Doomsday Mom: The Lori Vallow Story (EveryWhere Studios, Lighthouse Pictures, Peace Out Productions, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Doomsday Mom: The Lori Vallow Story was a considerably better-than-average Lifetime movie that got its “premiere” Saturday, June 26. It was based not only on a true story but a surprisingly recent one; many of Lifetime’s true-crime efforts have been cases from the 1990’s or 2000’s but this is a story that “broke” in 2019. The film was directed by Bradley Walsh from a script by Stephen Tolkin; Walsh has no other directorial credits on imdb.com but Tolkin has an extensive list of prior scripts, including other Lifetime movies based on particularly sordid or inexplicable crimes: The College Admissions Scandal, Cleveland Abduction, New York Prison Break: The Seduction of Joyce Mitchell, Twist of Faith, The Craigslist Killer. It’s not surprising that one of his previous credits has the title Twist of Faith (about the unlikely pairing of a Jewish man who withdrew from the world after losing his family and a Black woman who redeems him, played incandescently by singer/actress Toni Braxton), because this story is about a very different sort of “twist of faith.” Lori Vallow (Lauren Lee Smith, star of the Canadian TV series Frankie Drake Mysteries and a more highly regarded actress than the ones who usually play in Lifetime movies) is living in Arizona after having just separated from her husband (her fourth one, we eventually learn) and is raising two kids, one a teenage daughter named Tylee Ryan (Astrid Trueman) and one an adopted autistic son named J. J. Vallow (Aias Daiman).

She’s living a presumably contented, though financially stressed, life in Arizona when she encounters a book called Spread Your Wings by Chad Daybell (Marc Blucas), a cemetery worker and self-proclaimed messianic minister. Ordinarily you’d think a book with an anodyne title like Spread Your Wings and the equally banal cover art we see would be a platitudinous self-help tome, but in fact it’s part of a series Chad Daybell has self-published, a set of novels themed around the idea that we’re living in the end times and the return of Jesus Christ is just around the corner. Though this isn’t stressed in the movie, Chad was a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – he’d graduated from Brigham Young University in 1992 with a B.A. in journalism – and it’s pretty obvious that his end-times theology and the particular way it manifested itself was rooted in the colorful history of Mormonism and in particular all those raffish aspects of Mormon history the current church has tried to live down and suppress as much as possible. Lori’s fourth husband, Charles Vallow – to whom she’s still legally married, though separated, at the start of the film – was also a Mormon and made her convert when they married in 2006. Lori had been a lifelong Roman Catholic before that, but it’s evident from the film that – especially once she starts reading Chad’s books (which were part of a self-published series he called Standing in Holy Places) and ultimately meets him at a book signing – she’s adopted the beliefs of the farthest-out branches of Mormonism, including the ones about certain “elect” people being in direct communication with God and receiving “omens” about the imminent deaths of loved ones, as well as reincarnation (supposedly Chad Daybell told Lori Vallow that she had had 14 previous lifetimes, though only five were on Earth, and they had been married to each other in nine of them) and the idea that certain individuals can be literally possessed and taken over by Satan. Unlike Lori’s previous Roman Catholic faith, Chad’s version of “possession” doesn’t allow for any sort of exorcism; the soul of a possessed person, in his theology, can be set free only by the death of his or her (current) body.

Much of the interest in Doomsday Mom is in the sheer contrast between the banality of the characters’ lifestyles – all of them, good or evil, are suburbanites, “white” not only as to ethnicity (unusually for a Lifetime movie, there aren’t any African-Americans or other people of color in the dramatis personae) but in terms of the seeming blandness of their lifestyles, and about the only truly interesting villain here is Lori’s brother Alex Cox (Joshua Hinkson), who had served 90 days in jail in Texas for assaulting one of Lori’s previous husbands during their divorce trial. Lori and Chad start a love affair after he seduces her with all his talk about their previously having been married and their destiny to be together in these incarnations. He announces to Lori that her estranged husband Charles has been taken over by Satan and is therefore “no longer Charles” but the demon inside him that can only be liberated by his death. Of course, Lori has another, more mercenary motive for wanting Charles out of the way permanently: a $450,000 life insurance policy. Accordingly, she has her brother Alex murder Charles and fake it to look like an accidental killing in self-defense (Alex claims Charles attacked him with a baseball bat and he merely fought back), but they don’t college on the policy because shortly before his death Charles changed the beneficiaries on his policy to his sister (Linda Purl) and her husband (Patrick Duffy – father of the one who played on Dallas, and though it’s oddly unmentioned on their imdb.com pages he and Purl are married in real life and have been since 2017). Chad tells Lori that he’s had visions direct from God that indicate the imminent deaths not only of her husband but his wife Tammy – and while Charles duly dies on schedule, Tammy’s death takes a little longer until Chad can, shall we say, “arrange” it. (At this point one wishes that polygamy would have been one old Mormon tradition Chad would have revived from early Mormonism; whatever their relationship was like, it would have been far better for Tammy to have had to accept Lori as a “sister-wife” than for her husband to kill her.)

