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New charges filed against Lori Vallow Daybell

ST. ANTHONY, Idaho — New charges were filed late Monday against Lori Vallow Daybell, the mother of two children found dead on the Idaho property of her husband in early June.

Daybell, 46, was charged with two felony counts of conspiracy to destroy, alter or conceal evidence, East Idaho News reported.

Daybell and her husband, Chad Guy Daybell, are currently in jail. Lori Vallow Daybell has previously pleaded not guilty to charges of child abandonment and obstructing an investigation. Chad Daybell has pleaded not guilty to two counts of destruction, alteration and concealment of evidence.

A 16-page affidavit of probable cause contains information by detectives that led them to file charges against the couples, the newspaper reported.

Lori Vallow Daybell’s children, Joshua “J.J.” Vallow, 7, and Tylee Ryan, 17, were found buried on Chad Daybell’s property on June 9.

Lori Vallow Daybell was arrested in February in Hawaii after being found in contempt of court for failing to “physically produce” her children, KSL reported. The children had been missing since September.

A judge initially set bail at $5 million, before reducing it to $1 million, the television station reported.

No charges have been filed in the deaths of the children.

According to court documents, police said that based on cellphone records and GPS data, Lori Vallow Daybell’s brother, Alex Cox, likely played a role in burying Ryan’s body on Sept. 9, East Idaho News reported. Cox 51, was found unresponsive on his bathroom floor and pronounced dead at an area hospital on Dec. 12, 2019, the newspaper reported. The medical examiner said the cause of death was natural causes.

In court documents unsealed last week, police said Melanie Gibb, a friend of Lori Vallow Daybell, told authorities that her friend believed her children had become zombies.

“(T)he term ‘zombie’ refers to an individual whose mortal spirit has left their body and that their body is now the host of another spirit,” Rexburg police Lt. Ron Ball wrote in the affidavit. “The new spirit in a ‘zombie’ is always considered a ‘dark spirit.’

“While the ‘dark spirit’ inhabits the host body, the person’s true spirit goes into ‘limbo’ and is stuck there until the host body is physically killed,” Ball wrote in the affidavit as he summarized the statements of Lori Vallow Daybell’s longtime friend, Melanie Gibb. “As such, death of the physical body is seen as the mechanism by which the body’s original spirit can be released from limbo.”

Gibb began working with police in November after the Daybells asked her to lie to officers, East Idaho News reported.

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