PHOENIX (AP) Jurors have begun deliberating in the Arizona trial of Lori Vallow Daybell, the Idaho woman with doomsday religious beliefs charged with conspiring to murder her estranged husband in suburban Phoenix.
The jury convened for a short time Monday afternoon and will resume deliberations Tuesday.
Throughout the trial that began two weeks ago, jurors heard vastly different versions of Charles Vallow’s death at Vallow Daybell’s home in 2019.
Prosecutors argued that Vallow Daybell and her brother, Alex Cox, had planned to kill Vallow so she could collect money from his life insurance policy and marry her then-boyfriend, Chad Daybell, an Idaho author who wrote several religious novels about prophecies and the end of the world.
“What we see is a very planned out, premeditated murder,” prosecutor Treena Kay told the jury Monday in her closing argument.
Vallow Daybell isn’t a lawyer but chose to defend herself. She didn’t call any witnesses or put on any evidence in her defense, but said in her opening statement and again Monday in her closing argument that her estranged husband’s death wasn’t a crime.
“This was a tragedy,” she said Monday. “Don’t let them turn my family tragedy into a crime.”
Vallow Daybell is already serving three consecutive life sentences without parole for killing her two youngest children and conspiring to murder a romantic rival in Idaho.
In the Arizona case, she has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, she could face another life sentence.
Cox had said he acted in self-defense when he fatally shot Vallow. Cox died five months later from what medical examiners said was a blood clot in his lungs, and his account was later called into question.
Vallow Daybell said at the start of the trial that Vallow had chased her with a bat during the encounter and her brother shot him in self-defense after she left the house.
Cox waited 47 minutes before calling 911 “to stage the scene” and leave a bat near Vallow’s head, Kay said.
Before the jury began deliberating, prosecutors played a recorded conversation between Vallow Daybell and the life insurance company. Vallow Daybell believed she was the beneficiary of her husband’s $1 million policy, Kay said.
In the recording, she is heard saying that Vallow had been shot and that “it was an accident.”
Vallow Daybell kept glancing at the jury during the prosecution’s closing argument.
Last week, Adam Cox, another brother of Vallow Daybell, testified on behalf of the prosecution, telling jurors that he had no doubt his siblings were behind Vallow’s death.
Adam Cox said Vallow’s killing occurred just before he and Vallow were planning an intervention to bring Vallow Daybell back into the mainstream of their shared faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He testified that before Vallow’s death, his sister had told people her husband was no longer living and that a zombie was living inside his body.
Four months before he died, Charles Vallow filed for divorce from Vallow Daybell, saying she had become infatuated with near-death experiences and had claimed to have lived numerous lives on other planets. He alleged she threatened to ruin him financially and kill him. He sought a voluntary mental health evaluation of his wife.
The trial over Vallow’s death marks the first of two criminal trials in Arizona for Vallow Daybell. She’s scheduled to go on trial again in early June on a charge of conspiring to murder Brandon Boudreaux, the ex-husband of Vallow Daybell’s niece, Melani Pawlowski.
