Lori Vallow Daybell

0:00Hey Killer Psychie fans, have you heard? Honorable subscribers can listen to new episodes of Killer Psychie early and ad-free right now. Join Honorable in the Honorable app, or by subscribing on Apple Podcast. A listener note, this episode contains adult content and is not suitable for everyone. Please be advised. In the early 17th century, the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens created one of the most disturbing scenes in art history, the massacre of the innocents. The canvas is chaos made visible, with soldiers' wrenching children from their mother's arms, parents screaming in helpless terror, and violence erupting where love and protections should have existed. Rubens was depicting a story

1:03from the gospel of Matthew, in which King Herod consumed by fear, power, and prophecy, ordered the death of innocent children to preserve his own destiny. It is a story about something deeply unsettling. The moment of belief becomes untethered from morality. When a person convinces themselves, they serve a higher purpose. Ordinary rules no longer apply. Family bonds are broken. Compassion disappears, and the unthinkable can be recast as necessity. In modern times, we tell ourselves such stories belong to scripture or myths, or paintings hanging silently in museums. But in 2019, in quiet communities in Idaho and Arizona, another such story began to emerge. It involved a mother, a religious worldview, apocalyptic prophecies, and a

2:04circle of believers who spoke of light and darkness, spirits and possession, and of chosen people and divine missions. At the center of it all was Laurie Valow-Daybell. To many who knew her, Laurie seemed like a devoted mother. She was charismatic and deeply involved in her faith. But over time, her ordinary beliefs gave way to extraordinary convictions, and the line between spiritual certainty and dangerous delusion blurred. And those close to her, her husband Charles, her children, Tile and JJ, and others who stood in the way of a prophetic future, became casualties of a worldview that divided humanity into the saved and the condemned. Her story is one of faith twisted into certainty, certainty transformed into justification, and the devastating consequences that can follow when someone truly believes that earthly laws no longer apply.

3:11From Audible Originals and Tree Fort Media, I'm Candice DeLong, and this is Killer Psychie. For five decades, I studied People's Minds. Through my work as an FBI profiler and psychiatric nurse, I've interviewed countless murderers, including many serial killers. Why did they do it? To get a satisfying answer, we have to dive deep into their minds so that I can give you my best analysis of what made them do what they did. This episode is Laurie Valodaybil, The Doomsday Mom.

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5:20cuts through the tough grease. A detergent that tackles the worst stains and odors. 7th generation handles it all without any dyes or artificial fragrances. Real clean doesn't have to come with a long list of addons. Upgrade to a powerful clean without anything extra. Look for 7th generation dish soap and laundry detergent wherever you shop for your cleaning products. In the late summer of 2019, Lori Valla was living in Chandler Arizona with her two youngest kids, seven-year-old J.J., who was adopted years earlier and was on the autism spectrum, and 16-year-old Tiley Ryan, a bright, outdoorsy teenager who, by most accounts, doated on her little brother. In September of 2019, the family took a trip to Yellowstone. It was the last time anyone outside Lori's inner circle could say for certain that they saw Tiley alive. J.J. disappeared from view around the same time, and for weeks, almost nobody noticed.

6:27Lori was not reporting them missing, and she was not asking anyone for help finding them. When relatives asked where the kids were, they got a rotating cast of explanations. They were with family friends. They were doing school work out of state. They were fine. Stop asking. It was none until late November when Lori's own family grew suspicious enough to call Rexberg Idaho police for a welfare check that the case started to take shape publicly. Even then, Lori and her new husband, a man named Chad Daybell, gave investigators answers that did not add up. And there were reasons to be suspicious. Strange things had been happening around this family. In July of 2019, two months before the kids vanished, J.J.'s adoptive father, Lori's fourth husband, Charles Valo, was at the Chandler House to pick J.J. up for school. He and Lori were separated. He had filed for divorce that February. And in the paperwork, he said something that, at the time,

