Chad Daybell trial: Lori Vallow’s friend confronted with subpoena outside court in cult prophet case

Daybell was shaking at the defence table as graphic photos of Lori Vallow’s children’s remains were shown at his death penalty trial on Thursday.

Rexburg police detective Rey Hermosillo took the court through the horrific process of digging up the remains of Tylee, 16, and JJ, seven, who were found buried on Daybell’s property.

Spectators at the Ada County Courthouse in Boise, Idaho noticed the “doomsday cult” author start to tremble as the gruesome pictures were shown to the jury.

During opening statements this week, prosecutors said Daybell’s “desire for sex, power, and money led to the murders” of his former wife Tammy Daybell and the children of his new wife Lori Vallow, and that he sought to eliminate “obstacles” in pursuit of a life with Vallow.

Daybell’s defence attorney John Prior, however, said his client was manipulated by Vallow.

There will be no court today in Chad Daybell’s triple murder trial.

Detective Hermosillo finished his testimony for the state on Thursday.

The next witness is not yet available, so court will be in recess until Monday.

Rexburg Detective Ray Hermosillo testified on Thursday about finding Tylee Ryan and JJ Vallow’s remains buried on Chad Daybell’s property.

He said investigators took turns digging because the smell of decomposition was so bad.

Graphic photos of the remains were shown in court, but not on the livestream. Daybell reportedly began to tremble during the testimony, court spectators said.

JJ was found in a bag that was “wrapped in dark plastic with duct tape around it.” He was still in the red pyjamas he was last seen wearing with duct tape wrapped around his head, over his mouth, and around his wrists, arms and ankles. Det Hermosillo said there were scratch marks on his neck and bruises.

After the boy’s body was taken to the morgue, Det Hermosillo returned to the site and said they uncovered “globs of burnt flesh starting to protrude through the dirt” that were later determined to be Tylee Ryan’s charred remains.

“At that point, we saw what appeared to be the shape of a green melted bucket that appeared to have the remains of what we assumed was Tylee charred and burned inside that bucket,” he said.

JJ’s grandmother Kay Woodcock and Tammy Daybell’s aunt Vicki Hoban were not in courtroom on Thursday for the testimony. However, JJ’s grandfather Larry Woodcock, was spotted in the gallery.

Chad Daybell’s adult children have mostly stayed out of the spotlight in the wake of their father’s arrest in the death of their mother Tammy Daybell and Lori Vallow’s two children.

But almost all of them will testify in his death penalty case in his defence.

Daybell’s attorney John Prior said in opening statements that they will detail their mother’s “health struggle” before her sudden death in 2019.

Daybell had told police his wife had died suddenly in her sleep after battling an illness, but an autopsy later revealed she died of asphyxiation.

“They’re going to talk about their mother’s use of various medical treatments she would use—oils she would put on her leg, medicine, and different herbs she would take, and that their mother was suffering from a number of maladies, and she would refuse to see a doctor,”Mr Prior said said on Wednesday.

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Chad Daybell is now on trial for the murders of his wife Tammy Daybell and Lori Vallow’s children JJ Vallow and Tylee Ryan – almost one year after Vallow was convicted in the slayings.

JJ, seven, and Tylee, 16, went missing back in 2019, their remains later found buried on the grounds of Mr Daybell’s Chad property in Idaho.

One month after the children were last seen, Mr Daybell’s first wife Tammy, 49, died suddenly and Vallow and Mr Daybell jetted off and got married on a beach in Hawaii.

Prosecutors said that the couple conspired with Vallow’s brother Alex Cox to kill JJ, Tylee and Tammy as part of their doomsday cult beliefs – but also so they could collect life insurance money and the kids’ social security and survivor benefits.

Read about the bizarre and tragic case here:

Lori Vallow’s sister Summer Shiflet said the “cult mom” has been delusional for years.

Her comments came after Vallow’s sentencing last summer.

At the sentencing, Vallow spoke out for the first time, claiming that “Jesus Christ knows no one was murdered” and that the children and Tammy were “busy” and “happy” in heaven.

“I have known she’s been in this delusion for a while. It took me a long time to accept that and understand what was going on,” Ms Shiflet said.

“I had never seen anybody with a delusion disorder before. I didn’t know how to process that or what it looked like (but) that’s about typical of most conversations with her. It’s about her faith and there’s never any acknowledgment of what actually happened. You can’t ever really get any answers so it leads to frustrating situations.”

At Lori Vallow’s trial last year, prosecutors pinned her motive in the murders of her children on three pillars of a ‘cult playbook’: Power, money and sex.

But a survivor of one of America’s most notorious cults tells Rachel Sharp we may never know if a cult truly drove Vallow to kill.

Chad Daybell dug graves while he was a student at Brigham Young University and worked as a cemetery sexton in Utah for almost 20 years.

He told the Deseret News in 1992 that he believed digging graves helped him through school.

Daybell later founded his own publishing company, Spring Creek Book Company.

He authored several fiction and nonfiction books – many of them doomsday books loosely based on the teachings centered around The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

He married his first wife Tammy in 1990 and they founded Spring Creek Book Company together in Utah – the company which published his doomsday books.

The couple had five children together and moved to Salem, Idaho, in 2015.

Among his teachings, he claimed he could teleport, could see into the future, see dead people, and that he and Vallow were part of the chosen 144,000.