CNN
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On Friday, a day after returning a guilty verdict in Chad Daybell’s murder trial, an Idaho jury began deliberating whether Daybell should be sentenced to death for killing his first wife and two children by his second wife.
Daybell was convicted Thursday of first-degree murder and conspiracy in the deaths of his first wife, Tammy Daybell, and his two children with his second wife, Tylee Ryan, 16, and Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 7. Prosecutors have argued the murders were driven by power, sex, money and apocalyptic spiritual beliefs.
The sentencing phase of Daybell’s trial began shortly after the guilty verdict was handed down, with State Judge Stephen Boyce giving preliminary instructions to the jury, who began deliberating the defendant’s fate Friday afternoon after hearing victim impact statements and contrasting portraits of the defendant presented by his attorney.
In his opening statements to the jury on Friday, prosecutor Rob Wood asked jurors to consider aggravating factors that may lead them to believe Daybell deserves the death penalty.
First, he said, the three murders were committed for reward. Daybell was also convicted of insurance fraud resulting from life insurance policies that were allegedly paid out after the death of his first wife. Like Daybell, his second wife was also convicted of theft because she continued to receive Social Security benefits after the deaths of their children.
Wood also told the jury that the murders of the three victims were “particularly heinous, cruel and brutal and demonstrated extraordinary depravity.”
“The defendant had an utter disregard for human life,” Wood added. “Whether he conducted himself before, during or after this murder, he demonstrated a propensity to commit murder and likely poses a continuing threat to society.”
“It is up to you to decide whether one or more of these aggravating factors have been proven, and, if so, whether it is just or unjust to impose the death penalty under those circumstances,” the prosecutor concluded.
The sentence came about a year after Daybell’s second wife, Lori Vallow Daybell, was convicted of the murders of her children and sentenced to life in prison without parole. She was also convicted of conspiring to kill Tammy Daybell. Vallow Daybell is appealing her conviction to the state Supreme Court, with her defense team raising the issue of whether she was mentally competent to stand trial.
Authorities say they believe Tylee and JJ were killed in September 2019 (the month they were last reported to have been seen) and that Tammy Daybell was found dead in her Idaho home on October 19, 2019, just weeks before Chad Daybell married Vallow Daybell.
Addressing the jury on Friday, attorney John Pryor described Daybell as a once “quiet, modest and shy young man” who grew up in the small, close-knit “town of faith” of Springville, Utah. He said Daybell met his first wife, Tammy, and was married to her for 29 years, raising five “wonderful” children who were “deeply religious and very family-oriented.”
But Pryor said Daybell’s life changed in late 2018 when he met Vallow Daybell, who had already been married multiple times.
“All that glitters is not gold,” he told jurors. “Lori Vallow was the glitter. She wasn’t the gold. She was the catalyst that changed the plan…Confusion ensued and all these things started to cascade and things got very complicated and difficult.”
Pryor said his new relationship with Vallow was like a “bomb dropped” in the life of a “country boy from Springville.”
“We need to look back on that,” he said. “Look at Chad Daybell’s past before the bomb fell, the past before the Lori Vallow bomb fell…If that bullet hadn’t come along and changed course, would we be here? We shouldn’t be here.”
Jurors also heard testimony Friday from relatives of the victims.
“I am outraged and devastated to know that Tammy was treated in this way,” Tammy Daybell’s father, Ron Douglas, told jurors. “I take comfort in knowing that Tammy is resting in peace in Utah, buried alone and near her beloved mother.”
“It’s a great feeling,” Kay Woodcock said of her grandson, JJ, and niece-in-law, Tylee.
“I’m sitting here today trying to explain the immense pain that I and my entire family continue to endure every day,” she said. “But what do I do?”
“I can tell you there have been so many times over the years where we’ve been devastated by the fact that JJ wasn’t going to reach new milestones,” she said of her grandson. “The question always remains: What kind of person would he have been? What kind of man would he have been?”
Woodcock remembers Tyree as “a lovely, blonde, blue-eyed girl” who was “a total mama’s girl.”
Ms Woodcock added tearfully: “There is a hole in my heart and in the hearts of my entire family that will never be filled and will never go away.”
Daybell declined to speak in court after his victim impact statement.
Police discovered Tylee and JJ’s bodies in June 2020 on Chad Daybell’s Fremont County property, according to authorities.
“It’s a sad day. JJ would have been 12 years old,” JJ’s grandfather, Larry Woodcock, said after Thursday’s verdict.
Woodcock remembered his victims and asked the same question over and over again.
“What have they accomplished? Nothing. What have they done? They destroyed a family,” Woodcock said of Daybell and Lori Vallow Daybell.
But Larry Woodcock said the defendants could not destroy the memories the families had of the victims. “They can’t stand it,” Woodcock said, becoming emotional at one point and saying he felt like he couldn’t breathe when he heard the jury’s verdict in court.
“Sex, money and power” were the focus of the trial
In their opening statements, the prosecutor and defense presented contrasting portrayals of the defendant.
State authorities portrayed Daybell as a power-hungry, arrogant man who would stop at nothing to pursue “what he considered his rightful destiny.” Defense attorneys portrayed him as a religious man who was forced into an unhappy relationship by “a beautiful, spirited woman who knew how to get what she wanted.”
“Two children’s bodies were buried in the defendant Chad Daybell’s backyard,” Judge Wood said in his opening remarks to the jury at the start of the trial.
“The following month, his wife was found dead in their marital bed. Seventeen days after the death of his wife, Tammy Daybell, the defendant was photographed laughing and dancing on a beach in Hawaii at his wedding to Lori Vallow. Vallow was the defendant’s mistress and the mother of his children who were buried in a cemetery on the defendant’s property. Three bodies.”
Wood said Daybell “got the opportunity he considered his rightful destiny, and he didn’t let any person or any law stand in his way.”
“His desire for sex, money and power led him to pursue those ambitions,” the prosecutor added, “and this pursuit led to the deaths of his wife and Lori’s two innocent children.”
Tammy Daybell was initially believed to have died in her sleep, and Chad Daybell remarried less than three weeks after her death in 2019.
Pryor said Daybell’s life began to change when he met Vallow Daybell, a “beautiful, attractive woman” who “began to shower a great deal of attention on him” and ultimately lured him into an “inappropriate” and “unhappy” extramarital affair.
Vallow Daybell’s two children from his previous marriage were last seen on different days in September 2019. Wood said Tylee Ryan was a “normal, lively teenage girl” who loved her friends, while her brother JJ was on the autism spectrum and had special needs.
In late November 2019, a relative contacted police in Rexburg, Idaho, Police went to JJ’s home to check on his welfare since they hadn’t spoken to him recently. Police were unable to find JJ at the family’s home, but Vallow Daybell and Daybell had met and, according to authorities, the two had told them JJ was staying with a family friend in Arizona.
When police returned the next day with a search warrant, the couple had disappeared. They were eventually found in Hawaii in January 2020.
Law enforcement officials discovered the bodies of Tyree and JJ on Daybell’s property in Fremont County, Idaho, in June 2020. Vallow Daybell and Daybell were indicted on murder charges in May 2021.
Prosecutors say Tyree is believed to have been killed between Sept. 8 and 9, 2019, and JJ between Sept. 22 and 23.
“We are deeply saddened that these two shining stars have been taken from us and we hope that they died without pain or suffering,” the children’s families said in a statement after their bodies were discovered.
CNN’s Dalia Farheid contributed to this report.
