She’s the mother of two missing kids and she’s got doomsday cult connections — as well as multiple husbands. Several states are now involved in the ongoing criminal controversy over those two vanished minors who were last seen in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming in September 2019 — an outing federal agents believe was photographed, but as of yet, those photos have yet to be produced.
Lori Vallow Daybell was finally arrested in Hawaii in late February after nonchalantly giving the slip to local police in Rexberg, Idaho. And, according to a recent court filing, she referred to her own two children as “zombies” around the time they went missing.
Those claims come by way of an Arizona court document filed by Brandon Boudreaux last week.
Boudreaux is the ex-husband of Vallow’s niece, Melani Boudreaux Pawlowski. The court filing containing the zombie charge isn’t directly related to Vallow’s criminal case. Rather, it’s part of an ongoing custody battle between Boudreaux and Pawlowski over their own children — whose whereabouts are known.
Boudreaux, who currently has possession of his children, is fighting to keep them all the way away from Pawlowski for at least a couple of reasons: (1) he believes Pawlowski shares Vallow’s alleged doomsday belief system; and (2) he also thinks Pawlowski knows exactly where seven-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow and 17-year-old Tylee Ryan are located. Pawlowski, for her part, denies both charges.
Melani Pawlowski got her new last name by marrying a man called Ian Pawlowski — who is believed to be cooperating with police through his attorneys — shortly after she and Boudreaux were divorced.
To hear Ian’s side of it, Melani’s religious ideas were initially “harmless at first,” and she had acquired them through her relationship with her aunt and her fifth husband, Chad Daybell, who married Vallow immediately after his wife Tammy Daybell died. Daybell is not officially suspected of her murder, and autopsy results on her cause of death are still pending.
Obtained by East Idaho News, the exhibit contains a lengthy recitation of documents detailing what Ian Pawlowski allegedly told his attorneys after being questioned by police in Idaho late last year. According to the outlet, “three sources [say those documents] came from Pawlowski’s computer.”
Pawlowski allegedly wrote:
[Melani] explained zombies and her fears about what Chad and Lori stated concerning the original spirits being caught in limbo until the body’s death. She stated that [Boudreaux] had been possessed by a demon or another dark entity sometime after June of [2019]. She was told either through revelation or by Chad…that something needed to happen to [Boudreaux] in order for his spirit to progress and for the Lord’s plan to continue. She didn’t take well to the idea of her husband dying as part of the Lord’s plan, but didn’t think action would be taken by anyone.
Enter dead man Alex Cox.
Not the famed punk rock-turned-superstar-turned independent film director. This Cox is Vallow’s deceased brother who, perhaps unsurprisingly, died mysteriously in December 2019. He previously killed Vallow’s fourth husband, Charles Vallow, and is suspected of having fired upon Boudreaux — which appears to be referenced in Pawlowski’s alleged above statement to his attorneys.
Most of the document concerns the massive cast of characters — and many more people peripherally involved, and their alleged murder plot against Boudreaux — as well as a sundry list of the doomsday cult’s heterodox religious beliefs. Those beliefs are described as “a tabletop [role playing game] based on the Bible.”
The lengthy statement expresses concern for Melani’s safety and paints her as a misunderstood victim of Vallow’s and Daybell’s, but it also expresses Ian’s own shock and torment with having to account for his new bride’s complicated family relationships and ideas “ripped straight out a Dungeons & Dragons manual.”
“The discussion moved to Chad and Lori’s missing children,” the alleged Pawlowski document continues. “At the time, only JJ was counted as missing and the Rexburg PD had conducted raids on Melani’s apartment along with Al’s. Melani had been told by Chad and Lori that their children had been possessed and had become zombies. She shared concerns that she’s been told Brandon needed to die and that may indicate that the [sic] Tylee and JJ needed to die as well.”
Read the full and stunning document here.
[Image via CBS This Morning.]
