When the Moon Turns to Blood: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and a Story of Murder, Wild Faith, and End Times
By Leah Sottile

The crime:

Lori Vallow, her lover (and soon-to-be fifth husband) Chad Daybell, and Lori’s brother Alex Cox conspired to kill Lori’s then-husband Charles, Chad’s then-wife Tammy, and Lori’s two children, Tylee and J.J. Alex later died of natural causes, while Chad was sentenced to be executed and Lori to life in prison.

The book:

I’ve already gone over a lot of the facts in this case in my notes on John Glatt’s The Doomsday Mother. Both books came out before either Lori or Chad went to trial, but I don’t think they miss a lot. There are pros and cons with being timely. All too often true crime books spend far too much time on trial coverage, but trials do add information previously unknown to the public and it would have been nice to read an account of this case that took us to closure. In any event, I don’t expect more books about these events anytime soon so it looks like Glatt and Sottile are the last word. Public attention has moved on.

What makes this book different from Glatt’s is the focus Sottile places on the religious and cultural milieu that Lori and Chad were a part of. Here’s how she sets it up:

In one interview with a podcast about the Vallow/Daybell case, the managing editor at East Idaho News said people had made the case out to be a story of religion, when it in fact had everything to do with sex and greed. And to an extent, that became an early theory of the case, the reason two children were found dead in the yard of Chad Daybell was actually quite simple: two people wanted to be together and killed the people in their way. Even Lori’s own father seemed to imply that was his theory in his email to me.

But the more I sunk into the world of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell, the more clear it became that their story could only have happened inside a culture that festers in the LDS Church: a cancer that even men of God cannot seem to cut out.

Does Sottile make good on this claim? Well, she does her best. Personally, I think this was, mainly, a case of sex and greed. But those motives were mixed with religious views that take some time to unpack.

While they were both part of the LDS (Mormon) Church, Chad and Lori’s personal belief system was more a kind of pop-culture amalgam of stuff ranging from the Bible and the Book of Mormon to the Left Behind and Harry Potter series of novels. I don’t know if Chad wanted to be the head of an end-times cult or a bestselling author, or if there’s a distinction to be made there. There’s really no sorting any of it out, what with the possession by light and dark spirits, people being transformed into zombies, and a magic crystal on a pendant used to do readings.

Two things stand out however as key ingredients in Chad and Lori’s peculiar personal religion, and both are pretty familiar to cult watchers. In the first place there’s the idea that the members of the cult are among the saved. Chad took his lead from the Book of Revelation in figuring that only 144,000 individuals were going to be counted among the elect, which in a global population now of 8 billion is around 0.01 percent of us. Considering that all the immediate members of Chad’s circle were among this elite, that’s a serious sense of exceptionalism.

That exceptionalism is also seen in the way that in their past lives cult members enjoyed a lot of upward social mobility. Throughout all of human history, the vast majority of humanity have been peasant farmers or labourers who have left behind no material or historical record of their ever having existed. But if you’ve ever listened to anyone talk about their past lives all you’ll hear is of how they were Napoleon or Cleopatra. And so Chad, according to his own testimony, had previously lived as James the Just (the brother of Jesus), while Lori had been James’s wife Elena. Nor did it end there. “Almost everyone but Chad and Lori was a granddaughter or a spouse of a saint – some peripheral biblical character. But Chad and Lori were special, more important. Lori, in yet another life, had been married to Moroni, the Nephite warrior who appeared as an angel in a blinding holy light at the bedside of Joseph Smith.” That’s Mormon royalty for the rest of us.

As always when reading about the operation of a cult one is left wondering just how much of this anyone really believed. Tragically, I think in this case they believed a lot. But one can understand a lot of the psychological and cultural factors at play. Everyone has the need to feel they’re special, if not one of the elect. Having been a king or a saint in a previous life fills the same need to think that we’re somehow destined for greater things, that we have some biological marker that makes us better than the herd.

