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John Glatt: Doomsday Mother: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and the End of an American Family

 I've been following this case since 2020, when officers pleaded with Lori to return her children to Idaho. Since then, I've paid careful attention to new developments in the case. I also read Leah Sotille's book: When the Moon Turns to Blood. You can see my review for that HERE. This book was recommended to me on Audible, and I picked it up to see if it had any new insights on the case.

Doomsday Mother gives a pretty thorough background on both Lori Vallow Daybell and Chad Daybell. Lori grew up in California to well-off (but anti-government) parents. They were supposedly devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Lori's marriages ended in disaster. Chad grew up in Springville, Utah. He served a mission for the Church and then worked at the Springville cemetery, where he met Tami. The two were eventually married and started their family. After a near-death experience, Chad began writing about it and the end times. He ultimately claimed to be having visions. These visions and odd beliefs led to the start of a small cult that later included Lori. He conspired to marry Lori, but had to get her current husband out of the way. Lori's brother Alex shot and killed Charles, then claimed self-defense to the officers. Shortly after, Lori moved to Idaho. Tami Daybell also died, with Chad claiming that she had been ill for some time. Soon after, Lori's children went missing. Lori and Chad ran to Hawaii to get married, and were arrested because of the missing children.

If you haven't been following coverage of the case, this book is a good entry point into Lori and Chad's wild story and crazy beliefs. It breaks down who the key players in the case are and how they ended up connected. It also gives direct quotes from text messages, police affidavits, and other documents. It was nice to hear some of their perspectives in their own words. If you've been following the case, then a lot of this book is old news. There were some insights into conversations (and a lot of Lori's niece's ex-husband, Brandon Boudreaux) that I didn't know before, but that was about it. 

This book is outdated at this point as well. It was published before Lori and Chad's Idaho trials. Chad Daybell got the death penalty, and Lori got life in prison. She's also been convicted in connection with Charles Vallow's death in Arizona, as well as the attempted murder of Brandon. She's awaiting sentencing in those two cases (and soon, even this post will be outdated as well). In looking at some of the other reviews for this book, this is people's biggest complaint.

I found the book overall to be logically organized with very short chapters (sometimes that bugged me, though). It lays out all of Chad and Lori's history and events leading up to their Idaho trials. That context all matters to understanding the players involved.

Like Sotille's book, this book was written by someone who is not a member of the Church. This led to some awkward misconceptions and misrepresentations of LDS teachings and members. Glatt conflates temple worship with regular Sunday worship at times, claimed that Lori "recruited" a friend to run the young women's program while she was primary president, and failed to understand that after Chad was excommunicated from the Church, he was unable to attend the temple. I also felt that Glatt didn't fully understand why Chad would have been excommunicated and all that action entails. It's hard to read books like this and realize that this is an outsider to the LDS community attempting to look in, and they didn't do enough research to really understand the intricacies. This is my biggest gripe with the way this book was written.

In all, for a true crime book, this wasn't very grisly. It details the crimes without being too graphic. There wasn't anything in the book that really made me uncomfortable. It should be noted that with these types of books, there's going to be a level of scrutiny (and sometimes criticism) of the Church. I didn't find this to be uncomfortable, but I am comfortable with what I believe and where I stand with the Church. There's some discussion of sexual violence and incest, but neither of these topics is described in depth.

I rated this book ⭐⭐⭐



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