‘Doomsday mom’ seen smiling and laughing in police interview hours after husband’s death
Footage released by Arizona police shows Tylee Ryan, months before she was allegedly murdered by mother Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell
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Lori Vallow laughed and joked about her estranged husband during a police interview hours after he had been killed by her brother, in newly released footage that also shows her late daughter Tylee Ryan.
Police in Arizona released a trove of evidence from their investigation into the 2019 homicide of Ms Vallow’s fourth husband, Charles Vallow.
Mr Vallow, 62, was shot dead by Ms Vallow’s brother Alex Cox in July 2019 after an argument, and his death was ruled a homicide by an Arizona coroner last week.
Mr Cox claimed he fired in self-defence, and died in 2019 of natural causes before charges could be brought.
Ms Vallow has been charged with conspiracy in connection with her late husband’s death.
Months after the video was taken, she and her fifth husband, Chad Daybell were also accused of murdering her two children Tylee, 17, and JJ Ryan, 7.
They went missing in September 2019, and their bodies were found buried on Mr Daybell’s Idaho property in June 2020.
In the new video released by the Chandler Police Department this week, Ms Vallow tells a detective she had been seeking a divorce from her husband of 14 years.
“I don’t like him, and that’s just how it is,” Ms Vallow says.
She said Mr Vallow had favoured her younger child JJ, a special needs student, and often fought with her older daughter Tylee.
On the night that Mr Vallow died, Ms Vallow got into a fight with him at her rented home in Phoenix. Her daughter Tylee came out of her room carrying a baseball bat and told him to “leave her mother alone”.
“Then my brother heard all the commotion… My brother grabbed him from behind,” she said.
“They’re on the ground grappling or whatever.”
Ms Vallow later said she was trying to get away from her husband when she heard a shot, and then saw him lying on the ground.
In the video footage of Tylee’s interview, she said her stepdad “just looked like kind of a crazy person”.
“Like screaming and like his face was beet red, he just looked like really mad. I remember when he took the bat from me I saw his face for a split second and honestly it didn’t even look like him, he just looked like pure rage, like he was just seeing red.”
Lori Vallow is accused of plotting with her brother Alex Cox to kill Charles Vallow.
She and her husband, alleged “Doomsday Cultist” Chad Daybell, are also accused of murdering Ms Vallow’s two children JJ and Tylee. Mr Daybell is separately charged with the murder of his wife Tammy Daybell in 2019.
Chad Daybell also ran a publishing company and wrote books that were focused on the biblical “end times” and loosely based on the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Prosecutors in Idaho are planning to seek the death penalty against Mr Daybell.
Ms Vallow has been deemed unfit to stand trial and is confined to a psychiatric facility.