7:33probably sounded too strange to take seriously. Quote, she has stated that she is now a translated being who cannot taste death and has been given great power and authority from Jesus Christ himself. Charles told the court he feared for his life that Lori had talked about being a God assigned to lead 144,000 people into the second coming and had warned him not to get in her way. On July 11, 2019, Charles arrived at the house. Within minutes, he was dead, shot by Lori's brother, Alex Cox, who claimed self-defense. No charges were filed. It was written off officially as a family dispute gone tragically wrong. But it was the first domino. Charles Valo was not the only target that in October of 2019, Brandon Boudreau, the ex-husband of Lori's niece, Mulani, survived a drive-by

8:39shooting outside his own home in Chandler. Prosecutors would later allege that Alex Cox, the same man who had shot Charles Valo just months earlier, was behind the wheel, carrying out what they said was part of the same campaign. To clear away any one standing between Lori and the life she believed she had been promised. Boudreau was not hit. He survived. By the fall of 2019, the pattern was becoming unmistakable, one by one, the people who stood in the way were being removed. And with Charles gone, Lori's focus shifted fully to the man at the center of her new life, Chad Daybell. Daybell was a little-known self-published author in Idaho who wrote apocalyptic novels steeped in Latter-day St. Prophecy. He was married, and his wife Tammy was well-liked in their small community where she was the schoolteacher and was active in their church. On October 19,

9:442019, three months after Charles Valo was shot dead in Arizona, Tammy Daybell was found dead in her own bed, initially believed to be from natural causes. Then on November 5, 16 days after burying his wife, Chad Daybell married Lori Valo in Hawaii. For the friends and family watching from the outside, this was the moment things stopped looking like grief and coincidence and started looking like something else entirely. By December of 2019, Idaho police were actively trying to locate JJ and Tile and relatives were demanding answers. Lori and Chad's response was to leave the state entirely, settling into a rental on the island of Kauai and acting from the outside like nothing was wrong. That same month Alex Cox, Lori's brother, the man who shot Charles Valo,

10:45died suddenly. He was 51. The official explanation was a blood clot. No autopsy raised red flags at the time, but given everything else happening around this family, it was hard not to notice the pattern forming. The search for the missing children became a national story and reporters eventually tracked the couple down in Hawaii. In one of the cases, most infamous moments, a local news crew cornered Lori and Chad at a beach side restaurant, Cameras rolling, asking point blank where the kids were. Lori did not break. She barely reacted, an early, widely seen glimpse of the calm that would come to define her public image and unsettle people for the rest of the case. On February 20, 2020, Idaho authorities working with Hawaii police arrested Lori, not for murder, not yet, but on felony child desertion and non-support. Because nobody had found JJ or Tile, alive or dead, and Lori

11:54simply would not say where they were. Held on $5 million bail, she was extradited back to Idaho weeks later. Chad, notably, was not arrested. Still a step removed from direct suspicion, even though it was his property, everyone was about to start looking at very closely. And then on June 9, 2020, investigators acting on a search warrant for Chad Daybell's property in Rexburg began digging near a fire pit and a small pet cemetery in the backyard. What they found is almost too horrific to say plainly. JJ Vallow had been suffocated, his body wrapped and buried in plastic. Tile Ryan's remains had been dismembered and burned. Within days, both Lori and Chad were arrested and charged with murder. For a year, the public had been handed pieces of a puzzle that did not fit a dead

12:55husband, a dead wife, a sudden marriage, and most alarmingly, a mother who would not say where her children were. Now, the shape of that puzzle was impossible to ignore. What almost no one outside Lori's closest circle knew was that all of it was allegedly bound together by a belief system so extreme it is hard to categorize. A private theology of light and dark spirits, of zombies and chosen ones, of a woman who had told the people around her she had been personally selected by God. Lori Vallow was not born a killer. She was raised in a devout family, moved through a string of marriages and slipped almost invisibly to those who loved her into a belief system that would leave four people dead and forced the world to ask how faith became a motive for murder. James Arthur Ray James Arthur Ray was a charismatic self-help guru who promises followers of path

14:10to wealth and enlightenment by becoming the best versions of themselves, but not all who followed him finished their journey. After Ray appeared on Oprah, thousands flocked to his events, but what many people didn't know about were his more extreme methods. Methods that push his followers to their limits, giving some the transformative experience they envisioned and killing others. For the best binge-bel series like the one I just told you about, listen to the audible true crime podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can get all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. If you want to dive deeper into the world of killer psyche, there's a vault of exclusive episodes available only on Wondering Plus. By joining Wondering Plus, you will be able to uncover the twisted mind behind cinema's most chilling character in the episode Ed Geen, Hollywood's favorite killer.

