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It can all be traced back to a day in 2018 when Lori Vallow, a married mother of three, first crossed paths with author Chad Daybell at a spiritual conference in St. George, Utah.
In just a year’s time, that pivotal meeting would ultimately lead to at least four deaths, talk of zombies and demons, and a national manhunt, all driven by a bizarre set of religious beliefs that positioned Chad as a modern-day prophet and Lori as his real-world goddess.
The two were determined to be together no matter what obstacle was in their way — even if it meant killing their spouses and two of Lori’s children in a plot so heinous that it stunned the nation.
Dateline: Unforgettable revisited the shocking case in “The Trial of Lori Vallow Daybell” episode, laying out the couple’s deadly path of destruction.
“This story is as strange and disturbing as any we have ever told,” Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison shared of why the case is so memorable. “The notorious case of Doomsday mom Lori Vallow Daybell, charged in the murders of her own children, Tylee and JJ, a family destroyed. A couple who decided to play God and their children paid the price.”
Who is Lori Vallow?
Lori Vallow once appeared to be the idyllic suburban mom. Although she’d been unlucky in love early in life, Lori had settled down with her fourth husband, Charles Vallow.
“She just made everything fun,” her oldest son Colby Ryan recalled.
Colby had been a product of Lori’s short-lived second marriage. She also had a daughter, Tylee Ryan, from her third marriage to Joseph Ryan. And Lori and Charles had adopted their son JJ, who was autistic, after Charles’ nephew — the boy’s biological father — had been unable to care for him.
“They were simply the best parents there was and they truly did love JJ, There’s no doubt in our mind,” JJ’s grandpa Larry Woodcock remembered.
After years living in Hawaii, the family moved back to the mainland and settled in Arizona. By then, Colby was grown and had moved out of the house, but he still remained close with Tylee and JJ.
The family’s life took an unexpected turn when Lori, once a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, grew closer to a group of doomsday preppers known as Preparing a People. It was at one of the group’s spiritual conferences where she met Chad in October of 2018, a married father of five and former grave digger, who often wrote about the end times.
“This was like an instant fatal attraction,” Nate Eaton, news director of East Idaho News and a Dateline contributor, said of the meeting. “It was an instant, ‘I want you and I will do anything to have you.’”
There was only one problem: Chad and Lori were both married to other people.
Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell’s religious beliefs
After the conference, Chad returned to Rexburg, Idaho, where he had moved his family after believing it was the place where he and other chosen saints would ride out the upcoming war, famine and end times that he was predicting.
But he stayed in touch with Lori, who often hosted spiritual retreats at her house when Charles was away on business. Before long, Chad began to tell Lori that Charles had gone “dark,” a term they used to describe someone who had become a zombie or was possessed by an evil spirit.
After one business trip in 2019, Charles came home to find he’d been locked out of the house. A baffled Charles called police and told them, as seen in body camera footage, that his wife was insisting he was an evil spirit named “Nick Schneider.”
“I’ve taken over Charles’ body and Charles has been killed,” he explained of what his wife told him.
Charles told police that Lori was threatening to kill him and stressed that he was concerned for his safety and that of his children.
Charles Vallow fatally shot by wife Lori Vallow’s brother
Charles eventually moved out of the house, but on July 11, 2019, he went to Lori’s new home at 7:35 a.m. to take JJ to school as part of an agreed-upon arrangement. While he was there, Charles was shot and killed by Lori’s brother, Alex Cox.
Cox claimed he had killed Charles in self-defense.
“He was just yellin’ at me,” Cox told police on the morning of the shooting.
Lori would later tell detectives that after Charles arrived, an argument broke out that woke up Tylee. The 16-year-old emerged from her room with a baseball bat, which she said Charles grabbed out of her hand. Cox told officers that, fearing for their lives, he shot Charles and then called 911 a “couple of minutes” later. But records show the call wasn’t made until 8:36 a.m.
After Lori’s husband of nearly 14 years lay dead on the floor, she calmly took JJ to school herself, even stopping at Burger King at 7:49 a.m. that morning to get breakfast.
Although there were some unusual elements to the story, Cox, Lori and Tylee all stuck to the same account of events while talking to detectives.
Just four days after Charles’ death, Lori called the insurance company hoping to cash in on Charles’ $1 million life insurance policy, but she was surprised to learn that he’d changed the beneficiary on his policy to his sister, Kay Woodcock. Lori later lamented about the discovery in text messages to Chad.
“So I talked to the insurance company. He changed it in March. So it was probably Ned before we got rid of him…,” she wrote. “It’s a spear thru my heart.”
The news didn’t keep Lori down for long though.
What happened to Tylee Ryan and JJ Vallow?
Lori packed up and moved with Tylee and JJ to Rexburg, Idaho, at the end of the summer of 2019. Cox made the move too, getting a condo in the same complex as his sister.
