47.1. Origins
Is there something about Mormonism that produces fringe characters?
Last week, Chad Daybell joined eight other people living on Idaho’s Death Row. After the jury handed down their verdict that he should die at the hands of the state, several people asked me how I felt.
I had no answer.
He got a new mugshot after being sentenced to death. He smiled into the camera. He did not look like a man headed for the proverbial gallows, or maybe he did. I don’t know, but one thing felt about it was sick. It made me feel like he was trolling everyone, including me.1
Unlike at Lori Vallow’s sentencing, when the judge read her complex mental health diagnosis, we don’t know if Daybell suffers from something similar. Does he? I don’t know. If he doesn’t, what does this photo suggest? Anything? Nothing?
I have been writing consistently about this man — a man I’ve never interviewed, mind you — and his crimes for more than four years. For most of that time, the fate the justice system would issue always felt far off in the distance, consistently years-away. After my book came out, generally I was thinking about other things. I was living my life. Every now and then I’d be moving things around my rat’s nest of an office and encounter a box of Daybell’s memoirs and fictional books, some with his tight signature inscribed inside. I’d have the thought why am I keeping these? and then, without an obvious answer, push them back into a corner to deal with later.
Last week I was doing an interview about Daybell’s sentence, and the reporter asked me what specifically about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints makes it so ripe for conspiratorial ideas? It was a question I had been asked before, and had an answer for. My reporting has shown over the years that there is a subset of people within the LDS Church who place a greater emphasis on the Latter-day part of their name, meaning the last days before Christ returns, as prophesied in the Book of Revelation.
And though I know this to be true, and that my reporting has proved it over and over again, suddenly that answer felt unsatisfying. It does not offer an answer to “why.” And it places the entire onus on the LDS church hierarchy to fix the issue, and it seems the church does not care to trouble itself with such matters. Why did Daybell and Vallow kill? What was it about these specific beliefs that would cause that to happen? Could beliefs alone ever make someone kill? They had for Daybell and Vallow, and for the Lafferty Brothers, and for Bruce Longo.2
It is one thing to prep up for an apocalypse, to prepare for a mushroom cloud to bloom from the horizon, and for that to maybe never come. It is a different thing entirely to murder people because of your beliefs.
That reporter’s question clanged around in the cluttered cabinet that is my brain cavity for a few days, and as I thought about it, and did more research, a new answer presented itself..
The case of Brian David Mitchell, aka Immanuel David.
