- Photos of J.J. Vallow and Tylee Ryan remains were shown in the courtroom during their mother's trial Monday.
- In opening statements, an Idaho prosecutor said Lori Vallow's plot to kill was about "money, sex, and power."
BOISE, Idaho — Gasps broke out Monday morning in the Idaho courtroom where the woman dubbed "Doomsday Mommy" is being tried for her role in the murder of her two children and her most recent husband's late wife.
Prosecutors projected photos of the kids' remains onto a screen in the Boise courtroom. Prosecutors said that when they were found buried on Chad Daybell's property in June 2020, 17-year-old Tylee Ryan's hands had been cut off and 7-year-old J.J. Vallow had been bound with duct tape.
Prosecutors allege that Lori Vallow became radicalized in her religious beliefs, using them as a weapon in her plot to kill her 17-year-old daughter Tylee Ryan and 7-year-old adopted son J.J. Vallow. She is also charged with conspiring with her now-husband Chad Daybell to kill his wife Tammy Daybell before they were wed.
"Money, power, and sex, that's what this case is about," prosecutor Lindsey A. Blake told the 18 jurors on Monday morning.
Vallow and Daybell — an apocalyptic novelist— are accused of killing their former spouses and Lori Vallow's two children in 2019, before fleeing to vacation in Hawaii, where they were caught. Vallow's late brother, Alex Cox, is accused of aiding the alleged crimes, though he died in December 2019.
The complicated web of crimes prosecutors have accused the couple of, as well as their "doomsday" religious beliefs, have developed widespread attention among true crime sleuths. Spectators flocked to the main courthouse in Ada County where they are being tried, as well as a second courthouse nearly five hours away where they can watch the trial streamed remotely.
In her opening statement, Blake told jurors that Vallow believed she had the ability to tell whether people's spirits were "light" or "dark."
Blake spoke about how Vallow shopped for wedding rings for herself and Daybell in early 2019 when both of their respective spouses and the children were still alive.
The two married on a beach in Hawaii two weeks after Daybell reported finding Tammy dead one morning in bed, Blake said.
Prior to her death, Daybell increased Tammy Daybell's life insurance policy, Blake said.
Vallow is also awaiting trial for her alleged role in planning the killing of her 4th husband, Charles Vallow.
On July 11, 2019, Alex Cox — Vallow's brother — shot and killed Charles Vallow in Arizona and claimed self-defense.
Blake said that Vallow, Daybell, and her late brother Cox are also accused of conspiring in the attempted shooting of the then-husband of Vallow's niece. A man matching Cox's description also fired a weapon at Daybell's late wife in her garage, shortly before she died.
Daybell, a former gravedigger from Springville, Utah, ran a company with his wife that published books about near-death experiences and people's visions about the fall of the United States, Armageddon, and the rapture.
Vallow, a former high-school cheerleader in her native Southern California, was a beauty queen and a one-time Wheel of Fortune contestant who became a superfan of Daybell's books and podcasts, Blake said.
She introduced herself to him in St. George, Utah in 2018 at a meeting for a group called "Prepping a People."
Blake said that when they met, Daybell explained to Vallow they had a polygamous, eternal marriage.
Daybell told Vallow that she had once been the wife of the Mormon angel Moroni, but that he was also married to her in the days of Jesus.
As Blake gave her opening statement, images of the three victims remained projected to the jury. Blake also showed pictures of holes on Daybell's property in Salem, Idaho, where Tylee's mutilated and burned, and JJ's duct-taped and bagged bodies were found "cold in the ground in shallow graves."
As Blake spoke, Vallow, in a black jacket and black-rimmed glasses with long, wavy hair, swiveled her head side-to-side to her lawyers and wrote vigorously on a yellow legal pad. Her ankles were bound by a chain.
In center benches in the hardwood paneled courtroom sat JJ's grandparents, Larry and Kay Woodcock — who had reported the children missing in 2019 after not hearing from them for months.
Her attorney Jim Archibald said in his opening statement that there is enough reasonable doubt to acquit Vallow. He said that at the time her children were murdered in Rexburg, Idaho, they were inside a different apartment. He also said that she had been in Hawaii at the time Tammy Daybell died.
Archibald described Vallow as a highly-religious woman obsessed with "the end of times" whose beliefs began to "morph and change" after her relationship began with Daybell.
Daybell will be tried separately for the same crimes.