Idaho

Idaho jury begins deliberations in Chad Daybell murder trial

Published

2 years ago

May 29, 2024

Idaho jury begins deliberations in Chad Daybell murder trial

By Steve Almasy and Taylor Romine | CNN

Jury deliberations began Wednesday in the triple murder trial of Chad Daybell, a case Idaho prosecutors claim was fueled by power, sex, money and apocalyptic spiritual beliefs.

Daybell has pleaded not guilty to murder and conspiracy charges in the deaths of his first wife, Tammy Daybell, and the children of his second wife, Lori Vallow Daybell -– 16-year-old Tylee Ryan and 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow.

Authorities have said they believe Tylee and JJ were killed in September 2019 – the month they were last reported to have been seen – and that Tammy Daybell was found dead in her Idaho home on October 19, 2019, a few weeks before Chad Daybell married Lori Vallow Daybell. Tammy Daybell was initially believed to have died in her sleep.

Law enforcement found the remains of Tylee and JJ on Chad Daybell’s Fremont County property in June 2020, authorities said.

The jury was read its instructions Wednesday morning before closing arguments.

During closing arguments, Chad Daybell’s lawyer, John Prior, said there wasn’t enough direct evidence against Daybell and others were responsible for the deaths.

If convicted, Daybell could face the death penalty.

Vallow Daybell was convicted by a jury in May 2023 of the murder of her children and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. She also was convicted of conspiring to kill Tammy Daybell.

Vallow Daybell has appealed her convictions to the state Supreme Court, with her legal team raising the issue of whether she was mentally competent to stand trial.

Jurors concluded the first day of deliberations Wednesday evening and will resume at 8 a.m. Thursday.

2 children and a wife died weeks apart

During opening statements, prosecutor Rob Wood described Chad Daybell as a “seemingly ordinary man” who wrote books about the apocalypse, a person who “craves significance” and worked as a sexton in a graveyard.

“Two dead children buried in the defendant Chad Daybell’s backyard,” Wood said in his first words to the jury.

“The next month his wife is found dead in their marital bed. Seventeen days after the death of his wife, Tammy Daybell, this defendant is photographed laughing and dancing on a beach in Hawaii at his wedding to Lori Vallow, a woman who was his mistress and the mother of the children buried in the graves on his property. Three dead bodies.”

When Daybell “had a chance at what he considered his rightful destiny,” Wood said, he “made sure that no person and no law would stand in his way.”

“His desire for sex, money and power led him to pursue those ambitions,” the prosecutor added. “And this pursuit led to the deaths of his wife and Lori’s two innocent children.”

Tylee Ryan was a “normal, vibrant teenage girl” who loved her friends and her little brother JJ, who was on the autism spectrum and required special care, according to Wood.

In October 2018, Chad Daybell and Vallow Daybell met at a religious conference in Utah and he began to craft an alternate reality where his “obsession for glory was rooted in her adoration for him,” Wood told jurors.

Soon, Wood said, they viewed their spouses and even their children as “obstacles” that stood in their way.

“Anyone who opposed them were labeled sometimes as dark spirits or even zombies,” the prosecutor said.

During opening statements, Prior, the defense attorney, described his client as a religious man who wrote books about his faith, premonitions, good and evil, and the “coming of the end of things when his savior, in his mind, is going to come back.”

Prior said Daybell’s life began to change after he met Vallow Daybell, a “beautifully stunning woman” who “starts giving him a lot of attention” and eventually lured him into an “inappropriate” and “unfortunate” extramarital relationship.

Prior told the jury about Vallow Daybell’s brother, Alex Cox, who died in December 2019, and his history of violence – including the shooting and killing of Vallow Daybell’s former husband, Charles Vallow, in July 2019. The Maricopa County medical examiner in Arizona said Cox died of natural causes, CNN affiliate KPHO/KTVK reported.

“Alex Cox was Lori’s protector,” Prior said. “Alex Cox would do anything and everything to protect, aid and assist Lori Vallow … Whenever there was a problem or a threat to Lori Vallow, you will hear testimony that Alex Cox came to the rescue.”

DNA and forensics experts suggested Cox’s fingerprint was found on plastic wrapped around JJ’s body, Daybell’s defense attorney said. No DNA or hair belonging to Chad Daybell was found with the children’s bodies, and the exact cause of Tammy Daybell’s death could not be determined, Prior said.

