The Doomsday Mother: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and the End of an American Family
By John Glatt

The crime:

Lori Vallow was living with her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, when she met Chad Daybell, a Mormon author of religious-themed end-time books who was married at the time to Tammy, with whom he had had five children. Vallow had a young daughter, Tylee, by a previous marriage and had adopted an autistic grandnephew of Charles named J.J.

As near as can be reconstructed, Lori talked her brother Alex into killing Charles. (Alex would not be prosecuted for killing Charles, arguing he had shot him in self-defence. Then Alex would die, apparently of natural causes, before the later trials involving Lori and Chad, though he was complicit in those murders as well.) Both Tylee and J.J. disappeared and were found to have been murdered and buried on Chad’s property at his home in Idaho. Chad is thought to have then killed Tammy. Chad and Lori, cashing in on the deaths, flew to Hawaii where they married. That is also where they were later arrested. At trial after being returned back to Idaho, Chad was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Tammy, Tylee, and J.J. and sentenced to death. Lori was found guilty of the murder of Tylee and J.J. and conspiracy to murder Tammy. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The book:

While the story of the Vallow-Daybell doomsday murders (as they came to be known in the media) is a singular and horrifying one, it also hits on a lot of themes that readers of the True Crime Files will be very familiar with. For example, in two previous books by John Glatt (Love Her to Death and Tangled Vines) I’ve noted how bad an idea it is for women to meet up with their exes, or soon-to-be-exes, on their own. In both those books the wives in question ended up being murdered. In this book it’s slightly different in that it was Lori wanting to meet with Charles. He had a bad feeling about this, and even mentioned to Lori’s (normal) brother Adam some misgivings. He ended up being shot to death by Alex.

Charles should have also paid more attention to what were clear red flags. Actually, calling them red flags at this point would be putting it mildly. When she met Charles, Lori had already been divorced three times, with two kids by two different fathers. All by the age of 32. That’s not a red flag, it’s a klaxon. By the time of the fatal visit Lori was clearly a madwoman, and Charles had even arranged to have her committed. After all, in the days just proceeding their fatal meet-up she’d (1) cleaned out his bank accounts and then changed the numbers on them so he couldn’t access them (because he ran a business this meant he couldn’t make payroll); (2) was clearly interested in another man; (3) changed the locks on their house; (4) stole his truck, and (5) accused him of being possessed by an evil demon.

But he still “loved her to death” (his death, as it turned out). Alas, as I’ve had occasion to remark several times in these case files, there’s just no talking to a guy who’s in love.

You’d think any man would have to be crazy to take up with Lori after all this, but then crazy came along. Chad not only knew all about Lori’s history before getting involved with her but took notes on her previous relationships and family connections. To be sure, Chad was messed up himself, but it’s also true that some women just have a poisonous “it.”

Another familiar story worth flagging (because, as I’ve long maintained, we’re supposed to be taking notes and learning something from all this) is the significance of life insurance policies. Just before his wife’s death Chad “made ‘significant increases’ on several life insurance policies he had taken out on Tammy, bringing them to the maximum legal payout allowed.” And yet this wasn’t any kind of tip-off to the underwriters or police when Tammy just suddenly died. Meanwhile, I did get a bit of a kick out of how upset Lori was that Charles had made his sister the beneficiary of his policy just before he was killed. If she wanted that money I guess she should have moved a little faster.

In ways like this, and I’m being selective, what we have here then is a fairly standard murder story: married man meets married woman and they have to get rid of spouses and children to enjoy their new lives together. There are two twists that give it special interest though. The first is the apocalyptic belief system and “prepper” culture that Chad and Lori were immersed in. In fact, Chad could be described as the leader of a mini-cult that separated people out in the usual way (the saved and the damned, the sons of light and the spawn of darkness) in anticipation of the Rapture. Like a lot of modern cults, there also seemed to be some heavy drawing from pop culture. This goes back at least as far as L. Ron Hubbard and the roots of Scientology in C-list science fiction stories. Here’s something I took note of in my review of Steven Singular’s book Killer Cults that I think is relevant:

What is the link between cults and the products of pop culture? Charles Manson thought the song “Helter Skelter” from The Beatles’ White Album contained a hidden message about a coming race war. Adolfo Constanzo based his brutal crime cult on a 1987 flick called The Believers starring Martin Sheen and Jimmy Smits that I have only the vaguest recollection of today. The Heaven’s Gate cult took its lead from Star Trek mythology, with its members thinking of themselves as parts of an “Away Team” as they killed themselves. Why do so many people put so much faith, or even find any meaning, in such crap? I know that’s a question every outsider asks of any belief system, but Star Trek? I guess fandom and cult membership have to be plotted on a spectrum.