Take the matter of Chad’s “zombies.” These were imagined to be people whose souls were dead and who were inhabited by evil demons. But zombies are a big part of contemporary media culture (books, movies, videogames), fitting especially well with our sense of living at or near the end times. As I’ve argued at greater length elsewhere (see my review of Glenn Kay’s book Zombie Movies), what the zombie represents is simply other people, the apocalypse is only the revelation that all these creatures that look like human beings that we encounter every day aren’t even truly alive, or at least not as alive as we are. And so it’s no surprise that in addition to Chad’s theory of evil possession, Lori’s father also argued that anyone who paid taxes was a zombie. “Like hypnotized zombies the general population systematically and begrudgingly allow the IRS operations to steal their hard-earned money,” he wrote in a book. General population = zombies. Which means the elect, those 0.01 percent, are like the gang of survivors in The Walking Dead. And from here, how big a step is it to just getting rid of (that is, killing) other people? I mean, they’re already dead anyway.

The impression I had is that Lori was a hot mess from the get-go. Her family was likened to a psychological “hornet’s nest” that may have involved some form of sexual abuse. As early as 2007, more than ten years before the killing started, a court-appointed mental health examiner assessed her during custody proceedings as being someone whose “belief system is riddled with ghosts and seemingly fanatical religious dogma.” Once she fell in with Chad’s end-times cult she was casting witchy hexes and curses on her enemies by way of texts and seeing all kinds of bizarre spiritual phenomena operating in her daily life. It should go without saying that none of this had anything to do with Mormonism. I’m no apologist for the LDS, but you can find wingnuts in every religion, and at the end of the day I was left unconvinced by Sottile’s argument that there was something peculiar to the Mormon Church that gave rise to a case like this. Lori and Chad “had grown up with some elements of the far-right fringes of Mormon culture in their lives.” But while she mentions the Rafferty brothers (whose story was told by Jon Krakauer in Under the Banner of Heaven) and Warren Jeffs, and it’s true they based their crimes on what they took to be divine direction, there have always been people of every faith you can think of who have justified bad behaviour in such a way.

At first, the story of Chad and Lori and their missing children looked like a complicated version of a stock true-crime trope: a love affair gone wrong, a story of sexual desire so intense it drove two people to kill. They collected the insurance money from former loved ones and ran away together. But the story is so much more complicated than that. This is a story of faith, and of all the things we allow ourselves to believe.

I just can’t get totally on board with this. Yes, faith played a role in what happened, but it wasn’t “so much more complicated” than the stock true-crime trope. This was a case, primarily, of sex and greed. And failure. Lori and Chad were a pair of not very bright losers who wanted more out of life but felt they’d come to the end of the line. I found it most telling that neither of them invited any friends or family to attend their beach wedding in Hawaii. That just seemed sad. Then, recognizing that they’d come to their own, personal end of the line they projected this onto the rest of the world, seeing this as the end times. It’s the narcissistic apocalypse, and speaks very much to the spirit of the age.

Noted in passing:

It’s not clear what happened the morning Charles Vallow was shot and killed by Alex Cox (Lori’s brother). Charles and Alex are both now dead, as is Tylee, who may also have been present. And the only other possible witness is Lori, who says she wasn’t there. The story that Lori and Alex came up with, and that Tylee went along with when questioned by the police, is that Tylee had grabbed a baseball bat and tried to come between Charles and Lori when Charles was threatening his wife. Charles then wrenched the bat away from her and she ran out of the house. Alex then shot Charles after, he said, Charles started swinging the bat at him.

I don’t think this is what happened. It doesn’t seem to fit at all the kind of guy Charles was, or the frame of mind he was in. But Sottile takes it as established that Tylee “hadn’t flinched to stand between Lori and Charles Vallow with a baseball bat, ready to protect her mother.”

I was really surprised to read this. As I’ve said, I don’t think there’s any way now we can be sure of exactly what happened, but I really doubt it went down like this. I think it more likely Lori coached Tylee what to say, and even then their stories didn’t agree with each other anyway. There were plenty of reasons to be sceptical about it then, which is something Sottile should have registered.

