Is Chad Daybell a doomsday cult mastermind? Trial for the murder of Lori Vallow’s children and ex-wife begins

Chad Daybell has been known as many different names over the years: Gravedigger, “doomsday” author, alleged cult leader – but could he also soon be known as a convicted killer?

That’s up to an Ada County jury to decide when they settle in for several grueling weeks of heartbreaking testimony and graphic evidence exhibits in a Boise, Idaho courtroom next month. Jury selection begins on Monday 1 April and the highly-anticipated trial is expected to last at least two months.

Daybell is charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and grand theft over the deaths of his former wife Tammy Daybell, and his wife Lori Vallow’s children, Tylee Ryan, 16, and son Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 7.

The disturbing saga has shocked the nation over the last few years, which began in 2019 with the question, “Where are the children?” Vallow’s children were missing and she was in Hawaii with her new husband, Chad Daybell, just three weeks after Tammy had died suddenly in her sleep.

Nine months after the children were seen alive, their remains were found in shallow graves on Daybell’s property in Idaho in June 2020.

The children’s disappearance and deaths brought to light a series of other mysterious deaths and other incidents connected to the doomsday couple, revealing a pattern of people close to the pair dying suddenly.

As part of their cult beliefs, the couple allegedly believed in a “rating system of light and dark” for how they ranked the spirits of the people around them. This evolved into the belief that some people were “zombies” and the only way to get rid of the zombies was for the human body to be destroyed and thus rid their lives of “obstacles,” as their text messages later revealed.

Here’s what we know so far of the twisted tale:

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.