Hidden True Crime - Beyond the Veil: When Lori Met Chad and the Dream of Immortal Love Part I

Episode Date: February 20, 2021

Join us for an in-depth dinner conversation about belief formation and the desire for ideal love. We dig as deep as we can into Lori Vallow Daybell’s psyche and start to put all of the pieces together to develop a comprehensive psychological portrait of how and why these murders occurred. Tonight, we explore Lori’s role in these tragic events through an examination of Lori’s yearning for other-worldly love as a panacea for all her worldly pain and suffering. 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 so through those blessings, through that treachery of going to the temple, and then, and then, after I've had this washing over of the Lord who gave me all of his complete love, all of of his piece, which is not of this world. This is Lauren Matthias. And I'm Dr. John Matthias. And who you just heard was Lori Valadebel. She was bearing her testimony. That's what Mormons call the personal sharing of spiritual experiences.

Usually it's done during a Sunday church service. But here, Lori is burying her testimony at Melanie Gibbs' home in October 2018. This audio was released last month by Annie Cushing. 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. Tonight is Lucky Number episode 13. And what are we talking about, Dr. John? We'll be talking about love. Love.

As if our discussion of evil wasn't consistent. conceptually loaded enough, let's just throw in love. Let's, yeah, let's throw caution to the wind and explore love. Here's someone else talking about love from an episode of MTV's reality show Catfish. It was immediate connection, a million I love you back and forth. It was pretty cool. This catfish episode is about a man named Spencer from Knoxville, Tennessee. Spencer claims he's been in a virtual relationship with singer and pop star Katie Perry for six years.

He's never met her. He has talked to her on the phone once, he says, and it's been six years of emails. Katie's full of life. She's huge heart. Have you guys said that you love each other? Many times. Spencer is as certain as anything that he is in love. with Katie Perry, the Katie Perry, and that Katie is in love with him.

He's even made her a ring and is ready to propose. On the scale of 1 to 10, 10 being I fully believe I'm in a virtual relationship with Katie Perry, and one being this could be true, but probably isn't, but I thought it would be a good episode of catfish. Where do you fall on that scale? There's definitely love there. I don't have any doubt. And Lori Valodabal, she is certain she has met and seen the resurrected Jesus Christ. I'll just start by saying that I am a personal witness of the resurrected Jesus Christ. I am his advocate and I am his friend.

He is with me. She has no doubt. And I was one of his strongest warriors and I saw it. and he showed me so that I could never deny it again. The Savior is real. I had the love of Jesus Christ who washed over me. There is nothing like that on this earth. It is life-changing.

So let's take this to Dr. John. What do these two, Spencer, on Catfish, and Lori Vallow-Dabel, have in common? At the broadest level, the commonality is perceiving love to be a panacea, perceiving love to be a cure for all our ills, all our problems, all our pains and suffering. It is the perception of love as a cure all. As in Katie Perry would cure all of Spencer's woes, even though we don't know about them. And Christ would cure all of Lori's woes. woes? Is that kind of where you're going? Yeah, I think the analogy is that Katie Perry, a pop star,

a famous and rich pop star, well known with millions of Twitter and Instagram followers, is a secular version of Jesus potentially. I know that seems like a stretch, but in our culture, pop stars and celebrities take on kind of this secular, larger than life importance. And I think for someone who perhaps isn't as religious, it's quite conceivable to see someone like Katie Perry in the same vein that someone who is very religious might see Jesus Christ. Okay, taking that in. Well, there's a couple of commonalities. One is we need to examine the nature of belief.

The question here is, how? can a guy, how can this guy Spencer who's never met Katie Perry and can only imagine or create this fantasy of Katie Perry is how can he believe with certainty that she's in love with him without evidence?

Well, according to Spencer, he has a lot of evidence and he shows the hosts of Catfish, all of the evidence, all of the love emails. In fact, he says the lyrics are hints written directly for him. I've gone back and

listen to some of her songs in the last album. All of them have little bits of lyrics that are clues to me. It was not to me to figure it out, but I figured it out. I'm fully 100% confident. It's Katie. She's smart, and we are all bearing witness to it coming to fruition. It's Katie. I know it's Katie.

Never mind the fact that she's been dating other people, including dating, movie stars during the time that he believes she's in love with him. Those are just her side boys. She's got her sight set on Spencer and her song lyrics tell him so. So part of the issue is how do we create these beliefs or oftentimes these abstract beliefs and then think of them as being realistic? I have been ministered to by the angel Marama. I have seen him.

I have had lots of angelic ministry with people who wake me up, 4 o'clock in the morning, tell me things to do. For Lori, in order to begin to assess that question, we're going to have to return a bit to an examination of her family. Ah, the Cox family. And when we say Cox family, we mean Lori's family of origin, those who raised her. But before we continue, first we need to share something. We started this podcast on a whim. We were eating dinner one night talking about the daybell case that we've been talking about for several months and blogging about to some degree.

And we said, let's do it. Now or never. We purchased some equipment, got it out and we started. Unfortunately, there were a few elements to starting a podcast that we didn't consider because we started so quickly. and on a whim. So we had to pause these past few months for a number of reasons, but one of them was because we had to dot some eyes and cross some teas. Yeah, we had to resolve a few issues before we could move forward. We have done that to the best of our knowledge. So here we are. We're back. But before we start this podcast, we want to make a strong disclaimer, which is this podcast is primarily

educational, although we're talking about a specific case. I think the larger purpose here is to cite research and to present a speculative interpretation of a case that has not gone to court and it has not been adjudicated. And on that issue, as an aside, I should make it very clear that Chad and Lori are innocent until proven guilty, since this case has not gone to trial, although I anticipated that it would have gone to trial much sooner than it appears to be going to trial, that they'll have their day in court and they're both innocent at the moment.

So I should make it very clear that this is primarily an intellectual exercise about a particular case where the defendants may or may not be guilty. I guess we'll find out. Sometimes we make the presumption of guilt, and that's merely a function of the fact that we're speculating. We're running what if scenarios over and over. And the point of that

is to give our listeners a sense of how a forensic psychologist might interpret a case. One reason we wanted to do this is because so many psychologists don't do this. And I told John, I feel like it doesn't help the public to not understand psychology. from a psychologist's point of view and what we're discovering about people. And I am so glad that he's sharing his knowledge with us. But we just wanted to say, Chad and Lori are innocent until proven guilty.