Insofar as Chad was starting his own cult he seems to have borrowed from the same range of sources. We’re told he believed, for example, that the spells and curses in the Harry Potter books actually existed but required “great focused will to use.” Indeed, Chad even described himself to Lori as “a grown-up version of Harry Potter.” Meanwhile, one observer “felt like many of them [the cult’s beliefs] were ripped out of a Dungeons & Dragons manual. Between the stats, accounts of dark and light weapons . . . it sounded like someone had created a tabletop [Book of Mormon game] based on the Bible.”

It wasn’t clear to me from the evidence Glatt presents just how much of the stuff about light and dark spiritual possession and people turning into zombies Chad, as opposed to his followers, really believed. But this aspect of the case is gone into in more depth in Leah Sottile’s book When the Moon Turns to Blood so I won’t say more about it here.

The other thing that makes the story interesting is that we don’t really know that much about how Charles, Tylee, J.J., and Tammy were killed. By that I don’t just mean the actual causes of death, but how their murders might have been planned and arranged or who was directly involved. Clearly, however, Chad and Lori were responsible. This leads, however, to the deeper question of who was the dominant partner in their relationship.

As Glatt remarks in his postscript, despite all the coverage that the case received none of the accounts “have explained how the seemingly mild-mannered end-times author Chad Daybell managed to lead the glamorous grandmother into homicidal madness. But the real question is, what came first, the Lori chicken or the Chad egg?” Did Chad really lead Lori along, or was she leading him?

Let’s look at both sides.

The case for Lori being led by Chad was put by Special Prosecutor Rob Wood, who called what Chad did “spiritual abuse” and “spiritual manipulation”:

“I’m so torn. It’s such a conflicting feeling to know that this person’s been good her whole life, and then made this error in judgment and got sucked into this vortex of this man [Chad]. I feel for her. I just have so much compassion towards her because I know that’s not what she would have ever done on her own. And I hate her for that.”

Now Wood was talking to Lori’s sister at the time he said this, so not all of it may have been sincere. Lori had hardly been good “her whole life.” Not even close. But it does seem clear that she took a swerve for the worse when Chad entered in her life. Her marriage with Charles seemed to have been working, enough for him to have risked everything to save it. And even J.J.’s grandparents thought she’d been great with J.J. up until she met Chad. “You couldn’t ask for a better mother,” said J.J.’s grandfather. “She loved J.J. She loved Charles, and I don’t know what caused this conversion. You don’t go from being the mother of the year of a special needs [boy] to the person that won’t even tell you where they are. That just doesn’t happen.”

If you buy into the idea of Chad as cult leader you also find support for this notion of him leading Lori on. It’s telling in this regard that after their arrest Chad did talk her out of cooperating with the police and making a plea deal with prosecutors. One cult expert interviewed by Glatt says Chad was “still manipulating his new wife, even while she was behind bars” with his daily calls and scripture readings.  “He continued the marination of her mind.” Another expert interviewed by Sottile says Chad used “classic grooming techniques” on Lori. This strongly suggests someone very much in control.

On the other hand . . .

I don’t think Lori was ever normal. There seem to have been mental health issues running in her family.  Her father waged a quixotic life-long legal campaign against the government, claiming that he didn’t have to pay any taxes. Her brother Alex, who shot Charles, probably killed Tylee and J.J., and who attempted to kill the husband of Lori’s niece, may have had improper relations with Lori when they were both kids. Her sister Stacey went crazy starving herself to death, fearing that all food was poison. Stacey’s husband would liken the family to “a psychological hornet’s nest,” and that may have been selling it short. I don’t like the overuse of the excuse of mental illness when it comes to a lot of criminal cases, but it’s clear that Lori was sick.

As far as her personal relationships go, Lori also seems to have been a dominant personality. A friend named Melanie was described by someone who knew them both as “almost subservient to Lori . . . a passenger on Lori’s bus.” “Lori was definitely running the show,” was how the friendship was characterized. This seems to chime with the powerful hold Lori had over her brother Alex, and makes one wonder about her relationship with Chad. According to the minister who presided over their beach wedding in Hawaii: “Lori was definitely more forward than Chad . . . She really did all the pushing on this. She was definitely wearing the pants that day.” Also: “There were a couple of times when he really manned up, but most of the time she was the pilot.” For what it’s worth, this is the same impression I got seeing the video of them together when they were ambushed by a reporter in Hawaii. Lori seems far more in charge, with Chad sort of trailing beside her like he’s on a leash. As reported in When the Moon Turns to Blood, the police who first called on Chad and Lori when doing a wellness check on J.J. were singularly unimpressed with the man of the house:

Daybell was a jowly, potbellied man with an awkward, quiet demeanor, who gave off the air of a person who was deeply unsure of himself. He wore too-large clothes and walked with a forward-leaning slant, and when he spoke, he mumbled sleepily, like his words were smooth river rocks dropping from his lips.

