Lori Vallow Daybell trial live: Cameras banned from murder trial as jury selection begins

The trial of the doomsday cult couple has stalled for the past few years – in part due to the Covid-19 pandemic, mental incompetence and legal wranglings.

Lori Vallow has been behind bars since January 2020 when she was arrested in Hawaii and extradited to Idaho for failing to meet a court order to present her children to authorities.

Chad Daybell has been in prison since the children’s remains were discovered in June 2020.

The case was largely put on hold when Ms Vallow was found not mentally competent to stand trial.

She then spent almost a year at a mental health facility before she was ruled competent in May 2022 and the case proceeded through the courts.

So far, the pair are yet to turn on each other and have both pleaded not guilty.

In March, an Idaho judge ruled that Ms Vallow and Mr Daybell will be tried separately for the murders – prompting Mr Daybell’s case to be pushed back to an unconfirmed date while jury selection gets under way on 3 April in Ms Vallow’s trial.

The death penalty has now been taken off the table for Ms Vallow but not for Mr Daybell.

If found guilty, Ms Vallow faces life in prison.

“Cult mom” Lori Vallow is trying to get the grandparents of her slain son banned from her murder trial, in a move that the family members say has left them “blindsided and heartbroken”.

Ms Vallow’s trial is set to begin on Monday in a court in Idaho, where she faces life in prison for the murders of her two children Tylee Ryan, 16, and Joshua “JJ” Vallow, seven.

Tylee and JJ were last seen alive in September 2019 with their remains found buried on the grounds of her new husband doomsday cult author Chad Daybell’s property in Rexburg, Idaho, in June 2020.

Ms Vallow is charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy and grand theft in connection with the deaths of JJ and Tylee and is also charged with conspiracy to murder Mr Daybell’s first wife Tammy Daybell.

Now – after delays brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic and Ms Vallow being admitted to a psychiatric facility for almost a year – jury selection is set to begin on Monday in her trial.

However, JJ’s grandparents Kay and Larry Woodcock may no longer be able to attend the roughly 12-week trial due to a motion filed by Ms Vallow’s defence attorneys seeking to ban them from the courtroom.

The Independent’s Rachel Sharp has the full story:

The judge has banned cameras from the courtroom meaning there will be no livestream of the trial.

The case was also moved to Boise in an attempt to increase the likelihood of finding jurors that aren’t deeply familiar with the case.

Lori Vallow is charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy and grand theft in connection with the deaths of her two children JJ and Tylee.

She is also charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the death of Tammy.

She is also facing grand theft and insurance fraud counts for applying for Social Security benefits for Tylee and JJ after they died.

Separately, Ms Vallow is also charged with conspiring to murder her ex-husband Charles Vallow with Cox.

At the centre of the string of alleged murders and mystery deaths stands the couple’s bizarre doomsday cult.

Chad Daybell ran a publishing company that put out books about apocalyptic scenarios loosely based on the theology of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Lori Vallow followed his books for some time, before the pair finally met in person at a religious conference in Utah in October 2018.

Charles Vallow claimed in divorce documents that Ms Vallow believed she was a god-like figure chosen to carry out the work of 144,000 believers.

Multiple friends cited in police reports say that the couple believed they could drive out evil spirits and seek revelations from “beyond the spiritual veil”.

Ms Vallow even believed she could teleport between Arizona and Hawaii, according to documents.

But – most chillingly – the couple allegedly believed that people, including JJ and Tylee, had become “zombies”.

They allegedly had a scoring system for ranking how far people’s souls had gone from good to evil.

The only way to then rid an individual of the zombies would be for them to die, according to documents.

Prosecutors believe that Ms Vallow and Mr Daybell used these beliefs to further their plots to kill JJ, Tylee and Tammy.

The so-called “Doomsday cult mom” Lori Vallow has finally offered up an alibi for the murders of her two children, claiming she was somewhere else when they died in her brother’s apartment – and bizarrely adding that her husband and alleged co-conspirator Chad Daybell may or may not have been with her at the time.

Ms Vallow and cult leader Mr Daybell have both pleaded their innocence of all charges in a dramatic case that spans a deeply disturbing pattern of suspected murders, unexplained deaths of people close to the couple and bizarre cult beliefs about killing zombies.