In his ability to manipulate events and get other people to kill for him, Chad Daybell resembles Charles Manson – only he’s such a part of American white-bread suburbia his crimes can’t be blamed on hippies, the counterculture or drugs the way Manson’s were. Doomsday Mom is fascinating precisely for the contrast between the supposedly “moral” lives the characters live on the surface and the deeper, nastier drives in their personal conduct – and Tolkin’s script maintains a marvelous sense of uncertainty as to how much the characters (Lori and Chad in particular) are using their end-times religious beliefs and the sense that the imminence of Christ’s return means they don’t have to obey those pesky human laws as conscious rationalizations, and how much they actually believe them. Lori’s kids “mysteriously” disappear, first Tylee while she, Lori, Chad and Lori’s friend Melanie Gibb (Alison Wandzura), who joined Chad’s cult when Lori did but balked when Lori asked her by phone to lie for her to provide a false alibi, take a trip to Yellowstone and pose for a selfie at the edge of a cliff, then J. J. when Lori abruptly pulls him out of a special-needs school in Rexburg, Idaho, where Chad announced that he’d had a religious vision telling them to move to (though he subsequently skedaddles out of the country with Lori and sets up housekeeping in Kauai, Hawai’i, where Lori had formerly lived with one of her previous husbands). Lori says she’s going to start home-schooling him, but he’s never seen nor heard from again – until months later, when the Rexburg cops finally assemble enough evidence to get a search warrant for Chad’s pet cemetery (the scene is dominated by a really creepy-looking larger-than-life statue of a dog) and dig up J. J.’s remains.

By the ending of the movie, Lori has so totally “lost it” that she’s going on to a cellmate that she can hardly wait for a visit from her attorney because he’s really her son by a “celestial marriage” – supposedly this is proven by the attorney having blue eyes – so it’s not at all surprising when a line in the closing credits indicates that on May 27, 2021 a judge ruled that Lori Vallow was incompetent to stand trial for the murders of her kids. (The judge let the case against Chad Vallow, who was also charged with killing his wife and making it look like an accidental drug overdose, go to trial, but the trial hasn’t happened yet.) Doomsday Mom is an extraordinary parable of the dangers of religious faith and blind acceptance of utter silliness in the guise of religion and its teachings. I’m no longer the militant atheist I once was, when I would have cited a story like this as part of a blanket condemnation of all religion, but I still don’t like churches that make you check your common sense at the front door. Most of the origin stories of the great religions are pretty stupid – people with a bias against Mormonism like to cite the story of Joseph Smith, Jr. getting the text of the The Book of Mormon on golden plates from the Angel Moroni’s celestial lending library and being given two “seer stones,” the Urim and Thummim, with which by putting them into his hat and looking through them at the plates he could translate the so-called “reformed Egyptian” they were written in into English (so when Smith dictated the text of The Book of Mormon he was literally talking through his hat!), but that’s not appreciably sillier than the idea that Christ was born of a virgin impregnated by God, or the Angel Gabriel chose to dictate the text of the Koran to a camel-driver who could neither read nor write.

There are plenty of serious religious people who don’t believe these stories are literally true and take them essentially as symbols or metaphors, but if you insist that the Bible or the Koran or the Book of Mormon are literally the word of God, you can get into an awful lot of trouble and you can end up like Lori Vallow, believing the creepiest things (like first your husband and then your kids being “possessed by Satan” and needing you to kill their bodies to liberate their souls). I was trying to avoid using Hannah Arendt’s famous description of Adolf Eichmann as an exemplar of what she called “the banality of evil,” especially since as I read her book Eichmann in Jerusalem it occurred to me that she could have reversed her abstract nouns and called it “the evil of banality,” since Eichmann (at least in her conception of him) was amoral rather than immoral and had been raised in a culture that so overvalued conformity and obedience, and so undervalued independent thought he (in Arendt’s view, which I agree with) had no frame of reference even to register that what he was doing was evil, let alone to form the moral courage to resist it. Likewise Lori Vallow, who successively believed in two of the most mysterious branches of the Abrahamic religious tradition – the Roman Catholics, who for years insisted on conducting their services in a language the congregants didn’t understand; and the Mormons – was in essence a sitting duck to be manipulated by someone with an agenda like Chad Daybell’s (though neither the script of this movie nor the historical record is all that enlightening as to What Made Chad Run – was he as deliberate an evil manipulator as Hitler or Manson or was he himself a victim of a crazy belief system that blinded him to normal human decency, like some of the other Mormon breakaway leaders who ultimately sanctioned murder?), with his talk about God, Satan, possessed people and promises that he could enroll her into an “elect” which would survive the end times and live, in the old fairy-tale phrase, “happily ever after” for all eternity?