LISTEN: Ex-wife details bizarre relationship between Alex Cox and Lori Vallow Daybell
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CHANDLER, Ariz. — A phone call released Thursday afternoon from the Chandler Police Department reveals a conversation between a detective and Alex Cox’s ex-wife where she shares a bizarre relationship Cox allegedly had with his sister Lori Vallow Daybell.
Marriage records previously obtained by EastIdahoNews.com show Cox married a woman named Debbie in 1992. The couple divorced the following year, but when the Daybell case broke, she contacted a Chandler, Arizona, detective who recorded the interview in September 2020. Debbie’s last name was redacted in police reports, and EastIdahoNews.com is not reporting it.
“There were so many crazy dynamics in that family,” Debbie told investigators. “… It caused a lot of issues right away, and it actually made me scared and nervous.”
The ex-wife described a lot of inappropriate sexual touching between Cox and Daybell. According to the call and a Chandler Police report, Debbie said the brother and sister would simulate sex acts in front of her and the rest of the family.
“He also talked about (how she was) hot, and he sexualized her quite a bit. He did touch her breast and things,” Debbie said. “Alex and I only lived together married about four or five months. Then I just knew that family was too weird and that I made a big mistake, so I got out.”
Cox reportedly saw nothing wrong with the behavior and arguments ensued between him and his now ex-wife. Cox told Debbie he had a problem controlling his sex drive.
“While he and I were married, he got excommunicated from the Mormon church,” Debbie said. “… He was always really convicted in the faith, but where Alex is weak is he was just sexually promiscuous, (and) he kept getting kicked out of the church because I think he was a sex addict.”
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Debbie reported she learned Cox slept with a 15-year-old girl, and the teen’s father began looking for him to take care of the problem on his own. She said there was “too much promiscuity surrounding sex in our marriage early on,” and that played into their divorce.
The marriage between Debbie and Cox lasted only a year, but the two kept in touch for years, according to Debbie. She says the last time she spoke to Cox was shortly after he got out of jail for attacking Daybell’s third husband, Joseph Ryan, in Texas.
In the years after the last conversation Debbie had with Cox, he shot and killed Daybell’s fourth husband, Charles Vallow, in July 2019. Cox died in December 2019 in the months after his sister’s two children 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow and 16-year-old Tylee Ryan vanished. The medical examiner said he died of natural causes.
Investigators found Tylee and JJ’s bodies buried in the backyard of Daybell’s fifth husband, Chad Daybell, in June 2020.
Listen to the entire conversation with Debbie and the detective in the video player above.
