Law&Crime Sidebar - Inside ‘Doomsday Cult’ Mom Trial: ‘Does Lori Vallow Daybell Think Jurors Are Zombies?’

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

The jury is set in the trial of "Doomsday Cult" mom Lori Vallow Daybell in Idaho. Eight women and 10 men make up the jury which includes six alternates. The Law&Crime Network's Angenette Levy talks with GiGi McKelvey about Lori's demeanor in the courtroom and what she did throughout jury selection. Plus, former Idaho Attorney General Dave Leroy discusses the significance of what will likely be the state's most anticipated trial in a century and the evidence the jury will see. LAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergWriting & Video Editing - Michael DeiningerGuest Booking - Alyssa FisherSocial Media Management - Vanessa Bein & Kiera BronsonSUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER PODCASTS:Court JunkieObjectionsThey Walk Among AmericaCoptales and CocktailsThe Disturbing TruthSpeaking FreelyLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wonderly Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wonderly Plus in the Wondery app Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Agent Nate Russo returns in Oracle 3, Murder at the Grandview, the latest installment of the gripping Audible Original series. When a reunion at an abandoned island hotel turns deadly, Russo must untangle accident from murder. But beware, something sinister lurks in the grand. View Shadows. Joshua Jackson delivers a bone-chilling performance in this supernatural thriller that

will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. Welcome back to Sidebar here on Law and Crime. I'm Janette Levy. The jury is set. Eight women and ten men will hear the case against Lori Ville. Valo Daybell in the doomsday called mom trial in Boise, Idaho. The trial, of course, was moved to Ada County, Idaho from Fremont County, where these homicides occurred. Six of these jurors are alternates, but they don't know which six are the alternates and which are not. So that will be determined at the end of the case. And the jury has been told, apparently, that this case could last

eight weeks. Imagine that. So there are no cameras, unfortunately. Lori Valo Daybell is accused of murdering her two children, her adopted son J.J. Valo and her teenage daughter, Tiley Ryan, who prosecutors say she believed were zombies. Valo Daybell is also accused of conspiring to murder Tammy Daybell, the late wife of her current husband, Chad Daybell, who's being tried separately. So their trials were recently severed. Law and Crimes, G.G. McHelvey is in Ada County, Idaho. She's been there all week long inside the courtroom, inside the courthouse. Gigi, tell us how this process went. It seems like obviously always a tedious process to pick a jury. So tell us what you observed. It was tedious. It was hearing a lot of the same questions over and over and over with

different people. It was interesting to watch the, or to hear the jury and how much they knew or how much they didn't know about the case. I would say majority knew something, whether it's just a name or little things like she was in Hawaii without her kids. They were looking for kids. So it, but then they gave a lot of the same examples of circumstantial evidence, for example. They gave the example with a lot of the jurors. You tell your kid, they can't have a cookie. Then you go out of the room, come back in the room. The kid's got crumbs on their face, chocolate, the cookie jars open. Is it reasonable to say the kid probably ate the cookie? Most people said yes. I remember one guy who said, well, I would have to question the child first and then

make my decision. And then one person said, I would have to see the kid eat the cookie. So it was interesting the different answers. Overall, people said, yeah, I would probably assume because what they're leading into is this might be a very circumstantial case against Lori. Well, that's interesting. You bring up the cookie analogy. They love to use that one. Prosecutors want a juror who doesn't have to see the kid eating the cookie. They also use that rain analogy like, well, you didn't see it rain. You didn't hear it rain. But you go outside in the grass is wet. Do you think it's, do you think it rained. So it's interesting when they always pull out these old little things and question jurors, potential jurors, about them. Lori Valdebel, as we know, Gigi, was deemed incompetent

to stand trial at one point in time. She had her competency restored. We never learned what her particular mental health issues were, but we know she has them. We assume that she's receiving medication for those. I interviewed an author yesterday, described her as a complete narcissist or a total narcissist. So what are you observing from Lori Valo Debel? Because all we have right now are sketches. There are no cameras in the courtroom, unfortunately. She's very much involved in her defense. And that's part of competency as being able to assist in your defense. If you remember towards the end of the year last year, it was brought into question again by Jim Archibald about her competency very quickly. They turned it around and said she is competent. And we've seen that

all week. This is a very different Lori Valo to me in that courtroom. It's not. the kind of looking around everywhere, grinning at inappropriate times. She's riding on a legal pad. She is talking to both of her attorneys on a regular basis, just very involved in the whole process. And today, during the strikes, I don't think I've seen her more focused than she was during the 20 minutes where they were striking those jurors. She had her hand right in the middle of that from what we could see. That's interesting. Did her attorneys seem to be, as far as you could tell, taking her advice. I mean, do they seem to be looking at what she's telling them and then doing what she wants? Yeah, I mean, they were definitely listening to her and there was active

discussion sometimes between all three and then sometimes with just her and one attorney or the other. It does seem like they were listening to her very intently. She made notes all week. So whether or not she was making notes about these jurors as they came up, we don't know. She could have been doodling for all we know. But she was referring back to those notes during the strike process. So I do think maybe she made notes of, I don't like this one. I do like that one. There were certain jurors as well that she seemed to focus in on a little more than others. And I really haven't found a common thread. But I did notice yesterday. There was one juror who was 22, very young and it was a female. So you think about it had Tiley not been murdered, she would have been kind of close to that age. You wonder, we couldn't

