Family says remains found at Idaho home are Lori Vallow's children
Vallow's husband Chad Daybell, who owns the property, has been arrested with bail set at $1 million.
The grandparents of 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow, whose body, along with that of his 17-year-old sister Tylee Ryan, was discovered in Idaho on Tuesday after an eight-month-long search, visited the very home where authorities found the two dead children buried.
Larry and Kay Woodcock, who lived in Louisiana, were the ones to first call the Rexburg Police Department in Idaho in November 2019 to ask officers to perform a wellness check on JJ after not being able to contact him for an extended period of time.
That’s when the children’s alleged “cult mom” Lori Vallow and her new, fifth husband Chad Daybell, the author of several doomsday novels, fled to Hawaii, where Vallow was arrested in February on child abandonment charges and extradited back to Idaho.
LORI VALLOW'S MISSING IDAHO KIDS: EVERYTHING TO KNOW ABOUT THE DOOMSDAY CULT CASE
“That’s the scene where JJ was,” Larry Woodcock told Fox 13, before becoming visibly emotional, apologizing before pausing and turning to look at the field. “My little man.
"I'm not coming in hostility in any way," Woodcock continued, referring to the Daybell family. "I come with trying to be the peacemaker, and that's all I want. I just want to be a peacemaker. Let's all get along here."
Daybell, whose previous wife Tammy unexpectedly died in October, a month before he remarried Vallow, was arrested Tuesday after authorities found human remains on the property he owned. He has been charged with felony counts of destroying and concealing evidence. His bail was set for $1 million.
Rexburg police and the FBI arrived at the property in Salem, Idaho to execute a search warrant around 7 a.m. local time Tuesday. Aerial footage from the news outlet showed law enforcement gathered in Daybell’s backyard, where they appeared to be digging in one spot.
Tammy Daybell, Chad’s wife of nearly 30 years and the mother of his five adult children, died at her home in Salem on Oct. 19. The family declined to have an autopsy conducted before she was buried in Springville, Utah. Authorities have since exhumed her body, ruling the death suspicious, but the autopsy results have not been publicly released.
Authorities determined Tylee Ryan was last known to be seen alive in photos taken in Yellowstone National Park on Sept. 8. JJ was last seen on Sept. 23 attending Kennedy Elementary School in Rexburg. Vallow withdrew her son from the school the next day, claiming she would homeschool him.
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Vallow and her two children had recently relocated from Arizona. Lori Vallow’s fourth husband, Charles Vallow, was shot and killed in a Phoenix suburb in July 2019 by her brother, Alex Cox. He claimed the shooting was in self-defense and died that December. A coroner ruled that his death was the result of natural causes -- a blood clot in his lung, according to Fox 10.
Charles Vallow had filed for divorce from his wife, claiming he was afraid she might kill him and that she held apocalyptic beliefs, according to the outlet -- including that she was “a god assigned to carry out the work of the 144,000 at Christ’s second coming in July 2020.” The 144,000 number appears in the Bible and has varying religious significance among different Christian groups.
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