‘Doomsday Mom’ Lori Daybell convicted of conspiring to murder ex-husband

PHOENIX (CN) — An Arizona jury found Lori Vallow Daybell, the media-dubbed “Doomsday Mom” who murdered her two children whom she said were turned to zombies, guilty on Tuesday of conspiring to murder her ex-husband Charles Vallow.

“This is a good day,” Vallow’s younger brother Jerry Vallow said. “We won.”

More then 40 spectators, including 16 reporters and true crime podcasters and five members of Vallow’s family, sat silently in a Phoenix courtroom as the bailiff read the verdict.

“It’s sad,” a juror named Karl said outside courthouse after the proceedings. “It’s so sad that she did this to Charles, and she’s thrown away her life as well.”

The jury deliberated for just three hours.

State prosecutors say the 2019 killing in Chandler, Arizona, was inspired by the teachings of Vallow Daybell’s lover Chad Daybell, a Mormon doomsday author turned cult leader who taught of demonic possession, dark spirits and the apocalypse.

Though Vallow was shot twice in the chest by Vallow Daybell’s brother Alex Cox, who died before he could be prosecuted, prosecutors claimed during trial that Vallow Daybell planned the murder in an effort to collect life insurance and social security payouts, ultimately intending to marry Daybell and move to Hawaii.

It was there she was arrested for desertion of her two children, whom she and Daybell murdered in September 2019. In 2023, one Idaho jury gave three life sentences to Vallow Daybell and another sentenced Daybell to death.

Representing herself in her Arizona murder conspiracy trial, Vallow Daybell told the jury that her brother shot Vallow in self-defense after Vallow attacked them both with a baseball bat.

Following the guilty verdict, Vallow Daybell declined a sentencing aggravation phase, instead stipulating that the offense was dangerous, included accomplice, and caused emotional or financial harm to the victim or the victim’s immediate family.

Facing a potential fourth life sentence, the defendant elected to stay her sentencing until the conclusion of a final murder trial, which begins in June.

Throughout the two-week trial, friends and family of both the defendant and the victim explained Vallow Daybell’s cultish religious beliefs, fostered by her relationship with Daybell. Prosecutors presented text conversations that they said showed Vallow Daybell believed that the victim had been possessed by a dark spirit named Ned Schnieder who turned her ex-husband’s body into a zombie, much like what she said about her children.

Vallow Daybell’s second brother Adam Cox testified that Vallow Daybell told him she was “in the process of transferring from a mortal human being to an immortal being,” in the months leading up to Vallow’s murder.

Sarena Sharp, a follower of Daybell’s unconventional religious teachings, testified she met Vallow Daybell at a religious conference in 2018 and joined her on a “girls trip” in March 2019. There, Vallow Daybell told Sharp about Ned and asked for help casting the demon out.

Vallow Daybell mostly avoided religious topics while cross-examining witnesses, instead fixating on smaller details. She lingered over the fact that she had left the scene of the crime the morning of July 11, 2019, after her brother shot Vallow in her home, to drive her son to school, order Burger King for her daughter, and buy flip flops at Walgreens. She returned to the scene soon after to find police had responded to Cox’s 911 call, which he made 47 minutes after Vallow died.

A juror named Victoria Lewis said Vallow Daybell didn’t do herself any favors in jurors’ minds.

“Many days she was smiling and laughing and seemed to not take anything seriously” Lewis said.

Jerry Vallow agreed. “I thought she sucked,” he said. “I thought she was kind of a smarty pants. But I know what word I would really use.”

At trial, the defendant asked each first responder who testified whether she was “nonchalant,” which became the unofficial word of the trial, after some said she seemed unusually calm and collected having just watched her husband die.

But Vallow Daybell argued through her questioning that she was panicked enough to have run out of the house without shoes on, necessitating the flip flops, and ordered water at Burger King because “adrenaline makes you super thirsty.”

Enamored by the spotlight, Vallow Daybell seemed to relish her time crossing state witnesses, but couldn’t call any of her own because she failed to properly subpoena them — a manifestation of her lack of legal experience that kept her in constant contention with with increasingly impatient Maricopa County Judge Justin Beresky.

Vallow Daybell complained before trial that the state’s objection to her improperly disclosed witness list was an attempt to stifle her ability to self-represent, but Beresky chided her for choosing to rush to trial against the advice of her former counsel.

“You can’t have it both ways,” he told the defendant just days before selecting a jury.

As the state neared the end of its case-in-chief last week, Vallow Daybell again tried to add witnesses to her list, but couldn’t confirm whether her paralegal or private investigator had served them with subpoenas.

The jurors said they wished they could have heard from more witnesses, and were shocked and saddened to learn that Tyler and Joshua had also been killed.

Other spectators clapped and cheered for the two jurors as they walked past the press gaggle. One shouted “congratulations!”

Prosecutors consistently objected to Vallow Daybell’s improper questions and constant insertions of her own testimony between them, keeping the defendant from finding her rhythm at any point in trial.

Without witnesses of her own, she was unable to give what she thought would be proper context for, by example, a text message she sent to Cox reading “I will be like Nephi” that was interpreted to mean her act of murder will be justified by God. She tried to explain that she could have been referencing any of the many stories of Nephi in the Book of Mormon, but prosecutors objected to every attempt.

Jurors said that text message was the smoking gun.

Tuesday’s conviction marks the fourth murder-related conviction for Daybell. But her legal troubles don’t end here — she will soon return to Arizona state court to face yet another murder charge, this time regarding Brandon Boudreaux, the ex-husband of Vallow Daybell’s niece, who was shot at outside his home around the same time of the other murders.

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