Chad Daybell was a writer of religious fiction who believed, or told the people around him that he believed, that the end of the world was near and that he had been chosen to help lead others through it. In September and October 2019 three people close to him died in eastern Idaho: his wife, Tammy Daybell, and the two youngest children of Lori Vallow, the woman he had met at a religious conference the year before and would marry in Hawaii seventeen days after Tammy's death.
He was arrested in June 2020 and indicted with Lori Vallow Daybell in May 2021. The two were tried separately. Lori Vallow Daybell was convicted in 2023 and sentenced to life without parole. Chad Daybell's trial, moved from Fremont County to Boise because of the publicity in eastern Idaho, lasted nine weeks in the spring of 2024. On May 30, 2024, the jury found him guilty on every count, including three counts of first-degree murder. Two days later the same jury decided that he should die, and he became the ninth person on Idaho's death row. He has denied any part in the killings, and his appeal to the Idaho Supreme Court is pending.
Chad Guy Daybell was born in Utah and spent his childhood in Springville, a town in Utah County south of Provo. He attended Brigham Young University in Provo, where he studied journalism and where he met Tammy Douglas, who had also grown up in Utah County. They married on March 9, 1990, in Manti, Utah, while he was still a student. They had five children and raised them in Springville.
After college he worked as a copy editor at the Standard-Examiner, the daily newspaper in Ogden, Utah. He later became managing editor at Cedar Fort, a Utah publisher, and edited the autobiography of the former NFL quarterback Scott Mitchell. Mitchell, who knew him in those years, later described him as a quiet presence. "He was invisible," he said in 2024. He also found the couple's dynamic odd: "she never said a single word," he recalled of Tammy.
Daybell eventually founded his own company, Spring Creek Book Company, and published his own work and that of other authors through it. He wrote fiction and nonfiction, much of it aimed at members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including novels and books for children and teenagers. Among his titles were A Prophet in Palmyra, An Errand for Emma, Chasing Paradise, The Keys of the Kingdom and Through the Eyes of John.
Over time his publishing narrowed to a particular niche. Christopher Blythe, a folklore professor at Brigham Young University, described him as a publisher who concentrated on near-death experiences and visions of the last days. Daybell said that he had himself had near-death experiences, once at 17 and again in his early twenties, and he later said that the end-times novels he wrote were based on events he had seen in his own visions. A former colleague said he had known nothing of those claims at the time. His doomsday beliefs took shape in the middle and late 2010s; from 2014 his company also published the books of another writer of end-times visions. He appeared on podcasts devoted to those themes, and in late 2018 he and Lori Vallow recorded an episode together for one of them.
In 2015 he and Tammy took their family to Salem, a small community in Fremont County, Idaho, near Rexburg, and relocated the publishing company there. He said that revelations had told him to move to Idaho to prepare for the end times.
Tammy Daybell grew up in Utah County with her siblings and was the mother of five children. Her family remembered her for her laugh and for her devotion to them. "Tammy's true focus throughout her life was her family," they wrote after her death. She loved animals, above all Indian runner ducks, and kept pigeons, chickens, cats and rabbits. She gardened, cooked and played games with her family. Children's reading mattered deeply to her, and after her death her parents and siblings set up the Tammy Douglas Daybell Foundation on October 19, 2020, the first anniversary of her death, to promote literacy in Utah and Idaho. Its stated mission was to give children the chance to love the written word. The family put ducks on her headstone and in the foundation's logo.
Two weeks before she died, she visited her parents and siblings in Springville and showed no sign of illness. She was 49.
Chad Daybell met Lori Vallow in late October 2018 at a conference for people preparing for the end times in St. George, Utah. Both were married to other people. The meeting began an affair that lasted for months. Vallow later told a friend that the two of them believed they had been married to each other in an earlier period of existence.
The indictment gives October 26, 2018, as the date on which the conspiracy began. From that day, it alleges, Daybell, Vallow and Vallow's brother, Alex Cox, used religious beliefs to justify killings, expressing fringe beliefs about people becoming "zombies" and about preparing for the end of the world.