And as John has said, this is speculative. Another point I want to make is we don't have all the evidence, nor do we know all the evidence, which also means that we're developing hypotheses and speculating based upon the best of the information, that we have. I also told Lauren when we first started this podcast that it actually reminded me a lot of the Alfred plea, which as a forensic psychologist is a type of plea arrangement where a defendant essentially is pleading guilty but not fully admitting guilt. So the Alfred plea, which began

with a case in North Carolina, it was a murder case actually. Alfred's attorney argued, because he was going to be faced with capital punishment or the death penalty that he accepted a plea against his will. The end result of the offered plea and the way it shows up today in almost every state, there are a few states that do not accept an offered plea, but they're limited. I think three states don't. The way the offered plea works today is a defendant can avoid going to trial and they can accept a guilty plea without admitting guilt. A defendant accepting an offered plea is saying that they're innocent, but if the case did go to trial, a preponderance of evidence would more than likely find them guilty. For a forensic psychologist, this plea is a nightmare

because every time I get in front of someone who's accepted an Alfred plea, their lawyers advise them not to say a word to me. For example, when I ask someone about their history or their crime, they'll say, I didn't commit that crime. And when I ask them to give me some childhood history, they'll say my childhood was great. Many defendants with an Alford plea refused to provide information at the advice of their attorneys because they're essentially maintaining the position that they're innocent in spite of the fact that the offered plea suggests guilt. How is this relevant to the Daybell case? Because our current speculative interpretations of the case remind me a lot of how I deal with Alford plea cases.

which is to say that because the defendants in those cases don't provide much information, I have to seek information elsewhere. So what I do in those types of cases is I'll go to a spouse or a partner or family members or friends. I have to go to collateral information sources outside of the defendants and outside of the attorney to get valuable information. So I rely almost exclusively on court documents. We call them collateral information sources for information. I think that would be similar here in this case, that if I was hired to go in and evaluate Lori and Chad or both,

that more than likely, neither of them would provide any useful information about anything. And so the way I would deal with that situation is precisely the way I deal with an Alfred plea case, is I would have to find information elsewhere. So I think in that sense, our interpretation of this case is, to me, it's very much like an offered plea because the information from the actual defendants would probably be very limited. And Lauren and I have sought out to the best of our ability a number of collateral information sources that know the defendants very well. We have found numerous court documents in addition to Chad Daybell's autobiography and all of his personal writing, which in some ways has provided us with at least,

as much information as I would get in an Alfred plea case or probably more. So while I want to make it clear that this is speculative and no plea agreements have been accepted in this case, it does very much remind me of an Alfred plea case. We're not resorting to wild speculation,

although we don't know all the evidence, we don't have all the court information or findings or investigative findings. So it is grounded in information we have, but not complete information and it is very much speculative at this point.

Back to the Cox family. And when we talk about the Cox family, we are talking about Lori's family of origin, the people who raised her, her siblings and her mother and father. That is the Cox family we're talking about here. Barry is her dad, Janice is her mother, Summer is her sister.

We'll be mentioning those family members in this episode. And we talked about their family. We speculated about the fact, based upon the best evidence we had at the time, that Lori's family was what we referred to as a narcissistic family, meaning the dominant member of the family would have been her father, Barry Cox, who tended to be a very extreme and overbearing person in terms of his religious beliefs, his views of the government and the IRS, which he wanted to abolish in terms of his leadership in the family.

We have heard from a reliable source that Barry tended to, quote, rule the family with an iron fist. Barry would be considered very much a dominant figure in this family. He very much controlled the family. They were an enmeshed family. We speculated, and it is speculation that there might have been abuse. We speculated back in episode nine that perhaps there was. some type of abuse in the family. Since that episode, we've received some reliable information that we believe likely confirms that fact, although obviously we have no access to CPS records

or reports of any abuse in the family. So it is hypothetical. So let's talk about the nature of belief. How does a belief form? Beliefs for most of us begin in our families. Yes. They're shaped by the family culture. That's important because we want to look at the Cox family and we want to look at how this family culture influenced Lori's beliefs. I'm going to reference a study by Whitson and Galinsky from science in 2008. The title of the study is Lacking Control increases illusory pattern perception. The authors start by stating, quote, the desire to combat uncertainty and main control has long been considered a primary and fundamental motivating force in human life and one of the most important variables governing psychological well-being and physical health.

The purpose of the study, which involved six separate experiments, was to examine the impact of control or lack of control. Those were the two conditions on subjects' ability to perceive patterns or to identify patterns in a set of random and unrelated stimuli. What they found was that the participants who lack control, in other words, they were in the lack of control condition. So there were two conditions. There was a group that was primed in several ways to experience a lack of control. And there was another group, that control group, that did not have that.

They weren't primed to feel a lack of control. The results showed that the participants who lack control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images and noise, where no images existed, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions. The authors conclude, quote,

these six experiments demonstrate that lacking control motivates pattern perception. Experiencing a loss of control led participants to desire more structure and to perceive illusory patterns. The need to be and to feel in control is so strong that individuals will produce a pattern from noise to return the world to a more predictable state. Okay, so is this like conspiracy theories? In other words, what you're saying is, is when things feel out of hand, we will find patterns in random things. And maybe this is a jump, but... It's related to conspiracy theories. Yeah, they did find that people subject to less control were more likely to see conspiracies, to believe in conspiracy theories. Okay, so that's what I was

wondering, because I recently read an article that said that conspiracy theories become more common and more popular among the general public when things are uncertain like a pandemic or this intense election cycle. I have noticed a lot of conspiracy theories with friends. They seem to be everywhere. And that's what this article was relating it to. In times of uncertainty, there's a rise in conspiracy theories. And in seeing patterns that don't exist, seeing patterns and random noise is similar to a conspiracy theory, right? Because a conspiracy theory is based upon putting together pieces of a puzzle in a puzzle that doesn't really exist. Okay.

That's helpful to me. And so would you say that somebody that is often looking for patterns in random things, it's wanting to be in control? Yeah, I think all of us seek some type of control over our environment, but it's a question of degree. When the control becomes really tenuous or fragile, I think maybe some people overcompensate by trying to explain the world simply through conspiracy theories

or through seeing patterns that don't exist or developing superstitions. It's a way for us to regain some control over our environment, or at least to feel like we have a valid explanation for all of the uncertainty and for all of the unknown in the environment. And yes, I think our current environment with COVID-19 and all kinds of political uncertainty certainly tends to breed these types of interpretations of the world. So how does this play in DeLory? Well, let's tie this back to Lori's family.

Okay. We talked about the Daybell family, and we applied the lens of Robert Beaver's, the Beaver's model of family functioning. And we said that Chad's family was a mid-range family or a typical family. When we look at the Cox family, though, the evidence seems to point in the direction of seeing the Cox family as a, what Beaver's called, a borderline family. So in other words, they're less healthy. A borderline family is not the most dysfunctional family, but it's not a healthy family either. These are some of the characteristics of a borderline family.