But by then, Chad had told Lori that Tylee had also gone “dark.” On September 8, 2019, Lori, Tylee, JJ and Cox all went on a family trip to Yellowstone National Park, posing together for smiling photos. It would be the last time anyone saw Tylee alive. Later that night, Cox went to Lori’s for two hours in the middle of the night, GPS reports showed.
A couple of weeks later, JJ would disappear too. At the time, Melanie Gibb and her now-husband, David Warwick, were in Idaho visiting Lori and her family.
Gibb told Dateline‘s Morrison that Lori kept telling her during the trip about JJ being out of control.
“She was obsessed about talking about it to the point where she was saying, ‘Look how he’s behaving, look how hyper he is here,’” Gibb would later recall. “She was planting ideas to show me that she believed he was a zombie, and to my mind, he looked like typical JJ to me.”
The final image of JJ was captured on September 22, 2019, showing the 7-year-old wearing a pair of red pajamas. Less than 48 hours later, Lori texted a new babysitter she’d hired to let her know her services were no longer required.
There was still one more person in the way of Lori and Chad.
What happened to Tammy Daybell?
Chad had texted Lori at one point that his wife, Tammy Daybell, had become a demon named Viola.
“The short version is that she has been switched. Tammy is in Limbo, and a level 3 demonic entity … is in her body,” he wrote to Lori. “Not fully sure of the timing for removal, but … I don’t want to wait.”
Four days later, Tammy posted on Facebook about a scary incident at her home where she was approached outside by a man wearing a “ski mask,” carrying what she believed was a “paintball gun.”
“He shot at me several times, although I don’t think it was loaded,” she wrote of the October 9, 2019 event.
Just 10 days later, Tammy was dead. Chad told Tammy’s sister Samantha Gwilliam that Tammy had been sick and had a coughing fit before dying, saying he found her dead on the morning of October 19, 2019.
“He sounded upset and devastated. I mean, I was crying and he was crying and yeah, it was a really hard moment,” she said.
Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell get married
A little over two weeks later, on November 5, 2019, Chad and Lori got married on the beach in Hawaii in a private ceremony. The couple’s wedding photos show them laughing and smiling on the beach.
“Obviously, I was really upset,” Gwilliam said. “I felt like that was too soon for anybody to get over my sister.”
Although Tammy’s death was initially considered the result of natural causes, her body was later exhumed and an autopsy revealed she had been asphyxiated.
How Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell got caught
In less than a year’s time, every obstacle in Lori and Chad’s lives had been erased. But the newlyweds wouldn’t get to enjoy their honeymoon for long.
By late November of 2019, Kay and Larry Woodcock, JJ’s biological grandparents, were growing increasingly concerned about the boy after months of being unable to reach him.
“It was extremely unnerving to us because we had no idea what was going on,” Kay said. “We knew nothing.”
So Kay called police and asked them to do a welfare check on JJ in Rexburg. When officers arrived at Lori’s door, she told them JJ was in Arizona visiting her friend, but when they returned to the home just days later after discovering that was a lie, Lori was gone.
By then, police had discovered that Tylee had also seemingly vanished and they issued a nationwide alert to find the missing children.
Dateline would ultimately track the couple down at a resort on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. Police served Lori with a court order to produce evidence that the children were alive and well. When she didn’t, Lori was arrested on February 20, 2020 and extradited back to Idaho on March 5, 2020.
Then, three months later, on June 9, 2020, with Lori still behind bars, investigators discovered the children’s remains buried on Chad’s property. While JJ was found still wearing his red pajamas, with duct tape and a plastic bag over his head, Tylee’s remains were dismembered and burned beyond recognition. Chad was arrested as he tried to drive away from the scene.
What happened to Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell?
Lori was charged with two counts of first-degree murder in her children’s deaths, along with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in Tammy’s death. Chad was charged with three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Tammy, Tylee, and JJ, and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder for all three deaths.
By then, Cox, who prosecutors believe acted as Lori’s own personal Angel of Death and, according to cell phone records, was in the area at the time of each death, was also gone. He died of what authorities have ruled natural causes in December of 2019, not long after authorities made the decision to exhume Tammy’s body.
Cox’s wife of just two weeks, Zulema Pastenes, would later tell authorities that before his death, Cox told her that he was worried Chad and Lori were making him their “fall guy” and told her he had stashed $6,000 in cash for her just “in case” something happened to him.
Lori went on trial for the murders in April of 2023. Prosecutor Lindsey Blake argued that the string of murders had been motivated by “money, power and sex,” and not religious beliefs.
“It didn’t matter what obstacles she had to remove to get what she wanted,” Blake said in court.
Lori was convicted of all the charges against her and was sentenced to multiple life terms without a chance of parole. She’s also expected to face trial on conspiracy charges in Arizona for Charles’ death and is facing charges in connection with an attempt on the life of her niece’s ex.
In 2024, Chad was convicted of all charges against him in a separate trial. He has been sentenced to death and is appealing his verdict.
