah, these texts also, if it were a book, it would be titled Loing Fire by Chad Daybell. That's what you're reading from. We did do a reading of this on our Patreon account as well. So Chad is talking to Lori here, writing to Lori. He says, as they stayed in that favorite position, he moved his hands to her head and began to cleanse and parify each part of her body.

This is the important part. He could feel the pains and troubles she had endured throughout her life. being removed from her soul and being taken outside and destroyed. There's some implication there by Chad that the pains and trouble she had endured throughout her life, there's some clear reference, some allusion there to abuse. I agree. He's not telling us specifically what it is. We don't know if this is abuse in the family or domestic violence.

But in any case, making a clear reference here, I think, to abuse. And he's clearly manipulating the situation, too. I want to point that out. That's what we discussed in our Patreon episode discussing this. He knows something about trauma she's experienced. And he's using that in this moment to say that he's washing it all away and that he understands. So this is going to take me back to the Breaking Bad article I referenced earlier. Again, it appears that there are some risk factors for some types of abuse in the Cox family.

At the very least, I think we can say that Lori, from a fairly young age when she was married as a, was she married as a teenager? I think it was. She was, right? The first time, the first marriage to Nelson, they were boyfriend and girlfriend in high school, and I believe she was still a teenager when they got married, perhaps 18, but yes. But the point is that whether it's abuse in the family of origin or domestic violence in some of her early relationships, there's abuse going on. I'm going to go back to Breaking Bad and the rhetoric of evil. This is page 94. Ronald Masso.

He's referring to a book by a psychoanalyst. Her name is Sue Grant. Sue Grant wrote a really beautifully written book called The Reproduction of Evil. It's fairly complex. Her arguments are fairly complex. So I'm going to go to Nassau's summary of Grant. Here he says the book, Reproduction of Evil was written in 2000. Here's what Nassau says about Grant's book.

Quote, Sue Grant focuses special attention on the impact of early horrific trauma and the histories of individuals who have broken bad. Inspiring shame and dissociative efforts to preserve sanity, its legacy is a kind of psychic death, leaving some victims unable to connect emotionally with others, except through the imposition of suffering. The need to reverse early experiences of helplessness and victimization can unleash horrendous destructiveness. I love that quote, by the way, Sue Grant develops that idea in more depth than Nassau, but I love that quote because this whole notion of psychic death is also related to the idea of an empty cell. Psychic death

implies that the self is largely lost, the self is dead. And in order to bring that self back to life, you fill that hole or that void with abstractions or maybe ideology, whatever. You're going to fill it with something, I think, to try to fill alive. And so I think this is a really powerful idea that perhaps Lori Vallow, pre-Chad DeBel experiences some type of abuse. Certainly Chad alludes to that. And that creates psychic death and helplessness, which then leads to behaviors, acting out type of behaviors to inflict harm to feel more alive. I want to say something else about her first marriage. I don't know what happened in her first marriage.

I don't think John does either. But one thing we have heard from a very reliable source, first off, her first marriage was very short-lived. It was someone she dated in high school. But allegedly, according to this reliable source, she was kidnapped from this first marriage and taken back to her family of origin. Right. So again, it's hard to know what exactly, what,

these traumatic experiences are, what the exact abuse is, but we know that there's either descriptions or actual instances of abuse in her background. Again, this idea of a false self or a psychic death, I think these things are all related. So you have a psychic death, which leads to these feelings of helplessness, and then you probably get some type of attempt to remedy those feelings of helplessness through certain behaviors. And we'll get to that in a second. So this leads us to our next question about Lori, and that is a question about personality disorders. Oftentimes, in these types of situations, there's actually some fairly recent research showing that there's a possible correlation between childhood trauma and abuse and later borderline personality disorder.

I'm going to read from a book about the impact of narcissism on children. So the Pressman book is about a family, the family system of narcissism. This book is more specifically about adults that have been in narcissistic families. It's by Alon Galam. It's, it was published, I believe, in 90. It was in the 90s as well. 1992. This is page 32. Galam says, quote, the narcissistic parent lives on within the mind of the adult, even in the absence of the real parent. A final and tragic irony is that the child of a narcissist may herself have acquired many narcissistic traits up to and including being a full-blooded narcissist. Some common features might include self-centeredness, the compulsive need to be right,

and to have other people submit to her views, an inability to take criticism, the desire for perfection in self and or others. She is close to hypersensitivity combined with the continuous feeling of being mistreated, an exaggerated need for a claim and support, and an even more desperate need for reassurance that she is loved. I think that quote is the flip side of the narcissistic. family, which is that if you have a self by proxy, it's not unreasonable that the person raised in a narcissistic family then can become a narcissist or at least show some features of narcissism and or other personality disorders. On that front, we have, for example, this is

an evaluation performed by Vivian Lewis. This is Vivian's evaluation, but she did not do the interview. It's actually an evaluation on Joe Ryan, but in her diagnostic formulation, she has, she does render an opinion about the biological mother who is Lori. Right. Yeah, this interview is part of her evaluation. She used this interview for her assessment, but it was done by someone else. She says, based on the information she has, she says that there should be a rule out of histrionic and or borderline issues.

