The disappearance of 16-year-old Tylee Ryan and her 7-year-old brother JJ Vallow gripped the nation. Their mother, Lori Vallow, and her new husband, Chad Daybell, refused to tell anyone where the children were. Months after vanishing, their bodies were found buried in Daybell's backyard outside of Rexburg, Idaho. This discovery marked the beginning of a series of revelations that exposed a complex web of religious extremism, alleged murder, and shocking betrayals.
Exclusive Interviews and Revelations
Dateline NBC has extensively covered the sensational cases, providing in-depth looks at Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell.
Friday’s all-new Dateline NBC at 9pm ET/8pm CT revealed new details and an in-depth look at Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell, the Idaho couple charged in the murders of Lori’s children JJ & Tylee. During the broadcast, the brothers of Lori’s ex-husband, Charles, spoke out in their first interview since he was shot and killed by Lori’s own brother, who claimed it was self-defense.
Charles’s brother tells Keith Morrison, “That was not self-defense. That was an ambush." Additionally, The Doomsday Files will report on Lori and Chad’s inner circle, including Lori’s niece Melani’s alleged involvement with the couple’s fringe religious group that believed doomsday was near. The broadcast will also include never-before-heard secret audio recordings obtained by Dateline of Melani speaking about the attempted murder of her husband.
Along with the prison interview with Lori, the all-new Dateline will also feature interviews with Lori’s sole surviving child, son Colby Ryan; as well as with retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent Doug Hart; Madison County Sheriff Ron Ball, who was the former lead detective for the Rexburg Police Department; and Detective Ray Hermosilla, a co-lead for the Rexburg Police Department.
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Lori Vallow's Claims of Divine Intervention
In an NBC interview, Lori Vallow Daybell says "Jesus showed" her a future where she's not in prison. Lori then gave the reason why she's so confident that she'll eventually be exonerated. “I have seen things in the future that Jesus showed me when I was in heaven,” she said. “And we were not in jail, and we were not in prison, and they were still in the future, from now.”
New testimony: Lori Vallow reportedly had 18 burner phones
The Daybell Children Speak Out
After a year of public silence, Chad Daybell's five adult children - convinced their father is innocent - spoke out together for the first time to "48 Hours."
"My father needs someone to be a voice for him," Emma Murray tells "48 Hours" contributor Jonathan Vigliotti. They want to tell his story, how they believe JJ and Tylee's remains ended up in their father's backyard and why they believe he did not do it. Up until that terrible day when authorities swarmed their father's property looking for two missing kids, the five Daybell children say they were just an ordinary Mormon family living outside Rexburg, Idaho. Emma Murray: Absolutely. None of this would've happened if Lori Vallow had never come into my family's life.
Their father, Chad Daybell, is charged with one of the most savage crimes to ever befall this community: the murders of his new wife's two children - 16-year-old Tylee Ryan and 7-year-old JJ Vallow. Mark Daybell: It's just not possible. Anyone who says that my dad could kill a person doesn't know my dad.
The Daybell siblings, Emma, Mark, Leah, Seth, and Garth, spoke out together for the first time. Emma Murray: I think I would interpret it as many people have. But we have to remember that this is just one side of the story. And it does look really bad.
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Doubts About Chad Daybell's Involvement
After months of silence, Chad Daybell’s children are speaking out to proclaim his innocence, insisting he's too smart to have buried the bodies of Lori Vallow’s children on his own property. Investigators discovered the remains of 16-year-old Tylee Ryan and 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow buried in shallow graves at Daybell’s Idaho home in June of 2020-ending a months-long search for the missing children.
“I don’t know why [the bodies] would be there,” Chad’s daughter Emma Murray told CBS’s “48 Hours” in a new episode airing Wednesday. “But I do know that if he were to commit a crime, he wouldn’t be foolish enough to put the evidence in his own backyard.”
She insisted that her father had been framed by someone who secretly snuck onto the property to bury the children, telling reporter Jonathan Vigliotti that her father rarely went outside and said the location where the bodies were found could not been seen from his house. “This is his property,” she said of the possibility of him being set up. “If there’s bodies buried here, it would be attributed to him.” She said there are other more remote areas nearby if Chad had been trying to conceal a body and didn’t believe her father would have left such damning evidence so close to home, if he had been the one to carry out the acts.
