BOISE, Idaho — The trial for doomsday author Chad Daybell starts Monday in Ada County. He is charged with the deaths of his first wife, Tammy Daybell, and two of Lori Vallow Daybell's children, JJ Vallow and Tylee Ryan.
He also faces multiple conspiracy and insurance fraud charges. Lori was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in Idaho. She faces two more conspiracy to commit murder charges in Maricopa County, Ariz.
One charge is from a Chandler case connected to the death of her fourth husband, Charles Vallow.
"You take someone who is capable of committing murder and then combine that with a person who is willing to use strange beliefs to try to manipulate that person ... you put that combo together, and it definitely turned out deadly," Historian Barabara Jones Brown said.
Chad and Lori were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although, Jones Brown said their beliefs strayed from common teachings so much that the church does not "recognize the things that they believed in or things that they were doing."
During her trial, witnesses said the couple called certain people "zombies" — dark spirits they needed to get rid of. That includes Tammy, JJ and Tylee.
"That's what Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow came to believe about her children," said Matthew Bowman, Claremont Graduate University history and religion associate professor. "That they were possessed, they had been overcome by dark spirits and dark powers. And ultimately, they came to believe that killing them was actually a good thing because it would free their souls from that possession."
During Lori's trial, it was revealed that Tammy died by asphyxiation in 2019. JJ also died by asphyxiation; Tylee's cause of death was "homicide by unspecified means."
The children were last seen alive in September 2019, and authorities found their bodies in June 2020 on Chad's property in Rexburg.
Court documents show Chad and Lori met at a conference in 2018, where he spoke and signed books that he self-published under his company, Spring Creek Book Company. They married in Hawaii just weeks after Tammy's death.
Some of Chad's books, like "Living on the Edge of Heaven," detail the near-death experiences he claims to have had, one at age 17 when while cliff jumping. The other was supposedly in his early 20s after getting hit by a "monstrous wave" in California.
Jones Brown said Chad had a small following in a fringe subgroup of the church.
"It appears that he was using his teachings, the things he was saying to start [to] manipulate people, including manipulate Lori Vallow," she said.
Chad "sits at the intersection of a couple of different religious movements," Bowman said. In addition to his Latter-day Saints background, Chad drew inspiration from the charismatic movement.
"We mean groups that have visions, speak in tongues, practice faith healing, that sort of thing," Bowman said. "Daybell adopted from some of these groups a worldview that is sometimes called spiritual warfare. And this is the idea that the earth is really saturated by battles between angels and demons, light spirits and dark spirits."
Bowman said there is a growing number of people within the church concerned about the end times. He cites the pandemic and worsening political polarization. However, Chad and Lori are on a different level.
"I think you have simultaneously this very dualistic apocalyptic worldview and then also the sense that the spiritual battle was right in front of them, and there was something they could do about it," Bowman said.
Jury selection for Chad's trial starts Monday. Ada County's administrative judge told KTVB more than 2,000 jurors were brought in this week for questionnaires.
Ultimately, they need to get to 12 jurors and six alternates. The trial is expected to last 8 to 10 weeks, longer than Lori's since the death penalty is on the table.
In a recent interview with KTVB, Lori's brother said he does not care whether Chad gets a life or a death sentence "because he's going to be in jail for a really long time."
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