OAN Geraldyn Berry
1:35 PM – Friday, May 12, 2023
Lori Vallow Daybell has been found guilty by a jury of murdering two of her children in what the prosecution said was a doomsday scheme and plotting the murder of both her first husband’s first wife and her children.
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Vallow was convicted on all counts, including two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of conspiracy to commit murder, and grand theft for stealing her children’s Social Security benefits after their murders.
She faces a life in jail without the possibility of release.
In September 2019, Joshua, age seven, and Tylee, age 16, had disappeared and spurred a months-long search that came to an end in June 2020 when authorities discovered their bodies in Vallow’s sixth and current husband Chad Daybell’s home. Additionally, Vallow reportedly plotted with her husband to murder Tammy Daybell in October 2019.
The couple was found guilty after a six-week trial in which the prosecution claimed they believed the kids were zombies and killed them.
Lori Vallow Daybell “used money, power, and sex” to set the plan for the children’s murder in action in October 2018, and she and her husband “used religion to manipulate others,” according to Wood, the lead prosecutor, who addressed the jury during closing arguments on Thursday.
“It does not matter what they believed, it matters what they did,” Wood said. “They can believe whatever they want, but when it’s murder, that’s different.”
Lori Vallow Daybell was described as a kind mother who loved her children and Jesus by the defense counsel, Jim Archibald, but everything changed when she met Chad Baybell at the end of 2018.
“Is Lori a leader or a follower of Chad? She so desperately wants to be a leader, but she is following Chad,” Archibald said.
The jury heard text messages that the prosecution said were exchanged between Lori Vallow Daybell and her husband in the weeks before her children vanished throughout the trial.
The messages mentioned that the youngsters were “weary” from taking care of demons and that devils were invading their bodies. According to reports, Lori Vallow Daybell texted her husband asking him to “please ask the Lord to take them” and asking him if he believed there was a “perfectly orchestrated plan to take the children,” to which he allegedly replied, “There is a plan being orchestrated for the children.”
Lori Vallow Daybell reportedly claimed that she was “a God assigned to carry out the work of the 144,000 at Christ’s second coming in July 2020” and didn’t want anything to do with her family “because she had a more important mission to carry out,” according to court documents obtained by ABC News. The couple reportedly shared a doomsday ideology.
To their separate counts, they had both entered not guilty pleas. The court had approved having their cases heard separately.
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