34. Four Phone Calls

Tammy Daybell’s Springville, Utah grave, taken on my visit there in May 2020.

The case of Lori Vallow is one that inspires obsession: a twisted story with a serpentine timeline and a cast of characters that would give any of the Coen Brothers’ films a run for its money.

As Nate Schweber reported for Business Insider, the ongoing courtroom trial has attracted its own unique cast of “trial pilgrims,” who have felt drawn to Boise, Idaho to get a glimpse of Vallow in court, who scribbles on her notepad as witnesses talk about her. (ICYMI: Vallow is the mother accused of first-degree murder of her children, 16-year-old Tylee Ryan and 7-year-old JJ Vallow, as well as conspiracy to murder Tylee, JJ and the wife of her now-husband, Tammy Daybell, who was married to Chad Daybell for 29 years. )

If you’ve read When the Moon Turns to Blood, and/or are subscribed to my paid-series

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of posts on the trial, you might also put me in that camp of the obsessed. So you could understand that I had a lot of questions I hoped the trial would finally provide answers to.

Chief among those was how each of the victims in this Idaho-specific part of the case died. Last week, it was revealed that both Tammy Daybell and JJ Vallow died by asphyxiation. JJ was found with a plastic kitchen garbage bag over his head, and duct tape over his mouth. Due to the state of Tylee Ryan’s body, it was determined she died by “homicide of unspecified means.”

Tammy also died from asphyxia. More on that down later in this post.

Mostly, as the prosecution has laid out its case to the jury, the gaps of the story have slowly filled in. From the stand, FBI agents have talked about the location of cell phones — pinging in Chad’s backyard, but also in the drive-thrus of Del Taco and Chick-fil-A. Receipts have Alex Cox, Vallow’s brother, buying rain pants and a ski mask at a Sportsman’s Warehouse, but also a cold beverage for the ride home. The view from Chad and Tammy Daybell’s bedroom window looked out over their green-grass field, where the bodies of two children had been buried. The pieces of this story join together to create something even stranger; the incredibly mundane aspects of everyday life weave together with the unfathomably macabre. Buy a drink, and a ski mask. Bury a child, and go to bed looking at the gravesite.

Some of the most powerful ways prosecutors have illustrated the human impact of this case has been through the presentation of phone calls. I’d like to talk about parts of four of those calls here.

All credit on these audio files goes to East Idaho News, who have been dogged and consistent on the Vallow case for years, and have been diligent about sharing the audio of each day’s court proceedings. News Director Nate Eaton, who I met in Boise and is a mensch, reports each day from the courtroom, and puts together the nightly “Courtroom Insider” show. If you’re not already following him, please do.

Phone Call #1: Colby Ryan calls his mother in jail.

Two weeks ago, Lori Vallow’s eldest son Colby Ryan took the stand in Boise. During his testimony, a call was played in the courtroom that he had made to his mother during her incarceration in the Madison County Jail.

“You think you can hide from me?” Colby asked his mother at the outset of the phone call. (She was not turning on her camera for the video call)

“I’m not hiding, you stopped talking to me,” Vallow said.

“Probably because you murdered my siblings,” Colby said, “That’s probably why I stopped talking to you.”

“I didn’t,” Vallow said. “I’m sorry that you feel that way.”

She scolded Colby that it’s not good to “make judgements when you weren’t there and you don’t know what happened.”

“One day you will know what actually happened,” she said to her son. “We will all stand there with Jesus.”

Colby exploded. “You’re absolutely right! He will convict the people who acted in his name with pure blasphemy.”

Vallow giggled a high-pitched, almost witchy snicker.

“This is funny?” Colby asked his mother. She said no one could understand. No one was there, no one knew what happened. Colby said two people knew: his brother and sister, JJ and Tylee. They were there, they were buried in a backyard.

“And they love me, and we are sealed together forever,” Vallow said to her son. “They love me, and they are fine, and they know the truth, and I know the truth.”

“It doesn’t freaking matter what happened if they are buried in your new husband’s backyard,” he said. Colby pushed his mother again and again. Say what happened then. Just say it.

She doesn’t.

In many ways, this is the Lori Vallow the world knows: aloof, quiet, a woman talking about love and Jesus, annoyed at her integrity being questioned.

And so what remains of this phone call is that laugh. A laugh offered in the face of her living son as he begged her for answers, screamed at her, invoked Jesus, offered prayers, she found the ability to laugh.

Phone Call #2: Summer Shiflet calls her sister in jail.

Two weeks ago, Lori Vallow’s sister Summer Shiflet took the stand, and yet another phone call was played, in which Summer also phoned Vallow in jail.

Similarly to the call with Colby Ryan, Shiflet was devastated over the discovery of the childrens’ bodies in Daybell’s yard, and incensed by the ways that Vallow had lied. Memorably, a month before the children were discovered, she and Vallow’s mother had sat down for an interview with CBS News and defended her, and criticized the “mob mentality” that had developed around the story.

“You know they were there?” Shiflet asked Vallow through sobs and gasps.

“I can’t talk about it,” Vallow told her younger sister.

Shiflet was hysterical, could barely speak. Through tears, she asked her sister how she could let her children be “thrown away like garbage.”

“You think I let that happen?” Vallow asked, incredulous.

“Yes! I do!” Shiflet said.

“Oh, thanks,” Vallow said.

Shiflet asked for another explanation. Vallow said she couldn’t talk about it.