Takeaways:

If you think everyone else is a zombie, perhaps you are the zombie.

True Crime Files

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
By Zeke Faux

The crime:

In 2022 the cryptocurrency exchange FTX (short for “Futures Exchange”) went bankrupt, after having hit a peak valuation of $32 billion just weeks earlier. The founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (popularly designated SBF) was later convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering.

The book:

The FTX story is only the best known part of the crypto chronicle Zeke Faux tells here. There’s a funny image of an SBF coin on the cover with the latin tag “Nihil Valet” (No Value), but this is really a more general look at, as the subtitle has it, the rise and fall of cryptocurrency. In fact, the main target of Faux’s suspicions throughout is the “stablecoin” Tether, which turns into a kind of crypto white whale that he never lands. Nevertheless, Money Go Up is a great read: tart, funny, and filled with telling anecdotes from a journalist who circled the globe, apparently several times, to get the story. I burned through it in a day.

It’s not the whole story of crypto, or, for that matter, of FTX. For example, Faux deliberately eschews going into much detail about how cryptocurrencies works. This is something I can’t fault him for though, as I’ve consumed a number of explainers on the subject and come away with only the fuzziest notion of how the system operates. In my personal experience, however, I’ve found I know more than most people who’ve dabbled in cryptocurrency (including many obnoxious true believers mixed in with the merely crypto-curious), and there are several times in Faux’s narrative where he has crypto insiders admit that they don’t know much more.

Of course, being opaque has always been a feature and not a bug when it comes to crypto. As its name suggests, this is a currency whose whole point is to slam the door on transparency. And it is this character that, in turn, has made crypto the currency of choice for all kinds of criminal activity: Internet scams, tax evasion, human trafficking, and (most of all) money laundering. As a lawyer I knew told me back when this stuff just started taking off: there’s a reason why they want to keep it secret. And as I wrote here several years ago:

As with anything involving a lot of tech, a lot of money, and a lot of secrecy, I am suspicious of all of this. “Cutting out the middleman” and facilitating faster financial transactions may be of some value, but they don’t seem like really pressing needs for anyone. Meanwhile, avoiding any oversight is the kind of thing mostly bad actors want to take advantage of.

What’s the point of crypto anyway? As Faux entertainingly makes clear, it is not a convenience. The middlemen aren’t cut out, and indeed they take an even bigger piece of the crypto action than the much-despised banks do with regular (fiat) currency. When, strictly for journalistic purposes, Faux purchases and then sells a mutant ape NFT he names Doctor Scum the process is described as “excruciating” and confusing (the NFT is actually sold hours before he knows about it, which he accounts “some of the worst hours of my life”). Then there are the extra costs involved (and keep in mind this was only a $20,000 sale):

Had I been trading in U.S. dollars, I would have lost about $800. But in crypto, there’s a fee associated with every transaction. I ended up wasting at least another $1,160: $36 to Coinbase, $497 to Yuga Labs for their 2.5 percent cut on all ape sales, another $497 to the NFT marketplace, $90 to Bank of America, and about $40 in Ethereum fees.

Convenience? Getting rid of the middle man? Lower fees and transaction costs? Not likely. When Faux travels around the world trying to use crypto, even in states where its use is encouraged by the government, all it leaves him with is

a new appreciation for my Visa card. It worked instantly, with just a tap, charged no fees, and never asked me to memorize long strings of numbers, or to bury codes in my backyard. It even gave me airline miles. When my wife’s account was hacked and used to book an Airbnb, we were given a full refund with just a phone call.

Say what you want about the inconvenience of dealing with your bank, and I could say a lot, when it comes to customer service for your cryptocash account the bottom line, as relayed by one artist profiled here, is “SORRY YOU’RE FUCKED.”