They shift from chaotic to tyrannical control efforts. Their boundaries fluctuate, and they're often poor, but sometimes overly rigid. There's a lot of emotional distance in these families. There's a good deal of depression, and there's outbursts of rage, unpredictable rage, in these types of families. Beavers, in a 2000 article published in the Association for Family Therapy, says, quote, borderline families present with chaotic, overt power struggles alternating with ineffective but persistent efforts to establish dominance or submission patterns. Individual family members have little skill in meeting emotional needs, either their own or those of others. severely obsessional and anorexic patients may sometimes be found in these families, as well as borderline personality disorders.

And we have both of those in the Coxes. We have Stacy, who we believe was anorexic. She passed away. And Lori, who we believe borderline, and again, we have received additional information since that, that would claim we're on the right track. Right. The anorexia was clearly evident with Stacey. We know that from the court documents. Anorexia appears to be possible with the mother Janice. And there's some possibility that Lori has struggled with anorexia. So that would fit very well. Also, obsessional characteristics, we see that in Barry Cox. He's obsessed with the IRS, with overpowering and abolishing the IRS. it's an absurd undertaking for most of us, for a normal person, but for Barry Cox, there's this obsession.

So we see that in the leader of this family. After he was charged with tax evasion, he then went on years later to write a book that he published, self-published, trying to abolish the IRS. So it didn't necessarily come out of the charges a more humble man, just with more desire to take them down. We see with Lori a good deal. of borderline personality features.

I speculated that she likely had borderline personality disorder, and some of that was based on the psychosexual evaluation that was performed on Joe Ryan, where the evaluator interviewed Lori, however, this presentation of being on the extremes and having a great deal of instability and behaviors and emotions and self-image, these are consistent with the type of family

that Beavers is talking about here. Yes. And can we say, if not we'll edit this out, can we say that you have talked to Colby, to Lori's son Colby? Yes, I have had a chance to meet Colby in person. We talked for several hours. And what was your experience with Colby? Or what can you tell us? I thought Colby was a very genuine person who was simply seeking to make sense of a world that was and has been spiraling

not of control for him. You mentioned to me that you thought he was sincere. Yeah, I think he really is sincerely searching for answers and direction in the face of this entire fiasco. A lot of what Colby and I discussed is private at the moment. I think it's okay to share. It's reasonable to conclude from my discussions with Colby that Lori does meet many of the criteria for Borderline Persons. personality disorder. Okay. So let's go back. Let's think about the Cox family within the Beaver's family systems model. And by the way, the book where Beaver presents much of this research, the summary of a lot of Beaver's research can be found in a book called Successful Families Assessment and Intervention that was published in 1990 with Hampson, for those of you who are curious.

Many people are curious about John's references. And so we're going to try to share those more often in these coming episodes. So let's go back to the Cox family and think about how beliefs develop and the nature of this family. You have a family culture that's constantly shifting between tyrannical control and chaos, right? This is the perfect environment. This type of inconsistency is the perfect environment. to really mess up your kids. It's an environment of uncertainty.

It's an environment of fear. It's an environment of unpredictability. So Lori grows up in this environment. Let's go back to the study by Whitson and Galinsky that I referenced earlier, looking at the lack of control and how it affects us. There's a lot of uncertainty in the Cox family. So one natural response to that is to see order in randomness.

We talked about this a while back in an episode on Chad where I talked about the idea of illusory correlation. The idea of illusory correlation is that we tend to see patterns or correlations that don't exist. The brain in some ways is a pattern matching machine. Some psychologists have argued the very survival of the human species is dependent upon the brain's ability to predict the environment and the future. and to see patterns so that we can act on those patterns for our survival. The psychologist Michael Shermer has actually done a lot of research on the nature of belief. And one of his fundamental ideas, one of his fundamental premises is what he calls patternicity, which is the same idea.

As human beings, we've evolved to make sense of things that don't necessarily make sense, to make sense of the senseless. And we do that by finding order and patterns in the environment. This reminds me of the patterns that I've heard Lori talk about. Lori loves patterns. It's like her perpetual way of seeing the world. Take a listen to her here. So he told my husband and I to move to Hawaii.

So we were like, you really want us to move to Hawaii? Like, I'm going to need a confirmation of this on my father. Like, you're going to have to tell me this again. So I had six confirmations in the temple that we should. moved to Kauai and the very last one was a lady and I went into the dressing room and she said oh would you do a name for me and I grabbed her name looked at the name put it in my pocket and I told my father I was like I know you've given me like five confirmations I'll go do whatever you want me to do but I I really need to know this is what you want us to do and so I'm

in the Mesa temple and as soon as I'm going through the veil look at this card I opened it up look at her name and it's stamped Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii and it was The date was the day before. So she was yesterday in the Laia temple, and then she's flown overnight, and now she's in the Mesa Temple. Handing me this card, would you do your name for me? Hawaii, Hawaii. The Lord is in all the details of our lives. Sometimes those patterns are accurate.

A lot of times they're not. It's the same thing with illusory correlation. It's a similar idea. You have a family culture with Lori that has a great deal of chaos. the natural response to that is to find order in the random dots. Okay, right. It's to see things that aren't there. It's to develop some type of pattern matching beliefs to make sense of the environment.

I think that in this family, the one constant that Lori finds is this belief in her Mormon faith, which in and of itself isn't an issue. It becomes an issue for Lori because she's using these beliefs to solve all of her childhood problems. She's hiding behind these beliefs so that she doesn't have to deal with the uncertainty and the abuse and the pain and the inconsistencies in the environment. Okay. You know, John and I were listening to the entire recording of Lori bearing her testimony in October 2018. And this soundbite here that we'll share with you, the moment Lori said this. And Satan had been torturing me since I was a little kid.

So I've had that my whole life. That Satan has been torturing her since she was a little kid. John quickly said, what did you say? When I heard that, my first thought was she's talking about her father. She's talking about Barry Cox. She can't refer to her dad as Satan. But I think she's referencing her dad. If her father was abusive, it's easier for her to call him Satan than to call him dad.

It's easier for her to deal with that, to deal with the pain and the trauma of being abused by seeing this as a function of Satan rather than as coming from a family member. She's labeling Satan all of the abuse that occurred in the family. She's using the term Satan as a catch-all for the traumatic environment that you grew up in. But the biggest part of that traumatic environment was hypothetically her father. So directly or indirectly, she's referring to Barry her father as Satan. She could never say that directly. She would never point the finger at her father.

even if abuse transpired and she wanted to because it wouldn't be safe. Because there's a lot of loyalty in this family. We talked about this family being enmeshed, which means that they're overly close. They have poor boundaries. They protect each other at all costs. So it's easier for her to create this belief that it was Satan that caused this rather than her father. Okay. So in other words, back to what you were saying.

So she's using religious concepts to try to create emotional distance from the pain and trauma of her childhood. She's using Satan for evil. She's using the term Jesus for good. For good. Right. This is how this notion of love becomes associated with Jesus for Lori. And how that then becomes a panacea for all of her trauma and all the abuse. But it also becomes a way for her.

to suppress or push away any negative emotions. Jesus, Satan, black or white, either or, it's always these two extremes. It's interesting because a couple months ago when this recording came out, the part of this recording that made the news was Lori saying that she wanted to murder Joe Ryan, her ex-husband, Tiley's father, that she essentially made the choice between either murdering Joe Ryan or going to the temple every day. Like that was her either or there.

