‘We will both be exonerated in the future,’ Lori Vallow Daybell said of her husband Chad Daybell. ‘The same way I will be exonerated.’
Lori Vallow Daybell, who was convicted of the gruesome killings of her two youngest children and her husband’s former wife, said she believes she’ll be “exonerated” in her first on-screen interview.
Vallow Daybell, also known as the “Doomsday Mom,” was handed the maximum sentence possible in July 2023, more than three years after the bodies of her son, Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 7, and daughter Tylee Ryan, 16, were discovered by authorities in Vallow Daybell’s husband’s backyard in rural eastern Idaho.
Almost two years after she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Vallow Daybell sat down with NBC Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison to discuss her plans for the future.
She also spoke about her husband Chad Daybell, who was convicted in a separate trial for the murders of his first wife Tammy Daybell and his second wife’s two youngest children and sentenced to death.
“We will both be exonerated in the future,” Vallow Daybell said of her and Chad in the episode, titled Lori Vallow Daybell: The Jailhouse Interview. “The same way I will be exonerated.”
When Morrison asked Vallow Daybell to expand on why she believes she will be exonerated, she said, “I have seen things in the future that Jesus showed me when I was in heaven and we were not in jail. We were not in prison.”
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“After I get exonerated, maybe I’ll go on Dancing With the Stars,” she continued, “and you can come.”
“You’re the most hated mom in America,” Morrison told Vallow Daybell, who denies any wrongdoing in all three 2019 deaths.
“I heard that, and we all know what the media does and they exaggerate everything and they make stuff up and they twist things around so…” Vallow Daybell replied. “I don’t know how it became what it is today. It’s amazing to me and I don’t really know.”
When Vallow Daybell was asked if she felt misunderstood, she said, “absolutely.”
“How do you know a person if you never talk to them in five years? How do you know anything about them? How do you know anything about their life? About how it really is?” she said, referencing the number of years she’s been in prison.
When Morrison asked Vallow Daybell if she had been there when her children died, she said, “What place was that? Do you have any idea?”
“Well, I’m the only one that knows. Do you know? You’re pretending like you know,” she added.
Morrison said he was asking her a question and repeated, “Did you watch your children die?”
“That’s a really sad question,” Vallow Daybell said. “I was not there.”
Morrison told NBC that Vallow Daybell winked at the camera as she was led from her cell in handcuffs and with shackles on her ankles.
“That should have given us a clue what she was gonna be like,” Morrison said.
Prosecutors say Vallow Daybell and her husband justified the killings of the two children and Tammy Daybell by creating an apocalyptic belief system where people could be possessed by evil spirits and turned into “zombies,” and the only way to save a possessed person’s soul was for the possessed body to die.
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After being given three life sentences, Vallow Daybell also faces two other cases in Arizona — one on a charge of conspiring with her brother to kill her fourth husband, Charles Vallow, and one of conspiring to kill her niece’s ex-husband, Brandon Boudreaux. Charles Vallow was shot and killed in 2019, but her niece’s ex survived an attempt later that year.
It’s alleged that Vallow Daybell’s religious beliefs and Charles’ US$1-million life insurance policy motivated the killing.
On Tuesday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Justin Beresky said one pool camera will be allowed to provide a livestream to media outlets with a possible one- to two-minute delay for Vallow Daybell’s Arizona trial, according to news outlet KSL.
Vallow Daybell, who is representing herself in the trial with legal advisors, expressed concerns over having a livestream from the courtroom.
“We want to make sure the cameras aren’t going to be zooming in at any level to our notes or the things that are going to be on our table,” she said. “What has happened before is they just have the camera on my face the entire trial. I think when the judge is speaking, the judge needs to be on the camera. When the state is speaking, they need to be on camera.”
Vallow Daybell is due in court on March 18 for a pre-trial conference and jury selection for the trial is scheduled to begin on March 31.
— with files from Global News’ Michelle Butterfield and The Associated Press
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