Chad’s other children pointed out that the Tylee and JJ were found buried in shallow graves-yet their father had once worked as a gravedigger. “This is … a man who buries pets at, like, as deep as he can,” Seth Daybell said. “He knew how to dig graves and that just doesn’t sound believable to me.”
The Murders and Convictions
Lori and Chad were both convicted in separate trials for the gruesome killings of two of Lori’s children, Tylee Ryan, 16, and Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 7. The kids were last seen alive on different dates in September of 2019. In June of 2020, the children's remains were discovered buried on Chad’s rural Rexburg, Idaho, property, Dateline previously reported.
Read also: Vallow-Daybell Trial: Key Evidence
Chad, once a religious author who wrote about the end times, was also found guilty of murder and conspiracy in the death of his first wife, Tammy Daybell, 49, who was found dead in bed in October of 2019. While authorities initially believed that Tammy had died of natural causes, her body was later exhumed and an autopsy determined that she had been asphyxiated and the cause of death was amended to homicide.
Lori, during her own trial in 2023, was convicted of conspiring to kill Tammy. She’s also facing trial in Arizona for charges of conspiracy to commit murder in the July 2019 death of her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, along with conspiracy for the attempted murder of her niece's former husband.
Chad and Lori have both been charged with murder in the deaths of JJ and Tylee. Chad has pleaded not guilty. Lori is also facing conspiracy to commit shooting charges in the death of her ex-husband.
Vallow is currently behind bars and awaiting possible extradition to Rexburg, Idaho, where she and the children lived before they disappeared. Vallow was arrested last week by police in Kauai on an arrest warrant issued from authorities in Madison County, Idaho. Daybell was not arrested.
Vallow is facing multiple charges, including two felony counts of desertion and non-support of dependent children, according to police.
The Web of Deaths and Suspicion
The mysterious case goes beyond just the missing children and also includes the deaths of Vallow and Daybell's former spouses, as well as rumors of a cult.
Vallow's brother, Alex Cox, shot and killed her fourth husband in her Chandler, Arizona, home on July 11, 2019, police said. Police said Charles Vallow's death is being looked at as self-defense.
About six months after that shooting, on Dec. 11, 2019, Cox was found unresponsive in his Gilbert, Arizona, home and was later pronounced dead, according to Brenda Carrasco, a public information officer for Gilbert police. Autopsy results from Cox's death have not yet been made public.
In between Charles Vallow and Cox's death, Chad Daybell's wife also died under circumstances that are now believed to be suspicious. Tamara "Tammy" Daybell's death on Oct. 19, 2019, was initially thought to be natural. However, her remains were exhumed in late December and authorities were looking into whether or not she was poisoned, police said.
Authorities later learned through their investigation that Daybell collected at least $430,000 in life insurance after his wife died, according to a probable cause statement.
Tammy Daybell's Death and the Autopsy
Tammy’s death was initially believed to be the result of natural causes but after an investigation was launched to find Lori’s missing children, authorities exhumed the body and conducted an autopsy. Although the results of that autopsy have never been publicly revealed, Garth Daybell said authorities told him that his mother had been asphyxiated.
According to Garth, he had been at home on Oct. 19, 2019 when his 49-year-old mother was found dead in her bedroom. “My room was down the hall. And I heard a thump,” Garth Daybell told “48 Hours,” according to CBS News. “And I heard my dad yell, ‘Garth, Garth, come quick,’ with the most panic I’d ever heard in his voice.” He said his mother was dead before he and his father could place the call to 911.
Mark Daybell said even if his mother was asphyxiated, it doesn’t necessarily indicate what caused her death. “Asphyxiation doesn’t necessarily mean smothered,” he said. “According to my understanding, it just means the breath was interrupted. And in the end, she wasn’t able to breathe. And according to that, there’s more facts that we need.”
The Doomsday Beliefs
Both Vallow and Daybell have also been accused of being members of a cult.
