The 51-year-old Vallow Daybell also faces a murder charge in the attempted slaying of Gilbert resident Brandon Boudreaux, the estranged husband of Vallow Daybell's niece. That count is being tried separately, with the second trial tentatively scheduled to begin May 30.
Here's what's to know about Vallow Daybell's infamous crimes, the charges against her and the unhinged theology she has used to justify her killings.
Who is Lori Vallow Daybell?
A one-time hairdresser and former Mrs. Texas contestant who once appeared on “Wheel of Fortune,” Vallow Daybell is currently serving three consecutive life sentences for her involvement in three 2019 murders. Two of those killings were of her own children, 7-year-old Joshua Jason "J.J." Vallow and 16-year-old Tylee Ryan. The third person murdered was Tammy Daybell, the 49-year-old wife of cult leader and apocalyptic author Chad Daybell. He and Vallow Daybell married shortly after Tammy was laid to rest. The 56-year-old Daybell is on death row in Idaho after having been convicted in a separate trial of three counts of first-degree murder for the slayings of the two children and his wife.J.J. and Tylee went missing in Idaho in September 2019. Two months later, their grandparents prompted the police to snoop around. Already married, Daybell and Vallow Daybell fled to Hawaii and refused to cooperate with Idaho cops in finding her missing kids. While living on the island of Kauai, the couple was dogged by reporters asking them if the children were alive. Both declined to answer.
In February 2020, Vallow Daybell was arrested and extradited back to Idaho on two felony counts of child abandonment.
The bodies of her two children were discovered in June, buried in the backyard of Daybell's home near Rexburg, Idaho. Wearing the same red pajamas seen in the last photo of him alive, J.J.'s head was covered with a white plastic bag with his mouth, hands and ankles bound with duct tape. During Vallow Daybell's 2023 trial, forensic pathologist Dr. Garth Warren testified that toxicology results for J.J. showed trace amounts of alcohol and GHB, the date-rape drug. Cause of death: asphyxiation.
Tylee's body had been badly burned and dismembered, the remains placed in three separate bags. Her body was in such poor shape that a cause of death could not be determined. “This is a homicide, I just can’t tell you exactly why," Warren told the court, according to EastIdahoNews.com.
Tammy died at home on Oct. 19, 2019. Daybell told police that she had gone to bed with a cough and expired in her sleep. He claimed his wife had been ill and refused to allow an autopsy of the corpse. Daybell married Lori just 10 days later in Hawaii and reportedly benefitted from $430,000 in life insurance policies he'd taken out on Tammy. Tammy's body was later exhumed and an autopsy was performed, revealing that she had been asphyxiated.
Prosecutors claimed the killings were carried out with the help of Vallow Daybell's brother, Alex Cox, who died of natural causes on Dec. 12, 2019. Cox's wife later testified that the day before he died, Cox said he was afraid of being the Daybells' "fall guy," but he would not say for what.
All three were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and part of a Daybell-led group that shared a mélange of unorthodox beliefs not sanctioned by the mainstream church. Those beliefs involved reincarnation, end-time prophecies, prepping for Armageddon and the casting out of evil spirits. They also believed individuals could be rated on a scale of light to dark, with the dark persons possessed by spirits, thereby becoming "zombies" who must be eradicated. One friend of the group who testified at Vallow Daybell's trial said Cox "completely believed" in Chad and Lori and that J.J., Tammy and Tylee "were all zombies."
But in her opening statement at Vallow Daybell's trial, prosecutor Lindsey Blake told the jury that what motivated Vallow Daybell was hardly spiritual.
"What she wanted was money, power and sex,” Blake said, according to Deseret News. “It didn’t matter what obstacle she had to remove to get what she wanted . . . if it was a person, it didn’t matter who.”
According to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, there were others Vallow Daybell saw as obstacles: her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, and her niece's then-spouse, Brandon Boudreaux.
Lori Vallow Daybell was booked into a Maricopa County jail in November 2023 after being extradited from Idaho.
Maricopa County Sheriff's Office
What is Lori Vallow Daybell on trial for in Arizona?
Maricopa County prosecutors initially indicted Vallow Daybell for conspiring with Cox to have Vallow and Boudreaux murdered — though Boudreaux survived the attempt on his life. The charges were later upgraded to premeditated first-degree murder and first-degree murder, respectively. The county attorney’s office declined to bring charges against Chad Daybell for the killings, stating that there was "no reasonable likelihood of conviction.” Vallow Daybell was extradited to Arizona in November 2023 and has pled not guilty to all charges.Vallow Daybell was still married to Vallow when she met Daybell in October 2018 at a conference of like-minded "doomsday preppers" in St. George, Utah, where Daybell was speaking. An ex-grave digger, Daybell had won minor fame in certain radical LDS circles with novels about the impending "end times," which would presage a "great gathering" of Latter-day Saints to build the New Jerusalem. Daybell was smitten by Vallow Daybell and they became lovers.