In other words, she's not definitively saying that Lori would receive a diagnosis of histrionic or borderline personality disorder, but she's saying that she thinks it's, it's relevant and it could be an issue. So again, does Lori have a personality disorder? I don't know for sure, but it's interesting information that Vivian Lewis sees it is something that could be germane to this particular case. It's more information. Right. Needing to rule out histrionic or borderline personality disorder, according to Vivian. Right. Exactly. So again, it's not diagnosing her, but it's raising the question. And if you take the idea that there's oftentimes some correlation between childhood trauma and later personality disorders, then that would be perhaps, if there is abuse,

that would be perhaps more information that would be relevant to Lori maybe having a personality disorder. And yeah, and were these ever ruled out, we don't know. Yeah. And so, and the question then is people are probably saying, how's this relevant to breaking bad? Well, it's relevant to breaking bad because if somebody has a personality disorder, let's say Walter White has a personality disorder.

Let's say Walter White, let's say is deemed as a psychopath. Let's say he's stealing chemistry equipment from the lab. Let's say he's stealing money. He's embezzling money from the school. Let's say that he gets caught doing that in charge with some crimes, fraud, whatever. And let's say he gets evaluated by psychologist. And the psychologist said, Walter White is a psychopath. That's so clear.

Then you're going to have to reevaluate Walter's breaking bad because you're going to have to say, well, the psychologist said that when he was a chemistry teacher who was armed, already a psychopath. So it wasn't cancer that was the trigger for his breaking bad. It was the fact that this guy was a psychopath. He had a personality disorder. We would say that if psychologists said that Walter White had antisocial personality disorder, then the argument becomes Walter Wright was already bad. He didn't break bad. He was a psychopath. He just did what he already was kind of predisposed to do. He started cooking meth. He was already a psychopath. He just upped his game. He became a bigger psychopath. So it's completely relevant here because if Lori has some features of personality

disorders prior to meeting Chad, that I think you have to say something similar. Given the analogy I just made with Walter White, something similar with her, which is that perhaps there were some inclinations to be bad or to at least have some issues, some more ingrained or deeper issues prior to meeting Chad. Yeah. And so I want to start thinking about some of those. In one of our earlier podcasts, I speculated that she had some precepts. She had some psychopathic features. I may have jumped the gun a little bit on that. I think I was getting a little exuberant in the moment.

I don't know for sure if Lori would be a psychopath. I do want to say that I think she has some features of psychopathy. I don't know if she would qualify for the diagnosis. Well, and being a psychopath isn't part of the DFS, so it's technically. Yeah, technically. So I want to talk about one of the more recent models of psychopathy. I've talked a lot about Robert Hare and his views on psychopathy and Harris' checklist and how that's sort of the gold standard.

But there's a more recent model of psychopathy called the triarchic model of psychopathy. And this was developed by Christopher Patrick in 2009. He wrote what is by now a very well known article in academic circles. It's called the triarchic conceptualization of psychopathy. And Patrick argues that it's triarchic. That means three. So he argues that there's really three components of psychopathy. Three main components are meanness, disinhibition, which would be impulsiveness and

fearlessness, or he calls it fearless dominance. Or sometimes boldness, fairness and boldness would be similar. In the psychopathy literature, meanness is often also called callousness or sometimes refer to a CU, which is callousness, unemotional. This trait, by the way, this meanness trait is oftentimes, according to the current research we know on psychopathy, the biggest predictor in children of later adult psychopathy. So children that have this callous unemotional trait, otherwise called meanness, are in much higher risk to become psychopaths as adults. So I think this is really a critical variable in thinking about psychopathy. I'm going to read, this is page 927.

This is from the Patrick article. his original article on the triarchic model, which, by the way, has received a lot of research support over the last decade. Here's how he defines meanness. The term mean describes a constellation of phenotypic attributes including deficient empathy, disdain for and lack of close attachments with others, rebelliousness, excitement-seeking, exploitativeness, and empowerment through cruelty. So I want us to keep in mind this last part here. Empowerment through cruelty. That's going to be important components. moment of our discussion coming up here.

Okay, empowerment through cruelty. So people that have heard these interviews know this. You know, but, but those that are new to the case might not know this. So these are police interviews. We received these actually in our FOIA requests. Once again, John and I like to find out what's hidden. And so we file FOIA requests. And we have these from, from law enforcement in Arizona.

So two friends of Lurys are interviewed here with a similar story. Anything else that you could think of that's important, I guess now knowing that we have all these criminal investigations going, that you overheard then, that like I said, you might have written it off, but you go, oh man, now that all this is happening, that's weird or bizarre. In June, when we saw her after she'd been gone a couple of months, when I see we, Christina and I got together with her. She had said that, and Christina, she had said that, and Christina, she had been I don't even take ibuprofen, so I have no understanding of medicine or anything of that nature. Okay.

But there was some sort of, I think it was a medicine of some sort, and I don't know if it was something Charles took or if it was something that maybe was another medication that JJ took. Okay. I know JJ took quite a bit of medicine. Yeah. issues but she had said that she had been putting whatever this was into I think a smoothie or some sort of drink for Charles when she was in Texas okay sorry about that who told me that I can't remember if it was Nicole yeah no Nicole said hey yeah because she said I was there she said Christina and I were there so you She said, and that was, she couldn't remember the medication, but she said that she told both of you guys.

