Chad Daybell should be put to death for the murders of his first wife and his second wife’s two youngest children, a jury has decided.
The jury in Idaho unanimously agreed Saturday that Daybell, 55, deserves the death sentence for the gruesome murders of Tammy Daybell, 16-year-old Tylee Ryan and 7-year-old Joshua “JJ” Vallow.
He was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy charges last Thursday, after a lengthy case where prosecutors argued his crimes were fuelled by sex, money, power and “doomsday” spiritual motivations.
According to CNN, Daybell maintained a neutral expression as the death sentence was read in court. The judge said jurors had “found beyond a reasonable doubt … that the aggravating circumstances when weighed against the mitigating circumstances do not make the imposition of the death penalty unjust.”
To impose the death penalty, the jurors had to unanimously find that Daybell met at least one of the “aggravating circumstances” that state law says qualifies someone for capital punishment. They also had to agree that those aggravating factors weren’t outweighed by any mitigating factors that might have lessened his culpability or justified a lesser sentence.
The jury decided there were aggravating factors including an utter disregard for human life and the murders being especially heinous and cruel.
Last week’s guilty verdict came about a year after Lori Vallow Daybell, Daybell’s second wife, was also convicted for the murder of her children and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. She was also convicted of conspiring to murder Daybell’s first wife, Tammy, and has been accused of arranging her fourth husband’s murder so she and Daybell could be together.
The Daybell and Vallow Daybell investigation began in late 2019 when several family members reported concerns to police that they hadn’t seen or spoken to JJ and Tylee in months. Their bodies were eventually found buried in Chad’s yard in eastern Idaho in 2020.
Friends of the couple would go on to tell police, and testify in court, that the pair held fringe religious beliefs, including that they had been reincarnated in order to gather people before a biblical apocalypse.
Before Vallow Daybell’s two youngest children disappeared, she referred to them as “zombies,” former friend Melanie Gibb testified during last year’s trial. The couple claimed that zombies were people who had been possessed by dark spirits, and the only way to free the person’s trapped soul was to destroy their body by killing them.
Authorities believe the two children were killed in September 2019. Tammy was found dead on Oct. 19, 2019, a few weeks before Daybell and Vallow Daybell married, although it was initially believed she died in her sleep.
During Daybell’s nearly two-month-long trial, prosecutors painted a picture of a self-published author who wrote doomsday-laced fiction, promoted unusual spiritual beliefs including apocalyptic prophecies and tales of possession by evil spirits in order to justify the killings.
“This has been a tough case because of its complexity, both in telling the story of an investigation that spanned years and trying to figure out the best way to present it in a way that would make sense to others,” Fremont County Prosecutor Lindsey Blake said outside the Boise courthouse after the sentencing.
Daybell’s lawyer, John Prior, argued during the trial that there wasn’t enough evidence to tie Daybell to the killings, and suggested Vallow Daybell’s older brother, Alex Cox, was the culprit. Cox died in late 2019 and was never charged.
During the sentencing hearing, Prior asked the jurors to judge Daybell on his life before he met Vallow Daybell, describing her as a bomb that blew him off the trajectory of an otherwise wholesome life. But Daybell also declined to offer any mitigating evidence during the sentencing hearing. Mitigating evidence is often used to encourage jurors to have sympathy for a defendant in an effort to show that a life sentence would be more appropriate than capital punishment.
— With files from The Associated Press
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