Lori Vallow, a member of the Doomsday cult who killed her two children, grinned in court on Tuesday during a procedural hearing before her capital murder trial.
Throughout the Idaho hearing, Vallow, 49, scowled and chuckled while sometimes turning to face her lawyers and occasionally glancing back toward the audience.
When her family initially made news in 2020 when her children went missing, she was much less youthful-looking.
Tylee Ryan, 16, and JJ Vallow, 7, are suspected of being killed in September 2019 after their mother allegedly became obsessed with the end of the world.
In 2020, shallow graves containing their bones were discovered in the garden of their stepfather.
Lori was becoming more and more engaged with Chad Daybell, a doomsday preacher who was married to another lady at the time of their murders.
The two are surrounded by a web of death and mystery since both Chad’s wife and Lori’s brother previously perished under strange circumstances.
Two months after JJ and Tylee disappeared in November 2019, Lori and Chad exchanged vows on a private Hawaiian beach.
They were detained for months, all the while Lori and Chad were residing in Hawaii.
The couple has resisted telling investigators what happened to the children.
JJ’s corpse was located in Chad’s backyard next to a tree, and his sister’s body was found close by in the man’s pet graveyard.
Daybell’s five children contend that the discovery of Tylee and JJ’s bodies on their father’s Idaho property—buried in little graves—shows that he was ‘framed’ for the couple’s deaths.
They contend that their father, a former gravedigger, would never have buried remains in error.
Seth Daybell, the son of Daybell, told CBS’ 48 Hours, “He knew how to dig graves and it just doesn’t seem realistic to me.”
Furthermore, the kids argue that it is absurd that dad would conceal the dead in his backyard given the acres of uninhabited open land that surround his home.
The last time Lori’s brother Alex Cox’s phone pinged at the location was around the time the two kids vanished in September 2019.
Three months later, Cox died of what seemed to be a brain aneurysm.
In July of that year, Cox murdered Charles Vallow, Lori’s estranged husband. Before shooting his brother-in-law in self-defense, he said that he had interfered in a domestic argument between his sister and Charles.
On September 8, he travelled to Yellowstone National Park with Lori and her children. At that point, Tylee was last seen alive.
The children of Chad have already expressed their opinion that Lori is planning to frame him and that Alex Cox, her deceased brother, and themselves are to blame for the children’s deaths.
A judge pleaded not guilty on Lori’s behalf after she declined to take a position on the murder allegations.
In October, her trial is scheduled to start.
After her fourth husband Charles was shot to death during the argument with Cox at her house, Lori married Chad, who was her fifth spouse.
When he inquired about what had become of the two younger children, Lori would ominously respond, “Everything’s going to be disclosed soon,” according to her 26-year-old son from a previous marriage.
26-year-old Colby Ryan said he was still struggling.