Jury in cult mom Lori Vallow found GUILTY of murdering children

Cult mom Lori Vallow has been found guilty of murdering her children JJ and Tylee and conspiring to murder her husband’s former wife following a five-week trial in Idaho, and nearly four years after the children died. 

The 49-year-old was emotionless as the verdict was read aloud today in Boise, Idaho. 

Her defense team did not call a single witness nor did they put forward any kind of explanation for how the children died. 

Lori’s children – seven-year-old JJ and 16-year-old Tylee – vanished in September 2019. 

Their mother, newly-in-love with Doomsday-cult enthusiast Chad Daybell, avoided questions and evaded the authorities. 

She fled to Hawaii, refusing to tell the police where her children were, or answering any kind of questions about not only her children but the vast web of death and deceit that seemed to engulf her family. 

Chad Daybell is facing similar charges but his trial was put on pause. 

Lori, who was found mentally competent to stand trial, now faces life in prison. Prosecutors previously took the death penalty off the table.  

‘Four years for this,’ JJ’s grandfather Larry Woodcock said from the courtroom with tears in his eyes. ‘Four years we’ve been waiting.’

The case drew nationwide interest in 2019 after the kids vanished. It took another nine months for their bodies to be discovered in shallow graves in Chad Daybell’s backyard. 

JJ had been suffocated with a plastic bag, while Tylee’s corpse was so badly burned and dismembered that it is still not clear how she was killed.

If found guilty, Vallow faces life in prison after the death penalty was taken off the table earlier this year. 

Spectators lined up as early as 4am at the Ada County Courthouse in Boise, Idaho, to get a coveted spot in the courtroom and see the cult mom accused of three murders, including her own children, handed a verdict. 

Larry Woodcock, the grandfather of seven-year-old JJ Vallow, was in good spirits as he arrived at court Friday morning, greeting everyone in line. 

‘Today is the day,’ he said with a big smile, adding that he was hoping for a ‘just’ and ‘righteous’ verdict today. 

The State said Vallow was motivated by ‘money, power and sex’ and that she used all three of those things to achieve her twisted ends.

Jurors heard how they saw her children and Daybell’s wife as ‘obstacles’ to the romantic life they envisioned for themselves in Hawaii. 

Prosecutors said Vallow and Daybell believed – or chose to believe – that those who stood in their way were ‘dark’ possessed individuals who they referred to as ‘zombies.’

The cult mom is further charged over the death of her former husband Charles Vallow who was shot dead by her brother Alex Cox in Arizona in July, 2019. She is yet to enter a plea in that case.

Vallow met religious author Daybell at a conference in St George, Utah, in late 2018. She was already familiar with his religious novel in which he espoused ideas that the reckoning day was imminent.

Soon after meeting, the pair – both members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – embarked on an affair.

The cult they formed included relatives and friends they met at doomsday conferences.

Daybell acted as the leader and Vallow acted as his trusted lieutenant and conduit through which other members, like her brother Cox, would seek advice.

Cox, who died of natural causes in December, 2019, is accused of participating in the murder of Vallow’s children and his fingerprints were found on tape that was found wrapped around JJ’s corpse.

After allegedly killing the children in September, 2019, Vallow would tell friends and relatives various lies, including that JJ was with his grandparents and Tylee had gone to university.

But in late November, police began investigating after out-of-state relatives reported the children missing.

Days later Tammy Daybell’s death was reclassified as suspicious and her body exhumed. An autopsy – which Daybell had refused the night she died – shows she had died of asphyxiation, the same cause of death which would later be determined for JJ.

Vallow was eventually arrested in Hawaii in February 2020, but the children would not be found for another four months.

Jurors heard from Prosecutor Lindsey Blake described how charred remains were all that was left of Tylee.

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She told jurors: ‘You will hear it explained as a mass of bone and tissue. That’s what was left of this beautiful young woman.’

Tylee’s DNA was later found on a pickaxe and shovel in a shed on the property. 

JJ’s body was wrapped in trash bags and duct tape – the tape binding his arms in front of him and wrapping around his head. He had been suffocated inside a plastic bag.

The two children and Daybell’s previous wife Tammy were all killed because they stood in the way of the couple’s relationship, the State said. 

‘Remember, the defendant will remove any obstacle in her way to get what she wants, and she wanted Chad Daybell,’ Blake told jurors.

‘The defendant used money, power and sex to get what she wanted.’

Jurors have heard from friends and relatives of Vallow that she and Daybell believed the children were ‘dark’ and referred to them as ‘zombies’ before they disappeared.

‘The common theme was the body has to be destroyed,’ Blake said. ‘The defendant and Chad used their self-proclaimed religious teachings to justify their actions to others — their actions from affair to murder.’

Prosecutors say the couple planned to use life insurance money from Tammy’s death, and that Vallow kept collecting and spending the children’s social security and benefits after they died.

However, Vallow’s defense attorney pointed the finger at her doomsday preacher husband in a last ditch attempt to sway the jury. 

Jim Archibald attempted to paint a picture of Vallow as a loving mother who was seduced by Daybell and lied to protect him.

He claimed she had no idea Daybell and her brother Alex had ‘stuffed her kids’ bodies in Chad’s backyard’.