Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters/Rexburg Police Department
On the warm summer day when Lori Vallow learned she would spend the rest of her life behind bars for killing her children, it was one kind of conclusion to her years-long saga, but hardly the true ending of the story.
By then, Vallow’s story had been tumbling forward in the public eye for more than three years. It was a tale of a wild and salacious affair that instantly had true crime junkies and online sleuths foaming at the mouth: the devout Mormon mother who scurried off to Hawaii under cover of night with Chad Daybell, a self-proclaimed visionary and well-known author of apocalyptic novels. They believed they were godly warriors who had been married in past lives. The pair vanished just after police in Rexburg, Idaho arrived on Vallow’s doorstep asking questions about the whereabouts of her 7-year-old son, JJ. She smiled and tossed her hair and claimed it was all a big misunderstanding, and then she was gone in the dark: disappeared before anyone knew yet that her daughter, 16-year-old Tylee, was also missing.
It took months for authorities to understand the size and scope of Vallow’s intricate web: there were the two missing children, but soon more violence became clear. There was the strange case of Daybell’s wife: a cheery elementary school librarian who went to bed one night and never woke up. There was Vallow’s dead fourth husband: shot to death in Arizona. There was Vallow’s dead third husband: a man she reviled and whose body rotted in his apartment for days before anyone found him. There was a drive-by shooting. There were the strange “casting” meetings where faithful women would hold hands with Vallow, summon the elements, and pray for the deaths of their enemies.