BOISE, Idaho (NewsNation) — Chad Daybell was found guilty on all counts Thursday for murdering his ex-wife and his current wife’s two youngest children.
Daybell, 55, was charged with three counts of first-degree murder, insurance fraud, and conspiracy to commit murder and grand theft in connection with the 2019 deaths of Tammy Daybell, 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow and 16-year-old Tylee Ryan.
Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty.
Closing arguments
The trial lasted roughly two months, featuring testimony from dozens of witnesses at times turning strange and gruesome, with final arguments concluding Wednesday.
Prosecutors have called dozens of witnesses to bolster their claims that Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow conspired to kill the two children and Tammy Daybell, Chad’s first wife, because they wanted to get rid of any obstacles to their relationship and to obtain money from survivor benefits and life insurance.
Chad Daybell’s defense attorney, John Prior, contended there simply isn’t enough evidence to conclusively tie him to the deaths, or even to prove that his late wife, Tammy Daybell, was killed instead of dying from natural causes. Several witnesses, including Chad and Tammy Daybell’s adult children, testified for the defense.
Prosecutors say the couple justified the killings by creating an apocalyptic belief system that people could be possessed by evil spirits and turned into “zombies,” and that the only way to save a possessed person’s soul was for the possessed body to die.
Prosecutor Lindsey Blake said Wednesday that Daybell styled himself a leader of what he called “The Church of the Firstborn” and told Vallow and others that he could determine if someone had become a “zombie.” Daybell also claimed to be able to determine how close a person was to death by reading what he called their “death percentage,” Blake said.
Vallow was convicted of killing her sons last year and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. She is currently in Arizona awaiting trial on additional charges of conspiring to kill her estranged husband Charles Vallow and her niece’s ex-husband Brandon Boudreaux.
Who is Chad Daybell?
Chad Daybell is now married to Vallow, who is his second wife. He originally married Tammy Daybell in 1990, and they had five kids.
He previously ran a small publishing company and wrote fictional books about apocalyptic scenarios loosely based on the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He also hosted a podcast about preparing for the apocalypse.
Those close to Chad Daybell said he claimed he received visions from “beyond the veil.”
Prosecutors say he met Vallow at a conference in Utah in 2018. The two purportedly felt an “instant connection” and claimed they had been married to each other in a past life, according to police records.
Friends of the couple told investigators that the pair shared the same unusual beliefs, including that they could tell if someone had been taken over by an evil spirit.
Chad Daybell and Vallow led a group of friends in trying to cast out the supposed evil spirits by praying and doing “energy work,” prosecutors said. Friends told police that in some cases they determined a person had become a “zombie,” fully controlled by the evil spirit.
Vallow claimed the only way to get rid of a “zombie” was to destroy the person’s body, prosecutors say, and one friend told police she heard Vallow call the children zombies before they disappeared.
NewsNation digital producer Devan Markham and The Associated Press contributed to this report.