That image of rocks dropping from his lips is an odd one, but the picture is pretty clear. In the language of the manosphere, Chad, despite his archetypal alpha name, was a confirmed beta. Whenever Chad’s father phoned him as the case became public he tried to speak to him alone, but Chad would always click the call on to speaker so Lori could listen in. Again, this sounds like Lori was in control.

Having set out the two arguments I’ll conclude by sharing the blame. What seems most likely to be the case is that Lori and Chad were an instance of folie à deux, or shared madness. My hunch is that Lori was a stronger personality, that she was (pick your metaphor) driving the bus or piloting the plane, but for things to go so spectacularly bad they had to come together.

Glatt was once again writing a timely book here, that’s his métier, and went to press before either Chad or Lori had gone to trial. That said, this is a readable account of a series of terrible crimes and one that helps set the complicated story straight. In his postscript Glatt tells us that “In my many years of writing true crime books I have never seen another case as terrifying as that of Lori Vallow Daybell. It simply defies logic, lying somewhere between cold-blooded murder and wild religious science fiction – the very embodiment of the truth being stranger than fiction.” But was it really so strange? Chad and Lori were just kindred spirits, not so much for their shared heretical beliefs (both were excommunicated from the LDS Church, eventually) as for having arrived at a point in their lives where they just didn’t care about anyone or anything very much anymore aside from having a good time. And that level of indifference to others can result in incredible cruelty.

Noted in passing:

Lori liked to live large and spend a lot of money, something perhaps related to her being raised in privilege but her family having come down in the world due to her father’s legal problems. But after her third divorce, at the age of around 30, she apparently owed $724,000 to creditors. At the time she was working as a self-employed hairstylist. How do you burn through that kind of money?

“In September 2001, Chad won a Cedar Fort Publisher’ House Award for his Emma Trilogy, despite the conflict of interest as they had published it and just hired him.” Ha-ha. Oh, literary awards. How does anyone take them seriously?

A week after killing Tylee and burying her burned remains in what amounted to a pet cemetery, Chad and Lori did a podcast entitled “Chad Daybell Sharing Jesus’ Love.” You can see why so many people today are cynical about religion.

Joe Ryan, Lori’s third husband, died alone, his body only discovered three weeks later in his apartment, with “an open jar of spaghetti and dirty dishes in the sink.” A jar of spaghetti? Or a jar of spaghetti sauce? The latter seems far more likely.

Takeaways:

Apocalyptic beliefs usually have something nasty about them, viewing most of humanity as either damned or worthless, which in turn justifies seeing all the zombies sent straight off to hell. But such beliefs are also dangerous, because if you think the end of the world is coming soon then you don’t have to care much about the long-term consequences of your actions. If you meet someone who’s convinced the Rapture is imminent (as opposed to thinking that the world is sliding into a more secular sort of catastrophe at its own leisurely pace) I’d keep a polite distance.

True Crime Files

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
By John Carreyrou

The crime:

In 2003, at the age of 19, Stanford drop-out Elizabeth Holmes started Theranos, a company that sought to revolutionize blood testing by creating a machine capable of doing a number of different blood tests using only a small amount (a fingerprick) of blood. Theranos attracted large amounts of investment capital and at its height had a valuation of $9 billion, making Holmes herself both a media star and “the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States” (according to Forbes magazine). The blood-testing machines, however, never worked as advertised, and when the truth came out Theranos went bankrupt. Both Holmes and her second in command, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, were convicted of fraud, sentenced to prison, and subjected to massive fines.

The book:

I think it’s a testament to the power of financial crime stories that they’re all the same but are still interesting. Enron, Bernie Madoff, FTX. The particulars vary, but every scam is driven by greed. People kill for all sorts of reasons (including greed), but they swindle others and commit fraud for money. And the people who get suckered are lured on by their dreams of avarice. That’s all there is to it.

