RedHanded - Episode 180 - Lori Vallow: Doomsday

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

47 year old mum of 3, Lori Vallow was convinced of two things; she was a god and the world was ending. Her job was to prepare her people for the second coming of Christ, in July 2020... But even as her behaviour became increasingly erratic, and even as those around her started to die in mysterious ways, and even when 2 of her kids - J.J. and Tylee - vanished, it took a shockingly long time for the alarm to be raised. By which point, it would be far too late for the missing children... Sources: www.redhandedpodcast.com Merch: www.redhandedshop.com   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello you, it's me, Saruti, talking to you from May 2023.

Why am I here? What am I doing? Well, I'm here to reintroduce to you a red-handed classic episode from January 2021. Do not worry, it's not going to replace the main feed episode this week. We are re-uploading it for a very specific reason. And that reason is when we released this episode on Laurie Vallow, the doomsday mum, we said when there was an update after the trial, we would come back to it. So please enjoy re-listening to this episode with an included added update at the very end about what went down at the trial. But maybe you're like,

shut up Saruti, I don't have time to re-listen to all of this and your little update at the end. Well, that's quite rude. But if that is the case, then don't worry, we've got you covered because we have put together a very sharp, succinct 25-minute update on the entire Lori Vallow case from start to her conviction. And you can check that out right now as this week's shorthand, which will be out on Tuesday on Amazon Music. Enjoy! I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti. And welcome to Red Candid, the first episode that we have recorded actually in 2021. And in light of the Capitol building being stormed and all of us enduring the COVID apocalypse, we decided we'd throw in some doomsday preppers. With the end of the Capitol building being stormed and all of us enduring the COVID apocalypse, we decided we'd throw in some doomsday preppers. With the end of the world stuff, we're trying to get ahead of the curve because last week's episodes aged so terribly. We can't keep up, people. We can't keep up. Right

now, we are recording this on Friday morning, possibly the 8th of January. Who the fuck knows what's going to happen or what is happening in the world by the time you're listening to this? I don't know. Dangerous things. I really, really wish I did know. But we can't. Maybe we have to just accept that maybe we never controlled anything and we've always had this little amount of control. I think that is the mantra we're going to have to take on board for 2021 is that we have no control. And also the one that everybody really liked and picked up on from under the duvet last week, which is loud, confident and wrong.

Okay. So in the prep for this week's episode, which you probably, if you are living in the United States of America continental or otherwise, you will already know the lady we are talking about. And I had to spend quite a lot of time with doomsday preppers, not physically, obviously, digitally spending time. And I would really, really like to never,

ever have to do that again. If you would like to hear more about my harrowing doomsday prepping exposure, please wiggle your beautiful bottom over to under the duvet and you can listen to what I had to listen to and watch to produce this episode for you. As my intro might have given the game away on, there are a lot of not very nice people in this week's story. But we're starting with two very nice indeed people. Kay and Larry Woodcock. They're from Lake Charles, Louisiana, and they are extremely nice. Kay and Larry have six kids, 16 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Charles is now in his 70s, but Kay looks a bit

younger. And they are so nice that when Kay's son couldn't look after his own baby, Kay and Larry decided to adopt him. And that little boy was called JJ. JJ was the best. He was bubbly and kind and nice. Larry and Kay loved him. But concerns about Larry's age and JJ being diagnosed with autism meant that the couple started to think that JJ would be better off with a younger couple. That's where Kay's brother Charles came in. In 2014, when JJ was two years old, he was adopted by Charles and his wife, Laurie Vallow. Kay described this as the easiest, hardest decision she ever made. The Vallows already had their own blended family. They had both been married before.

Laurie had been married three times before. And they both had children from their previous relationships. And JJ completed the family. He bonded especially closely with Laurie's daughter, Tylee, who was 10 years older than him. And Tylee became JJ's protector. And Laurie was a good mum. She was also boiling hot. And probably no wonder how she managed to get married so many times.

On top of her looks, Laurie is also reported to be extremely charming, charismatic and extremely vain. The perfect combo. She's fit. I'm sorry, lads. She really is. So before he met Laurie, Charles was a Catholic. A supermarket one, but a Catholic nonetheless. But once he and Laurie got together, he converted to Mormonism. A supermarket Catholic is someone who, you're a Catholic for sure, but you only go to church on like Christmas, Easter, maybe Palm Sunday, but that is a bit of a push. So would it be the kind of Catholic who they wouldn't necessarily like do it day to day,

but if they filled in a census, they'd tick the Catholic box? Oh yeah, totally. Like, you know. You're having sex before marriage. Maybe you're even divorced. You're doing all the fun bits of everything. You go drink wine at mass and you have sex before marriage and you tick the Catholic box. Yeah. And you still get to be like, I'm a Catholic, so I am going to heaven. And I also carry this crushing guilt on my shoulders like a backpack of shame. Got it. Tick, tick, tick. Makes sense. Excellent. Everyone with us, outstanding. So this supermarket Catholic converts to Mormonism, like we said, and they move around a lot. They start off in Texas, they move to Arizona and they got married in Vegas, which, you know, OK.

Unless you do it in the fun way, why else you get married in Vegas? Did they do the little drive through thing or their little Elvis impersonator? Be careful, though, because some would categorise an Elvis impersonator as being a fun wedding, and that was the Turpin 13, so maybe even fun Vegas weddings are to be avoided. Maybe, maybe. I don't know. So Laurie was an extremely devout Mormon. She went to temple five times a week for hours at a time, which even apparently for temple elders, which Laurie was not one, is considered extreme.

Laurie threw herself into being the best possible Mormon she could be when her marriage to Joe Ryan, Tylee's dad, fell apart. So by the time Charles came along, Laurie was already in full Mormon swing. We have covered a few Mormon cases on this show before. If you're a long-time listener of Red Handed, you already know this. If you haven't come across our classically controversial Red Handed rundown on Mormonism, please kindly direct your attention to episode 86, The Community of Christ, Kirtland Cult, because it's all in there. Things seem pretty blissful for the first few years of

their marriage. But then around 2018, members of Charles and Laurie's respective extended families started to feel like something was a bit off. And this sense of a bit offness coincided with Laurie developing a keen interest in doomsday prepping. Preppers, as they have christened themselves, are people who are sure that the world is going to end pretty sharpish and anyone who doesn't prepare themselves for it is missing a trick. Preppers come in all shapes and sizes, although in my experience they are usually white and right wing. Loud, confident and wrong jumps to mind once again. Loud, confident and wrong, exactly.

I really felt like when I was looking into it, I was like, you know, maybe it's completely harmless. Like, so what, you're really into baked beans and you've got a bunker at the end of your garden. Like, who are you hurting with that? But the more I looked into it, I was like, oh no, this is pretty bad stuff. Oh, absolutely. I think it kind of encapsulates that entire world of like conspiracy theorists. And I think from the outside,

a lot of them can seem like flat earthers, for example, you can look at those people and be like, oh, what's the harm? They just want to believe that the earth is flat, or they really believe it, whatever, like, it's not very, you know, it's not going to kill anybody. But I think that kind of person that is able to take something so far and believe something that is so outside of like facts and what is provable. It just fits into that whole world we're starting to see, that whole tribe we're starting to see emerging of people who just live in like a post-truth world. And that's incredibly dangerous because we're now operating in a world increasingly where half the population seem to believe one thing and half the population seem to believe something else. And are there even such things as facts anymore?

And that's fucking terrifying. And I think a very timely episode we chose purely by accident. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely not on purpose at all. I have learned that some preppers are convinced that the global economy is on the brink of collapse. And since the gold standard of currency was abandoned, all the banks want to do is keep us all subdued and in debt. That one. Okay. I might be with you on that one. It's a global conspiracy. I'm in it. I'm here. I'm here for it. Not in this economy. Blah, blah, blah, etc. Please see previous 100 million excerpts.

I just think with that, you know, when I don't have any debt now, but when I did, I used to just look at it, like my overdraft or whatever, credit card bills, and I was like, it doesn't mean anything. It's just a number on a screen that will negatively affect me in the future. It's just that little kicker at the end, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. it's just that little kicker at the end isn't it yeah exactly other preppers like to hide from the government that they think will penalize them for having money and guns and they develop that into thinking that being a true patriot means hiding in a hole you dig under your house and dealing

only in cryptocurrency and dead chickens i don't understand i tried to watch along with my like spam documentaries that I watched this Christmas holiday. If you don't know what I'm talking about, come listen to Under the Duvet. I'm not talking about spam emails. I'm talking about canned meat. I also tried to watch documentaries about cryptocurrency to understand what it means to understand maybe what blockchain means. I still don't understand what it means. But I feel like maybe it's just this way to like have an unregulated currency. Is that the attraction? I don't get it.

I'm going to be honest. Somebody tell me. But maybe also don't because I don't know if I care that much right now. My cousin writes about cryptocurrency. So I have like a very, I'm not even going to use the word understanding because I don't understand it at all.

