Doomsday obsessive gets death penalty for murder of wife and girlfriend’s children
Former gravedigger and self-style prophet Chad Daybell was sentenced on Saturday.
A triple murder case that gripped the US and even sparked a Netflix documentary has finally come to a close.
Former gravedigger and self-styled doomsday prophet Chad Daybell will face the death penalty after being unanimously convicted on Saturday of the murders of his first wife and the children of his second, Lori Vallow.
Vallow is already serving life behind bars. Her story has been documented in the Netflix series, Sins of Our Mother.
Authorities charged Daybell and Vallow with multiple counts of murder, conspiracy and grand theft in connection with the demise of Daybell’s first wife Tammy and Vallow’s two youngest children – Tylee, who was 16 at the time, and Joshua, who was just seven years old.
Marking the end of a nearly two-month-long trial, Idaho judge Steven Boyce said: ‘The court typically would address the defendant further… But in this special sentencing proceeding, the victim-impact statements and the evidence has already demonstrated on the record, I think, the seriousness of what [has] occurred.
‘I don’t find any reason to further delve into the court’s rationale.’
So what exactly happened?
Self-Styled ‘Prophet of the End Times’
Born in 1968 to a Mormon family in Springville, Utah, Chad Daybell spent time working as a gravedigger to support his studies before publishing his first religiously themed novel in the late 1990s.
Five years later, he had quit his job at the cemetery to pursue his career as a writer, launching a publishing house with his first wife, Tammy.
Toward the end of the 2000s, Daybell’s writings, which often featured apocalyptic scenarios and prophetic callings, had found a small following among radical Mormon circles.
In time, his religious beliefs began to fall into line with the fictitious worlds he had created, with him prophesying an end to civilisation in the form of earthquakes and all-out war in the US.
How Daybell met Vallow
By 2015, Lori Vallow had become an avid reader of Daybell’s writings, with her own religious beliefs also growing more extreme.
A former beauty queen, Vallow had her eldest son Colby with her second husband, whom she had divorced in 1998. She had her daughter Tylee with her third husband Joseph Anthony Ryan Jr, who died of cardiovascular disease in 2018.
Meanwhile, Vallow had divorced Ryan to marry Leland ‘Charles’ Anthony Vallow in 2006, whose grandnephew Joshua she adopted in 2013.
Vallow first met Daybell in person in 2018. The pair were instantly smitten, with Daybell claiming they had been married in multiple previous lives, despite reincarnation being contrary to Mormon belief.
The pair eventually set up a doomsday podcast together, which swiftly developed a small but ardent extremist following.
Death of Charles Vallow
After discovering Lori Vallow was having an affair with Chad Daybell, Charles Vallow confronted his wife in June 2019 and sent an email to Daybell’s first wife Tammy, to whom Daybell was still married at the time.
Eleven days later, Charles Vallow was shot dead by Lori Vallow’s brother Alex Cox, following an altercation at Cox’s home after Charles had come to pick up Joshua.
Cox claimed the shooting had been in self-defence, and that the argument had escalated after he confronted Charles for allegedly abusing his sister Lori.
Prior to his death, Charles Vallow had amended his life insurance policy to preclude any payouts to Lori, who only learned of the changes after he died.
Vallow’s children disappear
In September 2019, both Tylee and Joshua Vallow disappeared without a trace. Brandon Boudreaux – the husband of Lori Vallow’s niece Melanie, who had become estranged from his wife due to her similarly extreme religious beliefs – would later tell authorities that both Lori and Chay Daybell had claimed the children were ‘possessed.’
A few weeks after the Vallow children disappeared, Boudreaux claimed to have been shot at from a vehicle known to have been used by Tylee and registered to the late Charles Vallow, allegedly in an attempt to claim the life insurance still held against him by his wife Melanie.
Available evidence suggested the attempted hit had been carried out by Alex Cox, Lori’s brother and a fellow member of the Daybell cult, who later died, reportedly of natural causes, in December of that year.
Tammy Daybell murdered
Just months after Chad Daybell told neighbours he’d had a vision that his first wife would pass away before turning 50, Tammy Daybell was shot at with a paintball gun in her driveway by masked assailants. The attack was later linked to Alex Cox.
Ten days after the incident in October 2019, Tammy was found dead in her home, apparently from natural causes. Her husband organised the funeral for just three days after her death, and soon collected a life insurance payout of roughly half a million dollars.
Chad Daybell initially refused for Tammy to undergo an autopsy. When her body was later exhumed, it was found she had been strangled, though these details only became public during Lori Vallow’s trial in April of last year.
Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow eventually tied the knot while on holiday in Hawaii in November 2019. Their wedding day fell two weeks after Tammy was killed, and as it was later revealed, two months after both Tylee and Joshua had been murdered.
Arrest of Daybell and Vallow
The case received national coverage after Vallow’s children were officially registered as missing, with a search effort launched in December 2019.
When authorities eventually tracked Daybell and Vallow down in Hawaii the following month, the couple were initially given five days to present the children before Vallow was eventually arrested in February 2020 in connection with their disappearances.
But it wasn’t until June that the children’s bodies were found buried in the backyard of Daybell’s home in Idaho. Prior to his arrest at the scene, Daybell phoned Vallow in jail before attempting to flee in his car.
Subsequent autopsies revealed Joshua had been asphyxiated with a plastic bag and duct tape. Though Tylee’s cause of death was never conclusively determined, her remains showed signs of attempted dismemberment.
Trial and conviction
Vallow’s trial on charges of murder, conspiracy and grand theft ended last April, while Daybell’s was only concluded yesterday. Both of the accused maintained their innocence throughout proceedings, and were nevertheless unanimously found guilty by a jury.
Vallow is already serving three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, while Daybell now faces the death penalty.
Following Daybell’s sentencing on Saturday, Colby Ryan, Vallow’s only surviving child, said: ‘My three kids will never know the kindness of Tylee’s heart or [Joshua’s] silly and goofy personality.
‘The only way I could describe the impact of their lives being lost is like a nuclear bomb dropping.
‘It’s not an overstatement to say that I lost everything.’
A representative for Tammy Daybell’s family added: ‘We are grateful for the relationships we have created through this horrible time and the support and love we were able to give each other.
‘We can all start to heal from the terrible losses we have suffered. We will miss Tammy every single day of our lives but we have some comfort knowing we will see her again.’
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