And that was when they were back in Texas, right? I'll all up with you on that. I don't do this. So not a problem, but I appreciate you calling and following up. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the Internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stock.

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Yeah. The reason we're starting with this particular example is because it's proof. This is definitive proof. I know in the second interview, she said that Lori sort of backtrack on that, but. Yeah, Christina said, well, she was like, it's not a big deal, just one or two. Right. But let's dig into this for a second. Like, it is a big deal.

It is a big deal because Lori is introducing a controlled substance without consent and unknowingly into Charles drinks. That by any statute is a crime. It's not only a crime, it's a felony. In most states, it's punishable by up to five years in prison. So why is this important? Because two people are saying that she's doing this. Lori doesn't see it as a big deal because Lori wants to control his behavior, whatever her justification is. it doesn't matter. This is criminal behavior.

She's introducing a controlled substance. Let's call it poison because Charles doesn't know he's taking these drinks. She's essentially poisoning Charles. She doesn't see it as a big deal because apparently she sees it as helping him. But I'm sure Charles would like to know that he's being poisoned. Not only does she not seem to think it's a big deal. She thinks it's fun to tell her friends about it. Like that she's almost like she's proud of it, right? It's just. Right. And so here we have this idea of empowerment through cruelty. This is where we're beginning it, right? Because she feels empowered. She's controlling his behavior. Although this particular case isn't as clear cut as the next one we're going to talk about. She potentially has his life in her hands. She could easily create a

situation where he overdoses. She can easily create a situation where she essentially murders him, whether knowingly or not. And so I don't see any other way of saying that that's cruel. When you poison people, there's a sadistic component in the sense that you're really negatively affecting someone's behavior and emotional state and mental state deliberately through a controlled substance. And so I think this is a great instance of this trait of meanness that we're going to start to explore here.

If you could please play the Larry Woodcock piece. So we're going to take this idea and we're going to run a little bit further with it. We're going to deepen this idea here. Yes, let me introduce. This is a never heard before story told by Larry Woodcock when he was at our house two years ago this month. We have not shared this until this moment. Let's take a listen to what Larry Woodcock has to say. I'm going to give you all a little bit of insight that is absolutely not known to anybody.

two people know it the last one of the last times we went to hawaii um and the day we left uh lorry had fixed a fruit salad i love fruit salads i loved her fruit salad and and she knew it because i told her i said you you just absolutely make one of the best fruit salads i've ever had and when Kay just said what she said, I was immediately drawn to this, the statement I'm fixing to make. When we left Hawaii that morning or that evening, we boarded the plane. The plane took off, and about halfway through the trip, I woke up and I told Kay, I'm dying.

Now, I've had enough people die in front of me, dying my arms, you know, around me that's died. I know in general the symptoms of that. And I truly believed in my heart that I was dying. I was going to die there on that plane. Well, Kay kept telling, you know, the stewardress and everybody, we got to do something. I said, no, just leave me alone.

Just leave me alone. We made the trip into Vegas as we were walking down the corridor to get our luggage and the people mover on the escalator. I just got so sick. And I honestly, in my heart, I thought I was going to die right there. And then I started throwing up. Kay had bought a. I had a brand new Saints cap, a ball cap that I had worn one time.

And it was in my bag. And here we are on a people mover. And so Larry said, I'm going to throw up. And I said, well, he said, give me something to throw up in. And I just opened my bag. And he grabbed that hat out of it. And he threw up in my new Saints hat. And I filled it up.

And then when we got all the people moving, then we just threw it away. But I'm wondering, and I've wondered this since it happened to us, because you and I talked about it. And I even asked Kay one time, I said, do you think she was trying to kill me? And Kay naturally said, no, I don't mean, for what reason? But why would she want to kill me? And I've always in my heart since that time, since the day we were on that escalator, and as I said, Kay and I talked about this, I just wondered if maybe in hindsight, and my point in saying what I just said, my point is I tried to figure,

what would she gain out of it by doing something with me, if that was her attempt, what would she gain out of it but she and k were so close one of the things that i've always tried to do is figure what angle would she use where would she go with that why me i mean i mean as far as i knew uh she thought that i was you know her her bestie and and from everything k has told me that that Laurie has told her that, you know, she thought I was... Oh, the son. Rosen, sat and rose on Larry every day. I mean, she just thought that much of it.

I think, I mean, first of all, thanks for sharing that story. It is remarkable. And I'm probably never going to forget the Saints hat as long as I live. Did you get the hat replaced? Or did you, did you throw it out? You did. Did you ride? No.

Okay. I was going to say, yeah, I think that, that hat wasn't salvageable. It was not salvage, but I loaded that hat down. And it was fruits. But I can tell you, I've never been poisoned. And so I can't, I don't have any personal experience. and in looking at in retrospect of everything that has happened, maybe she, in her mind, maybe she did have come up with a reason too.

But I can't imagine what it would be. So I think if I were to offer a professional perspective on that, I think you don't need reasons if that's true, if she was trying to kill you. In other words, she's not sitting down and saying, you know, she doesn't have a pro and con list when she's poisoning your food. She's just thinking, Larry looked at me funny this morning. I am so angry at him or I'm tired of him. Or maybe she took something you said as a criticism or a slight. Like it doesn't have to be as, it can be as simple as that.