15:12Unraveled the complex psychology of a terrorist who eluded the FBI for nearly two decades in the Unibomor Evil Genius episode and so much more. With Wondering Plus, you get access to exclusive episodes as well as early and ad-free access to the latest episodes of killer psyche days before everyone else. Wondering Plus also gives you early access to some of the biggest true crime podcasts out there like Dr. Death, Morbid, and Redhanded. Join Wondering Plus by clicking the link in the episode description or head over to Wondering.com slash plus. Laurie Vallo was not born into chaos. She was born Laurie Noreen Cox on June 26, 1973 in San Bernardino,

16:13California. She was the second youngest of five children born to Barry and Janice Cox. By Janice's own description, quote, it was just a big family, she would later say, and we did have a lot of fun. But the household also had an edge to it. Laurie's father Barry was known for a personal philosophy he called the Lower 95. The idea that 95% of the population was in his words, stupid, sheep-like, and unattractive, while he and his family belonged to the upper 5%. He spent decades in a personal battle with the IRS and eventually wrote an anti-government book about it. This strikes me as a potential yikes situation. A father who taught his children they belonged to a superior 5%, set apart from an inferior mass of humanity. This is a striking

17:14piece of early modeling for a daughter who would later describe herself as spiritually chosen above everyone around her. Add to it, the anti-government modeling, his, I don't pay taxes attitude, it seems very significant. Their rules do not apply to us. All of this begs the question, how does grandiosity and a sense of chosenness get transmitted consciously or not within a family system long before any formal belief system gives it a name? Well, parental overvaluation may be linked to narcissism. In an article titled Narcissistic Trades in Young People, Understanding the role of parenting and maltreatment, researchers found that over-parenting, lack of warmth, leniency, over-valuation, and childhood maltreatment have all been associated with higher levels of narcissism. The former interaction indicated that paternal over-valuation

18:18together with lower paternal care was associated with higher grandiose narcissism. Which raises the question, what did Lori's own upbringing look like? On paper at least it looked fairly all-American. Lori grew up mostly in Realto, California, where she attended Eisenhower High School from 1987 to 1991. She made the cheer squad, and she made friends easily. One childhood friend who met Lori at cheer tri-outs later described her as a Barbie doll, sweet, friendly, easy to like. That same friend would later tell a reporter something far more unsettling, that the girl she had known as a devout, wholesome cheerleader, had over the years, become someone she no longer recognized. She called the adult Lori a mystery, that she turned from a devout cheerleader to a mystery suggests the gap between Lori's public and private selves did not open suddenly in her 40s. It may have been widening

19:23quietly for decades. At 19 Lori married her high school sweetheart Nelson Yanes. Her mother would later say the family asked her to wait just a year, but Lori and Nelson went ahead anyway. Friends speculated that part of what doomed the marriage was that Yanes was not a member of the latter day's Saint Faith Lori had been raised in. It was over within a few years, and it would not be her last short marriage. Her 20s and 30s followed a pattern that in hindsight is hard to ignore. A second marriage to a man named William LaJoya lasted less than two years. In 2001 she married Joseph Ryan Tyley's father. That marriage ended in divorce in 2004. Ryan would later die of a reported heart attack in 2018 and was cremated. His death drew no suspicion at the time, but has since been reconsidered by people following the case. The marriage pattern itself is interesting. Short

20:28relationships repeated reinvention and what it might mean when almost every serious relationship in someone's adult life ends abruptly through divorce or later death. In an article published by the National Institute of Health, they found personality disorder symptoms are often related to divorce frequency. Quote multiple regression analysis showed paranoid and histrionic personality disorder symptoms to be consistently and positively associated with the number of divorces across all three sources of personality assessment. Regarding histrionic personality disorder, in an article in Cambridge University Press, researchers defined the disorder as having a quote, a pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking, beginning in early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts operationalized as eight diagnostic criteria.

