Lori Vallow’s surviving son reveals chilling response about siblings’ demise
Doomsday-obsessed mom Lori Vallow’s surviving son has revealed that she gave him a chilling response when he pressed her on the whereabouts of his missing younger siblings.
“I asked her 100 times, ‘What’s going on?’” Colby Ryan, 26, told the US Sun about Vallow, 48, who faces murder raps along with her husband, Chad Daybell, 52, in the deaths of Tyree Ryan, 17, and 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow.
“And the only answer I ever got was, ‘Everything’s going to be revealed soon,’” Ryan told the outlet. “So I just left. It was always a question mark — you couldn’t get a straight answer.”
He added: “It was already hard enough to reach out and be the one to chase her down, but that’s just kind of how it went.”
If Vallow and Daybell are convicted of any of the first-degree counts against them, prosecutors will ask for capital punishment as a sentencing option, court papers say.
When Vallow’s kids disappeared in 2019, the couple never reported them missing, police said. They also declined to aid detectives trying to find them.
Vallow and Daybell fled Idaho and traveled to Hawaii, where they were arrested in the kids’ disappearance, police said.
The burned bodies of both kids were eventually discovered in a makeshift cemetery near Daybell’s home several months after they disappeared.
Lawyers for Vallow, who has pleaded not guilty, had argued that she was mentally unfit for trial — but she was deemed able to understand the charges against her after spending 11 months in a mental hospital.
The couple at the time of the children’s disappearance reportedly were members of Preparing a People, a doomsday prepper group that they joined in 2018.
A friend of the mother told investigators that Vallow believed her kids were possessed by evil spirits and could eventually turn into zombies.
Ryan said he couldn’t get answers from his mother from the beginning.
“Pretty early on [after his siblings’ disappearances] I reached out to my mom and she was being really shady about it before she cut everybody, including me, off,” Ryan told the Sun.
“And then obviously, you’re going to start questioning, ‘Is everyone alive? Are they OK? What if the worst has happened?’ But you can’t think like that,” he said.
He said he continued to press his mom, while maintaining hope that his siblings were safe.
“There was a lot of back-and-forth and a lot of fear,” Colby continued. “But I had to keep faith also that there was a possibility nothing happened because I couldn’t imagine anything happening, especially with my mom.
“In my mind, there was just absolutely 100 percent no way that she would hurt them,” added Ryan, who recently released a self-published book, “The God Over Odds,” in which he describes his faith amid his childhood traumas.
Ryan said he once shared a close bond with his mother, but the relationship was compromised in 2001 after she married her third husband, Joseph Ryan.
He said Tylee’s biological dad was physically and sexually abusive toward him until the couple got divorced about three years later.
In 2006, Ryan’s mother married Charles Vallow, who became his adoptive father.
Lori is charged separately in Arizona with conspiring to murder Charles, who was fatally shot by her brother, Alex Cox, in July 2019.
Cox, who claimed the shooting was in self-defense, died in December of an apparent blood clot in his lung.
Ryan told the US Sun he was overcome with anger when he learned about his mother’s alleged crimes.
“They took my family away from me, they took them away from everybody else that loved them,” he said. “It’s one of the most painful things ever to hear, to hear details about how your own people, that you grew up around and loved, killed your own family.”