Like there's no, I know it's for normal, rational, human beings, we want reasons. We want, we want to say she's killing me for money. But with somebody like Lori, there's no reasons. It could be a very, it could have been something that you just had no clue about. Well, look and thinking back through all of this, I think one of the things that I never put up with Laurie's bullshit. That would be a reason. And now, I'm I respected her because she had JJ. And, and, but all this trying to convince our granddaughter that she needed to be part of this cult and, and wanted her to start reading books that Chad wrote.

Oh, she did. Yes. So, and maybe, maybe for some reason, because I didn't go along, with her her beliefs and I was I never hid that from her because I don't think I think she totally understood that her BS was not going to work with me and and I would call her out on to it but I think maybe that's part of it I don't know I've I've tried it like you said those type of people don't need a reason. Up until just a minute, a few minutes ago, there's only two people that knew about this,

came myself. And I will, without a doubt, still in my heart, believe that there was something trying to be committed because I've been sick. I know what it is to be sick. I know what it is to be afraid. And I can tell you, I was praying. that I didn't want to die on an airplane. First time hearing this story that John and I heard two years ago, and it hasn't left our mind since.

Right. And so here we are. We're asking this question about whether Lori broke bad or not. And this is way before Chad Daybell this story. So here we have another instance of potential poisoning. Do we know for sure that that's what Lori was trying to do? here? We don't because it was fruit. And of course, we all know that fruit can go bad and it can create problems. But Larry seemed pretty convinced that this was way beyond fruit, that this was, this had to do with poisoning. He was, he would have had no reason, by the way, to go to the hospital. Or he couldn't go to the hospital. He was on a plane. Yeah, he was on an airplane. He had no, really no motivation to get blood work done to see if this was poisoning because it didn't occur to him.

Right. At that point, he trusted Laura. But looking back, now that we know what he did to Charles, that she clearly poisoned his drinks, his smoothies, it seems to me like this is a pattern that we're starting to see. This story, if this was a poisoning attempt, again, we can't prove it, but let's say that it was. This gets into that quality of meanness. This gets into that callous, unemotional trait of empowerment through cruelty. I love that term because I think that really captures it. is about Lori feeling empowered.

If we talk about... That would be a reason. In other words, that would be a reason. A motive, right. If we talk about this idea of psychic death or the empty self or a false self, then this is an attempt to transform that sense of victimization and helplessness through poisoning to feel more empowered. And that's what she's doing.

This type of behavior, this type of meanness, if this is one of the main components of psychopathy. Again, we have to question. I'm not saying Lori's a psychopath, but does she have some of these elements or these traits of psychopathy? I don't know. It seems like she might hear. So again, if that's accurate, then clearly this is someone who didn't break bad with Chad. Clearly, this is someone who was struggling with these types of issues, with these types of bad, this type of badness prior to Chad, well prior to Chad. So there's another maybe you could play. So this is about Tiley. This is Nancy Grace interviewing Lori's friend from Hawaii, April Raymond, and they're discussing Tiley. We had a lot of health issues, and they could never really get to the bottom of them.

What kind of health problems that the doctors couldn't figure out? Tiley was always sick, and she would be in her room resting or sleeping or recovering or just getting back from the doctor. When she was younger, they told me that she had had several surgeries to try to figure out what was wrong and to try to fix things and it never accomplished anything. Was Lori Valo primarily involved in Tiley's treatments? Yes. If a fleet of doctors in a metropolitan city can't figure out what's wrong and called Mom Lori Valle. was the primary person taking care of her, I'd be very, very curious to find the true nature of Tiley Ryan's ailments, and if they were somehow inflicted on her.

And would Lori Vallow be there alone with her at the time she began manifesting the pain, and when the pain would go away? And what if any attention would Lori Vallow receive when Tiley would be ill? This is the first time hearing of this. I'm very, very distressed. While we're hearing this from between April and Nancy Grace, we have heard from several people about Tiley always being sick. And in the hospital, we've seen photos over in the hospital. Most of you that follow this case, know this is a very repeated story.

Right, exactly. And there's diagnoses, there are multiple diagnoses of pancreatitis, which it seems in these diagnoses to have no clear cause. So the question here becomes, and this is from, by the way, this is from a guardian ad litem report to the court, July 15th, 2009. I'm just going to quote this in the same period of time. Tiley was age six. She was diagnosed with pancreatitis, having had two episodes requiring hospitalization between February of 2006 and 2008. So there's clear documentation of pancreatitis and many other elements, back pains that are unexplicable that have no clear cause. This raises the question of whether this is some version of factitious disorder imposed on another,

otherwise previously known as Moochhausen's biproxy syndrome. I think that's the issue that April and Nancy Grace are raising here too, right? They're questioning whether Lori is poisoning or introducing a substance into Tile's drinks or food, and is that responsible for all her physical ailments. My short answer to that is we don't know for sure, but again, we're looking at, here we go. Larry Woodcock almost dies from what he believes is poisoning. We know for sure that she's introducing controlled substances into Charles drinks. We have inexplicable reasons for Tiley's illnesses, right?

