Lori Vallow’s murder trial hears eerie call with former best friend about missing children

Lori Vallow insisted her son JJ was ‘safe and happy’ months after she allegedly partnered with her doomsday cult husband to murder the little boy.

Jurors at her murder trial were played a damning phone call that the Vallow’s former best friend Melanie Gibb made in December 2019. 

During the call, which Chad Daybell was also on, Vallow also makes the haunting claim she could reveal JJ’s whereabouts, but that ‘that would not be good for JJ’. Several months later, the little boy’s badly decomposed body was found buried near his sister’s remains in Daybell’s backyard.

Jurors were previously shown harrowing pictures of JJ after he was found, wearing a red pajama set, pull up night-time diaper and covered in a children’s blanket. The boy was badly bruised, wrapped in thick layers of duct tape and placed in a black plastic bag.

Lori Vallow, pictured, allegedly killed her children after descending into religious fanaticism 

Gibb was compelled to contact the couple as fears grew for missing JJ, seven, and Tylee Ryan, 16, during which time Vallow had falsely claimed to police that JJ was with Gibb.

In the phone conversation played to the court Thursday, Gibb confronts Vallow about the claim and is told JJ had to be ‘moved somewhere safe’ to protect him from his grandmother, Kay Woodcock, who had raised concerns about the boy’s safety.

Vallow says police who were searching for the children are ‘working with [Kay] in a dark capacity’. She also claims, ‘there’s people after me’, adding: ‘I will do whatever the Lord needs me to do every day’.

The conversation becomes heated after Gibb reads Vallow a scripture. Vallow responds: ‘I don’t know why you’re being controversial to me or if you’re recording this conversation for the police or whatever, I don’t know what your intention is on this phone call.’

Vallow tells Gibb she ‘loves’ her but Gibb replies: ‘But if you really love me, you wouldn’t have told the police that I had JJ with me.’

‘This does not sound like you,’ Vallow responded. ‘It sounds like you’ve been influenced by somebody dark who wants you to believe dark things and have fear of the Celestial world.’

She says Christ is ‘coming soon’. At one point, Daybell intervenes to say his wife Tammy – who the couple allegedly murdered two months earlier – is ‘on a special mission’.

Vallow becomes agitated when Gibb tells her: ‘Well honey, you got a lot of natural desires. We all know that.’ Gibb accuses Vallow of ‘resting the scriptures’ for her own ‘vainglory’.

But Vallow claims God ‘has my back’ and adds hauntingly: ‘I could tell everything where JJ is right now and that would not be good for JJ. So, I’m sorry that you don’t want me to protect my children. But I would never ask you to not protect your children.’

The pair then argue about Vallow’s alleged relationship with Daybell while they were still married to their respective partners. Vallow hangs up after telling Gibb she will ‘tell me if I was lying or not when we’re both standing there with Jesus Christ’.

Daybell, pictured during a court hearing in August 2020, built a following as a religious fantasist who warned of an impending apocalypse 

Vallow is accused of killing her kids, seven-year-old Joshua (JJ), left, and 16-year-old Tylee, right

The phone call recording came after the jury heard damning testimony from Gibb, who said the ‘cult mom’ believed her children were ‘dark’, ‘possessed’ and ‘working under the contract of Satan’ in the months before they were murdered.

Gibb, who co-hosted a religious podcast with Vallow in 2018, shared how she saw the mom’s views become warped when she became entangled with Daybell. 

The ‘cult mom’ became enamored with the doomsday author after reading his books and lectures in 2017, where he espoused beliefs about an imminent apocalypse and believed he was chosen to lead humans through the end times.

Vallow, 49, was convinced that she and Daybell, 54, were ‘leaders’ ordered by God to shepherd 144,000 people through the second coming of Christ.

As their ideas became more deranged, the pair claimed Vallow’s children were possessed humans – or ‘zombies’ – who needed to ‘pass way’ to cleanse them of evil spirits. 

Gibb told Ada County Court on Thursday that she met Vallow in 2018 and the pair quickly developed a close friendship – traveling together to conferences of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

She said Vallow met Daybell around October 2018 and quickly became convinced she’d been married to him ‘four or five times’ in previous lives. The couple started to believe people close to them were possessed and they held ‘castings’ to rid the evil spirits, said Gibb, who took part in some of the castings.