I keep coming back to the Bre-X story (which I doubt many people have any memory of now, even though it was the basis for a movie) because it was one of the oldest cons in the book – the salted gold mine – and it basically represents the archetype for most frauds. Enron and Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and Theranos were all salted gold mines. People saw the shine of easy money and were struck by the fear of missing out. But in every case it was fake.

Should they have known it was too good to be true? I’m not sure that old admonition works in a lottery or casino economy like ours. Sometimes investments that seem too good to be true really do strike the jackpot. It’s all so random. That said, Holmes was making some very specific claims about what the Theranos testing devices could do that anyone with a medical background should have been able to see through quite easily. That her all-star board was made up primarily of very old men whose eminence had nothing to do with scientific knowledge wasn’t that surprising, or the fact that they did nothing to call any of Holmes’s claims into question. If there’s one thing that that the history of financial crime in our time proves it’s that corporate boards can be expected to do absolutely nothing in the face of even the most egregious misbehaviour. They’re just window dressing.

The more interesting question then is how many people knew Holmes’s pitch was fake but were just happy to make a killing on it, figuring they’d be able to get out in time and leave someone else holding the bag. My own sense is that most of the people taken in really were blinded at the thought of a ginormous pot of gold at the end of the Theranos rainbow. John Carreyrou, who was the first to break the story in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, makes it out that investors were “bewitched by Holmes’s mixture of charm, intelligence, and charisma.” Which may be true, up to a point. But I think most people seduce themselves in such matters. They fervently want to believe, and that desire is their undoing more than any spell cast by the con.

These were, after all, the gold rush days of Silicon Valley, and fortunes were being minted overnight by companies whose business models made far less sense. “Every startup founder in the Valley wanted to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and every VC [venture capitalist] wanted a seat on the next rocket ship to riches.” And the thing is, the idea for a fast and convenient method of blood testing was a good one, and since the demise of Theranos other companies have made progress working in the same direction. Holmes, however, had no experience in the field and there were red flags all over the place signaling that her device was humbug. There were also expert voices that raised doubts, but they were rigorously suppressed by the corporate thought police. Legal legend David Boies and his law firm come across as some of the real villains of the piece, perhaps because Carreyrou’s own interactions with them were so strained. Theranos was incredibly secretive and paranoid about bad press, and this wasn’t because they were trying to protect valuable intellectual property. What this resulted in was a lot of legal “hardball” which played very ugly indeed. If you were wondering why whistleblowers need protection, this could be a case study. The fact is, nobody wants to stop a money train.

Given all of what I’ve said about how typical a story of financial fraud Theranos was, it’s worth asking what made it so noteworthy. The key factor is the figure of Elizabeth Holmes. As a young, attractive, “female Steve Jobs” you have to think that if she hadn’t created herself (meaning that persona, complete with the black turtleneck and fake deep voice) then the media or the culture more generally would have had to invent her. She was what the age demanded even more than it demanded a portable, instant blood-test kit, and she was just as wonky a product when brought to market.

Carreyrou makes a convincing case that Holmes made a mistake in taking as her model for a startup the “fake it ‘til you make it” model of the tech giants and not the more disciplined approach of a medical company. But since she didn’t seem to have much affinity for either tech or medicine I think it was easy for her to get confused. In any event, tech was the “rocket ship to riches.” Beyond that, she was able to borrow the specious Silicon Valley rhetoric of wanting to change the world and improve everyone’s life through technology that has long been a hallmark of tech startups. And once again, this rhetoric was exposed as a sham. I find it amazing there are people, and among them even critics of the tech giants, who continue to echo this nonsense. There are people who still think that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook or Twitter/X are going to make the world a better place, or have ever had that as their goal. This is just sad and deluded. Elizabeth Holmes, like all the tech nerd-bros who came before and after her, wanted to be rich and powerful and that’s all there was to it.

But there are things about Holmes that are harder to explain. Chief among these is her mysterious relationship with Sunny Balwani. I say mysterious both because she attempted to keep the fact that they were living together hidden from everyone the entire time Theranos was in operation, and also because I just can’t figure it out.

What did she see in him? They seem to have first met when she was a student and he was a guy who had made a lot of money when a software company he’d been president of was acquired at the height of the dot-com bubble. Five months later the bubble burst and the company eventually went bankrupt. “His timing was perfect,” Carreyrou drily notes.

Holmes was young, stylish, smart, and capable of being charming. Balwani was nearly twenty years older, two inches shorter (he was about 5’5”), “portly,” “lacking in the most basic grace and manners,” not at all good-looking, and as for style . . .

