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BOISE, Idaho — Just a month before “doomsday mom” Lori Vallow’s daughter Tylee Ryan was last seen on Sept. 8, 2019, Lori Vallow texted her secret lover Chad Daybell and asked if there was a “perfectly orchestrated plan to take the children.”
Her children’s remains — 16-year-old Tylee Ryan and 7-year-old JJ Vallow — were found in the back of Daybell’s rural Salem property on June 9, 2020, abandoned, discarded and buried in shallow graves. JJ Vallow was last seen on Sept. 22, 2019, wearing red pajamas. He was later found in those red pajamas, bound in duct tape with a plastic bag around his head.
Tylee Ryan was last seen on Sept. 8, 2019, in Yellowstone National Park with her mother and uncle. Her remains were unrecognizable — chopped, burned, charred and only identifiable through DNA.
When Lori Vallow texted Chad Daybell — a self proclaimed prophet and the person who fed her theories on past lives, demonic possession and zombies — on Aug. 10, 2019, she asked him if they have to wait for the “perfectly orchestrated plan to take the children” to be carried out.
“We just have to wait for it to be carried out? I feel lost. Like I should be doing something to help,” Lori Vallow texted him.
These text messages were discovered on Lori Vallow’s iCloud account, and testified to, by former FBI Special Agent Douglas Hart, who is now the chief deputy of the Canyon County Sheriff’s Office.
“There is a plan being orchestrated for the children,” Chad Daybell replies to her. “I was shown last night how it fit together, but it has been taken from my mind of course.”
Lori Vallow, or Lori Vallow Daybell, is now on trial for the murders of her children and conspiracy to commit murder in the death of Chad Daybell’s wife, Tammy Daybell, who died by asphyxiation on Oct. 19, 2020.
The couple were having a secret affair after meeting in 2018 at a religious conference while Lori Vallow was still married to her husband, Charles Vallow. He was shot and killed by Lori Vallow’s brother, Alex Cox, on July 11, 2019. She has been indicted for conspiracy to commit murder in the death of Charles Vallow in Arizona, but that case is on hold pending her Idaho trial.
“You are doing everything right, my love. The Lord told me she is right on track… He said to just keep resolving the telestial issues so you are unbecombered and fully free,” Chad Daybell told Lori Vallow in a text from August of 2019.
She replied that it “feels good” her son, JJ Vallow, was “talking to the real Blake.”
“Getting close… I sensed he was barely attached to his body,” she wrote.
“You’re so incredible in many ways, your mission has barely begun,” Chad Daybell replies. Lori Vallow responds shortly later: “As long as it end with you… It’s all good.”
Just before August, Lori Vallow took a trip to California with JJ Vallow and her niece, Melani Pawlowski, as well as Pawlowski’s children. During this trip. Chad Daybell texts Lori Vallow that he has a question for her.
“Do you want me to cause pain yet to those two 3s you’re riding with?”
She tells him to hold off.
“They will be mistake to deal with. But I’ll text you if they start acting up and we can zap them,” Lori Vallow wrote.
“Sounds great,” Chad Daybell texts back. “Yes, if they are going to act up, we’ll at least give them a reason to scream. I love, cherish and adore you. The wonderful memories keep coming back. You are mesmerizing. Raphael is one lucky guy.”
“Death percentages” were discussed frequently, according to Hart, which is what he believed through his investigation indicated how close a person was to their death. Hart said on the stand that he felt Chad Daybell went very back and forth about what the “death percentages” meant — he felt that sometimes, the closer the percentage was to 100 meant close to death, and sometimes it was the other way around.
The secret couple also often named what they believed to be evil spirits or demons inside the people closest to them, text messages show.
Hart said the two referred to the demon in Ryan’s body as “Hillary,” the demon in Charles Vallow’s body as “Ned” or “Garrett” and the demon in Tammy Daybell’s body as “Hiplos” and “Viola.” Chad Daybell sometimes referred to himself as “James” and Lori Vallow as “Lili” or “Elena.”
Chad Daybell previously texted Lori Vallow on July 18, 2019 that he was “instructed” to focus his efforts on Hillary, the demon inside Ryan, setting the thought that the two children could be possessed straight into motion.
