Spiritual beliefs dominate day six of Lori Daybell murder trial
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PHOENIX (CN) — Witnesses in the murder trial of Lori Vallow Daybell say the defendant preached “bizarre” spirituality before her ex-husband was murdered.
“Lori told me she was in the process of transferring from a mortal human being to an immortal being,” Vallow Daybell’s brother Adam Cox told 14 jurors Thursday morning. “Becoming a celestial being.”
Vallow Daybell — previously convicted in Idaho in 2023 of murdering her two children and the wife of her lover, Chad Daybell — is accused of conspiring with her now-deceased brother Alex Cox to murder her ex-husband Charles Vallow in Chandler, Arizona, in 2019.
Prosecutors say she collected life insurance and social security payouts while using fringe religious beliefs extrapolated from the teachings of the Mormon Church to justify the killings.
Testifying in a Phoenix courtroom, Adam Cox said his sister began “going a little off the walls,” after meeting Mormon doomsday author and self-proclaimed religious leader Chad Daybell in 2018.
“It was very strange and bizarre,” he said.
He told the jury that Vallow Daybell believed herself to hold more spiritual authority than the priests of the Mormon Church, and that she no longer needed to repent.
The last time he spoke to his sister, Adam Cox said she asked him if he thought she was crazy.
“I don’t know if you’re crazy, but what you’re telling me is not true,” he recalled telling her. “She stopped talking to me.”
Cox said he worried that something was wrong but wasn’t taken seriously by the rest of the family.
Reportedly suspicious of his ex-wife, Vallow planned to hold an intervention for Vallow Daybell, and invited Adam Cox to Arizona to help. Adam Cox planned on staying with their other brother, Alex Cox, but Alex Cox stopped responding to text messages once Adam Cox arrived at the airport.
Adam Cox learned from Vallow the next morning that Alex Cox was at Vallow Daybell’s house.
“Something weird is happening,” he recalled thinking when his brother ghosted him but went to his sister’s house the next morning. “It was really fishy that I hadn’t heard from Charles.”
Content retrieved from: https://www.courthousenews.com/spiritual-beliefs-dominate-day-six-of-lori-daybell-murder-trial/.
