Lori Vallow‘s sister screamed at her for dancing on the beach while her kids were buried in the ground ‘like trash’ in a jailhouse call played at the cult mom’s trial.
Summer Shiflet wept on the stand Tuesday as she was forced to relive the harrowing conversation in which she shrieked at her older sister and demanded answers after she had defended her on TV just weeks before the children were found in shallow graves.
Vallow, 49, and her lover Chad Daybell are accused of killing her son JJ, seven, and daughter Tylee, 16, in Rexburg, Idaho, in September 2019. The pair married two months later in Hawaii. The State says the couple believed the children were ‘zombies’.
Their bodies were not discovered until the following June. Two weeks after they were found, Shiflet called her older sister in jail. She pleaded with Vallow to explain their deaths, told her that she had been deceived by Daybell and howled in disgust after the kids’ burnt corpses were discovered in her new husband’s backyard.
‘You were dancing on the beach while your kids were in the ground,’ Shiflet sobbed uncontrollably, referring to their wedding pictures in Kauai. ‘In the ground like a piece of trash.’
Summer Shiflet confronted her sister in a jailhouse phone call two weeks after JJ, seven, and Tylee, 16, (right) were found buried in her lover Chad Daybell’s backyard in Rexburg, Idaho
Vallow (pictured at an earlier court hearing), smiled up at her sister as she took the stand today
Vallow, 49, and her lover Chad Daybell are accused of killing her son JJ, seven, and daughter Tylee, 16, in Rexburg, Idaho, in September 2019. The pair married two months later in Hawaii. The State says the couple believed the children were ‘zombies’
The kids’ bodies were discovered in shallow graves on Daybell’s propery on June 9, 2020 – nine months after they vanished
Vallow, who smiled up at her sister as she took the stand today, responded by telling her she was just ‘trying to be happy’.
The younger sister was barely able to breathe at times during the blazing argument as Vallow continued to deny any wrongdoing without providing an explanation.
‘I just can’t understand, I don’t understand. I want to believe the best in you, I really do. It breaks my heart. They were just little kids, I don’t understand,’ Shiflet cried down the line.
Vallow replied calmly: ‘You know me Summer you still do.’
Shiflet told her: ‘I don’t know you because you have never done anything like that.’
She heart-wrenchingly told Vallow that she would have taken the children away to care for them if she was unable to and asked why she had cut her family off – even failing to tell them that their brother Alex Cox, who was part of the cult, had died.
‘We would have took them, we would have taken care of them. I don’t know what to think – you haven’t told us anything. You cut me and mom off for four months,’ Shiflet said.
‘You expect me to just keep believing without ever having a question … I would have taken Tylee and JJ in a heartbeat and everyone else would have. You know that.’
Vallow responded to her inconsolable questioning by telling her that she shouldn’t believe the media coverage.
‘Nobody knows I am sorry Summer,’ the alleged killer said. And then later she told her: ‘Nobody knows what I have been through.’
Shiflet said: ‘Nobody knows except for you and the Lord.’
The younger sister then questioned how Vallow could have become so obsessed by her deranged doomsday beliefs to believe that killing her children was right.
A month before the kids were found Shiflet (left) and her mother Janice Cox (right) defended Lori in a CBS interview and insisted that the children were safe because their mom would never hurt them
Tylee, 16, and JJ, seven, are shown with their uncle, Alex Cox, in what is believed to be the final photo of them, taken during a family trip to Yellowstone National Park on September 8, 2019
Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow in Hawaii after they were married. At the time cops were still searching for the kids in Idaho
‘I don’t have one scripture that says it’s OK for children to be thrown away like garbage in the ground. There is nothing in the scripture that says it’s OK to hurt a child,’ Shiflet said. ‘It’s the most selfish thing. I can’t think of anything worse.’
During the call she told Vallow through breathless sobs that she had always loved her and been there for her – even going out on TV alongside their mother to defend her against the allegations that she was a murderer.
‘Lori I have been your best friend. Lori I love you. But there is nothing OK about this,’ Shiflet said.
Vallow replied: ‘Nothing about this is OK Summer.’
Shiflet, who like Vallow was brought up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, continued: ‘I am telling you because I love you with all my heart please consider that Chad has lied and been deceived and that you have been deceived.
‘There is nothing OK about killing children. And if you didn’t kill them, you threw them away like garbage,’ Shiflet said. ‘You threw [Tylee] in a pet cemetery, you know how degrading that is?!’
She implored her sister: ‘Please consider that you have been deceived. That’s not Christ-like, there is nothing good in that, that’s not a test. They were innocent and they were loved.’
Shiflet ended the call by telling her to ‘come up with an explanation publicly.’
The sister took the stand today to briefly confirm their relationship and that she had called Vallow at her request on June 24, 2020.
Vallow and Daybell are further accused of killing his wife Tammy Daybell who died a month after the children vanished.
The children were missing for almost a year before their corpses were found buried in Daybell’s yard.
During the opening, prosecutor Lindsey Blake described how charred remains were all that was left of Tylee.
She told jurors: ‘You will hear it explained as a mass of bone and tissue. That’s what was left of this beautiful young woman.’
Tylee’s DNA was later found on a pickaxe and shovel in a shed on the property.
The key individuals in Lori Vallow’s tangled family tree, including her five husbands, two dead children and killer brother
JJ’s body was wrapped in trash bags and duct tape – the tape binding his arms in front of him and wrapping around his head.
The kids and Daybell’s previous wife Tammy were all killed because they stood in the way of the couple’s relationship, the State says.
‘Remember, the defendant will remove any obstacle in her way to get what she wants, and she wanted Chad Daybell,’ Blake told jurors.
‘The defendant used money, power and sex to get what she wanted.’
Jurors have heard from friends and relatives of Vallow that she and Daybell believed the children were ‘dark’ and referred to them as ‘zombies’ before they disappeared.
‘The common theme was the body has to be destroyed,’ Blake said. ‘The defendant and Chad used their self-proclaimed religious teachings to justify their actions to others — their actions from affair to murder.’
Prosecutors say the couple planned to use life insurance money from Tammy’s death, and that Vallow kept collecting and spending the children’s social security and benefits after they died.
The trial opened on April 10 and the State is expected to rest its case later this week.
Daybell is being tried separately.
