I listened to the first and second season of Leah Sotille’s Bundyville podcast in 2019 and was impressed by her talent for presenting a complicated and upsetting situation in a clear, interesting, and compelling way. Moreover, she made what seemed to me an impenetrably different way of thinking about the world understandable. So when I saw that she had a book out, I knew she would bring those same journalistic and personal skills to bear on her new subject. It didn’t matter to me what the subject was—I had never heard of either Vallow or Daybell before—I just knew it would be worth reading. And I was right.
My wife often listens to true crime podcasts while trying to beat insomnia and slide into sleep, so I offered to read the book to her each night, a practice we have always enjoyed with a well-written book. Sotille not only has the ability to turn a poetic phrase even when discussing the most awful aspects of human nature and activity, but she writes for the human ear, with flowing, rhythmic sentences. Given that she is experienced in writing for her podcast, I am not surprised, but I was still pleased with the strength of her prose and structuring.
The book was published on the verge of Lori Vallow’s trial and well before Chad Daybell’s, so none of the book focuses on the trials. Instead, Sotille is interested in the How of the story—how did these two people get to a place where they could kill two children (not to mention one of their spouses and potentially both of them). She looks at the environment of their upbringing and their social maturation, and the importance of the fringe cultures forming around the Mormon church. She takes her time to explain the tenets of the church and the difficult tightrope the church walks with some of its most troublesome beliefs. For example, the faith has at its very foundation a belief that God can give revelations to any member of the church. So how then does the church help determine what revelations are from God, which are meaningful, and which should be given weight. The official solution is that your personal revelations should be kept to yourself, that they are indeed revelations but that they are personal and apply to you only. Sharing them could cause trouble, so don’t do that. You can see how that has the ability to contain things like a sieve can hold water. In addition to these personal revelations, the church, coming from a past of being attacked ideologically and physically by others, stresses being prepared for catastrophe, which leaves fertile ground for preppers and doomsdayers to grow within the church. Add to these beliefs (and many more) the modern technology of online forums and the growing anti-government beliefs of right-wing religious groups and you have explosive ingredients intermixing near roaring flames.
There’s a wild shift in the book that occurs heading into Part Four. Up to this point, Sotille has been explaining the landscape and history of the tragedy. Heading into Part Four we understand that Vallow and Daybell have weird and dangerous beliefs. But nothing that comes before prepared me for the wildness of their beliefs or for the influence those beliefs have over others. It is a mad tumble down the rabbit hole, a murderous Wonderland where things are topsy turvy and subject only to their own twisted logic. It was hard for me to tie these two parts together, because the conditions described in the first half get overwhelmed by the particular insanities of the second half. It’s like getting an overview of the forest and then being suddenly thrown into the trees head first. It was difficult to keep the forest in mind while you are trying to dodge tree trunks.
There are so many moments in this book that blew my mind, looking into the lives and thoughts of a world well outside my own. Sotille provides a glimpse at a whole slice of American life that is otherwise inaccessible to those of us outside of it. This books may be about a specific set of crimes and the world that birthed them, but it is also about what is happening among the far-right religious groups, what is motivating them, what they take to be facts, and what they understand to be happening around them. It is terrifying, but it is important to know.
Sotille never offers a solution to what’s happening. But there is, I think, a suggestion that the churches and organizations that house these rapidly radicalizing groups of people need to face the constituents and members directly. They need to nip the paranoia and fear where it breeds, rather than watering it, or even ignoring it. People outside these groups cannot convince them that their thinking is dangerous and harmful. Only the authorities they trust and guide them out of the dark places they have been inhabiting. I suspect that the Church of Latter Day Saints will react negatively to the look this book takes at them. I can only hope that instead of being angry at their portrayal, that they look inward and ask themselves what they can do to prevent the fanning of paranoia’s and fear’s flames.
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