Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
In December 2019, police in Rexburg, Idaho alerted the media: Two children had gone missing, along with their mother, Lori Vallow, and her new husband, Chad Daybell. No one had any idea where they were. Quickly, speculation swirled—that maybe their disappearances, and their whereabouts, could be linked to the “cult-like” religious beliefs held by Vallow and Daybell. Both were avowed members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Daybell had found a small amount of celebrity within Mormon circles for authoring LDS fiction and running his own book publishing company. But both Vallow and Daybell also entertained ideas at the fringes of the Mormon faith—ideas that weren’t acceptable to talk about in church on Sundays. They held study groups and scrutinized the works of “near-death experience” authors who claimed to have died and come back to life with knowledge from “beyond the veil.”
Much has been discussed about Lori Vallow: the gorgeous mother and former beauty queen whose children went missing. But in When the Moon Turns to Blood, author Leah Sottile also examines how Daybell grew up in the mainstream LDS church in Utah, and when, exactly, he started to entertain beliefs that aren’t Mormon at all. In the book, she tells the story of when he decided he might not merely a man from a small Utah town, but a seer and a revelator who could predict the future.
After sundown, the peaks of the Wasatch Front fade into a darkening sky, and everything in Springville, Utah, becomes the music of crickets, all together sawing a twilight song.