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two Crime Conversations. We've handpicked some of the most chilling and thought provoking episodes from our feed, including gripping cult stories, powerful interviews with crime victims, and in depth accounts from women who have been incarcerated sharing the journeys that led them to that place. And that's just the beginning. We first brought you the story of Valo day Bell Doomsday
murders in twenty twenty two. As you'll hear, in November twenty nineteen, police conducted a welfare check on seven year old JJ Valow. He hadn't been seen since September, and police will come to realize that neither had his teenage sister. Their parents led a Mormon religious group, which police would discover to be a very sinister cult. Here's our original conversation.
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This episode deals with pedophilia and child abuse. Listener discretion is advised. It's a Tuesday in November twenty nineteen, and the autumn days in Rexburg, Idaho are getting cooler as winter fast approaches. Police are on the doorstep of five hundred and sixty five Pioneer Road, conducting a welfare check on seven year old JJ Vallo. JJ's grandparents haven't spoken to him for months, and they're getting really worried. His mum, Laurie Vallo, answers the door bye, thank you.
So yeah, this is a big mess. I just liked to the guy already asked you. He was just saying that you wanted to do a well chair day. So Jaj we Arizona. Who's he worked in Arizona. He's with one of my friends in Arizona.
But JJ isn't in Arizona. He's not with one of Laurie's friends. And his big sister, Tylie is missing too. Neither child has been seen since around September, when the family first moved from Arizona to Idaho, a few months after the shooting death of Lourie's fourth husband, police have stumbled on a web of lies that are about to unravel. Affairs, mysterious deaths, a doomsday cult, and at the center of it all two missing children and a mother who isn't trying to find them.
Where are your kids? Your comment? They've been missing for four months. You have nothing to say. Just tell us where they are.
I'm Jimmy Bath and this is True Crime Conversations Amma mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. In today's episode, I'm speaking with journalist and author Leah Sattilly. Her book When the Moon Turns to Blood examines the trail of mysterious deaths surrounding Lori Valo and her husband, doomsday novelist Chad Daybell. A reminder before we get into the episode. While the couple are facing charges, they are
yet to stand trial for their alleged crimes. Leah, can you give us a bit of an overview as to who Lourie Valo was before all of this went down? What was her family makeup, did she have a career, what was her story?
Yeah, that's a great question. I think it was actually a little bit hard to find when I was doing the reporting for this book. She was somebody that wasn't super online. She didn't have a high profile career or anything. But what is known about her is that most of her time she spent just being a stay at home mom. For a time, she did work as a hairdresser in Texas, which is probably why her hair always looks so amazing even in jail. But for most of the time, she
was just concentrating on being a mother. You know, it's a big part of the LDS faith that the Mormon church, you know, to be in a mother means to be a nurturer and a childcare provider. And that's a lot of what she did and her life really was when she wasn't working as a hairdresser anymore. It was raising her children. It was going to church, teaching Sunday school, and participating in church activities.
And she'd had quite a few husbands as well. She was onto her fulls by the time this story kind of really picks up.
Yes, So my understanding is that she married her high school sweetheart. It was something that was her first marriage. She sort of took off. Her family didn't even know that she was getting married. That was a very brief marriage. Her second marriage equally brief, but she did get pregnant and that was the father of her first son, Colby, who is alive. And that marriage I don't even think last of the year. Then she got a little bit
more into more serious relationships. So she was married to Joseph Ryan for quite some time, who is the father of Tyleie Ryan. And when that marriage fell apart, she married Charles Vaalo, her fourth husband and the father of JJ Vaalo. They adopted JJ together.
Can you set the scene a little bit about who JJ and Tylie were? Who were they as children?
Yeah, so that's a really good question. I spent so much of the book trying to understand who these children were beyond their photographs, because that's really what everybody knows about them. There are these two kids, they're in these photos, and that's kind of it. Tylie Ryan seemed by all accounts to be this very precocious, very intelligent child. She went to an art based school. At one point she
was into dancing, you know, real sarcastic, quick humor. Like kids at school couldn't even really bully her because she would just like come right back at them, just kind of like a really tough kid with a great sense of humor and a good head on her shoulders. Also really into church, you know, doing things that you know any girl would do. She was really into Hamilton. She you know, crushed on different celebrities with her girlfriends and
went to Disneyland and did all of those things. And she completed her ged so she didn't finish high school, but she did a certificate to kind of do the equivalent of that, and was trying to figure out what she was going to do next in her life. And then her little brother was JJ Vallo. So it's a real complicated family web here. I'll see if I can explain it easily. So Laurie was married to Charles Valo. Charles Valo's sister is a woman named Kay Woodcock who
is a real big figure in this story. Kay Woodcock has her own son, and her son had a little boy who's JJ. He had a different name when he was born for a variety of reasons I don't think we can really get into. He couldn't care for the child, and Kay Woodcock said to her brother, Charles, you know, are you and Laurie maybe in a position that you could adopt this little boy if they wanted to kind of keep him in the family, and they said yes. So Laurie and Charles adopted JJ when he was two
years old. They gave him a new name. He was born Canaan and they named him Joshua. And he was on autism spectrum, so he had really kind of high needs that required a lot of their energy, a lot of their time, and a lot of their understanding. They sent JJ to a special school that was you know, catered to kids on the spectrum, and he had a lot of success there. He had his own guide dog named Bailey, and seemed by all accounts to be a
really happy kid. And he remaintained a really close relationship with his grandparents, Kay Woodcock and Larry Woodcock.
