It was September 2019. Lori Vallow was moving to Rexburg, Idaho, from Gilbert, Arizona. She didn't want to go at first, according to her best friend, Melanie Gibb, but Chad Daybell insisted she make the move.
"She said she thought Chad would come to be with her in Arizona, and then she said, 'I changed my plans. I think I'm supposed to be up there (in Idaho). He says I'm supposed to be up there, but I need to get my own answer to find out if I’m supposed to be there,'" Gibb recalls.
Lori prayed and eventually, she said she received the answer that she needed to move to Rexburg to be with Chad, Gibb says. But there was one complication - Chad's wife, Tammy Daybell, was still alive.
"She was uncomfortable with it. She believed that Tammy was going to pass away, though, before she got up there," Gibb says. "That didn’t happen. She didn’t pass away before (Lori) got up there."
Gibb says Lori thought Tammy might die in a car crash -- but that didn't happen.
Lori moved into a townhouse in Rexburg with her two children, Joshua "JJ" Vallow and Tylee Ryan, the first week of September. Lori's brother, Alex Cox, arrived a few days later and rented a different townhouse in the same complex. Gibb visited Sept. 19 and remembers walking around the Brigham Young University-Idaho campus and indoor track with Lori and Chad, who were holding hands and kissing.
"I said, 'Aren’t you worried that people are going to see you?' She says, 'Well, Tammy doesn't come out a lot.' ... They said a lot of people that knew Chad didn't know what Tammy looked like because they didn't do a lot of things together," Gibb says.
During their walk, Alex babysat JJ at home, but Tylee was not there, and Lori never mentioned her. Weeks earlier, Gibb had spoken to Lori on the phone after she moved to Rexburg and heard Tylee yelling in the background, so she was surprised the 17-year-old was not around.
"I was told she was at (BYU-Idaho)," Gibb recalls. "I knew that Tylee had her GED, which she got when she was 16 or 17 ... There were definitely question marks. It didn't feel real. It didn't feel like the truth. I didn’t know what to say about it. I wouldn't assume that she had done something to her. It was unusual."
Equally concerning was what Lori said about JJ when Gibb arrived in Idaho.
"She said that he had turned into a zombie the day before I got there, and she was pointing out behaviors of his. ... She was trying to create uncertainty in me about what I saw. ... I was looking at him and thought, 'I don't know. He looks just like JJ to me,'" Gibb says.
This wasn't the first time Lori had spoken to Gibb about zombies.
More information and the complete story can be found at EastIdahoNews.com.