Mega Edition: The Chad Daybell Trial (Part 8) (10/20/26)
Day eight of Chad Daybell’s trial began with retired FBI Special Agent Doug Hart continuing his testimony about the messages exchanged between Chad and Lori Vallow. Jurors saw texts showing the two arguing over when they could be together while Chad was still married to Tammy, including messages in which Chad described family members as “telestial relatives” and “obstacles” and told Lori that being with her was his greatest hope and dream. Hart testified that Chad had created the light-and-dark rating system and that Charles Vallow, Tylee Ryan, JJ Vallow and Tammy Daybell had all eventually been classified as dark or associated with dark entities. Defense attorney John Prior pushed back hard, emphasizing that there was no text in which Chad explicitly said to kill the children and arguing that some of the language reflected unusual religious beliefs rather than a murder plan. The state then called JJ’s former babysitter Sidney Woodbury Shank, who described JJ as a fun child who sometimes struggled behaviorally, followed by Kennedy Elementary principal Josh Wilson, who testified that JJ attended school for only about three weeks before Lori withdrew him and said she planned to homeschool him. A BYU-Idaho official also testified that despite Lori’s suggestion that Tylee had moved to Rexburg for college, the university had no record that Tylee had ever applied or enrolled there. The afternoon brought some of the day’s most emotional testimony when Lori’s oldest son, Colby Ryan, took the stand. Colby described learning that Charles Vallow had died after Lori initially lied and told him Charles suffered a heart attack, and he recalled being disturbed by how calm and unaffected Lori appeared afterward. He testified about the last time he saw Tylee and JJ, recalled Tylee crying before the family moved to Idaho, and said later text exchanges from Tylee’s phone did not feel normal to him. Colby also testified that money continued arriving from Tylee’s Venmo account after he had stopped hearing directly from her and that Lori had told him Tylee’s Social Security money would become “everybody’s money.” The day concluded with testimony from David Warwick, Melanie Gibb’s husband, who described Chad and Lori’s teachings about evil spirits, past lives, the gathering of the 144,000 and people being possessed. Warwick said Chad told him Tammy would die young and that Lori had been his wife in a previous life, and he described seeing Alex Cox carry JJ upstairs on the night of September 22, 2019, the last night JJ was known to be alive. Warwick said that the next morning Lori claimed JJ had become uncontrollable and Alex had taken him away, even though Warwick had never seen Tylee during the entire four-day visit. to contact me: [email protected]