Lori Vallow Daybell has been found guilty of conspiring to murder her fourth husband in the latest turn of the deeply disturbing saga involving the doomsday cult mom.
Vallow Daybell conspired with her late brother, Alex Cox, to kill her estranged husband, Charles Vallow, at his home in Chandler, Arizona, in July 2019 so she could collect money from his life insurance policy and marry her now-husband and “doomsday” prophet Chad Daybell.
The jury deliberated for three hours over two days before handing down the verdict to Vallow Daybell, who is already serving three consecutive life sentences without parole for killing her two youngest children and conspiring to murder a romantic rival in Idaho.
She faces a life sentence without the possibility of release until serving at least 25 years in Arizona.
The latest verdict is only one part of a dramatic and complicated case centered on the doomsday couple that spans a sinister pattern of murders, unexplained deaths and bizarre cult beliefs about killing zombies.
Chad Daybell received the death sentence last year after being found guilty of murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the deaths of Vallow Daybell’s children Tylee Ryan, 16, JJ Vallow, 8, and his ex-wife Tammy Daybell, 49.
Charles Vallow’s death in 2019 was the first step in a wider plot by Vallow Daybell and Chad Daybell to rid their lives of “obstacles,” meaning their spouses and her children, according to text messages presented as evidence at her 2023 trial for the murders of her children.
Throughout the latest trial, jurors heard vastly different accounts of the death of Charles Vallow, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at his home in suburban Phoenix.
“What we see is a very planned out, premeditated murder,” prosecutor Treena Kay told the jury Monday in her two-hour closing argument.
Vallow Daybell represented herself during the trial and argued her estranged husband’s death was “a tragic family event” during her 20-minute closing argument.
She painted Charles Vallow as the aggressor in the incident that led to his death. At the start of the trial, Vallow Daybell said Charles Vallow had chased her with a bat during the encounter and her brother shot him in self-defense after she left the house.
Alex Cox mysteriously died five months after Charles Vallow’s murder from what medical examiners said was a blood clot in his lungs. His version of events that it was self-defense was later called into question.
During the trial, the prosecution delved into Vallow Daybell’s “twisted religious beliefs” and highlighted a lack of physical evidence of the confrontation between Charles Vallow and his brother-in-law.
Alex Cox waited 47 minutes before calling 911 “to stage the scene” and leave a bat near Charles Vallow’s head, Kay said.
Before the jury began deliberating, prosecutors played a recorded conversation between Vallow Daybell and the life insurance company, where they heard her say she was the beneficiary of her husband’s $1 million policy, Kay told the court.
In the recording, Vallow Daybell is heard saying that Charles Vallow had been shot and that “it was an accident.”
During the trial, another of Vallow’s brothers, Adam Cox, told jurors that he had “no doubt” his siblings were behind Charles Vallow’s death.
Testifying for the prosecution, Adam Cox said the murder occurred just before he and Charles Vallow were planning an intervention to bring Vallow Daybell back into the mainstream of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He testified that his sister had told people her husband was no longer living and that a zombie was living inside his body.
Four months before he died, it also emerged that Charles Vallow filed for divorce from Vallow Daybell, saying she had become infatuated with near-death experiences and had claimed to have lived numerous lives on other planets. He alleged she threatened to ruin him financially and kill him.
Vallow Daybell is scheduled to go on trial again in early June on a charge of conspiring to murder Brandon Boudreaux, the ex-husband of her niece, Melani Pawlowski. Boudreaux survived a drive-by shooting in Arizona in October 2019. The assailant was driving Charles Vallow’s car.
Vallow Daybell’s beliefs began to change in 2017 after she started reading Chad Daybell’s doomsday books. The pair met in person for the first time at a religious conference in Utah in 2018 and married in November 2019 – two months after the disappearance of Vallow Daybell’s two children.
In June 2020, their remains were discovered on Chad Daybell’s property. The couple was not charged with the murders until May 2021. They were tried separately, where Vallow Daybell was found guilty of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and grand theft over the deaths of her children. She was found guilty of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the death of Chad Daybell’s ex-wife, Tammy Daybell, who died in October 2019.
After a seven-week trial, Chad Daybell was found guilty of murder and conspiracy to commit murder in May 2024 in the deaths of the children and his ex-wife. He is awaiting execution in the Idaho Department of Corrections’ maximum security facility.
AP contributed