21:33A minimum of five is required to be accurately diagnosed and the reason for that length of time as a criteria of the diagnosis is to weed out any transient personality issues that the individual may only exhibit once in a while or grow out of rather than become what I call a true chink in the DNA diced toss that becomes permanent for the diagnosis these factors need to be present. A strong need to be the center of attention inappropriate and sexually seductive behavior. Highly changeable and superficial expressions of emotion use of physical appearance to attract attention generalized and vague speech dramatic over the top expressions of emotion, suggestibility and the histrionic personality, use relationships as closer and warmer than they actually are. Additionally, in a study title personality characteristics of divorce prone individuals, the authors found that the cases

22:37fell into one of three broad and overlapping groups. The groups have been called the self-involved narcissist that compliant depressed and the casualties of life specifics. Lori certainly checks a lot of these boxes. Along the way, she built a public identity that was anything but quiet. She worked as a hairdresser, she competed in beauty pageants, including a run at Mrs. Texas while living in Texas with one of her husbands. She appeared as a contestant on Wheel of Fortune and walked away with roughly $17,000 in cash and prizes. Lori seems to have a profound need to be seen. Even her very public post-a-rest interview shows a grandiose over the top look at me, manor. This sure seems like narcissism to me. In psychology today, Dr. Eleanor Greenberg's article, Understanding Narcissism,

23:39discusses the three types of narcissistic personality disorder, and this type seems to hit it on the head. The exhibitionist overt quote, this group gets their narcissistic supplies by being the center of admiring attention. They feel important when other people view them as high in status and treat them as special. They like to give advice because it enhances their sense that they are perfect and know everything. They also feel stronger and smarter when they are able to devalue other people, such as her father did, especially those they see as disrespectful or lower than them in status. By the time she married Charles Valo in 2006, Lori had spent years perfecting a certain kind of public performance. Pageant Ready, Camera Comfortable, Active In Her Church, posting smiling family photos online. She was the kind of woman other parents trusted, the one who showed up as school

24:43events and looked from the outside like she had it all together. Friends from this period describe someone who seemed, if anything, unremarkable. This gap is pretty wild. The significant distance between the public, Lori, Pageant's game shows, an image conscious devoted mother, and whatever was building underneath. Concealed ideology escalation often looks exactly like this from the outside. No visible break, just a slow private drift that the people closest to someone can miss entirely, especially when the public performance is as polished as Lori's was. During this time, Lori's family moved often from Texas to Hawaii in 2014 where they ran a juice business and then to Arizona in 2016 where Charles went to work as a life insurance agent. A detail that would later take on a darker meaning. The biggest shift in Lori began as best anyone

25:47can reconstruct it. In the mid-2010s, she grew increasingly involved in online communities built around near-death experiences and prophecy, a corner of the internet where people swap versions of the end times and claims of direct revelation from God. It was in this world that she crossed paths with Chad Debel, a self-published Idaho author whose apocalyptic novels drew from the same material. Chad also published the work of Julie Row, a self-described near-death experience author whose visions of the end times circulated through the same community. Within that world, Lori and a small circle of friends began holding what they called castings. These were informal gatherings where they discussed spiritual visions and ranked the people in their lives as light

26:48or dark. To outsiders, it would have looked like a book club or a prayer group. To the women inside it, it was something closer to a court deciding who around them still counted as themselves. Lori's own family watched this happen in real time and later struggled to explain it. One of her sisters would later say publicly that Lori had seemed delusional for years before any of this made headlines. At the same time, her sister insisted she had never heard Lori talk about near-death experiences or spiritual visions before a certain point. A contradiction that itself says something about how hard this was for the people closest to her to pin down, let alone stop. Family members often sent something as wrong well before they can name it, and their accounts afterwards are frequently inconsistent with each other, not because they are lying,

27:48but because gradual radicalization does not announce itself with a single, clear moment. The fog created by the siblings' newfound odd beliefs, behaviors, and convictions all contribute to a family's inability to intervene in time. But in Lori's case, even if they had seen something earlier, I doubt any intervention would have made a difference. She was not disturbed enough to be hospitalized and medicated at that time, and if everyone who believed they were on God's list of special people destined for heaven needed to be hospitalized, well, there would not be enough hospital beds to house them. We don't generally hospitalize people for what they are thinking, but we may do so for what they actually do if it hurts themself or someone else. It wasn't until people around Lori were dying or going missing that law enforcement took notice, and by then it was too late. By the time Lori and Chad's relationship deepened, both were still

