Footage from an Idaho storage facility seems to show Lori Vallow with a man after her children Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 7, and Tylee Ryan, 17, went missing, according to CBS. Their unit is on the radar of investigators: authorities reportedly found some of the children’s possessions, including a backpack with the missing son’s initials.
“It was disturbing to see that it was the children’s belongings that were in that storage unit,” said Rich Robertson, a private investigator working with JJ Vallow’s grandparents Kay and Larry Woodcock.
A reported search warrant regarding the boy’s school records in Arizona was connected to an ongoing investigation for conspiracy to commit first-degree homicide said to have occurred on July 11, 2019. (This was the day Lori Vallow’s brother Alex Cox shot and killed her previous husband Charles Vallow.)
The children went missing last September 23, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Cops in Rexburg, Idaho singled out Lori Vallow, saying she refused to help in the search and just left the state. She and her new husband Chad Daybell turned up in Hawaii, and stonewalled a reporter who tried to interview them on camera. She didn’t answer an Idaho court order to turn over the kids.
All told, the family has a dizzying backstory.
Daybell’s late wife Tammy Daybell died just days before he married Vallow. Authorities exhumed her body in December to take another look in the wake of the children’s disappearance. As we mentioned before, her brother Alex Cox shot and killed her previous husband Charles Vallow last July 11 back when the family lived in Arizona, and he said it was in self-defense. That sibling then died in December of unclear causes. Also, Charles Vallow had claimed in court papers that his estranged wife asserted she was a “god” preparing for the Second Coming of Christ.
JJ Vallow’s former school, the L.I.F.E Academy in Phoenix, said the mother told them a very different story about what happened to the late spouse. Lori Vallow withdrew her son via phone and email on September 5, claimed she received a job promotion in California, and said Charles Vallow died by suicide the previous month, school officials said according to Fox 10 Phoenix.
The mother never followed the formal process to withdraw, and the school never got a records request from JJ’s new school (Kennedy Elementary in Rexburg, Idaho). Staff said this wasn’t normal. Police in Chandler, Arizona had a warrant to collect the missing boy’s records at the Academy. This was the aforementioned document connected to the conspiracy investigation.
[Screengrab via CBS This Morning]
