Lori Vallow appears in court on April 14, 2023; her dead children, Tylee Ryan, on the left, and JJ Vallow, on the right, appear inset. (Courtroom pool sketch artist; Fremont County Sheriff’s Office)
The first week of testimony has concluded in the triple murder trial for Lori Vallow Daybell, 49, a “doomsday cult”-connected mother of two dead children and two dead former husbands. The information made available to jurors so far has been none too kind to the defense.
Vallow and her fifth and current husband, Chad Daybell, 54, stand accused of murder for the 2019 deaths of Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 7, and Tylee Ashlyn Ryan, 17. The children disappeared on different dates in September of that year. Vallow was initially arrested in Hawaii in February 2020 on charges of child desertion. Daybell was arrested later that year after the children’s bodies were found buried at his property. The two defendants were indicted for the murder of Vallow’s children and Daybell’s first wife, Tammy Daybell, 49, in May 2021. Initially prosecuted as husband-and-wife co-defendants, the couple’s cases were recently severed and they will be tried separately.
More Law&Crime coverage: ‘Cult mom’ Lori Vallow’s triple murder trial – here’s what to know
Here are seven particularly damaging evidentiary threads that unraveled for the accused triple murderess in just one week.
1. Lori Vallow’s ex-best friend discussed the cult
Melanie Gibb, Lori Vallow’s former longtime best friend, previously testified at Chad Daybell’s preliminary hearing in August of 2020. During that hearing, Gibb offered numerous details about accused killers’ bizarre belief system.
All of that and more came to light when Gibb testified during the fourth day of testimony in Vallow’s trial last week.
When Vallow met Daybell in October 2018, Gibb testified, “Lori said Chad told her they had been married in another time period and she believed it. She already believed in multiple lives.”
The couple appears to have started as Mormons, but their religious beliefs soon took a darker turn, the witness told jurors in Ada County, Idaho.
The idea of distinct spirits – with names like “Ned” and “Garrett” and “Hiplos” – inhabiting human bodies in between the spiritual and temporal worlds soon followed. Sometimes those spirits needed a push, Gibb said, so the two friends and other women, spurred on by Vallow’s increased religiosity, would take part in “castings” to try and send those spirits away. According to Gibb, Vallow was present for all of the castings and Daybell attended at least one.
Some of those beings were considered “dark.” And if the dark ones couldn’t be cast out, the possessed person became a “zombie.”
Gibb told jurors that she learned, over time, that Vallow believed her children, Tylee Ryan and JJ Vallow, had been possessed by dark spirits – and so had Charles Vallow and Tammy Daybell.
According to Gibb, Vallow told her that “both Charles and Tammy” were going to die. Additionally, the witness said, Daybell told Vallow he always knew his first wife was going to die young.
2. Vallow and Daybell allegedly asked Gibb to lie to police
Gibb also discussed a phone call she recorded with the couple on the day police contacted her about JJ Vallow’s whereabouts.
“I was wondering why you told the police that he was with me?” Gibb asked her friend in the phone call that she recorded. Lori Vallow replied, invoking Kay Woodcock, JJ Vallow’s grandmother, who had made the initial phone call asking for a welfare check on the special needs child in November 2019: “I just needed to [unintelligible] to have somebody that I – so I wouldn’t have to tell where he really was cause they were gonna tell Kay where he is.”
Daybell allegedly called once before and asked Gibb to say JJ Vallow was safe and with her. Gibb told jurors that she initially lied to law enforcement, telling them JJ Vallow was previously with her but had since been returned to his mother, because, she said, felt like her friends had put her in a “weird and uncomfortable position.”
That episode prompted her to record the next phone call of her own volition, Gibb said. She turned the recording over to the police.
“If you really loved me, you would not have told the police that I had JJ with me,” Gibb said in the phone call. “That’s not what a friend does. That just makes me look weird, and it’s just, it’s not safe for me. I don’t look good. I mean, you had to think of my welfare if you loved me.”
The phone call can be heard in full below:
3. Vallow’s strange comments during the phone call with Gibb
In that phone call with Gibb, played in full for jurors, Vallow made several additional comments likely to be considered noteworthy.
At one point, Vallow explains to her friend that she had to dissemble about her son’s whereabouts and bring her friend into contact with law enforcement in order to keep both of them “protected.”
Gibb appears to be unsure about that claim.
“Like I don’t…like if I knew how could that hurt me?” she asks. “I don’t understand how it could hurt me if I knew where he was?”
“Well I’m just not telling anybody so no one has to say where he is or get questioned about where he is so I can keep him as safe as possible,” Vallow replies. In her response, Gibbs is still not convinced.
Later on in the call, Vallow accuses Gibb of being “friends” with Kay Woodcock, despite knowing that she, too, is “dark.” This time Gibb adamantly replies that she barely knows Woodcock and certainly doesn’t know her enough to know if she qualifies as “dark.”
Then, the conversation sharply veers to a dispute over a life insurance policy. Gibb says she doesn’t know anything about that either. Vallow presses her friend, saying she knows she does, because she accessed her computer. Gibb says she has never accessed Vallow’s computer.
“I don’t know why you’re being controversial to me or if you’re recording this conversation for the police or whatever,” Vallow told her friend in response to the claim about her lack of computer access. “I don’t know what your intention is on this phone call.”
