Mom of two missing Idaho kids found in Hawaii with new husband
Police in Hawaii say the mother of two missing Idaho children has been found in the state, along with her new husband, but the children still have not been located.
The Kaua’i Police Department announced Sunday that Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell had been staying on Kaua’i and that they were served with a legal document on Saturday ordering Lori Vallow to produce the children. On Sunday, police executed a search warrant.
Tylee Ryan, 17, and Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 7, have been missing since September 2019. Police say their mother, now named Lori Vallow Daybell, and her new husband initially lied to investigators about where the children were. When police returned to their home in Idaho to question them, the adults had disappeared.
Lori Vallow’s estranged husband, Charles Vallow, was shot and killed by her brother, Alex Cox, in Arizona last summer. Cox also died in December of an undisclosed cause.
Daybell’s last wife, Tammy Daybell, died in October of what the family called “natural causes,” but police in Idaho have since exhumed her remains for further investigation. Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell were married two weeks after Tammy Daybell’s death.
Neither Lori Vallow nor Chad Daybell has been charged or arrested, Kaua’i police said Sunday.
On Dec. 20, the Rexburg Police Department in Idaho posted on Facebook that it, along with the Fremont County (Idaho) Sheriff’s Office and the FBI, was investigating possible ties between the two missing children and the death of a Fremont County woman. The woman, Tammy Daybell, was Chad Daybell’s wife.
Friends and family members have spoken out in the media with their concerns over Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell’s religious beliefs and focus on the end of the world.
A Facebook post by Kay Woodcock, Joshua’s grandmother, says Lori was a “wonderful, loving, attentive mother” until things started changing in the past 18 months because of her involvement with a new religious group, which Woodcock called a “cult.”
Chad Daybell, who says on his website that he is a Latter-day Saint, has written and self-published more than 25 books, some of which focus on near-death experiences, including Daybell’s own. Other books fictionalize the end of the world.
Both Daybell and Vallow were involved in an organization called “Preparing A People,” which has said it is “not a ‘group’ and is not a ‘Cult’ or something people join” in a posted statement on its website.