When her kids went missing, all eyes fell on Lori Vallow. Then she disappeared.
, Sottile’s book out on June 21, she interrogates the apocalyptic belief system of the children’s mother, Lori Vallow, and the doomsday writings of her husband, Mormon fiction writer Chad Daybell, tracing their origins to a paranoia that exists inside the culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is a story of snake oil charlatans and fake prophecies, of a beauty queen whose husbands keep ending up dead.
His name was Joshua, but everyone called him JJ. He was seven years old, with a wide, toothy grin and a laugh that shook his whole body. He carried an iPad tablet with him everywhere and loved video-chatting with his grandparents, far away in Louisiana. He called them Maw-Maw and Paw-Paw. Sometimes they spoke twice in a day.
The bustling college district gives way to a downtown of brick facades characteristic of Old West towns established in the mid-1800s. The ragged edge of Rexburg, like the ragged edge of most small western cities, is a place of loading docks and railroad tracks and metal-sided buildings with tall trucks parked in the lot. Just beyond the pristine temple grounds, tractors kick up clouds of dust in alfalfa and wheat fields.
At the detective’s question, Alex looked to Chad, but neither man said a word. Hermosillo repeated himself. Alex told the officers the boy — his nephew — was out of town, actually. He was visiting his grandmother in Louisiana. After the men closed the door, Hermosillo called his lieutenant and explained the strange situation. He instructed him to go directly to the Madison County Prosecutor’s Office. They were going to need a search warrant.
As Lori showed the men inside, she told them that she’d just hung up the phone another detective, who was asking about the whereabouts of her son. “This is a big mess,” she said.“He’s with one of my friends in Arizona. My friend Melanie. Her son has autism,” she explained. Lori told them that JJ was also diagnosed as autistic.
It was true that Kay Woodcock was JJ’s grandmother. But her particular relation to Lori was a bit more complicated to explain. By November 2019, Woodcock technically was Lori’s ex-sister-in-law. Lori had been married to Woodcock’s brother, Charles Vallow, for thirteen years. And Charles and Lori had adopted JJ — Kay Woodcock’s grandson, the son of her own son — when the boy was two years old because his birth parents were unable to care for the boy. Lori and Woodcock were not on good terms.
Lori told them about her daughter, Tylee Ryan. The only reason they’d moved to Rexburg was for her to attend BYU–Idaho, just up the hill from the town house.Before they left, the officers asked about the men they’d seen earlier. Who was the guy with her brother? His friend, she told them. Chad.“Mm-hmm. He’s an author,” she said.