The inconvenience of actually using crypto for anything leads to some funny stories, but they underline that question I asked earlier: What’s the point of crypto? Some of its popularity seems to be driven by the kind of thing that in politics is referred to as negative or affective polarization. A good example of this comes when Faux attends a crypto conference in the Bahamas (a “giant volcano of crypto bullshit”) where SBF was interviewed on stage by business author Michael Lewis. Now at the time Lewis was writing a book on Bankman-Fried (Going Infinite), which is always a bad sign. A very bad sign. Faux describes him as “lavishing praise” on big tech’s latest wunderkind, and asking questions “so fawning, they seemed inappropriate for a journalist.” But aside from that, it’s interesting to note some other things.

Lewis said he knew next to nothing about cryptocurrency. But he seemed quite confident that it was great. The writer said that, contrary to popular opinion, crypto was not well suited for crime. He posited that U.S. regulators were hostile to the industry because they’d been brainwashed or bought off by established Wall Street banks. I wondered if he simply hadn’t heard about the countless crypto scams, but the thought seemed preposterous.

“You look at the existing financial system, then you look at what’s been built outside the existing financial system by crypto, and the crypto version is better,” Lewis said.

Better? In what way? Michael Lewis is no dummy. So why, aside from the fact that he was being given access to SBF in order to write his book, was he so deep in the tank for crypto? One part of it, I think, is that negative polarization I mentioned. Crypto is obviously shady, but the government, the “established Wall Street banks,” “the existing financial system” and the elites running it, they are the enemy that needs to be destroyed. The hate, amplified by media and social media, becomes such a powerful drug that even successful elites become willing to cut off their nose to spite their face.

Another draw for crypto is that it is, effectively, a form of gambling, with supposed insiders and people who know the system making piles of money off of the suckers. At several points Faux even likens the crypto exchanges as being a casino. Meanwhile, time and again he tries to think of some real world use for cryptocurrency and comes up with nothing, aside from (obviously) enabling and concealing criminal activity. And, I suppose, letting rich kids play at being crypto bros, happy to give their money to bored billionaires rather than having to do anything so déclassé as paying taxes. Bored billionaires who, in turn, don’t give a damn about consumer protections or safeguards and are just squirreling their money away in offshore boltholes while running schemes many of them openly acknowledge to be fraudulent. One crypto executive thought his job title should be “Ponzi Consultant.” Another “happily” described his business as a “never-ending Ponzi scheme . . . what I call Ponzinomics.”

One thing that struck me is how brief a run FTX enjoyed. The exchange was only founded in 2019, took just a couple of years to reach stratospheric valuations, and was then kaput by 2022. The rise and fall of crypto (and at this point we can only pray that crypto won’t make a comeback, at least to the kind of hysterical levels described here) didn’t take very long. J. P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon compared it to a pet rock, and I don’t think NFTs lasted any longer than that iconic fad from from the 1970s. Do we even remember the bored ape NFTs anymore? Or Razzlekhan, the self-styled rapper who was one half of the biggest heist in history? If not, at least we won’t have to explain them to future generations.

That said, crypto is still with us, and all the terrible shit that comes with it. As Annie Lowrey recently reported in The Atlantic:

The FBI reports that cyper-investment scams cost Americans $4.6 billion in 2023 [remember: FTX collapsed in 2022], up 38 percent from the year before, and 1,700 percent over the previous five years. That’s more than ransomware scams, fake tech-support swindles, web extortion schemes, phishing attacks, malware breaches, and nonpayment and nondelivery frauds combined. And it is an undercount, given that it includes only complaints made to law enforcement; most folks don’t bother making a police report in an attempt to get their bitcoin back, knowing it is hopeless.

So why does crypto persist? Because people, greedy people looking to make a very quick and very easy million, or billion, want to believe in it. It’s basically a cult, and Faux isn’t under any illusions that it will be going away anytime soon.