Sometime in 2018, Lori met Chad Daybell, developing what friends say seemed like a cult-like devotion to him. Vaisia Itaaehau: She was a fan of his writing. And … when she actually got to talk with him, it, yeah, just escalated from there.
Lori started doing podcasts with Chad. Morgan Loew: Lori believed that she was chosen to lead the 144,000 after the apocalypse. To lead the survivors of the human race to an eternal life while the rest of society burned.
She also believed she had been appointed another, more ominous role, says Raymond. April Raymond: Part of her mission on Earth was to eliminate the darkness, the demonic - the evil.
Lori Vallow's Transformation
The Lori Vallow the world has come to know - the "doomsday mom" who refused to say where her children were, the woman now accused with Chad Daybell of murdering her own two kids - is nothing like the doting mother April Raymond once considered a dear friend. April Raymond: She did everything for JJ, everything for Tylee. They were … the center of her world. And so, I'm not sure what hijacked that priority.
But around 2017, friends say Lori's relationships with her kids began to shift - sometime after she started reading the books of Chad Daybell. Daybell was a professional gravedigger-turned-novelist and podcaster from Rexburg, Idaho. Daybell was married. He and his wife Tammy were raising five children. Some say, over the years, Chad's religious beliefs became extreme. He believed he could talk to dead people and see into the future. According to one witness, Chad talked about dark spirits and zombies.
Morgan Loew: Chad had this belief that some people who were on this earth weren't really the people they were supposed to be. … Their souls had left them. … And - evilness took over their bodies. And the only way to release their spirits to heaven was to kill the bodies.
The Allegations of "Zombies"
We know that in the spring of 2019, Lori started referring to Tylee as a zombie, to at least one of her close friends. One of those close friends was April Raymond. April Raymond: And she had described Tylee as having a dark spirit.
The night before JJ vanished, Lori's good friend, Melanie Gibb and her boyfriend David Warwick were staying at Lori's townhome. Warwick testified that Alex put JJ to bed in Lori's room. But the little boy was nowhere to be seen the next morning. Lori told David why:
DAVID WARWICK: She said that he was being a zombie and climbed up on the cabinets, climbed up on top of the fridge, smashed her picture of Christ down, and then climbed up onto the upper cabinets and got between the top of the cabinet and the ceiling.
ROB WOOD: OK. And then what did she tell you?
DAVID WARWICK: I asked to see him, and she just said that he was out of control, so she had Alex come and get him … JJ was never seen again.
Timeline of Key Events
The following table summarizes the key events in the Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow case:
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| July 11, 2019 | Charles Vallow shot and killed by Alex Cox in Arizona. |
| September 2019 | Tylee Ryan and JJ Vallow last seen alive. |
| October 19, 2019 | Tammy Daybell dies; initially believed to be of natural causes. |
| November 26, 2019 | Police conduct a welfare check on JJ Vallow. Lori tells them he is in Arizona with a friend. |
| December 11, 2019 | Alex Cox found dead in Arizona. |
| December 2019 | Tammy Daybell's remains exhumed. |
| February 20, 2020 | Lori Vallow arrested in Hawaii on child abandonment charges. |
| June 2020 | Remains of Tylee Ryan and JJ Vallow discovered on Chad Daybell's property. |
| 2023 | Lori Vallow convicted of conspiring to kill Tammy Daybell. |
Chad Daybell's Silence
The husband of Lori Vallow, an Idaho mother facing charges amid her children's monthslong disappearance, spoke out for the first time in the case, thanking his supporters but refusing to say if the kids are ok.
Chad Daybell, Vallow's fifth husband, told ABC News' National Correspondent Marcus Moore that he couldn't comment on the whereabouts or well-being of 7-year-old Joshua "JJ" Vallow and 17-year-old Tylee Ryan, who were last seen in September 2019. He is not the biological father of either child.
"Are the kids ok?" Moore asked Daybell at a gas station in Kauai, Hawaii, where he and Vallow had been living for about a month, on Monday.
"I just can't comment," he replied. "I just can't comment."
When asked by Moore if there was anything he wanted to say to people who are concerned about the children, himself and Vallow, Daybell responded with, "Just grateful for any support. We just have to wait for the legal process to work through."
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