Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - BONUS: ‘CULT MOM’ Lori Vallow husband Chad Daybell arrested after human remains found on his property.

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

As the search for JJ Vallow and Tylee Ryan continues, Joseph Scott Morgan explains how investigators found human remains on ‘Cult Mom’ Lori Vallow husband Chad Daybell's property. What comes next? Crime Stories investigative reporter Dave Mack joins the discussion. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Joseph Scott Morgan is professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University. He's also author of Blood Beneath My Feet. What have they found at the residence and property of Chad Daybell, Joe Scott? You know what? Two words, human remains. I did not think this day would ever come. I did not think that we would hear that, But Chad Daybell has been arrested. The authorities, including the FBI, the state police with Idaho, the local sheriff's office in that area, and the Rexburg Police Department went to his property and have begun excavating that property. And on that property, we can report now that they have actually found two, not one, but two sets of human remains.

Now, we do not know at this time who these remains belong to. We don't know if it is, in fact, the children. But the fact that it is on his property, that they have acquired a search warrant, because let's keep in mind with a search warrant, it's very specific. Contrary to what people think, you can't just take a shotgun approach to one of these. You have to be very specific about where you're going to search. The question then has to be asked, where do the authorities develop the information to actually go into the search warrant to present to a judge or magistrate that would sign off on this saying, yes, go and execute the search warrant. They have to be very specific.

So that gives us an idea that they developed information either through questioning, maybe Mr. Daybell, or through a second source that they talked to that maybe is anonymous that said, listen, you might want to search this particular area. Now, the area where they are searching, and I've looked at the aerial photographs, and there are plenty of them to see. These appear to come from drone footage. I can tell you that the area where they are searching is immediately adjacent to what many of us would call a fire pit or a fire ring. There's literally a big area where you can tell that burning has been going on there.

There are big logs that are pulled up where people are actually using these apparently to sit around the fire and enjoy a bonfire. But just adjacent to that, just adjacent to that is a large area that has been excavated. And when I say excavated, they brought out a front end loader, a backhoe to come and dig down the earth. Now it looks like they've dug down maybe two to three feet. And in some of the images, you can actually see the investigators down in this depressed area, down into this area where they have dug away the soil to kind of sift through it. There's even a sifting station that's immediately adjacent to this under a big blue tarp where you take the

dirt that you've taken out of this pit and sift through it, kind of shake it down, and you're looking for all types of evidence. They're going to be looking for things like bullets, cigarette butts, buttons off of clothing, zippers, anything, or maybe even teeth, small bones, stuff that gets lost. And when you're looking at brown dirt, everything looks brown, and it's tough to examine it. That's why after they get everything out of this area, everything comes out of it, they're going to take these remains to the medical examiner's office, more than likely in Boise, and examine these things under controlled conditions. That means that the forensic

anthropologist, which is a PhD scientist most of the time, will actually leave from the scene, more than likely, go with the remains to the location where the medical examiner's office, and along with probably a forensic dentist and a forensic pathologist, who is also the ME, will all examine these remains. They'll be photographed extensively. They're going to examine every bone. They're going to look for every nick and every bone. They're going to see, first off, who these remains belong to. Remember, we've got two sets of remains, so they're going to have to separate everything out. Then they're going to try to determine, and this is the most difficult part, the cause of death.

When you have skeletonized remains like these, it's very, very difficult. Now, let's think about J.J. and Tylee. They've been missing since roughly, I think Tylee went missing back in late August. J.J. has been missing essentially since September. That's the last time these two kids have been seen. Let's just speculate here and say, well, what if they had been buried at this location? We're now into June. Several months later, that means that anything that was in the ground since that point in time

is going to be greatly degraded and decomposed. So those fine pieces of evidence that we're looking for that are going to tie back to, say, the causal effects of death, sometimes those can be compromised. Sometimes it can be very difficult. If you're talking about a gunshot wound, for instance, to the back of the head, yeah, that's kind of glaring. Anybody could see that, but what if this is something else?

What if the two remains that are in that area that has been excavated, what if there's no soft tissue left? What if these are soft tissue related injuries, say like a suffocation or strangulation? You might not be able to see that or something even more sinister. And we'd look back to Tammy Daybell, who died in October, was never thoroughly examined, never drew talks on her. What if it was some kind of chemical agent that was used to render their death? You're not going to be able to find any evidence of that. So right now, yeah, it's great that we have found out that there are two sets of remains. But the problem is there's still a lot of

work to be done. The police are going to have to sift through everything very, very carefully. I submit right now that this investigation is not at a conclusion. It is at the beginning at this point, because all this time they have been looking for these children. And many people have just thought, well, they're alive. We're holding out hope. This has gone from simply a search and rescue mission to now a double homicide investigation, potentially. Let me ask you this. Yep. How is it possible that the police were out on this property? They served a search warrant at the residence of Chad Daybell already.