So Charles who is the adopted father of JJ. So Laurie and Charles were together, you know, for more than a decade of marriage before things started to turn sah there. What did start happening because Laurie started to get involved in some teachings around that time.
When they met, you know, there was a big age difference between them, Like I think that they would joke that he was kind of like a sugar daddy a little bit, and she was kind of this hot, you know wife, and they thought that was real funny and they're a beautiful couple, and you know, yeah, like you said, about a decade into their relationship, Laurie started to entertain ideas really at the fringes of the Mormon faith, things
that are not acceptable to talk about in church. And you know, Charles converted to Mormonism for Laurie, so he was also a real active member in the church. She continued to go to her local ward every Sunday and teach Sunday School, but on the side, she was becoming a part of these groups that would sort of you know, read into scripture and really kind of fringy extremist ways, sort of looking for radical teachings within the Book of Mormon,
entertaining things like energy work and near death experiences. And also she started attending conferences on the sort of survivalist prepper circuit within the inter Mountain West, so like Utah, Arizona, and really kind of sinking deeply into this culture that the mainstream LDS church has long been like no, no, no, this is not what we teach, this is not who
we are. This is not Mormonism. But even so, there's like what I found in my reporting, there's a lot of people who want to like level up their faith. That's kind of what they'll say. They're like seeking something more. They're not satisfied with, you know, just being a normal Mormon. They want something that's going to make them feel a
little closer to their faith. And so what I found was that I thought she was maybe a part of like a fringe minority, and you know, that's the is the case, but it's a lot bigger than I thought. These conferences and these groups of people that kind of entertain this stuff.
Now we're going to go into Chad in Daytail later, but he's already kind of on the picture now because he is a big influence in all of this stuff that she's kind of sinking into.
Exactly she met Chad on that prepper circuit. He was in Your Death Experience author had kind of like a small cachet I think, like of celebrity within that circuit, and that's where they met. That's how they came together.
Am I right in saying that one of the issues between Charles and Laurie's relationship is that he is accusing her of having an affair, she's accusing him of having an affair. There's all this kind of it gets a bit messy.
It did. It got very messy. I think that one thing that I had to understand in doing my reporting was that, you know, Charles was no angel, and that in no way means that he should not be alive. But there's no excuse for him being killed. But he definitely started to have a sense that something was going on with Laurie. You know, she had said to him, look, I can kill you with my powers. I'm a goddess.
Like she started to really be out and proud about the things that she was believing, and Charles was like, what is going on with you? And he tried really to ring the alarm kind of at church with her friends, with her family, and kind of got shut down at every point. Now, she also accused him of cheating on her. She had said something to Kay Woodcock about that he was paying prostitutes, and she'd found some kind of credit card receipts and stuff. You know, it was clear that
their marriage was really falling apart. At one point, Laurie disappeared for two months and went to Hawaii and left JJ. You know, with Charles, he had no idea where she was, and he filed for divorce. When she came back, he revoked that filing for divorce because he said, I think we can make it work, but of course it didn't work.
Yeah, so I want to take us to July eleven, twenty nineteen, emergency service is a cold to Laurie's house. Laurie and Charles's house, what was happening.
So what happened was Charles had started getting more aggressive with Laurie, saying, I'm going to expose you. I'm going to expose you and your boyfriend, Chad Dabel. I'm going to tell all these faithful people that you're around that you're not really living by the way the church says,
that you're doing all this crazy stuff. You know. They were kind of threatening each other, and she got word that Charles had started speaking to her brother, to her sisters, to her parents, and he was going to try and stage an intervention with her brother where they would record her talking about what she believed and then they would show it to somebody in the church in hopes of maybe getting her excommunicated or or doing something that would really kind of wake her up out of this kind
of trance that she was in with these beliefs. So knowing that, Rie called her brother Alex, who at this point is known as somebody that you know has always kind of been like a guardian, and she thought of Alex as her guardian angel, and she said, come over, I need you to be here. So that morning, Charles came over to pick up JJ. He said he was going to bring him to school. A confrontation ensued, and Alex went to his room that he was staying in and got the gun that he brought with him and
shot Charles. He said it was in self defense. Now we know that investigators found two bullets, one of which was in a wall, but the other one was directly into the floor, which suggested to them that he shot Charles like you know a mobster would in a movie, Like he shot him as he was laying on the ground. So that shot, based on and many other pieces of evidence, started to suggest to them that this was a murder. It was not an act of self defense.
