Chad Daybell after hearing his fate in Ada County, Idaho, on May 30, 2024. (Nate Eaton/East Idaho News)
On two different days in September 2019, Chad Guy Daybell, 55, murdered his second wife’s children; in October 2019, he murdered his first wife, a jury in Ada County, Idaho determined on Thursday.
The defendant conspired with his second wife, convicted killer Lori Vallow, 50, to kill his first wife, Tamara “Tammy” Daybell, 49, and Tylee Ashlyn Ryan, 16, Vallow’s biological daughter from a prior marriage, and Joshua Jaxon “J.J.” Vallow, 7, Vallow’s adopted son.
Daybell was found guilty of all the indicted counts against him — including multiple counts of insurance fraud, conspiracy to commit murder, and conspiracy to commit grand theft by deception.
After five hours and 48 minutes of deliberations that began late Wednesday afternoon, 12 jurors decided Daybell’s fate. The timestamp on the reading of their decision was just after 2 p.m. MST.
The defendant appeared still as the verdicts were read.
The children disappeared and were considered missing for some time before the horrible truth became clear — that they were both killed, one after another, in early and late September 2019. The killer’s first wife was originally believed to have died from natural causes, but hindsight knowledge gave authorities cause to reevaluate that determination.
Tylee was last seen alive in a photograph taken at Yellowstone National Park on Sept. 8, 2019. During Daybell’s trial, it was established that J.J. was killed sometime during the early morning hours of Sept. 23, 2019. Tammy Daybell died on Oct. 19, 2019.
Vallow was initially arrested in Hawaii in February 2020 on charges of child desertion. Daybell was arrested in June 2020 after the children’s bodies were found buried at his property. The two defendants were indicted for the murder of Vallow’s children and Tammy Daybell in May 2021 on multiple counts of murder in the first degree, conspiracy to commit murder in the first degree, and grand theft by deception.
Initially prosecuted as husband-and-wife co-defendants, their cases were severed in March 2023. Vallow was convicted of her crimes in May 2023. Her husband’s trial took place during the same month this year.
Main image: Chad Daybell (John Roark/The Post-Register/Pool); Top left inset: Joshua “JJ” Vallow (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children); Bottom left inset: Tylee Ryan (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children); Top right inset: Tammy Daybell (East Idaho News)
During the trial, Melanie Gibb, a formerly devoted family friend, reprised her prior testimony from Vallow’s April 2023 trial — discussing details about the killers’ bizarre post-Mormon belief system and how those beliefs became a real-world nightmare for the victims.
Vallow and Daybell met at a doomsday conference in 2018. There, they came to believe that they had been married in a past life. Other nondoctrinaire beliefs, atypical of their Mormon upbringing, came to be shared between the lovestruck murderers, including the idea that people emit energies that can be categorized as light and dark.
“She told me the day before I arrived that he became dark,” Gibb said — testifying about the novel religious beliefs in which Daybell was the arbiter of who was irreparably possessed by a certain, and decidedly novel, form of evil. In this belief structure, oddly named spirits latch onto human bodies. In time, those unfortunate human beings are considered to have become “dark.” And if the dark ones couldn’t be cast out, the possessed person would become a “zombie.”
By the fall of 2019, prosecutors argued, the couple came to think of J.J. Vallow, Tylee Ryan, and Tammy Daybell as unreachable zombies.
“They were considered dark translated beings,” Gibb testified.
After a 25-day-long trial, the defense filed a perfunctory motion for acquittal. The resulting hearing brought up an oddity: a deficiency in the charging document — an incorrect date range for when the murder of J.J. occurred — that only the judge himself seemed to notice.
The defense made pains to suggest allowing the wrong dates to stand throughout the process was part of their plan to have one murder count dismissed. The state pushed back on this request. The court, however, chalked it up to simply a clerical error.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in the case.
The sentencing phase of the trial began just after 3 p.m. on Thursday. As in the guilt-or-innocence phase, Seventh District Judge Steven Boyce will preside over the proceedings that will determine how Daybell spends his remaining time on earth. If the state gets its way, that time will be spent as the ninth inmate on Idaho’s Death Row.
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