28:55married to other people, and both were describing themselves in increasingly grand terms as spiritually chosen. Lori told Charles to whom she was technically still married, that she was a translated being who could not taste death, assigned by God to lead the faithful into the millennium. Lori said she had lived past lives on other planets, and that she was eternally bound to an ancient prophet from the Book of Mormon. And it was not only God she believed had singled her out. Lori believed that she and Chad had known each other across lifetimes, long before either of them was born into this one. The two met at a religious conference in St. George, Utah in 2018, and Lori would later tell Dateline's Keith Morrison that she recognized Chad spiritually the moment they

29:57spoke. Chad told her they had been married before in multiple past lives, and even wrote them into one of his own stories as James and Alina, two souls destined to find each other again and again across time. Prosecutors would later read passages of that story aloud in court as evidence of just how deep and how early the fantasy ran. There's a lot to focus on here, not the least of which is dangerous grandiosity, messianic self-concept, and critically folia do, or shared psychotic disorder, where two people's beliefs escalate each other past what either might reach alone. David Webb, psychology educator and author writes, quote folia do is one of those psychiatric conditions that sounds almost too strange to be real. It describes a phenomenon where one person's delusional beliefs

30:59are transmitted to another, typically someone they live with, or are deeply emotionally connected to. The result is a shared psychosis, a private reality built by two people together sealed off from the outside world, which is resistant to challenge. Now if you're a dedicated fan, then you've heard me discuss this a few other times. It is a very rare psychiatric disorder. In my 10 years as the psychiatric nurse, I only saw it one time. Basically, it is where two people's delusions escalate each other past what they might reach by themselves. A critical factor for its development and nurturing is that the two people only have each other in their lives, and almost no other social contact is present. They are isolated, and there is no one around to notice that they are, well, crazy. And I mean, there's no sane person who might keep them grounded or get them professional

32:03help. But this is a true crime podcast that focuses on the why. I find myself asking, where does faith end and where does motive, aka money, insurance policies, and sexual attraction begin? The two were not necessarily separate. Chad and Laurie both had families, children, spouses. How inconvenient for them. No? And out of their belief system came a language all their own. The idea that without any evidence at all, people could be possessed by dark spirits and effectively become zombies. No longer their true selves, and in Laurie and Chad's framework, no longer entitled to live. Friends who spent time with the group described informal gatherings where people were categorized as worthy or not worthy. As those someone's entire moral standing could be decided in an afternoon, Laurie would later tell friends that her own son had become a zombie,

33:10that he was acting out and speaking in different voices. She said, Tyley, her daughter had turned dark. Yikes? This sounds a lot like the messages some cult leaders profess to their followers. There are some very distinctive signs that someone may be in a cult, and several of these seem very relevant to Laurie's behavior. Chad and Laurie operated within and then were radicalized beyond an existing fringe religious ecosystem. They both exhibited classic cult leader dynamics on a smaller, more intimate scale. Chad? Well, he functioned as the group's prophet. He claimed to have visions and said his gift to prophecy allowed him to foresee his first wife's death. Well, there's a shocker. He wrote 25 books about Doomsday and told people they could be reincarnated. Laurie eventually became like a co-head of this group. She did not start

34:15out that way, but it looks like she was drawn in, then escalated, the belief system further. In other words, these two lovebirds fed into each other's beliefs, and at the core was the belief that they and only they could determine if someone was dark and deserving of death. It is entirely possible, in fact, I'd say probable, that Laurie and Chad eventually saw JJ's autism diagnosis as proof he was on the dark side. They re-fream JJ's behavioral differences through their belief system. They thought it was evidence of possession, rather than understanding it as a disability. This is Chad and Laurie taking their I am perfect you are not and therefore you must die belief to the extreme. Are you serious Laurie? In your belief system killing your own children is okay? They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and if that's true, then a video is worth a million of them.