Here's that moment when she says she has to make this choice. I was going to murder him. I was going to kill him. Like the scripture say, like Nephi killed it, just to stop the pain. 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 wow. There's a reason this recording made the news. She just admitted publicly her willingness to murder. What is going on here? We've all been waiting to see what you think of this. I think there's two main components to Lori's statement there. The first is what I would refer to as the cognitive or problem-solving component. In other words, how she assesses the world intellectually and how she solves problems based upon that assessor.

As in like how could she think this is even normal to say? No, that she's seen a problem, which is Joe Ryan, and the way she's trying to solve that intellectually is through murder. Yeah. So the first component is an intellectual one. It's what I would call a decision-making or problem-solving component. And the second component would be more of an emotional component, which is how she perceives Joe Ryan

as a human being or does she perceive Joe Ryan as a human being? Let's start with the first one. Let's look at the cognitive intellectual component of this statement first. The problem is that Lori doesn't perceive any options here. There's a psychologist, a German psychologist by the name of Dietrich Dorner who wrote a book called The Logic of Failure. It's a brilliant book. It's one of my favorite books. It's probably one of the most neglected books that I can think of in our field. But what Dorner says is that every system, and that includes families, that includes communities, that includes social problems like poverty. And any system that we deal with, there's a lot of complexity. We as human beings struggle with that. We struggle with two things. We struggle with

solving problems that are complex that have a lot of variables that are related to each other, and we struggle with predicting the future, that, in other words, it's not just that these problems are complex, but these problems have future consequences. And it's difficult for human beings in general to deal with complexity and to then project that complexity out

into future consequences. So a great example of that would be something like climate change. Climate change is a very, very complex issue with a lot of variables that interact that is very difficult and resistant to simple solutions. And the future consequences are that if something isn't done about this,

then eventually Miami will be underwater. Or there's going to be warming to an extent that many serious problems will resolve. My point is that Dorner says that when human beings are confronted with complex systems, with many variables, one of the solutions to solving those types of problems is to resort to what he calls horizontal flight. Horizontal flight is we take a very small piece of the puzzle and we focus only on that. So let's say that someone is overwhelmed by climate change and they don't really know how to deal with the complexity of that. So in order to potentially cope with that problem, they'll gravitate towards one very specific simple solution. For example, perhaps the solution

it might be throwing out their aluminum cans in a recycling bin every week. And that's all they do. And maybe that's going to help. But it's certainly not going to solve this problem in a larger level. It makes the person feel better. It makes them feel like they're contributing. But it's not going to solve the problem. It's taking a very small piece of the puzzle and using that piece as a way to cope with the anxiety and stress of this larger problem.

Or let's take the mindset of Lori Valo. Climate change isn't even an issue because Jesus Christ is coming and the second coming is on its way and it doesn't even matter. That's her solution to the problem, I'm sure, and every problem. Well, and that's the second issue that Dorner talks about that when a problem becomes so overwhelming that we don't know how to cope with it, we resort to what he calls vertical flight, which is essentially just going into flight. flights of fantasy. Fantasy will take you away from the problems completely. It'll take you into another world, a fictional world.

And I think Lori actually does both here. So when she talks about murder as a solution, she's actually using both. She's using horizontal flight because she's trying to simplify this problem to such an extent that she's saying there's only one solution here. It's murder

or the temple. There's nothing in between. She's making this problem, which is fairly complex but solvable into this really simple horizontal flight solution, which is let's murder this guy. Right. And Alex Cox did attack him once. So we know there's definitely a thought process in the Cox household. And vertical flight we see with precisely what Lauren just said, which is this flight into the fantasy of Jesus Christ is going to solve all our problems. And the second coming makes all these problems are relevant.

And so what if I murder this guy because the world's coming to an end anyway, so why worry about it? Who cares if he's dead? He's going to be dead anyway. It's just a matter of time. Which, by the way, it appears that Lori, going back many, many years, we don't know exactly when, but probably into her childhood, Lori has harbored this fantasy of the second coming or the imminence of the new world, the rapture, the apocalypse.

She's had this fantasy for many, many years. So Chad coming into her life with this vision of the apocalypse is nothing new. Lori's expected this for many years. Right. This isn't a new belief. But can we talk about the second element here you mentioned that it was emotional? Because it's more than strange. I mean, it's psychotic that she, in my opinion, at least that she would just want to murder this guy.

Like that's where her mind goes. Temple or murder. And she's telling her church leader this, I'm going to murder him. What is going through her mind? Once you understand that the cognitive component is the most simplistic, reductive strategy possible. In other words, if you can't solve a problem with your axe, very few people are going to resort to the most simplistic, solution of murder. But once you do that, then that brings you to the second component, which is an utter lack

of empathy, an utter lack of compassion, empathy, and understanding for another human being. In other words, what she's doing here is completely objectifying Joe Ryan. Keep in mind that Joe Ryan is the father of her daughter. Right. No matter how bad this is, and I understand. Lori sees this as a major barrier to her child's well-being because she believes that Tiley was sexually abused. Maybe, or she's making the whole thing up. Right, in spite of the fact that there's no evidence showing that Tiley was sexually abused. But the fact is that she sees Joe as an object that's in her way and that should be disposed of

through murder rather than as a thinking, feeling, potentially loving human being that deserves respect and that should have some presence in her daughter's life. In all of the court documents that I have read, and I have read hundreds of pages now of court documents, I have not seen any proof that Tiley was ever sexually abused by Joe Ryan. I will share that. This lack of emotion is consistent with a good deal of research on psychopaths. I have speculated previously the lawyer seems to lack fear, which is supported by the research by Abigail Marsh. But we can take this a step further here and examine some of the research on psychopathy more broadly,

which indicates that psychopaths lack emotion more generally. Specifically, what are called the distress emotions. The distress emotions are fear and sadness. And the reason that's important is because when people experience fear or sadness, a typical human response is to reach out to that person and to nurture them, to help them. A psychopath lacking the ability to understand and to react to, distress emotions, lacks the ability to comfort and connect to other human beings.