“You went off to Hawaii and were dancing on the beach while your kids were in the ground?” Shiflet said.

“You know me, Summer,” Vallow said, but Shiflet pushed back.

“We believed you! We stood up for you!” Shiflet said, screaming instead of crying. “Either explain it or don’t expect me not to be upset … when the kids are on Chad’s property.” She demanded truth.

“Nobody knows. I’m sorry, honey,” Vallow said, chillingly calm.

“Then nobody knows except for you and the Lord.”

“Yeah, ask him,” Vallow said.

“I have!” Shiflet yelled. “And guess what? I don’t have one scripture that says it’s okay for children to be thrown away like garbage in the ground.” She screamed and cried. She asked how Lori could go on without her children.

“Nobody in the world knows what I’ve been through,” Vallow said. She said no one in the world could see her pain, no one had seen her writhing on the ground, crying and in agony. No one had seen that Lori Vallow.

Shiflet didn’t buy it, again raising the subject of the photos of Vallow and Daybell’s beach wedding in Hawaii. “You were dancing on a beach!” Shiflet said.

“Yeah! Months later,” Vallow said. “Trying to go on with life. Trying to find some kind of happiness. Do you think I want to be alone?”

Phone Calls #3 and #4: Tammy Daybell calls 911 / Garth and Chad Daybell call 911.

Last week, two 911 calls were played in the courtroom. The first was made by one of the victims of this case: Tammy Daybell. And it was a stunning thing to hear her voice, after all this time, so clearly, so calm.

Tammy had called 911 on October 9, 2019. Here’s an excerpt about that night from When the Moon Turns to Blood:

A few days later, Tammy Daybell was returning home from a meeting of the Relief Society—the LDS women’s organization—where she had been prepping freezer meals. She pulled her car into the driveway under the large golden house numbers, got out, and saw a man standing near the back of her car as if he had been waiting for her to get home. He had a gun and was wearing a ski mask, and he fired at her.

Tammy shrieked. “What are you doing?!” she screamed at him, and yelled for Chad, who was inside the house.

The man in black fled, running around the side of the brick home toward the backyard. The county denied my records request for calls for service of any kind at the Daybell home, so it’s unknown whether Tammy Daybell called the police or filed any kind of report that night. But she did post about it on Facebook, and she seemed almost hesitant to be scared by what had happened:

Okay Neighbors—

Something really weird just happened, and I want you to know so you can watch out.

I had gotten home and parked in our front driveway. As I was getting stuff out of the backseat, a guy wearing a ski mask was suddenly standing by the back of my car with a paintball gun. He shot at me several times, although I don’t think it was loaded. I yelled for Chad and he ran off around the back of my house.

I have no idea what his motive was, and he never spoke, even after I asked him several times what he thought he was doing. I was about to smack him with my freezer meals from Enrichment tonight when I decided to yell for Chad instead.

When, ten days later, Tammy Daybell—at age forty-nine—was found dead in her bed, it was hard not to think the strange incident with the man in black was somehow connected to it.

In court, we got an answer — two 911 calls placed back to back: the first by Tammy’s son-in-law, who lived across the street, and then from Tammy herself. Here’s the one from Tammy:

“Hi, I need to report something,” Tammy Daybell said to the Fremont County dispatcher. The dispatcher said she’d just gotten another call about a “suspicious person” from nearby.

“He was all dressed in black and he had a ski mask on,” Tammy confirmed. He was holding a gun — she thought it was a paintball gun — like he was going to shoot at her. “I kept asking him what he was doing because I could tell it was a paintball thing. And then just kept doing it so I yelled for my husband and he took off running around the back of my house.”

This is presumed to be Alex Cox, and if he ran toward the back yard, he ran toward a place that was familiar to him: a place where his cell phone had been pinging on the last known days Tylee and JJ had ever been seen alive, in the places where their bodies would eventually be found.

“He didn’t say anything,” she said. “He was holding the gun like he had a rifle, and was shooting at me. But nothing came out of the gun either, so I don’t think it was loaded.”

The way Tammy sounds on the phone is so calm, so assured that this was just a neighborhood kid pulling a prank, but who froze up and simply stood there. And hearing her words now, it further complicates Alex Cox as the hitman: someone who had maybe killed before, but when standing face-to-face with a new victim — a person he did not know, not a child, but an adult — he couldn’t do it.

The next 911 call came ten days later from the Daybell house, and before anything was said, someone could be heard crying loudly in the background.

“We just found my mom, she’s on the ground frozen. She’s stiff. Uh, I don’t know,” Garth Daybell, Tammy and Chad’s oldest son, told the dispatcher. Someone took the phone from his hand.

“I’m Chad, the husband. She’s clearly dead,” Daybell said.

As the dispatcher asks questions, Daybell moaned and cried. “Yeah, she’s not even — she’s frozen.”

The Daybell family — in a story now confirmed by Fremont County Coroner Brenda Dye — did not want an autopsy performed. Tammy Daybell was then buried back in her hometown of Springville, Utah, near her family.

But on December 11, 2019, her body was exhumed.

On Monday, testimony provided by the Utah State Medical Examiner Dr. Erik Christensen, who performed the autopsy of her body, told a more complicated story of her death.

Christensen confirmed that Tammy died by asphyxiation, and that he observed bruising on her chest and her arms (which he said likely occurred close to her time of death, since bodies cannot bruise as easily after circulation stops). Which delivers the biggest bombshell of all out of this case:

Someone restrained Tammy Daybell. And then they killed her.

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