Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / Hidden in Plain Sight: Decoding the Doomsday Mom's High-Conflict Personality
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you deal with the most challenging human interactions, those involving someone with a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm here with my co-host, bill Eddie. Speaker 2 (00:23): Hi everybody. Speaker 1 (00:24): We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute where we focus on training, consulting, coaching, all kinds of things, everything to do with high conflict. So we are very glad that you have joined us today and welcome back everyone. We are going to talk about something a little bit different today, maybe a year and a half ago or so. We talked about the Alex Murdoch case for those outside the US you may have heard of it, and if not, it might be worth a Google or go back and listened to one of our episodes about it. But it was a murder case and it happened to be one of our most highly downloaded episodes on our podcast. No surprise there, I guess. So now we're going to shift into talking about the Lori Vallow, Chad Dayville Double Murder, actually quadruple murder, several different trials. Today we'll focus on the most recent Lori Vallow trial, which was held in Arizona where I live. We'll also loop in all of the other trials because you can't not do that. It was such a messy, messy case. So we'll put all the links in the show notes to information about it. There's even a Netflix documentary or show, I guess, about her. So let's dive right in. Speaker 1 (01:50): So Bill, I know it was kind of newer to you. I tracked true crime and you're not such a tracker of true crime. So I know you had to do a little bit of research. I started watching and reading about this trial several years ago. Mostly it made national news when this woman's children were missing. But because I lived in Arizona, and this is where the children had been living, and the mom, Lori had been living at the time, it was kind of bigger news here in Arizona, and it started with there's these two missing children. No one can find them. Their grandmother was calling law enforcement and anyone she could find basically to try to track down the grandchildren who were, I think age of seven and 16 or so at the time. So that's kind of where it all began and thus began a months long search by law enforcement for these two young children. Speaker 1 (02:55): Ultimately, it was very extraordinarily sad news and the children were not found alive unfortunately. So that's kind of how it began. And then as the story unraveled, we find that Lori, the mother, kind of got involved in kind of an extreme or an offbrand religion of her own making in a way where she had authority to decide if someone was dark or light and a dark spirit versus a light spirit and if there a dark spirit there, a zombie. So just some really bizarre things. And she happened to meet up with someone else who had very similar thoughts. His name was Chad Dayville, and when they met at a conference in Arizona here where I live and had one of those sparky moments when they first met by their account, there was a spark extremely enlightening moment. Both had to had claim to have had near death experiences believed that they were the enlightened ones that would lead other followers in the end times, and that must happen in Idaho. Speaker 1 (04:17): So anyway, there's so much to tell in this story, bill, but I guess we can start with as the story unraveled, it was discovered that she kind of looped her brother in one of her brothers to help her, and she's been convicted of this now to murder her then husband, a man named Charles Vallow. It was seen as kind of a self-defense act in the beginning, but just recently here in April, 2025, she was convicted of conspiracy to murder. Now, her brother died shortly thereafter, but not before. He also did a lot more damage. So let's start there. Bill, with the murder of her husband, it appears to be that there was a setup to bring her husband into the house, essentially to end his life, to get his health or his life insurance policy. He had a $1 million policy. There was a lot of video. Police were on scene after 9 1 1 was called 45 minutes after shots were fired and he was dead. And the police tape interview showed a mom wife who was very, as they said in the trial, nonchalant about the whole thing. So let's start there. What were your thoughts about this first case? Speaker 2 (05:39): Well, it seemed to me several things go through my mind. And while we don't diagnose people, we look at possibilities and people that investigate need to figure this out. But some of those behaviors are associated typically with a sociopath or someone with an antisocial personality, which is really characterized by a lack of empathy and a lack of remorse and a willingness, first of all to be highly aggressive, a willingness to hurt other people, not necessarily on purpose sometimes, but sometimes on purpose. And I mentioned sociopath, also antisocial, but there's a third term that all of these kind of