What struck me was the behavior of Alex off to that incident. Police camera footage of him on the footpath outside and he's he's just shot someone and he appears fine. And then there's this other element where Laurie just takes JJ to school, like everything just feels so normal.
I'm so glad that you've seen that footage because it is so striking. I mean, first, you're right, Alex, you know, he comes outside, he says, I shot my brother in law. You know, he came out with he hit me in the head with a baseball that I shot him in self defense. Charles Vella at once was a college baseball player, and he was a very you know, very muscular strong man, and I imagine that if he'd hit somebody in the head with a baseball bat that he would be very hurt.
And Alex had this just teeny tiny trickle of blood on the back of his head, like maybe he'd fallen down or something. So that was clearly a line that he was feeding the police, but they bought it. And the thing that struck me was that, you know, one of the police officers was sort of realizing what was happening, that you know, there was a dead body inside, and he tells Alex, hang on, you know, and need just sit here on the curb and he goes to kind
of get his colleagues and rope it off. So it's a murder scene, and Alex has the nerve to be like, hey, can I get some water? Like it just it just was like, you know, we talked so much about the differences in the way law enforcement treats people of color and white people in America, and this was just one of those glaring examples where you're like, this person just shot someone and they're just like acting like they're some kind of victim.
And he was asking about the weather and stuff.
It's bizarre. It's really bizarre. And then yeah, Laurie, so after Charles was shot, you know, she got in the car with JJ, went to Burger King to get him some chicken fries and a sprite for breakfast, took him to school, went to a pharmacy and bought some flip flops for her and Kyle to wear, which you know, I don't think has ever been answered, but it makes me wonder why, you know, did they leave I think
they may have left the house without shoes on. But then part of me is like, did they walk through blood that they didn't want? You know, that's a speculation on my part, but yeah, she kind of went about her mourning and then came back and pulled up to the house and the police, you know, told her, your husband has been shot by your brother, and she's like laughing and being like, wow, what an impression to make on my new neighbors. Ha ha ha. It was very
it was very odd. It was very odd. And what's amazing is that the police really bought what Alex and Laurie told them. It took over a year for them to release some of the evidence where they're like, hang on, this was definitely not an act of self defense.
Had Alex done anything this before? You mentioned that he was kind of like the family protecta. Was there any other incidents.
They had a really strange relationship. There is one incident of note that is, you know, for people who followed this story, I think it's critical to know that when Laurie was married to her third husband, Joseph Ryan, they had a very very messy divorce and it was so messy because she accused Joseph Ryan of molesting Tylee and her older brother Colby, and that was in and out of court. I mean, it went to trial, which is
very rare that something like that would happen. And to this day, the mental health professionals that worked on that case, that interviewed the kids that testified in the trial, they told Dateline that they still think that there's nothing that happened, that it was all a complete fabrication of Flori. But regardless, this was sort of the circumstances. She was telling everyone that her husband had molested her children and it was
a big deal. So at one point Joseph Ryan had the ability to see his daughter again, but it had to be at a facility where someone could like monitor. It was like, you know, as they were kind of working towards a normalcy again, he started seeing her there and it was kind of like, so everybody was like
a neutral party sort of place. Well, he sees Tylee and then he leaves and he's going out to his car and there's a guy standing by his car and it's Alex and he says, you know, I need to talk to you, and Joseph Frian's like, we don't need to talk. And Alex gets out of taser and tases him, and you know, Joseph Ryan gets tased, he falls down, he gets up, he runs away. Alex continues to tase him,
Joseph Ryan falls down again, fractures his wrist. You know, the police get called, and in the end, Alex Cox ends up going to jail for several months for this assault that he thought Josephryan was a child molester and he deserved that. So later Tyler Ryan would tell her father, Joseph Ryan, that she saw it happen. So there's a lot of speculation of whether or not Laurie and him were in on this together, and that, you know, Tylee was there.
What happens next, because not long after the shooting, Laurie and the kids' lifetown they do.