So in other words, without the ability to experience or recognize distress emotions, there's a disconnection from other people. There's a lack of empathy. There's a tendency to objectify people, just as she's doing with Joe Ryan in this quote. This is a quote by Sheldon Itzkowitz from a book called Psychophie. and human evil. This is on page 21. He is summarizing some of the research on psychopaths. Here's what he says. Quote, they, meaning psychopaths, are emotionally shallow and superficial people who lack the basic personal qualities and emotions necessary to create and maintain deep, loving, intimate

relationships. They want and crave excitement and novelty without which they become bored easily. psychopath's dangerousness is disguised by their capacity for presenting themselves as charming, likable, amusing, entertaining, quick-witted, and interesting people. Sounds like Lori. If we look at this in terms of Lori, I think it's not hard to see that her lack of empathy, her immediate impulse to go towards murder rather than empathy is so obvious and evident in this testimony. of hers that it's actually a bit frightening. Let's go back to the Cox family and talk about belief. I want to reference some of the work of Kathleen Taylor, who's a psychologist who teaches

at Oxford. She wrote a book called Brainwashing. And Kathleen Taylor has argued that, along with many psychologists, that emotionally charged beliefs are by far the most difficult to change. that the amygdala, which we've talked about with Lori, often becomes activated by strong emotions, a fight-or-flight-type response. And when the amygdala and the hypothalamus and various parts of the mid-brain are activated, they form memories that are emotionally charged.

And these memories, when they become associated with beliefs, become really, really resistant to change. Social psychologists typically refer to this as hot cognition. This is important because I think that Lori growing up was very much in this condition of not only uncertainty, like we mentioned, and trauma because of some of the abuse. But it was an emotionally charged atmosphere. This was a family that was going from tyrannical control to complete chaos a lot, I think, because of barriers and consistencies. So what this means is that the emotional nature of that family culture means that these beliefs in the Mormon church and in the Second Coming and in the rapture become very entrenched. They become very resistant to change.

They're extremely emotionally charged. However, there's an irony here, which is the beliefs in religion have a lot of emotion behind them. but the kids and the family don't. This is not a family that's good with emotions. In fact, they're emotionally deficient. There's a lot of emotion connected with these beliefs, but there's deficiencies and actually expressing the emotions. Right. In fact, Alex Cox, Lori Vallow's brother,

I spoke to his friend, Mary Tracy, for an hour, and she really did say they never talked about really any emotions. He would absolutely not talk about emotions. That full interview is on our Patreon account for our Patreon members. Right. This was a family that couldn't deal with emotions. In fact, they were emotionally deficient. And not only that, Stacey, with her anorexia and with her type 1 diabetes, that was never discussed.

Didn't they go to Hawaii when she was dying? Yeah. That's what the family therapist Murray Bowen is called emotional cutoff, which is when there's a highly emotionally charged situation, you run away from it. You literally go to Hawaii or Disneyland. You escape to somewhere that's safer, that feels safer, that doesn't have the emotional charge. And we have learned that, am I right, that that's what the Cox family does and what I would say the Lori Vallow family did, that they would escape by going someplace. In episode nine, we talked about how Barry, in his defense of Stacey, in Stacey's custody battle with Steve Cope, how, Barry said quite emphatically that he didn't understand how Steve could be disgruntled because they took trips to Disneyland and Hawaii and he spent all this money on him.

To clarify Barry Cox, Lori's father, the custody battle with Steve Cope, the late Stacey's ex-husband, as they were getting divorced. So Barry's daughter, Stacey, and Steve Cope. Barry in his custody affidavit sees money and trips. and material goods as an expression of love. Right, not love itself. Right, and this actually is going to be a really important idea. And also, I should add, that Colby said something very similar when I talked to him. Colby said that it was very common that when the emotional temperature and the family was turned up,

that the response from Lori was exactly the same. It was to flee the situation and to go have fun. So in other words, the solution was to bury any emotion or any emotional issues and to run to Disneyland or Hawaii or kind of these typical, apparently they had these. Places. Prominent gathering places that they seem to always go to. So in other words, there is no emotion in the Cox family or in Lori Valladay Bell. One thing we've heard over and over from friends and people, people close to Lori is she simply did not express or show emotion with the exception of anger.

And even then, it wasn't super common, but anger and some joy. But we never heard anyone describe Lori as ever being fearful or sad. In other words, it's consistent with the lack of understanding and expression of the distress emotions. Many of these ideas on distress emotions, by the way, can be found in the research of James Blair and some of his colleagues. Blair summarizes a lot of his early research in a book called The Psychopath, Emotion and the Brain from 2005. One thing you said that I loved was she was a drama queen without the emotion. She's like a stone cold, emotionless drama queen. Sounds fun.

But then in this testimony, her voice would change. I heard her in a new light that I'd never seen her. It wasn't the high-pitched Lori talking to Chad in prison. It was a loud, authoritative Lori. Were those not emotions then that I was hearing? Listen to this. There seems to be drama. And I got to see myself as a warrior fighting for the Savior in the

be mortal world. If I went to other worlds and I fought and I was one of his strongest warriors and I saw it and he showed me so that I could never deny it again. I was not sweet and I was not innocent. I am old. I have fought. I have fought in many. I fought in this war for millennia. And that's who I am. And I came down here to be a warrior and fight. There's a difference between drama and emotion. You can imagine someone acting or an actor expressing emotion that they may not feel. Actually, if you listen closely to the Lori testimony, there's very little emotion. If you listen really, really closely, she talks about murder, almost in a deadpan voice.

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 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 typical record. She talks about sobbing all night. I would just be in there just sobbing. I would just be in there in the celestial room sobbing.

And people will come up to me all the time and they're like, Sister, are you okay? And I'd be like, no, I'm not okay. I just keep crying. She talks about all of these emotional issues, but she does it in a very dramatic, emotional way. It feels like she's acting. I don't think Lori was connected to her emotions, just as the Cox family wasn't connected to her emotions with the exception of anger and rage.

And that's common in these borderline type families that Beavers describes. She mentions emotion in her testimony. Here are a couple places. You made me this super sweet person. I'm so sensitive. My whole life, everything hurt my feeling. I was totally sweet and innocent. And I was like, why would you ask me to fight this life and beat this warrior? She says that she would be sobbing in the temple, that she was having her own pain. I felt like someone was just stabbing me in the stomach with a knife all the time. I felt physical pain. I felt so much physical pain and emotional pain and mental pain. And in the meantime, I was dealing with a husband

and two step kids and my two kids and then waking up screaming in the middle of the night and night sweats and terrors and all the things that go along with everything that happens with that. Satan's been torturing her. We talked about that. Interestingly enough, Lori's last statement

about the night terrors sounds a lot like post-traumatic stress disorder, which would be consistent with some of her possible childhood traumas. When she talks about emotions. She's describing emotions without emotion. These ideas actually remind me of a dialogue from the Showtime series, Dexter. I was actually thinking the same thing.

John and I watch Dexter together. Yeah, it makes for great date nights. For a psychologist and a journalist, it does. Dexter is actually a character and a fictional character. but so much of this show is consistent with psychopathy. It raises a lot of questions about crime and evil. The quote we're going to play, it's a dialogue between Dexter and Lila, and Dexter is confronting Lila. And Lila, by the way, has many features of borderline personality disorder. We were watching it and I actually said to John, she reminds me of Lurie.

