Lori Vallow, the “doomsday cult mother” who is spending the rest of her life behind bars for the murders of her two children and for conspiring to kill her husband’s first wife, is speaking out in her first TV interview.
Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, wearing purple handcuffs, the convicted murderer sits down with Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison and tells him that she believes she will be set free.
“I will be exonerated. We will both be exonerated in the future,” she says in the clip for the upcoming episode, referring to her husband Chad Daybell, who is on death row for the murders.
“I have seen things in the future that Jesus showed me when I was in heaven,” she adds when pressed by Morrison. “And we were not in jail and we were not in prison.”
The bizarre tangent will play out during what Dateline describes as an “extensive and often combative interview,” which airs in an all-new special this Friday at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.
Vallow continues to maintain her innocence nearly two years after she was sentenced in 2023 to life in prison in Idaho for the 2019 murders of her two youngest children, Tylee Ryan, 16, and Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 8, as well conspiring to kill her husband Chad Daybell’s former wife, Tammy Daybell.
A separate jury found Daybell guilty of the same crimes. He was sentenced to death in 2024.
In the new interview, when Morrison points out Daybell’s death sentence to Vallow, she responds: “I understand that, yeah. These are fascinating stories.”
Vallow’s children vanished without a trace in September 2019, sparking a multi-state search while their mother appeared carefree as she married her new husband Daybell on a beach in Hawaii.
Nine months later, the bodies of the children were found buried in a pet cemetery on Daybell’s property in Idaho.
Their disappearances and deaths mark only part of a dramatic case that spans a deeply disturbing pattern of murders, unexplained deaths and bizarre cult beliefs about killing zombies.
In the trailer for Friday’s episode, Morrison wonders if Vallow will finally reveal why so many people close to her have ended up dead.
“The media loves to take tragedies and turn them into crimes,” she says in the clip. “I had a lot of tragedies in a row.”
Morrison presses her further, “I’m asking you a question. Did you watch your children die?”
“That’s a really sad question,” she replies.
Vallow then tells Morrison: “You’ve heard a lot of stuff Keith. What I tell you will be the truth.”
The Dateline special will also feature exclusive interviews with retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent Doug Hart, Madison County Sheriff Ron Ball, Rexburg Police Detective Ray Hermosillo, Madison County Prosecutor Rob Wood, and Colby Ryan, Vallow’s oldest son.
“I guess I was always a very positive, ‘see the best in people’ kind of person,” Ryan tells Morrison during the interview. “And then I watched someone that I knew my entire life do what she did. And it just changed the way I view people.”
“The way that my sister was treated was with hate, that’s not even human to do what they did to her (body), after,” he added.
Vallow is currently behind bars in Arizona at the Maricopa County Jail awaiting trial for the 2019 death of her fourth husband, Charles Vallow and conspiring in the attempted murder of her niece’s ex-husband, Brandon Boudreaux.
The shootings, which happened within days of each other in 2019, were motivated by money and a bizarre spiritual system, according to investigators.
Vallow is representing herself in the Charles Vallow trial, which is scheduled to begin on March 31. No trial date has been set for the Brandon Boudreaux trial.
Lori Vallow Daybell: The Jailhouse Interview, is the seventh broadcast on the Daybell saga from Dateline, which has covered the case since the beginning. Morrison also reported on the investigation for Dateline’s #1 podcast, Mommy Doomsday.
The two-hour special airs Friday on NBC at 9 p.m. ET and is available for streaming on Peacock the following day.
