ONE
THE CHEERLEADER
Lori Norene Cox was born on June 26, 1973, in Rialto, California, the fifth child of Barry and Janis Cox. Their eldest, Stacey Lynn, had been born seven years earlier, followed by two sons, Alexander Lamar in 1968 and Adam Lane a year later. A daughter, Laura Lee, was born on August 7, 1971, but tragically died at the age of six weeks. Four years later, Janis gave birth to Summer Nouvelle, completing the family.
The Cox family had deep roots in Rialto, named after the bridge in Venice and just fifty-six miles east of Los Angeles. Barry was a successful life insurance underwriter with political aspirations. In March 1974 he actively campaigned for a vacant seat on the Rialto City Council.
“I would like to see more long-range city planning,” read his campaign statement. “I support programs that benefit the needs of the youth and the elderly and want to reduce all unnecessary spending.”
Prior to the election, Cox, then thirty-three, was profiled in the San Bernardino County Sun, which highlighted his Mormon credentials. A lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), he served as a missionary in England in the early 1960s.
Although he failed to win a seat on the city council, Barry was appointed the 1974 Beneficial Life Insurance man of the year for selling over a million dollars of insurance. He won the award again the following year, and his bosses took out an advertisement in the San Bernardino County Sun to publicly congratulate him.
* * *
In 1980, seven-year-old Lori, known by the family as Lolo, started at Trapp Elementary School. She was slightly overweight with blond hair and blue eyes, her natural charm and affability drawing people to her like a magnet.
In third grade she became best friends with Rose Vaughan (not her real name), whose parents knew Barry and Janis Cox. The two girls soon became inseparable, and Rose was always at the Coxes’ house in Sycamore Avenue, where she got to know Lori’s parents and siblings well.
“We were together all the time,” said Rose. “Lori was always very, very sweet. She was kind and cared about everybody.”
The Cox family lived in a large house on the ultraexclusive El Rancho Verde Country Club, across from the eighteen-hole golf course. Lori and her four siblings were raised in affluence and always had the best of everything.
“Lori grew up spoiled,” said Rose. “Her parents were well-off and bought the kids everything they wanted.”
The Coxes attended the Redlands California Temple in Redlands, where Lori and her siblings were all active in the children’s program. But Rose, who was not Mormon, noticed that the Coxes were far more flamboyant than other big LDS families in Rialto, and not particularly religious.
“Her family did not act Mormon,” Rose explained. “They went to church occasionally, but it wasn’t like they were superdevout.”
Rose’s mother was a teacher and strict, so nothing had prepared her for Lori’s unconventional parents. Janis favored high heels, tight leopard-skin pants, short tight tops, bleached-blond hair, and freshly done nails.
“They would leave all the kids alone and go to Hawaii for the weekend,” said Rose. “They were not present.”
Lori’s parents also did not believe in taxes and would battle the IRS for decades. In 2019, Barry self-published a manifesto entitled How the American Public Can Dismantle the IRS, dedicating it to all freedom-loving USA citizens.
“The reader will learn the American public has been brainwashed or indoctrinated by IRS propaganda,” wrote Cox, “which is used as a weapon of FEAR to scare the hell out of every American.”
Outspoken at social gatherings, Barry Cox would often argue that taxes were illegal and that the IRS was a criminal organization.
“He was very vocal,” said Rose. “My father hated him because he refused to pay taxes.”
As Rose got to know the Cox family better, she tried to avoid Lori’s older brother Alex. The tall, gangly teenager never had a girlfriend and seemed fixated on his younger sister Lori.
“Alex just gave me the creeps,” said Rose. “When Lori and I were in the pool, he was always watching us and I didn’t like that.”
* * *
Lori Cox was a popular student who always got good grades without trying too hard. In May 1984, the fifth grader won the Trapp Elementary School spelling bee and was singled out in a local newspaper report.
While Lori was in middle school, Barry and Janis started frequenting the Santa Anita racetrack, often taking Lori along for good luck.
“Her parents pulled Lori out of school a lot to go to the track,” remembered Rose. “I think her father was a gambler.”
Lori’s brother Adam once won a bet with his father about who would win the Kentucky Derby, and Barry paid up by building a basketball court in their front driveway.
According to Rose, Barry and Janis would also go to Hawaii for weeks at a time, leaving the children alone in the house. They gave sixteen-year-old Alex blank checks to buy food for the siblings, putting him in charge of Lori and Summer.
Alex would cash the checks, spending most of the money on himself. He would also order pizza and throw parties for his friends.
“Alex was supposed to look after Summer,” said Rose, “but he was always doing something bad, so Lori had to.”
Several times Barry and Janis brought Lori to Hawaii, where she fell in love with the magical islands, which would draw her back again and again throughout her life.
Every Friday night, Lori would go over to Rose’s house for dinner and spent holidays with her family. Looking back, Rose believes that Lori craved the security of a stable family and looked to Rose’s parents to provide what she lacked at home.
“I had more of a really centered family,” Rose explained. “My mom and dad were always around and cooked dinner every night. Lori really liked that, and she used to like coming over to my house. Her mom just didn’t act like a mother.”
* * *
When Lori was in sixth grade, Janis decided Lori should lose weight and put her on a strict diet. Lori was not happy, but her mother insisted that Lori had to stick to it so she could become a cheerleader. Janis also enlisted her daughter to join her church softball team, which Janis loved coaching. And she would ridicule Lori in front of her friends if Janis caught her eating chips or something else Janis considered fattening.