The beliefs at the center of the case were laid out at trial by people who had been inside the small group around the couple. A former close friend of Lori Vallow testified that Daybell and Vallow said they had been married in a previous life and that they would lead 144,000 people in the last days described in the Book of Revelation. She said they believed that people could be taken over by dark, evil energy, and that the couple performed what they called "castings," meant to drive out the evil spirits that Daybell said were inside Charles Vallow, Lori's husband, and Tammy Daybell. She told the jury that she understood a casting could end in a death, though she had not expected violence.
Another friend of Lori Vallow, who married Alex Cox two weeks before his death, described the same system in more detail. Daybell, she testified, rated people as "light" or "dark" according to how far evil had taken them over. Spirits were said to begin at a rating of 1 and to arrive on earth at a 2; her own rating of 4.2, she was told, meant she had lived on earth before. She said Daybell taught that he and Lori were already "exalted" and had no need to repent, and that he claimed he could read anyone's past, present and future in a "book of life." People could be possessed shortly before death, she said, with their original spirit sent into limbo. Over time Tammy Daybell was rated dark, as were many of Lori's relatives, while Chad's own family was rated light.
A Madison County sheriff's investigator testified about a message sent from Tammy Daybell's account, which Chad often used, that labeled a child from a church class the Daybells taught as "4.2 dark." Texts between the couple cited in the indictment discussed "death percentages" for Tammy and for the children and described Tammy as being in limbo and possessed by a spirit named "Viola." The couple also used names from what they said were past lives, among them "James and Elaina."
Prosecutors described Daybell as the leader of a group they called the Church of the Firstborn, a "self-proclaimed visionary" who labeled Charles Vallow, the two children and Tammy Daybell as dark and taught that "the body has to die." The religion, the lead prosecutor Rob Wood told the jury, was a "convenient narrative" that gave the couple "the pretext to remove people from this world for their own good." The real motives, he said, were sex, money and power.
The months that followed brought a succession of deaths. Charles Vallow died in Chandler, Arizona, on July 11, 2019. Police said Alex Cox was responsible; Cox claimed self-defense and was never charged. The Arizona charges over his death were brought against Lori Vallow Daybell. The same month, Daybell sent Lori Vallow a love story by text message, and on July 30, 2019, the indictment alleges, the couple's texts turned to "death percentages."
That summer the couple quarreled for the first time in earnest, over a family vacation. An FBI agent read their texts of August 8, 2019, to the jury: Daybell told Vallow that being cut off from her was "absolutely excruciating," then wrote that her dead grandfather had warned him she was "unprotected." "The angels are angry that you are ignoring me," he wrote, and told her that a thumbs-up from her would restore her protection. She replied within about ten minutes that she loved him, and he told her the protection was back.
In September 2019 Lori Vallow and her children moved from Chandler to Rexburg, Idaho. On September 8, 2019, Chad Daybell signed an application to raise the life insurance on Tammy to the maximum the policy allowed, about $430,000.
Tylee Ryan was 16. Joshua Jaxon Vallow, known as JJ, was 7. They were Lori Vallow's two youngest children. Both died in September 2019 in Rexburg, Idaho. The indictment and the verdicts that followed charged and convicted their mother and Chad Daybell of their murders, with other charges.
Tammy Daybell died in Salem on October 19, 2019. Daybell told investigators that she had died in her sleep. Her death was first treated as natural. A friend of the couple testified that he grew uneasy at how quickly Daybell wanted the funeral held and at his extreme religious views, and that he asked one of Tammy's relatives whether it might be murder. Her death was later reclassified as a homicide. Prosecutors argued that Daybell had invented details of an illness to shape the first ruling on her death, and that his life insurance claim gave an account of her health that conflicted with his own.
The day after he reported her death, Daybell messaged Vallow that he was sad, but not "for the reason everyone thinks." The Fremont County prosecutor, Lindsey Blake, later summed up the state's reading of the couple's exchanges for the jury: "What needs to change?" she asked, and answered, "Tammy's in the way." Daybell received money from two life insurance policies on Tammy, on both of which he was the beneficiary.
On November 5, 2019, seventeen days after Tammy's death, Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow married in Hawaii.
