Chad Daybell sentenced to death in triple murder case

Lina PortmanJune 2, 2024

0 3 minutes read

Chad Daybell after hearing his fate in an Ada County, Idaho, court on May 30, 2024. (Nate Eaton/East Idaho News)

Chad Daybell was sentenced to death in the 'doomsday cult' triple murder case after being found guilty on all counts.

An Idaho jury decided Saturday that Daybell, 55, should be sentenced to death for the murders of his first wife and Lori Vallow's two children. The sentence came after jurors determined that on two separate days in September 2019, he murdered 16-year-old Tylee Ryan and 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow. In October 2019, he murdered his first wife, Tammy Daybell.

Daybell showed no emotion as the sentence was read, the Associated Press reported. He declined to make a statement, the press service said.

As Law&Crime reported, Daybell conspired with Vallow, 50, his second wife and also a convicted killer, to murder his first wife, Tamara “Tammy” Daybell, 49, and Tylee Ashlyn Ryan, 16, the Vallow's biological daughter from a previous marriage, and Joshua Jaxon “JJ” Vallow, 7, Vallow's adopted son.

Daybell was found guilty of all charges against him, including multiple counts of insurance fraud, conspiracy to commit murder, and conspiracy to commit grand theft by deception.

The children disappeared and were considered missing for some time before the horrible truth became clear: They were both killed, one after the other, in early and late September 2019. It was initially thought that the killer's first wife had died of natural causes, but in hindsight this knowledge gave authorities reason to reevaluate this decision.

Tylee was last seen alive in a photograph taken in Yellowstone National Park on September 8, 2019. During Daybell's trial, it was established that JJ was killed in the early morning of September 23, 2019. Tammy Daybell died on October 23, 2019. 19, 2019.

Vallow was initially arrested in Hawaii in February 2020 on child desertion charges. Daybell was arrested in June 2020 after the children's bodies were found buried on his property. Both defendants were charged with the May 2021 murders of Vallow and Tammy Daybell's children on multiple counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, and grand theft by deception.

Initially prosecuted as husband and wife co-defendants, their cases were separated in March 2023. Vallow was convicted of her crimes in May 2023. Her husband's trial took place the same month this year.

During the trial, Melanie Gibb, a former devoted family friend, reprized her earlier testimony during Vallow's April 2023 trial – discussing details of the killers' strange post-Mormon belief system and how these beliefs have become a real nightmare for the victims.

Vallow and Daybell met at an apocalyptic conference in 2018. There, they came to believe they had married in a past life. Other non-dogmatic beliefs, atypical of their Mormon upbringing, came to be shared among love murderers, including the idea that people emit energies that can be classified as light and dark.

“She told me the day before I arrived that it had gone dark,” Gibb said – testifying to the new religious beliefs in which Daybell was the arbiter of who was irremediably possessed by some form of evil, decidedly new . In this belief structure, spirits with strange names cling to the human body. Over time, these unfortunate human beings are considered to have become “dark.” And if the forces of darkness could not be driven out, the possessed person would become a “zombie”.

By the fall of 2019, prosecutors argued, the couple came to view JJ Vallow, Tylee Ryan and Tammy Daybell as unattainable zombies.

“They were seen as translated dark beings,” Gibb testified.

After a 25-day trial, the defense filed a perfunctory motion for acquittal. The resulting hearing raised an oddity: a gap in the charging document — an incorrect date range for when JJ's murder took place — that only the judge himself seemed to notice.

The defense has taken pains to suggest that leaving incorrect dates throughout the process was part of its plan to have a murder charge dismissed. The state rejected this request. The court, however, attributed this to a simple clerical error.

Colin Kalmbacher of Law&Crime contributed to this report.

Lina Portman

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