The Doomsday Mom: The Complete Story of Lori Vallow Daybell and Chad Daybell

On the morning of July 11, 2019, Charles Vallow drove to the house Lori was renting in Chandler, Arizona. He was there to pick up JJ and take him to school. He never left the house alive.

At 8:36 a.m., Lori’s brother Alex Cox called 911. “I got in a fight with my brother-in-law. and I shot him in self-defense,” he told the dispatcher.

Alex Cox’s Story

When police arrived, Alex gave his version of what happened. Charles and Lori had been arguing, he said. Tylee, then 16, stepped in holding a baseball bat. Charles took the bat from her and swung it. Alex said he grabbed Charles from behind and the two men fell to the floor, and then Charles hit him in the back of the head with the bat.

“I turned around and he hit me in the back of the head with the bat,” Alex told officers, according to body camera footage released by FOX 10 Phoenix. Asked why Charles would do that, he said: “I don’t know. He was enraged.” He showed detectives a gash on the back of his head.

Alex said he then went to get his gun. “So I went to my room and got my gun, ’cause I always carry it,” he told officers. He said he warned Charles to put the bat down, then shot him twice in the chest. He also told police that Lori, Tylee, and JJ had all left the house before he fired.

What Tylee Told Detectives

Tylee sat for a recorded interview with detectives that lasted about two hours. She said she woke up to yelling, grabbed a baseball bat, and stepped between Charles and her mother, pointing the bat at him. “I stuck the baseball bat out there, and he just grabbed it and tried to take it,” she said.

She described Charles stepping back “almost as if someone had pulled him back,” and said she heard a sound that “sounded like someone took (the bat) and hit it really hard against the floor.” She said she did not see the shooting. Her mother told her to take JJ out to the car. Lori came out almost right away, told Tylee that Alex was fine, and said they were going to take JJ to school.

Lori gave police yet another version. She said she heard a gunshot, walked from the kitchen into the living room, and found Charles dead. Then she went outside to the children and drove away in Charles’s rental car, coming back later.

Holes in the Story

On the day of the shooting, police accepted the self-defense claim. Alex and Lori were both questioned and released, and no one was charged. But the details didn’t line up.

Alex claimed he called 911 “within a few minutes” of the shooting. Detectives later found surveillance footage of Lori and the children going through a Burger King drive-thru that morning. Comparing that with the 911 call, they found a gap of about 42 to 43 minutes, and wrote that “someone’s account of the timeline is inaccurate.”

The physical evidence raised more questions. Alex said he shot Charles while he was standing. But Chandler detective testimony at Lori’s trial indicated that Charles appeared to have been shot once while standing and again while he was on the ground.

Detective Nathan Moffat, who drove Lori home from the police station, noticed something else. “The odd part about it would be the complete lack of emotion,” he later said. “This just doesn’t feel right.” The family’s landlord, Joe Pongratz, wrote on Facebook that Lori “never sounded shocked, sad or heartbroken.”

Charles’s family was sure it was no accident. Kay Woodcock publicly called it a “setup” and “murder.”

The Texts After the Shooting

Years later, at Lori’s trial, an FBI agent walked jurors through thousands of text messages recovered from Lori’s iCloud account. The messages from the weeks after Charles died told a very different story than the one Lori gave police.

There were no signs of grief. Instead, Chad was sending Lori long romantic messages, which investigators called a “romance novel,” written about “James” and “Elena.” Lori, meanwhile, was focused on money. On July 18, 2019, a week after Charles died, she found out she was not the beneficiary of his life insurance. “He left nothing for jj!” she wrote. She noted that she would “still get the 4000 a month from SS,” meaning Social Security survivor benefits for the children. She also wrote: “He changed it in March…Ned before we got rid of him.”

Other messages showed the couple applying their beliefs to the people closest to them:

FBI Special Agent Douglas Hart testified that the couple had assigned names to the spirits they believed had taken over people. “Hillary” was the name for the spirit in Tylee, he said, and “Rhonda” was a dark spirit in Kay Woodcock. The numbers in the texts became known as “death percentages.” In one message that summer, Chad told Lori that Tammy’s percentage had “fallen steadily.”

The Move to Rexburg

Within weeks of Charles’s death, Lori packed up and moved north. By the end of August 2019, she, Tylee, JJ, and Alex Cox had all relocated to Rexburg, Idaho, just a short drive from Chad Daybell’s home in Salem. They took apartments in the same complex on Pioneer Road. Lori’s niece Melani also moved into an apartment there.

On September 3, 2019, Lori enrolled JJ at Kennedy Elementary School in Rexburg. Tylee was never enrolled in any Idaho school, though Lori would later claim her daughter was attending BYU-Idaho.

From the outside, it looked like a widowed mother making a fresh start. In reality, the family’s last weeks together had begun.