A mother. A doomsday prophet. Two dead children. A trail of bodies across two states.
Lori Vallow Daybell was once a beauty queen, devoted mother, and lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. By 2025, she had been convicted by multiple juries in two states for crimes connected to the deaths of her children, Tylee Ryan and Joshua "JJ" Vallow, the death of her husband Charles Vallow, the death of Tammy Daybell, and the attempted murder of Brandon Boudreaux.
This carefully researched true-crime account reconstructs the case from the public record: police affidavits, court filings, trial testimony, autopsy findings, sentencing hearings, appeal documents, and contemporaneous reporting.
At the centre of the story is a private theology built by Lori and Chad Daybell: visions, castings, "zombies", death percentages, past lives, and a claimed divine mission that prosecutors argued became the language of murder. But beneath the apocalyptic beliefs lay motives as old as crime itself - money, desire, power, and the removal of anyone who stood in the way.
From Charles Vallow's warnings to police, to the disappearance of Tylee and JJ, to the discovery of their remains in Chad Daybell's backyard, to Lori's Idaho convictions, Chad's death sentence, and Lori's Arizona trials, LORI follows the full arc of one of the most disturbing American criminal cases of the twenty-first century.
This is not a story about monsters born in shadow. It is a story about choices, belief, manipulation, institutional failure, and the people who refused to stop asking the question that finally cracked the case open: Where are the kids?