35:18If you want to see just how happy and carefree they were when they got married in Hawaii, only months after Laurie's children JJ and Tiley disappeared, and only two weeks after his wife died, you can find it on a date line episode and other true crime shows. It's all over the place. When a reporter started dogging them about where Laurie's kids were, she did not offer any explanation, but she did step up her pace to evade the man asking the questions. Want to know why? Because she knew she had violated the law, she knew she had done something wrong, and she did it because she did not want to be burdened by troublesome children. Was she delusional? Maybe. Some psychiatrists think so, but here's the thing about committing a crime when a person is truly delusional. If you don't actually believe what you did was wrong, then you have no trouble admitting it. For example, the Sacramento Vampire Killer in season one, he was a long-time

36:24delusional schizophrenic. When the police showed up at his door, he welcomed them inside and explained to them why he killed the people they were arresting him for. He needed their blood so that he could go on living. Inelectionally, he knew it was against the law, but his delusion told him that he would die without their blood. Here's another example of someone that was delusional killed a lot of people and what happened when the police tried to arrest him. James Holmes, after he shot up the theater in Aurora, Colorado, got in an elevator, went up to the top of the parking area where his car was. The police approached him. Did he run? No. Did he try to flee in any way? No. Did he drop his guns? Not until he was told. When he asked them what they wanted, they said, you're under arrest. But okay, he knew he had done it. He was very, very seriously ill and not on medication because he refused to go to therapy. That's what schizophrenia or psychotic

37:28symptoms can do. And Lori didn't have any of that. What Lori had was a desire to be alone with Chad Daybell, in of story. Well, not quite. By 2019, the woman who had once been the friendly face that school pickup was telling her own husband that she was a god assigned to carry out a divine mission and warning him not to get in her way. The distance between who Lori Valow had appeared to be and what she had allowed herself to become had by then collapsed entirely. When prosecutors later stood in front of a jury and tried to explain why, they did not reach for theology first. They reached for something simpler. Money, power, and sex. They said Lori removed obstacles to get what she wanted and that the belief system, however sincerely she may have held it, also happened to justify every single thing she wanted anyway. I could not agree more.

38:57Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to profess their undying love for one another. You can't bear it any longer. Well, maybe a chapter longer. Performance is so good, you'll give love a second chance. Audible. Stories that speak to you. The moment a body is found, the clock starts ticking. 48 hours. That's how long detectives have before the trail begins to go cold. From A&E and Crime House, this is the official podcast from the famous True Crime series The First 48. Step inside the critical window, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs that crack a case wide open. On Carter Roy, each week I revisit a landmark homicide investigation with a depth you know and immersive long form storytelling built for your ears. Real detectives, real cases, real stakes. This is The First 48. New episodes every Thursday. Listen to and follow the first 48

40:03on Apple podcasts. Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In June of 2020, Laurie Valow and Chad Daybell were both in custody, both charged with murder. After the bodies of Laurie's children, JJ and Tiley were pulled from the backyard of Chad Daybell's property. For a year, Laurie had told anyone who asked that her children were fine, that they were somewhere else, that there was nothing to worry about. Now she was sitting in an Idaho jail cell, facing charges that made clear just how much worse this was than a missing person's case. What came next was years of hearings, two states, and a legal reckoning that would eventually touch

41:04for deaths. Through the summer of 2020, prosecutors built out the case. Laurie and Chad were formally charged in Idaho with the murders of JJ and Tiley. Tammy Daybell's death originally logged as natural causes was reclassified as a homicide after her body was exhumed and conspiracy charges followed for both of them. Arizona opened its own case around the same time, charging Laurie with conspiracy in the 2019 shooting death of her fourth husband, Charles Valow, and in a separate failed plot to kill Brandon Boudreau, the ex-husband of Laurie's niece. What had looked a year earlier, like a strange but contained family tragedy in a Chandler suburb, was now a coordinated set of prosecutions stretching across two states tied together by the same alleged motive, clearing a path financially and spiritually for the life Laurie believed she and