Here's that dialogue from Dexter. This is from Season 2, Episode 12. What do you think I wanted? To know what it's like. Feel something that deeply. Anything. That's why you hang out in recovery groups. You're emotionally colorblind.

You use the right words. You pantomime, the right behavior. The feelings never come to pass. It's not true. It is. You know, the dictionary definitely. definition of emotions, longing, joy, sorrow. You have no idea what any of those things actually feel like.

You're wrong. I have feelings for you. You want to have feelings for me. They're just impulses. Enough. They're primitive responses to immediate means. You know all the words, but you can't hear the music. Don't do this.

I love. Just like you. This is one of the paradoxes of Lori Valo Debo, that she can appear to be emotional but she's not actually feeling. She's hiding behind all of this rhetoric about religion without actually feeling. It's almost like she knows what to say and she tries to express this emotional side, but she can't do it. Well, that's definitely true. We hear her all the times saying things and acting and lying and manipulating.

I mean, is that the manipulative part of who she is? She's so manipulative. Well, the line is a great example. A good liar is best without emotion. In fact, here's a little tidbit that psychopaths are really good at passing lie detectors because they don't feel. They don't have any emotion. If you think about a character like Dexter, and I know that's fictional,

but Dexter, who's a serial killer, one of the things he says all the time in that series is, I have no feelings. So the way Dexter is able to function, and I think he's based upon actual serial colors, by the way, his character. The way he's able to function in that series is fascinating. He functions through deceit. He's able to have normal relationships and to express some emotions or pretend like he's expressing emotions, but there's nothing there. He's quite honest about the fact that he doesn't know how to feel. And I think you see something similar with Lori.

Again, psychopaths are masterful at passing lie detectors, because lie detectors are based upon the premise that we can get a baseline of emotion or anxiety. They're trying to get galvanic skin responses that are picking up on those subtle emotional cues in the body that get expressed through on the lie detector in subtle ways. But psychopaths can essentially blunt all anxiety, and all emotion and go flatline on a lie detector,

which means that when you ask a question that's emotionally charged, they're not going to respond to it. That makes a lot of sense because she does lie so effortlessly. Here are some of Lori's lies. I collected a lot of these. We're going to start with Melanie Gibbs' testimony at Chad Daybell's preliminary hearing. Melanie is Lori's best friend. Melanie says that Lori told her,

that Lori gave JJ to Kay Woodcock, JJ's biological grandmother by convincing Kay that Lori had cancer. I asked how it went, giving JJ to Kay. She told me that they met up in an airport, and she told Kay that she had breast cancer and that she would need help with JJ for a period of time, and she said it went well. Now let's head to the first initial welfare check police made on JJ. The request was made by Kay, that same Kay, who is JJ's grandmother. And by the time this welfare check happens, Lori is married to Chad, both of their spouses are dead, and both JJ and Tiley have been murdered. And now, according to Lori, Kay is trying to kidnap JJ. He was just saying that you wanted to do a well check on JJ. So JJ would be where?

He's in Arizona. Who's he with in Arizona? He's with one of my friends in Arizona. Oh. One of my brothers is trained to kill me, not the brother that lives here, obviously. He's kind of my protector. My other brothers that was in with my husband who was trying to kill me for my $2.9 a life in sharing. No way.

Since he passed away, she's been trying to. trying to fight me for him and being really horrible to me and not going to fight. So I knew she was going to try to sue me for him or... Okay. Yeah, because she has this million dollars. She can hire people to help him and I have nothing. But you have legal custody. He's my son.

I adopted him. She does nothing who wants to cause me trouble. We moved up here in September. My daughter would go VYU. Your daughter goes BYU? Yeah. Does she live here? Mm-hmm.

You listen to Lori, lie again and again and again and again, and I never sense any guilt, any anxiety. I mean, maybe there's almost a bit of joy in manipulation. Maybe that's the only thing that I can see. But you're right. There's no worry. Right. And normal human beings, when they lie, usually it's hard. It's harder for normal human beings to lie because there's some feeling associated with the lie.

that it's hard to disguise our feelings completely. And I think when I sit in front of someone in a prison, for example, I'm always looking at those subtle cues. Does the person show any emotion? Is there any emotion or feeling associated with a lie? And if there's not, and I know for the most part it's a lie because 10 witnesses have said that they saw this behavior, they saw this crime,

then that concerns me. Then I'm thinking, this is someone that could very well be a psychopath because there's an absolute lack of emotion. And that takes us back to that experience where Melanie Gibb, Lori Ballow's best friend,

testified in court that when Lori called Melanie to lie about JJ's whereabouts, she was not nervous at all. When I picked up, she said, just won't let you know, everything's fine. She was upbeat, cheery, acting like, nothing was wrong.

She had no emotion. When Chad, Daybell called Melanie and told her the same thing, please lie about where JJ is, he was nervous. That's what she said. He was nervous. I asked him if he was nervous and he said yes. To your perception, when you spoke with Mr. Daybell that day, how did he sound?

Very nervous. Is that why you asked him if he was nervous? Uh-huh. So Lori essentially one-ups Chad. She's a psychopath. We've talked about the fact that she expresses no fear. Right. And that she can't recognize fear.

We can probably carry that a step further and say that with the exception of anger, she expresses no emotions. Dexter in the HBO series says he has no emotions whatsoever of any kind, even anger. But Lori, like a good psychopath, has some anger. and I think she gets that from her family and also the anger is consistent with borderline personality disorder. I want to just circle back to Kathleen Taylor's research on brainwashing.

Taylor talks about the conditions under which beliefs can change. The basic premise with a belief is it forms in our family that if it's emotionally charged, it's very difficult to change. But Taylor says that if there's, high uncertainty, and we go back to that a lot. Like this notion of uncertainty is fundamental to the way beliefs get formed. The greater the uncertainty, the more likely we are to search for structure and order to make sense of our environment,

especially in childhood. If you're in a traumatic environment, the best way, or one of the best ways to cope with that, is to try to impose some type of order or pattern on that environment. And in this case, with Lori, that happens to be through religion. But Taylor says that the way you can change your belief is create maximum uncertainty and then to have an emotionally charged environment. So again, both of these are true of the Cox family. And here's the most important piece. To engage in the repetition of whatever belief it is you want to be formed or changed.