Lori Vallow responds, asking him to find out the “percentages” for Ryan and her son, JJ Vallow.
“She is at 0.13. I turned up the pain to 10 and placed a spiritual virus in her. He is at 99.99… Raphael visited him and told him to follow Amy into the light. I also assured him that James would love and take care of his mommy, which he will with all of his heart and soul,” Chad Daybell texts her.
He later tells her JJ Vallow’s percentage is at two and Tammy Daybell’s percentage is at three. Chad Daybell mentions a chart of people he came up with that indicates “what percentage mortals are still in their body.”
Chad Daybell says the chart worked effectively for his neighbor, George Bush and Stan Lee.
On Aug. 7, 2019, Lori Vallow tells Chad Daybell they are “both so tired of taking care of demons.”
“We are weary. Please ask the Lord to take them!” she says in a text.
At one point in August of 2019, the two get in an argument where Lori Vallow ends up ignoring Chad Daybell’s messages to her. He begins texting her multiple times.
“The angels are angry you are ignoring me… I’m not trying to manipulate you to respond, I understand you need your space… But the protection I built around your house is gone,” he tells her. She later responds, “I love you!”
Later that month, Lori Vallow encourages Chad Daybell in a text message to “check” her daughter, Tylee Ryan.
“She is being super sweet and helpful and she cleaned her room. She is switched. Totally not her. See if she got switched,” she writes.
Chad Daybell texts her back that Ryan “was switched.”
“Please let me know when you can talk and I will explain it,” he says in the texts.
She also asks him to “check JJ” because he is calm and watching movies, the texts show.
“I’m told she is lying about him being calm and watching movies,” Chad Daybell writes.
The two continually text each other in the summer months and into fall that they have no patience in waiting to be together, as the children and Tammy Daybell were still alive. Chad Daybell even refers to himself as Harry Potter, who is trapped in a closet under the stairs and only able to come out every few weeks. The texts are very romantic, sometimes inherently sexual. Hart said they’d often refer to Chad Daybell’s genitalia as “the storm.”
As the discussion of demons and evil spirits progress, Lori Vallow asks again what her son’s “percentage” is.
“Is he at zero yet?” she asks Chad Daybell. Lori Vallow tells him he was “up all night talking nonsense.”
Chad Daybell replies that yes, JJ Vallow is now “at zero” and that he was talking to people who were both “light and dark” which meant, according to previous testimony, good and evil. He says he is so sick of “telestial relatives” that are obstacles between he and Lori Vallow.
No texts are shown from Lori Vallow’s iCloud accounts in the beginning of September 2019, when the children went missing. However, this doesn’t mean there isn’t any — another agent on the stand said four weeks into the trial that the couple had multiple “burner phones” they used, which is a cheap, typically untraceable phone that can be discarded or destroyed easily.
Just before Tylee Ryan’s disappearance, Lori Vallow texts her brother Alex Cox that he needs more practice at the shooting range and tells him she’s working on some “Z’s” to which Hart said meant “zombies.”
“We r trying to get to the bottom of what we need to do to eliminate them completely. I am sure you will be told also,” she writes.
Cox texts back, “Excellent.”
In a text message gap from August 2019 to September 2019, two days after JJ Vallow was last seen, his babysitter Sidney Woodbury texts Lori Vallow asking if there is still a plan for her to watch JJ Vallow that day.
Lori Vallow responds that her son’s grandparents took him for a few weeks and she will be doing some traveling in Hawaii.
She stopped using her iCloud accounts the next month, according to previous testimony, right around when she and Chad Daybell fled to Hawaii and got married on Nov. 5, 2019. On Nov. 27, 2019, police issued their welfare check on JJ Vallow, and the investigation into the children’s disappearance began.
Douglas Hart, whose team was involved from the beginning — when Rexburg Police contacted the FBI for help — said he never stopped looking for the children until they were found.
“You always hope for the best outcome and work as tirelessly as possible until the case is resolved,” he told the jury. And yes, Lori Vallow was a good mother, he said — “with the exception of what happened to her children.”
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