They apparently had to go back to square one because that's been several weeks ago now. And how did they develop information to come back and do such a targeted search? This is not a small property. This is a fairly large area, and it looks like they were pinpointing where they were going to be looking this is a very large piece of property that daybell owns and i find it as an investigator very interesting i'll just say it's piqued my interest that's for sure that they didn't go to the left or the right of the of the fire pit they didn't go to the back of the fire pit. They didn't go to the back of the property. They went specifically to this area, immediately adjacent to this fire pit, immediately adjacent to the fire ring where people

could sit around and enjoy this, and within feet of that area, began to dig. And it's not like they dug a bunch of test areas all around that. You can see that in the aerial photography. I've seen multiple cases where death investigations are involved where they're digging around a property and you'll see multiple holes. That's not what happened here. They went to a specific area and they didn't venture out from that. They centered on that area. They've been digging and excavating that area. That tells me that they had specific information when they walked into that judge or magistrate's office and said, Your Honor, here's this piece of paper. It's a warrant.

It's a search warrant for Chad Daybell's property. We have reason to believe that there are remains or significant evidence in this specific location. They could probably even measure this down to the foot and say, this is where it's going to be. They put shovel to dirt and they came up with human remains. Will they be able to determine how long the remains have been on the property in the dirt? It's going to be very interesting to see if they're able to determine specifically how long these remains have been in that area. You know, people have been searching for the children, for Tylee and JJ now for months.

And I think everybody wants to know, well, if this is in fact Tylee and JJ's remains, how long have they been there? Were they held somewhere else? Were they frozen perhaps for a period of time and then brought to this area and deposited here? So what they're going to be looking at is something that we refer to as postmortem interval, literally the time since death. And there's a lot of factors that play into this when you're talking about buried human remains, because it's not just like you walk into a room and there's somebody that has been unrefrigerated. Maybe they died in their sleep the night before. These are bodies that have been placed supposedly in bare earth,

have been subjected to the harsh environment that's up there, and have been degrading for this period of time. That is supposing that this is not a historic or historical burial, which I'm assuming it's probably not since we've got two bodies here on Chad Daybell's property. And they didn't go very deep. It looks like they've only dug down maybe two to three feet at its greatest depth to reclaim whatever is there. If folks are looking for the police to say, yes, they died on this specific date, that ain't going to happen in this case. It's almost an empirical impossibility to do that,

unless you had an eyewitness that saw all of this and then watched the bodies be buried or participated in the burial. Maybe on the off chance you could, you know, tighten it down a little bit more. But if these remains have been buried and they have been there for months and months and months, you're not going to be able to say it was on a specific date. Now you can bracket this and say, maybe a forensic anthropologist might can say plus or minus six to eight weeks. And that's going to be about as tight as they're going to be able to get it. At the end of the day, this ain't CSI from TV. They're not able to tie things down that tightly.

We'll see what the scientists say after the exam is completed, though. From an investigator standpoint, what does it mean to you that, in reality, the last time J.J. Vallow was seen was around September 23rd, Tylee Ryan a bit before then. But now we know that Tammy Daybell passed away at this residence where they just found two sets of human remains. She passed away in October, well after the last time the children, the young children were seen alive. What would that tell you? I think that one of the things that, that this, you know, it really makes me think of is that in succession, we have got three people that have literally left us in this period of time. We've got Tylee in August.

The next month you have JJ who disappears as well. And then you have Tammy Daybell who mysteriously dies in her sleep. A 49 year old woman who was quote unquote, just coughing before she went to bed and no one ever did an exam on her body. So you've got three people that pass in very close or you've got three people that are no longer with us at this point in a very short period of time. We're talking about a matter of weeks. And there's some type of potential association with Chad Daybell's property here. I think that as an investigator, I've got a red flag that I can see right now that's going up. I've got bells that are going off. Something has happened here

that's connected between all of these two. You take that and then you begin to look at Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow's behavior immediately after this. How long was it? Not very long after they got married and they headed off to Hawaii. Now, I don't think that these are huge intellectual leaps that we're taking here, but we can speculate all we want. We're going to have to see what the scientific information says and then couple that with the investigative information that the FBI, the state investigators have all been developing over this period of time. And I think that once all of this kind of comes out and is presented to the public, they're going to be surprised and they're going to be shocked and it's going to be striking.

And I think that you're going to be able to look at this and say, wow, hell really doesn't have a basement. We've gone really far down a rabbit hole here. This is an iHeart Podcast.