Idaho doomsday mom Laurie Vallow She smiled and smiled from her seat in the courtroom Monday as she awaited the verdict for her murder two kids and a plot to kill her husband the ex wife.
Vallow slumped in her seat amid her two defense attorneys in her orange and white prison jumpsuit, while family members urged Ada County Court Judge Stephen Boyce to hand down a life sentence.
“You’re going to live in your jail cell for the rest of your life,” said Samantha Gilliam, the sister of Tammy Dibble, who was murdered shortly before Vallow married her husband.
She called Vallow “a liar, an adulteress, and a murderer” and said, “Angels don’t come to save you”—an apparent reference to Vallow’s apocalyptic religious beliefs.
Vallow was found guilty of all charges in May in connection with the deaths of her two children, 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow and 16-year-old Tayl Ryan. The jury also convicted her of conspiring with her husband, Chad Daybell, to kill Tammy in October 2019.
Vicki Hoban, one of Tammy’s aunts, told Vallow she hopes the rest of the 49-year-old’s life will be “full of fear and you live each day terrified” for her role in the “brutal murder of great people.” In a statement read by Madison County District Attorney Rob Wood, Vallow’s son also provides a heartbreaking analysis of his life since 2019.
“I lost my entire family in life. I watched everything fall apart and crack. I lost my sister, brother, father and mother. I lost cousins, family, friends and everything in between,” Colby Ryan, who was not present in court, said in the statement.
However, the harsh words didn’t seem to visibly affect Vallow. During depositions, she is seen looking away, talking to her attorney, and smiling. Defense attorneys for Valo said on Monday that she may speak in her own defence.
The verdict is the culmination of a surreal trial involving religious extremism. zombie “demon”and marital strife.
Chad Dibble has written a romantic novel about the affair with Lori Vallow, witness says
During the six-week trial, prosecutors argued that Vallow and her husband, Chad Dibble, driven to kill by their beliefs in a splinter branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the need for money to start their new life in Hawaii. To prove their case, 60 witnesses testified to the jury about a plethora of evidence that showed Vallow was the “one common thread” between the three murders.
“There is literally no evidence that (Vallow) has remorse or responsibility,” Wood said Monday as he pleaded for life in prison.
Prosecutors said the murders came about a year after Vallow and Daype first met in 2018 at a religious convention in Utah. At the time, Daybell was a popular Mormon author, and Vallow was a devoted fan. The couple, who were married to other people at the time, soon fell in love and began a secret affair that many witnesses said centered on religious extremism.
Melanie Gibb testified that Vallow, her ex-girlfriend, believed she was one of the 144,000 people who would be on earth for the second coming of Jesus Christ. Gibb said that Vallow also began preaching about a light and dark scale and that those in the latter would become “zombies”.
Prosecutors also presented harrowing evidence about the three murders, including how Vallow’s son was found smothered with a white plastic bag taped to his head and found in Daybell’s pet cemetery in June 2020. The most damning piece of evidence against Vallow, a DNA expert, was found A piece of her hair is stuck to the tape used to wrap JJ’s buried body.
Dr. Garth Warren, who works for the Ada County Coroner’s Office, also testified that Tilly was found in a fire pit near her brother – but her remains were so badly dismembered and burned that he could not determine why she was killed.
Prosecutors also provided details of how Tammy Daybell was first killed, revealing that she suffocated in her Idaho home about a month after the children were killed. Two weeks after Tammy’s death, which was initially assumed to be of natural causes, prosecutors said Daybell flew to Hawaii for marriage Vallow in November 2019.
A month later, the police begin to realize that JJ and Tylee are missing. Vallow and Daybell in particular did not answer questions and told conflicting stories about the children’s whereabouts.
‘I put a face on evil’: Analyst Lori Vallow speaks
Vallow was finally arrested in Hawaii in February 2020, prompting investigations of her and her family.
But the ruling does not mark the end of the road for Valo. She is facing a separate trial in Arizona after allegedly conspiring with her brother to kill her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, in July 2019. Her brother, Alex Cox, died months after the incident, which he claimed was self-defense. Lori Vallow has also been charged in Arizona with conspiracy to kill her niece’s ex-husband, Brandon Boudreau.
Daybell, who was cut short from Vallow’s trial before her trial, is scheduled to face a jury next June. He is charged with similar offenses in connection with the three murders and faces the death penalty.
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