You have all of these elements are coming together. And let me add one more, a testimony of JJ's last babysitter in Rexberg, who she said that Lori told her. that she could give J.J. Benadryl to help him sleep. Yeah. And let me, this is from, this is from an affidavit written by, filed in the courts by Cheryl Willer. One is a quote from one of her sons. I'm not going to mention the name of her son. I believe around 12 years old at the time. He says, quote, Lori gave us all kinds of those green Advil slash Nyquil and Lunesta pills so we could

go to bed early. They practically shoved it down our throat. Also in that affidavit, she talks about that there is a diagnosis in one of the health reports of one of the Vallow children. I'm not going to mention name again here, but there's an actual diagnosis in a chart pertaining to this particular situation that Cheryl says, the quoting states that the application indicates Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. So a doctor that they dealt with to deal with a lot of medical problems back then that was treating one of the children. Again, I'm not going to say who the child is, but one of the children. And this was a skin rash, by the way, a skin rash.

Yeah, skin rash. One of the children in the household was having some problems and the child gets diagnosed because the causes are so vague and so nebulous gets diagnosed with Munchausen's by proxy syndrome. Now we call it factitious disorder imposed on another. But so there is actual evidence in a medical chart, I believe today, as we speak, of a diagnosis pertaining to Lori of Moonsons by proxy syndrome. Can I say something about this really quickly too? Because I reached out to Cheryl. Yep. Many people have seen this affidavit.

It's floated around. the web. It refers to Lori and Charles concerns Cheryl had. So I reached out to her for clarification. And she stated this and I just want to say this too. Because I asked her as like, is this Lori and Charles help me out here. She said, I believe this was only Lori. This is from Cheryl Wheeler to us. And she said that I could share this. I believe it was only Lori. Laurie. Charles just didn't think like this. During our marriage, I was the primary caretaker. I am not complaining about that. But Charles would have naturally defaulted to Lori's style of mothering. I know that you understand the affidavit was during a custody battle. This custody battle would not have even been brought up if it were not for

Lori's involvement in my children's life. So the custody battle was only happening because Lori entered her children's life, according to Cheryl Wheeler. So I want to share that too. Go ahead, John. Right. That all of these, again, so the main point is that all of these physical ailments and health problems started when Lori enters the picture. Right. Charles may have been involved in some of that indirectly, but it's not, but the cause is

Lori, that Lori is the driver and the impetus for all these physical ailments. Prior to Lori, there were no issues with the kids at all with Charles. It's important as no. Right. That's the important point. I'm going to read a quote here. This is from a book on Moonschausen's. This is, by the way, a really fascinating book on Moonshausen.

There's not a lot of great books written about Moon Chauzen Syndrome by proxy, but this is called Hurting for Love. Moon Chauzen's by Proxy Syndrome. It's by Shreier and Lebo. Here's what they say about Moon Chalnsonson's by proxy syndrome. This is page 95. They, meaning mothers, they seize the opportunity afforded by the birth of a child to actively relate to

and control physicians by amplifying a minor ailment in their children and reducing an illness in their infants. And so doing, they try to maintain an intense yet distant, perverse, and ambivalent relationship with a powerfully loved and powerfully feared paternal representative. As we will demonstrate, the physician comes to represent a second chance at a long-for relationship with the father, but the fear of yet another abandonment is equally, if not more powerful. What these case studies suggest is that the good Moonschallisans by proxy syndrome mother is a masquerade of mothering that springs from childhood roots that were quietly traumatic include a profound absence of recognition of the child who will become a Moonschallens

by proxy syndrome mother. Many of these young girls, and so she's referring to before their mothers, many of these young girls feel neglected and desperate for approval and recognition. Their argument, the author's argument, is that Moonsons is a function of, interestingly enough, the desire for paternal love. No doubt, Lori had a lot of conflict with her father, and there is that element, or at least in the case studies that they evaluate, they believe there's that element. And the main payoff is attention and recognition, but specifically the attention and recognition of the father. And also previous neglect, trauma, childhood trauma. So I think you have, potentially you have a lot of those elements in this particular case. The thing that I really started thinking about after reading that book, by the way,

is this idea of triangulation. We talked about this with Murdoch, how I've talked about the family therapist, Murray Bowen, who says that the basic unit in a family is a triangle. So when there's problems between two members and a family, often the third member will be brought in to diffuse the conflict to take the heat down. And with Tiley, I think Tiley plays that role to a very large extent in this family that Tiley's always brought in to diffuse conflicts between other people. The Tiley becomes this pawn of sorts.

And it's sad, but I think there's this attempt by Lori to triangulate Tiley, who she's very conflicted about, by the way. Lori detest Joe Ryan, and unfortunately, Tiley is the daughter of Joe Ryan. So I think in some ways, Tiley suffers by association with Joe Ryan. I think Lori has this constant approach avoidance relationship with Tiley in the sense that she wants to be close to her, but then she gets angry at her because she associates her with Joe Ryan. So I think that if there is Moon Chausen's in this particular case or fact it's just disorder. It has something to do with that dynamic. That she feels a great deal of love and dependency towards Tiley, but she also wants to punish her

because of her association with Joe Ryan. So I think the poisoning is an attempt to keep Tiley close because she's sick all the time and Tiley needs her. There's a dependency, but it's also an attempt to inflict harm on Tiley because she represents that association to Joe Ryan. So it's sort of this, I love you, but I'm going to punish you type relationship. And it's also, I think, applicable to her hospital stays, that I think there's this interesting dynamic that this book points out that the physician gets triangulated. You know, I'd be really curious to know if there's a consistent physician who's treating Tiley that Lori is interested in or attracted to, right? That would make this even more fascinating because now Lori is showing.