Yeah, they're there in Arizona for a couple more actually, no, probably only about a month and a half before they decide to move very randomly to Rexburg, Idaho. It's a few states away. You know. Laurie lives in the Phoenix area in Arizona's a very urban, suburban place, and she decides to go to this very small town in rural southern Idaho and she pulls JJ out of school, She gets rid of his service dog, returns it to the place that you know train service dogs, and says, we
aren't going to need the dog anymore. So they moved to Rexburg, Idaho, and she tells no one, No one knows that she moved. So they get to Rexburg in early September of twenty nineteen, and pretty quickly, you know, if you go to the area, everybody goes to Yellowstone National Park. That's like the thing that you do in
the family. Like a family, they go to Yellowstone National Park. Lurie, Tylee, JJ, and Alex Cox, Laurie's brother, and that is the last time that Tyler Ryan has ever seen is in photos from that trip to Yellowstone. Now, the whole reason that we can surmise that Laurie moved to Rexburg was that Chad Dabel lived there. This was somebody that she was arranging to see. You know, while she was still married to Charles, they were meeting, they were going to conferences
and seeing each other. She had a separate cell phone that she would talk to for Chad Dabel. She very clearly she was having an affair. But with Charles out of the picture, she moves north to Rexburg, goes to Yellowstone. Tyleye's never seen, but she has JJ for a few more weeks and then JJ is last seen in late September twenty nineteen.
Does anyone notice that they'd gone? I guess they're in this new town where no one knows them.
I think the person who noticed the most that they had moved from Arizona was Charles Valla's sister, Kay Woodcock. Now she lived in a totally different state, but she had really regular contact with JJ, with her grandson, and all of a sudden that just stopped. After Charles died. You know, they had a funeral for him, and Laurie refused to go. I mean, she didn't go to the funeral. She said she didn't want JJ to go to his funeral. She stopped answering Kate's calls, and then they just moved.
And this could come out in the trial that maybe some of Laurie's friends that she was involved with knew, but for the most part, really nobody knew. Nobody really and her family knew. Her own son, Colby, her oldest son, did not initially know that his mom and his siblings moved to Idaho. He had no idea, So it was a very very random thing.
You're listening to true crime Conversations with me, Jemma buff I'm speaking with investigative journalists. Leah satilly about Lourie Vallo and her husband Chad day Bell. I want to set up Chad Dabell a little bit more because he already had a family in rex Book, didn't he.
Yeah, he was married to a woman named Tammy. They had been married for twenty nine years, you know, since they were quite young. They had five children, several that were grown, several that still lived at home. But yeah, by whole accounts, a very happy life together. They ran his book publishing company called Spring Creek Books that published lots of different authors, but also published all of his books.
And then Tammy also worked as a librarian at a local elementary school, very popular among kids, you know, very known for her love of books and that kind of thing. But yeah, he had a whole life. He had moved his family from Utah a few years earlier, and that was also seen in the Dabel family as very odd, Like what you're moving to Rexburg, Idaho? Why you know,
it's less far than Lori's move. But Davell started to write in his books about his belief that, you know, the Promised Land, the sort of like place where the chosen people would be saved in the End Times was Rexburg, Idaho, And you have to wonder if that's the reason why he moved there and why he encouraged Laurie and other people to move there.
Not long after Laurie comes to Rexburg, something happens to Tammy.
Right, So in October twenty nineteen, she is coming home from a meeting of the Relief Society. This is the LDS Women's organization. And my understanding is that she was going and prepping like freezer meals, so a bunch of meals for the week where you could just pop it in the freezer and get it out when you get
home from work and dinner's on the table. So she had just gotten home, she'd just pulled in the driveway of the day Bell House, gets out of her car and there's a guy in all black with a mask standing there and he starts shooting at her with a gun. And her initial thought was to scream, but then later she thought, well, maybe it was a paintball gun. I don't think that it was. I think that it was a real gun. And I think the conclusion that almost
everyone has made is that that was Alex Cox. And she screamed she called for Chad and then what we'll call Alex ran away, and she posted on Facebook and just said, hey, neighbors, just so you know this, like random guy came and shot at me with a paintball gun and I don't know what to do with that, but just letting you know. And it was a couple of weeks later, you know, things normalized, She went back to work. You know, everything is going the way it
would go. And then one night, all of a sudden. There's a bunch of different conflicting stories here, but the way her son tells it, the oldest Dave Bell child, is that all of a sudden, he heard the thump in the bedroom and Chad said, you got to come in here, and his mother was half on the bed and half off the bed, and it looked like she was dead. Now, Chad has given several different accounts of this.
He has said that she's given that account. He's also given an account that he woke up in the morning and Tammy had died sometime in her sleep. You have to remember this is a woman in her forties. By
all accounts, she was really fit, she was running. She had just visited her face family back in Utah, and they were talking about how she had taken like a clogging class, like Hi Cardio kind of things, like she was real active and you know, had a real busy life and everything, and then all of a sudden, she just died. And I think, you know, among the shocking things of what happened around Tammy Dabel's death was she died.
