Chad Daybell, a prolific author of doomsday-focused religious novels, married widow Lori Vallow soon after his first wife Tammy was found dead under mysterious circumstances.
Days later, the middle-aged newlyweds were looking for housing in Hawaii—with Chad telling a potential landlady that it was Tammy who helped him, from beyond the grave, find love again.
“I woke up that morning and she had been dead for a couple hours but she had a peaceful look on her face at her burial. I felt her tell me she was happy and helping our family on the other side of the veil,” Daybell texted the property owner, according to Fox 10.
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“She helped me reconnect with Lori so quickly and it helped my children move forward.”
Daybell was presumably speaking of his and Tammy’s five adult children—and not Vallow’s two youngest children, Tylee and J.J., who vanished in late September and are now the subject of a multi-state police investigation.
Cops are also investigating Tammy’s Oct. 12 death, which was initially listed as natural, and exhumed her body after the children disappeared. And they are taking another look at the death of Vallow’s fourth husband, who was shot dead by her brother—who has since died himself—in July.
Daybell and Vallow were based in eastern Idaho but seem to have decamped for Hawaii, where Vallow had once lived, soon after Tammy’s death. Last week, Hawaii police served them with a child protection order to produce the kids within five days.
The Thursday deadline came and went with no sign of Vallow, 17-year-old Tylee or 7-year-old J.J., who has autism.
“I’d love to know where those kids are and I think all of America wants to know where they are,” J.J.’s grandmother, Kay Woodcock, said at a press conference last week.
“How do you not have them for four months? What kind of mother does that?” she added. “The only word that is coming to mind is ‘monster.’”
Woodcock has said Vallow was a loving mother until she became obsessed with Daybell’s apocalyptic books, which are aimed at a Mormon audience, and moved to Idaho.
Martin said when they showed up Jan. 7 to look at the master bedroom she had for rent in Kauai, they didn’t seem to have a care in the world.
“They said that they waited all day for God to tell them which house to go to and he told them to come to mine,” she told Fox 10.
“They were just like two teenagers that had just been set free and they were just giddy,” Martin remembered.
Police have publicly pleaded with Vallow to assist in the investigation, to no avail, and have said they believe the children’s lives are in danger.