One night while they were in seventh grade, Lori tearfully confided to Rose that Alex wanted to have sex with her. They were sitting on the floor in Lori’s bedroom when she suddenly burst into tears, blurting out that her older brother had been making sexual moves on her.
“We grew up together so we talked about everything,” said Rose. “Suddenly Lori was crying and emotional and she just said, ‘Alex is trying to have sex with me. What can I do?’”
The two girls fell into each other’s arms and hugged and cried. Finally Rose told Lori that she had no idea what to do. Lori never brought it up again and Rose never pursued it. Now, in hindsight, Rose wishes that she had told her parents at the time.
“I had a really good relationship with my mom,” she said, “but I just got scared and didn’t follow up. And I regret it because what if that could have changed the course of history?”
* * *
In fall 1988, Lori and Rose moved up to Eisenhower High School. The previous year Lori’s older sister, Stacey, had married a Home Depot executive named Steve Cope and left home.
Under her mother’s supervision, Lori had now slimmed down and was in great shape. She joined the Eisenhower cheerleading squad as a flier, the member thrown up in the air to the cheers of the crowd.
“She was popular [and] had a lot of friends,” said her older brother Adam. “There’s a lot of what Lori has that attracts people to her.”
Lori soon became close to another member of the cheerleading squad, Bernadette Flores-Lopez, who remembers them clicking immediately. Although Bernadette came from a less affluent part of town, she was soon a regular visitor to the Coxes’ Sycamore Avenue house along with the rest of the cheer squad. They would hang out and swim in the Coxes’ pool. The cheer squad’s favorite routine was to the Sly and the Family Stone 1960s hit “Dance to the Music,” which they regularly rehearsed at the Cox house.
“I thought she was just a Barbie doll,” said Bernadette. “She was just really, really friendly, not overly friendly, but she was just really sweet. I was just so excited to get to know her.”
Bernadette remembers Lori as being a devout Mormon who attended religious-seminary classes before school every morning.
“In her house there was a giant copy of the Book of Mormon,” said Bernadette.
In her senior year, Lori started dating another Eisenhower student named Nelson Yanes. She was smitten from the start.
“We grew up right around the corner from each other,” said Nelson. “I was her first boyfriend.”
Nelson, who came from a wealthy family but was not Mormon, soon met Lori’s unconventional parents and remembers them as “a different type of family.”
Almost overnight, Lori Cox had transformed from a plain chunky girl into a miniature version of her flashy mother.
She embarked on a new social life revolving around the cheerleading squad, making her something of a celebrity at Eisenhower High School. She even went on a cheerleading trip to Six Flags Magic Mountain, where they did an impromptu performance.
“She bleached her hair and started wearing skimpy clothes,” recalled Rose. “She started getting her nails done and wore red lipstick.… She was all about her social circle with flashy cars and flashy clothes. That just wasn’t the Lori that I grew up with.”
Rose also didn’t approve of Lori’s new boyfriend, Nelson, and thought he was a “hothead.” Rose remembers him as having a temper and yelling at Lori in the school hallways, where she would cower and never stand up for herself.
“The more Lori started to be around Nelson,” said Rose, “the less I started to be around.”
Lori now adored being the center of attention and loved people telling her how beautiful she was, after losing so much weight. Rose had never before seen this narcissistic streak. She wondered if Lori was trying to impress her older brother Alex and whether he was still pursuing her sexually.
“And I don’t know if it was because she grew up chunky,” said Rose, “and then all of a sudden got really thin. Or if it had anything to do with Alex and what Lori had told me in the seventh grade.”
* * *
On April 24, 1989, Lori’s sister Stacey gave birth to a daughter she named Melani. Over the years Lori would become a second mother to her niece. They would become close and Melani would adopt her aunt’s extreme religious beliefs.
“Lori used to carry me around as a little baby,” said Melani, “and pretend that I was hers when she was sixteen.”
The following year Stacey, now living in Washington State, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and put on an insulin program. She was told by her doctor to regularly inject insulin and closely monitor her blood sugar. Stacey would refuse to adhere to this life-or-death regimen.
* * *
On July 6, 1990, sixteen-year-old Stacey Gilliam, who was in the same year as Lori Cox at Eisenhower High School, was brutally murdered by her boyfriend, Mark Barros. The two were in his van celebrating his seventeenth birthday eating pizza and cake and discussing religion in a Winchell’s parking lot in San Bernardino. Barros suddenly asked if she was afraid to die, and Stacey said she was not. He then took out a knife and repeatedly slashed her throat before stabbing her in the chest.
The following morning Barros went to a police station and surrendered, telling police he had been thinking about murdering Stacey for a year.
Lori Cox knew Stacey and was, like everyone else at Eisenhower High, shocked by the murder.
“It was absolutely horrible,” remembers Rose Vaughan.
Years later there would be rumors that Lori had been in the car, too, when her friend had been murdered.
“Lori was not there that night Stacey was murdered,” Rose says.
Barros pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and served twenty-eight years in prison before being granted parole in February 2018.
* * *
Lori Cox graduated from Eisenhower High School on June 12, 1991. Her yearbook graduation photo shows a sophisticated young lady with long blond hair in California-style beachy waves. She has a wide smile and is wearing a dark bustier top and glam gloves with zippers.
According to Lori’s Eisenhower alumni page, her favorite school memory was a 1989 cheerleading pep rally before a big football game, when all eyes were on her.
Copyright © 2021 by John Glatt