So again, if you think about the Cox family, there's constant repetition of these extreme religious beliefs that Lori is hearing over and over again. So you have not only the conditions where these beliefs are going to be formed and hardened and very difficult to overcome, but these turn out to be the same conditions that allow us to change beliefs. So if you wanted to deprogram someone from a cult, this is precisely what you'd have to do. You'd create other conditions of uncertainty, which would be really uncomfortable someone, but you'd try to do that. And you would want to throw in a certain amount of stress, and then you would want to engage in repetition of whatever. ever new belief you're trying to instill, which, by the way, as an aside, as long as we're talking

about beliefs, I want to reinforce some of these ideas with a quote from Daniel Conneman, who's a Nobel Prize winner, psychologist, who teaches it my alma mater, Princeton. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 for his research on behavioral economics. This is a quote from Conneman. He says, quote, for some of our most important beliefs, we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous and it is also essential. Conneman is essentially saying exactly what we're talking about here, which is beliefs don't necessarily need to be based upon evidence, that they're emotional, that they start in our families, and that once we have these beliefs, once they're formed,

we then engage in seeking information that confirms our beliefs. We've talked about this earlier. confirmation bias. Right. This is the confirmation bias. This is such a huge bias for all of us that we seek information to confirm our beliefs. Which is very easy with Google these days. You can find anything you want. But we don't seek information that disconfirms our beliefs. And so this is why beliefs become entrenched. We grow up in a family culture that's emotionally charged or uncertain or has a certain amount of chaos. And we gravitate towards certain beliefs. our family repeats. Our family provides us with a lot of repetition of certain beliefs,

and those beliefs become entrenched, and then we go out into the world, and we look for confirmation of those beliefs to show us their validity. The other thing that happens as we get older and move away from our families is that we maintain beliefs to maintain our self-concepts. There's this theory called self-verification theory

and psychology that essentially predicts that most human beings, in order to remain consistent with how we perceive ourselves, we will act in habitual ways and believe things in an habitual way so that it confirms that we are who we think we are. In addition to attempting to verify our perceptions of ourselves, we also seek others, social groups, social networks, who share similar beliefs. and ideas because that too reinforces our identity. It normalizes our beliefs no matter how extreme they are. Sort of like Lori sharing her what I would call extreme testimony at Melanie Gibbs' home

or this group attending there preparing the people conferences. Their extreme beliefs stop feeling so extreme, surrounded by people accepting and confirming these beliefs. A really critical component of occult, for example, is the fact that you're associating with like-minded individuals, and those people are reinforcing all of your beliefs, even if they're completely untethered from reality, that very rarely are you going to find people to challenge those beliefs. Again, this is the confirmation bias, right? That this is true of how we see ourselves and our identities, and it's also true of the people that we see. seek out and the social groups that we join. Lori's family definitely plays a part in her beliefs, clearly, the family religion,

but even more so, we have heard from a reliable source that her family was also attending these preparing the people meetings and that they were possibly there at a meeting shortly after Lori met Chad, if not at another meeting. That was a shared belief in the extremism, but also going back to confirmation bias. Can we talk about Spencer again? Over an hour ago, we started this podcast with Spencer, a man convinced that he was in a virtual relationship with Katie Perry.

Despite never meeting the pop star, he finds evidence or confirmation bias of this extreme belief in email messages, in Katie Perry's own song lyrics. Spencer knows without a doubt that Katie Perry's in love with him. Yeah, I think the Kahneman quote is entirely consistent with Spencer's belief that Katie Perry's in love with him.

I mean, they give him so much evidence on this episode. John and I have now watched this episode three times, by the way. We'll say to each other sometimes, we'll check ourselves. Are you dating Katie Perry right now? because the hosts of this MTV show give him evidence after evidence that shows him you are absolutely being catfished you are not dating Katie Perry Katie Perry doesn't know who you are here's a girl named Harriet who's actually catfishing you and he'll say yeah no I know it's her I know things that you don't know and again her song lyrics are speaking to me and

there's hints in them. You guys just don't know. It's amazing to watch. Listen to Spencer here while he is meeting Harriet, the woman who has been writing him for six years, pretending to be Katie Perry. 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. O-Doo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on features you need. Check out O-D-O-O-O-O-O-D-O-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-O-com. It's her. I don't think it is, man. Who else could it be? I mean, really, Katie.

You can't possibly think it's still Katie Perry I do Okay, so Whoa Do you want to I mean Can you just pop his bubble for a second And tell him that he has not been talking to Katie Perry

Is there something you can tell him That might ring true Um You're middle name's array You dressed up as that hot sauce for Halloween What's the name of our kids that we talked about. It was Lyca, Luca, something else. Start with Al, probably. It's not her. What do you mean? It's not her. Why did she get the name wrong? No, she got the first

that two names, right? She doesn't remember things as much as you do. I'm sorry. This is not, we're not getting punked right now. There's no, this is it. I think that Katie would get a kick out of me getting pumped a little bit. This might be a little bit hard of that. So Katie Perry and Harriet conspired to bring in here. I've got some details that were pretty important. So she doesn't care. Important details to her. Right. Because she didn't care that much, which is maybe harder to accept.

We've found the person you've been talking to beyond really any shred of doubt. And you still want to believe the thing that makes you happier. What's one financial lesson you learned the hard way? I'll go first. It's not too late to start saving. Today's episode is sponsored by Acorns. Acorns is a financial wellness app that makes it easy to start saving and investing for your future. You don't need to be an expert.

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Compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns, Tier 1 compensation provided. Investing involves risk, Acorns Advisors, LLC, and SEC registered investment advisor. A few important disclosures at Acorns.com slash hidden true crime. hormonal changes are so hard to see the least hot flashes anyone else add in the thousands of hormone disruptors that are in our environment and it is even worse from our water food the air we breathe and the clothes we wear they are everywhere but the good news is that when hormone harmony enters the picture it can help reduce hormonal symptoms in women of all ages hormone harmony is a supplement that contains science-backed herbal extracts called adaptogens the best thing about adaptogens they help the body adapt to any stressors like chaotic hormonal changes that happen naturally throughout a woman's life. Hormone harmony is actually part of my personal 2024 playbook. Hormone harmony makes no compromises

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diagnostic.com by using code hidden true crime at checkout. That's true diagnostic. T-R-U-D-A-A-G-N-O-S-T-I-C-C-N-O-S-T-I-C-C. Just use code hidden-true crime to save 20% off. Plus, if you subscribe, you'll get an additional 20% off. Discover your true age today. And I think that takes us back to this idea of love that we started with. The question is, why does Spencer cling to? so tightly to this idea that Katie Perry loves him. And I think the reason is because it's emotionally charged for him. In the episode, he's actually really flat. He doesn't have many emotions at all.

At all. Much as I would imagine Lori doesn't have many emotions. Lori's more dramatic, but I don't think Lori has a lot of those underlying emotions. As you would say, when we watch. He's flat. He has no affect. And so what Spencer wants is he wants to feel normal. He wants to feel connected. He wants an experience of being alive and feeling loved and feeling like he belongs.

And I think those are exactly the same things that Lori wants. They are both seeking some way of resolving all past childhood hurts and wounds and possibly even seeking. redemption through love. The commonality to dig a little deeper than we did at the beginning of this episode, the commonality here is that love for these two is an abstraction. What do you mean in abstraction? Love is an abstraction.