On November 26, 2019, at the request of police in Gilbert, Arizona, the Rexburg Police Department became involved in the case. Investigators said the couple lied to them about the children. In December 2019 the FBI joined the inquiry. Alex Cox died in Arizona that December of natural causes.
Lori Vallow Daybell was arrested in Hawaii in early 2020 and returned to Idaho, where she first appeared in court in Rexburg on March 6, 2020, on felony charges concerning the children. Chad Daybell was arrested on June 9, 2020, and booked into the Fremont County Jail on initial felony charges. Video shown at trial recorded him telling one of his daughters, "I'm not coming back," and giving her instructions on paying his bills and where his money was kept. On August 4, 2020, a Fremont County judge ruled that there was enough evidence to send those first charges to trial. In August 2020 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints excommunicated him.
Seven law enforcement agencies in three states took part in the investigation. At trial FBI witnesses traced the couple's movements in 2019, and an FBI forensic accountant walked the jury through their finances, including the increased insurance on Tammy and a series of cash transfers.
On May 25, 2021, prosecutors from Fremont and Madison counties announced that a Fremont County grand jury had indicted Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow Daybell. It was the first time either had been charged directly with the killings. Blake told reporters that prosecutors had only recently been able to go before a grand jury because of COVID-19 safety rules in the courts.
The nine-count indictment charged both of them with the first-degree murder of each child, with other charges; with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder of Tammy Daybell; and, against Chad alone, with first-degree murder of Tammy Daybell and two counts of insurance fraud over the two policies on her life. Lori Vallow Daybell alone faced a further count of grand theft over Social Security survivor benefits. Chad Daybell pleaded not guilty to every count.
On August 5, 2021, the special prosecutor Rob Wood and Lindsey Blake filed notice that they would seek the death penalty against Chad Daybell. They alleged four statutory aggravating circumstances: that the murders were committed for remuneration; that they were especially cruel and manifested exceptional depravity; that he had shown an utter disregard for human life; and that he had a propensity to commit murder that would probably make him a continuing threat to society. "The nature and magnitude of these crimes warrant the possibility of the highest possible punishment," the prosecutors said. The decision, they added, applied only to him. Lori Vallow Daybell's case was then on hold after a mental health expert found her unable to assist in her defense, and she had been committed for treatment.
Daybell's lawyer, John Prior, argued from the start that his client could not get a fair trial in eastern Idaho. On October 8, 2021, Judge Steven Boyce ruled that the trial should be moved and suggested Ada County, Idaho's most populous county. On October 20, 2021, Chief Justice G. Richard Bevan of the Idaho Supreme Court signed an order transferring the case "for purposes of trial only" from Fremont County, in the Seventh Judicial District, to Ada County, in the Fourth. Boyce kept the case.
The couple were meant to be tried together in April 2023. On March 2, 2023, Boyce severed the cases. Both defense teams said they had too little time to examine new evidence disclosed late by the state, and Lori Vallow Daybell had not waived her right to a speedy trial. "Severance is the only option I see," the judge said. Her trial went ahead in April; his was postponed.
After her trial, prosecutors asked Boyce to bring Chad Daybell's trial back to eastern Idaho. On December 8, 2023, he refused in an eight-page order. Nearly every eligible citizen of Fremont County capable of jury service had followed the case, he wrote, and a large jury pool was needed to protect Daybell's right to due process in a case where death was possible. A trial in Boise was expensive, he acknowledged, but cheaper than failing to seat a jury in Fremont County and having to move it anyway.
Lori Vallow Daybell's trial opened on April 10, 2023. On May 12, 2023, the jury found her guilty on all counts: first-degree murder of both children, conspiracy to commit murder in their deaths and in Tammy Daybell's, and grand theft. On July 31, 2023, Boyce sentenced her to life in prison without parole on the murder and conspiracy counts, three of the terms to run consecutively, and to ten years for grand theft. He told her she had chosen "the most evil and destructive path possible." She told the court that "no one was murdered in this case." Unlike her husband, she did not face the death penalty. The two were not allowed to meet or coordinate their defenses. Chad Daybell waived his right to a speedy trial, and his trial was set for April 1, 2024.