But Eve says something and I think it's true and she says it's all traceable so I'm like okay fine not a clue not a fucking clue mate other preppers still predict a mass extinction event in the shape of either a nuclear war biochemical warfare or an enormous natural disaster I don't particularly have a problem with like oh if an if an earthquake happens, this is my go bag. That's fine. Oh, 100%. I totally think so. If you live in a country where that kind of shit is happening on the regular, you should be prepared. We live in the south of England where like literally nothing ever happens ever.

And now I've said that, who knows, by the time you listen to this episode, maybe the south of England is on fire. I don't know. But I have thought about this quite hard. And if there's a nuclear winter, because China and the US have, you know, just decided to go for it, because let's remember, there's still like 10 days of Donald Trump's presidency and he does have the nuclear codes. I don't want to be around. I don't want to try and survive scratching about in the earth in a nuclear winter. Does that make me defeatist? I kind of just want to go. Be not here. To be honest, the world pre-apocalypse isn't that great. So post apocalypse is going to be way worse. Like I barely want to be here at the moment. No, it sounds

terrible. Think how bad it is now. Think how much worse it would be without the fucking internet or running water and you'd look like the man off the fucking road. I don't want to be here. I don't want to survive. Not that interested in surviving a nuclear or mass extinction event, particularly. Call me a dinosaur because I'm extinct. I don't think we should do it. And by do it, I mean survive. My friends and I did have a conversation about this one day during a lockdown walk. And we were like, what would we do?

And we're like, let's each agree to get a bag and write lots of names of drugs down put them in there and then everybody pick one out source that drug and if there's a nuclear winter we all get together just take that drug we're all on different drugs so who knows what's going to happen it's going to be very interesting and then hopefully you know time will just pass and we'll not be here anymore that's the plan oh man am I a prepper maybe maybe by the end of this record we will be preppers maybe we'll talk ourselves around a bag of heroin and a tin of peaches I'm a prepper now so Laurie Vallow who is obviously the focus of our episode today she fell into a type of prepper that I had heretofore not considered, which was very stupid of me.

She was a religious prepper, which I just hadn't thought about at all. They're the OGs, Hannah. They are the OGs. They've been fucking going on about this for years. That's why I'm so stupid to not even think about it. Think of all the sandwich boards, all the bells, all the end is nigh shit. So true, So true. So true.

I think it's because Catholicism isn't, there's no target. It's not like do all of these things and then you'll live forever and go to heaven. It's kind of like you might get in, maybe. Don't hold your breath. It's like that really snobbish club in Berlin, right? In Berghain. Yes. Catholicism and Berghain are exactly the same.

Much easier to get into if you pretend to be German. Laurie's particular style of doomsday preparation was centred around the second coming of Jesus Christ. So Laurie thought that when the big JC came back, which was going to be imminent, Laurie wasn't going to just look busy. Laurie was going to be ready. Because if you stay ready, you don't have to get ready, friends.

That's it, mate. That's the motto. There's so many mottos this year. Pick what you need. I stole that one off Drag Race. It's not mine. Religious doomsday preppers' predictions about how the world will end are as varied as the number of ways people interpret the most famous chapter of gibberish ever written, the Book of Revelation. If you've

read it, you will know that it makes so little actual sense that you can make it mean basically anything. Le classique. Can't remember, I was watching something and I made like a reference to the Whore of Babylon. So I was like, okay, I'll like remind myself what that actually means. No one knows. They're like, it's a person. It's a concept. It's actually about a city falling down. Nobody knows. I was actually going to ask you because you referenced the Whore of Babylon later in this episode.

And I was reading the notes and I was like, I don't know what that is. I'm going to ask Hannah, but I realize nobody knows then. Maybe. She, well, if we're going to call her a she, there's a passage in the book of Revelations about the whore of Babylon. And it kind of it's just like everyone's on horses in Revelation. So I think she like rides in on a horse and she's wearing purple and red and gold. But it's actually to do with a war or like the fall of that. I have no idea.

I honestly. She sounds like a fucking badass, though. And it is a great title. The whore of Babylon. If she's even a person. No one knows. This badass, though. And it is a great title. The Whore of Babylon. If she's even a person. No one knows. This is the thing. I don't know.

I don't know. Let's move on because I don't know. Laurie was obsessed with the second coming, underground storage units, dried food in jars. And according to her children and Charles, Laurie became more and more erratic as time went on. As I have discovered to my detriment this week, if you are after prepper content, there is enough out there to sink a ship or start a mass extinction event. And Laurie

consumed all of it. Books, podcasts, blogs. She even went to in-person conferences hosted by other doomsday preppers. And those aren't free. She paid. She used actual money that you can buy other things with to go to these things and talk. It baffles me. As a former conference producer myself, if they are getting enough of an audience that they can charge for this stuff, these people are fucking serious. But then being a prepper sounds very expensive. All the equipment they buy, all that, you know, dehydrated food. It's not cheap, is it? No, no, it's not a cheap hobby. I don't think. No. Laurie was, as you can see, very much invested in it. So she'd go to these conferences. And you know, they're not just like the soft kind of conferences where you just go to quote unquote network. Oh no, she was listening to lectures

about how to be ready to survive the apocalypse and afterwards be best buddies with Jesus of Nazareth, the world's best carpenter. I mean, that copy just writes itself, though, if you're a producer. They're just conference producer. Ching, ching, ching, ching, ching. There's so much money, my friends. I would like us to go to one of these conferences when we're allowed back into the world. Do you think it would be fun? Do you think we'd come out in the cult, though?

We'll find, I'm sure after this episode, we're going to hear from at least one person being like, I'm a prepper and I'm really nice. Oh, I'm sure you are. You are prepared. Why don't we email them and be like, OK, find us a really chill prepper convention and we'll go with you.

Exactly. That's the gap in the market. Someone needs to start a chill Preppers convention and then we can go there and have some fun. Back to Laurie. Her favourite books were the ones that were about near-death experiences, specifically written for a Mormon audience, which is a fucking niche, isn't it? Again, me being really stupid, there are bajillions of Mormons, especially in America. Obviously, there is a book writing market specifically for a Mormon audience. Why would that? That makes perfect sense. It makes so much sense. Think of Mormons as being a very white collar

religion, maybe because they also always wear white collars, but I feel like it is. I feel like they've got some money. I would entertain that niche. Makes sense. So Laurie spent a lot of her time with preparing a people, which is a group some people call a cult and other people call just a lecture series. That's quite a difference, isn't it? I think what the people who made preparing a people are trying to do is they're trying to distance themselves, obviously, from what happens next. So they're sort of dispelling this cult thing by being like it's not even a group you can join like it doesn't exist as an entity i see i see i see and it is actually very difficult now to find like pretty much anything on them other than a statement by a company called color

my media who insists that preparing a people is certainly not a cult, or even in fact a group. But we do know that the lecture series is a Mormon-flavoured doomsday prepper situation about how to prepare effectively for the second coming of Superstar Jesus Christ. Or is it Jesus Christ Superstar? Probably that. The musical is Jesus Christ Superstar. His official name, though, is Superstar Jesus Christ. Have you never seen Jesus Christ Superstar? Stupid official name, though, is Superstar Jesus Christ. Yeah. Have you never seen Jesus Christ Superstar? Stupid. I don't know why I even let that escape my mouth.

Obviously, you haven't seen it. And all of that is exactly Laurie Vallow's jam. But she also had very extreme beliefs of her own that did not quite fit into Mormon or even preparing a people's doctrine. And these beliefs were quietly ignored by Laurie and Charles's various relatives. But it did get more and more difficult to write off Laurie's zany interests when she started to send non-perishable goods to her cousins, sister-in-laws and brothers. I mean, if she really believes it, that's quite nice of her. Yeah, true. She's like, oh, this thing's definitely going to happen 100%. Here you go, brother. Have some kidney beans. Exactly. I don't know because a majority of people I know

and have around me, especially because I live with my mum at the moment, are not conspiracy people. But maybe in a family where everyone has their own different conspiracy theory, maybe someone's an anti-vaxxer, someone else is like, oh, the world's flat. You know, maybe you're like, oh, well, at least Laurie only thinks the world's going to end tomorrow. That's not that bad. Yeah. I think it's just pushed under the rug for a bit. And also like Mormon beliefs are pretty crazy anyway. This is true. My only thing would be, yes, absolutely preppers. Likeppers like you know if you're believing lots of things like anti-vaxxing stuff like maybe the person at the table who just thinks that the world is going to end soon isn't the worst but my question to that is does a person

who thinks that the end is very very fucking imminent more dangerous because then the stuff you do doesn't really matter as much they've got nothing nothing to lose. Yeah. Good point. Touch of nihilism that comes with the doomsday prepper mentality or any of these kind of conspiracy theory ways of thinking. But anyway, I'm going to save this for under the duvet. We'll talk about it then. Laurie's religious prep fantasia became impossible to ignore in January 2019 when Charles returned from a business trip to find that the key to his front door no longer worked. Laurie had changed the locks. She'd taken Tylee and JJ and gone to a hotel.