I didn’t think the prices of all of the cryptocurrencies were about to go to zero, or that we’d never see another hot new coin mint overnight billionaires. On the stock market, pump-and-dump scams have persisted for hundreds of years, and yet there are still new suckers willing to buy shares in some shell company that claims to have struck gold.

The one coin I especially wouldn’t bet against is Bitcoin. It’s not that it’s useful – if anything, it’s more unwieldy than the others. But Bitcoin’s true believers are so convinced that it’s hard to imagine anything will change their minds. To them, whatever the question, the answer is “buy Bitcoin.” Everything they see is evidence Bitcoin will rise, like the members of a cult certain that the apocalypse – and their salvation – is just around the corner.

What surprised me, after finishing Number Go Up, was how little I ended up caring about SBF. Perhaps it’s just because that, while a crook, he was far from the worst crook in an industry rife with scammers. But I also couldn’t help feeling that he didn’t care all that much either way about the money. To be sure, he was no altruist, effective or any other kind. But the impression I had was that he knew all along FTX was a joke, a funhouse ride filled with smoke and mirrors, and he was just waiting for the inevitable collapse in his 12,000-square-foot Bahamian penthouse, eating junk food and playing videogames until the Feds came calling. Faux registers surprise at how blasé he appeared when the whole house of cards came crashing down, which for some reason made me think of the response the chief weapons investigator had when he informed George W. Bush that Iraq didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction. He was struck by how uninterested the president seemed. Did he believe they did? Or did he just not care? That’s the thing about bullshit, as defined by Harry Frankfurt. It’s not a lie if you don’t care if it’s true or not. I think SBF was living in an entire ecosystem of bullshit, unconcerned over whether any of it was real.

This is part of what makes Number Go Up such an entertaining and even downright funny a book. But that would be the wrong takeaway. Yes, there are plenty of freaks and geeks to amuse us, like the “laughably weird founders” of Tether. The crypto world is one, Faux tells us, “where a lack of experience or competence has never been a barrier to fame and fortune.” So much for the meritocracy! But dig a little deeper, as Faux does, and you see beyond the great fortunes to the destroyed lives and violent crimes that are such a big part of the crypto story. The book gets progressively darker, finally taking us to a slave-labour cyber-scam camp in Cambodia. It’s a horrifying vision of a world we rarely get to see, and the worst part of it is that it’s probably not even the smallest or most evil part of what’s really going on.

Noted in passing:

What does money buy?

Alex Mashinsky was co-founder and CEO of the crypto lending network Celsius, a company whose business model never seemed to make the slightest bit of sense. When we last see Mashinsky it’s in a Manhattan courtroom, as part of a hearing into a dispute between Celsius and a former employee after Celsius’s bankruptcy (Mashinsky himself would later be arrested and tried for fraud). But when Faux interviewed him at a smoothie shop he was still riding high.

The interview doesn’t go well. Mashinsky blows a bunch of smoke at Faux about Celsius being a five-legged stool or a candy shop, but then gets distracted by his disintegrating paper straw which requires him to order his public relations representative to bring him another one. I’m sure it’s just me, but I would hope that if I ever get to be really rich I’ll never ask someone to fetch me a straw. I’ll get my own.

Things get worse though when Mashinsky gets annoyed at the noise of the smoothie shop’s blender (something I would have thought very much part of the atmosphere in such a joint). “Can we get out of here? It’s just driving me crazy!” he yells. Retreating to his $8.7 million apartment the interview continues as picks “at a tray of fruit brought by another assistant.”

Why do people want to be rich? For some of them it’s just so they can be like this.

Takeaways:

You don’t really invest in cryptocurrency. Investment means buying shares in a company which then does things in a real economy, like employ people and make things. At best, cryptocurrency is a form of gambling. As Faux concludes, the promises made about crypto have proven empty, while “the benefits of crypto to the rest of the world seemed to be limited to enabling a zero-sum gambling mania.” And gambling is always odious and profoundly damaging to society and individuals.

And, just to repeat: it’s only gambling at best. It can be a lot of other things that are worse.

True Crime Files