Why Did Lori Vallow Daybell Pick Up 2 More Life Sentences?

First, Lori Vallow Daybell’s read Chad Daybell’s books about the end of the world. Then, they fell in love.

In the process, Vallow Daybell arranged the killing of her fourth husband. She and Daybell also killed two of her children and his wife.

Before she was dubbed the “Doomsday mom” for the bizarre beliefs that drove the horrendous spate of violence, Vallow Daybell had a seemingly happily marriage to her fourth husband Charles Vallow.

Together in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler, Ariz., they were raising Tylee Ryan, her child from her previous marriage, as well as Joshua “JJ” Vallow, whom she and Vallow Daybell adopted together.

But in 2018—12 years into their marriage—she began an affair with Daybell after reading his self-published doomsday prophecy novels. 

In July 2019, her brother, Alex Cox, shot and killed Vallow in an act that Cox said was self-defense. Less than two months later, on September 1, she and the children moved to the small city of Rexburg, Idaho, to live closer to Daybell.

Early that November, Vallow Daybell and Daybell got married on an idyllic Hawaiian beach in Kauai. None of their relatives were present. Daybell's first wife, Tammy, had died only 17 days earlier, and the couple knew at the time that JJ and Tylee had been buried in Daybell’s backyard. 

Tylee and JJ had last been seen on September 8 and September 22, 2019, respectively, according to CBS News.

By October, Kay Woodcock (Charles’s older sister) was suspicious because she had not seen the children and began investigating. She got access to Charles’s Amazon account, and through that account figured out that Lori had ordered new wedding rings two weeks before Tammy died.

Investigators became increasingly suspicious and found wedding pictures of the couple online wearing those rings. At Woodcock’s request, they attempted to conduct a child welfare check but didn’t find the children—amplifying their concerns, according to ABC 7 News.

As their suspicions mounted, investigators decided to exhume Tammy’s remains on December 11. A subsequent autopsy revealed that Tammy had died of asphyxiation, not a heart attack.

One day later, Vallow Daybell's 51-year-old brother Cox died. The medical examiner ruled that he died of natural causes from pulmonary blood clots. 

In late January, Daybell and Vallow Daybell were served with a court order in Hawaii to produce their missing children. After they ignored that order, they were arrested and extradited to Idaho.

Authorities then obtained a search warrant for Daybell’s property in Rexburg and the bodies of the children were found in shallow graves. Medical examiners determined that JJ had been asphyxiated with a plastic bag. Tylee’s body was so grotesquely dismembered and charred that authorities did not determine the cause of death beyond homicide.

In May 2023, a jury found Vallow Daybell guilty of murdering her children, as well as guilty of conspiracy to commit murder in their deaths and the death of Daybell’s wife Tammy. She was sentenced to life without parole.

Vallow Daybell was found guilty of murder and conspiracy in the three cases and sentenced to death in June 2024.

Friends and family believe that the pair’s motives in the killings were driven by extreme fringe religious delusions about evil spirit zombies and the end of the world.

After Vallow Daybell’s capacity for violence was laid bare to investigators, they reopened other cases, including the death of her fourth husband at the hands of her brother.

At trial, a medical examiner testified that Charles had been shot with two bullets—and that the second bullet may have been fired after Charles was already lying on the ground.

In a conversation Charles had with police in January 2019 several months before he was killed, he told officers that his wife had “lost her mind,” and “threatened me, to murder me, to kill me.” He also said he worried she might harm their children.

After Vallow Daybell was convicted in Idaho, she represented herself in the Arizona trial of her husband’s death and was found guilty in April 2025 of conspiring to kill him. She received an additional life sentence in July 2025. In October 2025, Vallow Daybell was ordered to pay $11,747.99 in restitution to Woodcock in connection to Charles's murder.

In the string of victims left by Vallow Daybell and Daybell, Brandon Boudreaux stands out as an exception because an attempt orchestrated by Vallow Daybell to take his life was unsuccessful. Boudreaux was the estranged husband of a niece of Vallow Daybell. Cox drove to Boudreaux’s house in 2019 and shot at him as Boudreaux was pulling in to his driveway. Boudreaux’s car window shattered but he was uninjured.

Boudreaux was going through a divorce with Vallow Daybell’s niece at the time of the shooting, which he believes is why he was targeted. He took the stand and testified at her trial for trying to kill him, facing down a cross-examination from Lori. 

There were ample Google searches on Vallow Daybell’s devices that tied her to the planning of that attempted murder, according to Courthouse News Service. 

She was found guilty of conspiring to kill Boudreaux and received a second life sentence in Arizon.

The deaths of several more people close to Daybell and Vallow Daybell prompted investigations.

Most notable is Vallow Daybell’s brother who died on December 12, 2019, the day after Tammy Daybell’s remains were exhumed.

At Daybell's trial, Cox’s widow Zulema Pastenes said that Cox told her a day or two before his death that he was worried that he was being set up as a “fall guy”. 

He also told her that he’d left her a duffle bag full of cash in the closet of their home “if anything happens to me,” according to East Idaho News.  No charges were ever brought in the death of Cox, with an autopsy revealing that he had died of natural causes.

Vallow Daybell’s third husband, Joseph Anthony Ryan, died of a heart attack in 2018 at the age of 59. Years prior to his death, Cox had threatened Ryan’s life and tased him multiple times during a child custody exchange between Ryan and Vallow Daybell. The Phoenix Police Department reopened the case, determining that he died of natural causes.