“While in the sealing room, a spirit came up to me and kissed me on the cheek before going through the wall. And there were people who spoke to me. Suddenly, I heard a very loud voice. I looked around and said to myself : “Has anyone heard? No? OK. And he entrusted me with a mission…”. Lori Vallow felt that she had the power of a goddess, a prophet who had been entrusted with a mission, the apocalypse was about to arrive and “there would be 144,000 people who would be saved and continue with God’s handiwork.” The rest were evil spirits that hid in the bodies of people. Actually, for Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell, they were no longer people, they were zombies.
Among them were her children, J.J, 6 1/2, and Tylee, 16. They had been listed as evil spirits. She had to put an end to them, like her ex-husband, like her ex-wife, like Lori’s niece’s ex-husband. They were killed, burned, dismembered, buried on Chad Daybell’s property in Arizona.
This week, four years after she killed her children, Lori Vallow has been sentenced to three consecutive life sentences, while the Netflix documentary The Sins of Our Mother, which tells the terrible story of this woman, has been placed as one of the most viewed content on the platform. A true crime in which Colby Ryan, the eldest son of this murderous mother, tries to close a wound that not even the American Justice will be able to close. In the words of Idaho Judge Steven W. Boyce, “I don’t think to this day he has any remorse for the suffering and pain he caused.”
The sins of our mother tries to shed light on one of the most mediatic and most terrible cases in the US, not only because of how horrible it is that a mother kills her children but, above all, why.
“The angel Moroni has guided me. The angels have guided me a lot. I don’t need much sleep anymore because the angels are constantly waking me up and telling me what I can do to further the work of the lord.” She is Lori Vallow, a seductive, attractive woman, raised in Mormonism and with “a tendency to super-spiritualize everything”, as she recalls her father in the docuseries.
This was -and continues to be- the life of Lori Vallow, who has been treated by several psychiatrists since she was unsuccessfully arrested. A life that seemed normal but behind it was intense and dark; a life marked by passions, frustrated marriages, an extreme and strange religious fanaticism and deaths…
Lori Cox, her real name – she would acquire the surname Vallow from her fourth husband – was the third of four siblings: Adam, Alex, Lori and Summer. She was born in California and raised Mormon. “Lori loved The Book of Mormon,” Lori’s mother recounts. She marries very young, just after finishing high school, and her first child Colby is born. She separates and remarries. She is born Tylee. But what seemed like the perfect story turns into a nightmare. Her third husband is a man who, according to Colby’s account, abused him and mistreated them. Lori ran away. “I told my mother everything that she had done to me. She was silent and made me feel like she had done something wrong. I felt like I had ruined her life. That was the turning point for her.” Colby explains.
“A turning point in my life led me to the temple. I was married to someone horrible, who raped my children.” And she was going to kill him. I thought I couldn’t take it anymore and I told my bishop and I thought: ‘Unless I dedicate my life to the temple I will commit murder. I was honest because, at that moment, I had nothing to lose. I wanted to avoid spilling blood and stop suffering.” It was Lori. It was 2005.
Years later and after living from one place to another, he meets Charles Vallow: “My mother married Charles because she loved him, but also because it gave her financial security. We all did not feel comfortable and in 2013 they adopted J.J.”. The little boy had autism and was Charles’ great-nephew. Lori’s religious obsession was on the rise. Her faith had grown more extreme. And it is when her son Colby marries Kelsee that everything becomes extreme.
He began to buy stocks of rice, legumes, powdered milk, “he was preparing for the end, as if we had to survive the zombies,” friends close to Lori during those years declare in the documentary.
“We come together as saints, as brothers and sisters and prepare for the second coming of Christ. We want to be there together and we want to be strong and together.” 2016. Lori Vallow and her brother Alex Cox meet Melanie Gibb, Zulema Pastenes and… Chad Deybell. Chad believed that he was a prophet whose mission was to save good souls from the end of the world that was to come on July 22, 2020. Lori becomes obsessed with him. Chad’s story is that of a young Mormon who began by converting people to Mormonism. At a very young age he jumped off a cliff, collided with a wall and was knocked unconscious. It was his first experience with death. “In his imagination this gives him the power of a prophet,” says a clinical and forensic psychologist who treated both of them. He marries Tammy, with whom he has five children, and begins to write books about the coming of the Apocalypse. Lori fell for him, so much so that she ended her marriage to Charles Vallow. Months later Charles died at the hands of Alex Cox. So they considered the case in self-defense. It would later be shown not to.
Charles Vallow was the first to realize that Lori had completely lost her mind. But she had created a spider web in which she had hooked everyone around her. He made believe that Charles had been unfaithful, that he was stealing her from her, that he wanted to end her. And everyone, including the police, believed her. “The policemen believed that Charles was crazier than her,” they explain in the documentary. Alex was Lori’s execution arm, as she Lori had convinced him that Charles’s body had been possessed by a demon she called Ned Schneider and had to be ended.
It was a system that Chad Deybell had created that scored people according to whether they were evil spirits or good spirits. If you are evil, your body is not there. You are a zombie and the only way to release the evil spirit is to kill the body. According to Chad, there were 20,000 zombies. When J.J. and Tylee disappear an email sent to Colby by Charles days before he was killed warned that Lori was convinced that JJ and Tylee, her own children were zombies, were evil spirits. Tylee a level 4.1 spirit; J.J., a 6-year-old boy, 3.7. At that time no one read it, they were in Lori’s spider web. Then it was too late.
In October 2019 Tammy, Chad’s wife dies under strange circumstances. A healthy 49-year-old woman dies in her home. Chad Deybell had texted Lori hours before Tammy died: “She has been possessed by a level 3 evil entity named Viola.” Nothing is investigated. Lori and Chad got married weeks later. The wedding ring Lori wore was bought weeks before Tammy died.
Chad, Lori and the whole group leave for Rexburg, the town that Chad believed was going to be the new Jerusalem. And it is there where after a complaint from the grandparents of J.J. a police patrol arrives. The children are not. Lori lies and tells them that they are in Arizona with a friend. When the Police verify that the children are not with Melanie Gibb they return to the house. They have all disappeared. Not a trace of them remains.
The disappearance of children jumps to the media. Everybody’s looking for Lori, Chad, J.J. and Tylee. Colby calls her mother, who tells her not to worry, that she’s taking care of everything. Lori’s phone was never active again.
In January 2020, after months of searching, Lori and Chad were located in the Hawaiian town of Kauai, where Lori had already lived with Charles Vallow and their children. There is no trace of the children. She is given 24 hours to show up with the children, she never gets to show up with them and she is arrested. “What do you think I’ve done?” is heard in the docuseries in Lori’s first conversation with her already-arrested son Colby. Lori tells him about Abraham and Isaac and tells him the story of how Abraham was willing to sacrifice her son because God had asked him to.
On June 9, the Police search the house and property of Chad from Arizona and find burned human remains in the garden: they were J.J. and Tylee. “When we removed the dirt, we observed a boy in red pajamas. In Lori’s iCloud there was a heartbreaking image from September 22, 2019: JJ on the couch in those pajamas. It was the last photograph of him. That day he was murdered.
Tylee’s body had been dismembered and burned. Investigators believe her uncle Alexander – who died of a clot in his lung in December 2019 – was responsible for burying her. To J.J. she had been tied up with tape, she had plastic over her head and it was inside a black garbage bag.
Lori Vallow will never get out of jail. Chad Daybell will stand trial in 2024 and could face the death penalty. “It’s inhumane to take your children that you should care for and do to them what they did to them,” says Colby Ryan.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project