Couple believed they were religious figures

Chad Daybell and Vallow Daybell called themselves “James and Elaina” and believed they were religious figures and had a system of rating people as “light” or “dark,” a prosecutor told jurors during Vallow Daybell’s trial.

The state accused the couple of using their “doomsday” religious beliefs to justify the killings. In particular, Daybell and Vallow Daybell exchanged texts about Tammy Daybell “being in limbo” and “being possessed by a spirit named Viola,” according to the indictment.

People close to the couple said they had been involved in strong religious ideologies.

In addition, Daybell was connected to a religious doomsday prepper website which described itself as a “series of lecture events focusing on self-reliance and personal preparation.”

The publishers of the site said they decided to pull content featuring either Daybell or Vallow Daybell after the children’s disappearance.

The disappearance of the children made national headlines

Vallow Daybell’s two children from a previous marriage were last seen on different days in September 2019.

In late November 2019, relatives asked police in Rexburg, Idaho, to do a welfare check on JJ because they hadn’t talked to him recently. Police didn’t find him at the family’s house but did see Vallow Daybell and Daybell, who said JJ was staying with a family friend in Arizona, according to authorities.

When police returned with a search warrant the next day, the couple was gone. They were ultimately found in Hawaii in January 2020.

In June 2020, law enforcement officials found the remains of Tylee and JJ on Daybell’s property in Fremont County, Idaho. Vallow Daybell and Daybell were indicted on murder charges in May 2021.

Tylee was believed to have been killed between September 8 and 9, 2019, and JJ between September 22 and 23, according to prosecutors.

After Vallow Daybell’s indictment and not guilty plea in 2021, a judge ruled she was incompetent to stand trial, but she was deemed fit to proceed with trial after spending nearly a year in a mental hospital. Vallow Daybell has maintained her innocence.

When Vallow Daybell was sentenced last year, she denied having killed her children and cited religious texts and beliefs.

She said she had spoken to Jesus, her children and her husband’s wife after their deaths and said they were “happy and extremely busy” in heaven.

“Jesus Christ knows that no one was murdered in this case,” Vallow Daybell said. “Accidental deaths happen, suicides happen, fatal side effects from medications happen.”

Judge Steven W. Boyce said at the sentencing hearing: “I don’t believe that any God in any religion would want to have this happen.”

The judge said she justified the killings “by going down a bizarre, religious rabbit hole. And clearly you are still down there.”

Vallow Daybell has appealed her convictions to the state Supreme Court, with her legal team raising the issue of whether Vallow Daybell was mentally competent to stand trial.

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Idaho

‘Unrelenting’: Statehouse reporters recap 2026 legislative session in Idaho Falls – East Idaho News

Published

4 hours ago

April 19, 2026

Press Room

‘Unrelenting’: Statehouse reporters recap 2026 legislative session in Idaho Falls – East Idaho News

IDAHO FALLS — Two prominent Idaho Statehouse reporters say this past legislative session was “unrelenting,” chaotic, largely driven by budget cuts, and they see the Legislature getting more powerful.

Kevin Richert and Clark Corbin recapped this past legislative session at a forum on the ISU Idaho Falls Campus on Thursday.

Richert is a senior reporter at Idaho Education News, with more than 30 years of experience covering education policy and politics. Corbin is a senior reporter at the Idaho Capital Sun who has covered every Idaho legislative session, gavel to gavel, since 2011.

The event was hosted by the City Club of Idaho Falls, which “exists to sponsor and promote civil dialogue and discourse on all matters of public interest” and strives to be “nonpartisan and nonsectarian,” according to its website.

Budget cuts

Both Richert and Corbin said this session was driven by budget cuts. Corbin said this was due to a lack of revenue stemming from past income tax and the adoption of new federal tax cuts.

“Cuts for almost every state agency and state department dominated the legislative session,” Corbin said. “We’re talking about 4% budget cuts for most state agencies and departments in the current fiscal year, and we’re talking about an additional 5% budget cuts for almost all state agencies and departments starting next year — fiscal year ’27 — and continuing permanently.”