overlap and that psychopath or psychopathology, and those are all strong considerations. There's another thing that comes up that people look at when people think other people are zombies and other things like that. We think of delusions that someone's having delusions, and of course delusions are most commonly associated with schizophrenia. Speaker 2 (07:03): But at this point I want to say that people with schizophrenia are no more likely to be murderers or violent than the average person. So that itself doesn't explain something like this. Whereas antisocial personality disorder is characterized as more aggressive, more violent. I reading a study recently about more domestic violence from people with antisocial personalities, but one thing that stands out is an enjoyment of other people's pain. And the reading up I did on that at one point, I think her sister was talking to her on the phone and she had moved to Hawaii, I think maybe with her fifth husband, I'm not sure because it's hard to keep track. Speaker 1 (07:59): Yes. He became her fifth husband in Hawaii. Yes. Speaker 2 (08:02): Yeah. After the murder of the fourth husband, I guess. Speaker 1 (08:06): Correct. Speaker 2 (08:07): Anyway, that she was apparently dancing on the beach and her sister was like, how can you do this? Well, people need to understand there is a small percent of people like this that are willing to hurt other people. Now, most of them are murderers, but they may be quite cool. They may be supervisors at work who enjoy terrorizing their employees or they may be killers. Most of our serial killers are psychopaths from at least everything that I see and read and such. But there's also another thing. Usually schizophrenia gets started between about 15 and 25. That's usually when people have their first psychotic break. You start seeing this more distorted thinking. They may hear voices and see people that aren't there, things like that. Well, from what I read up to 2018, she was kind of a normal person and a normal mother with a 16-year-old and a 7-year-old son, and she was 45 I think, or was around that time. Speaker 2 (09:24): And that's not typical for schizophrenia beginning at that time. Now, on rare occasion, may see bipolar disorder with something like this. Again, it's not bipolar disorder. Doesn't mean you're more violent than average, but occasionally that's associated. I think it always comes back to the personality disorder because antisocial personality disorder has got a lot of association with crime, illegal behavior. They say about 40 to 50% of prisons prisoners have antisocial personality disorder. So that's most likely. But another consideration because of age, occasionally, and this is pretty rare, someone has a brain tumor and it presses upon their brain and may distort their personality and distort their behavior. And occasionally there's been murders related to someone who had something occur, something medical occur that started to cause bizarre behavior and such. So all of these are considerations for people that really dig deep and evaluate things like this. But as an outside observer, as a high conflict consultant, and some people say expert, those would be the things I'd look into. Speaker 1 (10:58): So the brain tumor piece, maybe think about she has another child, Kolby, and I'd love to get him on the podcast here, maybe we will. He was older than the two younger children, Tylee the teenage girl, and JJ was the younger boy, and Colby was a little bit older. Now, I've been watching these trials for a couple of years now. I'm Speaker 2 (11:21): Not surprised. Speaker 1 (11:21): You're not surprised. And I watch other podcasts like The Lawyer and East Idaho News because they've been following these and they break things down. So the most recent trial for Lori was the last couple of weeks she was found guilty of murdering Charles Vallow, her fourth husband, and they've been through, now we haven't even apprised you, our listeners, of all the other murders that have taken place yet, but this young man who's now probably in his late twenties or maybe 30, I'd listened to an interview after the guilty verdict this past week. He's devastated. He's been devastated for several years now. But there was a new realization of devastation for him, and that was that all of a sudden it made sense why his mom was not really there for him and didn't provide empathy. Those, these are my words, when he was a child and he would cry when he needed, it sounded to me like when he needed his mom, she wasn't there for him. Speaker 1 (12:23): But if we looked back over a longer history, I think we might see that this had been there. Although her other brother, her still living brother, who was not a part of any of this and was very skeptical of this for a long time, he thought they had a pretty normal childhood. Her mom and sister thought had an interview several years ago saying, there's just no way on planet earth that she ever did this thing. So this thing I'll go on to explain here. The murder of the first husband happened in July, I think 2019. And she moved then