Did a doomsday cult really drive Lori Vallow to murder her children?
Power. Money. Sex.
These are the three things that prosecutors say drove Lori Vallow to kill.
And they’re also the three things that experts say make up the playbook of a destructive cult.
“All cult leaders are driven by those three things in that particular order,” Steve Hassan, a world-renowned cult expert and former member of the Moonies cult, tells The Independent.
“Power is number one, then two it’s money which is also used for control, and three is sex. It’s the playbook of a cult leader.”
Vallow soon earned the nickname the “cult mom” not long after her two youngest children Tylee Ryan, 16, and Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 7, disappeared in September 2019.
As the children’s other family members desperately searched for them – and begged Vallow to come clean about where they were – details about her doomsday cult beliefs began to emerge.
The 50-year-old mother-of-three had grown up in the Church of the Latter-day Saints (LDS) but, since meeting her new lover Chad Daybell, her beliefs had grown ever more extreme.
She believed she and Mr Daybell had been chosen for a religious mission to lead “the 144,000” followers – that he was a prophet and she a goddess.
Her murder trial – which ended in a conviction for killing the kids and conspiring to kill Mr Daybell’s first wife Tammy – exposed how these beliefs grew increasingly fantastical and dangerous, invoking zombies, dark spirits and death.
At her trial, prosecutors said that Vallow, Mr Daybell and their inner circle believed in a “rating system of light and dark” with certain death percentages for how they ranked the spirits of the people around them.
Over time, this then evolved into the belief that some people had become “zombies”. And that the only way to get rid of the zombie was to destroy the human body it was in.
Shockingly, this included her two children.
Before their disappearances, Vallow had told friends that they had been taken over by “dark spirits”, and that Tylee was possessed by a demon named “Hillary”, according to courtroom testimony.
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