American Massacre

Leah Sottile's 'When the Moon Turns to Blood' highlights America's apocalyptic now

Chad Daybell, a graying, soft-chinned man with weakness for checked button-down shirts—a man who looked altogether more like a state senator than a mass murderer—believed that he could control storms and fires. He believed he was a reincarnation of the angel Moroni, and that Jesus Christ was on the cusp of returning to His earthly dominion. Daybell had written about the apocalypse in countless novels, but now it was truly coming—the world was beset by spiritual “zombies” that only he, and the few acolytes of his nameless cult, had the power to cast out. And his lover, Lori Vallow—his wife in countless past lives—was the key to calling Christ back to the earth. Chad Daybell, Lori Vallow, and their tight circle of followers in Rexburg, Idaho, believed fervently, and let that belief guide them in every action. Those who mistook their faith for passing mania, or brushed it off as fundamentally unserious, were in for a deadly surprise. Together, this blessed cohort would summon the angels from on high, and hustle the 144,000 elect into the survivalist tent cities they’d erect to weather the storm of tribulation. Of course, there were a few minor inconveniences to take care of first. Her children. His wife. Her husband. And then, as the Book of Revelation would have it, “the sun would become black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon as blood.”

The story of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell, and the string of deaths they left in their wake, is documented in Leah Sottile’s new book, When The Moon Turns to Blood (Twelve Books, June 2022). The slim volume is a remarkable document—a story interpenetrated with many other stories. At its center is the culmination of a lurid true-crime case, a gruesome double child murder. Sottile’s narrative weaves that story with the fringe beliefs of the Mormon main players, and lays out a further backdrop of the extremism of the American West, with its network of overlapping conspiracists that commune at prepper conferences and bombard authorities with bizarre civil suits and armed standoffs. The trial of the pair is set to proceed in January.

The Oregon-based Sottile has been reporting on extremism in the American West for years, in publications ranging from the Idaho Spokesman-Review to the New York Times Magazine, and if the broader view she offers meshes awkwardly at times with the minutely detailed timeline of domestic turmoil and obsession at the book’s center, any reporter can be forgiven for wanting to sow the seeds of salutary obsession. What draws the disparate threads together, and make it a particularly salient read in the present ferment of the U.S., is the fact that it’s a cautionary tale about belief—and the ways that ignoring or downplaying the fervently held beliefs of others is a very easy way to be blindsided by the atrocities committed in their name.

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As tabloid watchers know, this dark odyssey has been a news fixture for years now—not least, as Sottile admits, because at its center is a striking blonde white woman, Lori, the blonde former beauty queen. Vallow’s case caught fire among the national media in one infamous moment: In the middle of the manhunt for her own missing children—7-year-old J.J. and teenage Tylee—she decamped to Hawaii, appearing blithely in athleisure to give inquiring reporters non-answers and walk away with a swing of blonde curls. This perversion of motherhood, the shadow of sexual intrigue and multiple murder (Vallow and Daybell, devout Mormons, began their union as adulterers, only to have inconvenient spouses disappear), and the religious fervor that surrounded it all makes for a ripely American story, with tendrils reaching into the frontier past, and offering valuable insight into a present landscape roiled by wild belief. The “Dateline NBC” series on the case has the unforgivably campy title of “Mommy Doomsday,” because in addition to being a very bad Mommy, Lori Vallow had taken center stage in the nameless apocalyptic Mormon cult led by her lover. 

Like millions of other Americans, Vallow and Daybell felt the apocalypse to be close at hand, and themselves chosen to bring it about; where the pair diverge, slightly, from the majority of those slavering for the End of Days, is that they became convinced they were the fulcrums of the entire cosmos, and that the mortal disposition of those who inconvenienced them amounted to a divine commandment. The rest content themselves with driving policy, and ensuring the impersonal deaths of strangers at arms’ length, bleeding out from ectopic pregnancies, denied the methotrexate that treats their lupus, killed by abusive husbands or boyfriends that cannot countenance a pregnant body. The faith that drives these deaths is no less thoroughgoing, its endpoint no less a blissful emergence from a flaming world, with the dead and damned left behind in their millions.

What separates these masses from the “Doomsday Mommy” and her few followers is that Vallow and Daybell believed the machinations of God were working through their particular lives, and that they used their own hands, rather than the impersonal workings of the law, and they killed their own children, rather than other people’s. Much of the book is taken up with the details of the case—the charred, buried bodies of the scorned children, the contents of Chad Daybell’s many, many novels (Evading Babylon, The Great Gathering, Martial Law, Days of Fury) about attractive Mormons weathering the ferocious storms of the apocalypse, the maze of ecstatic text messages between the couple and the scant but dedicated members of their cult. Sottile also lays out other ideologies of the Mountain West: the familiar tales of Mormon fundamentalism, a rather better treatment of the history of the faith itself and its political consequences than the supercilious Jon Krakauer ever mustered, and other oddments: the sovereign citizens who shuck the earthly authority of the United States, the legions of survivalist “preppers” preparing for its breakdown.