The way Sunny dressed was . . . meant to telegraph affluence, though not necessarily taste. He wore white designer shirts with puffy sleeves, acid-washed jeans, and blue Gucci loafers. His shirts’ top three buttons were always undone, causing his chest hair to spill out and revealing a thin gold chain around his neck. A pungent scent of cologne emanated from him at all times. Combined with the flashy cars, the overall impression was of someone heading out to a night-club rather than to the office.

And it got worse. Balwani was born in Pakistan, which apparently helped shape his abrasive and authoritarian management style. While most people seemed to like working for Holmes, Balwani was a presence that few could endure. When he wasn’t firing employees for petty infractions he was “boastful and patronizing,” “haughty and demeaning . . . barking orders and dressing people down.” Like a lot of blowhards who have risen to positions of prominence on the basis of nothing more than blind luck, this arrogance was probably defensive. Theranos employees soon found ways to manage his moods, “as it dawned on them that they were dealing with an erratic man-child of limited intellect and even more limited attention span.” They even played practical jokes on him that exploited his ignorance of chemistry and engineering. If he hadn’t been placed in a position of responsibility everyone would have just considered him an obnoxious jerk and tried to steer clear of him.

Which brings us back to the question of what Holmes saw in him. Even Carreyrou is left shaking his head.

One school of thought is that she became captive to Balwani’s nefarious influence. Under this theory, Balwani was Holmes’s Svengali and molded her – the innocent ingénue with big dreams – into the precocious young female startup founder that the Valley craved and that he was too old, too male, and too Indian to play himself. There’s no question that Balwani was a bad influence. But to place all the blame on his shoulders is not only too convenient, it’s inaccurate. Employees who saw the two interact up close describe a partnership in which Holmes, even if she was almost twenty years younger, had the last say. Moreover, Balwani didn’t join Theranos until late 2009. By then, Holmes had already been misleading pharmaceutical companies for years about the readiness of her technology. And with actions that ranged from blackmailing her chief financial officer to suing employees, she had displayed a pattern of ruthlessness at odds with the portrait of a well-intentioned young woman manipulated by an older man.

Yet why were they still living together up until the end? Again: what did she see in him? Something here doesn’t add up.

Bad Blood is one of those slightly frustrating true crime books that on the one hand stands as definitive, being both well written and giving the perspective of a journalist who became closely involved in the events leading up to the company’s unraveling, but that, in the usual rush to be timely, came out several years before the Theranos trials brought some closure to the story. Still, it remains the best if not the fullest account of what happened, and Carreyrou’s assessment of what went wrong strikes me as right on target.

Noted in passing:

When Theranos’s corporate HQ (what had previously been Facebook’s building) was being given a makeover Holmes wanted motivational quotes painted in black on the white walls. These were the usual guff from people like Michael Jordan and Theodore Roosevelt. But pride of place went to a quote that she fell in love with “from Yoda in Star Wars” (actually The Empire Strikes Back): “Do or do not. There is no try.” She had this “painted in huge capital letters in the building’s entrance.”

As far as red flags go, I think this might have been enough for me to hold off investing any money in the company. I mean, really. Yoda?

One of the more surprising names on the list of Theranos marks was Rupert Murdoch (yes, another old guy). Indeed, after putting $125 million into the company he was its biggest investor. But after everything went smash and the lawsuits were gearing up, he seems not to have been too distressed.

Most of the other investors opted against litigation, settling instead for a grant of extra shares in exchange for a promise not to sue. One notable exception was Rupert Murdoch. The media mogul sold his stock back to Theranos for one dollar so he could claim a big tax write-off on his other earnings. With a fortune estimated at $12 billion, Murdoch could afford to lose more than $100 million on a bad investment.

This is what the game looks like when you’re a billionaire. Even when you lose you win.

Takeaways:

I think Holmes was basically blind with greed and ambition, but the way she shut herself off from any criticism or nay-saying really spelled her doom. I think it was super-investor Warren Buffett who said that he likes to keep someone on the payroll who will disagree with every position he takes and decision he makes, because otherwise he would just be surrounded by yes-men. One of Holmes’s friends became worried that in “her relentless drive to be a successful startup founder, she had built a bubble around herself that was cutting her off from reality.” At one point Holmes even told an all-hands meeting that she was “building a religion” and that “if there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave.”

As I’ve said before, the bubble is a danger for anyone who achieves a position of relative wealth and power. The state of being insulated from negativity is something I think a lot of people dream of. It’s very seductive, but the results can be fatal.

True Crime Files