A journalist who has been following the murder trial of Lori Vallow filed a letter to a justice of the Idaho Supreme Court earlier this month. In the letter, the journalist stated that the judge in the case of Lori Vallow had ordered: “an unprecedented quantity of papers sealed.”
The woman who is being referred to as the “cult mom” is suspected of murdering her two children, Joshua “J.J.” Vallow, age 7, and Tylee Ryan, age 17, in 2019, and then claiming social security payments in the name of her son after their deaths. Joshua was a member of a cult.
Lori Hellis, creator of the blog “The Lori Vallow Story” and former criminal defense lawyer, said in a letter to Idaho Supreme Court Justice Gregory Moeller that “Since the case began in March 2020, Judge Boyce has ordered what is, in my experience, an exceptional quantity of papers sealed.” Because of the large number of sealed papers, I decided to investigate the requirements for sealed documents in Idaho cases. After doing so, I found that Judge Boyce had not followed the processes that are outlined in ICAR 32.
On August 18, Hellis had first filed applications to unseal some records, but Boyce had refused those requests a few days later. The writer then noted that her motions had been returned to her because the Seventh District clerk had detected problems in her files. The faults had been found in the writer’s filings.