see that juror. Did she maybe favor, Tiley, a little bit? Laurie didn't take her eyes off that juror. That was interesting to me. And she also tends to listen more intently to what sounds like middle-aged women, women around her age to kind of get the feel for it. Oddly enough, I didn't see her looking at the men too much, but maybe after five husbands, she's kind of tired of looking at men in that way. Good point. Good point. It seems she likes the husband she has now, though. Something that's kind of going through my mind, given what we've been told in this case, is the fact that she and Chad Daybell and her brother thought they could see people who were inhabited by zombies. It makes you wonder, does she, if she does indeed truly believe that, is she looking at these people and

wondering if they're zombies? I know that sounds silly, but it makes me wonder if she's thinking she can see something. Yeah. And I mean, we've never heard officially, but the rumblings we have heard about Lori is that she still very much believes what she did the day she was arrested. So she could have been writing down light and dark scales for all these jurors for all we know. But, you You know, it is interesting. It's hard to know what goes in her thought process, what goes on up there. I mean, does she ever stop and think about her kids? Does she ever realize the gravity of what has happened? A lot of people think that she's just evil. A lot of people acknowledge there could be mental illness. Maybe it's a mixture of both. But she's hard to read in that regard. But she's not hard to read in when she's very interested in something because she laser focuses. She definitely has the ability to stop what she's doing and focus in on one particular juror, which she did several times. throughout this process. Do we know if a lot of the jurors in this case, perspective and otherwise were Mormons or participate in the Mormon faith? We were not, I never personally heard any specific questions posed to any of the jurors about what faith they practice. Sometimes they would

pose the question if somebody believes something that's radically different from the religious beliefs you have, would you be able to put that aside and make a fair and impartial judgment against Lori Valo. Most said yes. In fact, yesterday, one guy flat out said no. He said, if somebody's beliefs are fundamentally different than mine, then I would have a hard time setting that aside. And they gave the example of reading some plates and also like interpreting some kind of

instruction. So I think it's going to come into the whole moron eye thing that went on in the text messages between them. I'm not sure. But they were asking very specific questions that I believe have to do with the more in faith. But it was never asked, are you LDS? Are you Mormon? Anything like that? One final question I have. The last time we saw Lori Valo Daybell in court, it was during that

hearing where she appeared to be smiling quite broadly. It was right after I believe that it had been determined that her competency had been restored. Are we seeing that from her? No. It's like I say, it's like a light switch. I was, I was curious to see how she was going to react in that courtroom during this process because you can go one or two ways. You can try to just convince the jury that you're you're not really there and that maybe they see you acting a little inappropriate for what you're doing and try to embed that in somebody's head. But it was the opposite. It was just laser focused. None of this looking around, smiling, grinning, anything like that. She was there with, from what we could see. Now, it's a very small screen in

the overflow room. We cannot see facial expressions. We can tell it's Lori. That's about it. But from everything that we saw, she was business 100% this week. It didn't seem like there was any drifting off and going someplace else. She was right there in the middle of her attorneys and in the middle of most conversations the entire week. Well, Gigi, you're a trooper to sit through all of that, tweeting all of that. Thank you so much for coming on. We know you'll be there throughout the following week as well. And we're looking forward to see what both sides present. Recently, I spoke with former Idaho Attorney General Dave Leroy about just how big this case is for the GEM state. It's an opportunity to show that we can conduct even under controversial, world significant, highly publicized trial circumstances.

A fair and impartial trial here in Idaho in an efficient professional way. Judge Boyce has shown that he's going to command control of the courtroom, both of the first. and the prosecution have shown some able early moves. And I would expect it to be a classic trial of a woman on circumstantial evidence with a very significant attention paid to all of the facts and all of the motion maneuvers, all of the legal rulings. This is the most highly publicized trial in Idaho in recent memory. Dave Leroy recalls the last trial in Idaho that received this much attention was back in the early 1900s. It was the murder trial of a man named Harry Orchard. He was represented by Clarence Darrow, the legendary criminal defense attorney. Back then, of course,

they didn't have TV cameras in the courtroom. And in Lori Valo DeBel's trial, they're simply just not being allowed. Well, that's one manifestation of Judge Boyce's intent to control this trial. He's not going to let it be a circus trial, a show trial. He's going to try to focus on the facts, focus on the law, focus on proper procedure by giving at the end either each session or each day quite promptly an audio recording. He will allow the media and the public to participate in a properly constitutional fashion. Law and crime, of course, will have those audio recordings for you each day. Leroy also told me a little bit about the evidence that he expects to hear. It would be a good deal of scientific evidence. There'll be some reconstructive evidence.

We'll see some cell phone evidence. So it will have both a very curious aspect of this overlay of the Mormon theory of the end of the world and the prophet and zombies, as the children were alleged to be, a very curious component. And that's it for this edition of Law and Crime Sidebar podcast. You can listen to and download Sidebar Podcast. bar on Apple, Spotify, Google, and wherever else you get your podcasts. And of course, you can always watch it on Law and Crimes YouTube channel. I'm Ann Janette Levy, and we will see you next time. You can binge all episodes of this Law and Crime series,

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