And Idaho has this really unique thing where the coroner came and asked, do you want me to do an autopsy and the family said no. You know, a private investigator I interviewed for the book said, well, that's a really good way to cover up a murder. It's unique and that's not how it is in most states. Idaho has some pretty unique laws. So they didn't do an autopsy. They shift her over to Utah, where she warn't to be buried. She was buried in a graveyard that Chad
Dabel once worked at as a grave digger. And that was that. It seemed like that was the end of Tammy's story.
And he's my math correct. He bought. Two weeks later, Laurie and Chad get married.
Yes, they do. Two weeks later. In my book, I talk about how Chad's brother, Brad told me that at Tammy's funeral, Chad pulled him aside and said, Hey, I'm going to be getting married. And Brad was like, what are you talking about. You're getting married, like your wife just died. And he's like, well, you gotta, you know, wait for a while. And he's like, I can't wait. I need to get married now, and he said, don't tell anyone. Don't tell anybody. So his brother was like,
what the heck is going on? And truly, two weeks later, he and Laurie Valla were married on a beach in Hawaii, so his second marriage, her fifth marriage, and there was no one there. It was just the two of them. They wore matching white clothing and purple flower lays around their neck and these green malachite stone rings that they had ordered off Amazon. And that was that. They went home home to Rexburg. Laurie did not move into the
day Bell house. She stayed in her townhouse and Chad Daybell his children, I got remarried, and they were all very shocked by that news that who is this woman? Our mother just sided You're telling us you just got married. What is going on?
And something to remind listeners about at this point, is that JJ and Tylie are missing this whole time.
Yeah, and no one knows. I mean, if the timeline that everyone has determined is correct, the last time Tylie was seen in early September. The last time JJ was seen was late September, and you're right by November when they are remarried, it has been over a month, almost two months since anyone has seen Tylie and over a
month since anyone has seen JJ. And that's when Kay Woodcock kind of comes into the equation because she calls the police in Rexburg, Idaho, after getting into Charles Vella's Amazon account and seeing that Laurie was using his Amazon account to shift packages to, of all places, Rexburg, Idaho. And she's like, oh my god, Laurie moved. She moved to Idaho to this town. So she called the police in Rexburg, Idaho and said, I haven't seen my grandson since August when we were on a video call, and
can you go to this address and check. So they went to the door, knocked on it and asked where the kids were. And that's kind of where everything goes insane.
Well, that's, you know, what you would call a welfare chick, and I've listened to that and when you know the background, Laurie's lying. She lies to authorities.
She's so good at lying. Did you notice that, like she she's so seamless. Oh no, don't worry about it. This is all a big misunderstanding. JJ's just with my friends back in Arizona. He's with my friend Melanie. She has an autistic child too. You know, it seemed like a believable story, And the detective said, okay, you know, we'll give you the benefit of doubt. Just have your friend give us a call and this will all be taking that. We just need to get eyes on the kid. Well,
twenty four hours later, they hadn't. They hadn't heard from Laurie, they hadn't heard from her friend. The police in Arizona hadn't seen JJ, and so they went back to Laurie's house with a warrant to search the property and whoof she was gone. They didn't know where she went. She had disappeared.
What else happened in that phone call? Because there was the lie about JJ bang with a friend, which the friend pops up and says not true. That She also says something about where Tyler might be, and then she says that Chad is her brother's friend or something along those lines.
Yeah, right, right. So when the police went to her door, you're right. They initially talked to Alex and Chad Davielle and they said, you know, have you seen this little boy JJ. And Alex said, oh, no, he's with his grandparents. He's with his grandma Kay Woodcock. And they said, well, that's not true. She's the one that called us, so immediately got caught in a lie. They asked both Chad Alex for Laurie's phone number, and they both said that
they didn't have it. So the police left and they came back, and then Laurie was home and she, you know, said, uh, yeah, JJ's with my friend Melanie gibb down in Arizona. And they asked, you know, who were those guys. Well, that was my brother and my brother's friend. And they said, well, what's your brother's friend's name, Chad? He's a writer, they said, you know, asked what his last name was, and you hear the click. You hear it start to click for
one of the detectives. She says, his name is Chad Babel and he says Daveill, didn't his wife just die? And she's like, I don't know. I think so, you know, kind of pleas dumb, you know, when you know what's going on. Her and Chatter are already married at that point, and Chad's you know, they're both faking it. They know that they are very close to getting caught in something, and they're trying to sort of weave this elaborate lie about how they all know each other and what their relation is.
So you mentioned that after this check they go poof. I say, they go to Hawaii. What are they doing there?
