Transcript of Ep 1: Warning Signs

In the summer of 2019, Nancy Jo Hancock began a whirlwind romance with a man she met on the dating site LDS Planet.

I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

You may know it as the Mormon Church.

It's not a church-sponsored site, but it's for LDS people to meet. And his profile came on there, and he reached out and sent me a message.

Nancy Jo had no way of knowing the man she was chatting with online, Charles Vallow, would soon find himself in the middle of one of the nation's most shocking crimes.

It's hard to imagine that someone's really going to kill someone.

Charles was handsome. He had a beard, a shaved head, and an easy smile.

He was just funny. And he asked me for my phone number and we began texting and talking.

Nancy Jo was drawn in from the get-go. Originally from Louisiana, Charles spoke with a drawl, and he seemed the perfect Southern gentleman.

Very easy to talk to. So charming, so funny, and he was just very kind. He was so kind.

They lived in different states. Nancy Jo was in Phoenix, Arizona. Charles was in Houston, Texas.

He was living there, and that's where he was going to work.

But Charles said he'd soon be living in Phoenix part-time. He was also going to rent the In fact, he said he was coming into town in a week. Charles and Nancy Jo texted and talked day and night. He shared his life story with her. In some ways, he sounded too good to be true. He told her he was a successful businessman. He had played semi-pro baseball when he was younger. But he was also incredibly sensitive and sweet, the devoted father of a 7-year-old boy with autism named The love of Charles' life was JJ.

As we talked, he, you know, sent me pictures of him and JJ. I mean, that was the love of his life. He loved that little boy.

But as Charles' life story caught up with present day, some of the things he was saying concerned Nancy Jo. For one, Charles was still married. So he was pretty upfront with you, the fact that he was still married.

Very upfront with me.

He told Nancy Jo he'd recently found evidence that his wife was cheating on him. She'd been recording videos of herself dancing and sending them to a man.

Not just a few, like lots of videos.

And from Charles' descriptions of his wife, she sounded like a lot. Charles said that at one point, back when he'd been living in Phoenix, Lori had told him they were through and then just disappeared. He had no idea where she'd gone, and he scrambled to figure out how to take care of JJ with his busy work schedule.

And he had moved, he and JJ, to Houston.

2 and a half months later, Lori reappeared.

Decided she was moving back to Arizona.

The plan was that Lori would take care of JJ in Phoenix, and Charles would fly in regularly to see him.

So because he would be here part-time, we continued speaking and Then agreed to meet when he was coming in town.

Charles Vallow arrived in Phoenix the evening of July 10th, 2019.

So he flew in and met me at the Keg restaurant.

Were you, like, nervous at all?

No. I felt like I knew him a lot better than I knew most people that you go on a first date with. We had spent hours on the phone.

Charles was just as charming in person.

He asked me about my family and my kids. And, I mean, we talked a lot about— about a lot of things. Baseball, college years, Louisiana.

As the dinner went on, Charles opened up even more about the struggles he was having with his wife.

I've talked to a lot of men that have anger about their ex-wives. Charles did not. He was telling me what was going on, but he was still very, very shockingly kind.

Charles told Nancy Jo that his wife Lori had become completely obsessed with the idea that the world was ending soon, and she was saying all kinds of crazy things.

She was saying that she didn't need to eat anymore because she was immortal, and that she could kill him and dispose of his body with her powers and no one would find him.

Charles thought his wife was having some sort of mental breakdown.

The situation that he was in was kind of like, A train wreck that you can't look away from. You know, you'd just be like, you gotta be kidding me.

Were you thinking, oh, he might be exaggerating a bit, or you didn't know the whole situation?

I could tell that he believed that possibly he was in danger.

In fact, Charles told her he was worried enough that he changed his life insurance policy so that Lori wouldn't get any money if he died.

Because he feared that monetary reason was why he would be killed, so that they could get that life insurance.

Still, Charles was having trouble disentangling his life from Lori's.

I could tell that while he knew he needed to move on from Lori, that he still had a love for her that was— I think he would have probably even described it unhealthy at that point.

Lori had been their autistic son JJ's primary caretaker for most of his life.

He just wanted her to be a good mom to JJ, and he was so kind and generous. He was paying all of her bills. He rented her a place.

As the dinner date wound down, Charles told Nancy Jo just how much he was looking forward to seeing JJ the next day.

The only thing that I could relate it to was like a kid on Christmas morning. And I'll tell you, anyone who would have ended up with him would have been second in his life because the love of Charles's life was JJ. It really was. I've dated a lot of guys and he was just a good guy. He was kind. He was funny. He loved God. He loved his family. He was one of the good ones.

