The sister of killer ‘Doomsday Mom’ Lori Vallow has thanked prosecutors after a death sentence was passed on the man who she murdered her children with in Idaho.
Summer Shiflet publicly defended her sister and struggled to believe Vallow had killed her own children in pursuit of ‘money, power and sex’ when she was arrested in February 2020.
But she broke her silence to admit her sister has lost touch with reality over the murders of Joshua ‘JJ’ Vallow, 7, Tylee Ryan, 16, and Tammy Daybell, the former wife of her accomplice Chad Daybell.
Daybell, 55, expressed no emotion on Thursday as he was sentenced to death for his role in the murder of the children, but Shiflet told delegates at CrimeCon 2024 that justice had been done.
‘I had no expectations but when I heard those words, it was everything I needed to hear,’ she said.
Summer Shiflet blames Chad Daybell for turning her sister Lori Vallow into a deluded killer
Daybell, 55, expressed no emotion on Saturday as he was sentenced to death but Lori Vallow’s sister Summer Shiflet thanked prosecutors for their work
Lori Vallow murdered two of her three children and the ex-wife of her new husband but told her sister that they are all doing well
Prosecutors, who called 67 witnesses throughout the trial, said the couple justified the three killings by creating a detailed and apocalyptic belief system, part of an elaborate scheme to eliminate any obstacles to their relationship and to obtain money from survivor benefits and life insurance.
The children disappeared from their home in September 2019, shortly before the couple flew off to Hawaii for their wedding.
The bodies of JJ and Tylee were found the following June in shallow graves in Daybell’s Fremont County, Idaho property.
JJ had been asphyxiated with a plastic bag but Tylee’s remains had been dismembered and so badly burned that investigators were unable to determine a precise cause of death.
Shiflet said on Saturday that Vallow, 50, has convinced herself that her dead children are doing well.
‘One thing for me, personally, in coming to understand why this happened, which is a huge question, is: how does your sister and this mother get to this point from a one-year period from meeting Chad Daybell to having your kids murdered,’ Shiflet told a panel.
‘How does that happen? How do you get to that point?
‘So, for me, it’s been helpful to understand her diagnosis and to understand that her reality is as real to her as our reality is to us.
‘And she 100% thinks she is sane. She does not think there is anything wrong with her.’
Joshua Vallow, 7, left, and Tylee Ryan, 17. They were last seen on Sept. 23, 2019 in Rexburg, Idaho, before their remains were discovered on Daybell’s property nine months later
Vallow told the court told that her murdered children were still ‘happy’ and ‘busy’
Daybell and his ex-wife Tammy Daybell before she was murdered in October 2019
In this aerial photo, investigators search for human remains at Chad Daybell’s residence in Salem, Idaho, on June 9, 2020 – they found the remains of Vallow’s two youngest children, JJ and Tylee
Prosecutors successfully argued that the doomsday mother became obsessed with ideas of an impending apocalypse, and the only way to save her children’s souls so they could be among 144,000 people who would survive was to kill them.
Jurors heard how the couple saw her children and Daybell’s wife as ‘obstacles’ to the romantic life they envisioned for themselves in Hawaii.
Prosecutors said Vallow and Daybell believed – or chose to believe – that those who stood in their way were ‘dark’ possessed individuals who they referred to as ‘zombies.’
She was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole last year by Judge Steven Boyce who listed her mental health issues as ‘delusional disorder’ mixed with ‘hyper-religiosity’ and a ‘continuous and unspecified personality disorder’ with narcissistic features.
She told the court that her deceased children were ‘happy’ and ‘busy’.
‘I have had many communications with Jesus Christ, savior of this world, and our heavenly parents,’ she added.
‘I have had many angelic visitors have come and communicated with me and even manifested themselves to me because of these communications.
‘I know for a fact that my children are happy and busy in the spirit world. Because of my communications with my friend, Tammy Daybell, I know that she is also very happy and extremely busy.’
The pair were convicted of three counts of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, insurance fraud and grand theft.
Daybell, 55, was stone faced as the sentence was handed Saturday as the Idaho jury unanimously agreed that no mitigating factors would make a death sentence for him unjust.
‘It’s not an overstatement to say that I lost everything, but more importantly we all lost Tylee and JJ,’ said Colby Ryan, Tylee and JJ’s brother, Lori’s only living child.
‘I stand here today motherless, fatherless, sisterless and brotherless.’
Tylee Ryan’s aunt, Annie Cushing, said, ‘She was intelligent, clever, funny, sarcastic and had the voice of an angel.’
JJ Vallow’s grandmother Kay Woodcock noted he would have turned 12-years-old earlier in the week if he were still alive.
‘Would he have been the next Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Tim Burton, Elon Musk? We will never know,’ Woodcock said.
A string of mysterious deaths emerged involving family members on both sides
As public interest in the case grew, the couple fled Idaho for Hawaii, marrying on the beach in a romantic ceremony that they gleefully documented in photos
Vallow was served poolside in Kauai on January 25, 2020, with demands to produce her children to police after they had been missing from Rexburg, Idaho since September 2019
Tammy Daybell’s younger sister Samantha Gwilliam said, ‘My sister was ripped from our lives, because of her murder, we lost a beloved mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and daughter. She is irreplaceable.’
Vallow has been extradited to Arizona, where she faces two charges of conspiring to murder both her ex-husband, Charles Vallow, and Brandon Boudreaux, the ex-husband of her niece.
Daybell faces death by firing squad.
Shiflet said her sister would rather be in prison than address her mental health disorders in hospital.
‘She doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong,’ she added.