Daybell, as a fervent end-times author, was a devotee of doomsday prepping, and minor celebrity in survivalist circles. “Ideology can cloud what you think you’ll need most in times of strife,” Sottile writes, with the air of long experience with that community. “Some people might stock canned food, believing food shortages will be the downfall of society, but forget about filtered water. Those who believe in inevitable future violence will stockpile ammunition… How you think the world will end says a lot about you, too: it’s an apocalyptic Rorschach test that reveals what someone fears most.” Daybell’s ideology was fixed on a Heaven-sent apocalypse, one rooted in Mormon ideals about personal revelation, one that wrested divine intercession away from the hierarchy of the Church.

What makes Sottile’s account so remarkable, and shows the utility of her years studying extremists—her podcast, Bundyville, examined the beliefs of the Mormon fundamentalists behind a month-long standoff with federal agents at Malheur Wildlife Refuge with extraordinary tenacity—is that she never doubts the sincerity of those beliefs. She never second-guesses the earnestness of Vallow’s faith, or that of Daybell’s small, tight circle of Mormon-housewife acolytes. As murderous and zealous as the tenets of their faith are, Sottile reports on them matter-of-factly, rendering the consequences a logical outgrowth of that thick bracken of belief. There is never the urge, here, to hold the believers at a condescending arm’s length, to dismiss them as simply crazed or their faith unworthy of consideration. Sottile meticulously lays out a belief system rooted in a century of ever-increasing Mormon right-wing extremism, interconnected with other millenarian American subcultures, each with a tight and coherent belief system that operates on its own internal logic. 

Sottile’s considered handling of the very fringes of belief stands in stark contrast to a national media seemingly unwilling or unable to contend with the degree to which religious zealotry has reshaped the public life of our nation. So much of the flailing of the national-media commentariat in the wake of the fall of Roe v. Wade seems to amount to the belief, among centrists, that no one could possibly be truly unreasonable, under the tenets of a tightly constrained vision of centrist reasonableness they mistakenly believe to be universal. That the deaths this ideology condemns pregnant people to will shock its proponents out of their strange trance, that this is all a ploy for power, or a hypocrisy run rampant.

There’s a strange urge to flail out for balance, to find a concomitant left-wing stridency that simply does not exist in the present United States. More than that, there’s an ardent desire to see the avowed opponents of bodily autonomy, true democracy, religious pluralism, and sexual freedom as temporarily embarrassed liberals, who are concealing their true, measured sentiments under a veil of pretended zealotry. There is a persistent refusal to acknowledge that the opponents of civil rights believe what they say they believe, and will do what they say they will do, even as they are doing it already. Perhaps this comes, ultimately, from cowardice: if you dismiss your opponents as crazy, or stupid, or insincere, it is easy to assume that they will withdraw on their own, before they’ve torn you apart. That their lusts can be sated with scraps, that good order acts like entropy, asserting itself without effort. When the Moon Turns to Blood can be seen in this sense as a parable: the many people who saw Chad and Lori building a fortress of increasingly violent belief—in their own holiness, in the evil of those, even children, who stood in the way of their union—and who turned away, convinced it could not be truly serious.

“It feels like the people who died in this story were killed in plain sight,” Sottile writes. The corpses of two children resulted from this inaction. They were preceded by two dead husbands, a dead wife. Vallow and Daybell are awaiting trial in Idaho, prepper country, white supremacist country, with its pristine mountains, its plains and prairies. “It felt like the case could be an allegory for the rest of the world, for everything happening right now in this country,” Sottile writes in the afterword. “There seems to be a sense of doubt that evil can be sitting right in front of us, a belief that moral questions are things only to be considered in a voting booth and not in our everyday lives. When you start to look around, you can see fear everywhere.” Ecstatic fear of the apocalypse; justified fear of the present; fear of our neighbors’ hearts; fear of our own.

The least we can do, in this instance, is to grant ourselves the knowledge that we do have enemies, unshakable in their purpose. That these enemies have their own reasons for acting as they do—belief systems with their own coherence, if perhaps not as wild as the Vallow-Daybell belief in spiritual zombies and embodied angels, then as fiercely held. That these beliefs have been earnestly cultivated and are tightly held. It is only from this departure point—the understanding that no cleverly constructed bon mot or accusation of hypocrisy can shake a moral grounding that has both foundations and guarded walls hewn from the spirit and from Scripture and from this country’s history—that the enemy can be fairly encountered. One can begin to understand the enemy—starting with what, precisely, they believe, and why—only once stripped of the self-administered blindfold of disbelief. Sottile earned her credence, and the penetrating gaze it allowed her, through years of reporting on Western extremists. Now that we are all thrust into the hot crushing hands of merciless piety, it behooves us to educate ourselves as fast as we can. When the Moon Turns to Blood is a better starting place than most, and the work of a reporter coming into her own as a narrator of social crisis and those who welcome it.