It seems like they're on a honeymoon. I mean, it's interesting because in December twenty nineteen, that's when the authorities in Roxburg said, you know, we've got two missing children on our hands, and they did an amber alert. They you know, did a press conference and said, you know, keep an eye out for these two people, Chad Dabo
and Marivello. We have no idea where they are. And that's when people started to speculate that it had something to do with her religious beliefs, that their disappearance might have had something with their fringe Mormon beliefs. So that's kind of when I started paying attention because I'm thinking, are they survivalists? Like, are they in some kind of bunker somewhere with a bunch of guns and a bunch
of canned food waiting out the apocalypse. What is just so crazy about that is that they were the exact opposite. They were in this fancy condo that they had rented in Hawaii that overlooked a golf course. And finally it took months to track them down there. But when the FBI and authorities in Hawaii and Idaho went and arrested them, it was February and there was no evidence that JJ and Tyley had ever been there.
There are a few things that happened before that that I want to touch on. One Alex passes away right watch.
How good question? I mean, it's the number of bodies. I mean, I've been a reporter for almost twenty years and I have never written this story where there are just so many dead people. So in December of twenty nineteen, a lot of things happen. Please say the kids are missing, keep an eye out for them. Tammy Dabell is exhumed by authorities in Utah because at that point, people are like, hang on, this woman just died. People are getting really suspicious, and in Idaho you don't have to say what a
cause of death is. But she was buried in Utah and there are totally different laws. They exhumed her body, did a bunch of tests, and put her back in the ground, really before anybody knew it. The very next day, Lori Vella's brother Alex, drops dead and it's a very very odd thing. So he is in Arizona at that point.
He is in the bathroom of his new wife, who he had been married to for two weeks, and was also somebody that I would say was a follower of Chad and Laurie, a woman that was kind of on board with all their weird interpretations of Warmon scripture, you know, talking about all these kind of wild ideologies that they had, and all of a sudden, I mean, you've probably heard
the nine to one one call. This woman's son called the ambulance and said, you know, this man is on my mother's bathroom floor and he's vomiting and there's all kinds of phone coming out of his mouth. He's barely breathing, and he just died. So it's interesting because nobody really knows. I mean, the medical examiner there said he died of natural but it was literally moments after he had been exchanging text messages with Chad Dabell. It was the day
after Tammy was found. So it's yeah, it seems very odd, right, The timing is very strange.
There's so many twists and turns in this story, yeah, which I think is why everyone is so fascinated by it.
Right, saying that's what's Upian was like, what the heck is going on? Here? Here's another dead body, here's another dead body. What is the deal with these people?
So back to a few months later when police do actually catch up with Laurie and Chad, but JJ's parents get a judge to order for Laurie to produce the kids. And that's how this kind of arrest situation comes about, isn't it.
Yeah. You know when they found her in Hawaii, you know, really all she had to say was like, here's where JJ is. It's all good, But she wouldn't say anything. So they extradited her back, you know, from Hawaii to Idaho, put her on a plane and handcuffed in jail, and you know, she had many, many months to say something but said nothing. No one had any idea where these children.
Were, so she just happily sat in prison just yeah, zipped didn't say it would yeah.
You know, and it's I haven't been inside the jail where she was, like, I've been outside of it, and it is this teeny tiny little jail like there is so few people they can fit there. You know. It was this tiny jail cell where she could go outside into this little tiny yard like for a couple hours
or an hour every day, and that was it. I mean, it was like, you know, she wasn't even seen trial yet, but she was already sort of being subjected to like a torturous lifestyle that you would think somebody that is like would say, okay, you know, let me just tell you what happened, But she didn't. She just sat in her jail cell and read Mormon scripture and cleaned and that was it. Like, I mean, she didn't break I guess from what she.
Believed was Chad arrested at this point when they got expired back No, so he was just living his life in Rexburg.
He was living his life in Rexburg. He was back home at his house, you know, living with his kids, posting, you know, on another Voice of Warning, which is like a big website that he was a part of, just kind of doing his thing. But his new wife was in jail. You have to imagine that they were talking on the phone, you know, that he could call her and that kind of thing. But she was extradited in February, so that's four months that he was back in Rixburg just sort of living his life.
So it's at that four months post arrest point. It's June twenty twenty that police converge on Chad's property in Rexburg.