Charles called the police and told them that Laurie had totally lost the plot and he was fearful for his children. Thanks to body cams you can watch Charles's whole exchange with the police. Here's a summary of what he said. He told the officers that he's locked outside his house and that Laurie was, quote, psychologically gone. She'd threatened his life and that of their children, saying that she didn't care what happened to the kids. More shocking than that, Laurie was convinced that she was a god capable of receiving spiritual revelations and visions that would help her prepare those chosen to live in the new Jerusalem after the Great War as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. According to Charles, Laurie had told him that murdering him would be no problem because a. she was a god, b. Charles

was already dead, c. his body has been possessed by a demon, and d. the cleanup wouldn't even be hard because an angel would help her dispose of his earthly body. A distraught Charles filed a petition for an emergency mental health evaluation for Laurie, which is not a sectioning, but it could be the precursor to one. At this stage in the game, it's difficult to know because all we have is Charles's word. That's all the police have at this stage.

And, you know, he's just been locked out of his house. He could be spewing all sorts of nonsense. Laurie took herself off to this mental health evaluation of her own free will. And these evaluations can go on for days of observation if it's deemed necessary. But Laurie was free to go just a couple of hours after she got there and she was given a clean bill of mental health. And so on the 31st of January, Laurie and now 17-year-old Tylee went to their local police station to give their side of the story. Laurie told police that she had locked Charles out of the house and taken the

kids away because Charles had been cheating on her and she had the receipts. These accusations of infidelity have been denied by Charles' family. Laurie added the only reason Charles petitioned the mental health evaluation was because he was trying to get back at her. Laurie goes on to detail that Charles was also physically abusive to her and to the children. And Tylee, who is sat next to her mother the whole time, corroborates this story,

adding that in 13 years they had had to leave the house about five times to escape Charles's rages because they were so worried for their safety. Laurie is certainly erratic and heightened in this police interview. She is upset, it's clear to see. But saying that, I've also definitely seen worse upsetedness at like a house of phrases return desk in times before because it's not like that much no she's upset and she's like my husband's an asshole but maybe he was an asshole you know we don't know at this like she's upset she's angry she's short but I don't think it's particularly that much of a red flag behaviour-wise.

And the police listening are sympathetic, telling Laurie that she certainly didn't seem like a threat to her children. Laurie therefore promptly took Tylee to Hawaii. Something we will discover multiple times in this story is that Laurie loved Hawaii. And if she's not in her house, that is probably where she'd gone. But it takes law enforcement quite some time to figure that out. The next month, in February, Charles filed for divorce.

His legal documentation showed that Laurie had withdrawn $35,000 from a business account. That money was intended for payroll at his business and no prizes for guessing how Laurie had paid for the trip to Hawaii. Laurie's religious beliefs were also explained in the divorce files. These are reasonably readily available. You can go and read them. And it's claimed in these papers that Laurie believed that she was, quote, a translated being that had lived many lives

and travelled to many different planets. Which, you know, that sounds bonkers, but depending on your particular brand of Mormonism, Mormons do believe that you get your own planet. So, you know, it's not that far away. She also thought that she didn't need to eat, that she was bulletproof, and that she was well on the way to being immortal.

And we should point out that these beliefs of Laurie's, however outlandish, were not a secret. She wasn't ashamed of them. She spoke about them often and literally nobody thought that maybe the kids should have gone to live somewhere else for a bit. In the coming months, Charles would report his serious concern for Laurie's mental health to the police multiple times, but nothing much happened.

Until the 11th of July 2019, when, as the preppers like to say, S-H-T-F, which is all over prepper content, and it means, I had to Google it, shit hits the fan. Both. I'm in police and ambulance. What's the emergency there? There was a fight with my brother-in-law, and I shot him in self-defense. Okay, let me get the medics on the phone.

And is he hurt, or is he alive, or...? Yeah, there's blood. He's not moving. How long ago did this happen? Um, I shot my brother-in-law. Okay, what part of his body is injured? In the chest. I'm sorry, where? In the chest.

Okay, is he awake and responsive or unconscious? Unconscious. Okay, is he breathing? I can't tell. Are you willing to go over to him and check? Sure. Okay, do you just let me know if you see his chest going up and down? How old is he? It's not moving. He's 60. Okay, and are you wanting to start CPR?

No, I don't know how to do that. I can walk you through it. Who else is there in the house with you? Just me. Police and medics are on the way to help you. Thank you. How long ago did this occur? Did it just happen? Yeah, maybe five minutes before I called. Okay. Okay, were you guys arguing when this happened? Yeah.

Okay. Was he armed also, or just you? What happened there? Yeah, he came at me with a bat. Anyone been drinking or doing drugs or anything today, or no? I don't know, but I've never seen him that enraged before. The voice you just heard is that of Alex Cox, and he's Laurie's brother. He had just shot Charles Vallow to death in Chandler, Arizona,

at the apartment in which Laurie lived. The CPR did not work, if he even tried it. Charles had gone to the apartment to pick up JJ to take him to school. According to Alex Cox, Charles then became physically aggressive towards Laurie and then Laurie entirely left. Alex alleged that Charles came at him with a baseball bat so he went into his room, retrieved his handgun and shot Charles twice in the chest. How much of that is true, we will never actually know.

Alex did have a small injury on the back of his head, but that's about it. Because the murder of Charles Vallow was ruled to be self-defence. Which is crazy. Self-defence is so hard to prove. Obviously, I don't know, I haven't read the court documents, but I was really shocked by that. It doesn't seem to be a big point in this case at all. Like everything you read or everything you listen to or watch is like, and it was self-defense and everyone moved on.

Yeah, I am like you, incredibly shocked. And yeah, we haven't read the court documents for that particular assault. But like self-defense, like you said, is incredibly hard to prove. Like literally, it seems like Alex Cotts just went, oh, it was self-defence and everyone went, OK, then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what the gun laws are in Arizona, but I would imagine pretty lax. And as you heard in the call, Alex is incredibly calm.

He doesn't express any regret or any remorse. No urgency, even. And we've talked about 911 calls at length for many moons. People react differently. Maybe he was in shock, but it is something to think about. And he wasn't the only one who was acting strangely. Laurie and Tylee turned up after the police were called. Tylee stood next to her mother with her arms crossed,

and she does look really defensive, but she's a kid, like whatever. And we don't know what she's just seen either. We don't actually know when she left. We don't know. Laurie leant on the bonnet of her car and told the police that this was her house and that she'd only lived there for three weeks. And then she makes this weird faux apology

to her neighbours and laughs. I know we said earlier that her behaviour in the police station, you know, wouldn't have raised that many red flags. This one, fuck me. She's like smiling and laughing. She's like, I've only lived here for three weeks. Sorry, neighbours. Your husband has just been shot dead by your brother. She's like smiling and laughing. She's like, I've only lived here for three weeks. Sorry, neighbours.

Your husband has just been shot dead by your brother. And you're like, wow, making jokes about it. Again, you know, maybe she's in shock. I don't know. But she is certainly disconnected from what's happening. And the lack of care that she was exhibiting is backed up by something else she did. Laurie informed Charles's sons, which she partially raised. She told them that their dad was dead via text message 36 hours after he died. Wow.

Wow. And initially she was like, oh, Charles killed himself. Yeah. Maybe not a sign that everything is like totally OK with Laurie Vallow at this point. I think at this stage in the game, we can firmly say that there is significant issues going on. So Laurie, after this very delayed text to her stepchildren, Laurie swiftly made attempts to claim Charles's $1 million life insurance policy payout. But when she did this, she found out, much to her shock, that she was no longer the beneficiary. Kay Woodcock now was.

If you remember, obviously, Kay is Charles's sister. So upon finding out that she was no longer the million-dollar baby, Laurie was incensed. Her retaliation was to cut Kay and Larry off completely. That meant that they couldn't visit JJ. She wouldn't even let them speak to him on the phone, apart from a couple of times. But these calls lasted just about a minute and seemed to the Woodcocks to be strained and staged. In the Investigation Discovery documentary, which I think is the best one out there on this, it's very centered around Kay and Larry Woodcock. And I do truly believe that they loved JJ, like 100%. And so much happens in this case because they just would not quit. I really think them sending JJ to live with Laurie and Charles at the time was them genuinely trying to do the best that they possibly could for JJ. I totally agree.

And I think that this case wouldn't even be where it was today, which we'll obviously get to if it wasn't for Kay and Larry Woodcock. There's just no way. But, you know, we're jumping the gun a bit. So the only message Laurie sent to Kay was, quote, five kids and no insurance money. The sister gets it all, Which is pretty blunt, okay? It's to the point, isn't it?

Yeah. No, oh, my husband and your brother is dead. Let's have a funeral, maybe a wake. Yeah. Just, I didn't get my money. Fuck you. I never want to see you again. Yeah, exactly. Not, hey, I have got these five kids. Could I have some money? Could you lend? No, fuck you. I hate you. You can't see the kids anymore. And also not the best way to clear your name in the light of your husband's extremely suspicious death. Not ideal. And about a month after Charles was killed, Laurie sent a round robin email letting her family members know that she now had a new job in

California. So she was taking JJ out of school and moving there. After all of the troubled marriages, the murders, and the loss of a million dollars, it was of no surprise that Laurie wanted a fresh start. But after she left Arizona, she became impossible to get hold of. Larry and Kay became increasingly worried as the months rolled by and they still weren't able to speak to JJ. They both realised that they didn't know where he was living, who he was with or if he was even safe.

