Opening statements started Monday in the murder trial of Lori Vallow Daybell, the Idaho mother accused of killing her two youngest children and her husband’s late wife.
Vallow Daybell will spend life in prison if convicted, while her husband, Chad Daybell, who will be tried separately, could face the death penalty. The deaths have drawn widespread scrutiny, speculation, and sensationalism and have been the subject of a Netflix docuseries.
In front of 12 jurors and six alternates, prosecutors and defense attorneys each painted a vastly different picture of Vallow Daybell. Fremont County Prosecutor Lindsey Blake portrayed Vallow Daybill as someone who used “money, power and sex to get what she wanted.”
Meanwhile, Vallow Daybell’s state-appointed defense attorney Jim Archibald described Vallow Daybell as a “kind and loving mother” to her children who had a particularly deep interest in religion and the Bible.
He argued that prosecutors don’t really know what role Vallow Daybell may have had in the deaths.
Vallow Daybell and her husband both pleaded not guilty to a slew of charges, including murder, conspiracy and grand theft, in the deaths of Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 7, and Tylee Ryan, 16, who was last seen a few days before her 17th birthday in 2019.
The couple is also accused of killing Chad Daybell’s former wife, Tammy Daybell, who unexpectedly died in October 2019, about two weeks before Chad Daybell married Vallow.
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In a Boise courtroom, Blake told jurors that Vallow Daybell wanted Chad Daybell and that she would “remove any obstacle in her way to get what she wants,” even if that meant killing her own kids.
When family members reported the two children missing to authorities in November 2019, Vallow Daybell and her husband refused to cooperate with the investigation and left the state. The couple was later found in Kaua’i, Hawaii, in January 2020, without the children. The couple was later arrested in Hawaii and then extradited to Idaho.
The children’s bodies were found buried on Daybell’s property in rural eastern Idaho in June 2020.
“Charred remains, that’s what was left of Tylee,” Blake, the prosecutor, told jurors during her opening statements.
Blake then showed them a photo of human remains partially uncovered in a patch of dirt.
“You will hear it explained as a mass of bone and tissue. That’s what was left of this beautiful young woman,” Blake said.
The prosecutor added that some of Vallow Daybell’s friends will testify during the trial that Vallow Daybell said the children and Tammy Daybell were “dark” before their deaths, focusing on the couple’s doomsday-focused faith.
According to police reports, one friend said Vallow Daybell allegedly called her kids “zombies.”
“The common theme was the body has to be destroyed,” Blake told jurors. “The defendant and Chad used their self-proclaimed religious teachings to justify their actions to others — their actions from affair to murder.”
Later, Archibald, Vallow Daybell’s attorney, told jurors that his client’s religious beliefs only began to change after she met Chad Daybell, a religious author whose fictional books focused on the apocalypse and loosely based on the beliefs of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Archibald also told jurors that prosecutors don’t really know what happened in this case. He added that the criminal charges accuse Vallow Daybell of either directing, encouraging, assisting or participating in the murders.
“Did she kill, or did she assist, or did she encourage? Or, did she direct?” Archibald said. “They aren’t sure.”
Vallow Daybell’s trial will center on her mental capacity
Some experts said the trial will almost assuredly focus on Vallow Daybell’s mental state at the time of the killings. Prosecutors are also expected to make the case that Vallow Daybell and her husband further their alleged plan to kill the kids and Tammy Daybell to collect life insurance money and the children’s social security and survivor benefits.
“It’s an incredibly complicated case with a deeply emotional set of facts that people, including children, are dead,” said David Leroy, a former Idaho attorney general and lieutenant governor. “The term, ‘Doomsday Mom’ is a very compelling reason to pay attention to what happened here.”
Leroy said Vallow Daybell’s defense team may have its hands full as Leroy notes he was one of the architects of Idaho’s 1982 law abolishing the insanity defense plea. In other words, Vallow Daybell can’t use insanity as a defense, he said.
“Her mental state of mind typically will not come up in a very direct way in this case, unless the defense attempts to suggest she was in the mental power of a third person and not criminally involved in a conspiracy or a murder,” Leroy said.
Idaho does allow for a “guilty but insane” verdict from a jury.
Vallow Daybell’s defense attorneys are not expected to say anything salacious and tantalizing to defend her, said John Delatorre, a forensic and disaster psychologist in Arizona and Texas.
“I think they will stick with Vallow Daybell didn’t do it, she was someplace else and that any DNA obtained could have been placed there before the murders,” Delatorre said.
However, Leroy guessed prosecutors weren’t going to let that be an excuse for her alleged crimes.
“Her silence for six months could be seen as an equivalent admission of some involvement in criminal activity,” he said.
Contributing: Associated Press