What do they find? So they showed up in the morning and said, we have a warrant to search the property. Chad, you need to stay on the property. And he went and sat out in the driveway. So if you go to the Dabo house, you know, you could sit in the driveway and be able to see the backyard. And so, you know, local police and the FBI descended on the backyard. You know, they had dogs with them that were sort of sniffing the ground and they honed in on two
areas of the yard. So you know, this is a really rural place, so it's just sort of this massive field and they had a pet cemetery where they had buried some you know, passed away dogs and cats. And then there was also like a fire pit area where they could have like bonfires and that kind of thing. So the dogs really concentrated on those two spots. And in the pet cemetery area they unearthed the body of
JJ Vaalow. He was you know, duct taped, his hands were duct taped together, he had duct tape over his face, he had you know, it was really it was really horrible. He was in his pajamas. But then in the fire pit area they excavated body parts that they then had to test and it proved to be the remains of Tyler Ryan. Really really grizzly scene. I mean, in both cases both are grizzly, but what Tylee's body was just unrecognizable.
So that was when Chad Dabel decided to you know, he's sitting in his car, he turns his car on speeds out of the driveway. The cops had this place, you know, there were so many of them there. He didn't make it very far. They pulled him over and they arrested him, and that was his last gasp of freedom. He's been in jail ever since.
How did the police know to go to that backyard in the first place.
I mean, it's a great question. I think that there's a lot of different things that'll probably come out in
the trial. But the one thing that we do know was they started really doing a lot of forensic testing on the cell phones of Alex Cox and Laurie and you know, all the people are around them, but specifically Alex Cox's phone hanged to a cell tower on the day that Tyler Ryan was last seen after they went to Yellowstone, and on last day that JJ had ever been seen, so that I think gave them a lot of,
you know, clues. He also sort of remained in these two areas for quite some time, so you know, by the power of modern technology, they were able to like really be able to be specific about where they were looking. And so that is at least one piece of evidence. I think that allowed them to know where to look.
So the kids' bodies were found in June of twenty twenty and Chad and Laurie went charged until May the following year. What happened in that time frame was that just polace building evidence.
So I think so, I think so, I think I think at that point everyone realized there are so many moving parts here. So you've got the bodies of JJ and Tylie. You've got the body of Tammy Daybill in a totally different state, totally different jurisdiction. You've got the body now of Charles Valow down in Arizona, not really looking like a self defense case anymore. And then you've got the body of Alex Cox. How did he die?
You know, you get these multiple jurisdictions. What I've found over the years, it is like very difficult for those to talk to each other and kind of combine evidence. So my understanding is that police in Rexburg started then going down to Arizona. They started doing interviews, They started trying to get people around Chad and Laurie to talk to them about what they knew. And I don't know when that started. And that's another thing to your previous question.
I'm not sure if some of those friends started to share information that also led to finding JJ and Tylee. But yeah, I mean, it took about a year for really any charges of weight because for a while, the only charge that Laurie was facing was just failing to produce her kids. It was like a misdemeanor, So it was something that you know, it's serious, but it wasn't
like we're not talking prison time at that point. So yeah, it took about a year and then the hammer dropped and it was like conspiracy to murder, first degree murder. And then all of a sudden, we're talking about our prosecutors in Idaho going to make this a death penalty case, and they did.
Can you take us through the charges one by one? Who is being accused of what?
Okay, I'm gonna try and get this right. So Chad and Lourie are both facing charges of first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the deaths of Tylie Ryan and JJ Vallo and Tammy Dabell. Laurie is potentially also facing charges in Arizona for the death of Charles Valo, but Arizona has sort of said we're gonna let Idaho do their thing and get through with that before we
bring her here. There are also several charges involving I don't know exactly what the term is, but Laurie was using or is accused of using, like Tylee's debit card and things like that. So there are some kind of like financial you know things around ty Lee as well, so you know there's they're very serious charge. I mean, you cannot just call for the death penalty for anything but conspiracy to commit murder and first murder certainly.
Or that Chad plays not guilty immediately. But Laurie's case was put on hold for a while. Why was that it.
Was put on hold because pretty quickly after the ward's death penalties started getting tossed around, all of a sudden, Laurie was deemed to be incompetent. So what that meant was was that she didn't understand the charges that were against her, and she wasn't mentally competent to assist in her defense. So obviously, like a lawyer needs their client to be able to tell them, you know what happened,
you know, to be able to defend them appropriately. So this is something that happens sometimes with death penalty cases. This is why, like death penalty cases can take a really long time to go to trial because oftentimes you will see somebody all of a sudden they're mentally incompetent, they get taken out of the jail, they get put in a mental health facility, or they can be restored to competence, see, so they can understand how to assist
in their defense. So she was in a mental health facility, you know, in a completely different place in Idaho for a number of months trying to be restored to competency.
And that ends up happening.
It does. She's daemed fit eventually, I mean it took a while, but she was deemed fit and then they finally were able to officially charge her of what she also pleaded not guilty.
When are we expecting these trials to play out?