up to Idaho within about a month and a half and kind of didn't tell anyone where she was going. She took the kids, went to Idaho. Well, it turns out that's where Chad debell, the man she'd met to became her fifth husband later that year where he lived. Speaker 1 (13:16): So next thing you know, his wife dies in Idaho. She's in her mid forties in great health. There's no reason for it right now. The calls about the children are becoming more urgent. Where are the children? Where are the children? Long story short, they did find the children and they had been murdered and they'd been buried in Chad day's backyard in Idaho. It appears that they put the brother, the now deceased brother up to the actual bad deeds, probably manipulated him into that. So there were four murders, the murder of her husband, the murder of Chad's wife, and then the two children. And within by November, I believe, so the first murder was July. By November they were in Hawaii getting married, beautiful pictures on the beach with flower lays on and happy, happy and living their best life. And yet they say the children are missing and they won't say where they are. Speaker 1 (14:17): Of course, they knew where they were. It's interesting Bill, because we have the highest levels of remorse when you can bury your children in the backyard, right when you can murder your own children. We're talking about the most depraved mind to go on and just live life as if nothing has happened. There's zero connection to remorse, zero connection to empathy. As a mother myself, this would be the most devastating news ever. But she was just going on to live her life. I think that's what's so hard for people to understand what is missing there that would cause you to just make people so disposable and then go on not just people, but your own children and the children or the parents of your children. Speaker 2 (15:07): Yeah. What's interesting, I didn't know that you said, is that her other brother and sister said their childhood was pretty normal, and I wanted to start with that. And that her older son, which I think was by an earlier father, said that she didn't seem to have that warmth that when he needed her turned to her, she wasn't really there. So the thing that people should know about antisocial personality disorder, and I'm going to say sociopath and antisocial are pretty equivalent and about 4% of adults around the world. And there was a big study that came up with that in the US like 20 some years ago with looking at percentages of personalities. But the thing that's important to know here, of the 10 personality disorders studied in the diagnostic manual for mental health professionals, this is the one that seems to be most connected to genetics so that it could be she's in a family of three or four kids and that her genetic tendencies had these antisocial traits built in from birth could be, it's helpful to understand, especially helpful for parents if they have three or four kids. Speaker 2 (16:37): And one is so extreme is to know this isn't necessarily anything about your parenting skills. This is the role of the dice. And we all as human beings have these kind of genetic tendencies floating around and showing up in different families and understanding. Traditionally, mental health professionals and therapists, and I was trained in the 1980s have always thought early childhoods where things get off track, a child is abused, they grow up and they're abusive, things like that. But I think more recently that people studying, especially personality disorders, talk about that really a lot more may bere tendencies. Now again, tendencies means someone's upbringing might help correct for that, but that these may just be there. And this lack of empathy, lack of remorse is one of the things I think that stands out in parenting that kids say, I just could never really get that from my parent anyway. Speaker 2 (17:56): So I think it helps understand, this could be genetic tendencies from birth. So people say, how could this be today? How could someone get married, be happy, dancing on the beach, who's buried her own dead children? And to me, that's the strongest explanation is that as a percent of people with antisocial personalities, most of whom don't murder people by the way. So it's a smaller percent that do this. And a lot of the prison population has these antisocial personalities, and they don't just start at 15 or 25, like schizophrenia or even bipolar disorder kind of comes on during late adolescence, early adulthood. These characteristics are there. And some research I've looked at said, 50% of people who are going to become antisocial are showing antisocial behavior by 10 years old, and 90% are showing it by 12 years old. So it's there and it starts showing up. Speaker 2 (19:14): And what they call it in the diagnostic manual is conduct disorder, fire starting, torturing small animals and pets, stealing from family members, those kinds of cruelty and lack of empathy and remorse. And so this is something that's part of society that catches people by surprise. And the thing to know is