Lori Vallow Daybell reacts to guilty verdict in exclusive interview

PHOENIX (AZFamily) — So-called “Doomsday Mom” Lori Vallow Daybell said in an exclusive interview she wasn’t expecting to be found guilty of conspiring to murder her fourth husband, Charles Vallow. She sat down with True Crime Arizona correspondent Briana Whitney on Thursday.

Vallow Daybell said she was stunned by Tuesday’s verdict. “I mean, obviously I knew that was a possibility, yeah, so, it was a bit of a surprise actually,” she said.

The jury in Phoenix found her guilty after deliberating for about three hours, and she faces another possible life sentence on top of the three she is already serving in Idaho. She had help from her brother, Alex Cox, in the shooting death of Vallow at her home in Chandler in July 2019. Prosecutors said she wanted to cash in on Vallow’s life insurance policy and then marry her then-boyfriend, doomsday writer Chad Daybell.

The jurors didn’t know Vallow Daybell was convicted in Idaho of killing her two children, 16-year-old Tylee Ryan and 7-year-old J.J. Vallow, and conspired to kill Chad Daybell’s wife, Tammy Daybell. After the verdict, some jurors told Arizona’s Family they wondered why there were information gaps during her Arizona trial, and why Tylee Ryan wasn’t called as a witness.

Where is Tylee Ryan?

Whitney asked what it was like seeing Ryan in the body-camera video taken from the 2019 scene during the trial. “Well, I understand where Tylee is in heaven. I know what she’s doing and where she is, so it’s been almost six years since she passed away. I mean, this is the catalyst, right? What happened with her and Charles was the catalyst of her killing herself. So I was precluded from talking about that. I was precluded from bringing that up,” Vallow Daybell said. “But the detectives obviously don’t say that she killed herself,” Whitney responded. “I’m aware of what they say, but they weren’t there,” Vallow Daybell responded.

She also said she told Colby Ryan, her other son, what “really” happened to J.J. Colby Ryan played a phone call between him and his mom on his podcast where she claimed Tylee Ryan killed J.J. and after that, she killed herself. Both of their bodies were found buried on Chad Daybell’s Idaho property in 2020.

Her interactions with family, friends at trial

During the trial that lasted more than two weeks, Vallow Daybell represented herself and surprised some people when she decided to not call any witnesses in her defense. She said she couldn’t because the judge wouldn’t let her talk about certain things. “In the judicial system the way that it works is they really don’t let you put on a defense. They just don’t. They don’t let you put on your defense the way you want to present it,” she told Whitney. “They precluded me basically from having a defense. They preclude you from talking about the things most important to prove their case so if the judge precludes all those things, what are you supposed to get up and say?”

Vallow Daybell was also worried that if she testified or called anyone, the state would have gotten a rebuttal and she didn’t want to go through that. But she had plenty of fiery cross-examination of her family, friends and even a woman Charles Vallow dated. Her only surviving brother, Adam Cox, testified for the prosecution and said he believed Vallow Daybell was behind Charles Vallow’s murder. It was the first time she had faced her brother in years. “It all happened so fast I am still processing,” she said. “It was different when I was up there with him because you’ve known him your whole life.”

Vallow Daybell also cross-examined Nancy Jo Hancock, a woman Charles Vallow was dating at the time. She claims she didn’t know he was dating other people while they were estranged. “I don’t think bothered me that much I think it surprised me. Because I was not aware of any of that until we got the discovery,” she said. Vallow Daybell denied she was cheating with Chad Daybell, who she married weeks after Charles Vallow’s death. “You can say affair, but Chad was really just my best friend,” she said.

Vallow Daybell explains religious texts

A lot of the trial was centered around Vallow Daybell’s religious beliefs, including text messages with Alex Cox about becoming “like Nephi,” a person in the Book of Mormon who God commands to kill another man. “They’ve been totally and completely misconstrued,” Vallow Daybell told Whitney. “We weren’t speaking of anything that was happening here we were speaking of things happening in the spirit world. So, anybody that’s going to read texts of yours. It’s going to be way over their head in the sense that they hadn’t had those experiences so they have nowhere to put them.”

She also claimed Adam Cox, Charles Vallow and Brando Boudreaux, her niece’s ex-husband, were plotting against her. Adam Cox testified that Charles Vallow’s murder just before he and Vallow were planning an intervention to bring his sister back into the mainstream of their shared faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He testified that before Vallow’s death, his sister had told people her husband was no longer living and that a zombie was living inside his body.

Vallow Daybell is scheduled to go on trial again in early June, accused in a scheme to kill Boudreaux. Investigators said Alex Cox shot at Boudreaux at his home in October 2019, nearly hitting him in the head.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.

Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.

Copyright 2025 KTVK/KPHO. All rights reserved.