The date had gone well, but Nancy Jo felt like she needed to be honest with Charles. The stories he'd told her about his ex-wife, Lori, just seemed a little too intense.

I said to him, you have too much of a connection. No one is going to want to have a serious relationship with you. Until you disconnect from Lori.

But after returning home, Nancy Jo wondered if she'd been too harsh.

So, I sent a text and I said, hey, I apologize if I was too hard on you. And I still know what his response was to this day, and I think it's just so charming. He said, you used velvet gloves. And then he said, you know, I'll reach out to you, we'll meet up for a late lunch or something. So I said, oh, you know, that sounds great. So around 11, I text him and I just said, hey, how'd your morning with JJ go? And he didn't text back, which was very unusual because he was like, you text him, he texts you back. That's just how he had been through the week that I'd known him. So I waited a while, and then probably around 1:30, I called. His phone went to voicemail, and I didn't leave a voicemail.

Nancy Jo never heard back from Charles.

I just thought, well, I guess that date wasn't as good of a date as I thought it was. So fast forward to 6 months later, and I'm sitting at home folding some laundry on a Saturday night. You know, when other people are watching movies, I'm watching Dateline. And they're talking about missing kids and, you know, this crazy woman, and Charles's picture comes on the screen. And it's the picture that he used on the dating site. So it was a very familiar picture to me. Yeah. And so I paused it, and I rewound it, and I listened, and I saw the date.

According to reports, the morning after his date with Nancy Jo, Charles attacked his wife Lori. And when her brother, Alex Cox, stepped in to defend her, The confrontation turned deadly. Charles allegedly swung a baseball bat at Lori's brother and hit him in the back of the head.

You could not convince me that that man I talked to the night before would have done that.

Lori's brother said he went to his room and got a gun.

911, what's the emergency there?

Uh, there was a— I got in a fight with my brother-in-law and I shot him in self-defense.

And is he hurt?

Yeah, there's blood. He's, he's not moving.

What's your name, sir?

My name is Alex. Last name is Cox. Alex.

What's his name, your brother-in-law?

Charles Vallow.

And was he armed also?

Yeah, he came at me with a bat. Never seen him that enraged before.

From KSL Podcasts, I'm Nate Eaton, and this is Deceived: The Daybell Story. I first heard about this story 3 months after Charles Vallow went out with Nancy Jo and was then killed the next morning by his brother-in-law, Alex Cox. We'll get back to that murder later in the series. Because when I initially learned about this case, it had nothing to do with Charles at all, but rather a mysterious death here in East Idaho where I live and work. I sat down with my producer, Ben Keebrick, to tell him about it.

So what's your name? Who do you work for? And what were you doing when you first heard about this case?

My name is Nate Eaton. I'm the news director and reporter for eastidahonews.com. I worked in television for about 15 years, and it was crazy. I worked on the East Coast in Virginia. I was on the 11 o'clock news every night covering crimes and shootings, and it just got to be— I got burned out, I guess you could say. So this job came along. I thought, oh, go to Idaho with my family, live a slower pace, never expecting that the biggest story of my career would happen right here in, you know, You know, my backyard. So it was 2019 in the fall. I get this text from a source, a police source, who said something big is about to happen. And I'm thinking, oh, a huge drug bust, because that sometimes happens. There's a road through Idaho up to Canada. And then he was really quiet about details. And normally this source will talk, and he was just so hush-hush about it. And then a week or so later, I get a text from a friend who says, have you heard anything about Tammy Daybell's death? And I had never heard the name Tammy Daybell. I didn't know who she was.

But I went and looked at the obituary, and it was this youngish mother. She was 49, living in Rexburg, the school librarian, mother of 5, who had suddenly passed away in her sleep. And, uh, this message from a friend said, I heard that there's something more to it. Well, I got the message and thought, that's interesting, and didn't think much more of it. So fast forward to December, the Friday before Christmas, we get a news release from the Rexburg Police Department talking about 2 missing children who officers believe are in danger. And they attached photos of the 2 missing kids, JJ and Tylee. JJ is at the time 6 or 7, my daughter's age. That's how I always imagine him. Nicely combed hair, cute smile, you know, the teeth coming in. Tylee, blonde teenager, big smile. Looked like 2 really sweet kids. I mean, they, they just like normal kids. And reading through the release, it was unlike any release I had ever seen.

We got this press release and it was weird.

