Lori Vallow, the Idaho mother convicted of killing two of her children in what she once described as a divine mission, has reached out from prison to her only surviving child, Colby Ryan publicly during a true crime convention.

The moment came during a panel at CrimeCon 2025 in Denver on Friday, where Ryan appeared alongside journalist Nate Eaton. The two have spoken before—Eaton has followed Vallow’s case closely for years, covering the unraveling saga that stunned the country and left two children dead.

During the panel, Eaton told the audience that Vallow, now serving multiple life sentences, had sent a message through him.

“If you talk to Colby, please tell him that ‘I love you very much, no matter what,’” Eaton read. The message ended with a cryptic reference: “You can ask him about Matthew 25.”

That chapter in the Bible includes parables about judgment—the separation of good and evil, the prepared and the unprepared. It’s a pointed reference, and Ryan didn’t miss the implication.

“It’s her trying to talk about the wicked and the good being sifted apart,” he told Eaton and the audience. “Basically, it’s her way of trying to say she is still good and, basically, godly.”

Ryan, now an adult, was not a part of the crimes that tore through his family in 2019. That year, his mother’s beliefs—centered around apocalyptic prophecies and spiritual warfare—spiraled into violence. Vallow’s children, 7-year-old Joshua “J.J.” Vallow and 16-year-old Tylee Ryan, were found dead in shallow graves on the Idaho property of Vallow’s husband, Chad Daybell. The couple, prosecutors said, believed the children had become “zombies.”

In court documents, investigators described how Vallow and Daybell defined a “zombie” as a person whose original spirit had left their body and been replaced by a “dark spirit.” Vallow told friends it was her and Chad’s job to rid the world of such beings before the second coming of Christ.

She was convicted in 2023 for the murders of J.J. and Tylee and sentenced to life in prison. She was also convicted of conspiring to kill Tammy Daybell, Chad’s first wife, and Brandon Boudreaux, the former husband of Vallow’s niece.

Despite it all, Vallow continues to invoke religious themes from behind bars. Ryan, however, isn’t interested.

Asked if he wanted to speak with his mother again, he didn’t hesitate: “No.”

He’s been open in the past about his grief and confusion. As the lone surviving child, Ryan has said he struggles to understand how the woman who raised him could be responsible for so much death and destruction. If anything, her message reinforced what Ryan already believes: that she’s still clinging to the same beliefs that justified the unthinkable.

Vallow remains imprisoned in Idaho, serving multiple consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.