42:06Chad were meant to lead. The case did not move quickly. Laurie's mental state became its own legal battle. Her defense raised competency questions and proceedings were paused for psychiatric evaluation. Months passed while both sides argued over whether she was even fit to stand trial. Eventually, she was found competent between competency proceedings, pretrial motions, and the sheer scope of evidence spread across two states and four separate deaths, the case dragged on from 2020 into 2023 before an Idaho jury was finally seated. The trial opened in Boise in April of 2023. Move from Rexburg because of how much local pretrial publicity the case had already generated. Over several weeks, jurors heard from Laurie's own family, from her son, Colby Ryan, from former friends who described the group's private theology of light and dark spirits,

43:08and from investigators who walked the jury through the discovery in the backyard. On May 12, 2023, the jury returned its verdict, guilty on every count. First degree murder of JJ Vallo. First degree murder of Ty Lee Ryan. Conspiracy to commit murder in the death of Tammy Daybell. Grand theft tied to survivor benefits and insurance money. Before sentencing, the judge ruled that the death penalty was not available against her. On July 31, 2023, Laurie was sentenced to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. She addressed the court, but offered little that resembled remorse. Her own siblings gave victim impact statements describing a woman they no longer recognized. Chad Daybell was tried separately, roughly a year later, beginning in April of 2024. His jury reached a guilty verdict on all eight counts in a matter of

44:13hours. Then on June 1, 2024, that same jury did something Laurie's case never allowed. They unanimously recommended the death penalty. Two co-defendants, one set of murders, two very different outcomes. Laurie spared execution by a legal ruling specific to her case, Chad sentenced to die. With the Idaho trial behind her, Laurie was extradited to Arizona to face what remained. In 2025, a Maricopa County jury convicted her of conspiracy to commit first degree murder in the death of Charles Vallow. A second trial addressing the plot against Brandon Boudreau ended the same way guilty. For part of the Arizona proceedings, Laurie chose to represent herself in court, a decision that drew national attention and, to many watching, looked less like a legal strategy and more like a continuation of the same need for control that had defined her for years. She was sentenced to two

45:19additional life terms, each carrying parole eligibility after 25 years to be served consecutively. Add it all up and Laurie Vallow Daybell, now 53 years old, is serving seven life sentences across two states. There is no scenario in which she walks free. She is incarcerated today at the Pocatello Women's Correctional Center in Idaho. Appeals are pending in both Idaho and Arizona, raising constitutional and procedural challenges, but as of now, none has gone anywhere. Chad Daybell remains on Idaho's death row, his own appeal still working through the courts. The children Laurie called zombies, the husband and the woman she was convicted of having killed to clear a path to the life she believed she was owed, are gone. What is left is a woman surrounded for the rest of her life by the same silence she once used to protect herself.

46:32Be sure to follow Killer Psychie on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. And guess what? Audible subscribers can listen to new episodes of Killer Psychie one week early and add free right now. All you have to do is join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. From Audible Originals and Tree Fort Media, this is Killer Psychie, produced by Audible with Tree Fort Media. I'm your host Candice D'Long. Make sure to follow us on TikTok and Instagram at at Killer Psychie Podcast and on my official Facebook page Killer Psychie with Candice D'Long. There you'll find exclusive content behind the scenes insights and updates on upcoming episodes. Don't miss a moment, join the conversation and let's explore the depths of the human psyche together.

47:33This episode was written and researched by Mary Chalenza and Jada Williams. Our series producers are Mary Chalenza and Jada Williams. Mixed and sound designed by Matt Dyson and Anthony Laurie. Tree Fort's head of audio is Matt Dyson. For Audible, Andy Beckerman is our senior producer. Desi Blaylock is our managing producer. Executive producers for Tree Fort are Kelly Garner and Mary Chalenza. And myself, Candice D'Long. Executive producer for Audible, Jenny Lauer Beckman, head of creative development at Audible, Kate Naven, head of Audible originals North America, Marshall Louis, chief content officer Rachel Giazza, copyright 2026 by Audible originals LLC. Sound recording, copyright 2026 by Audible originals LLC. You stepped out for your morning jog. Except it's not your usual morning jog.

48:42You started listening to an epic sci-fi book, Unaudible. 30 chapters later, you've accidentally run a half marathon. You lost track of how far you've run, somewhere just past the city limits. You can't stop. You have to find out what happens next. Then it's over. The universe seems bigger. You feel different. You feel like you have no idea where you are. Audible. Stories that speak to you.