Daughter who police say was killed by Idaho 'doomsday' couple talked to investigators about her stepdad's death two months before disappearing
- Newly released video shows Tylee Ryan fidget as she talks to Chandler, Arizona police about her stepdad's shooting death.
- Ryan told police that Charles Vallow was angry on the morning that he was shot.
A newly released video shows the slain 17-year-old daughter of doomsday prepper Lori Vallow talk to police about the shooting death of her stepfather.
Tylee Ryan, who police say Vallow and her husband, Chad Daybell, killed as a part of an apocalyptic conspiracy, was interviewed by police in Chandler, Arizona two months before she and her brother, JJ Vallow, disappeared.
In the July 2019 interview, which was among a trove of investigative materials released to Insider and other news outlets this week, Ryan fidgets and plays with her bare feet as she talks about how Charles Vallow was shot and killed in what she described as an argument.
Police would learn months later through text messages and interviews that Lori Vallow plotted to kill her husband because she believed he was possessed by a demon, according to a probable cause affidavit provided to Insider. Vallow was indicted for the killing in July, after both her children and Daybell's ex-wife were found dead.
In Ryan's telling, she awoke on July 11, 2019 to an argument between Charles Vallow, her mother, and her uncle, Alex Cox. She told police that she grabbed a bat from her room so she could "feel safe with something in her hands."
She then ordered Vallow, who looked angrier than she'd ever seen him, to back away from her mother.
"Obviously I didn't hit him or anything with the bat," Ryan said in the interview. "It was kind of just for like security, I guess, to know that I had it."
Vallow then took the bat from Ryan, she said, and Cox pulled him backwards, prompting her and her 7-year-old brother to flee the house.
"I ran out the door and sort of just stood there with my little brother," Ryan said.
Cox, who is Lori Vallow's brother, later told police that he shot Charles Vallow when he refused to drop the bat. Police initially considered the shooting an act of self-defense, but Lori Vallow has since been charged with conspiring with Cox to kill her then-husband.
Cox also believed Vallow had special powers and was a goddess chosen to prepare 144,000 people for the end of the world, according to the affidavit viewed by Insider. Police say Cox died of natural causes in December 2019, three months after Ryan and her brother were last seen alive.
A web of deaths tied to Lori Vallow
The death of Charles Vallow kicked off a string of criminal investigations linked to Lori Vallow and Daybell, an apocalyptic novelist who she married four months after the shooting.
Shortly after the death, Vallow and Cox moved to Rexburg, Idaho, where she married Daybell a month after his wife, Tammy, died.
In November 2019, Rexburg police went to Vallow and Daybell's home to check on the children after their grandmother said she hadn't seen or heard from them in months. Vallow told police that her kids were staying with family, which authorities later learned wasn't true.
The couple disappeared the next day, and were discovered vacationing in Hawaii in February.
Vallow and Daybell were both charged with first-degree murder after Ryan and JJ's remains were found on Daybell's property in May.
Those who know Vallow told officials that she believed her two children were "possessed and had become zombies," according to court documents in an unrelated case involving Vallow's niece.
Vallow was found "not competent to proceed" with a trial in her children's deaths, and since has been receiving mental health treatment. If she is eventually found competent, she and Daybell will be tried together. The couple was also indicted for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the October 2019 death of Tammy Daybell.
Daybell has pleaded not guilty to all charges related to the death of the children and his former wife.