Lori Vallow says heavenly premonition has her convinced she will be ‘exonerated’ for murdering her kids, in first interview from prison
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?”