Eventually Larry and Kay heard that Laurie, JJ and Tylee were renting an apartment in Rexburg, Idaho. Alex Cox was living in the same complex. Now Rex Rexburg is a small, safe, snowy, super Mormon and certainly not California town. Clearly, Laurie was attempting to throw Larry and Kay off the scent. Concerned, Larry and Kay requested a welfare check on Laurie and the children from their home 900 miles away in Louisiana. So on November the 26th, 2019, the Rexburg police in Idaho obliged their request and they went to Laurie's apartment. At first, only Alex Cox and a new mystery man who we haven't met yet were there though. The email saying I'm going to California, some places report that actually comes later in the story, some places report that it happens now.

But either way, what we need to know is that she just ups and leaves, shows up in Rexburg, Idaho, which is not like, it's not like, oh, I'm moving to Atlanta. It's the middle of nowhere. Kay and Larry are like, we literally had no idea it even existed until we heard from someone else that that's where she was. It's the sign of somebody who is laying low. So when the police show up for this welfare check, Alex Cox initially informed them that JJ was in Louisiana with his grandparents,

but obviously the police knew that that was a lie as the grandparents were the ones that had sent them. But the day was saved when Laurie returned home and told the police that her son was actually staying with her friend Melanie Gibb, who still lived in Arizona. Tylee wasn't home either. Laurie told officers that she was at the local BYU studying. That's Brigham Young University. I understand they've got three campuses, one in Utah, obviously, and then one in Rexburg, Idaho, and also one in Hawaii.

So maybe there's more Mormons in Hawaii than I thought. Interesting. Yeah, because Brigham Young Uni is a Mormon uni, isn't it? Oh, yeah. The most Morm. In the footage that there is of this welfare call, once again, thanks to body cams, you can hear Laurie saying, quote, people are always looking for me and I don't want to be found. So the police seem like they've sort of been charmed by Laurie and they leave the apartment. but it's not over because they got in touch with Melanie Gibb, who revealed that JJ wasn't with her.

And Tylee never enrolled at BYU. So where were the kids? And why was Laurie lying? Rightfully, the police were concerned enough to get themselves a search warrant for Laurie's apartment and they went back the next day, only to find that Laurie, Alex and the mystery man were gone. Laurie Vallow had vanished again. She left behind JJ's clothes, children's suitcases, a scooter that JJ loved. It would

have been very difficult to make him leave it behind. Kay and Larry kept on with their own investigation and they spoke to Laurie's neighbours who told them that they'd last seen JJ in September and that she thought that it was odd that Tylee no longer seemed to be looking after him and actually Tylee hadn't been around for quite a while. It's all very like Casey Anthony. She's here, they're there, they're with this friend. Like, I don't know, the mind boggles that Kay and Larry were the only people that were like, where are these kids? I think that's the, obviously, crossing state lines complicates things,

but I was constantly gobsmacked when reading about this, how easy it was for these children just to disappear and no one noticed. Because why would you, if you show up in a new state where no one knows you, no one's going to ask you. It's honestly terrifying because vulnerable children who didn't have a Kay or a Larry looking for them could just vanish into thin air and no one would ever even know anything until it was far too late. They did conferences whenever they could, and they even offered a $20,000 reward to anyone who could give them any leads as to the location of JJ and Tylee. Now, getting the press interested in a good-looking missing mum, two missing children, and a dead estranged husband was not difficult. So Tylee and JJ became national news. And I'm sure all of you guys listening probably followed this story

intensely last year. I saw you guys talking about it all the time on social media. We wanted to wait until like something actually happened with this case before we covered it. But this was everywhere, not even just national news. It was here. I was following this story. It was absolutely massive. So eventually, law enforcement cottoned on to what we already know. Laurie loved Hawaii, and she had bought herself a ticket out there. So Laurie was tracked down to a condo on the island of Kauai, where she was living with husband number five. Husband number five was the mystery man at her Rexburg apartment, a man named Chad Daybell, who Laurie had married just months after Charles Vallow was killed by her brother. And that was just the

beginning. Laurie had been a fan of Chad's for quite some time, because, you see, he was the author of her very favourite near-death experience, Mormon Prepper Fiction. Some of his more inspired titles include things like One Foot in the Grave and The Edge of Heaven. And the covers are just exactly what you think they are. They're just like clouds and like a tombstone. It's quite no shade on self-publishing, but you can tell they're self-published by looking at them. Oh my god, I want to see these. Sounds like her dream man, though. Sounds like her dream man. And I can't also help that any man called Chad,

I just feel like it's a fake name. I feel like not a real name. Is it short for something? Is it like Chad D'Angelo? What is it? I really didn't know where I was going to go with that. The only thing I can think is Chadwick, maybe. Chadwick?

Chadwick Daybell the third near-death experience mormon prepper fiction writer so the couple actually met in real life at a prepping the people conference in late 2018 where they decided to do the worst thing they could possibly have done they started a a podcast. Shoot them at dawn. No more. No, no. Do you know what, though? I was watching the rallies that were going on, like with the whole, you know, stop the steal, march, blah, blah, blah.

And there was all these people that were getting up and like doing speeches. Obviously, various fucking maniacs. And one guy stood up and he's like wearing a fucking MAGA hat and all this shit and he's standing up there yelling about how the PCR tests for COVID are fake and then he says he's like yelling about it for quite some time and then he just casually slips into and if you listen to my podcast there you will hear me interviewing the man who created the PCR test and he himself will tell you that they are. And I was like, oh, here we fucking go. Oh my God. Podcasting, obviously great, but a double-edged sword

because anyone can do it means anyone can do it. Absolutely. So be careful what you consume, please. Yes, they started a podcast and yes, we did write that specifically for Dramatic Effect. Maybe they didn't actually start their own one,

but they certainly appeared as guests on several Prepper podcasts. One was called Time to Warrior Up, which sounds very peaceful and nice, doesn't it? Oh, God. So they appear on several podcasts and Chad was kind of a big deal in the Mormon Prepper situation. I'm also not going to say the name of the shows that I listen to because I'm not going to say the name of the shows that I listen to because I'm not

going to signal boost anyone who tells people to get their news from the Liberty Daily or Breitbart. But what I will talk about is AVOW, which stands for Another Voice of Warning. And it's an online forum for Mormon preppers where you can learn about everything from how to deliver a baby in the wilderness to how to pack your go bag. Every single one of your Mormon needs for the coming apocalypse. Chad and Laurie were very involved in this forum. You can't like, there's this video on the homepage of this website for Another Voice of Warning. And I think it's like a super important Mormon man giving a speech in 1979, I think, about how the end of the world is going to be really, really soon. So I can understand why

Mormon people feel like the end of the world is like a very now problem that needs to be dealt with because it's very embedded in their doctrine. So go and have a look at Another Voice of Reason and you can decide whether it's a website for people who are attempting to gain a deeper understanding of their faith or whether it is a online rat trap of radicalism. We don't know how fascist Chad and Laurie were because any trace of a podcast that they made or appeared on as guests has been taken down. Because the preppers and the Mormons and the prepper Mormons would now like to distance themselves from this couple. Ugh, again though, just a classic. Le classique, they're not to do with us. Oh, you're saying that they were fully engrossed into like everything we've been talking about and yelling about for years and then they went and did some bad shit? That's not to do with us. I saw an amazing tweet about the storming of the Capitol building that was like,

well, that escalated slowly over four years. I saw that. And I was just like, can we all just agree if we agree on nothing else in 2021 that rhetoric has an impact? Can we stop pretending like people can just say whatever crazy shit they want in a religion or in a cult or in a fucking president of the United States and that it has no impact on people and then you can just be like oh they're nothing to do with me and that crazy shit I was saying. Enough please Mormons and everyone else but anyway. When he met Laurie Chad was in his 50s and a lifelong super Mormon. He was the leader of his local congregation in Rexburg, Idaho, a softly spoken and well-liked man,

but also a very married one. He had met his wife, Tammy, also, of course, at BYU. They had married young and settled down in Utah, where they had five kids, and started a small publishing company. And it's pretty safe to say that this publishing company was entirely a vanity project for Chad because this publishing company only made about two grand a year. So Chad,

of course, had to have another job. And his other job was that he was a sexton, which isn't quite as sexy as it may sound initially because it actually means grave digger. A sexton's like a helper, a churchy helper. But his particular flavour of sexton is he literally was a grave digger. That was how he paid his bills. Makes sense. Funeral proof business, the death business, right? Not funeral proof, recession proof business, the death business.

Funeral proof. Fucking hell. So when he started writing his book, Chad was very classically Mormon. But after he had a near-death experience, he became convinced that he could see beyond the veil. He believed that he had spoken to Jesus and he believed that he was now a clairvoyant and that he had been put on this earth to do something very special. It's nice to have a purpose though, isn't it? It's nice to feel like your life means something. It's nice to feel wanted.

