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Though the trial had affirmed most of what people who'd followed the case already knew, it provided no additional clarity into why all of this had to happen. It seemed like there were just as many questions afterward, and the lessons the court proceedings provided were difficult to parse: how easily beautiful things can fool us; how real monsters are nothing like in the movies; how we think we'll be able to sense evil when we see it, but, really, we won't. To brand Lori as some fringe oddity pays no heed to all the ways he was enabled by a culture of people around her. Her crimes lacked any humanity; it was deeply uncomfortable to see Lori not as a monster, or as an animal, but as a human being.

— When the Moon Turns to Blood by Leah Sottile (Page 94)

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%)

One reason the story of Lori Vallow is so shocking is because, by all accounts, she was so kind. Kindness can be a mask of its own, a thing used to bait people into a cafe, chloroform held under their noses. And it worked for her. It must have been exhilarating when people believed what she told them about zombies — and everything else — and didn't say she was crazy. That must have been when Lori figured out that false kindness was a better cloak than beauty could ever be. Lori was recorded telling people that she wanted to kill Joe Ryan. Witnesses told police Alex Cox had said he wished Charles Vallow would die. And yet no one reacted. So maybe the heart of this story is something much more endemic: a societal numbness to death and violence, and a fixation on fear. It felt like the case could be an allegory for the rest of the world, for everything happening right now in this country. There seems to be a sense of doubt that evil can be sitting right in front of us, a belief that moral questions are things only to be considered in a voting booth and not in our everyday lives. When you start to look around, you can see fear everywhere. Fear in politics. Fear in policy. Fear every time we pull-to-refresh and a new hell confronts us. It seems we have collectively decided to laser-focus our energy on personal and collective ruin, and the case of Chad and Lori is, in effect, a ripple of that.

— When the Moon Turns to Blood by Leah Sottile (88% - 89%)