up with a physician who she can't really have a relationship with, she's married. But yet, there's this fantasy of paternal love, that she gets to go to this physician. And it's sort of risk-free in the sense that she's around this physician all the time. I presume it would be a male in that case. She gets to be seen as this really good mother because she's always bringing her daughter in for attention and yet at the same time she's inflicting suffering and pain on her daughter by poisoning her and nobody can figure out what's going on really i mean pancreatitis might be a valid diagnosis but that's questionable or even i mean not just attention from a doctor though right attention from her family tyly's sick again tyley's in the hospital everyone knows lorry's there being a good mother

charles is on his own you know taking care of jj or you know before or after charles You know, this everybody knows where she is. People are coming to visit Tiley and Lori. She's getting that attention, that recognition. Right. And so the main motivations, I think, for Munchausen's would be attention and recognition. And the poisoning component of that would be empowerment. The Lori has the secret sense of empowerment that she's in control, that she is punishing Tiley.

And I'm not saying that's conscious, by the way. I think the way she's punishing Tiley here, she knows she's potentially in. again, I don't know for sure if this is true, but she knows potentially that she's harming her and punishing her through medication or whatever she's giving her. But she also knows that she's going to get a positive payoff from that, as you said, from attention. But she's in control of the situation. This is her drama. She's in control from start to finish. And that's an important piece of this too, I think. So we're still on this question of whether Lori broke bad or whether she was already bad prior to Chad Daybell.

So hopefully we're getting closer to an answer with that. I think here's, this is another letter to the courts from Mary Vogel. This is from February 28th, 2008. And so people understand Mary Vogel was the ad litem. She took the place of Tom Ware. So Tom Ware, the ad litem of Tileys was released from the case and Mary Vogel came in. Here's what Mary says, February 28th, 2008. she's talking about the relationship, the custody battle for Tiley.

She says this is a pattern that has continued to spiral Tiley's life into a dramatic and destructive situation that I do think is harmful and have outlined in previous letters and reports to the court. If these events and situations persist, I believe that it becomes more and more possible to overlook something truly dangerous or exactly. or exaggerate something that is manipulative in nature, it is a dangerous pattern. Mary Fogel, the guardian mad lighten to Tiley, is essentially telling the courts that she thinks

that Lori Vallow at the time, that Lori Vallow is more than capable of creating harm to another human being. And then she actually sees her as dangerous. At one point, Mary suggested foster care for Tiley. At one point during this custody battle, she brought up foster care and had researched it and was looking to see if Tiley might actually be safer in a foster care

situation. So let's go back to our question of what's the storyline? What's a potential storyline that someone could develop in the trial to get Lori Valo Debel acquitted? It seems to me that the most compelling storyline would be that Lori had a few mental health problems early on in her life, nothing too bad. She was the victim of some trauma and her family. She had some bad relationships that were violent, but she had no criminal record. She meets Chad Daybell. She breaks bad. Chad Dayball makes all the decisions. She's not involved in many of those decisions. Alex Cox may be communicating with Chad Daybell. Alex Cox is responsible for the murders. Lori's just this innocent victim who's caught up in the whirlwind who breaks bad as a result of Chad. But here, I think we're

presenting some evidence that maybe that narrative is inaccurate. We're questioning whether Lori had a personality disorder prior to Chad. It seems like there's some evidence that she may. have the other thing we didn't mention is Alex Cox assaulted Joe Ryan previously and spent time in prison that we have to assume that clearly that Lori would know about that assault. Laurie not only probably knows about it, but she may very well have asked Alex to do that. And so in that particular instance, we're seeing the same pattern that we see with Debo, right? Lori is requesting violence from her brother. Did Chad and Lori both request that violence from Alex?

Did Lori? I mean, we don't know for sure, but this would be evidence that she didn't break bad. that she was already involved in similar types of schemes and behaviors prior to Chad Daybell. And then, of course, there's this major issue about Lori potentially poisoning other people. We know for sure that she poisoned Charles. That seems indisputable. She may have poisoned Larry. We've heard other stories about other adults that probably experienced similar issues. There's a question here about factitious disorder imposed on another with Tiley about her over-medicating

other children that she was raising, right? There's clearly a big question here about the pattern. And so let's go back to this issue of risk. I want to talk a little bit of motive to why did Walter White break bad? If Lori breaks bad, and we assume it probably had to have been earlier in her life. So when Lori did break bad, if she did break bad, it would have occurred probably around the time that she decided that poisoning people was a valid strategy for coping with the world. I've already discussed how I think that Walter White would be a very low risk prior to getting cancer.