For Chad, that purpose was that Jesus had told him that he needed him to do a very special thing in Rexburg, Idaho, because it was a place of refuge, meaning that if there was some sort of Armageddon, Rexburg would remain untouched. Very convenient isn't it? That's super convenient. Rexburg Idaho there you go you heard it here second because Chad's already written about it but you heard it here and you know this is the same kind of thinking that led Jim Jones for example to pick the middle of the Guyanese jungle for his quote-unquote agricultural project. It probably also helped that Rexburg was 95% Mormon and had a BYU campus, but that doesn't sound quite as prophetic and magical, does it? So when he got to Rexburg,

Chad got even more extreme in his beliefs. He claimed that he could see people's souls and know if they were good or bad. He called bad people zombies because their souls had already left them. So now Laurie's sudden erratic religious beliefs started to make a lot more sense. She thought that Chad Daybell was the Messiah and that she was his acolyte put on earth to aid him in his ultimate task, which was to prepare those who were chosen for the end of the world and the subsequent kingdom of heaven. Laurie and Chad could have had the perfect Prepper love story.

They met at a conference, start a Prepper podcast, save all the Mormons from the whore of Babylon, but there was a slight problem. Both of them were married to other people. We already know that Charles Vallow stopped being an obstacle in summer 2019 and on October the 25th, Tammy Daybell stopped being a problem too when she died in her sleep at just 49 years old. Chad, the gravedigger, declined to have an autopsy performed on the mother of his five children after her mysterious death. And just two weeks later, he married Laurie on a beach in Hawaii. Oh, for God's sake. And even better, even better, just in case anyone thought their marriage

was a spur of the moment thing, Laurie bought her own wedding ring on Amazon three weeks before Tammy died. I mean, I know it's a complicated timeline in retrospect, but it feels like they're confused by the timeline in real time. Wait, Laurie, don't fucking buy a wedding dress three weeks before the man you're having an affair with's wife is found dead in her bed. What the fuck? And also, buying your own wedding ring on Amazon makes me feel sad, Laurie. But, you know, this is husband number five. Maybe she's over it. But also, the world's going to end. You don't want to be spunking your load on a fucking ring you don't need in the afterlife

when you're hanging out with Jesus of Nazareth. Going to need all of that money for when the economy collapses. Two weeks before the perfectly healthy Tammy died in her sleep, a masked man shot at her with a BB gun outside her house. Tammy posted about this incident on Facebook. The police were called, but no one ever identified the masked man. I mean, this is not really very relevant, but I just do wonder why someone's shooting at her with a BB gun.

I mean, this is a country that you can go buy a fucking assault weapon with your cornflakes in Walmart. I really don't know. It's very bizarre. Strange. So Laurie's iCloud revealed an image of Tylee at Yellowstone National Park with her uncle Alex Cox taken on the 8th of September 2019. The family are also seen on CCTV entering the National Park but there were no CCTV cameras at the park's exit. So this is the last known place Tylee was seen and we don't even know if she ever made it out of the park.

Okay Yellowstone National Park I've never been but I imagine it's very wildernessy. It might be prudent to have CCTV cameras on the way out so you can check that people aren't lost. Park. Okay, Yellowstone National Park. I've never been, but I imagine it's very wildernessy. It might be prudent to have CCTV cameras on the way out so you can check that people aren't lost. Why don't you have them? I mean, one of the biggest things I like to do is just sit and watch creepy videos on YouTube about people who went missing in national parks. This happens all the fucking time. And the officials are just like, we don't know where they went. Maybe have some fucking CCTV cameras when people leave. Maybe have a like dongle that they have to give back when they i don't know like there could be systems put in place and one of these could be just some fucking cameras anyway

we're not here to solve that particular problem today but basically the point is we don't know if tyler ever made it out and if you were going to do something nefarious, maybe this is it. Fucking acres and acres of woodland and no way of anybody to know if that person ever left the national park. So several of Laurie's friends have subsequently reported that Laurie had referred to Tylee as having a dark spirit. The phone records of Alex Cox showed that after the national Park, he went home to his Rexburg apartment. Then at 2.45, he went to Laurie's apartment, where he stayed for a few hours. Then, at 9am, he went to Chad Daybell's house. After Alex had left, Chad texted his wife saying,

Well, I've had an interesting morning. I spotted a big raccoon along the fence. I hurried and got my gun. One shot did the trick. He is now in our pet cemetery. Fun times. Oh, okay. Questions here to be asked. This is in the morning. Raccoons seem to be nocturnal. We don't have them in this country, but that is our understanding. So why would one be running along the fence in the middle of the day? I don't really understand that. And is it just him? Is it just Chad finding a way to explain away a freshly dug grave? I don't know. I find the idea of a pet cemetery on your own. Pet cemeteries are weird anyway, but having a pet cemetery on your own land, I really feel like there is no raccoon. He's just like, oh, this freshly dug patch of earth. Yeah. I'll just explain it to my wife who is not yet dead, but we'll get there. Exactly. So no one saw Tylee

after her visit to Yellowstone National Park and no one except Kay and Larry Woodcock were looking for her. A couple of weeks after the Yellowstone trip, Laurie was visited by her friend Melanie Gibb, who has reported the last known sighting of JJ. According to Melanie, she had been recording a religious podcast in Laurie's kitchen on the 22nd of September 2019, when Alex Cox appeared with a sleeping JJ. Laurie told Melanie that JJ was a zombie and had been climbing all over the cabinets, pulling down pictures of Jesus. JJ was put to bed in Laurie's room and he was never seen again.

The next day at 9.55am, Alex Cox's phone took another trip to Chad Daybell's back garden. This time, he was only there for 17 minutes. Quick note on Melanie Gibb. So this happens in September. She goes to visit Laurie and she doesn't see Tylee at all and then

she sees JJ being put to bed and then she doesn't see him again and Laurie's spewing all this shit about zombies. It is two months before the welfare check from the police where they ring Melanie Gibb and say do you have JJ and she's like no in those two months it's strange to me that she wasn't like maybe but also maybe she's like oh my friend is erratic and maybe Tylee really was at university and maybe JJ really was just asleep. It's difficult, but it's two months where literally nobody sees either child. Yeah.

It's hard to understand the dynamics of, like, should people have picked up on it earlier? But it does seem alarming that nobody questions this, especially when she's saying shit like JJ's a zombie and Tylee has a dark spirit. Let's talk about this 17 minutes that Alex spends in Chad Daybell's back garden. If Alex Cox was burying a dead JJ, there is no way he could have managed that in 17 minutes on his own. He must have had expert help. Good job, Chad Daybell's day job is a grave digger. You couldn't make it up.

You couldn't make it up. No. If I saw that in a film, I'd be like, yeah, I know. It's such a like Scooby-Doo villain job. So it seems bizarre that two very visible people within the church

could have become so fixated on the end of days that they warped their perception so much they thought they had supernatural powers and perhaps they killed two children. That's something else to think about. They had jobs. They were in the community. They weren't tucked away in a house on a hill and not talking to anyone.

Yeah, I think that's one of the most poignant parts of this entire case is that while, yes, they were on the fringes in some dimension in terms of this whole prepperpper community blah blah blah but other than that they were very mainstream people quote unquote like very very visible that is the exact word and yet their children were so invisible and that's what's so striking about the entire case. So the end of days chat might seem out of the ordinary to most of us, but actually it's not that bizarre at all. A lot of what Laurie and Chad were obsessed with is pretty common in Mormon teaching. Mormons used to predict the end of the world all the time, but they stopped being quite so specific when it kept not happening. I mean, that's the thing.

You don't want to say it's too soon, but you don't want to say it's too far away. It's very hard to pinpoint the perfect doomsday date. It's just a bit embarrassing, isn't it? It is. It's awkward, isn't it? It's awkward for everybody involved. So now, within the Mormon community, it is my understanding that no set dates of Armageddon are publicised, and actually sharing any visions of the world ending

that may have been bestowed upon you is frowned upon significantly. So Chad standing up and talking about near-death experiences and seeing Belong the Veil, that's not chill really at all. But the end of the world and the end of America, interestingly, are very present in Mormon theology. Do you know about the white horse prophecy? Not a pale horse, a white one. I don't know. I don't think so. So my understanding is that Brigham Young like fucked up a load of shit and said loads of stuff that many Mormons now don't agree with. One of which is the white horse prophecy, which is about

the constitution of America hanging by a thread and Mormons fix it. So for a period of time, even if it is now not widely taught, Mormons really believed that they were not only the saviours of the world, but literally of America. Well, it makes sense because they were like, nah, Jesus was in America. That's what they say, right? It's the all-American religion, for sure. Hello, friends.

