Lori Vallow offered to 'pray' with husband Chad Daybell as cops searched home for bodies of their missing kids
Authorities have released a phone call between Lori Vallow and her husband on the day the bodies of her two missing children were recovered from his backyard. Vallow, who is currently in jail on a $1 million bond, was heard talking to Chad Daybell in a recording played as evidence during the husband's two-day preliminary hearing Tuesday, People reported. "Are you okay?" Vallow asks Daybell on the June 9 call.
"They’re searching the property,” he responds, seeming upset.
“The house right now?” Lori asks, before Daybell confirms and tells her that her lawyer will speak with her.
Vallow then asks her husband what she can do for him, if she can pray with him. Daybell, however, tells his wife, "I'm feeling pretty calm."
Daybell is facing charges including conspiracy to commit destruction, alteration, or concealment of evidence in the disappearance of J.J. and his sister, Tylee Ryan, 17. Their bodies were found on June 9 in the backyard of Daybell's Idaho residence.
Daybell, a religious doomsday fanatic, married Vallow on November 5, 2019. The pair quickly came under scrutiny after J.J.'s out-of-state grandparents filed a missing-persons report over the kids' disappearance later that month. J.J. was reportedly the adoptive son of Vallow from a previous marriage.
The couple reportedly fled their Rexburg home before police could execute a search warrant. They were eventually located on January 25 in Kaua’i, Hawaii -- without the children. Vallow, who refused a court order to turn her children over the police or child welfare officials, was arrested in Hawaii on February 20.
Rexburg police said that while looking for the children, they were able to document several misleading statements the pair had made about their whereabouts, and then said they “strongly believe that Joshua and Tylee’s lives [were] in danger.”
According to a court filing in Madison County, Idaho, J.J. was last seen on September 23 at his school in Rexburg. His mother unenrolled him and reportedly told the principal she was considering home-schooling the kid. Meanwhile, the last known picture of Tylee was taken on September 8, when she was on a day trip to Yellowstone National Park with her mother, brother, and uncle Alex Cox.
Cox's cellphone records indicated he was on Daybell's property on two dates that aligned with the last time the kids were spotted. Authorities used that as a lead to look for the children's bodies at the site.
Joshua was found wrapped in plastic and duct tape, with his ankles and hands tied in the ground. While his sister's remains were burned.
"It was a mass of dismembered human remains, partially burnt. We did the best we could but it was kind of hard to recognize," the court was told by detectives. "We just couldn't tell what we were dealing with. We ended up excavating all the way around it and at the very bottom of this mass, we find this melted green bucket and then to the bottom, to the side of that green bucket, we eventually find a skull. ...we find some teeth."
That said, no one has been charged in J.J. and Tylee's deaths.
Vallow is remanded in custody on earlier charges of "desertion and nonsupport of dependent children, as well as resisting or obstructing officers, criminal solicitation to commit a crime, contempt of court and willful disobedience of court process or order for defying a December court order to produce the two kids," according to People.
While she has pleaded not guilty to those charges, she is also charged with conspiracy to commit destruction, alteration or concealment of evidence. Vallow has not entered a plea agreement as yet.