I think that Lori Val de Bala, prior to meeting Chad Debo, would have been a reasonably serious risk. And I'm not the only one, right? The Mary Fogel identifies her as a danger to Tiley. That if the Moonschausans is accurate and if this poisoning other people is accurate, she's an immense risk. All of that occurs before Chad. So the question here is, if Lori is capable. of poisoning other human beings. You know, in Nevada,

let's say that Charles dies from the Xanax. Let's say he overdoses. That's actually, that's attempted murder by poisoning. That's actually a felony that results in life in prison. So is it possible to go from these types of behaviors

to murdering kids? And the answer is it has to be. Because of this cruelty or this meanness component, this trait that is often found in psychopaths, that if you're willing to inflict harm upon your spouse, and your daughter, which in many ways is objectifying them, it's dehumanizing them,

it's seeing them as objects, then you're probably willing to take the next step and murder them at some point if the situation calls for it. I have said in the past that I think Chad Daybell plays a major role in Lori's decisions. I do still think that. I think that Chad becomes the catalyst where murder becomes possible. I believe that if Chad doesn't come in the picture, the probability is less. that these children are murdered. However, that propensity towards violence is already there. That dehumanization of her kids is already there. And so that leap to murder is not a major leap. So we have

an interview on our Beyond the Veil podcast with Dr. Christine that I'd recommend anyone to listen to. And Dr. Christine shares her own personal story. She was LDS and a false prophet manipulated her. severely. There was polygamy involved. There was scripture involved. And she was falling for all of it. And she was severely abused throughout this entire situation. And it got to a certain point where the false prophet said to her, I need you to give your kids up for adoption. I need you to get rid of your kids if we're going to continue. If you're going to be by my side and all of this. And it was that moment that she thought, no way, no way. That was the beginning of her way out of the manipulation. It took a while. She hid her kids from him. She didn't give him up for adoption. And I've always thought

of that story as a great example of where you're going with this. Chad is the catalyst. Chad is the one making the request. This is Chad's belief system. This is what he's asking of Lori, he's deeming tally dark and JJ's now a zombie too and now his own wife is a zombie. But if Lori had been a healthier person like Dr. Christine had been, I think she would have thought, no way. And what is he asking of me? But she she didn't. And I just want to point that out too. And that for me helps me to kind of explain their two separate roles in this. Yeah, I agree. Right. Did she, did Lori? Lori has already dehumanized her kids previously, especially Tiley, probably JJ to some degree because

she's medicating him to sleep. In fact, all the kids in the home, she's using medication and or poison to control them. And so there's already this dehumanization, which means that when she meets Chad and Chad refers to the kids or to the people that are going to be murdered as zombies, that's not much of a leap. She's not going to object to that, whereas Dr. Christine did. I do want to conclude with some final thoughts. What are the motives, right? Let's talk about Walter White for a second. For Walter White, the reason he cooks math and breaks bad is because, at least initially, he says he's doing it for his family. And that makes sense. He doesn't want to leave his family in debt over his medical bills. He wants to provide. He has a son that's disabled. He wants to provide. He

wants to provide for him. He has a daughter that was recently born. But what is Lori up to? Let's go back to the infamous murder testimony. Okay, this is the same event we started with. Lori stating she didn't have a murderous heart. She just wanted to stop the pain and the bleeding and she started going to the temple every day. This is from that same moment, recorded that same time at Melanie Gibbs home 2008, October 2008. I too, like Melanie have had the love of Jesus Christ. wash over me. There is nothing like that on this earth. It is life-changing and eternity altering. I love my Savior with my whole heart. After I've had this washing over of the Lord who gave me all of his complete love, all of his peace, which is not of this world. I've spent

so much time in dark courtrooms where the evil powers overpower those rooms. And I spent so much time in there that he washed all of that away for me. So I think that is fascinating to me because I think really getting close to something like true motive with that in the sense that Lories is basically telling us that she can't do real relationships, that she's more interested in this idea of eternal or celestial love. We know that she's obsessed with Twilight. Twilight is a relationship between a vampire and a human. And it's immortal love, not of this world. It's not of this world, but it's a pure fantasy. And so I think what Lori never had was real human love. I think that there's a big gap there with her father, that there's a real hole in her heart because her father, I

think was somewhat distant and maybe struggled to convey a sense of love to Lori, at least. I don't know about the other kids in the family. And again, you just heard the quote I read about how factitious disorder imposed on another or Moons. I prefer Moochausen's because it's a little more poetic. So I prefer the term Moonshausens. But how Moonshausens is in many ways an attempt to regain paternal love that never really was there. And so I think you have. a version of that here. In fact, let me read from, this is from the Chad Deba love text again. These are so critical to understanding this case, by the way. Chad says he knew, he meaning Chad, he knew they had been eternal companions for eons and that

their love was beyond celestial, right? What a statement. He's telling her, not only have they been together for eternity and eons, but their love was beyond celestial. Celestial is heavenly love. But he's saying, so Chad is selling her, not only is Chad telling her she's a goddess, but he's essentially telling her that their love is beyond, that's, he, more specifically, I want to say in, in Mormon doctrine, Celestials is high as you get. In Mormon doctrine, heaven has different degrees of glory and celestial is as high as you go. So it's beyond celestial. Right.

