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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader, Spencer Henry, and today I am coming to you with one of the most bizarre cases in recent history.

The truth of the matter is, it's an ongoing investigation, which is rare for this show, and it seems to be getting crazier by the minute.

I just feel like I need to talk to you guys about it because the past few weeks my inboxes have been flooded with emails from cult babes inquiring about the media frenzy surrounding Laurie Valow and her two missing children.

Seven-year-old JJ Valow and his older sister, Tylee Ryan, have been missing since September of last year.

Though I typically stray away from current happenings, I couldn't help but want to talk about this one because I want to put exposure on it because these kids are missing, and if the small percentage they have survived, I would like them to be found.

But it's just wild. We've got cult connections, murders, missing children. This story is just like every Cult Leader episode put into one, and there's a lot to talk about.

So I'm going to cite my sources at the end just so that it doesn't make this story even more all over the place, but I kind of feel like you might even want to listen to this one more than once in order to really grasp all of the insanity that leads up to the disappearance.

We're going to start back in December of 2018. So we have Laurie Valow, right? That's the mom of the two missing kids, and she is married at this point to Charles Valow.

Well, Charles wanted to get a divorce from Laurie. The two had been living in Arizona at the time. They were raising the two children, seven-year-old Joshua, JJ Valow, and 17-year-old Tylee Ryan.

Now, JJ had actually been adopted by the couple. He was a relative of Charles's child that they had that they were unable to care for, so Charles adopted him.

And then Tylee was Laurie's biological daughter, but her father Joseph Ryan had actually passed away in 2018 from a heart attack, or at least we think. Just wait, because it's going to get crazier and crazier.

So Joseph and Laurie also had an older son named Colby, and Roget took him a little bit later on, but basically Charles wanted to divorce Laurie because he felt like she was unable to care for their children anymore.

She started with a lot of just like manic behaviors on December 5, 2018, with really when things in their marriage plummeted.

Laurie had started really kind of falling deeper and deeper into her religious beliefs, and she ends up spending a lot of time with this guy named Chad Daybell.

The two of them started guest appearing on a podcast, which we'll talk about later, but basically it's about the end of the world, and the second coming of Christ.

And Laurie had actually told Charles that she no longer cared about him or JJ. She really fell into this Chad guy, and kind of all of their really strong like belief systems.

She started believing and telling people that she was the reincarnated wife of Joseph Smith.

If that name sounds familiar, it's because he was the founder of Mormonism.

Anyway, as Charles files for divorce from Laurie, he cited a lot of things, including all of this erratic behavior, how she said she was the reincarnated wife of Joseph Smith, and all this weird doomsday stuff that she kept talking about.

But he also said that Laurie had threatened to murder him, which remember this, because this is going to come into play later, and that she also stole some substantial amounts of money from him.

Charles, however, withdrew his petition for divorce that March, saying that he wanted to try and make the marriage work, which was a mistake.

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