This is Nate Sunderland, my colleague at East Idaho News.

It was weird because normally you get a missing person release, you just get a page that says a little bit about their demographics. But this one, it was strange because and their parents refused to talk about it. And we're like, what? What does that mean? That was kind of the beginning of what became easily the strangest case we've ever dealt with. So we wrote it up based on the press release and what little information we could get from police, and it exploded.

Local law enforcement agencies and the FBI are investigating a possible connection between the death of a Fremont County woman and 2 missing Rexburg children who are believed to be in serious danger.

We got 20,000 shares on that Facebook post when we put out that they were missing.

49-year-old Tammy Daybell, a school librarian, was found deceased in her home October 19th. Her death was initially believed to be from natural causes, but a later investigation revealed the death might be suspicious. Within weeks of Tammy Daybell's death, Her surviving husband, Chad Daybell, had married Lori Vallow, who is the mother of the missing children.

We put in the caption, their parents aren't talking.

It's not clear what the connection is between the 2 cases. On November 26th, Rexburg police tried to conduct a welfare check on Joshua JJ Vallow, Lori Vallow's adopted 7-year-old special needs son. Relatives outside of Idaho had requested the check because they hadn't spoken to JJ since September. The next day, police executed search warrants in an attempt to locate JJ, and investigators determined that Vallow and Daybell had abruptly left their home. Authorities do not know where they are, and they continue to be uncooperative.

We put it up on our website, and the post went crazy. And that night, I went to my children. They had a choir concert in Rexburg, the city where these 2 kids were missing. Rexburg bills itself as America's Family Community. They have a big sign that says that. So I'm driving up there. Eastern Idaho is quite rural. You can drive 5 minutes in any direction and you'll be in a farm. And I called another police source and I, I'm like, so what's the deal with these missing kids? And he also said, I can't tell you much, but, um, picture the craziest story you've ever covered times 100. So I called our intern Eric, and I said, these sources are saying there's something more, and I'm at this choir concert. The other weird thing is that Rexburg's a very tight-knit community. I think 95% are Latter-day Saints, and no one seemed to know who these kids were. After the concert, our intern Eric, he calls me and he's like, you're not gonna believe this. The mother of the missing kids' 4th husband, Charles Vallow, was shot and killed by her brother in July.

I got in a fight with my brother-in-law and I shot him in self-defense.

I think at that point we realized that something was weird. You've got missing kids, you've got dead spouses. And a lot of really fishy circumstances. And then the next day, on a Saturday afternoon, I get a call from the Rexburg assistant chief of police. And he says, we're about to send you the pictures of the parents who are missing and refuse to talk to us.

Lori is a beautiful woman, blonde hair, very fair. And then she's married to this potato-looking guy, Chad Daybell, who's just frumpy and, like, What the heck is going on?

We put the pictures of the parents out there, and when we did that, we started getting all sorts of tips. Chad Daybell was leading this religious fringe group.

He would give blessings to computers.

Lori Vallow was big into this podcast called Preparing a People.

I just thought, that's the weirdest thing I've ever heard.

They were both into these end-of-times teachings.

All kinds of just weird, strange beliefs.

If maybe they believe the world is ending on a certain date—

Maybe they're just in a bunker somewhere.

As my colleague Nate Sunderland started researching Lori and Chad's religious beliefs, it seemed that these sorts of extreme teachings were more common than we had realized.

The more we dug into this case, the more doomsday prepper stuff we started to see, and the more it felt like they were everywhere. There are all sorts of doomsday preppers in our area who have eccentric Mormon beliefs that are not mainstream. This stuff feels like something that a lot of people believe, but they just don't talk about unless they're in certain circles. I'm a Mormon, and I remember going to my religious leader and saying, Bishop, I feel like I'm going to church and I'm looking around and I'm wondering, are you a normal Mormon? Or are you a Mormon that bought $50,000 worth of tents and thinks you're gonna go camp in the middle of nowhere to wait for the 144,000. How do I go to church and sit down with people who have these beliefs? I actually left that meeting feeling even more unwell because my bishop at the time told me his parents had actually been pushed out of the church because of some of their extreme beliefs. And that just compounded my sudden thought that, oh my goodness, how many eccentric Mormons are there here? And what kind of eccentric beliefs are there?

It was tremendously faith-shaking, this story. And the entire community is not like Chad and Lori Daybell. In fact, vast majority of people are not anything like them. But there are those fervent believers out there, and I think there are more of them than we'd like to admit.