RELATED | Gov. Little signs so-called ‘crappy bill’ to cut state budget

Richert said he thought higher education was taking the brunt of budget cuts. “It’s not a question of whether tuition fees are going to go up at the universities; it’s a question of how much,” he said.

When asked what the future would hold, Corbin said the budget cuts aren’t likely to go away, and their effects will be felt over time.

“There could always be a change of leadership in the House, but they do expect the budget crunch to continue in the next year’s legislative session,” Corbin said.

‘Radiator capping’

Richert said he has one word to describe this year’s legislative session: “unrelenting.”

One thing that made it feel that way was that some bills were recycled over and over, he said. For example, Richert said the Legislature saw five different versions of a bill that proposed cuts to the Idaho Digital Learning Alliance.

“We had multiple bills that came from the dead,” he said.

The journalists said this is partly due to a tactic called “radiator capping.” The term means to replace the entire car — the bill’s text, in political terms — while only keeping the radiator cap: the bill number. By rewriting a bill on the House or Senate floor while maintaining its number, failed bills can effectively bypass the committee process.

“Those are the changes they tried to make on immigration bills, on union bills this year,” Corbin said. “It made it extremely difficult for the public to have any idea what was going on, to have any opportunity to participate in the legislative process and share their opinions.

A more powerful, more chaotic Legislature

Richert said Idaho’s annual legislative sessions are trending longer, commonly going into the early part of April, and producing a record number of bills.

“There are rumblings that this Legislature, as a body, is wanting to expand its reach over more and have even more power over the other branches of government to the point of — are we trending towards more of a full-time professional legislature?” Richert said. “We’re a long way from there.”

“The legislative branch of government, particularly the Idaho House of Representatives, is the most powerful I’ve seen it in 16 years of covering state government,” Corbin said.

He added that this year’s legislative session was unlike any he’s experienced.

“The overall temperature in the building was bad,” Corbin said. “It was divisive. It was chaotic. People were not hiding their feelings of disgust for each other. These traditional ideas of decorum and respect very much fell by the wayside.”

Richert said Gov. Brad Little vetoed very few bills that came across his desk, and the ones he did weren’t high-profile.

RELATED | Idaho Gov. Brad Little issues 5 vetoes. Here are the bills affected

“I think the governor behaved like he was very concerned about the supermajority-controlled Legislature, and I think that that Legislature, in turn, asserted itself and took control of the agenda this year,” Corbin said.

Are legislators representing Idaho?

Corbin said some bills this year also focused on the LGBTQ+ community, such as a bathroom restriction for transgender individuals, and a bill that banned the City of Boise from waving a Pride flag.

RELATED | Idaho governor signs bill to criminalize trans people using bathrooms that align with their identity

RELATED | Boise removes LGBTQ+ pride flag as Idaho governor signs bill to fine city for its display

When asked if these were what Idahoans wanted, Corbin said it doesn’t necessarily appear so to him, based on his review of Boise State University’s annual public policy survey.

“For years and years, I’ve heard concerns about affordability of housing, access to housing, managing the growth of the state of Idaho, having quality public schools available for our young people — that also generates a workforce pipeline for some of our businesses,” Corbin said. “I’ve heard about paying for wildfires. I’ve heard about having good roads, supporting access to public lands, public recreation, those are the concerns I hear from Idahoans.”

“But the Legislature spent a significant amount of time over the last two, three, four years placing additional restrictions on LGBTQ communities, placing restrictions on what teachers can and cannot teach in their classrooms, what school boards can and cannot do,” Corbin continued. “They talked about requiring a moment of silence every day to begin the public school day, where children could pray or read the Bible.”

RELATED | Gov. Brad Little signs public school ‘moment of silence’ bill into law

Corbin said it may be his own opinion, but perhaps it is easier to “make a bunch of noise about what’s going wrong and (distract) people with social issues” rather than focus on harder issues that Idaho faces.

“I think what you saw on the policy space is a reflection of the fact that you had legislators thinking about reelection, and legislators with time on their hands — and that’s not always a good combination,” Richert said.

Accountability

When asked how people can keep legislators accountable, Corbin said it can be done by following the state Legislature through trusted news sources, going to community events and voting.

“This is a great year to practice accountability, because all 105 state legislators and all statewide elected officials are up for election this year,” he said.