Lori Daybell, the mother who was convicted of murdering two of her children in a so-called doomsday plot, has now been found guilty of conspiring with her brother to kill her fourth husband.
The case was presented to the jury in Maricopa County, Arizona, on Monday afternoon, and they returned their verdict on Tuesday afternoon.
Lori Daybell, 51, represented herself during the Phoenix trial. She didn’t take the stand or call witnesses.
Lori Daybell, dubbed the “doomsday mom,” has maintained that her brother shot her then-husband of 13 years, Charles Vallow, in self-defense at her Chandler, Arizona, home in July 2019. Her brother, Alex Cox, died of natural causes several months after the shooting.
She pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.
Prosecutors said Daybell staged the shooting to get rid of her estranged husband so she could get his $1 million life insurance policy and marry her current husband, Chad Daybell, four months after the shooting.
Prosecutors said she used their “twisted” religious beliefs to justify the murder and gave her brother “religious authority” to kill Vallow because they believed he was possessed by an evil spirit known as “Ned.”
Over two weeks, the state called more than a dozen witnesses, including Daybell’s other brother, Adam Cox, who testified that he had “no doubt” that his two siblings conspired to kill Vallow after learning that his brother had fatally shot him.
Maricopa County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Treena Kay stated in her closing argument that the evidence at the scene demonstrated that Vallow was not shot in self-defense, but was “executed” and the scene “staged.” She recounted text messages sent by Lori Daybell to her husband, Chad, seven days after Vallow’s death, in which she discussed her husband’s life insurance policy.
Kay stated that after learning that she was no longer the beneficiary of the plan, the defendant messaged Chad that “Ned” most likely changed it “before we got rid of him.”
The prosecutor also brought up a text message the defendant sent to Alex Cox days before the fatal shooting, in which she said they could “be like Nephi,” a prophet in the Book of Mormon who God commanded to kill Laban.
“Lori Vallow wanted the million dollars, and she wanted Chad Daybell, and she and Alex used that twisted religious beliefs they had so that they could kill the evil, possessed Charles and ‘be like Nephi,'” Kay added.
Three jurors who spoke to reporters after the verdict stated that the text message evidence in the case stood out while they were deliberating. The jurors claimed they had no knowledge of Lori Daybell’s previous convictions, which were not discussed during the Phoenix trial.
Members of Vallow’s family expressed relief after the guilty verdict.
“I’m ready to move on,” Vallow’s sister, Kay Woodcock, told reporters outside the courtroom.
“This was thrust upon us, and our lives just went into, like a tornado, for a long time,” she told me.
After the guilty verdict, Lori Daybell agreed to several aggravating factors in the case rather than having a jury decide on them. Among them, she agreed that this was a dangerous offense that required the presence of an accomplice. When asked if she agreed that as a result of her actions, the victim or the victim’s family “suffered emotional or financial harm,” she said, “Absolutely.”
She will be sentenced following another upcoming trial in Maricopa County, where she is accused of conspiring with her brother Alex Cox to kill Brandon Boudreaux, her niece’s ex-husband.
Three months after Vallow’s shooting, Boudreaux called 911 to report that someone driving by in a Jeep had shot at his vehicle outside his Gilbert, Arizona home.
She pleaded not guilty in that case.
Lori and Chad Daybell were both convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of her children, Joshua “J.J.” Vallow, 7, and Tylee Ryan, 16, who went missing months after Charles Vallow was killed.
In separate trials in 2023 and 2024, prosecutors claimed the couple believed the children were possessed zombies and murdered them to be together. The children’s remains were discovered on Daybell’s Idaho property in June 2020, after a months-long search.
Lori Daybell is currently serving a life sentence without parole for the murder of her two children. She has denied killing them.
Chad Daybell was sentenced to death after being convicted of murdering his two children and his first wife, Tamara Daybell, and is currently on Idaho’s death row.
