Content warning Content Warnings for Religious Abuse; High Control Groups; Child Murder; and Christofacism
I never thought twice about losing myself in a new darkness in an otherwise dark time. The Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell case required obsession, and if you've never truly been obsessed with anything, let me tell you: It can feel like love. It can feel like falling. Obsession provided infinite distraction. It felt like I was mining for gold. [...] After I returned home from the trial in Boise, after seeing those gruesome photos, I was beset, for days, by a feeling of dread. In the courtroom, I finally understood that the depths I had been mining into were deeper and darker than I could have ever realized. This was an abyss; those photographs were the bottom. I wanted to brand Lori Vallow a monster, or an animal, but that felt too close to what she did when she called people zombies. "Evil" felt wrong too: a word born of religiosity. Wicked felt right. Depraved, even more. For weeks, my mind flashed to those images. One night, as my husband paused while sautéing vegetables on the stove to dance along to the Cure's jaunty "Friday I'm in Love" playing on the stereo, our dogs playfully yipped and stood on their hind legs as if to join in. I smile, laughing at the scene. Then those pictures were in my head: greek skin, kitchen bag, decompositional fluid. If this is what gold was, I didn't want its luster anymore.
— When the Moon Turns to Blood by Leah Sottile (94% - 95%)
The state of Idaho had to offer barf bags and offered to pay for therapy to the jury in the Lori Vallow case. Apparently the photos of the decomposing bodies of her children were so horrifying that everyone in court was traumatized.
I think about this a lot in relation to true crime as a genre of nonfiction: sometimes I wonder if consuming all this stuff is a way of ...(re)traumatizing ourselves somehow, as if to justify intellectual fears about what's going on in the world around us.