Mega Edition: Lori Vallow And Those Who Knew Her Best (9/13/26)

The phone call between Lori Vallow Daybell and her surviving son Colby Ryan showed just how far removed Lori remained from the established evidence surrounding the deaths of Tylee Ryan and JJ Vallow. During the jailhouse conversation, Colby finally confronted his mother about how his siblings died, and Lori offered a version investigators said was incompatible with the evidence: she suggested Tylee had accidentally smothered JJ while trying to keep him quiet and then killed herself afterward. Colby rejected that explanation outright, saying his sister did not kill JJ and accusing Lori of unfairly putting the blame on Tylee. Melanie Gibb’s Dateline interview provided an equally damaging window into Lori’s behavior during the children’s disappearance. Gibb described Lori and Chad Daybell as mutually destructive, saying they had “deception in them” and were exceptionally comfortable lying. She recalled the moment Lori told police JJ was staying with her, even though he was not, and said she realized Lori and Chad were trying to use her as cover. Gibb later secretly recorded Lori insisting JJ was “safe and happy” when authorities now know he was already dead.

True-crime author John Glatt, who wrote The Doomsday Mother, viewed the case as one of the most disturbing he had ever covered. Glatt said that after writing roughly two dozen true-crime books, little compared with the brutality of what happened to Tylee and JJ and the deaths surrounding Lori and Chad. He was particularly struck by Lori’s behavior immediately after Charles Vallow was shot by her brother Alex Cox, pointing to body-camera footage in which Lori appeared relaxed enough to joke with police less than an hour after her husband had been killed. Glatt also emphasized the importance of Chad’s elaborate “light” and “dark” belief system and the way those ideas became intertwined with Lori’s worldview. Taken together, the Colby call, Gibb’s account and Glatt’s assessment painted a remarkably consistent picture: Lori did not simply become caught up in bizarre religious ideas, but repeatedly lied, manipulated people around her and continued constructing alternative explanations even after overwhelming evidence established what happened to her children.


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