His five adult children, meanwhile, stood by him. In their first television interview, in August 2021, each said he had played no part in the deaths. "He was framed," one of his daughters said. "My father needs someone to be a voice for him."
Jury selection began at the Ada County Courthouse on April 1, 2024. Prospective jurors filled out questionnaires before questioning, and Wood asked them how much they had absorbed of the coverage of Lori Vallow Daybell's trial. On April 8 a panel of twelve jurors and six alternates was seated. The jurors were sequestered.
Opening statements were given on April 10. Wood described Daybell as a grandiose man hungry for power, who "made sure that no person and no law would stand in his way" once he saw the chance at what he considered his rightful destiny. Spouses and children, he said, had become obstacles. Prior answered that Daybell was a religious author whose life had been upended by Lori Vallow, and he pointed the jury to her brother, Alex Cox, whom he called "Lori's protector."
Lori Vallow's eldest son testified that after the autumn of 2019 his mother rarely spoke to him, and that she had seemed "calm, unrattled" while he panicked. The two women from the group around the couple described the ratings and castings. Detectives and FBI specialists described the investigation, the couple's movements and their money. On May 16, 2024, the 25th day of the trial, the state rested. Prior moved for acquittal on all counts, and Boyce denied the motion.
The defense called eleven witnesses. Daybell was not among them; when the judge asked whether the decision not to testify was his own, he replied, "That is correct." Two of his adult children testified for the defense about the night their mother died, and prosecutors called rebuttal witnesses who contradicted his son's account of it. A defense expert told the jury there was no scientific evidence that Tammy Daybell's death was a homicide.
Closing arguments took up May 29, 2024. "Money, power and sex," Blake told the jury. "That's what the defendant cared about." The couple, she said, had set out to remove their "earthly obstacles," her children and his wife, and once those were gone they "had money, power, sex, and no obstacles." Each death, she argued, had been followed by a new source of money, whether Social Security payments or life insurance. She read from Daybell's own writings about "telestial relatives" who were "simply obstacles." She played a recording in which Daybell called Alex Cox a "defender" who had "earned the privilege" of a place in the church, and she quoted a blessing in which he told Cox, "You've already assisted us in ways that can never be repaid. And you will continue to do so." Under the instructions, she reminded the jurors, Daybell did not have to have caused the deaths with his own hands; it was enough that he had "advised, assisted, encouraged, commanded or coerced" them.
Prior told the jury that his client was not the planner but "the next victim" of Lori Vallow Daybell's desire for money, deceived by her. Cox, he argued, had his own motive. He described Daybell as a "pot stirrer" who liked uncomfortable religious ideas, said the beliefs at issue were not foreign to many Latter-day Saints, and accused investigators of confirmation bias: they had "picked a target," he said, and shown the jury only a handful of messages out of thousands. "He strayed. He had an affair," Prior said. "The affair doesn't mean he killed anybody." The case went to the jury that afternoon.
The jury returned on May 30, 2024. Daybell was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Tylee Ryan and of JJ Vallow, with other charges; of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and of first-degree murder as to Tammy Daybell; and of both counts of insurance fraud. The jurors had deliberated about seven hours over two days. Many in the courtroom wept as the verdicts were read. Daybell showed almost no emotion. Outside, people listening to the live stream cheered each "guilty." Tammy Daybell's father embraced JJ's grandparents as they cried outside the courtroom.
A juror later recalled how the decision on guilt had been reached: "We went around the room on each count," he said, and every juror agreed. Asked whether anyone had ever voted not guilty, he said, "On the guilt part? Nothing. We were convinced." Another juror said she had not been sure of Daybell's guilt for much of the trial and had wanted to hear the defense first; the case came together for her only after about three weeks.
The penalty phase began within an hour of the verdict. On May 31 the families spoke. Tammy Daybell's father told the court that the case had left him angry. Her brother called her the "heart and glue" of her siblings and said some of Chad and Tammy's children had cut ties with her family to defend their father. JJ's grandmother said there was "a hole in my heart" that would never be filled. Lori Vallow's eldest son, who had lost his whole family, said that losing his siblings was "like a nuclear bomb dropping." "It's not an overstatement to say that I lost everything," he said. A statement from Tammy's family said, "We will miss Tammy every single day of our lives."
