IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (Court TV) — In an emotional phone call that was posted as part of a podcast series, Lori Vallow Daybell‘s son grilled his mother about his siblings’ murders and her religious beliefs.
Lori was found guilty of murdering her two children, Tylee Ryan and JJ Vallow, whose bodies were found buried on her fifth husband’s property. Lori was also convicted of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the death of her fifth husband’s first wife, Tammy Daybell. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Lori Vallow Daybell sits during her sentencing hearing at the Fremont County Courthouse in St. Anthony, Idaho, Monday, July 31, 2023. The Idaho mother Vallow Daybell has been sentenced to life in prison without parole Monday in the murders of her two youngest children and a romantic rival. The case has included bizarre claims that her son and daughter were zombies and that she was a goddess sent to usher in the Biblical apocalypse. (Tony Blakeslee/EastIdahoNews.com via AP, Pool)
Lori’s eldest child, Colby Ryan, who testified at her murder trial, no longer lived with his mother when his younger siblings died. In a jail phone call shortly after the children’s bodies were found, Colby screamed that Lori was a “murdering mother.” Since then, Colby has started the Scar Wars Podcast, where he talks about the case.
Court TV’s Trial Archives | ID v. Lori Vallow Daybell (2023)
On the most recent episode, posted on Oct. 6, Colby spoke in an undated recorded phone call with his mother for the first time in four years. Immediately upon hearing her son’s voice, Lori’s first questions to Colby were, “How are you doing? Are you okay?”
The call quickly turned contentious, with Colby reacting emotionally to comments his mother made about Tylee coming to visit her and saying, “I’m sorry for being such a brat.” Lori also emphatically denied referring to her children as “zombies,” contrary to what prosecutors said during her trial.
At her sentencing, Lori denied killing her children and instead suggested that their deaths had been accidental or the result of a drug overdose. When pressed for the details of how his siblings died, Lori eventually told her son that Tylee was responsible for JJ’s death and that after killing her little brother, Tylee took her own life.
“When I came in on that scene and they were gone, I thought Tylee did it to get back at me,” Lori told Colby. “I thought it was all my fault. I thought she was mad at me, and that’s what had happened. And the reason why she visited me and why JJ visited me and came to me right after that is because to tell me that it wasn’t my fault, because I was blaming myself 100 percent. 100 percent.”
Investigators say this photo showing Tylee and JJ with their uncle, Alex Cox, taken at Yellowstone National Park, is the last evidence of Tylee alive. (FBI)
But that claim runs contrary to the evidence that prosecutors presented at trial. The last confirmed sighting of Tylee alive was on Sept. 8, 2019, when she was with JJ, Lori and Lori’s brother, Alex Cox, at Yellowstone National Park. JJ was last seen alive on Sept. 22, when Lori’s friend Melanie Gibb and her boyfriend stayed over. Lori told Colby that in the two weeks leading up to that weekend, Tylee (who prosecutors say was already dead by that point) had stopped taking her anti-anxiety medication and birth control, which she implied contributed to what happened.
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Tylee and JJ’s bodies were found in a pet cemetery on Chad Daybell’s property. JJ’s remains were wrapped in bags with duct tape, while Tylee’s remains were damaged beyond all recognition. When Colby pressed his mother for answers on the conditions of his siblings’ bodies, she maintained that Tylee wanted to be cremated but also denied having any role in the disposal of the bodies.
Lori: “I wasn’t aware what happened to them after I left that scene.”
Colby: “So you gave the responsibility to someone else?”
Lori: “Correct, I did. I just ran out. … At the time, I didn’t want anyone to know what Tylee had done to JJ, and I wanted to continue to protect Tylee as her mother, who has been trying to protect her her whole life. … I would have done anything to protect Tylee.”
Lori continues to embrace controversial religious beliefs that include demonic possession and an insistence that she met with Jesus Christ at a Mormon temple. “When you have a visit from Jesus, a personal visit, because there is opposition in all things, you will have a personal visit from Lucifer,” Lori explained to Colby. “Jesus gave me a job, and Lucifer has done every single thing to get me to take my own life. Because if I leave here, I cannot do my job for Jesus.”
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Lori told Colby that there are eight women in her jail pod facing the death penalty and that she helps them daily with their workouts and their cases. She tearfully begged Colby for a chance to be in his life and that of his children. Colby told his mother, “I wish more than anything that I had my family. … One day, everybody was gone and everything was gone.”
Lori, who was sentenced for the murders in Idaho, is currently in Arizona awaiting trial for the murder of her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, and the attempted murder of her niece’s ex-husband, Brandon Boudreaux.