I mean thinking about love as an ideal state. In other words, it's a type of love you might find in a Disney movie like Cinderella. or maybe in the Twilight series, where a vampire and a human being fall in love, and love is idealized in a very romantic, unrealistic way. In fact, love is seen as immortal. So the notion of love as an abstraction is seen love as perfection, as bliss,

as a love that's largely unobtainable and likely not of this world. Lori says in that opening quote that Jesus' love is not of this world. 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.

It's similar with the Katie Perry analogy with Spencer. He doesn't know Katie Perry, and he never will. That it's an abstraction to him, that this love is a fantasy that he's creating, right? It's not a real love. It's out of this world. It's out of this world.

Right. It's not a world he would know or will ever know. But what it does for him is it allows him to experience some sense of belonging and connection and love, at least when he's fantasizing about being with Katie Perry. And I think Lori, when she's fantasizing about being with Jesus Christ, is going through a very similar experience. Both want to feel special and connected to something potentially larger than life. Both maintain an ideal of perfect love as an attempt to fill an emotional void. For both of them, I think to some degree, this is about some type of redemption, some type of clenitude.

some type of cleansing of past sins or wounds or hurts from childhood. Listen to Spencer here, talking as if Katie Perry is Christ-like. And we are all bearing witness to it coming to fruition. It's Katie. I know it's Katie. And we are all bearing witness to it coming to fruition. Huh. So take your pick, Jesus or Katie. Well, I would imagine that no matter who we are, Katie Perry is probably,

more obtainable than Jesus Christ. I mean, at least she exists in this world. I mean, if I had to, I could probably get Petty Perry's autograph, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't get Jesus's autograph. Okay, that's fair. Yeah. I wonder if Spencer could ever get Katie Perry's autograph. He deserves Katie Perry's autograph. I'll say that. In fairness, Katie Perry does know about Spencer,

and she feels empathy for him. so I don't think it's out of the question to think that he might get her autograph one day. True. We hope you do, Spencer. So help me understand. Let's see what's my question. I guess help me understand why this all matters. I think seeing love as an abstraction is problematic because it tends to demean life. What happens is we cling to impossible dreams in exchange for living life as it is.

We become so consumed by our fantasies of love that we start reaching for unobtainable ideals. We become captivated by the unachievable, by the rapture, by a world that doesn't exist. And that takes us away from our lives. That takes us away from life and real love. that's painfully finite and imperfect and complex. And I think that's problematic. Because in the case of Spencer, for example, he's so consumed by this fantasy of being with Katie Perry

that he probably fails to function in his everyday life. And it certainly takes him away from finding real love with a person that might be able to truly love him. And with Lori, it similarly takes her away from finding any type of meaningful flesh and blood love with a partner who could potentially offer her a reciprocal relationship. So why does this matter? Because I think it's important if we're searching for love in particular to look at what's obvious, to find love that's potentially in front of us.

and ultimately to be able to cope with life and love and all its complexity, richness, and messiness, because that's real. I think as difficult as it may be, that's what gives us some type of fulfillment and makes our lives meaningful and authentic. This reminds me of a quote that John and I both love about Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan was a well-known astronomer. He hosted the well-known PBS documentary Cosmos, which he actually co-wrote with his wife, Anne Drian. My recollection of Carl Sagan was his famous use of the expression often parodied on Saturday Night Live by saying billions and billions. and billions and billions of light years away. And many do know this about Carl Sagan.

He was a non-believer. His wife, Andrianne, a Peabody Award-winning writer, who also co-wrote again, Cosmos with him, wrote a tribute for her husband. She wrote this, sharing the depth of their love and what it meant for them. she says when my husband died because he was so famous and known for not being a believer many people would come up to me it still sometimes happens and asked me if karl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife they also frequently ask me if i think i will ever see him again carl faced death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusion

The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But the great thing is that when we were together for nearly 20 years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous. Not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance, that pure chance could be so generous and so kind,

that we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in cosmos, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time, that we could be together for 20 years. that is something which sustains me and it's much more meaningful. The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again, but I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos. and that was wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. Unlike Andriane, I do hope that I'll be able to see my husband again one day.

I cling to that hope and that faith. But whether or not that hope comes to fruition that I have to be with him, what matters is why we're together now. Whether we know and believe and have faith in the afterlife with our loved ones or not, What matters is that we love them now. That I do believe is more important than the belief or the hope that I might see him again someday. This quote means a lot to me because it's precisely the opposite of Lori and Chad's relationship. Exactly. The opposite.

Where they see love as an illusion, they see love as something to be found in the future, something to be had in the New Jerusalem, but much less important in the here and now. I think the big question I always have is, can you see the person in front of you? Can you really see them? This is what Ann brings up. Can you see them for who they really are? And can they show you who they are? And in spite of that, can you still love them with a fierce appreciation and respect? I think very clearly, Chad and Lori failed immensely in that arena and their illusion of this ideal love and this other world led them in the wrong direction and it led them to a disastrous outcome, which I hope by seeing each other we can avoid.

Like many of our episodes, this one will be split into two parts. we have a whole other hour of dinner coming for our next episode. We are happy to be back and producing episodes, and we're so grateful for those who have stayed with us during this lapse. We are new to the podcasting world, and like I said earlier, we've had to doxomize and cross some teas, and we are planning to continue for a long time. To remind everyone, we have started a YouTube channel, Hidden True Crime.

Our Facebook page is Facebook.com slash hidden true crime, and our Instagram is Instagram.com slash hidden true crime. We want to thank Cheryl Wheeler. She's the ex-wife of Charles Vallow, who was shot and killed. She knew Lori, and she has provided us so much insight, information, and documents that we have never seen before. Cheryl, we're so grateful for your time. We will be discussing many of these things in the coming episodes.

A quick PSA. There is a Facebook discussion group that many of our listeners were a part of. True Crime Underground, Lori Vallow Colt Mom, is the name. That group was taken down a month or two ago. Don't know why. Ask Facebook. But that group is back up. John and I do not run this group. but the administrators of that group wants you to know that you were not deleted or kicked off of that group and would love for you to join again.

That Facebook group is called, again, True Crime Underground, Lori Vallow cult mom. But be warned, the rabbit hole of information on this case never ends. Thank you for our supporters who help make our podcast possible at patreon.com slash hidden true crime. We also want to thank the women with Wicked Truths and F-bombs. They have given us a lot of the documents that we have been able to go through. Thank you for joining us for dinner tonight. We hope that you'll continue to share with your friends, that there is a seat for them at our dinner table as well.

And as usual, stay out of portals. We're a helmet. And we'll add to that, don't date Katie Perry. She's taken. And even if she wasn't. Don't date Katie Perry. Don't date Katie Perry. It will probably lead to nothing positive.

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