A large portion of the call concerns theological discussions, accusations, and recriminations about fealty to the faith.
At one point, after several bits of Mormon-related storytelling, Vallow says she has been doing what the Lord instructed her to do.
Gibb strongly takes issue and suggests the exact opposite is true:
I believe that you have been very deceived by Satan. I believe that he has tricked you and I just I don’t believe that what you’re doing is correct. I just don’t. I mean Tammy dies and then your husband died and then he’s (JJ) missing. It just doesn’t sound like God’s plan to me. It gives my gut feeling, like in my gut it feels weird.
“I know exactly where JJ is,” Vallow told her friend at another point during the phone call. “He is safe and fine.”
4. Text messages between Daybell and Vallow about life insurance
Seven days after Charles Vallow — Lori’s then-husband — was killed by Lori Vallow’s brother Alex Cox, who himself later died from a pulmonary embolism, the widow was apparently not grieving and her soon-to-be fifth husband was there to console her about money, text messages allegedly show.
“I just got a letter from the insurance company that I am not the beneficiary,” Lori Vallow wrote. “It’s a spear thru my heart. Who do you think he changed it to? Brandon or possibly Kay?”
Chad Daybell responds: “Wow. That’s terrible. There is no way to find out.”
Later that same day, still discussing the life insurance policy beneficiary issue, Chad Daybell references a Mormon belief about a satanic group of ancient American robber barons: “I love you. This is terrible but it is probably another step in bringing down the Gadiantons, especially Brandon.”
The reference to “Brandon” would seemingly be Brandon Boudreaux, the ex-husband of Vallow’s niece, Melani Boudreaux Pawlowski. Boudreaux is considered a likely witness for the state and had said in a 2020 child custody filing that he feared that Cox and his ex-wife were intent on killing him, in part, because he questioned their zombie-infused religious beliefs.
In responding to Chad Daybell’s text, Lori Vallow refers to one of the aforementioned alleged dark beings: “It was probably Ned before we got rid of him. They can’t tell me to who of course but it’s done. I’ll still get the 4000 a month from SS.”
5. Vallow tells Cox’s wife that her son will have a short life
Zulema Pastenes is Cox’s widow, having been married for just under three weeks when he died. On Friday, she took the stand.
According to Pastenes, Lori Vallow once told her that JJ Vallow was going to have “a very short life.” Pastenes testified that Chad Daybell echoed that assessment at a meeting in August 2019, but he advised her not to worry because he would quickly be reincarnated as Lori Vallow’s grandson.
Zulema never heard anything about how long Tylee would live. #lorivallow@LawCrimeNetwork
— Pretty Lies & Alibis🎙 (@PrettyLiesAlibi) April 14, 2023
6. Comments Vallow made to Zulema about Tammy Daybell
Ten days before she died, Tammy Daybell was shot at with what she believed was a paintball gun by a masked man, although prosecutors have said they believe it was Cox firing live rounds at her. That night — and later, after Tammy Daybell’s death — Lori Vallow apparently had some thoughts to share.
Pastenes told jurors that on the night of the paintball shooting, Lori Vallow texted her to come over to her niece’s home in Arizona because they needed her help with a casting. This time, jurors learned, it was believed that Tammy Daybell had been possessed by a demon named “Viola.” The casting occurred, Pastenes said, and she was praised by Lori Vallow, who seemed in good spirits – until she got a phone call.
Lori said, “idiot, moron” to whoever she was on the phone with. After she hung up she told Zulema , “Idiot – he can’t do anything right by himself” #lorivallow @LawCrimeNetwork
— Pretty Lies & Alibis🎙 (@PrettyLiesAlibi) April 14, 2023
Later, after Tammy Daybell died, Zulema said that Lori told her she and Chad Daybell had received “instructions and visitations from angels who taught them how to cast out demons.”
Those instructions apparently worked, Lori Vallow allegedly told Pastenes, and that’s why Tammy Daybell was dead.
In October 2019, Tammy Daybell, at the age of 49, died in her sleep – weeks before the two alleged killers got married. Her death was initially attributed to “natural causes,” but authorities later reversed course and re-opened the investigation.
7. Cox told his wife he was afraid he was going to be a fall guy
Alex Cox died on Dec. 12, 2019.
His wife testified that she did not even know the children were missing until her husband’s death – and that’s when she started asking questions. But the day before, Pastenes told the jury, things were very “weird” between her and her brief husband – and she had a different set of questions.
On Dec. 11, 2019, Alex Cox was allegedly discussing the exhumation of Tammy Daybell’s body with Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell.
Pastenes testified that she was confused about the phone call – asking Cox why she would be exhumed if she died from natural causes. When pressed for information, she said, her husband clammed up.
Eventually, Pastenes said, she asked her husband if he had anything to do with Tammy Daybell’s death. He didn’t answer.
Concerned, Cox’s wife then asked her husband where the two alleged killers were. He didn’t answer that question either – at least not directly, Pastenes testified.
“I think I’m being their fall guy,” Pastenes said her husband told her. She said responded along the lines of: “Fall guy for what? What have you done that you would be the fall guy for?”
The witness would go on to say that the she was frustrated because Cox still didn’t have much to say for himself. Again, he eventually came around with another oblique answer, she said: “Either I am a man of God or I am not.”
Law&Crime correspondent Gigi McKelvey contributed to this report.
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