if you start seeing kids showing signs like this, like conduct disorder, get 'em some help because when they're teenagers, they can still be helped as adults. It's really hard. There's very little knowledge of really good treatments for people with antisocial personality disorder. She's not a treatable person given this history. Speaker 1 (20:04): Right. What about in younger children? If you have a child who's really interested in fire or they maybe have a big temper or something, are there things that you can watch out for or questions you can ask? Speaker 2 (20:19): Younger than 10 kids are just all over the place. In the 1970s, I was a kindergarten teacher for four years. A lot of people don't know that. And then I got a master's in social work, became a child and family counselor. But kids can be cruel without lacking a conscience or lacking. They try things. Kids just try all kinds of things. The thing is, under 10 years old, I wouldn't worry that you've got an antisocial child, but I would say if you see antisocial behavior, hitting, lying, stealing and taking things like that is correct, it work on it, Hey, that's not okay. You're going to have time out. You're not going to have this special trip. You keep doing that. So that's the age where behavior can be really, really changed. And I actually do know of someone who probably was on that antisocial personality path by age nine, who basically got raised by some really wonderful people and made his life work today by reigning in those tendencies, got in some trouble around 20 and then really turn things around has been on a good path into the thirties. And so it's possible, and that's why we just need to have our eyes open and do things. But once someone's 10 or 12, they're going to need some help to not have those behaviors stick. But this woman who knew in her family that she was going to do all this stuff when she grew up, but if she showed signs of lack of empathy as an adult already, those are some warning signs. Speaker 1 (22:17): Definitely warning signs. And it's tricky for those probably in her family or similar situations, they're probably wondering, how did we miss this? What happened? From everything I've seen with her, she's a really beautiful woman. She jokes around, she has a sense of humor. She's bright, she's very bright, articulate, probably a very fun person. She has these kids. She's probably doing school functions with the kids, just very normal mom things. And then she and Charles adopted his nephew, or maybe great nephew, I'm not sure, who was on the autism spectrum and really required a lot of work. So I mean, how could you think of someone who adopted a child that really took so much special help as someone who's going to eventually kill that child? It doesn't, those dots don't connect in our heads ever. So yeah, lots of sadness. And one of her prior husbands had passed away too, and people are kind of suspicious about that at this point as well. So there was the first murder of Charles, the husband, and then the murder of the wife up in Idaho of Chad debell. And they had children in their teens and twenties at that point. So they lost their mother and then murdering the children as well. If we turn and think about Chad now. Speaker 1 (23:53): So his background is he was one of a few children raced in Utah. Seemed like a fairly normal functional family from what I've read. And I did watch that entire trial. I actually do work sometimes too, bill, Speaker 2 (24:08): I know you do. Speaker 1 (24:11): I kind of work all the time, but sometimes I have trials on in the background. Speaker 2 (24:15): This is the breaks that you take, Speaker 1 (24:18): Breaks and just kind of some background stuff. And I fall asleep to murder trials, probably not the best thing. So his brothers seemed to be a bit more successful and that kind of thing. And he wasn't so much and a little bit chubby, overweight, things like that. So it kind of made me wonder if he's was looking for, now he's at a spark with this hot, beautiful woman. She really seems to be into him and everything kind of spiraled downhill before that. I don't know what life was like before that for him and what was with him. Did she completely manipulate him into being a part of this? Because now he's living the rest of his life in prison just done. He'll never get out. So his life changed. Everyone's life changed. And so I think about the impact of all of these. But going back to him, do you think that someone who wasn't diagnosed with a conduct disorder that I know of, hadn't displayed wife killing in the past and now has suddenly met this person who's already, well, she hadn't murdered her husband at that point or conspired to murder him. Do you think on his own he would have gone to these links? Or do you think he could have been just manipulated to a level that is just unbelievable? Speaker 2 (25:49): I'd want to know a lot more about his childhood. In other words, was he essentially quotes normal until she came along? Speaker 1 (25:59): That's what I gather. Speaker 2 (26:00): Or did he also maybe have some lack of