So by December 20th, 2019, we'd learned that not only were 2 children, JJ and Tylee, missing, but their mom Lori and her new husband Chad Daybell were in hiding. And Chad and Lori's spouses had both died within the last 6 months. Lori's 4th husband, Charles Vallow, was shot and killed by her brother in July, and Chad's wife, Tammy, had died in October. And we tried to do as much news gathering as we could, but remember, this is right before Christmas. So Christmas came and went, and there weren't really any new details. And we started looking more into the death of Chad Daybell's wife, Tammy. Turns out that just 10 days before she died, after returning home from a clogging class, Tammy put a strange post on a local Facebook group.

She wrote, Okay neighbors, something really weird just happened and I want you to know so that you can watch out. I had gotten home and parked in our front driveway. As I was getting stuff out of the back seat, a guy wearing a ski mask was Suddenly standing by the back of my car.

She described the man in greater detail in an email to her son, Mark.

It was a guy dressed in black pointing a rifle at me. I think I was in a bit of shock because I just said, what do you think you're doing? Well, the guy started pulling the trigger, and I could just hear a clicking and a whooshing sound.

Then I noticed the rifle was actually a paintball gun. It had a hopper. on the top of it. He stayed back by the car and just kept pulling the trigger while pointing the gun at me. And for some reason, I just kept asking him what he thought he was doing. And he didn't step towards me or even say anything.

Then the guy ran around the north side of the house. I ran in the house and got Chad.

We called the police and reported it, and they suspect it was a bipolar teenager who lives down the street.

Just 10 days after this bizarre event, 49-year-old Tammy died in her sleep. The coroner said from natural causes. And then 2 weeks later, Chad Daybell married Lori Vallow. To our newsroom, this all seemed a little too coincidental. And evidently, police thought so too, because we learned that in December, they had exhumed Tammy's body and planned to perform an autopsy. And even stranger, on the same day it was announced police were exhuming Tammy's body, Lori's brother Alex, the one who'd shot her 4th husband Charles, he'd died that same day. So now we've got 2 dead spouses, a dead brother, 2 missing adults, and 2 missing kids. On the 3rd of January, 2020, I got a text saying the cops were at Chad Daybell's house serving a warrant. I immediately alerted our staff and we sent our intern, Eric Grossarth, to check it out.

Hey everyone, Eric here with eastidahonews.com. I am in Salem and behind me is the house of Chad Daybell where the FBI, Rexburg Police Department, and Fremont County Sheriff's Office are currently serving a search warrant.

Freezing cold. There was snow on the ground, and police had completely surrounded Chad Daybell's house. But Chad Daybell? He's still missing. He's not there.

This whole area behind me is an active crime scene, part of their investigation.

Chad lived on a 4-acre lot in a rural area about 10 minutes north of Rexburg. The house itself was a modest ranch-style home with a tin roof, but the large property contained a number of sheds and shacks and a large red barn that had once headquartered Chad's small publishing company. And underneath all that snow out back, there was a fire pit and the family's pet cemetery. Law enforcement were using metal detectors to sweep over snow outside the home. They seemed to be focusing on one area in particular. Other officers had evidence gloves on, carrying bags in and out of the house.

It remains unclear, again, what they are searching for in this house. Other than it is most likely connected to the suspicious death of Tammy Daybell, as well as the disappearance of his new children, Tylee Ryan and Joshua Vallow.

That was on a Friday, and the following Monday on January 6th, I went and met with Sheriff Len Humphreys. What was the purpose of the search?

We're trying to clarify things, figure out what it was that possibly might have happened there.

At this point, would you be comfortable saying that Tammy Daybell's death was not natural?

It's suspicious.

It's suspicious? Mm-hmm.

We're waiting for the lab results.

But if the search of Chad's home had turned up anything of value, law enforcement wasn't talking. The next day, on January 7th, 2020, JJ's grandparents, Kay and Larry, came to Rexburg, Idaho, from Louisiana and held a news conference.

Good morning, everybody. My name is Larry Woodcock, my wife Kay Woodcock, and we are here to speak about the missing children, JJ Vallow and Tylee Ryan.

And it was them that originally sparked this whole thing because they had tried to talk with JJ on FaceTime. JJ had special needs. He was on the autism spectrum. And so he might not be able to carry on a conversation, but he would at least turn on the iPad and chat for a couple of seconds and then hang up and then call back repeatedly. And that had stopped completely. And Lori was not responding to the grandmother's messages about, can I see JJ? So the grandparents hold a news conference.