Daybell espoused a bizarre ‘rating system’ that underpinned his religious fantasies, whereby he would rank individuals on how ‘light’ and ‘dark’ their souls were. Those who were too ‘dark’ had become ‘zombies’, and the only way to save their souls was to kill their host bodies.  

Vallow’s children, Tylee and JJ disappeared in September 2019 but were never reported missing by their mother

The couple believed possessed people included, JJ, Tylee, Vallow’s husband Charles Vallow, and other relatives and ‘random people’.

They claimed some individuals were ‘high level dark’, that the ‘darkness evolved’ and one person was ‘part of Hitler’s group’.

Gibb said Vallow ‘felt that she was part of the 144,000’ that would be on earth ‘during the return of the savior’. People who were light would be saved and people who were dark were ‘working under the contract of Satan’.

Vallow first began to claim her husband Charles Vallow was ‘taken over by an evil spirit’ in January 2018. Months later, Charles Vallow was shot dead by Lori Vallow’s brother, Alex Cox. Gibb said Cox was part of Vallow and Daybell’s ‘inner circle’ and bought into their beliefs.

Vallow had previously said she dreamed Charles Vallow would die in a car crash – but when it didn’t happen, she said ‘Satan interfered with the plan’.

Gibb also told how Vallow first met Daybell at an LDS conference in Utah in 2018 and they immediately connected.

She said: ‘They were very friendly to each other… talking a lot about some of their ideas and beliefs that they had at that time. There was definitely attraction right from the beginning. She seemed very interested in him.’

Vallow ‘seemed flattered’ by Daybell and their conversations were ‘flirty’.

Within weeks of meeting, Daybell told Vallow they had been married ‘multiple’ times. Vallow believed ‘she had been married to a prophet from the Book of Mormon called Moroni’.

‘She told me that they had been married I believe four or five times and she would go into different details with me about who she was, what character she was and what character he was,’ Gibb said.

On another occasion, Vallow said she had been ‘sealed’ with Daybell in a church. ‘They met in the temple together,’ Gibb said. Vallow told her a prophet was there, ‘she said Jesus Christ was there’ and they were ‘reunited again’.

Vallow stared intently at her former best friend throughout the testimony and occasionally turned to exchange words with her lawyers. She appeared in court in a gray blazer and had her ankles shackled to the floor during the hearing.

Gibb recalled meeting Lori Vallow for the first time in October 2018 at a church event. The pair struck up a close friendship and Gibb met JJ and Tylee several weeks later.

Tylee ‘often seemed upset and frustrated’ with Vallow ‘pretty much most of the time’.

Speaking about JJ, Gibb added: ‘Sometimes I would watch her with him and she was very affectionate and loving to him. I watched her sing a song to him as she was putting him to bed’.

But several months after Vallow met Daybell, the connection changed and she was ‘distracted a lot’.

Vallow pictured during a court hearing in March 2020

Vallow and Gibb previously worked on a podcast together – but in recent years Vallow’s former best friend has turned on her. 

In a May 2020 interview, a month before the remains of Vallow’s children JJ and Tylee were discovered on the property of Chad Daybell, Gibb revealed how the ‘cult mom’ had plotted to convince police that her kids weren’t missing. 

Gibb said she learned JJ and Tylee were missing on November 26 while she was in Utah for the Thanksgiving holiday. Chad, a former gravedigger, had called her out of the blue sounding ‘scared and nervous’.

‘I still get emotional about it,’ she said, revealing that Daybell warned her ‘don’t pick up the phone’ if police reached out to her. ‘My heart just dropped,’ she continued.

Gibb testified at Daybell’s preliminary criminal hearing in August 2020, where she dramatically played a 21-minute phone call she secretly recorded confronting Lori and Chad over the missing children. 

‘I knew after many people heard that, they would understand Chad and Lori and my relationship with them a little bit better,’ Gibb told East Idaho News. ‘I’m really grateful that got to come out. 

‘Overall, I’m grateful to be able to share the information and knowledge that I have,’ she said at the time. ‘It’s hard to talk about those things knowing the whole world is watching you.’