empathy, lack of remorse, coldness, willingness to let other people get hurt? See, what's interesting is you said that Lori's older son talked about her as a mother when he was young in that lack of that it helped him connect the dots so that it sounds like she already had some of these tendencies, did he or not? Now, here's another twist to add to all of this is some people really have dependent personalities or codependent personalities. They really focus on another person and in many ways allow themselves to be bossed around. The personalities that we think of as high conflict personalities often end up in relationships with people with some codependent traits, and not necessarily a dependent personality disorder, but kind of a willingness to help. A lot of us have that, social workers, nurses, all of that. But some people have that more extreme and are more easily manipulated. So the question is possibly, was he really kind of a codependent person who went along with this horrible thing of killing his wife? And I want to suggest there some belief that if you remember the high school murders, the first ones, so Littleton, Colorado, Speaker 1 (27:46): Columbine, Speaker 2 (27:47): Columbine, yeah, there's some theory there that the one boy may have been antisocial already and that the other had this kind of codependent relationship with him and really kind of was bossed into doing this thing with him. And there are other people like that. You think of Charlie Manchin's, young women who he so captivated them that they with no history of crime, let alone murder, followed his commands and may have had one of these more easily shaped codependent personalities. So the fit with these extreme personalities and others is something to also examine and look at. Or on the other hand, maybe he already had antisocial tendencies. So I don't know. And these are the things to look at. Speaker 1 (28:50): Yeah, and we probably will never know. I just kind of looked at it as this guy who suddenly found himself in the cool club. He'd had just kind of an ordinary life. I mean, looked to be from the outside to be a wonderful family life, family man, lovely wife. She was a teacher, lovely kid, just really ordinary, regular people. And then suddenly he's now the enlightened. He's enlightened. He's had the near death experience. So I think that's maybe a clue. So now think that I'm so special that I'm the appointed one by God after having these near death experiences to come back to Earth and lead the 144,000 into the promised Land or something like that. And Lori is thinking this of herself as well. So the two of them together, Chad would direct the dark spirit and the numbering system of them. And if you look at the pattern, it's a light spirit until they do something we don't like or that makes us look like we're going to be ad or Speaker 2 (29:55): We decide, Speaker 1 (29:56): We decide who's a dark spirit and what your number is. So he became this very all powerful special being and seemed to manipulate members of his own family to get them to go move to Idaho where he already had some family. And I don't know, this is my own thinking, not anything I've heard, but that perhaps he was trying to manipulate family members in Idaho to get their land for this special, 144,000 or something like that. So I guess that kind of sticks in my mind that he thought saw himself as enlightened. And Lori is enlightened, and so they could choose to take other people's lives. And that's tragic. All of it's tragic. And now to go for the mom, what Lori, what she's turned this into is I know where my children are. They're happy. They let me know they're happy. And what really happened was that the 17-year-old daughter, teenage daughter was maybe playing too roughly with her little special needs brother who was seven accidentally killed him, and then she killed herself because she couldn't stand it. Speaker 2 (31:14): Lori's story, Speaker 1 (31:16): That's Lori's story. And to me, that is the true, not diagnosing, but that's some sociopathic behavior right there. I mean, not only do you kill your own children, but now you put the blame on them. If that is not the ultimate high conflict personality, I don't know what is. Speaker 2 (31:33): Yeah, yeah. Well, preoccupied with blaming others, and this is an extreme case of that. I did read somewhere that she died first, so she couldn't have killed him. And this may be a story that Lori's just distorted. So completely what's interesting, when I've had family court divorce cases with someone who I think has antisocial traits and such, and I've represented their former partner, and the antisocial partner just lies constantly. And I've asked my clients, do you think that she believes her lies? And I remember one client said, I don't think she did at the beginning, but I think she believes them now that they repeat them to themselves so much. And with antisocial personalities, the truth isn't really an issue. It's what works. And so you like to say there's a different operating system. It really is like the wiring turned around. That's how they