Dateline NBC: “The Doomsday Files” (NBC-TV, aired November 12, 2021)

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

I spent most of last night watching a two-hour Dateline NBC report called “The Doomsday Files,” about the criminal career of Lori Vallow and her lover, Chad Daybell. Lori Vallow was a Texas woman who’d already been married three times previously and was on her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, when she went to a Mormon spiritual retreat and there met Daybell, who had written and self-published a series of religious novels about the end of the world. In fact, Chad was convinced that the end times were imminent and he had founded his own religious movement and claimed to be a prophet who could tell when someone was demonically possessed. I’d already watched a dramatization of this story on Lifetime, Doomsday Mom: The Lori Vallow Story, and if anything I thought the Lifetime movie, written by Stephen Tolkin (a writer with some substantial credits behind him), came closer to the emotional truth of the story than the supposedly factual presentation on Dateline. The Dateline reporters claimed to have “new evidence” that the killings Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell were associated with – including Lori’s husband, Chad’s wife and Lori’s two kids, Tylee and J. J. (the latter a “special needs” kid the Vallows had adopted) – didn’t have any particular religious motivation but were just two people in lust with each other knocking off anyone who stood in the way of them getting together. As told here, the story is more Double Indemnity than Under the Banner of Heaven. Lori’s accomplice, and the man who actually did most of the killing for him, was her brother, Alex Cox (not, presumably, to be confused with the director of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy), who actually murdered Charles Vallow and Tammy Daybell before dying himself.

His widow – whom he’d been married to for only two weeks when he croaked, and who suspected him of trying to murder her as well – was told she couldn’t touch his body in the hospital because the police had declared it a crime scene, and the police suspected Lori and Chad of having poisoned him, but his autopsy revealed he had died naturally of heart disease. The case ended with Lori and Chad both being arrested, and Chad convicted of murder while Lori is in a mental institution because a judge heard her descriptions of her own religious mania and ruled she was not competent to stand trial. Needless to say, this has irked Charles’ surviving relatives (two brothers who were interviewed for the show), who suspect her of faking insanity to get out of being convicted and possibly executed for her crimes. The Lori Vallow case is fascinating for its intersection of religious mania and carnal lust – Chad Daybell courted her largely by sending her texts in which he called her a “goddess” and sdaid they had been married nine times previously in earlier incarnations, only five of which had been on Earth – and by minimizing the role of their twisted version of religion in motivating their crimes the Dateline producers made the story less interesting and insightful than Stephen Tolkin had on Lifetime. When I pusted to moviemagg about the Lifetime version (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/doomsday-mom-lori-vallow-story.html), I noted that though I’ve moved away from the hard-core atheism of my youth, I still as highly skeptical of religion and the way it’s been used to justify all kinds of crimes – from the individual scale to the mass murders of the Mittle Ages – and what made the Vallow-Daybell story interesting to me was how Chad Daybell could condemn anyone he wanted to death at the hands of his followers simply by saying they were “dark” – i.e., that they were possessed by devils and only their physical death could redeem their souls. Religion is at the heart of this story and I was surprised and disappointed that the NBC producers went out of their way to minimize its importance to this tale!