Within months, Vallow Daybell's marriage to Vallow was foundering. Vallow petitioned for divorce, claiming in court paperwork that his wife had taken off after draining $35,000 from his bank account. He said his spouse had "become infatuated and at times obsessive" about "near death experiences and spiritual visions," believing that she was "sealed (eternally married) to the ancient Book of Mormon prophet Moroni." She also believed she had been reincarnated several times and was "a translated being who cannot taste death," sent by God to lead the 144,000 chosen people spoken of in the Book of Revelation.
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According to the court filing, Vallow Daybell told her husband via phone that he was possessed by an "evil spirit" named Ned Schneider. His wife warned him that she would "kill him upon his return home" and that an angel would help her dispose of the body. Vallow tried to get his wife psychiatric help, but she refused because she said "they would discover that she's a translated being." Disturbed, Vallow changed his $1 million life insurance policy to make his grandmother the beneficiary, something Vallow Daybell would learn only when she tried to cash in on the policy after her husband’s death.
The divorce was never finalized and the pair shared the parenting of J.J., who was autistic and had been adopted by them. (Tylee was Vallow Daybell's daughter from a different marriage). On July 11, 2019, Vallow stopped by Vallow Daybell’s Chandler house to take J.J. to school. Cox was in the house and a fight broke out, with Cox shooting Vallow dead. Cox told Chandler cops that he had been defending himself after Vallow swung a bat at him and hit his head. Cox was never arrested or charged, and a month later, he moved with Vallow Daybell and her children to Rexburg, Idaho, where Daybell lived.
Daybell's niece, Melani Pawlowski, reportedly shared some of the same beliefs as her aunt. She also moved to Idaho in 2019 after a strange incident in which her husband, Boudreaux, was shot at one morning by an unknown man in a vehicle. Divorce paperwork later filed by Boudreaux explained how the gunman shot at him from a parked vehicle as he was returning to his home in Gilbert, hitting Boudreaux's Tesla "just inches" above his head. Cox is now believed to have been the shooter.
About 12 days later, out of the blue, his estranged wife informed him she was moving to Idaho, leaving him and and children behind. In additional divorce paperwork filed in 2020, Boudreaux expressed concern for the safety of his children because his wife was "involved in a cult where numerous members, adults and children alike have been killed off like flies."
What are Vallow Daybell’s religious beliefs?
The saga of Vallow Daybell and her slain children has spawned numerous documentaries and podcasts, a Lifetime movie and the true-crime book "When the Moon Turns to Blood" by investigative reporter Leah Sottile. Part of the fascination with the murderess is no doubt due to Vallow Daybell’s obscure beliefs that exist on the outer fringes of Mormon society, unsanctioned by the church.Lindsay Park, executive director of the Sunstone Education Foundation, a nonprofit institution dedicated to the study of LDS culture, told the Idaho Statesman that the Daybells were "fundamentalists," minus the polygamy usually associated with such groups. They transformed the basic tenets of Mormon belief in extreme ways, Park said, referring to it as a kind of "Mormon fanfic."
Vallow Daybell and others in the sect believed in spiritual warfare between light and dark forces, preparing for the imminent return of Jesus Christ to Earth, prophecies and revelations and communications with the dead. They also shared grotesque fantasies about zombies and evil spirits that inhabit people, who must then be destroyed by burning, dismembering and binding their bodies. No doubt much of this will be explored by Treena Kay, the deputy Maricopa County attorney assigned to prosecute Vallow Daybell.
(Interestingly, the Vallow Daybell case is not a one-off when it comes to crime and extremist, doomsday LDS beliefs. In 2023, a Gilbert woman and her brother allegedly attempted to smuggle the woman's 17-year-old son to Canada because they believed the boy to be “the herald of the Second Coming of Christ” and that the end of the world was nigh.)
According to the old proverb, Vallow Daybell will have a fool for a client. Before her Idaho trial, where she did not represent herself, Vallow Daybell was twice deemed unfit, bringing the trial to a standstill until the court restored her to competency. That shouldn't be an issue in her upcoming trials in Phoenix. After a mental health evaluation last year, she was declared competent to stand trial and Judge Beresky allowed her to represent herself, with the help of advisory counsel.
Last year, Vallow Daybell attempted to block camera access in the court, but Beresky is allowing one pool camera from Court TV to record the spectacle. Regardless, Vallow Daybell wasn't camera shy about sitting down for a jailhouse interview with Dateline NBC's Keith Morrison, which aired in early March. In it, she claimed Jesus visits her in prison and that she and Daybell were wrongfully convicted and would one day be fully exonerated. Morrison later said she tried to convince him that Tylee killed J.J. before killing herself, a tale she also told her adult son on his podcast, "Scar Wars."
Throughout the interview, Vallow Daybell shoveled the bullshit with abandon.
“After I get exonerated," she told Morrison with a smile, "maybe I’ll go on ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and you can come."