And so this, this is, people have, have talked about how Chad is. and her type physically, and she's usually worth these guys that are maybe more attractive and more physically imposing, but that's not really what Chad is appealing to. He's appealing to the very thing that Lori just said to us, that she wants a love that is beyond this world. In other words, she wants a love that doesn't exist. She wants a love that exists in fantasy. And so in the Netflix documentary and in talking to Colby personally he mentioned a few times that his mother was often talking about the story of Abraham and Isaac and in many ways that story is I think relevant to this particular situation because God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac because God is

testing his commitment to celestial love. In other words, to God, to a love beyond the human plane. And Isaac is spared at the end. However, I think that Lori would feel that that story, if it was necessary to sacrifice children, I think that Lori would feel compelled to do that, especially if Chad was asking her. I think Chad may very well have made that request because he was testing her love. He was testing her loyalty. And I think Lori would not have objected to that because she would have seen this whole idea of eternal love and celestial love as being the most compelling thing that she could ever want. This is what she wanted more than anything else. And the reason she wanted that is because of all her childhood wounds and their traumas,

potentially abuse, because of her strained relationship with her father, because of this notion of psychic death that I quoted about why people break bad, this sense of helplessness, and this really strong desire for attention and recognition. And ultimately, if she was poisoning people, to feel that sense of empowerment through poisoning and through cruelty. So I think that when we dig deep enough, this is where we land. We land on this idea of love that is an illusion, love that exists in fantasy. I'm going to end here with a few quotes.

I want to go back to Walter White. This is from a book. It's called Philosophy and Breaking Bad. It's a brilliant, for those Breaking Bad fans that are willing to go the extra length to really think about Breaking Bad. This is a really excellent book. Philosophy and Breaking Bad. It's edited by Decker, Copsel, and ARP. This is in the introduction.

This particular article, I think, is written by, let me check here. It's written by, I don't know which author wrote the introduction, but page 19. 19 and 20. The authors say, we are meant to disdain Walt and to cast judgment on his deeds and motivations. He has certainly no role model, but then few epic heroes are. But it is the journey that is important. Walt was a nobody who becomes a legend, his alter ego's name whispered in hushed tones, spray painted on walls, and in the real world, iconic and ubiquitous. There's little sense in distinguishing Walt from other heroes whose histories are spotted with violence. and death. The world that he leaves behind is not worsened, and the lives of his children are

improved by his actions. Numerous criminal drug lords are left dead in his wake, as well as a clutch of nasty white supremacist and a couple of crooked business people, too. Perhaps Walt is not a hero as such, but his journey is undeniably the hero's journey, and his appeal to us is similarly undeniable. If he ended the show as merely evil, we would have lost interest and felt betrayed. We feel instead a sense of justice in the final act. I love that because there's certainly a complexity to Walter White in the sense that we could really have a strong argument about if and why he would be heroic. And I think that the authors here begin answering that, that in many ways Walt is on this hero's journey to figure out who he is.

And while he creates this trail of destruction and death, oftentimes bad guys get killed, by the way, not good guys. In the end, I think, as the authors point out, maybe there's the sense of justice, that the bad guys got their due. And comparatively, I see that as a bit of a litmus test. Comparatively, there's no sense in which we could ever say that Lori Valdebel leaves this story with a sense of justice. There's no justice in Lori's story.

There's no happy ending. There's no bad guys getting their due, right? And so that's a big difference between Breaking Bad and Lori. That Walt may break bad, but in that Breaking Bad, he really is trying to figure out who he is. He's really struggling, whether we agree with it or not, he's really struggling for authenticity. And towards the end, he says something to the effect of,

Skyler, who is his wife, confronts him and says, you keep saying you're doing this for family, but I don't think you are. Tell me the truth. And Walt says something to the effect of, I'm doing it for myself. And what Walt means is that he wants to figure out who he is. He doesn't want to be that meek loser at the beginning that everyone's mocking.

He wants to feel powerful. He wants to feel like he's made a difference. I don't know that he would have knowingly chosen to cook method, become a drug lord but in some ways as the authors say here the world is potentially a better place and maybe there's some sense of justice but in no way can we feel that the dable story has that sense of justice and in no way has lorry made any type of authentic journey or hero's journey to figure out who she is so i think that contrast really kind of when i read that by the way I thought about how vastly different these two stories are.

And how, although, you know, I don't know I would see Walt White as a hero, I think that the difference is that Chad and Lori Debo leave nothing but harm and suffering and pain in their wake, whereas at least Walter White struggled to figure out who he was and what he was capable of. he did leave as they he did potentially leave the world a better place and he left the world a more just place and I wish we could say the same about Daveau. We can learn so many lessons from this story.

Don't fall for false profits. Don't date Katie Perry for those that have watched our older podcast, our older episodes and stay out of portals. And don't break that either. Don't break it. The best way to avoid any of this is not to break bad. Yes. Yes. Thank you, everyone for being with us. Even if we're not here with you live in the moment, we are here. We are watching with you. And we've appreciated

this conversation that is creating. Thank you for your patience and your kindness and sticking with us throughout this whole journey. And may there be some sense of justice in the end for the Woodcocks and the mini victims of Chad and Lori Daebaum. Thanks, everyone. And Have a good night. Good night. Hello, Hidden Gems. It's Lauren with Hidden a True Crime podcast. As a TV reporter, I learned the art of visual storytelling.

So if you're like me, you enjoy listening, but also viewing. You can actually head to our YouTube channel, Hidden True Crime, to watch these interviews. Hit the subscribe button for surprise lives and breaking news. And for exclusive content, things Dr. John and I only dare say behind a paywall, become a patron member at patreon.com slash hidden true crime. You'll find bonus episodes, early releases, and insider info.

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