Prior asked the jurors to judge Daybell by the life he had led before he met Lori Vallow, whom he called a "bomb" that had brought chaos into it. The crazy thoughts and the religious extremism, he said, had begun only after they met. Daybell presented no mitigating evidence and declined to make a statement.
The same twelve jurors deliberated for about six hours on Friday, May 31, and two more on Saturday, June 1. They were unanimous. They found that the state had proved the aggravating circumstances it alleged, among them that the murders were especially cruel and manifested exceptional depravity, and that the mitigating circumstances were not sufficiently compelling to make a death sentence unjust. After a short recess Boyce imposed the sentences. "The jury has made a finding that it would be appropriate to impose the death penalty," he said. He sentenced Daybell to death on each of the six capital counts and to 15 years on each count of insurance fraud, the terms to run at the same time. He imposed no fines, finding Daybell indigent. Prosecutors asked for $130,000 in restitution together with $300,000 in life insurance proceeds. The judge noted that Daybell had no criminal history before the case and had always conducted himself professionally in court.
"We saw justice," JJ's grandfather said afterward. "Equal, honest and righteous." Lori Vallow's eldest son said it was good that Daybell "can't hurt anybody else, and that's what matters." A cousin of Tammy's said the families could now "start to heal from the terrible losses we have suffered." Tammy's aunt said the families had formed a bond they would keep. Idaho's attorney general, Raúl Labrador, whose office had assisted the county prosecutors, said he hoped the outcome would bring "a measure of peace" to the families. "Capital cases always come with appeals," he wrote two days later.
On June 3, 2024, Daybell entered the custody of the Idaho Department of Correction. On the Monday after the sentence, Prior filed a notice of appeal asking the Idaho Supreme Court to review the trial, the verdict and the sentence. He listed six issues: whether Boyce erred in refusing to dismiss the grand jury indictment; in excluding the report and testimony of a defense expert; in letting the state amend the indictment after it rested; in denying the defense motion to dismiss at the close of the state's case; and in giving the jury the current reasonable-doubt instruction at both the guilt and the penalty phases. He reserved the right to add issues once appellate lawyers were appointed, asked that the state appellate public defender be appointed at once, and asked that transcript fees be waived because Daybell was incarcerated and indigent.
In September 2025 a series of letters attributed to Daybell began to appear online, on a website and a social media account run by one of his daughters, who confirmed that they were his. Writing from death row, he said: "I am not a conspirator or a killer. I never have been." He wrote that he had loved Tammy and had never considered harming her, said that he had followed his lawyer's advice to show no emotion in court, and said he was grateful that "a more complete story" would be told during his appeals. The letters did not mention Lori Vallow Daybell.
His case surfaced again in his wife's appeal. In a brief filed in January 2026, state prosecutors argued that her first lawyer had been properly disqualified because Chad Daybell had arranged and paid for that lawyer to represent her, though the two were named co-conspirators. Daybell's own appeal, the filing noted, was pending separately. When the Idaho Supreme Court heard Lori Vallow Daybell's appeal on November 2, 2026, an assistant attorney general told the justices that Daybell's first call after officers served a warrant on him had been to the same lawyer.
Under Idaho law a person convicted of first-degree murder may be sentenced to death or to life in prison, and death may be sought only if the prosecutor files a written notice of intent to seek it. If the state proves a statutory aggravating circumstance beyond a reasonable doubt but the jury decides death would be unjust, the court must impose a fixed life sentence. If no aggravating circumstance is proved, or if the state does not seek death, the sentence is life with a minimum term of at least ten years.