It's me, the fact-check fairy. Was really hoping that they would manage to make it into more than the second week of 2021 without fucking it up, but they've done it. The White Horse prophecy is not Brigham Young. It was a guy called Edwin Rushton in 1900, and he claimed that it was actually stated by joseph smith in 1843 whether it was or not nobody knows so in a way then it makes sense that mormon

prepper groups exist it's a very natural progression because if you really believed the end was extremely fucking nigh you would prepare yourself and you would prepare those you loved. But where Chad and Laurie's beliefs strayed from the morm norm, apart from the zombie stuff, was their obsession with the 144,000, which if you have a Christian background of any shape or form, you will probably be vaguely aware of. Chad believed that he was the one who was tasked with preparing the 144,000 for the second coming of Christ, which he predicted would happen in July 2020, which we came close, but not quite, Chad. You were close, but no cigar there. Can you imagine them sat around watching all that shit kicking off in July and be like,

oh my God, we were right. Fuck. So who are the 144,000, you ask? There are, I'm afraid, as many answers to that question as there are interpretations of the book of Revelation. Welcome to Helen Hot Takes with Hannah Maguire. The 144,000 are mentioned in the book of Revelation as being from all of the 12 tribes of Israel and also being sealed, which many interpret to mean safe, as in safe from the end of the world. And because the 144,000 are from the tribes of Israel, that means they are Jewish, so they are by default God's chosen people. The most literal interpretation is that the 144,000

people will be saved from the apocalypse. That's the teaching of the Jehovah's Witnesses. And I asked my friend who used to be a Jehovah's Witness to confirm what their understanding of the 144,000 was, and this is what I took from it. The 144,000 are the chosen ones who get to live in the kingdom of heaven with the big JC after the big apocalypse Armageddon. Everyone else who is lucky enough to survive the apocalypse in whatever form it takes get to stay on earth. They don't get eliminated,

but they are ruled by the kingdom of heaven, which is full of Jehovah's Witnesses, apparently. In order to make the cut into the 144,000, you have to be the best Jehovah's Witness that you could possibly be, which usually involves converting a whole bunch of people, which kind of defeats the point that you're giving away your seat. Surely? What if you convert someone and then they become a way better Jehovah's Witness than you and then you don't get to go? I guess it's like an MLM, isn't it? Where it's like, you could be at the top and you could have a white BMW leased to you because you're the big cheese, but you've got to convert a load of people who are going to sit on the little pyramid underneath you. I mean, I'm not sure that's

how they explain it to you, but I feel like that's the general vibe, isn't it? You've got to get the fodder through the door and then you can be the king yes quite however almost every other christian doctrine refutes this particular interpretation and says that what john was actually getting at when he wrote the book of revelation was that the 144,000 is actually code for infinite number okay so in the bible 12 pops up quite a lot as a sacred number. There are 12 apostles, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 gates of heaven, 12 angels, blah, blah, blah. And 144,000 is 12 times 12 times 1,000. So apparently that makes it a perfectly complete and infinite number in Bible speak times. You heard it here first.

What? That's not how maths works. It's the classic Christian thing, isn't it? Of like, oh, no, not the thing they actually wrote. I'm going to do some quick maths about this and actually everyone can go to heaven. Oh, wow. It's just like Book of Mormon fan fiction now with maths. So the 144,000, the Mormons don't entertain it at all. It's one of the things they skip over. Wow. How interesting. So where did Chad pick up this 144,000 obsession, we hear you ask? To be honest, we don't know. Maybe it was from the Preparing a People forum.

Maybe it wasn't. When you read about this story, you will hear people, including Mr. Rich Dr. Phil, who, if you remember, has more money than Beyonce, because we've talked about that before on this show, casting aspersions that preparing a people is a cult and that Chad was the leader of this cult. Dr. Phil's got like a four, five-part podcast series on this case. Bizarre.

He said something about, he was like, oh, Jonestown, where like a couple of hundred people, blah, blah, blah, blah, drank the Kool-Aid. And I was like, number one, Dr. Phil. It was 900 people. It was the biggest loss of American life, like before 9-11 in peacetime. And also it was flavor aid. Stop it, Dr. Phil.

Get off the fucking, get off, get off the chat. Dr. Phil has exited the chat. So Chad was about as popular as you can get in Mormon prepper circles, which is, I am afraid, not very popular at all. And although this is such a fresh case, we still don't have 100% of the information at the moment. I think that Laurie and Chad were probably something like a splinter cell. That's probably the best way to explain it. We don't have enough information. Can we say that Chad was the leader? Don't think so. Was it a cult?

We don't know. But if they were, they were trying to start a cult of their own, but it was probably a side sell of this larger group. So Chad wanted to be a cult leader. I think that much is clear. But the problem is, is that he didn't or couldn't pull it off. He only managed to recruit Laurie and maybe her brother. While Laurie and Chad were pinpointed in their Hawaii house, another piece of evidence surfaced. It was the CCTV footage from a storage unit rented out by Laurie. And when they searched it, it was full of Tylee and JJ's stuff. Not a good sign, a very fucking bad sign in the case of two missing kids. So the footage shows Laurie and Alex making several trips to and from the storage unit, which they eventually abandoned.

In one clip, Alex carries what looks to be a very heavy tote bag with something flopping over the side. That something looks quite a lot like a child's arm. Except it wasn't. Still, this footage served to spur on the nationwide search. Five states police and the FBI were now involved. They had found Laurie. They had found her fifth husband. But where were the children? And Laurie was refusing to give any information. If the children were safe, why would she not just say so? There is footage of her in Hawaii and a reporter tells her that people all over

America are praying for her children. And Laurie just says to this, that's great. And nothing else. It's bonkers. One of the more baffling things about this case is her just being like, they're fine. And everyone else being like, well, then where are they? And that went on for six months. That was allowed to continue. Her just being like, they're fine. Yeah, I remember. I remember like following this case, wanting us to cover it and just constantly like searching the name Laurie Vallow in the news tab to see what happened, being sure that by now she's going to be arrested if those kids haven't been like presented. No, went on for fucking ages. They just allowed her to get away with it. And the police were doing their best to sort of get public information as well.

And anyone with information about the whereabouts of Tylee and JJ was asked to call 1-800-THE-LOST, which is just so fucking chilling. I can't. It's horrendous, isn't it? I mean, it's like The Lost. That's like the name of a fucking, you know, next gritty crime drama that comes out on this case. Like, fucking hell. In December 2019, the remains of Tammy Daybell were exhumed and her death was reclassified as suspicious. What a surprise. The next day, the next day, I can't get over this.

The 12th of December Laurie's brother Alex Cox was found dead on the floor of his bathroom his autopsy marked the cause of death as I've been practicing

this with my mum bilateral pulmonary thromboembolism not as I originally read it thrombombalism because I asked

my mum to explain my mum's a nurse asked her to explain what this was and how it could kill you and she was like what are you saying I was like thr kill you. And she was like, what are you saying? I was like, thrombombalism. She was like, no, that can't be it.

Thrombombalism sounds like a flavour of fucking Mbongo or something. Oh God, Mbongo, the casually racist juice drink. For our international listeners in the 90s, there was a carton of juice called Mbongo and their slogan was they drink it in the Congo and their little mascot was a gorilla in the congo and their like little mascot was a gorilla yeah we don't have it anymore what a bilateral pulmonary thromboembolism is is blood clots being thrown to your lungs and bilateral means both so it's both lungs at the

same time have clots in them and when oxygen can't get to a part of a tissue it dies that's how cyanide kills you so bilateral thromboembolism would have been very painful. It's essentially a respiratory and circulatory collapse. And it feels like you're having a heart attack. So in other words, it's natural causes. But interestingly, Alex Cox had an overdose of Narcan, which is an opioid blocker in his system. Narcan is like, you've seen in like Louis Theroux like heroin in America documentaries, I've seen Narcan administered to people

who have overdosed on heroin and they like immediately come round. I understand the effects of Narcan only last for about 40 minutes. So if you don't do something like get them to a hospital within 40 minutes, they will go back into an overdose. But we don't know why Alex Cox had Narcan in his system. If he was overdosing on opioids of any kind, it's unlikely he administered Narcan himself. But even though the timing and his

closeness to this case is very suspicious, I think a bilateral pulmonary thromboembolism is quite difficult to induce in someone. Yeah. So I think it probably was that that knocked him off rather than a murder. Unless this person was like, knew he was having this attack and they were like, he was taking opioids for the pain and they were like, we're going to make you suffer, have this opioid blocker. I don't know.

That was just what I was thinking as you were talking. Oh, maybe. If you have any theories on how one might induce a bilateral thromboembolism, please let us know because I have been thinking about it all week and I just can't get my head around it. After Alex's death on Christmas Eve from their Hawaii haven, Chad and Laurie issued a statement in which they claimed to love their children and that they would address allegations once they had moved past speculation and rumour. You've had six months, babes. Oh my God, I watched that thing. I was

like, what is happening? Somebody put her in jail. These kids are dead. Fucking hell. On the 25th of January 2020, Laurie was given the perfect chance to move past speculation and rumour when she was required by the Rexburg Police Department to present both Tylee and JJ before 5pm. She never showed up, and as a result, she was held in contempt. Laurie and Chad's house in Hawaii was searched, and there was no evidence that Tylee and JJ had ever been there. There were, like, two towels, two yoga mats, two deck chairs,

two of everything. The only kids stuff that they found was Tylee and JJ's birth certificate, JJ's iPad and Tylee's ATM card and they were all discovered in their rental car. So it looks like the kids were never in Hawaii, which we all really knew. So where are they? Finally, in February 2020, Lori Vallow, now Daybell, was arrested in Hawaii and told that she was headed back to Idaho. Chad remained a free man. By the 5th of March, Laurie was on a plane. No one had seen her children for six whole months.