Now, for the first time, Ms Vallow has provided an alibi for her children’s murders, according to a new court filing submitted by her legal team last week.

Ms Vallow claims she was at her own apartment in Rexburg, Idaho, when the two children died in her brother’s home in the same complex, the documents state.

Read the full story here:

In December 2019, Lori Vallow’s brother Alex Cox also died suddenly aged just 51.

At the time, authorities were demanding Ms Vallow present her children, Tammy Daybell’s body was about to be exhumed and Cox had killed Vallow just months earlier.

One day, Cox was found gasping for air on the bathroom floor of the home he shared with his wife Zulema Pastenes – who he had married just two weeks earlier.

The autopsy found he had a blood clot wedged in the arteries of his lungs and his death was ruled natural causes. However the overdose drug Narcan was also found in his system.

Days before his death, Ms Pastenes said he suggested his death could be looming.

“Like one or two days before he passed, he said to me, ‘Zulema, if anything happens to me, I want you to know that there is money in a bag in the closet and it’s for you. It’s not much but it’s for you,’” she told police, according to court records.

The day he died, he had also allegedly called Mr Daybell to receive a “blessing” over the phone.

No charges have ever been brought in connection to his death.

Chad Daybell married his first wife Tammy in 1990 and they had five children together. They also founded a publishing company together – the company that released his doomsday books.

Just one month after the children vanished – on 19 October 2019 – Tammy, an otherwise healthy 49-year-old, died suddenly in her sleep.

In a bizarre twist, her death came just 10 days after she had called 911 to report someone shooting at her with a paintball gun in the driveway of their home.

Despite the mysterious circumstances, her husband declined an autopsy and her death was ruled natural causes.

Two weeks later, Mr Daybell and Lori Vallow married on a beach in Hawaii.

It was only after the two children were reported missing – and authorities began delving into Ms Vallow and Mr Daybell, their sudden remarriage and bizarre cult beliefs – that questions began being asked about her death.

Investigators exhumed her body for an autopsy in December 2020.

Now, Mr Daybell and Ms Vallow are charged with her murder, with prosecutors alleging that the couple conspired with Alex Cox to kill the 49-year-old.

In July 2019 – two months prior to the alleged murders of JJ and Tylee – Lori Vallow’s brother Alex Cox shot and killed her husband Charles Vallow.

Vallow and Ms Vallow had been married since 2006 and had adopted JJ – who was the biological grandson of Vallow’s sister.

Vallow had gone to his estranged wife’s home in Chandler, Arizona, to pick up JJ when he was shot twice by Cox.

Cox claimed that Vallow attacked him with a baseball bat so he shot him in self-defence.

However, Cox did not perform CPR on Vallow and waited 43 minutes to call police.

At the time of Vallow’s shooting, the case was ruled self-defence.

Ms Vallow is now charged with conspiring with Cox to murder Vallow and is awaiting trial in Arizona on those charges.

More than three years after her children were last seen alive, “doomsday cult mom” Lori Vallow is about to finally stand trial for their murders.

Tylee Ryan, 16, and Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 8, vanished without a trace in September 2019, sparking a multi-state search while their mother appeared carefree – marrying her new husband Chad Daybell on a beach in Hawaii.

The children’s bodies were finally discovered nine months later buried in a pet cemetery on Mr Daybell’s property in Idaho.

Their disappearances and deaths mark only part of a dramatic case that spans a deeply disturbing pattern of murders, unexplained deaths and bizarre cult beliefs about killing zombies.

Now, Ms Vallow and Mr Daybell are charged in Idaho with JJ and Tylee’s murders, as well as the murder of Mr Daybell’s first wife Tammy Daybell.

Ms Vallow is also separately charged in Arizona with conspiring to murder her fourth husband Charles Vallow, with the help of her now-deceased brother Alex Cox – who mysteriously also died three months after the children’s disappearance.

The doomsday couple – who are yet to turn on each other – were due to stand trial together in Idaho but the cases have now been severed.

Now, Ms Vallow’s murder trial will begin on 3 April.

Here’s a timeline of the tragic and bizarre case: