Keith Morrison has spoken with dozens of inmates over his career, but nothing comes close to his jailhouse interview with Lori Vallow Daybell. Not in sheer strangeness, not in frustration, and certainly not in the way she seemed completely at ease sitting across from him, spinning a story that defied both logic and reality.

It took years for Morrison and his team to secure the interview. Letters, emails, and persistence finally paid off when Daybell agreed to sit down with him in Maricopa County Jail. Ninety minutes. That was the time they were granted. And Morrison, a seasoned journalist, thought that would be more than enough. But it wasn’t.

From the moment she walked into the room, it was clear that Daybell was not there to confess or clarify. She winked at the camera, her demeanor unsettlingly upbeat for someone convicted of the murders of her two youngest children, JJ Vallow and Tylee Ryan, along with Chad Daybell’s former wife, Tammy Daybell. She’s already serving a life sentence in Idaho, and another trial looms in Arizona for the death of her fourth husband, Charles Vallow. Yet, none of that seemed to weigh on her. Instead, she took control of the interview, redirecting, deflecting, and challenging Morrison at every turn.

“Get your facts straight, Keith,” she chided him more than once, as if she were the one in charge of setting the record straight. “I thought we were going to be friends, Keith.” There was an unsettling rhythm to her words, a performative quality, like she had rehearsed these lines in her head long before the cameras started rolling.

Morrison, no stranger to manipulative interview subjects, saw right through it. She had an agenda, and it wasn’t to tell the truth. It was to tell her truth—the one that lives inside her head, untouched by facts or evidence. The chore, as Morrison described it, was to pull her off that well-rehearsed train track and into a place where reality mattered. But Lori wasn’t having it. She danced around questions, throwing out a sprawling, convoluted narrative that he likened to a shaggy dog story—a long-winded, winding tale designed to eat up time and avoid the hard questions.

“She’s no dummy,” Morrison admitted. “She knew exactly what she was doing.” And what she was doing was making sure the focus remained on the illusion she had created, not on the brutal, undeniable facts of what happened to her children.

But here’s the thing—Lori Vallow Daybell isn’t just delusional. She’s charismatic. That’s what makes her dangerous. That’s what made people follow her. It’s easy to think of cult leaders as fringe weirdos, but they’re rarely that obvious. They’re likable. Persuasive. Charming. Morrison could see it. She smiled. She laughed. She joked. She exuded confidence. She didn’t see herself as mentally ill, though multiple evaluations declared her incompetent for trial before she was finally deemed fit. No, in her mind, she is right. And everyone else? They just don’t understand.

That charm, that ability to manipulate, is exactly how she convinced people to go along with her apocalyptic beliefs, her “vision” of who was light and who was dark. And when people—children included—were labeled dark, well, we know what happened next.

By the end of the interview, Morrison was mentally exhausted. She had drained him, just as she had drained everyone who tried to pin her down with the truth. When the cameras stopped rolling, she smiled and told him he’d have to come back if he wanted to ask anything else.

He walked out thinking, I never want to do that again. But almost immediately, he knew he would. Because that’s what Lori Vallow Daybell does. She lures people in. Even those who know exactly what she is.

The two-hour Dateline special will feature Morrison’s full interview with Daybell, as well as conversations with law enforcement, legal experts, and her surviving son, Colby Ryan, who has spent years trying to rebuild his life in the aftermath of his mother’s crimes. It airs Friday at 8 p.m. MST on NBC and will be available for streaming on Peacock the next day.

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