Lori Daybell
Newly released audio raises new questions around Idaho defendant Lori Daybell (aka Lori Vallow). She said in an October 2018 religious meeting she had wanted to kill her then-dead former husband Joseph Ryan, 59. Audio was supplied to East Idaho News by Ryan’s sister Annie Cushing, who voiced the hope that police in Phoenix, Arizona would investigate her brother’s death, which was ostensibly caused by a heart attack on April 3, 2018.
Cushing is sort of getting her wish. Cops in Arizona said they are reviewing the case, but they stopped short of saying they were re-investigating.
To clarify, this does not mean the case is being re-opened. It is under review. https://t.co/DEyD2dg9zB
— Justin Lum (@jlumfox10) November 8, 2020
Cushing did not say how she obtained the recording, but the news outlet said they confirmed the voices of some people at the meeting.
“I would go through the scriptures and find all the things,” Daybell–then married to Charles Vallow–said the following about her contentious relationship with Ryan. “If he comes against you once, if he comes against you twice, if he comes against you three times, then you can kill him. It says it in the scriptures.”
Daybell’s relationship with Ryan was demonstrably ugly; her brother Alex Cox was once charged for tasering Ryan and threatening to kill him in 2007. Colby Ryan, Lori Daybell’s son from an earlier relationship, said his stepfather Joseph Ryan was both physical and sexually abusive.
All of that is complicated enough, but things got even more convoluted after Joseph Ryan’s death.
Cox shot and killed Charles Vallow when the family still lived in Arizona in 2019. Lori (at the time Lori Vallow) moved to Idaho with Tylee Ryan (her then-16 year-old daughter with Joseph Ryan), and her adopted son 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow. The children went missing in September 2019. Their mother ended up marrying her fifth husband Chad Daybell; she was charged with allegedly snubbing a court order to turn over the kids.
The bodies of the children were found in June 2020 on property belonging to Chad Daybell. No homicide charges have been filed, but Lori Daybell and her new husband are charged in connection to hiding these remains. Alex Cox, who died in December of a blood clot, is being treated as an unindicted co-conspirator.
[Mugshot via Madison County Jail]
