A 55-year-old American was sentenced to death for the triple murder of his ex-wife and the two children of his current partner with the complicity of the latter.
Chad Daybell has been on trial since April 1 in Idaho (United States). This 55-year-old American was sentenced to death for the triple murder of his ex-wife and the two children of his current partner with the complicity of the latter, reports ABC News.
Prosecutors said Chad Daybell, author of books about the apocalypse, cited spiritual beliefs to justify his killings, claiming all three victims were possessed.
“Destroy their bodies” to dispossess them
Chad Daybell explained that he “marked” his former partner and the two children of his current wife, so that they could live their romance “without being encumbered by earthly parents, earthly obstacles”.
In 2020, Chad Daybell and his wife Lori Vallow, Mormons and followers of apocalypse theories, hit the headlines in the United States after the death of Lori Vallow’s two children. Disappeared a year earlier, Joshua Vallow, 7, and Tylee Ryan, 16, were found buried in Chad Daybell’s backyard in eastern Idaho.
Convinced that the children were “zombies”, Daybell and Vallow told investigators that the only way to rid them of “the dark spirits” that inhabited them was to “destroy their bodies”, according to the testimony of one of their friends. with the courts. According to the American, she would be the reincarnation of a goddess responsible for preparing humanity for the second coming of Christ.
“My sister shouldn’t be dead”
In May 2023, Lori Vallow was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her two children, but also for helping her husband prepare the murder of his ex-wife Tammy Daybell. The death of the woman, who died in her sleep in November 2019, was first attributed to natural causes, then reconsidered as murder by asphyxiation, according to an autopsy.
My sister shouldn’t be dead,” Samantha Gwilliam told the court. “She should be here, alive, smiling, with her family and friends. She should take care of her grandchildren and her animals.”
Chad Daybell was also convicted of $430,000 in insurance fraud in connection with the death of his ex-wife.
According to ABC News, since Idaho introduced the death penalty in 1864, the state has carried out 29 executions, the last of which was in 2012, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Last February, the execution of an American death row inmate was stopped at the last minute in this state because he was unable to administer the lethal solution within the legal time limit.