They have been missing now for approximately 2 months. And, um, I have a tendency to get very emotional when I talk about the children. I get extremely emotional when I talk about JJ. JJ is my heart. And all I want is just to see those children. And especially— and I'm being greedy— especially my boy JJ, my little man. And I just want to— I want to hear him beat on the drums. Mm-hmm. I want to hear him say, Papa, let's go ride. You know, or let's go to Chuck E.'s and let's go get a hamburger. That's what I want. And I'm hoping beyond hope that that happens in the near future. We're here to offer a $20,000 reward. I'm hoping that this will allow one person, one person to simply say, I know where he's at. And give us that information so that we can bring JJ and we can bring Tylee back. So please, if you know something, as the saying goes, say something.

The Woodcocks weren't just concerned with JJ because they were his grandparents, they also felt partially responsible for what had happened. When JJ was born, his mother had substance abuse issues and couldn't care for him. So Larry and Kay took him in, but they were older and didn't feel like they had the energy to give JJ the attention they felt he deserved. Kay's brother, Charles Vallow, however, had married a younger woman, Lori Vallow, who was a stay-at-home mom. So when Charles and Lori offered to adopt JJ, the Woodcocks thought it made sense.

If somebody 2 years ago would have said, this is what's going to happen with Lori, I would have never believed it. If Kay and I would have had any thought that in the future we were going to be involved in an issue like this, we would have never let JJ up for adoption. No. Never would have happened. Laurie was a good mother. When JJ was young, you couldn't ask for a better mother. She loved JJ. loved Charles. But there's a timeline change with Lori, and it started a few years ago. And I, I don't know what caused this conversion. You, you don't go from being the mother of the year, the mother of, of a special needs child, to The person that won't even tell you where she's at. That just doesn't happen. I don't know how you do that. I wish somebody would explain it to me. I wish she would explain it to me.

So what had happened to Lori? What had changed her from seemingly the mother of the year to the mother who just up and disappears? Well, it turns out that what we knew back then in January of 2020 was just the tip of the iceberg. And the full story is only now coming out with key figures finally sharing their story, like Nancy Jo Hancock, the woman you heard about at the beginning of this episode.

I didn't intend to ever do an interview. Ever.

Thanks for changing your mind.

Wanna know why? I am really angry at the way That Lori Daybell is representing my church. The very bizarre things that Chad and Lori believe are not what we believe.

When the full extent of what Lori and Chad were doing was finally revealed, no one knew what to think. Some blamed religion.

People seem to think that the things that she spouts are representative of my church.

Others, mental illness.

I knew they were crazy. I mean, that was clear.

Others still blamed lust and greed.

He feared that he would be killed so that they could get that life insurance.

I've been covering this case and its aftermath for over 6 years now, and the question I get asked the most is a variation of, what do you think? What do you think really happened? Or, who do you think was ultimately responsible? Do you think Lori is a liar, or does she really believe what she says? And those are the questions I'm hoping to answer in this podcast. This isn't a fun story. It's a tragedy, one that made me look hard in the mirror, examine my own community, my religion, my profession, even my own faith. I'm telling this story not so that we can gawk at the train wreck, but to examine where the train went off the rails and maybe help others Charles was a human.

He was a brother, a father, a son, an uncle, a friend, and he deserved justice.

Throughout my 6 years of reporting this story, I've interviewed hundreds of people, attended 4 lengthy trials, and learned about a whole underground world I never knew existed. My reporting has taken me across the country, from Idaho to Texas, Arizona, Utah, California, New York, even Florida. Even Hawaii. In fact, back in January of 2020, after the Woodcox news conference, I was about to leave freezing Idaho and go on my first reporting trip for this story because Larry Woodcox's plea for tips hadn't fallen on deaf ears. On the afternoon of January 14th, our newsroom Facebook page received a message from an anonymous source. It was a set of GPS coordinates pointing to a location on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. Next to all the coordinates was a message that simply said, they're here. Are you from here in Kauai? I am. Okay. Have you ever seen these children? That's next time on Deceived: The Daybell Story. Episode 2 is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Deceived is researched and written by Ben Kiebrick and hosted by me, Nate Eaton. Production and sound design by Ben Kiebrick. Pre-production help by Jenny Ament. Deceived is a production of KSL Podcasts.

The executive producer is Cheryl Worsley. Special thanks to Dave Cauley, Amy Donaldson, Kellyanne Halverson, Aaron Mason, Ryan Meeks, and Andrea Smardan for their notes. Voice acting on this episode by Aaron Mason and Cheryl Worsley.