BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The only surviving child of a woman charged in the murders of her two youngest children and a romantic rival confronted his mother about his siblings’ deaths in an emotional phone call played for jurors on Tuesday in a trial that has touched on claims of evil spirits, zombie children and an additional murder charge in another state.
Prosecutors played the call shortly after Colby Ryan, Lori Vallow Daybell’s oldest child, took the stand in the bizarre triple murder case in Idaho. The call was made after the bodies of Ryan’s siblings, Joshua “JJ” Vallow and Tylee Ryan, were found buried in an eastern Idaho yard in 2020, and after Vallow Daybell was jailed in connection with the crime.
It starts with Ryan asking his mom if she thought she could keep hiding from him.
“I’m not hiding, why would you think I’m hiding?” Vallow Daybell responds.
“Probably because you murdered my siblings! Maybe you should understand,” Ryan continued, before his mother interrupted:
“I didn’t. I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said.
But Ryan said his mother lied to him multiple times while his brother and sister were missing, with someone even sending him texts from his sister’s phone as if they were from Tylee.
“To know that they’re gone, and you knew! And my phone is being texted by my little sister, who’s not even alive!” Ryan said, his voice rising. “My poor brother, who is the sweetest little kid ever — for what purpose? You tell me this is God’s will: For my whole family, including my stepfather, to be dead.”
Prosecutors say Vallow Daybell and her fifth husband, Chad Daybell, espoused strange doomsday-focused beliefs involving demonic possession and “zombies” to further their alleged plan to kill the kids and his previous wife Tammy Daybell.
They are also accused of collecting life insurance money and nearly $6,000 a month from the kids’ social security and survivor benefits due to the deaths of their fathers: Tylee’s father Joe Ryan died in 2018 and JJ’s father Charles Vallow died in 2019.