So right now they're scheduled for January twenty twenty three, So that's a long time. I mean that's almost three years from when they were found in Hawaii. You know, it could still get moved, but I think that right now there is a very very aggressive effort to see justice for what happened and to really solve what happened with Tammy and what happened, you know, what is known by the police and by the prosecutors in Rexperts. So
it will happen in January twenty twenty three. Part of the delay has been that they need to move the trial from the rural community where Laurie and Chad are both housed in jail and where they see charges to Boise, Idaho, which is I want to say, five hours away, and it's a much more you know, a larger city, and they think that they can get a much more unbiased
jury pool there. So they're trying, you know, you get the right to a fair trial, and the judge has just basically said, you know, I don't think that they can get a fair trial here because everybody knows the case.
Have Chad and Laurie said anything since being charged?
No, nothing, A notable amount of nothing. I mean I've covered other federal trials, not death penalty trials, but other federal trials where the people in jail will use the media and say I want to do an interview. I want to talk about what I know this is. You know, I'm not guilty, and that it has just been utter silence the only time anything has happened that felt and I put like a heavy emphasis on it felt like
it was coming from Chad. Was a while back, as Chad has sat in jail, his children did a big TV interview with a news program here where they said they all sat down with the reporter and they said, our father is not guilty. This is a conspiracy. Somebody did something to him, and you know, they really couldn't answer for how dead bodies ended up in their backyard.
I mean, it doesn't look good, but it did really feel like maybe one last gasp of Chad trying to control the narrative in jail and get his children to speak for him. That's my theory. I don't know if that's actually true.
What about Tylee and JJ? For the people left behind that did love them. The grandparents of JJ and Laurie had another son. Were they given a proper goodbye?
No? I mean I think that Laurie has communicated with her eldest son, Colby, who has been utterly destroyed by this. I mean he was very close to his siblings and didn't know that his family had moved. I mean, he was grown up and out of the house and sort of psued doing his own relationship and marriage, and you know that all of a sudden, his mom vanishes, then she's on TV. Then his brother and sister are gone,
and his head was spinning. I think just as much as anybody, he has been really vocal about how much it is just really destroyed him and He's really a very religious person and has tried to sort of seek healing through his spirituality for how he feels about his mother. Kay and Larry Woodcock, I mean, JJ was their grandson. I don't know that they considered Tylye to be their
grandchild too. And I think Tyley is unique in that account because initially, you know, people didn't even really talk about When the police went to Laurie's door, they were asking about JJ. They weren't asking about Tylee. I don't think anybody knew that she was missing. It was almost like she was a little bit of an island on her own. But Kay and Larry have been consistently, you know, they live across the country, and they have been consistently
at all the court hearings that are major. You know, they show up there, they sit there, they watch Laurie, watch Chad, and they give press conferences and it's heartbreaking to watch. You know. In the last press conference I saw that they gave, Larry said, you know, we know that justice is going to be served, Like we have no doubt in our minds. The evidence is just it's very stacked against them.
How are you feeling ahead of the trial because you have dug into every corner of this story, do you still have a lot of unanswered questions that you're hyping come out?
Yes? I think I really want to know what the prosecutors in Idaho and the detectives know about Tyler Ryan's last days, about JJ's last days. That tripped Yellowstone is very strange. I mean, they were taking family photos, you know, they were taking photos of her, and then that night is the night that they think that she was killed. It's very strange to me. I want to know what happened. I want to know more about Laurie and Chad's supposed control of Alex Cox. I don't know. I think that
they're going to say that everything. They're going to blame everything on Alex, who's dead and can't speak for himself. I want to know more about that. And I really I think the thing that anybody who's watched this case wants more than anything is how the heck did Tammy Davell die? Because the medical examiner in Utah has not said what they found when they exumed her and they did an autopsy, whatever happened there is under lock and key.
They have not said what it is. So I think that's going to be the big reveal as if they found something.
Lea Settilli knew everything there is to know about this case. What an absolute joy it was for her to Lindu's her knowledge in this complicated and horrifying story. When we wrapped up our interview about Lauri and Chad's alleged crimes, there were a few more questions I wanted to ask about the couple's cult like beliefs that were the backdrop of this case.
They believed that they were so pure that the law didn't even apply to them, that they could really do what they wanted because they were God's chosen warriors. They were the ones that were recruiting the people to survive the end of the world, so that gave them free rein to do what they wanted.
That episode is available now exclusively for Mamma Mia subscribers. You'll find a link to that in our show notes. True Crime Conversations is a mmamea podcast hosted by me Jemma Bath and my executive producer is Geamoylan. If you have a case you think we should cover next, get in touch with us. Send an email to true Crime at mammamea dot com dot au or join our online community. Just search for True Crime Conversations on Facebook and make
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