Religious devotion has the potential to tip into extremism, and that appears to have been the case with Lori Vallow Daybell and her fifth husband, Chad Daybell, whose Mormonism took on deranged and apocalyptic forms, and seems to have driven them to allegedly murder their respective prior spouses as well as two of Lori’s children: 16-year-old Tylee Ashlyn Ryan and 7-year-old Joshua Jaxon “J.J.” Vallow. Crimes don’t come much more heinous than this and, as illustrated by Sins of Our Mother, they also don’t come out of the blue—rather, they’re the byproduct of increasingly warped belief systems and behavior, which in this instance had to do with Lori and Chad’s certainty that the End Times were imminent and that only they could identify the demon zombies in their midst.
A three-part non-fiction affair premiering Sept. 14 on Netflix, Sins of Our Mother is directed by Skye Borgman (The Girl in the Picture, I Just Killed My Dad), who is now approaching Alex Gibney-grade levels of productivity. Such efficiency, however, has undercut her latest; since Lori and Chad are still awaiting their 2023 trials for the murders of Tylee, J.J., and Lori’s previous husband Charles and Chad’s former wife Tammy, Borgman’s docuseries looks to have been somewhat rushed to completion. While there’s little doubt about the couple’s guilt, they’ve yet to mount a public defense and their legal fates have yet to be decided, thus leaving Borgman, and viewers, to infer what lies ahead. Concluding before its story’s finale, it feels like an incomplete attempt to beat any prospective competitors to the punch—or, perhaps, to simply keep feeding the true-crime content machine at all costs.
Nevertheless, if it fizzles out before crossing the finishing line, Sins of Our Mother is an initially compelling saga about the dangers of zealotry.
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Lori was brought up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and over the course of her first four marriages, she raised her kids—oldest son Colby, daughter Tylee, and adopted son J.J.—in her faith. She also demanded a husband who shared her Mormonism, and she thought she had found that with her fourth spouse, Charles, this despite the fact that he was less devout and needed to be coached up a bit. Alas, that union, like the ones before them, didn’t take, in large part because Lori began gravitating to an ever more radical version of Mormonism in which—as she states in audio recordings—she believed herself to be an oft-reincarnated warrior who regularly spoke to the angel Moroni. To promote these views, she hosted a podcast called Preparing a People with Melanie Gibb, and that pointed her in the direction of Chad Daybell, a Mormon author who treated his books about the forthcoming doomsday as akin to scripture, and who claimed to be able to determine—via a numerical system of his own design—the degree to which people were on the “light” or “dark” side of the spiritual spectrum.
As Colby, his wife Kelsee, and Lori’s mom Janis explain in detail in Sins of Our Mother, Lori was, for a long time, a loyal and protective mother, such that they took her side when her fourth marriage soured and Charles angrily proclaimed—to them and the authorities, as in opening body-cam footage—that Lori was off her rocker, threatening to kill him because there was some demon named “Ned” living inside him. Domestic turmoil turned to tragedy on July 11, 2019, when Charles, panicked about the welfare of his children, visited Lori’s home and was shot dead by her brother Alex in an act of supposed self-defense. Bizarrely, Lori told different people a variety of false stories about how Charles had perished, and on Oct. 2, 2019, she purchased a green malachite ring from Amazon for her impending nuptials to Chad—even though Chad’s wife Tammy wouldn’t die (in her sleep of “natural causes”) until Oct. 19.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, but Sins of Our Mother is a nightmare about people failing to heed warning signs and/or refusing to honestly see the bigger picture. Through text messages, phone call recordings and other archival material, Borgman’s docuseries reveals Lori and Chad to be fanatics convinced that they, rather than Jesus, were destined to lead the 144,000 survivors of the apocalypse in a “New Jerusalem” located in Rexburg, Idaho. This lunacy was embraced by Lori’s brother Alex and niece Melani Boudreaux who, along with their new true-believer spouses, soon moved to the city. They were, from all appearances, a nascent mini-cult, clinging to the idea that they were on a divine mission that required them to kill any and all “zombies” that threatened their duty. From all accounts, Alex served as the group’s de facto hitman, but any answers he might have provided are now gone, since he passed away (of blood clots) in December 2019.
All of this came to a head in late 2019, when J.J.’s grandparents couldn’t reach the boy and Lori started spinning lies about his whereabouts. Shortly thereafter, she and Chad went on the run, refusing to respond to questions about J.J. and Tylee even once the media began hounding them. By December, an investigation was opened into the kids’ disappearances, although it wasn’t until June 9, 2020, that the children’s remains were found on Chad’s Idaho property, having been ostensibly murdered in September 2019 by Lori and Chad. Whether a jury finds them guilty of those crimes won’t be known until 2023, when their joint trial commences (prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for both). But on the basis of what’s depicted in Sins of Our Mother, it’s difficult—even with Lori spending time in psychiatric facilities to determine her fitness to stand trial—to imagine any exoneration in their future.
Sins of Our Mother is rife with additional crazy details, as well as the anguished on-camera testimony of Colby, whose interviews provide a step-by-step breakdown—at least from his perspective—of this horrific ordeal (the fact that Colby has just been arrested on suspicion of sex crimes does not make it into the proceedings). There’s not much to glean from it except the notion that piousness sometimes goes lethally off the rails. Yet as a shocking tabloid tale, it still gets under one’s skin.