This case was so huge that the FBI organised a decoy so the press would be distracted from Laurie's actual arrival into her jail. When she got there, she was charged with two felony counts for desertion and non-support of dependent children and a misdemeanor for resisting and obstructing an officer and then a couple of other misdemeanors, solicitation of a crime and contempt of court. She was held on a $5 million bond, which was reduced to $1 million, but either way, no one was going to pay to get Laurie out of jail. On 17 March 2020, Laurie released a statement professing her innocence.

Two members of her defence team then quit and the judge removed himself from the case. All she has been charged with up until this stage is desertion. Murder only came into the picture on the 9th of April 2020 when law enforcement announced that they were now investigating both Laurie and Chad for murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy in connection with the death of Tammy Daybell. Still, though, this has nothing to do with JJ entirely.

This murder charge that they're now looking at is just to do with Tammy. She's still, to this day, she hasn't been charged with murder. Yeah, of anybody. So what is Laurie saying exactly that she's innocent of, then? She's still, to this day, she hasn't been charged with murder. Yeah, of anybody. So what is Laurie saying exactly that she's innocent of then when she makes her statement? Where are the kids? Well, friends, we are about to find out. While Laurie sat in jail facing pretty minor charges,

Chad's pet cemetery was raided and searched by police. Chad sat in his car and looked on, and he received a call from Laurie. Are you okay? The house they're in? Yeah. Okay. Are they in the house? No, they're out on the property. Are they seizing stuff again? They're searching.

They're searching for something magical. Yeah. So you see the transpires. Okay. What can I do for you? So what you just heard right there, as I'm sure you can tell, is the voice of a man who knows that it's all over. And he was right. Authorities found two patches of grass that were shorter than all the rest.

The first was four foot by two foot, and removal of the topsoil revealed three large flat rocks, then wooden panelling, then a layer of black plastic. This plastic was cut open to reveal the body of JJ, wrapped in duct tape. Again, very Casey Anthony. The question here, as it was there, was why would you wrap someone in duct tape if they were already dead? Was JJ buried alive? Tylee's remains were also discovered. We know even less about her death,

but whoever killed her also dismembered her and burnt her. As the remains were discovered, Chad drove away from his house and his comeuppance. But he didn't get far. He was pulled over and arrested on charges of destruction and concealment of evidence, and he was also held on a $1 million bail, which nobody paid. That brings us up to the now times. Where are we?

Laurie's misdemeanor trial is set for the 25th of January 2021 and Chad's is set to begin on the 11th of January, so this very week, this very Monday. So by the time you are listening, his trial will have begun and we understand that he's pled not guilty to all of his charges. Laurie and Chad are under investigation for murder charges. They haven't been charged with them yet. For Charles Vallow, Alex Cox, Tammy Daybell

and possibly Tylee and JJ, although that is yet to be announced and we'll update you as soon as we know. It's hard to stomach how it took six months of missing children to come to an arrest and still no charge. Like, the only charge to do with the children is desertion and I think that was even dropped it's baffling but some people are worried that laurie and chad will never be charged with murder especially not the murders of jj and tylee because a lot of people suspect that alex cox was

the one who actually killed the children and alex cox is dead oh off. Even if the police and the FBI can prove that Chad Daybell helped with the grave digging, that's only concealment of evidence and unlawful burial. It's not murder. If Chad is found guilty on his current charges, he faces up to 20 years in prison. Laurie faces a maximum, currently this might change, of 10 years. That makes me sick. I hate it. But we'll have to wait and see, like Hannah said, what actually happens when this trial kicks off. And yeah, like she said, we'll also keep you guys in the loop and updated about what's going on. So before we wrap up today's case, would you guys like a bonus death?

Well, you're going to get one. Guess who else died? Absolutely out of nowhere. Tylee's dad, Joe Ryan, was found dead in his Arizona apartment in April 2018 of an apparent heart attack. Prior to his death, Lori had accused Joe of sexually abusing her children. She also claimed that her hatred towards Jo is what drove her so violently into the arms of the church. She told a friend, quote, I went and met with my bishop and I was like, I'm either going to turn my life to the temple or I'm going to commit murder. And like, okay, maybe you're listening to that and thinking, yeah, maybe a lot of people would talk about murdering someone who they said had sexually abused their kids.

So maybe that is why it was overlooked by her next husband, Charles Vallow, who also ended up dead as well. So Jo's death is currently under review by the Phoenix Police Department. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but maybe it's not. I think it's, there is no denying that people around Laurie die or people connected with her tend to die. I think the one I'm most likely to be convinced was actually just a coincidence is the death of Alex Cox. Yeah, I think the Tammy death is super fucking, they did it, probably, allegedly. Tammy's the number number one I'm pretty sure she knocked Joe off as well I don't think Joe was a very well man in general so a heart attack

was probably expected but if she was involved with Joe's death she does it while she's married to Charles or maybe even before so I mean it's speculation we don't know it's under investigation we'll let you know if something happens but But four people dying around, well, six, if you count the children, is a lot. Absolutely. So, yeah, we'll just have to wait and see what happens. But there is no way that Laurie Vallow was just accidentally caught up in this. She's a very interesting character, let's say that. And we'll come back to it after the trial. So thank you guys so much for listening. All right, Pastor Me, let me stop you right there. Thank you indeed for listening this far. And now we are going to do what I promised at the very start. We are now going to head straight into the update from the trial that just finished a few weeks ago. Let's get into it.

Interestingly, she waived her right to a preliminary hearing. But during other appearances in court, Laurie is just sort of sat there constantly smiling, completely looking unconcerned. She even does this thing where she looks around at her devastated family members, so like the grandparents of the children, with no sign whatsoever of like any remorse or guilt or shame. Like if you are in that position, at least have the decency to not look at them. But she just looks at them like they're there about to watch her like do a show or something. It's the weirdest fucking thing. Tonight, Matthew.

Yeah, I'm going to be the world's craziest mom yeah honestly when she's in court it looks like she's laughing at everyone and everything because she knows a secret they don't know it's great it's like and again this lends into the theory that i think she's insane when i don't it's almost like she's like you're all making such a big deal of this like little do you, none of this is going to matter when the big war kicks off and apocalypse happens. This is all nothing. I did what I had to do. But I still don't think she's insane. I think she's just a horrible person. And let's take a closer look at that. At first, Laurie's defence made the case that she was not fit to stand trial. So she was sent off to a psychiatric facility for 90 days to be assessed.

After much deliberation and countless COVID-related delays, in April 2022, a judge decided that Laurie Vallow was indeed fit to stand trial. And that trial, which took place in Boise, Idaho, lasted six weeks. But the jury deliberated for just eight hours before finding Laurie Vallow guilty. So now let's look at the trial of Laurie Vallow and the biggest bombshells that were dropped. We did have to do that update, even if you listened to the episode or not, because otherwise kind of everybody that I talk about in this next bit makes no sense. So let's get into what actually happened. So first off, let's talk about the remains of the children.

The detective who found the remains of Tylee and JJ took the stand. And he described in horrifying detail how 16-year-old Tylee's body had been hacked up, burned, and her limbs had been scattered around Chad Daybell's garden. And this is a quote. He said, eventually we uncovered bits and pieces of Tylee that had been burned. There were pieces of bone, charred flesh, just globs of flesh that were falling apart. I don't love the word glob. No. But as soon as he says it, you know exactly what he means. So the state of Tylee's remains meant it was impossible to say how she'd actually died. During the trial, jurors looked visibly distressed as they were forced to listen to these brutal

accounts. But things only got worse when photos of Tylee's remains were also shown to the court. As were stomach-churningly graphic photos of JJ. Everyone at the trial was shown images of the seven-year-old JJ's body still dressed in his red pyjamas and pull-up night-time nappy. He had plastic bags wrapped around his tiny little head, and he was lying buried in a shallow grave on Chad Daybell's grounds. The last proof of life of little JJ was a photo taken on the 22nd of September 2019, showing him sitting on a sofa, dressed in a matching set of red pyjamas. So it's quite likely that he died around that time.

JJ's cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation due to the multiple plastic bags found around his head and the duct tape covering his mouth. But horrifically, JJ had scratch marks on his neck suggesting he was awake and fought to try to get the bag off his head. I hate that so much. He is so little. Like, I think when you see him, he looks little for a seven-year-old and he has special needs not that any child would be terrified but it is just so horrendous this entire thing that picture and there is one other thing that the um

post-mortem showed up it was brought up in court but it can't really be accurately backed up the pathologist said that they found traces of ghb oh god in jj's system which is of course the date rape drug but they also did say that it can naturally occur in the body so they don't know for sure if he was drugged or not and to be honest the fact that he has scratch marks on his neck, where he probably fought to get the bag off, I think he wasn't drugged. So when the images of the children's remains were shown, jurors gasped and the kids' grandparents sobbed. Laurie's attorney, and this fucking made me so furious. I remember this being in the headlines when this actually happened during the trial. But Laurie's attorney at this point asked if she could be excused for the rest of the day from court because it was too upsetting for her. Thankfully, the judge said no because fuck Laurie Vallow.