function. So my guess is if she has any tiny bit of remorse that this story is how she justifies to herself that she didn't do anything, my guess is that she totally knows and that it's just part of her lack of any empathy or remorse and that she's probably where she needs to be so that no one else gets hurt. Speaker 1 (33:06): And now she sees herself as the great heroine of the prison system and all the women that have been abused and she's going to help them all and she's happy to be there, mean. Speaker 2 (33:16): Well, let me, I left out one other possibility here, and that's the narcissism. And what you're talking about now was the narcissism. And often in these extreme cases, it occurs with the antisocial personality, but the narcissism, I'm so special and I'm going organize, I'm going to help all the women in the prison so special. That combination, they call it malignant narcissism is just really powerful and dangerous. And not everybody with that murders people, not everybody with that ends up in prison, but this personality does exist, and there's thousands of people like this. So people just need to know this is an odd, fairly rare but not impossible personality that may enter somebody's life at some point. Speaker 1 (34:08): Yeah, and I was thinking about narcissism too in that she, instead of choosing to have an attorney represent her in this latest trial because she's had one for the children and one now for Charles Vallow, she sells one to go that she represented herself. And I watched the trial and I watched, I could hardly wait until she was up at the stand interviewing witnesses for the state because I mean, she could sound somewhat credible and she sounded, she'd done some homework and some research, but then you go listen to someone who actually knows what they're doing as a lawyer in a murder trial, and she missed so many things. But what it made me think about is that's a fair level of narcissism there that I can do a better job representing myself than a trained lawyer with years of experience could do representing me. And I listened to a post-trial interview of her after the guilty verdict, and they asked if she would change that, and she said, no, no, no, no. Speaker 1 (35:18): I do it all again, so I know better. I'm smarter. I'm having a good time basically on earth here because when I go to heaven, I know what my job is there. I know what my job is here, and this is my job to be in the prisons and help people. So I think when people think of delusional people, we want to think of them as out on the streets and just looking crazy, looking delusional and talking about aliens and all that. But this is a different kind of thing. And it's almost like you said, there's a fill in of that, puts a shield up so they don't have to, I guess they never feel that remorse and they never connect those dots and whatever story they start in their head, it just stays and that becomes the truth. So it's very sad. But I guess kind of in wrapping this up, and again, we are not diagnosing anyone, but obviously this is about, as dysfunctional and disordered as you get, it is as disordered as you get. Our wish is for her surviving family, her son and her siblings, and I think both of her parents are still alive, and just those who were taken in by her and they became negative advocates in a way they succumbed to the charm. Our hope is that there's a lot of healing Speaker 2 (36:42): And it's not their fault. That's the thing, really, that's the benefit of understanding the genetic tendencies that seem to be involved in these cases. It's not that you shouldn't have yelled at your child when they were four or made them have a timeout that that's not what causes this. Speaker 1 (37:03): Right. And for Colby, her son who's still living, I saw this as kind of this final verdict as maybe another chapter in his healing journey, but I think it was a pretty big one for him to just realize his childhood was normal to him because what you have is what's normal. And then to realize just kind of have that come at you all in one day and you realize that wasn't normal, that can start a whole healing process and a grieving process. And so I'm sure he's getting lots of advice from a lot of people and hopefully a lot of help and prayers and support. So we'll do the same. Speaker 1 (37:48): That's it for this week and next week, we're going to be talking with author Sena Rooney. She wrote the book called The Big Book on Borderline Personality Disorder, and she's just fantastic, and I think you really enjoy listening to her. We're going to go into an in-depth discussion on a lot of things to do with BPD. So in the meantime, send your questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or submit them to high conflict institute.com/podcast. Until next time, keep learning, keep practicing the skills and be kind to yourself and other while we try to keep the conflict small and find the missing piece. It's All Your Fault is a protection of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts at True Story fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.