Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On November 26, 2019, two police officers knocked on the door of an apartment in Rexburg, a small college town in eastern Idaho.
They were there for a 7-year-old boy named Joshua “JJ” Vallow. His grandmother, Kay Woodcock, had not been able to reach him, and she had asked police to check that he was safe.
One of the first people they spoke to was Alex Cox, the brother of JJ’s mother. Asked where JJ was, he did not answer at first. Then he said the boy was with his grandmother.
The officer told him that was unlikely. His grandmother was the one who had called them.
The mother
Officers also talked with JJ’s mother, Lori Vallow, 46, twice that day, and their body cameras recorded it.
JJ was with a friend in Arizona, she said, a woman named Melanie Gibb. He was at the movies with her. Her daughter, Tylee Ryan, 16, was away at college at BYU-Idaho.
None of it was true.
“I feel like I’m being tracked all the time,” Lori told the officers. “Like, why are police coming to my door?”
The next day, police came back with a search warrant. Lori was gone. One apartment was completely empty. In another, officers found a suitcase with JJ’s name on it.
A year of strange deaths
The welfare check was the first time police in Idaho looked closely at Lori Vallow. When they did, they found a trail of death behind her.
Lori had been married five times. Her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, had adopted JJ, his great-nephew, as a baby, and raised him with Lori in the Phoenix suburbs.
In early 2019, Charles had grown afraid of his wife. On January 31, he talked to police in Gilbert, Arizona, and a body camera recorded him. He said she had been taking large amounts of money from their accounts and had threatened to kill him. She had told him, he said, that he was no longer really Charles.
“She’s unhinged,” he said in the footage. “It scares the crap out of me.”
In February, Charles filed for divorce and asked for custody of JJ. He dropped the petition the following month.
On July 11, 2019, at Lori’s home in Chandler, Arizona, her brother Alex Cox shot Charles Vallow twice in the chest. Cox told police it was self-defense after Charles hit him with a baseball bat. He was never charged.
Weeks later, Lori moved to Rexburg with JJ and Tylee.
The doomsday author
There was a reason she chose Rexburg. Chad Daybell lived nearby.
Chad was a former cemetery sexton who wrote novels about the end of the world, and he ran a small publishing business. He was married, with five grown children. Lori and Chad had met at a religious conference in 2018.
On October 19, 2019, Chad’s wife, Tammy Daybell, 49, was found dead at their home in Salem, outside Rexburg. Chad said she had died in her sleep. No autopsy was done at the time.
Two weeks later, on November 5, Chad and Lori were married on a beach in Hawaii. The photos show them laughing on the sand in white clothes and purple leis.
JJ and Tylee were not at the wedding. Nobody outside the family had seen either child for weeks.
Gone
After the welfare check, Lori and Chad left Idaho. On December 20, Rexburg police announced that JJ and Tylee were missing and that they believed the children were in danger. Lori and Chad, they said, had lied to investigators.
The case became national news. Tammy Daybell’s body was exhumed, and the autopsy later showed she had died of asphyxiation.
In January 2020, police found the couple on the island of Kauai. An Idaho judge ordered Lori to bring the children to authorities within five days. She did not.
On February 20, 2020, Lori Vallow was arrested on Kauai and charged with child abandonment. She still would not say where her children were.
Investigators were going through everything: the phones, the texts, the bank records, the people around her. And they kept coming back to one witness, the friend Lori had named at the door.
Melanie Gibb had been Lori’s closest friend for years. She had never had JJ. And she told investigators what Lori and Chad had been calling her children.
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