The decision on death belongs to the jury. Under section 19-2515 of the Idaho Code, the jury must unanimously find at least one statutory aggravating circumstance and must unanimously decide that death should be imposed. Once an aggravating circumstance is found, the defendant is sentenced to death unless the mitigating circumstances are sufficiently compelling that death would be unjust, and the mitigation is weighed against each aggravating circumstance separately. The statute lists eleven such circumstances. Those alleged against Daybell are among them: murder committed for remuneration or the promise of it; murder that is especially cruel and manifests exceptional depravity; murder by which the defendant exhibited utter disregard for human life; and conduct showing a propensity to commit murder that will probably constitute a continuing threat to society.
Every death sentence in Idaho is reviewed by the Idaho Supreme Court, whether or not the defendant appeals. Under section 19-2827, the court considers the review together with any direct appeal and must decide whether the sentence was imposed under the influence of passion, prejudice or any other arbitrary factor and whether the evidence supports the finding of an aggravating circumstance. It may affirm the sentence or set it aside and send the case back for a new sentencing. A felony appeal must be filed within 42 days of sentencing, and such appeals can take several years.
When Daybell was sentenced in June 2024, eight people were on Idaho's death row. He was the ninth.
Daybell has never admitted any part in the deaths. At trial his lawyer argued that Alex Cox was responsible and that Daybell was framed; the jury rejected that defense. Cox died in December 2019 without ever being charged, and his role remains an allegation made by both sides for different purposes: the prosecution called him an agent of the couple, the defense the true culprit.
The Idaho indictment against Chad Daybell covered only the three Idaho deaths. Over the death of Charles Vallow in Arizona in July 2019, Lori Vallow Daybell was extradited to Arizona to face charges over it and over a second case, and in 2025 she received two further life sentences there, to run consecutively.
Daybell's denials continue from prison. In his published letters he has disputed the prosecution's account of Tammy's health in the months before her death, a claim several trial witnesses contradicted. The indictment dates Tammy Daybell's death to October 18, 2019; her family marks it on October 19.
March 9, 1990: Chad Daybell marries Tammy Douglas in Manti, Utah.
2015: The Daybells move from Springville, Utah, to Salem, Fremont County, Idaho.
Late October 2018: Daybell meets Lori Vallow at a conference in St. George, Utah.
October 26, 2018: The date the indictment gives for the start of the conspiracy.
July 11, 2019: Charles Vallow dies in Chandler, Arizona.
August 8, 2019: The couple's first serious quarrel, recorded in texts later read to the jury.
September 2019: Lori Vallow moves to Rexburg; Tylee Ryan, 16, and JJ Vallow, 7, die in Rexburg.
September 8, 2019: Daybell applies to raise Tammy's life insurance to the policy maximum.
October 19, 2019: Tammy Daybell dies in Salem, aged 49.
November 5, 2019: Daybell and Vallow marry in Hawaii.
November 26, 2019: Rexburg police become involved at the request of police in Gilbert, Arizona.
December 2019: Alex Cox dies in Arizona of natural causes.
March 6, 2020: Lori Vallow Daybell's first court appearance in Rexburg.
June 9, 2020: Chad Daybell is arrested in Fremont County.
August 2020: He is excommunicated by his church.
October 19, 2020: Tammy's family launches the Tammy Douglas Daybell Foundation.
May 25, 2021: A Fremont County grand jury indicts Daybell and Vallow Daybell on murder and related charges.
August 5, 2021: Prosecutors file notice of intent to seek the death penalty against him.
October 20, 2021: The Idaho Supreme Court approves moving the trial to Ada County.
March 2, 2023: The two cases are severed.
May 12, 2023: Lori Vallow Daybell is convicted; she is sentenced to life without parole on July 31, 2023.
December 8, 2023: Boyce refuses to move Daybell's trial back to eastern Idaho.
April 1, 2024: Jury selection begins in Boise; opening statements on April 10.
May 16, 2024: The state rests.
May 29, 2024: Closing arguments.
May 30, 2024: Guilty on all counts.
June 1, 2024: The jury returns death; Boyce imposes the sentences.
June 3, 2024: Daybell enters state prison custody; notice of appeal filed the same week.
September 2025: Letters attributed to him, denying the killings, are published online.
January 2026: His appeal is pending separately from his wife's before the Idaho Supreme Court.
November 2, 2026: The Idaho Supreme Court hears Lori Vallow Daybell's appeal.