So hard. Honestly. Especially when you take into account what else the court heard. Because alongside her brother Alex Cox's fingerprints, Laurie Vallow's hair was found on the duct tape which had been used to wrap the plastic bag around JJ's head. Here is my question. Yes. I mean, she doesn't try very hard,

but if you really believe the apocalypse is coming, why are you burying them? Why are you hiding them? I mean, honestly, this is why. It's like, I just don't believe her. I don't believe her. We'll go on to talk about it later and make a comparison to another case, but, like, I just think this was far more base than all of that.

So what did the prosecutor say happened? What motive have we got? Was it really a religious delusion or something else entirely? Well, the state alleged at trial that this whole case was driven by money, power and sex. And that Laurie Vallow and Chad Daybell conspired with Laurie's brother Alex Cox to murder Tammy, JJ and Tylee as a part of their bizarre cult beliefs. But also, and this is crucial, for financial purposes so they could collect Tammy's life insurance money and the children's social security and survivor benefits. And that's very interesting when you put it all

together with the internet searches from Laurie's Gmail account, which were also made public at trial. It seems that Laurie Vallow had shopped for life insurance policies for her children just two months before they were murdered. A few days later, the same Gmail account also searched for how to sell a service dog. JJ, who, like we said, had autism,

had a service dog. She is fucking cold as ice. Don't tell me this is just delusional crazy. I mean, it's crazy. She's not insane. Laurie had also googled wedding rings and wedding dresses long before Chad Daybell's wife Tammy died. There's no indication that he'd even split up with Tammy, let alone started divorce proceedings against her. There are texts between Chad and Tammy that just look like a normal married couple. She didn't even know that he was having an affair, let alone did she think there were problems in their marriage. But Laurie's here shopping for a fucking dress. Yeah, so it's stuff like this that makes us think that it's not a religious

delusion. It's all about money and being with Chad. And speaking of Tammy, so this is Chad's wife. This trial was the first time that we learned her cause of death. Like we said, healthy, normal 49-year-old Tammy Daybell had suddenly died on the 19th of October 2019. When that happened, Chad Daybell declined an autopsy. I wonder why. Yes and her death was ruled as being due to natural causes. I have issue with that. Like what you can just kill your spouse and then say I don't want an autopsy as long as nothing looks suspicious. It's tricky because obviously the next of kin is both the most likely person to have killed them and also the one in charge of whether there's an autopsy or not.

Yeah. It feels a bit slippery. It's a bit of a catch-22. Yeah. I'm not here for, you know, governmental overreach, but I'm like, maybe we just do autopsies just in case. And this fact that they basically say nothing suspicious here, nothing to look at, was despite the fact that 10 days before her death, Tammy had called 911 to report that someone

had fired a gun at her in the driveway of her own home. And then she turns up dead and they're like, well, maybe it was the shock of being shot at last week. So at trial it was confirmed that when Tammy was finally exhumed and a post-mortem was carried out, investigators were able to confirm that she had indeed died of asphyxia. Tammy also had bruises on her arms and on her chest that could only have happened in the hours around her death. Combine this with Tammy's friend Alice Gilbert's testimony at trial about Chad Daybell. This is what she said. She said, quote, He had a vision that Tammy's time on Earth was coming to an end.

He didn't know how or when, but he didn't see her living past the age of 50. That's pretty damning stuff, Chad. And he just can't keep his fucking mouth shut. No, famously not. Next up, the trial revealed more weird stuff that the police found in Laurie's garage, including several guns, ammunition, empty magazines, silencers, army-grade knives, hazmat-style suits, and preparedness bags with emergency kits and a camouflage suit. So that suggests that maybe she did really believe in all of the end-of-day stuff.

But I don't really think that makes her less culpable. She knowingly killed her children and covered it up. And she covered it up because she knew it was wrong. Then, unlike, say, Andrea Yates, Laurie didn't hand herself in. Or kill herself. Laurie Vallow found ways to line her pockets and ran off to Hawaii with Chad Daybell. So sure, she might be delusional, but she's also highly calculated,

manipulative, narcissistic, and predatory. Lori Vallow, in my opinion, is delusional insofar as the way that people who join cults are delusional. Yes, yes. It doesn't mean, what, if you're in a cult and like have crazy delusional beliefs that you kill somebody, know it's wrong, cover it up, steal a bunch of money, try to sell your dead, autistic, adopted son JJ's service dog, and then run off with that money with your new partner to Hawaii. Are you telling me she doesn't know what she did was wrong? Are you telling me she actually did this thinking she had no other choice? Andrea Yates kills her children because she thinks she had no other choice. Andrea Yates kills her children because she thinks she has no other choice and then the minute she does it she calls her husband, she calls the police, she confesses and she wants to be arrested. This woman is not that.

For example, and this is just more stuff that I think shows you that while it may seem like she's delusional I also think she's sort of setting the scene for this manipulation. Because in the months leading up to his death, Laurie told people that JJ was possessed. We talked earlier in this episode and also in the main episode about how Chad Daybell came up with a ranking system to score people on demonicness. Well, apparently, according to him,

Tylee had become possessed by a demon named Hillary. And seven-year-old JJ had definitely been taken over by dark spirits. According to Laurie JJ would climb on top of the fridge on top of the cabinets and would say things like I love Satan whilst knocking over pictures of Jesus. JJ was seven years old and had autism and was surrounded by these fucking wackos who also from testimony at people at this trial were doing things like casting demons out of people in their houses opening portals up jj's adopted dad charles had also just been murdered so if he was saying these kind of things or acting in that way i fucking wonder why and she uses that as a reason to justify why she killed him but she

doesn't even really because she never admits it oh this is so interesting the case against laurie was so solid that her attorneys declined to present a defense case at all what the fuck i've never heard of that i read that and i was like shut the fuck up that is unbelievable they were just like we're not even gonna bother here's what they said we don't believe the state has proven its case so the defense rests sure i bet that was the fastest money that attorney ever fucking made i mean honestly at what point do you come to that decision but the thing that worries me about that, and hopefully this isn't something that happens,

is that can she then later appeal and say that she had inadequate counsel or something? Because they literally didn't fucking present a case. Right, yeah. But it's hard to understand how they can even come close to saying we don't believe the state has proven its case. The state called roughly 60 witnesses throughout the five weeks of trial. The defence called none. Yeah, not one. The only thing the defence did was throw Chad Daybell under the bus during closing arguments. And that man absolutely deserves to be right under a bus like

Regina George. But all the defence says is basically that Laurie was innocent, she was a good mother and she was manipulated by Chad and was completely under his control. Fucking bollocks. Now look, they say she's never had a history of anything. She's never had a history of any problem. She's always been a good mother. How is it suddenly when Chad Daybell comes into her life, she suddenly starts acting like this

and she gets involved in something like this? She's obviously completely under his control. And I think that argument cuts both ways she's not suddenly developed insanity if she was normal i always think she was very narcissistic and very self-serving in the documentary you hear a lot from her eldest son and from his partner and his partner has always felt uncomfortable around lori saying things like she would say things to me like j Jesus loves you but he loves me more like she is a narcissist so I'm like how are you saying she suddenly went crazy I don't think that kind of psychosis comes on that suddenly without being a very clear trigger the only thing that happens is she meets Chad Daybell I think it's

much more like um a folly a. She's completely obsessed with him. She wants to be with him. I suspect that Chad Daybell didn't want these kids anywhere around her. And he's on a mega ego trip. He wants money. They get about $430,000 from Tammy's death. Charles had a $1 million life insurance policy. But after they killed him, they found out that he had changed it.

And Laurie was no longer the benefactor i love charles charles was a genuinely good man and yeah fucking bollocks i don't agree at all that laurie valo was just under chad's control she was a willing active participant in all of this and thankfully the jury agreed so laurie valo has been convicted as of now two Fridays ago, but she'll be sentenced within the next month or so, most likely to life, though they have said that her mental health will be taken into consideration at sentencing. Why?

Precisely. Fuck her. If you send her to a mental institution, she'll never get out. Send her wherever the fuck you want, but send her somewhere. I cannot stand that woman and chad daybell makes me sick yeah it's gross so we're still waiting for his trial to get started um but yeah laurie valo's defense well and truly threw him under the bus and he incriminated himself all over the fucking place there was a text that he sent to tammy the day that the police think that

um alex cox laurie's brother buried the children in chad daybell's garden because he obviously had to explain why the garden's been fucking dug up because there's a bunch of shallow graves everywhere and he texts his wife saying that he shot a raccoon and that he had to bury it in their pet cemetery i remember that bit and um he even ends the text with such fun or something like that. Disgusting. Vile. Absolutely.

Just a fucking whole host of disgusting people. A whole host of absolutely batshit things that went on. And yeah, really, really heartbreaking. Go check out our full episode for the entire rundown on all of these people. But that is the update. I don't really want to do an update when Chad's trial happens because there's nothing really left to say. I think Laurie Vallow's trial covers everything. And yeah, she is the bigger perpetrator to me because they were her fucking kids. I completely agree.

So there you go. That is it. And we will see you next week with something else. Hooray! Bye! Thank you. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made, a seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off,

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